Adieu Langage, Bonjour Cinema: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

How appropriate that a movie titled Goodbye to Language should cast a spell difficult to put into words. It’s a sustained trip, lighting my brain on fire for the duration, then smoldering satisfactorily for days after. Its director is the legendary Jean-Luc Godard, now 84, who has long expressed through his work a deep love of what movies can do, and an eagerly experimental disregard for anything approaching conventional rules of filmmaking. A palpable presence behind the scenes, his guiding hand can be felt in every edit, each gesture, from his cool black-and-white jump-cut debut feature, 1960’s world cinema landmark Breathless, through his increasingly dense essayistic stream-of-consciousness musings – the towering achievement being Histoire(s) du Cinema, a 288 minute inquiry into the very nature of motion pictures.

Goodbye to Language is another pinnacle, a full expression of his idiosyncratic approaches that heads straight into an added dimension: 3D. Every other 3D film you’ll see uses the technology to trick the audience’s eyes into seeing vast depths to the background while the foreground looms closer, perhaps breaking the proscenium in ways that (theoretically) enhance a narrative. Godard uses these illusions, but doesn’t leave them at face value. He plays tricks, experiments. An animating question of the film seems to be, “Didja know 3D could do this?” It’s a film so lively and playful, it’s clear even he was not sure at the start. He lets us watch as he finds out. There’s continual visual astonishment at play here, stimulating and invigorating. With cinematographer Fabrice Aragno, Godard starts from the standard Hollywood setting, like a shot with metal bars, a hand reaching through them, and the fourth wall. But then he stretches, pulling the angles and distances between planes of depth in befuddling and exhilarating ways.

Extra perceptions of dimensionality provide added mind-altering qualities to the visual essay trickery Godard’s been up to for a few decades now. Superimpositions, layered dissolves, unexpected cuts, and off-kilter angles add up to a rough-hewn beauty of a visual experience. Even without dealing with the ideas the images contain, it’s a exhilarating pleasure to watch when 3D throws a title card right into your face, blocking out text underneath, or when a chair, or a dock, or a book is strangely disassociated from its surroundings, hovering neither here nor there in your field of vision. Or try this shot: a woman is holding her iPhone. The camera is perched next to her arm, which comes towards the audience. The phone and the images on it sit in the midground, the reflections on the screen simultaneously pulling deep into and floating out of the background. In every shot, Godard invites you to say goodbye to language and see the world anew on a visceral visual level.

But that doesn’t mean the film is silent or plotless, though the sound isn’t calibrated for clarity and the narrative, such as it is, isn’t entirely comprehensible on first glance. The soundtrack is filled with classical music, loud sound effects, and murmured dialogue. It cuts in and out, switches volumes and sources suddenly, shifting placement in the mix in startling changes. We hear epigrammatic philosophizing, arty muttering, arguments, and borrowed quotations, all the while watching a couple, two couples, sit by the water, lounge naked at home, perform their daily ablutions, have deep thoughts and arguments. At least twice there’s violent death, just off screen. One scene goes back in time to show us Mary Shelley. And there’s a dog, Godard’s pet Roxy, who wanders through several scenes, staring, thinking, playing, being. At one point she’s joined by a contemplative voice over you’d swear was written by Herzog if Monet wasn’t cited.

If this all sounds impenetrable to you, I hate to say I won’t solve the film here. Not on one viewing I won’t. But a Godard film is not a story problem to be solved. It’s for adventurous filmgoers who’ll find the playfulness of its experimentation its own reward. Get drunk on the delights within, and be left marveling at the possibilities of cinema yet unexplored. Godard has made a film that proceeds with its own logic, riffing on 3D’s doubling effect by doubling down on that symbolism: mirrors, repetitions, reflections, two sets of couples, juxtapositions, a dialectic methodical cleverness to forming ideas through interplay of image and sound, layers of references and signifiers. At one point, a man declares that the act of defecation is the only true equality in the world, the camera finding him sitting on the toilet as he speaks, Rodin’s The Thinker versus Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops.

The doubling comes to a head in the two instances of the year’s best camera move, the one you’ve definitely heard of if you’ve heard anything at all about this film. The two cameras used to capture 3D follow different characters moving away from each other, in total a layered abstraction that’s also two separate shots you can edit between by closing one eye or the other. It’s a moment so head-splittingly novel, I found myself wanting to rewind the film and rewatch it right then and there.

Here’s a movie that gives you image after image, letting you add them up for yourself. Goodbye to Language makes as good an argument as any for the ease with which language and all its history, culture, and metaphor, can complicate what we’re actually trying to tell one another, and that cinema transcends language, moving images making pure ideas. This is, after all, the foundational cinematic idea, of making meaning out of nothing more than what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Godard puts in his frame images you’ve never seen before.

A Boy and His Robot: BIG HERO 6

Turns out there’s some creative life left in the superhero movie. It just took Disney Animation to step away from the endless synergy, in-jokes, crossovers, and five-year plans to find it. Their team of computer animation artists took Big Hero 6, a Marvel comic so obscure their corporate cousins didn’t want to hold onto it for their massive Cinematic Universe, and focused on telling a contained story and doing it well. The result has everything you’d expect from a superhero movie: a tragic inciting incident, tight suits, high-tech gadgets, a supervillain with a connection to the heroes, and a finale involving a massive energy beam and billions of dollars in property damage. So it’s nothing new. But by keeping it simple and energetic, Disney has made the brightest and most colorful superhero movie in quite some time. It reminded me why I ever liked these kinds of stories in the first place.

Directors Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt) create a vivid near-future mashup metropolis called San Fransokyo, filled with a variety of architectures and influences from its portmanteau component inspirations. Fans, like me, of imaginary cities should get a kick out of it, even more so in 3D. But that’s the set dressing whizzing by in the backgrounds. The filmmakers take their time building the characters, confident enough to be bustling with worldbuilding spectacle firmly in the background, as sci-fi concepts drive the plot without taking over.

We meet Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old robotics genius who graduated high school early and isn’t feeling up to college. Instead, he makes money gambling in illegal back alley robot fights. But his older brother (Daniel Henney) insists on introducing him to the high tech robotics lab on campus, tempting him with promise of resources and collaborators to help him achieve his fullest potential. It’s a strong brotherly bond we observe, which makes its quick severing all the more impactful. There’s a fire at a science fair and it claims the older boy’s life, leaving the younger depressed and lonely.

Hiro’s only companion is the prototype healthcare robot his brother built and left behind. The robot, named Baymax, is the film’s best creation. He’s built to be huggable. A large, inflated, soft plastic body makes him look something like a robo-Totoro. There’s a rubbery squeak to his every movement. He speaks (charmingly voiced by Scott Adsit) in loveably logical constructions and programmed intelligence that slowly accrues personality. When his battery is low, he sounds drunk. He’s a fantastic presence, bursting to life diagnosing Hiro. Observing the boy’s depression, the bot’s programming determines that cheering him up will be his mission, even if it means helping to track down the arsonist behind the fire. Hiro doesn’t waste any time building Baymax slick armor and programming him some kung fu knowledge.

