Reviewing Jane: I Often Think It Odd That It Should Be So Dull

 In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2007

Director: Julian Jarrold

Cast: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters 

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: PG

If you took the opportunity to read my review for the dutiful downer Miss Austen Regrets, you may have noticed the many comments sniping at literary biopic motion pictures for generally being intolerably stupid. In truth that was largely aimed at Shakespeare in Love. I hadn't seen Becoming Jane since high school so I was willing to assume that my opinion formed at that time would hold no weight, because not only have I come a long way in my approach to analyzing the worth of cinema, I understand infinitely more about Austen and the breadth of her work than I did at the time. Astonishingly, I think I have now become the first person in human history to agree with an opinion I held in high school.

Hold onto your hats, folks.

Becoming Jane is the story of, astonishingly, a young Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway). She is one of those modern women plunked down in the past that we like to position as protagonists in historical dramas, rebelling against gender boundaries and holding fast to her belief that she can contribute more to the world as an author than as some rich man's wife. There is indeed a rich man around to test that theory, the nephew of local fancypants Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith), who she refuses despite the encouragement of her mom (Julie Walters) and dad (James Cromwell). Her heart belongs to another, the uncouth boxer and judge's nephew Tom LeFroy (James McAvoy), even though - would you believe it - she at first finds him prideful and perhaps develops a bit of a prejudice against him.

The course of true love never did run smooth, and it's famous fact that Jane Austen died without ever marrying, but just maybe this youthful romance will inspire her to write six of the most famous books about love of all time.

Starting with Pride & Prejudice, because this movie spits in the face of her publishing history.

Yes, this is one of those incredibly crass movies that posits that all an author has to do to create a literary masterwork is to write down the exact events that are happening in their lives and change the names. So even though it's based on her actual life (extremely loosely, I might have mentioned), we should approach this as an adaptation of one of her novels because it literally is, all the way down to the Lady Catherine de Bourgh of it all.

The core of a Jane Austen novel is the effortless blending of biting satirical observations of the landed gentry with earnest, effective romantic drama. Becoming Jane has neither. As an evocation of Austen's comic gift, Miss Austen Regrets is leaps and bounds ahead of Becoming Jane - and that movie saw fit to have their Jane just wander around quoting all of the best lines of dialogue she had already written. The Austen of Becoming Jane is certainly headstrong and willing to defend the use of irony in her writing, but she almost never indulges herself in it, preferring to hide in corners and cry wherever possible.

And as a romance, Becoming Jane leans entirely on our desire to see the pretty white people make out. They put almost no work into depicting why LeFroy and Austen might actually be interested in one another, they just kind of quietly transition from hate to love offscreen. And sure, they are an aesthetically pleasing couple, but in action it's a little hard to take Hathaway's barely-there British accent too seriously.

Those lips weren't made for accents, they were made for smooching!

I probably shouldn't have expected a multi-faceted study of domestic life and a lady's perspective on romance from a movie that doesn't see fit to have its female lead character speak a significant line of dialogue until about fifteen minutes in, so I guess that's what I get. 

Taken solely as a historical costume drama, Becoming Jane is wholly acceptable, with plenty of beautiful compositions of the bucolic British countryside blooming with a timeless elegance. Although if we're speaking literally, the costumes themselves aren't quite that interesting, damn those prim Regency-era frocks. The only exceptions to the rule of "plain earth tones, let's not make a fuss" are Tom LeFroy's elegant coats and Lady Gresham's voluminous outfits that are ready-made for drag performances.

I've now seen Becoming Jane twice in my life and I have absolutely no desire to ever see it a third. This coming from someone who's halfway through a volume of Jane Austen's letters to her sister Cassandra (also a character in the movie, but so minor as to not actually deserve a mention), which are mostly just descriptions of travel and who was at what balls.

TL;DR: Becoming Jane is a disappointing effort at capturing the wit and wisdom of one of history's greatest authors.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 846

Other Films Based on Jane Austen in General

Becoming Jane (Jarrold, 2007)

Miss Austen Regrets (Lovering, 2007)

The Jane Austen Book Club (Swicord, 2007)

Austenland (Hess, 2013)

Life, Uh...

Year: 2018

Director: J. A. Bayona

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies in the history of cinema, so I don't know whether that makes it shocking or completely understandable that I felt no interest in checking out Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The fifth entry in the long-running blockbuster franchise is about as far from that original film as you can get while still being about CGI dinosaurs. Jurassic Park has more in common with When Harry Met Sally than Fallen Kingdom.

Approach with caution.

So, Fallen Kingdom picks up several years after Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are living in peace on Isla Nublar following the destruction of the theme park, but a volcanic eruption threatens their survival. Dinosaur rights activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are sent to the island on a rescue mission by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), a proxy for John Hammond's former business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Because you can never trust the rich, in real life and especially the movies, this trip may not be as kosher as it seems.

