Monday at the Movies - October 28, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, cartoons!

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) – Everyone and her brother knows I’m a Disney snob, a Pixar shill, and an unabashed child-at-heart when it comes to the House of Mouse.  So I will concede that it’s very near impossible for me to say something unreservedly positive about any other studio’s animated output, but I’ll admit that How to Train Your Dragon is about as good as any non-Disney cartoon can be.  In part, this is due to a departure from what I consider Dreamworks house style:  talking animals that fart in between parodies of pop songs.  Instead, How to’s dragons neither speak nor break wind; rather, they emote silently through wide eyes or menacing body language.  The voice cast is also wisely more reserved, avoiding distracting star casting (though I question the logic behind a uniformly Scottish voice cast as Vikings); as father and son, Gerard Butler and Jay Baruchel bring some new life to the less-than-fresh disappointed parent plotline, and Craig Ferguson is always a safe bet as the top supporting character.  How to Train Your Dragon’s big win, though, is in transcending the just-for-kids mentality that seems to govern so many Dreamworks features – no surprise, perhaps, considering that directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who also helped adapt the screenplay from the Cressida Cowell novels, cut their teeth over at Disney with Lilo & Stitch (Sanders even voiced Stitch).  While the studio still has a way to go before it creates something as poetic as the opening montage from Up, Dreamworks gives me some hope that there’s more like How to Train Your Dragon in the running – at least, until the inevitable dragon who, likely to be voiced by Jack Black, possesses the power of flammable flatulence.

Mulan (1998) – Does it make me an old man that I can vividly recall the breathless anticipation when we bought the VHS tape of Mulan?  I was stoked beyond belief for this one (Lion King aside, I wasn’t much of a theatergoer in my younger days until the 1999 Star Wars prequel), and fifteen years later it still holds up as a strong entry in what retrospectively looks like Disney’s “alternative princess” stage (see also Pocahontas, Esmeralda, Megara).  To save her ailing father, Mulan (Ming-Na Wen) enters military service in his stead against the invading Hun army; moral support and comic relief is provided by Eddie Murphy as the spunky dragon Mushu.  This is one of those Disney movies where all the elements just work; the “girl in boy’s position” plotline never feels overly politically correct and is played with enough humor and earnest action that there’s something for everyone to find.  At a brisk 87 minutes (that’s including end credits), there’s no fat in the movie, and you may find the movie ending long before you tire of it; the obligatory training montage is pulled off with typical Disney aplomb courtesy of a catchy Donny Osmand track, and the movie’s two big action sequences – a snowbound ambush and a capital city invasion – work better than a lot of conventional action film set pieces thanks to some wise editing and breathtaking animatics that take full advantage of contemporary technology (which still looks first-rate) to give us a breathtaking sense of scope.  Whether viewed earnestly for the first time or nostalgically after years away from a childhood favorite, Mulan is still a fine entry in the Disney animated canon.

 That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

This Is The End (2013)

You can read it as a scathing critique of self-obsessed celebrity culture, or you can take it as the payoff to a decade-long string of actors playing the same character over and over until they give up and play themselves.  But whichever way you choose to take it, This Is The End proves to be childishly crude, incredibly narcissistic, entirely self-indulgent – and, in the end, more fun than it has any right to be.

Trapped at James Franco’s house when a block party turns apocalyptic, a team of Frat Packers – Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, and Franco – struggle through the Biblical apocalypse while navigating their own petty differences and personal insecurities.  For example, with a demon at the door, the men argue about where to masturbate and whether anyone is entitled to a fifth of a Milky Way bar.  Satirizing the apoca-porn genre, which fetishizes death and destruction in disturbing ways (thank you, Roland Emmerich), This Is The End takes several surprisingly earnest turns, even while its leads are giggling about drinking urine.

Let’s be honest – taking This Is The End to task for its blatant and unapologetic immaturity is a little like scolding an infant for soiling himself.  Lest we forget, the writers – if indeed we can call “improvisation facilitators” such – were the savants (emphasis on the idiot) behind Superbad, a gleefully enjoyable movie that was quite obviously written by ten-year-olds.  So of course you’re going to get jokes about genitals and more weed gags than you can shake a joint at.  Of course.  And if that’s your thing, this movie has it in spades.

I’m of mixed feelings on this one.  It’s feel-good in the sense that you’ll probably end up laughing, even in spite of yourself if you go in deliberately trying not to have a good time (why you’d do that is anyone’s guess, but such people seem to exist).  Let’s be honest (the refrain of the day, it seems) – the earnest marijuana giggles Rogen delivers like a puttering engine are infectious, especially when it’s apparent that the rest of the cast are having as much fun making the film.  The cast are all fairly engaging as overblown caricatures of themselves (including an incisive turn by Jonah Hill as the “Hollywood fake” nice guy), though the standout performance award goes to Craig Robinson, who sells it to the back row with the same gregarious delight that made Hot Tub Time Machine more of a success.  There’s something about his mumbled confessions and oblivious non-sequiturs that gives him a fantastic screen presence.

But at the same time, I have trouble giving a good review to a film that contains a five-minute rape joke.  While the masturbation location conversation has a certain victimless immaturity to it, This Is The End takes on a very uncomfortable tone when Emma Watson becomes the subject of a hypothetical-rape conversation.  Though it’s played for laughs as a series of escalating misunderstandings, the scene is made all the more distasteful by McBride’s (admittedly) self-aware scummy self-caricature; and as the rape accusation is bounced around among buddies, the film’s brutal rejection of the Bechdel test is thrown into sharp relief.  I’m willing to excuse many of the film’s excesses  (including the bizarre detail that every demon has pronouncedly enormous genitals), but I’m at a loss as to why the film couldn’t have included Kristen Bell or Aubrey Plaza or – for God’s sake! – Melissa McCarthy among the survivors.

Perhaps I’m overthinking it.  There’s a certain ad hoc insanity to which you have to surrender in order to appreciate a film like this one, a go-along-for-the-ride resignation that carries with it a kind of intoxicating bliss while the lead actors bumble their way through arguments about the quotidian aspects of morning-after survival.  While certainly not for everyone, This Is The End has enough entertainment value that most people will find something worth enjoying – be it the catchy enthusiasm, the high stakes action-comedy, or even the exaggeration of excess (note the mild-mannered Michael Cera, rendered here as an oversexed addict).  A martini glass of urine never looked so funny.

This Is The End is rated R for “crude and sexual content throughout, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence.”  Every sexual and profane epithet you can imagine gets trotted out to excessive effect; alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine are abused throughout.  We see Cera’s rear end and the aforementioned demonic genitalia (twice), while many celebrities die in quick but intense fashion (played, you guessed it, for laughs).