As the boy and his robot build a relationship that helps bring the boy purpose in life, the film doesn’t have time to spend moping and brooding, launching quickly into the fun. It helps to have a bright palate filled with vibrant young characters. The older brother’s robotics classmates join Hiro and Baymax’s quest for justice, and are eager to form a makeshift superhero team to help do so. It’s a typical origin story, with mourning geniuses who have access to incredible high-tech gadgetry vowing to set things right. But the film gets a great deal of humor and excitement out of the characters’ repartee and diversity. There’s a goofy geek (T.J. Miller), a sunny egghead (Genesis Rodriguez), a serious gearhead (Jamie Chung), and a muscled nerd (Damon Wayons Jr.). Together with the cute robot and precocious teen, who help them turn their lab experiments into suits and weapons, they form a group that’s fun to be around, and the sense of camaraderie and individuality doesn’t disappear when the action starts.

That’s what ultimately sets Big Hero 6 apart from the competition. Even charming superhero teams like The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy get swallowed up by the spectacle. But these characters, by virtue of their animation, don’t disappear into CGI costumes and stunt doubles. Their movements and personalities are constant whether running from swarms of nanobots or sitting around a table. Their talents and gadgets are well developed for clever payoffs in clear, confident comic book framing turned fluid motion. Animation needs thought behind every motion, every gesture, every frame. They don’t waste time animating endless punching matches and collateral damage to be chopped to ribbons in an editing bay. Apparently the way to improve the culture-dominating live-action cartoons is to bring them closer to their roots.

Here rambunctious action is well timed and staged, used sparingly. There’s cleverness and coherence to the construction of these sequences, so the action doesn’t grow exhausting. It’s informed by character and, even better, manages to be exciting and energetic without imperiling thousands of innocent lives. It’s actually a buoyant superhero action movie about the value of life, and the futility of violence. You’d think movies ostensibly about characters who save people would figure that out a little more often. The more time we spend watching the interplay between the boy, his robot, and their new friends, enjoying the humor and feeling the sadness of their loss, the more impact the handful of action sequences have.

I cared about the relationships, as formulaic as they are. The voice work is appealing. The character designs are the usual rubbery realism of Disney CG animation. And their world is so colorful and full of energy. It’s a good reminder that formula storytelling gets to be that way because once upon a time the structures worked. In Big Hero 6, it works. On a plot level, there’s not a single surprise to be had, but I was swept up in its momentum and imagination. Running a trim 108 minutes, it’s the first superhero movie in a decade to leave me wanting more in a good way. What a difference having loveable characters, pleasing design, economical storytelling, coherent themes, and action that doesn’t outstay its welcome makes.

The Jack Frost Rises: RISE OF THE GUARDIANS

When it comes to representations of magical legends of childhood, it’s basically Santa Claus or nothing. Rise of the Guardians starts off with a good idea by knocking the jolly old elf down a peg or two by putting him on equal footing with his fictional colleagues: the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy. The movie imagines them as a sort of holiday-themed supergroup a la The Avengers, using their powers of presents and wonder to protect the children of the world. Would that they could also use their powers to preserve a sense of wonder and fun in this film, but hey, one problem at a time.

At the film’s start, things appear to be relatively peaceful, but soon the apparently long gone Boogeyman appears. He’s gathered some kind of mumbo jumbo ability to convert Sandman’s dream sand into pure nightmare fuel, which leads to some finely animated menace with galloping yellow-eyed sand creatures and roiling seas of black grit. Santa, a burly, tattooed chap with a thick Russian accent activates the Aurora Borealis, which is apparently the secret distress signal for legendary beings. Once assembled, these guardian angels hear from their silent leader, the man on the moon. He signals that the Guardians need a new member to help them save the world’s dreams: Jack Frost.

Frost is a thin, hoodie-wearing scamp who flies around the world spreading cold and snow, touching surfaces with his magic staff that spreads frost in a way reminiscent of the ice-spreading fairies in Fantasia’s Tchaikovsky segment. Though he enjoys bringing slippery ice and snow days to the children of the world, he’s sad that none of them believe in him. When the Guardians show up and ask for his help, he’s reluctant. If you guess that he’ll end up travelling a rough approximation of the hero’s journey from begrudging help to a full-fledged Guardian throughout the course of the movie, you’d be right. This being a rather self-serious, if still determinedly bouncy, fantasy, he’s given the requisite troubled past, though here the twist is that he can’t remember it. (The reveal is one nice card the film has up its sleeve). The plot, adapted from the William Joyce books by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, becomes a typical clash of good and evil played out thinly, but with some energy.

Every aspect of the film is highly competent, brightly colored and full of hectic movement. The character design is more or less as creative as the voice work is functional. Frost (Chris Pine) is designed, oddly enough, as some kind of teen matinee idol, as if shipped from a Generic Protagonist factory. I liked the rougher conception of Santa (gruffly voiced by Alec Baldwin) as an amiable bruiser with an army of big, helpful yetis and diminutive, largely useless, elves at his command. The Easter bunny (Hugh Jackman) is simply a large rabbit, but I like the way his colorful eggs can sprout legs and hide themselves. The Sandman’s a silent, short, sandy fellow, whereas the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) is a giant hummingbird lady who flits to and fro. The Boogeyman, however, makes for a rather bland villain, like someone sanded the distinctiveness off of Tom Hiddleston and gave him the voice of Jude Law. He’s easily dwarfed by his nightmare-magic.

Where the movie fails most of all is in its central thesis. The Guardians gain their powers from children believing in them and so they, in turn, protect children with their powers. That’s all fine, but the film plays out like forced frivolity, constantly extolling the benefits of childlike wonder and belief in magic while being itself depressingly literal about magic while assuming that an audience’s wonder will follow. Though first-time director Peter Ramsey has a nice control over the film’s visuals, no aspect of the film manages to rise above the level of competent. It felt to me like a long 97 minutes, filled with lots of talk of magic, but little magic felt. It clunks along from one sequence to the next, stopping at each of the characters’ lairs for a little bit of visual invention and spinning the oh-so-simple plot in place long enough to movie it ever-so-slightly forward. I’d bet kids won’t mind it so much, but what do I know? I’m not them. It’s a colorful distraction with a modicum of imagination, but all that I can testify to is that sitting through it once was more than enough for me, thanks.

Teenage Dream: KATY PERRY: PART OF ME

Katy Perry, the pop star bombshell, has now reached the point in her celebrity ascension to ubiquity that a big screen concert documentary is hardly an unpredictable step. Paramount Pictures has gone all out, hiring the same production companies responsible for their hit Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, a nice-enough piece of commercial fluff from last year, to churn out a relatively low-cost summer tentpole to capitalize on Perry’s very recent success. She’s had insanely catchy number-one-single after insanely catchy number-one-single off of her last album, Teenage Dream. She’s had a high-profile marriage to comedian Russell Brand, followed by an equally high-profile divorce. She’s been on countless talk shows and magazine covers, had flashy performances on award shows where she had lots of nominations and took home some awards. To top it all off, she’s had a lucrative, well-attended worldwide tour. All that and more is contained within the runtime of Katy Perry: Part of Me, which may not be one of the best films of the summer, but is certainly one of the best events.

