..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
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..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Up, Drag Me to Hell, Departures, Outrage ... and more
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Up (Four Stars)
U. S.; Pete Docter, 2009
     
Up, the fantastic new Pixar feature, flies us right up into those magical realms of sky, flight and fantasy that Judy Garland's Dorothy traveled in her Kansas twister ride to Oz, or that little Pascal Lamorisse and his Parisian balloons flew away into, at the end of his dad Albert‘s The Red Balloon.

Co-written and directed by Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) with Bob Peterson, it’s almost a great children‘s movie, and another strong argument that the Pixar cartoon cadre is the strongest creative force operating in mainstream Hollywood right now.
     
If you have children and don’t take them, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you see it without kids, you should love it anyway. It’ll help bring back all those wondrous childhood movie experiences, like The Wizard of Oz, The Red Balloon and the early Disney features (Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio) that once made a kid‘s trip to the movie house so intoxicating and madly enchanting. And adventurous.
     
Yet, in what might appear a paradox, the hero of Up -- albeit with a kid sidekick -- is a harsh, isolate, seemingly past-it and mean old man named Carl Frederickson, voiced with classic gruffness by Ed Asner, whose squashed grizzled features also are replicated in Carl‘s onscreen face.
     
Carl, once a bright and (most important) adventurous lad, with a bright and even more adventurous partner/wife Ellie (Elie Docter), now is a retired balloon-seller who lives alone in a shabby but homey old house: one of those hanger-on dwellings once surrounded by other, similar homes, but now alone itself in an area drastically torn down, replaced or modernized during his lifetime, until it (and it seems, he) are simply old relics lost in concrete and construction.
     
Up seems initially about how the old are sadly abandoned and shunted aside, how they gradually lose their loves and dreams, and are forced to succumb to the world’s cruelty, indifference or smugly ageist bigotry.

All that, and almost all of Carl’s life, are conveyed in the movie‘s sprightly opening sections, covering Carl’s boyhood, his meeting with the plucky little lassie, Ellie (who keeps a diary of adventures and adventures-to-be), their joint admiration for the famous Movietone Newsreel star and daring South American explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer, at his plumiest), leading up to a  lyrical five-minute sequence, a glorious little montage  that becomes the most beautiful and bewitchingly sad piece of cinema I’ve seen this year.
     
As the score swells and the years pass, we see Carl and Ellie marry, plan their adventures, then painfully discover they can’t have children of their own, reconcile themselves to the impossibility of both family and finally, drop also the long-cherished childhood dream of adventure as well, and then sink into a gradual home-sweet-home but dull routine of passing years and a shifting, crumbling neighborhood that is finally, inevitably invaded by death and impending destruction.
     
That’s the poetic but real-life-ish story of love, resignation and loss that Docter and Peterson  tell us in their mesmerizing five minute ballad of aging and dreams deferred. I loved it, and I very much liked the rest too: the slapstick, soaring, adventure movie escape hatch that the filmmakers supply for 78-year-old Carl, who, at the last minute, dodges the wrecker‘s ball, when he opens up and lets loose a buoyant mantle of thousands of gleaming balloons that pull his three-story home up into the air and sail it away -- from the courts, their decisions and the construction companies and head toward, as we know it has to, South America! And the jungle mountain haunts of the disgraced explorer, Muntz! Who disappeared decades ago after a rare-bird skeleton scandal! (Night at the Museum, eat your heart out.)
     
It’s probably the most astonishing emotional movie turnabout from a tragic portrayal of defeated, lonely old age since…well, since F. W. Murnau tacked on that crazy, drunken, happy ending to the tale of Emil Jannings’s beleaguered ex-head porter in The Last Laugh. Except that this is an ending we definitely want to see.
   