Along for the ride are sharp-tongued paleobiologist Zia (Daniella Pineda) and wimpy tech dweeb Franklin (Justice Smith), as well as what the movie paints as years of emotional baggage and sexual tension between Owen and Claire, even though it's just thin air. Also there's a little girl (Isabella Sermon) running around, because what's a Jurassic Park movie without an unnecessary child character?

Better.

Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is a phenomenally dumb movie that takes the franchise in a phenomenally dumb direction that paints future Jurassic directors into a corner, forcing them to make a phenomenally dumb movie as well, whenever that should come down the pike. It's so dumb that its dumbness is literally infecting the future. Its dumbness has slipped out of the timestream, and not even Doctor Who can stop it.

Sometimes this dumbness is used to its advantage, like how every shot of Claire begins at her sensible shoes and pans up, throwing a hilariously overbearing number of winks at the "high heels in the jungle" controversy. Mostly it is used to its detriment, like the rapidly fluctuating number of guards around at any given time when our heroes need to sneak around the bad guy's lair that totally diminish any tension or stakes because they're never around when plot stuff needs to happen. 

Sometimes Fallen Kingdom hits the bad-good strides I was hoping for, including a sterling moment where Bryce Dallas Howard shrieks the word "Chair!" with a hurricane-blast of emotion like she was gunning for that clip to end up on her Oscar reel. In fact, she's frequently too good for the material, but in the completely wrong direction, turning random lines into scenery-obliterating grenades of diva drama that would make Gone with the Wind blush. 

"These raptors will never be hungry again!"

While Howard is busy either giving the best or the worst performance in the movie, the rest of the cast just flounders around, drowning in a sea of unmotivated decision-making, inscrutable dialogue, and CGI mayhem. Chris Pratt seems devoted to being as bland a male cypher as possible, and a heap of character actors dawdle around the edges with nothing in particular to do. And don't get me started on Jeff Goldblum, who I don't particularly like on a good day, and who is positively catatonic in his one-scene cameo.

The only person who seems to have actually showed up to work is J. A. Bayona, who directs the crap out of the movie. Not out of the actors, mind you. But as far as the imagery goes, Bayona is the second best director to ever touch one of these movies. His composition of light and shadow is frequently exquisite, especially in the bizarre turn the film takes toward gothic mansion horror in the third act. He directs the movie like a German expressionist masterpiece, only instead of using the implication to drive the horror, you also get to see a whole lot of CGI dino-monster.

If this were any other movie, I'd call that the best of both worlds. But Fallen Kingdom isn't the best of anything. Bayona really is working it (to the extent that I'd even recommend seeing this movie, just to bask in the way he captures the feeling of majesty and awe that Spielberg so capably honed in the original film), but it's still a dumb, milquetoast popcorn epic that doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of narrative, character, acting, fun, or much of anything a person would come to this movie for.

I mean, I came for the visual references to Nosferatu, but I ain't your average bear.

Oh, and the score isn't even good. John Williams' iconic themes are mostly shelved in favor of a bizarre choral piece that shrieks in your face how big and important every scene in the movie is. It's the movie in a nutshell: Fallen Kingdom tries very hard to be a lot of different things, and it fails in a lot of spectacular ways. The things that work really work, but if you made a list of those things, it would fit on a Post-It note.

TL;DR: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a bland nothing of a popcorn flick, although its director clearly has his head in the game.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 916
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: That'll Do, Pig

In which we review the movies in the Babe duology, which the blogger was forced to watch by the maniac he's dating, but found to be quite a treat.

Babe

Year: 1995

Director: Chris Noonan

Cast: James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Christine Cavanaugh

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A young pig is taken to a bucolic farm, where he longs to be a sheepdog instead of just a fancy dinner.

I don't usually respond to movies with animal protagonists, but I do respond to movies with effects brought to life by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, so I guess I was as neutral as Switzerland coming into Babe, which I'm certain I saw as a young child but remembered literally nothing about. And let me tell you what, I loved it. 

Babe is not only an adaptation of a children's novel, it is a storybook come to blissful, bucolic life. The farm set feels stagebound in a way that doesn't limit belief but rather creates a homey, insulated fairy tale atmosphere, and yet the world of the film spins an unlimited amount of potential from its glorious creature designs. This might just be the best work the Henson company has ever done, delicately switching between excellent trained animal actors and lifelike animatronics to create the impression of talking animals in a way that still holds up even two decades later.

The only effects liability is the sheep (which, incidentally, were the only creatures designed by a different company), who have a rather stiff range of expression and dead glassy eyes when it comes down to it, but other than that Babe is quite frankly a technical masterwork. There's something to be said about the fact that in the 23 years separating then and now, no Racing Stripes or Beverly Hills Chihuahua or Marmaduke has come even close to achieving the look and feel of these lifelike animals. To create something like this requires a great deal of craftsmanship, skill, and love, and that's something that the incredibly patient producer George Miller has proven himself to have in spades.