The documentary marks the feature directorial debut of veteran reality show producers Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz. They’ve worked together on competition shows like Top Chef and Project Runway and are quite canny in their decision to port over their reality show style of storytelling to the backstage-concert documentary format in order to drive interest. There’s an approach that competition-based reality shows have of quickly sketching in biographies in ways that draw in audience interest and play upon audience sympathies. That happens here to great, calculating effect. Luckily, Perry has an interesting story that Cutforth and Lipsitz can emphasize without stretching too much for good material. Her parents, evangelical ministers, raised their children in a sheltered environment. Perry’s early singing came in church and, later, on a gospel record. Once grown, Perry moved to Los Angeles with dreams of making it big and, after years of struggle, she did.

The film follows her world tour chronologically while cutting between the 3D spectacle of her on-stage production numbers and 2D home-video footage, photographs, and talking heads, mostly her staff and family (I especially liked the brief moments we spend with her darling grandmother), that weave in Perry’s past. The directors cut between performances of her best known songs in ways that may not resemble the concerts’ set lists, but provide emotional resonance to whatever is going on off-stage or from her personal history, going from, say, talk of her earlier failed attempts to be molded by various record executives into a performance of her song “Who Am I Living For?”  Obvious, but effective. The most powerful of these moments comes with a shockingly honest backstage moment during which her marriage is falling apart and she lies weeping on a cot before begging her makeup and hair people to get started for the show. Smart camera placement shows us her shaky efforts to compose herself as she crouches on a lift that will take her onstage to start her performance. She makes it, and the directors fade into a tearful performance of “The One That Got Away.”

With bits of backstage and background business woven so skillfully into the performances themselves, this concert film is a cut above the competition. It tells a good story. But the main attraction is probably going to be the songs themselves, the movie’s biggest success and weakness and what makes the movie an impressive event. The technical aspects of her tour translate to film quite well. Perry has lots of on-stage charisma that translates into on-screen charm. Her concert is a fun production, filled to bursting with goofy primary-colored costumes, talented background dancers, a dusting of pyrotechnics, confetti and foam, and, especially important to the 3D effect, layers of screens behind her and layers of screaming fans in front of her. (The best uses of the third dimension are laser beams that zip off the stage right towards your face.) The sound mixing of the movie gives her songs a boost with the thudding bass and enveloping surround sound definitely helping to give her live performances a you-are-there feel. The stagey spectacle does its theatrical job to full effect.

As for her songs, you already know if you like them or not. (And if you don’t, you probably won’t be seeing this movie anyways). Some of them, I could have done without. Her song “Peacock” is especially awful with overtly covertly dirty lyrics that can barely be called double entendres. (They’re more like half entendres at best.) But I think a great many of her songs – like “Teenage Dream,” “California Gurls,” “Firework,” “Part of Me,” “Hot N Cold” – are something like great pure pop confections. Those sequences in the film turned the theater into a party at my screening; the delight in the room was infectious. When Perry points to the audience and yells “Sing!” as she slides into a chorus, the on-screen spectators sang right out and so did the teenagers and their parents sitting all around me.

Cutforth and Lipsitz’s approach to assembling the film pays off. I was surprised how, between expertly produced numbers, the film managed to feel compelling and candid (often enough, at least) despite its gleaming corporate promotional packaging. This is a documentary with a clear agenda to deglamorize and humanize a pop star, making her on some level understandable and relatable, only to build her façade back up, leaving her star power shining all the more powerfully by the end. I think it more or less gets there. There are lots of better movies to see this summer, but I doubt there will be many more that feel like such a theatrical experience. For the full effect, see it on as big a screen as possible in a theater with a booming sound system. It’s fun, definitely cheaper than buying a concert ticket and probably more comfortable than attending.

Note: One nice backstage moment involves a funny Lady Gaga cameo. Now there’s a pop star made for 3D. 

Mother and Child: BRAVE

Unlike previous Pixar films that started from a relatively small premise (the secret world of toys, an old man who wants to fly his house to South America, a rat who wants to become a chef, robots in love) and expanded to greater thematic and emotional import (dealing with change, dealing with disappointment, dealing with art, dealing with the fate of humanity), Brave starts with big sweeping vistas and finds in them a wee little fable about deeply relatable issues. Set against wide landscapes of forest and lake and a towering castle, the film finds not epic fantasy, but a small family drama. It’s an inversion of the Pixar formula and as such occasionally comes across as thinner and less ambitious than their usual output. (That’s the downside of putting out nearly a dozen masterpieces in less than twenty years.) It may be a quieter and less immediately gripping film than audiences might be expecting, but it works convincingly and entertainingly on its own terms.

The family at the center of Brave leads a vaguely Scottish kingdom made up of four clans. There’s a good-natured, bulky, muscular king (Billy Connolly) and his conscientious, compassionate queen (Emma Thompson). Their youngest kids, little, scampering redheaded triplet boys, are darling troublemakers, but their chief concern is their oldest child, a daughter named Merida (Kelly Macdonald). The other three clans are on their way to present their first-born sons in a competition for Merida’s hand, but the princess has no desire to be forced into anything as dull as marriage. She’s an adventurous, independent spirit who suffers through her mother’s lessons in poise and respectability in order to saddle up her trusty horse and gallop away from the castle on her days off to let her long, curly red hair flow in the wind as she enjoys archery, rock-climbing, and wilderness exploration. She’s talented and spirited, but not the proper lady that her mother hopes for her to become.

The plot of the movie involves the way Merida’s desires for her future conflict with her mother’s. This draws in all sorts of traditional fairy tale elements, from wispy forest spirits that just might lead you to your destiny, a daffy witch (Julie Walters) and her bubbling cauldron of spells destined to go wrong, ancient curses, powerful legends, and potential turmoil in the kingdom egged on by the outsized egos of the three proud men (Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd, and Craig Ferguson) who would rather the princess marry one of their sons as generations of princesses have before them. But all of this is only background for the main focus on a mother-daughter relationship and the way deeply felt disagreements could escalate past exasperation and hurt feelings into situations where real harm can be done. Words are said and actions are taken that are quickly regretted and leave both mother and daughter in tears. Their problems feel irresolvable, but the moving through line of emotional truth here is the way the movie is built around this mother and daughter learning to understand and love each other more fully, differing points of view and all.

This tight focus turns the film into what is essentially a two-character show. All of the others – from the adorable, dialogue-free, triplets, to the raucous clan leaders and their sons, to the forest witch and her talking bird – are there mostly to move things along and provide background interest. Functionally, this strong de-emphasis on the ensemble heightens a fable-like simplicity of tone and emotion. There’s no real villain here, only the ticking-clock of a curse that falls on mother and daughter in the aftermath of a particularly wounding argument. They have to learn to work together, empower each other to take advantage of their individual and collective strengths and weaknesses in order to pull through, mending the powerfully expressed rift in their relationship as they go. What a wonderful female-centric plot that gives full weight to their emotions and decisions and pushes most else to the side. The central metaphor here is potent and the resolution is drawn-out to a deeply moving emotional punch.