Accompanying Carl is his own boy wonder, chubby but ever-game 8-year-old wilderness scout Russell (Jordan Agai), who was on the porch --and later clings to it, knocking and screaming for help,  when the house took off. Awaiting them is a truly magical joke-packed flight that ends in Muntz’s South American hangout -- near a waterfall that looks like Angel Falls, in a profusely green jungle and towering highland populated by the nice dog Dug (voiced by filmmaker Peterson), nastier dogs Alpha and Beta (Peterson again and Delroy Lindo), and the delightful goofy, brighty-plumed big bird  Kevin (no voice) --and, amazingly, by Muntz himself who is not quite what he seemed. But then, how many newsreel heroes are?
     
I’m not going to tell you what happens next, with a few exceptions -- because this is one of the funniest and most exciting of all the Pixar features, and you deserve to have the jokes and the action come to you mostly fresh and unspoiled. But, of course, much of the rest of the movie takes place up there in the sky too, in Carl’s balloon house and on Muntz’s spectacular whirlybird super-dirigible-like, propeller- driven sky-ship --and there are chases and wild escapes,  and the characters fight and slide all over the skyship’s body and Carl’s porch, in scenes that will either feed your vertigo or kill it dead. “Exhilarating“ is a word that was made for Up.
   
It’s exhilarating though for more than mere (Mere!) adventure and spectacle. This is a move which spiritually delivers a well-earned knockout blow to the rejection, marginalization and sometimes abusive mistreatment that the elderly here -- and elsewhere -- suffer.
   
I was glad to see and hear Asner grumble and take off,  partly because I’m sick of turning on cable TV news and seeing and hearing the greed-crazed creeps of the right yelling about how they don’t want their money (or as they deceptively try to put it, their children‘s) spent on health care, help for the disadvantaged, and other "non-necessities," for the old or the otherwise marginalized -- and, in their self-obsessed minds, undeserving.
     
Our older population deserves much better, in the midst of a severe economic crisis, than money-mad, whining brats like these. And that’s the kind of theme and undercurrent that makes Up more than kid stuff. According to Up’s credits, there’s a real-life Carl and Ellie, so the movie has a real-life stimulus,  however delightfully impossible it all seems. I hope that they’re happy.
     
I’ll make two mild complaints. Only two. In the midst of all his admittedly preoccupying and hazardous exploits, I thought Russell should have worried more about getting word back home. And, more importantly, there should have been a way, to let Ellie -- or the spirit of Ellie --join in Carl’s great adventure. There is a scene that almost any writer would have written for Up that isn’t here: a sequence where Ellie, or his vision of her, comes back for a moment to Carl, perhaps near her long-yearned-for Paradise Falls. (Maybe it was there and I dreamed through it.)
   
Perhaps it wasn’t included because it would have been included by almost anyone else and the savvy Pixar guys wanted to avoid cliché or corn, even if that‘s what the audience wanted. But there’s one strict rule about dreams of blissfully happy adventure like Up. In the end, you should always give your customers what they want. And Up mostly does.

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Drag Me to Hell (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Sam Raimi, 2009
     
Drag Me to Hell, from Sam (SpiderMan) Raimi is in his Evil Dead mode and gear: a scary movie that’s really scary and a horror flick that, despite a hell-bound plot that‘s not too original and has notable holes, managed to keep the audience with whom I saw it, jumping and screaming -- and then laughing and applauding after each fresh jump and scream, all the way to the last shot. I won’t say I was one of the screamers. But I did jump more than once -- and I’ve seen David Lean‘s Great Expectations, Brian De Palma’s Carrie and the Evil Deads and Rosemary‘s Baby and the like, so I knew what to expect.
   
Here‘s what we get. Alison Lohman is young bank office manager Christine Brown, who’s in competition with office sneak Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee), both bucking for a promo from fake-kindly boss Mr. Jacks (David Paymer). Mindful of the mortgage crisis (the movie has incredible crash timing) tells her not to be too nice. So unlucky Christine denies a mortgage payment extension to the fiercely unkempt, raggle-toothed and gnarly-nailed Mrs. Ganush (played by Lorna Raver, the big hit of a very good cast) -- who begs for more time so she won’t lose her home, and pulls out her gooey false teeth when the stunner Christine confers with Jacks and comes back to refuse the extension. Then, as they say, all Hell breaks loose.
   