But I can’t quite figure out why, with such an effective centerpiece, the movie as a whole feels somewhat slight. A factor could be the humor, which occasionally rings too broad for the more serious plot, especially when said humor involves men losing their kilts. Other times, though, the humor, especially warm, subtle physical moments and sweet dialogue, is nicely amusing. Perhaps the biggest problem is simply that it has to fight against the perception of Pixar perfection. The fact of the matter is that, even though it can’t live up to the highest highs Pixar has had, it’s still a remarkably solid piece of work that moves with great energy and great feeling with a nicely nuanced portrayal of mother-daughter relationships. There are moments where characters just look at each other, times where scenes are held just a beat longer than expected. In them we find lovely little moments that help sell the emotion behind it all.

If it weren’t a Pixar movie, especially a Pixar movie following up the studio’s first perceived creative misstep, the sometimes-fun, but awfully minor Cars 2, it could be easier to see Brave for what it is: a better-than-average family movie that’s a touch simplistic and with a few misguided jokes, but with emotionality so strong, main characters so compelling, and a core conflict so well-observed. It’s also an animated film with a gorgeously rendered environment beautifully animated in inviting and wondrous ways. Here the lush green fields and forest, the deep blue sea, and the warm castle of flickering flame on cobblestone are a wonderfully comfortable setting imbued with just enough magic and possibility to pull off the more fantastical elements of the story. (It’s one of the best-looking films of the year, though if you see it in weirdly dark and muddy 3D you might not know it.) And in the center of it all there’s Merida and her family, the real focus of the film and the film’s strongest element by far. They’re well cast with actors who have lovely musical accents and are charmingly animated so that they feel so lovable, so warm and funny and real, that they ground the whole thing with a very strong rooting interest.

But this is a Pixar movie and it is not a total masterpiece. And that’s too bad, but it’s hardly a deal breaker and no good reason to feel disappointed. The behind the scenes shuffling, which has resulted in a movie with director’s credits for Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman and a co-director's credit for Steve Purcell (all first-time Pixar directors, though Chapman’s the only one who has directed previously with Dreamworks Animation’s first feature, The Prince of Egypt), may explain some of the diffuse vision and the reliance on more convention than the brightly inventive studio is usually up to. But whoever is responsible for the moments between Merida and her mother deserves much praise, for those moments of great feeling and nuance, more than anything else, are what set this movie comfortably above its immediate competition from other American animation studios. After all, this is a film that tells a fresh legend, no small feat. And, like all good legends, this one rings with truth.

Movie Magic: HUGO

Orson Welles reportedly called filmmaking “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!” This line seems apt for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a film which is built around a gorgeous recreation of 1930’s Paris, in particular a massive train station in which most of the film takes place. It builds a convincing world with several employees getting charming through-lines like a café owner (Frances de la Tour), a newsstand owner (Richard Griffiths), a florist (Emily Mortimer), and a security guard (Sacha Baron Cohen). The virtuosic opening starts high above Paris and in one fluid shot dips down into the train station, slides through the entire building, and comes to rest at a giant clock face, behind which we see a pair of eyes. This is Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a young boy who is the center of the film’s story. He sees all of these characters in the station as he scampers through the walls, winding the clocks and stealing just enough to survive. His uncle (Ray Winstone) had the job before him, but now his uncle has disappeared. As long as the clocks continue to run, no one will suspect that there’s an orphan in the walls.

His father (Jude Law) was a clockmaker and a repairman, with a house full of gears and switches, the air filled with soft, perpetual ticking. One night he brought home a silver, metallic wind-up doll, a rusty, neglected automaton that was full of promise and mystery. Hugo was helping him fix it when his uncle suddenly appeared informing him that his father was killed in a fire at the museum where he found some extra work. This is how Hugo came to be in the train station and why he is drawn to the shop run by a toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who stocks it with magic tricks and wind-up figures. When the timing is right, Hugo sneaks mechanical pieces and toys back to his hideaway where he uses them to continue to work on the broken automaton his father left behind.

The toymaker catches Hugo and confiscates the contents of his pockets, which includes a notebook in which his father had sketched plans for the mechanical man’s fixing. Distraught, Hugo follows the toymaker through the wintry streets of Paris but is so helpless and filled with conflicting emotions that he can’t figure out what to do next. Outside the toymaker’s house, he meets the man’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who promises to help him. Together they try to find a way to fix the automaton, but along the way they realize that another, perhaps more important, thing that needs repair is the toymaker himself. Papa Georges, as Isabelle calls him, is a man who was an early filmmaking innovator who fell on hard times and pushed his passion away out of necessity. He’s lost access to his passion and lost his films to the cruelties of his situation. It’s as if a part of him is now missing.

This is a film of marvelously fluid tone, contemplative and emotionally involving while shot through with terrific humor and quietly earned thrills. The kids are on a quest to fix the mechanical man and get involved along the way in a journey filled with learning. An elderly librarian (Christopher Lee) and a learned film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) are happy to help them. There’s a love of facts and knowledge here that is thrilling. There’s also a very real sense of a childhood friendship developing that’s balanced quite nicely with the deep vein of sorrow and grief that runs through the film, of death and destruction, of lives shattered by war and by accidents, of people who need to continue to move forward, to do what they feel called to do, despite all their personal setbacks.

And in all this weighty material there lies a more conventional kid-friendly plot with Hugo scrambling to hide from the lanky guard who will surely send him to the orphanage. This is played for broad comedy at times (Baron Cohen is very good at it, after all), but it’s laced with such a spiky threat to Hugo that it feels funny and adventurous without pandering to the children in the audience or cheapening the film’s so very moving themes. In fact, this guard, as comedic as he is, is also a character wounded by his past, an orphan himself, and a limping veteran of the Great War as well. There’s no such thing as a simple character here. They all serve a purpose.

Masterful filmmaking is in evidence here, inventive and visually striking in ways that support the enthralling magic of the film. Scorsese is playing with all kinds of technological tricks new and old, from wonderfully expressive, layered and dynamic 3D angles (this is a rare film for which a 3D screening would be essential) to sweeping, fluid tracking shots. The plot, when you get right down to it, is rather simple and certainly was of no surface need to last over two hours. But any shorter and Scorsese wouldn’t have had time to explore such wonderful emotion, to show us all he wanted to show, his gorgeous, fully realized world with cinematography from Robert Richardson and production design from Dante Ferretti. This is a beautiful film to regard with a color palate of icy blue and rich gold. It’s easy to get enfolded into the film’s warmth and power. Much like Brian Selznick’s incredible book, on which the film is based, didn’t need all those pages of beautifully sketched illustrations, but would certainly be less distinctive and less artful without them, Scorsese creates a fully realized cinematic environment that doesn’t slip away easily.

There’s a bit of Scorsese in the characters, the curious boy, the bookish girl, the bearded scholar, and the clever toymaker. In them is the a man who loves finding what makes things tick, who loves stories, who loves learning, and who loves to entertain. This feels like an intensely personal film, a lovely interior adventure, a small-scale epic of character and emotion that is also a moving tribute to the importance of film history and film preservation, a cause near to Scorsese’s heart. One of the most spellbinding moments of the film – of the year, even – is a sequence that dives deeper into the past and gives us an enchanting montage that offers a look at the career of film pioneer Georges Méliès. In another delightful moment, the kids sit in the library and read to each other from an early history of cinema and the pages come alive. Here is a film with an absorbing narrative that also effectively communicates the deep core reasons for why I love film. When Hugo tells Isabelle his fond memories of going to the movies with his father, the words he spoke resonated not just with his story but also with my own. It was a nearly overwhelming moment. For all of Scorsese’s work teaching the importance of preserving and appreciating the cultural heritage of cinema, this might be his most important and vital teaching tool yet.