Hell hath no fury like an elderly martgage victim. Despite the best efforts of touchy psychic Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), of fellow Satan victim Shaun Sen Dena (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza) and stalwart fiancé Clay Dalton (Justin Long) -- who keeps, however, going home at inopportune moments -- Christine is in for some really bad times. (President Obama might consider requiring all bank executives be forced to watch Drag Me to Hell once a week.) But, as with Up, I think I should shut up about the rest. I will however advise cat-lovers of possible havoc to their sensibilities. And the kitten doesn’t suffer as long as the bank officer.
       
Another caveat. Drag Me to Hell is a terrifically entertaining movie, though the script, by Sam and Ivan Raimi, is no great shakes. But the direction is gruesomely fabulous. And, as with Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s a jocular air to it all that keeps the movie amusing as well as horrific. Give the devil his due -- which was certainly missing in the much harder-trying Angels and Demons. This movie -- I can’t help it -- should hand you a hell of a time.

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Departures (Four Stars)
Japan; Yojiro Takita, 2008
   
Death begets beauty in Departures, a moving new film that teaches us, and its reluctant hero Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), all about the fine art of encoffination: the  delicate ritual preparation of a corpse for cremation, a last rite performed with the utmost discretion and quiet showmanship in front of the assembled family and funeral guests, before the coffin is plunged into the flames.
   
It‘s a curious subject, but director Takita handles it beautifully, and the film, which effortlessly mixes dark comedy and believably sentimental family drama, has won prize after prize -- including ten Japanese Academy Awards (best film, best director, best actor and seven others), the Grand Prize at Montreal, and the American Oscar for best foreign language film.
   
You can see why. It’s the sort of picture that both more casual art house audiences and some cognoscenti often love. It makes you laugh and feel, without coercing your emotions. The hero of Departures, Daigo (played by Motoki, who first suggested the film) is both artist and nebbish: a  young man fleeing a failed career as a mediocre classical cellist in a now defunct Tokyo symphony orchestra, to become, almost by accident, a professional encoffineer in his hometown of  Yamagata, where he has settled in his late mother’s‘ old café bar and home.
       
Encoffination,  as we see, and as Daigo gradually learns it  -- under the expert tutelage  of his world-wise boss, Ikuei Sasaki (played, in the film‘s best performance, by Tsutomu Yamazaki, who, 46 years ago,  was the screaming, embittered young kidnapper/killer in Kurosawa’s great 1963 crime thriller, High and Low) --  is an amazing ensemble. It involves makeup and coiffure (painstakingly applied to bring the stilled faces back to life), costuming (to rearrange or redress the body‘s clothes without exposing too much flesh and offending the audience), doctoring (to straighten the crooked and soften the rough),  and, most of all, a sense of both drama and self-abnegation (to perform each task with such tact and care that the entire procedure becomes an exquisite ceremony of solace.).
     
Ironically, despite that goal of consolation, it’s a profession that inspires some revulsion in the average Japanese -- and does here, in Daigo’s initially devoted-seeming young wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) -- simply because its practicioners handle the dead. (The film, emotionally and artistically, is the almost polar opposite of Drag Me to Hell, which turns those fears into movie horror.) But Daigo, despite his own qualms -- he‘s shocked when he enters Sasaki‘s shop and finds a row of coffins, believing the word “departures” in the employment meant earthly travels and not those of the afterlife -- becomes an expert encoffineer, showing the talent Sasaki recognized almost instantly.
     
Along the way, Daigo tries to heal the splintered relationship with Mika, to reconcile with the father who abandoned his mother (and whom he hates), and to justify and repay the kindness of boss Sasaki and his also coffin-smart office assistant Kamimura (Kimiko Yo). The ways Takita and Koyama resolve all matters, and the encoffinations themselves, are somewhat predictable, but affecting anyway, though less in the subtle ways Ozu‘s films move you than in the more populist vein of Keisuke Kinoshita (Twenty Four Eyes).
   
The Japanese are often great at rituals and decorative arts -- as in origami, or as in the art of flower arranging, for which director Hiroshi “Woman in the Dunes” Teshigahara abandoned moviemaking for years, after his father (a painter, flower arranger and school head) died. And Departures, while not remarkably visually beautiful in the usual Japanese movie sense, does impress you and touch your heart . The theme, of course, is that the rituals are more for the living than the dead, and that we should show as much care and love when the people are alive. The cello music Daigo plays is often Bach, and it fits these Departures.

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Outrage (Two Stars)
U.S.; Kirby Dick, 2008
   
Director Kirby Dick, who specializes in American sexuality, here has an explosive subject: closeted gay right wing politicians, who whoopee, but mostly avoid voting for legislation that would benefit their fellow homosexuals, while masking themselves as conservative family values types.
     
Hypocrisy, of course. And here, Dick and reporter Michael Rogers spill the beans (some admittedly already out of the can) on gay caballeros like (they claim) Larry (Singing Senator) Craig, political chairman Ken (Sock it to the DNC) Mehlman, some lesser lights and the  mother of them all, Red-Scare McCarthy boy Roy Cohn. Also mentioned, though not as conclusively, are congressman and frequent cable news talking head David Dreier and Florida governor and Prez hopeful Charlie Crist.
       
Democrats pop up too, including ex-New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, Mayor Smilin’ Ed Koch, and the proudly self-outed Barney Frank, whom Bill (Riled Up) O’Reilly once screamed at on TV. (I’ll avoid the obvious jokes about screamers and drama queens.)
   
The movie could use some more past history. How about onetime senate leader Bob Kerr, the original Gay Caballero? Or, to stretch to the (politicized) church, Cardinal Francis Spellman, a movie of whose life might make Preminger‘s “Cardinal” blush.
     
As for the ethics of outing, I think all these guys should be out of the closet. And, if they‘re hypocrites, in this environment (where Republicans are always digging up and spewing dirt), they should be ejected. As for the movie, it’s okay. At The Music Box, in Chicago

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Every Little Step (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; James D. Stern/Adam Del Deo, 2008
 
A backstage documentary about a revival of creator-choreographer-director Michael Bennett’s modern classic musical A Chorus Line, which also backtracks, to tell the story of the first show and how it was made. The doc is somewhat overrated, but not bad -- and it makes you wish Bennett and not Richard Attenborough, had made the movie of the original Chorus Line. ) At The Music Box, in Chicago.

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Courting Condi (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Sebastian Doggart, 2008
   
Devin Ratray, who looks like Jack Black on a binge, plays a caricature of himself, a two-ton Romeo who claims to be in love with Condoleeza Rice and begins stalking and sending her love songs. So writer-director Sebastian Doggart follows him as Devin warbles ballads to Condie, investigates the past of his beloved Secretary of State, and receives chastening news of her behavior under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
     
But since we can never really believe Devin has a crush on Condi, no matter how many lovesick moans and sighs he musters, most of the jokes don’t work. A perfect example is a phony Frank Luntz focus session: Luntz plays the joke well, but Ratray seems to get preoccupied with out-smart-assing Luntz, which doesn’t quite suit his lovelorn character. Strangely, the best things here are mostly the straighter journalistic scenes. At Gene Siskel Center, in Chicago.

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Dillinger is Dead (Three Stars)
Italy; Marco Ferreri, 1966
   
Michel Piccoli, as a gas mask manufacturer with a snooze-happy wife  (Anita Pallenberg) and a hottie maid (Annie Girardot) spends much of this movie on one night, quietly cooking, playing pop records,  and bouncing between bedrooms, all the while fiddling around with what may be John Dillinger’s gun. This once notorious film, unavailable for years and now re-released by Janus, is one of Ferreri’s more subversive movies, and the end is still a double shocker.
   
Dillinger is Dead is neither au courant, nor classic, and its almost deliberately unlikable. But the movie still grips and disturbs, and Piccoli, who later ate and schtupped himself to death in Ferreri’s best film La Grande Bouffe, proves himself equally handy here with pot. skillet, snake or gangster‘s rod. (In Italian, with English subtitles.)   At Gene Siskel Center, in Chicago.


Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
May 21, 2009

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