I saw the film in a theater that had several young kids in the audience. They were having a great time and left the theater saying to each other “What a great movie!” Maybe, just maybe, one of them will be inspired to learn more about the movies. (Perhaps the best Christmas present for a child who loves Hugo would be a kid-friendly book about film and a box set of early cinema, especially the comedies). Scorsese isn’t content to say that movies are magical and then simply show us familiar clips of great silent films (no matter how surprising and joyful the appearance of Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, and more on the screen of a modern multiplex was to this cinephile). Instead, Scorsese goes ahead and makes a magical film about movie magic, proving his point in practice.

Quick Look: CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

One of Werner Herzog’s two documentaries this year, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, creates a space for wonder. How often are we allowed that in this day and age? This is a film that stretches out as a hushed visual reverie allowing for quiet reflection upon the deepest questions of the nature of mankind and the nature of art. The lovable eccentric German auteur received rare permission from the French government to enter the Chauvet caves in the south of France to film the oldest discovered cave paintings. Because of the fragile ecosystem within this ancient geographic formation, the cave is sealed off year round, only open for brief periods of time for a select group of researchers to spend fleeting moments gathering data. Herzog meets them and lets them speak to us in his typical style of allowing digressions and tangents to unravel with a charming patience. How else would we learn that one researcher was once a circus performer? Who else would find an archeologist who likes to dress up in caveman-style pelts and plays a handmade bone flute, the better to interact with the ancients? Who but Herzog would find it necessary to give us a scene with a man who uses his sense of smell to search for caves? The delightful oddities of these people add interest to the main attraction, which are most definitely the cave paintings themselves. Gorgeously preserved and shot in stunning 3D, which allows their contours and textures to extend towards and curve away from the audience with exciting depth, these paintings are shared to a wide audience in a stirring and enchanting style. These paintings have been preserved and explored in a way only filmmaking would allow. Herzog’s typically lovely narration, droll and inquisitive in his soft German accent, and a swirling choral score that seems to be bubbling up from the very souls of the ancient artists, help create the film’s successful atmosphere, an absorbing, endlessly fascinating window to the past.

Dance of the Penguins: HAPPY FEET TWO

The singing penguins of 2006’s computer animated Happy Feet, having been taught to embrace dancing by that film’s outcast turned hero Mumble (Elijah Wood), are back singing and dancing in Happy Feet Two. The first film’s popularity – not to mention it’s Oscar for Best Animated Film over the far superior Cars and Monster House – has been mostly inexplicable to me. Baby penguins are cute and the film’s brightly colored with some nice music, but it’s also slow and turgid with a pat “be yourself” message awkwardly shoved into an episodic plot that ends in a belabored deus ex machina. It has a few good sequences, but it’s an awfully uneven experience. Needless to say, I was hardly eager to return to that film’s world.

It’s a small surprise, then, that I found the sequel to be a more enjoyable experience. This time, it’s Mumble’s son, Eric (Ava Acres), who feels like an outcast. The film opens with all the penguins singing and dancing and spinning around in celebration of life on their little patch of Antarctica while little Eric just watches. Encouraged to dance, he finally, timidly taps his feet until he gets them tangled up. He falls down and wets himself while the crowd tries not to laugh too hard. Embarrassed, Eric and a couple of his friends head off to another penguin’s territory, where some of the population sounds like Robin Williams.

Mumble goes off to find them, which means that he and the kids aren’t at home when a big chuck of iceberg breaks off of the continent and rides a tidal wave right into the side of the penguins' home. All of the penguins are trapped, surrounded on all sides by towering walls of ice, the iceberg blocking their only path away from their home and to the sea. They will surely, inevitably die of starvation unless help arrives. This is upsetting material for a kid’s film, made all the more so when little Eric, with his dad and pals, make their way back to the now-trapped tribe and look down, beaks quivering. “Mama?” Eric whimpers. They’re so close and yet so far, stuck with the possibility of sitting helpless while everyone they know starves.

Unlike the first film, which so often struck me as aimless in plot and obvious in theme, Two benefits from such an urgent and defined crisis. The plot, after a detour involving a heart-tugging encounter with an elephant seal (Richard Carter) and his cubs, follows the birds’ attempts to feed and hopefully free their flock, attempts that involve the other penguins’ tribe and a puffin masquerading as a flying penguin (voiced with typical ace goofy-accent work from Hank Azaria). This bird is given a terrific flashback that’s animated with great skill, eventually seamlessly integrating him into live-action footage of human researchers.

Returning from the first film, director George Miller has created a new film of quite lovely animation that makes good use of the 3D technology, creating an effortless depth and some playful moments that send water, bubbles, flippers or fish towards the audience. Underwater scenery pops in especially striking ways, such as in the jokey running subplot involving two little krill (Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) who decide to run away from the swarm. They’re introduced as just two in a rolling sea of krill that fills the entire screen and seems to extend infinitely forwards and backwards on the screen and past the heads of the audience. Scenes of schools of fish and of penguins hunting, or being hunted, beneath the waves take similar striking advantage of the CG fluidity and 3D depth.

The script from Miller and three others is tighter, faster, funnier, and more suspenseful than the first go around with these penguins, though it’s still kind of uneven. From time to time I felt only distracted, not entertained, though the film feels even brighter, more musical and more colorful than its predecessor. The variety of the music is jarring at times. How did the penguins learn all these songs? But the numbers are often unexpected, entertaining, and occasionally have real emotional impact. I especially loved a moment in which the film stands still and regards a little penguin belting out some Puccini. This is a film with visuals and sound that get definite benefit from the big screen experience.

The sequel’s altogether a smoother production than the original. It goes down easier despite the weighty concerns that drive the plot. Despite some broad humor, it's a subtler film. The themes never feel overly obvious. And it was the right choice to keep the main character a little penguin the whole time, unlike his father who started small and grew up over the course of his film. I can hardly tell the adult penguins apart in close up, let alone in their gigantic production numbers, but the little ones make up for anonymity with adorability. The children are all fluffy and precocious and so very cute. They’re closing in on Owl Jolson territory as far as rooting interest goes. *

The thematic concerns of the film hit the global warming angle hard, and it makes more of an impact this time. From the tiny krill to the lumbering elephant seals and the towering humans, all are affected by the changing climate. It’s telling that the humans, who appear in the final moments of Happy Feet to save the day and preserve a happy ending, make only fleeting appearances in Happy Feet Two. People could be the heroes, but they just aren’t able to help. These animals are left to deal with the changing landscapes all on their own. They might dance their way to survival this time, but the long-term prospects for their home is gloomy.

*Owl Jolson is the star of the great 1936 Warner Brothers’ animated short I Love to Singa, included in this week’s hilarious, indispensible Blu-ray release Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1, which puts to shame the CGI Sylvester and Tweety short that screens before Happy Feet Two.

On High: A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS

Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have found the sweet spot for Harold & Kumar silliness and it only took a hit of Christmas to do so. (But, not even a week past Halloween, don’t you think it’s a little early for Yuletide in the multiplex?) The first film to feature the stoner pals was 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, an ambling, crude film in which they were too high to find their way to hamburgers at White Castle without running into all kinds of problems. Was it funny? Some thought so. I found it had its charms, but, even at 88 minutes, it was a tad on the tiring side. Then came 2008’s Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which took away most of its predecessors defiantly ambitionless smallness and replaced it with self-important Bush-era satire that, while agreeable, sucked out much of what made the first film so low-key.

Now here we are with A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, a title that seems to scream out that the screenwriters have gone further astray when in fact they’ve dialed back. As this picture begins, Harold and Kumar haven’t spoken for years. They’re living very different lives. Kumar (Kal Penn) lives in his old small apartment, constantly smoking weed with his new nerdy roommate (Amir Blumenfeld) and stewing, lamenting the loss of his relationship with his old girlfriend. Harold (John Cho), on the other hand, is a married banker trying desperately to make sure Christmas will be perfect for his wife (Paula Garcés) and her family. Not only will his very scary father-in-law (Danny Trejo!) be spending the holidays with them, but he’s also bringing the whole extended family along as well as the Christmas tree that he has personally grown for 12 years to be the perfect holiday adornment. Needless to say, Harold is finding full-fledged adulthood stressful.

As luck would have it, a giant joint addressed to Harold is delivered to the old apartment on Christmas Eve, so Kumar does the right thing and brings it over. Harold’s father-in-law has loaded up the whole family and driven them into town for midnight mass, leaving the tree in his son-in-law’s care, so he’s there alone to greet his old friend. As they haltingly reacquaint themselves, Kumar lights up the joint. Harold, who has long given up the habit, scolds him and tosses it out the window. A gust of wind flips it back into the house and burns down the tree. Now, the two guys have to head out and find a tree of the same size and perfection in order to save Harold’s reputation with his father-in-law.

It’s a plot that turns out to be perfectly pitched for these guys, with higher stakes than merely getting to White Castle, but not so overheated to include Guantanamo Bay. It also proves that these characters have a charming knack for finding trouble, even when they’re sober, at least some of the time. Their race to find a tree gathers reluctant support from Kumar’s roommate and one of Harold’s co-workers (Thomas Lennon) and his baby. Their difficult, but not impossible, task is interrupted by strange obstacles punctuated by bouts of bad taste. The search soon involves a car crash, the Russian Mafia, drugs, guns, random violence, a giant Claymation snowman, surprise encounters with old friends, beer pong, intimidating tree salesmen, Neil Patrick Harris, an elaborate song-and-dance number, a waffle-making robot, a painful recreation of A Christmas Story’s tongue-on-a-cold-pole scene recreated with an even more sensitive body part, and Santa Claus himself, complete with his flying reindeer. It’s gleefully goofy, with first-time director Todd Strauss-Schulson further enlivening the sometimes disgusting and, truth be told, often funny script by chucking things at the camera in 3D just to make sure we’ve gotten the full extent of the jokey concept.

This is a film that will go anywhere for a joke. But, unlike the first two, which felt blunter and coarser, this installment balances its crudeness with sweetness. This is a thoroughly, irreverently secular, spectacularly hard-R, Christmas movie that nonetheless, in its shocking, subversive way, reaffirms the basic meaning of the holiday. Beneath the non-stop crude references and raunchy dialogue, this is essentially a story about friendship and family and uses its holiday setting to help the characters learn to appreciate each other, reconcile their differences, and become better people in the process. In that way, it’s also a casually sweet riff on evolving male friendship. That may be the biggest surprise of all, that this loose, aimless, goofy movie with enough vulgarity to ensure it’s self-selecting audience will be a small one, is at its core just a particularly filthy spin on pure sentimentality. Harold and Kumar have (sort of) grown up! Like its predecessors, this third H&K adventure feels less than the sum of its riffs, but it hangs together better as a movie, complete with actual narrative momentum and the series’ highest rate of inspired scenes to insulting ones. Besides, can any movie that puts Danny Trejo in a Christmas sweater be all bad?

Less Than Purrfect: PUSS IN BOOTS

Puss in Boots, an anthropomorphized cat with snazzy footwear, first clawed his way to smirking CGI fame with the second Shrek, showing up as a terrific foil and an adorable sight gag with a soft, yet rolling, voice provided in a near purr by Antonio Banderas. The character is a swashbuckling feline, with a twist of Zorro mixed with the roaming Banderas gunman from Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Needless to say, he was strikingly perfect in the fractured fairy tale universe in which he appeared.

Now that the Shreks have stayed well past their welcome, it’s only natural that one of the most enjoyable supporting characters has struck off on his own (albeit with a small army of credited screenwriters and Shrek the Third director Chris Miller) to forge a potential new franchise for Dreamworks Animation with what is, I suppose, a prequel to those movies. It’s mostly a failure, an entirely inconsequential film that had a minimum of my interest while it ran, but lost it as soon as the credits rolled. It’s a nice try, anyways.

In Puss in Boots the titular rogue swordsman is out to find some magic beans when he runs into a cat burglar, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and a talking egg, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis). They, too, want the beans, but Humpty and Puss have some backstory to get out of the way. In an extended flashback we learn not only why these two seem to hate each other, we also get a look at the origins of Puss in Boots, a look that answers all kinds of none-too-pressing questions. Why is he an outlaw? Why does he wear those boots? You’ll find out.

With all of this out of the way, the plot can get down to business. The two cats and the egg team up to take the magic beans and grow a beanstalk to the giant’s castle where they will find the golden-egg-laying goose that will make them rich, rich, rich, I tell you! The beans are currently in the possession of a surly, thuggish Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), who just haven’t been the same since Jack fell down and broke his crown.

Lacking the emotional depth and visual energy of the Kung Fu Panda movies, Puss in Boots tries desperately to wring a few additional notes out of a one- or two-note character by sending him through a sagging plot loaded up with predictable kids movie antics and a few did-I-just-hear-that? innuendos to ostensibly delight the parents who will probably just be hoping their kids don’t ask them to explain later. It’s not entirely without its charms, but those charms are few and far between. Puss’s cat behavior is cute at times as he laps up some milk or is distracted by a beam of light and the voice performance from Banderas is simply delightful. I just wish this cat had something a little more memorable to do.

It’s all rather handsomely animated, even if the frames seem to be a bit sparse and uninteresting, especially compared to dense gag-riddled scenery of the Shreks. But what really seems to be missing most of all is a sense of urgency or necessity. It’s all perfectly harmless and easy enough to watch, but I find it hard to believe it’ll stick in the memory for very long. Even on the way back to my car, I found some of the details slipping away. It’s just barely passable and, especially in the case of whole families who’ll show up and be forced to pay 3D surcharges, that’s just not quite good enough.

Sing Sing: GLEE: THE 3D CONCERT MOVIE

I don’t write about TV shows here, but if I were to start doing so Glee would not be my first choice. I’d rather write about Breaking Bad, or Mad Men, or Louie, or Parks & Recreation, or Community, or The Good Wife, or, or, or. But, that’s neither here nor there. None of those great shows have a recently released 3D concert movie to their name. Which is just as well since Glee, a show about a bunch of misfit choir kids in an Ohio high school, has a concept ripe for cinema. The widescreen and big sound could have potentially given the show the fullest expression of its inconsistent and deeply flawed musical soul.

The show itself started promisingly enough, but by the maddening second season it became clear that showrunners Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, and Brad Falchuk were not making the show I was ready to like. (To be fair, Falchuk, more than any of the other creators, seems to be interested in emotional coherence and narrative momentum). I want Glee to be a heartfelt high school musical with characters using their songs to express deeply held feelings, for production numbers to bubble up just because regular old talking just can’t handle the emotions on screen. Actually, the show is sometimes just that, and that’s when it’s good. Ironically enough, the best episode the series has yet produced, season one’s “Dream On,” was that. It was directed by Joss Whedon, a TV auteur in his own right, creating what is perhaps the clearest and strangest example of an outsider coming in and showing a better understanding of what a show should and could be.

Most of the time, the show is miscalculated comedy and thinly written characters that change their circumstances and emotions whenever and however it best suits the whim of the week. It’s exhausting and dull with terrible teasing flashes of brilliance. It’s often one of the best shows and one of the worst shows on the air right now, usually in the same episode, sometimes at the same time. It has attracted legions of vocal and committed fans though, and Glee: The 3D Concert Movie is sure to make them happy. For a hopeful but discouraged Glee skeptic like me, it’s hard to get too excited about it.

The film is technically proficient, loud, glittery, high-energy, and short. It features the cast singing and dancing (though the editing doesn’t do the choreography any favors) and every-so-often talking backstage in character. Once in a great while, the proceedings pause to showcase real-life stories from fans who have found inspiration in Glee, even though said inspiration is mostly tangential and incidental. There’s lots of screaming and swooning going on – this is a very youthful audience – but, as if to prove that this is no Hannah Montana concert movie, we get strategic cutaways to middle-aged fans flipping equally out over seeing their favorite characters singing memorable songs from past episodes.

What makes the show itself so good in patches, the very good, even great, acting from Chris Colfer and Mike O’Malley and the terrific charisma from the likes of Darren Criss and Lea Michele, is missing here by the movie’s very nature. It’s just a string of performances and a bunch of self-congratulatory multi-media aggrandizement. I don’t doubt that people going to see Glee: The 3D Concert Movie will get exactly what they want to see. The movie is exactly what it set out to be, for better or worse. But couldn’t director Kevin Tancharoen, last seen trying to remake Fame, have tried to do something more with this opportunity? Maybe the constraints of being disposable between-season product, fuel for the money machine that is Glee, prevented him from doing so.

More Finals: FINAL DESTINATION 5

The biggest problem with the last couple Final Destination movies is that the audience starts the film way ahead of the characters. Since rare is the survivor in one of these cinematic death traps, we know all the rules and are forced to wait around for the new batch of characters to catch up to where we are. Each film starts with gathering a group of characters and then killing them all off in an over-the-top calamity. Then it circles back to reveal that the accident has yet to occur. What we’ve seen is merely a premonition that was just experienced by our main character. Said main character then saves some of the group seconds before the disaster occurs, but rather than saving their lives he’s brought them into a new kind of prolonged torture. Since they were all marked to die, Death itself, the ever-present invisible menace, is out to hunt down all of these escapees one by one.

I have a tremendous affection for this series. The first three are especially efficient and are probably the very best examples of the premise that could possibly be made, imbued with a gutsy B-movie sensibility paired with a devilish delight in methodically setting up the variables that, when triggered in just the wrong, or right, order will lead to a freak accident. They’re slasher movies without the villain. When you get right down to it, it’s far more unsettling for me to contemplate death by weird, complicated, unforeseeable circumstances than it is to simply ponder meeting a masked machete-man in the woods. The former is simply much more likely than the latter. These films succeed through their total commitment to the innovation and imagination (not to mention the incineration, impalement, and other sudden bloody frights) inherent in the concept.

By the time we arrived at the fourth feature in the series it was all starting to seem a little tired but here we are yet again, this time with Final Destination 5. It dials back some of the flippancy that began to settle in last time, occasionally summoning up the dread and propulsion that made the first three so much creepy fun. The recipient of the premonition this time is Nicholas D’Agasto, who wears the responsibility well. As for a group of his co-workers headed to a retreat that are saved by his early warning of a bridge collapse, they’re less memorable than they should be. The boss (David Koechner), the I.T. guy (P.J. Byrne), the intern (Emma Bell) and various office workers (Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, and Arlen Escarpeta) are just plain less interesting than other ensembles and that makes the time spent waiting for the characters to learn why they survived, only to start mysteriously dying, a bit on the tedious side. (I do like how, as in all these movies, several character names are winks to horror icons of the past, this time including Friedkin, Hooper, and Castle).

As the characters line up to meet their grisly ends, the film, directed by Steven Quale from a script by Eric Heisserer, makes good use of its 3D technology, finding great ways to accent depth and heights but then still getting a kick out of thrusting bloody entrails and goop right at you. The way the plot unfolds feels a bit more belabored than usual. “You know how many things had to go wrong for this to happen?” a detective asks after a laser-eye surgery patient suffers through several steps of equipment malfunctions. It’s unsettling to a certain extent, and certainly gross, but lacks a real visceral impact like even an earlier sequence in this very movie that finds cringing suspense from the threat of unnatural bodily harm from gymnastics gone wrong. (I knew there was a good reason I find it difficult to watch uneven bars routines).

Learning about the franchise’s rules comes courtesy of the series’ one major semi-recurring supporting actor, Tony Todd as an eerie coroner. Asked how he knows so much, he responds “I’ve seen it all before.” And so we have. This one has a handful of good moments and ends on a terrific nod to the franchise’s past on top of a well-executed climax. The film goes through the events you’d expect, hits all the beats the other films have conditioned us to foresee.

Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES

In 2003, when Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer released Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, they had the element of surprise on their side. They had a hugely enjoyable crowd-pleaser, and a pirate film, no less, based on a theme park ride, an idea that then (and now) sounds improbable. Yet the film worked with its big rollicking set pieces, it’s playful treatment of the iconography of swashbuckling (Errol Flynn might have fit right in), and its lilting off-kilter star-turn from Johnny Depp as the instant breakout hit character Captain Jack Sparrow.

As a drunken, improvisatory scoundrel who loves being a pirate more than anything other than his own cleverness, Depp’s mumbling, mascara-wearing, stumbling swordsman was an unlikely hero. Hindsight, however, makes it all seem so inevitable. Depp can be a charming actor and in the film he’s given an infinitely charming character that he not only inhabits but also seems to have emerged fully created from deep within himself. He’s the secret genius amongst all of the characters, able to play people off of each other to achieve his goals while trying (or seemingly trying) to avoid doing the hard work. All he wants to do is to captain his beloved ship and he effortlessly steals away the show in the process, even if he’s actually a bit of a supporting character to the overarching damsel/hero romance between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.

The pure charm and excitement (not to mention the surprise) was dampened with a second feature, Dead Man’s Chest. With the sequel Disney via Verbinski attempted an expansion of the mythos of the first film that tried to retroactively turn that film into a trilogy starter. It’s nothing more than two-and-a-half hours of exposition with a few sequences of fun thrown in for good measure. It is, however, a booming, cluttered messy film of impressive, immersive design that is occasionally very enjoyable. It successfully moves the first film away from a standalone plot and puts it in a larger universe of details and characters engaged in and rebelling against various interconnected curses and codes.

By the time the trilogy ended with At World’s End, I enjoyed diving into the complicated, overextended, multilayered plotting. At three hours, the film is no quick, breezy blockbuster but Verbinski uses its heft to find voluminous weirdness almost hallucinatory in their meticulously odd construction. (There’s a lengthy sequence involving a topsy-turvy trip into Davy Jones’s Locker of all things, not to mention the climax that kicks off when a voodoo giant bursts into a river of crabs). Some find it tiresome; I find it exhilaratingly dense in its commitment to seeing just how odd a summer tent-pole release can get, how light on its feet a film can be while lumbering around with so many subplots and side characters.

After some time off, Disney has Depp back for more time as Captain Jack. By this point, he’s the clear backbone of the series. In this new film, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, he’s just about all that remains of the old mythos. The scene-stealer has become the focus. Most of the ensemble accrued over the course of three films has been stripped away. (Say goodbye to Bloom, Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, and others). This is a simpler film, the simplest of all these Pirates, but it has some of the old pleasures without being nearly as bizarre or intricate. The biggest pleasure of these movies has been their denseness; this one's biggest flaw is it's relatively straightforward nature. It’s comparatively thin and, by the end, a bit anticlimactic; it’s eventful, but less epic in scope. Part of the fun of the bloat has been lost in the new focus on leanness, but I still found just enough to enjoy.

When Johnny Depp makes his entrance, I realized yet again what fun it is to see him as Jack Sparrow. I had forgotten how enjoyable he is to watch, the charmer, scamp, wobbly drunk and perpetual schemer. He commands the screen with ease. Here he’s positioned as the star of the show; he’s playing second fiddle to no one. What works, however, is the way he’s pulled into a plot that both could and couldn’t go on without him. In an opening sequence in London, he impersonates a judge, flees, is caught, and ends up in front of babbling fool King George (Richard Griffiths) who implores him to help his privateer (none other than Sparrow’s long-time rival, Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa) beat the Spanish to the Fountain of Youth.

This race to the fountain will be going on without Sparrow, but so many of the principal players seem to think he knows the way that he ends up accidentally helping out. But that’s Sparrow for you. He has a way of playing all sides against each other in a way that seems like he’d rather be anywhere else than amongst such intricate scheming. By not seeming to care (actually, he just might not care) he wriggles his way out of each situation, usually with the upper hand.

Captain Jack won’t help Barbossa and instead strikes off on his own and gets tricked into working aboard Blackbeard’s ship. This glowering baddie (played growly by Ian McShane) and his fiery long-lost daughter (Penélope Cruz) are foils for Jack’s half-planned bumbling. The daughter, especially, has it out for Jack, but mostly because years earlier she was all set to become a nun until she had an affair with him. On Blackbeard’s ship is also a captive missionary (Sam Claflin), just because there needs to be someone younger around to fall for a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) who gets captured to provide a tear with which to activate the magic of the fountain’s water.

So, the whole thing’s a race (though a fairly rudderless one) and a somewhat overcomplicated quest. Gone are the elaborate curses and multitude of side characters from the first three Pirates. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who’ve actually scripted all four of these things) are trying something new, plotwise. It more or less worked for me, although some of the action beats fall flat (swordplay isn't always edited for clarity or even impact) and the whole thing feels a little overstretched. But the cast is fully on board with the loud fantasy of it all and the proceedings don’t swallow them up. (Rush even does a fantastic bit of acting that involves readjusting his balance after he loses a bit of weight from one leg).

Speaking of new, the director this time around is Rob Marshall. He’s no Verbinski, but he handles the spectacle well. His 2002 film Chicago is, despite what Oscar might say, no Best Picture, but fun enough I suppose. This success had the unfortunate effect of causing him to think that he should be making Very Important Movies. His hollow Memoirs of a Geisha and god-awful Nine are a one-two punch in which he pushed his filmmaking to the limits of insufferableness and beyond. Here he finds his inner showman and stages the swordplay and effects with a degree of competency he has heretofore never displayed. (No, not even in the Academy Award winning Chicago).

Of course, that’s because Marshall is swallowed up in the machine. Bruckheimer and Disney are making product and while someone like Verbinski (take another look at this year’s Rango and you can see the kind of distinct vision he can have) could in some ways assert his own identity as a filmmaker, Marshall is just a cog. No one would let him mess this up too badly. There’s a sense that this movie could almost have churned itself out. But not quite. There’s a small wit and the occasional nice visual staging going on (the 3D is even used strikingly at times) and the action beats arrive on time. Some, like the series of escapes at the film’s opening and, later, a ship’s bewitched rigging tangling up mutineers, are done with a likable, unexpected, flourish.

The movie’s not great (I doubt the series will ever be as good as the original, and not just for lack of surprise) but it’s fun. Definitely not for those already tired of the series or cynical about this one’s very existence, it’s at least not too insistent about your approval. It’s sufficiently good-natured (relaxed, even) and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a film I was fully prepared to find unnecessary. Every buckle gets swashed (leaving lots of dangling plot lines for future installments) with a degree of energy that can make for a pleasant night at the movies.

Quick Look: RIO

Rio is a solid B-level CG animation effort from Blue Sky, best known for its Ice Age from all the way back in 2002 and which was, for my money, its only satisfying feature. (Even those Ice Age sequels were mostly mediocre). But now with Rio, a musical, warm-hearted animated comedy, the company has finally bested its best-known feature. It only took them a decade of lesser efforts. (Robots, anyone?) This film is cute, colorful, toothless fun. It’s safe, but not without its charms. It’s about the last two blue macaws on Earth, one a neurotic flightless house pet from Minnesota (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) and the other a super-confident jungle bird from Brazil (voiced by Anne Hathaway). A scientist (Rodrigo Santoro) and a Minnesotan (Leslie Mann) agree to mate their birds and meet in Rio de Janeiro to do so. Luckily, this isn’t simply a story driven by the need for two birds to mate. That’s a bit on the creepy side for a decidedly kid-centric feature. Instead, the G-rated thrust of it all is a chase with an impressive sense of place, courtesy of director Carlos Saldanha, who has Rio as a hometown. Bird smugglers steal the birds and its up to the scientist and the American tourist to get them back. The birds, for their part, escape the smugglers (especially a nasty cockatoo with the voice of Jemaine Clement) and try to get help from a toucan (George Lopez), two hip-hop birds (Jamie Foxx and will.i.am), and a very slobbery bulldog (Tracy Morgan). The various characters race through the streets of Rio and get into all kinds of vibrant, tuneful trouble. The film never feels wholly original – it feels at times like its been cobbled together from good ideas that have been used in countless other animated films – but its never dull. It has a nice sense of pacing and location and never wears out its welcome. Even the 3D is used to nice, if mostly unobtrusive, effect. I won’t deny that the movie put a smile on my face. I can’t say Rio is great, but it sure is swell.