But a technically perfect children's film is nothing without heart, and Babe has enough of that for a whole pod of blue whales. Pure, blissful, painful heart bursts from every pore of this film, starting and ending with its two core performances. Christine Cavanaugh is irresistibly tender and innocent as Babe, a pig who doesn't know enough about the world not to believe he can do anything. And James Cromwell has a brilliant interiority to his outwardly hardened farmer character, letting the pig crack his gruff, masculine exterior in a variety of brilliantly small, subtle ways.

The screenplay is also tight as all get out, letting Babe wander through a variety of domestic, picaresque adventures that establish the world of the farm and the personalities of the animals within it, before slowly introducing the naïve pig to the harsh risks and realities of what it means to be a farm animal. Terror, death, and isolation form a constant presence over the film, but it doesn't shy away from darkness, allowing the sweetness to seem even more pure and scrumptious. It never gets pushed into saccharine, cheesy territory exactly because of that dash of reality taking the edge off.

In short, Babe is one of the best kids' films ever made. It's a beautiful combination of everything that makes it both a perfect motion picture (technical prowess and storytelling spirit) and a perfect storybook tale (heart with a dash of edgy reality). It's impossible not to be invested in Babe's journey, however big or small the plot developments are. If you have a child, this should be the only movie they watch until they're old enough to start seeing Scream movies.

Rating: 10/10

Babe: Pig in the City

Year: 1998

Director: George Miller

Cast: Magda Szubanski, Elizabeth Daily, Mickey Rooney 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

Babe leaves the farm in an attempt to raise money to save it, and ends up getting stuck in The City with a gaggle of assorted outcast animals.

When I told my mother I was going to watch Babe: Pig in the City, she said, "oh, the bad one?" Mind you, she'd never seen the film, but let's just say that that it doesn't enjoy the most sterling reputation in the world at large. And it's not hard to imagine why. It takes the sweet, gentle bliss of the original Babe and runs it through a meat grinder. While it's pretty interesting and unique on its own merits, those merits are not that of a Babe movie, or really that of a movie intended for minors to any degree.

It's not fair to say that this tonal shift is George Miller's fault, considering that he shepherded the original film into the world as producer, but this one is very George Miller. His Mad Max sensibilities burst through every pore of Pig in the City, and while those instincts are as sharp as ever, they're just not... cute. Take, for instance, one of the most disgusting characters to ever grace the silver screen: Mickey Rooney's mute clown Uncle Fugly, who is the scariest character the man has ever played, and this is a guy who starred in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5.

I don't normally post photos in mini-reviews, but look at this sh*t.

And that's not the only place where the man indulges in his more bizarre, manic instincts. I'm talking exuberant slapstick involving elaborate pulley systems, multiple disgusting side characters with pig noses, and a general daredevil attitude with the fragile psyches of the children that are supposedly in the  film's core audience. I think it says a lot that you could read this film as a prequel to either Hotel for Dogs or The Godfather.

That's not to say this is a bad thing. It's just not what people were asking for, and that's fair. But approaching this film as an adult, there's a lot to appreciate here. First of all, there's a wide variety of subtextual material to plumb. I won't go into great detail, but Pig in the City offers perspectives on gentrification, homelessness, and class disparity all sprinkled with ample Holocaust and slavery imagery. I've never seen a kids' movie with so much grim reality on its mind, even as it tells a simplistic fable within that framework.

Unfortunately, none of this carries the emotional heft of the original Babe, which faces the reality of being an animal on a farm in a simple, clear, and thus brutally precise way. It flings its ideas this way and that, and they only coalesce into something satisfyingly probing in the character of the orangutan Thelonius, a great ape whose only wish is to maintain his dignity in an increasingly cruel, unforgiving world.

But one thing that's unequivocally great is the design of the titular city itself and its inhabitants. Although Babe spends most of his time in a single hotel, every time he visits the broader environment of The City, it's a breathtaking amalgam of the greatest urban landscapes this wide world has to offer. It quite blatantly refuses to take place in any single city, lumping together landmarks and visual signifiers from a dozen different famous metropolises.

There we go with another picture, and if the fact that I can't resist including these doesn't prove Pig in the City has something stunning and visual to offer, I don't know what will.

This production design is perhaps the only thing that consistently maintains the dreamy storybook quality of the original film, and it's glorious, from the Venice canals that border Babe's hotel to the angular roads that drift across its downtown area to the Day-Glo muscle beach at its outskirts. And the costuming of the characters that inhabit this world is glorious, ranging from Medieval powdered faces with Cindy Lou Who hair to leather punks on roller blades to this angular work of art who runs the hotel.

She's like an Ellen Greene character made her way into the Capital from The Hunger Games, and oh boy there I go with the pictures again.

It's a boisterous good time visually speaking, and the animal actors are just as top notch this time around. Unfortunately, it's still just not as good as Babe, but really there aren't many things that are. Changing the actress playing Babe robs the character of some of its all-important heart, and the movie is a little too obsessed with effects setpieces and big, broad humor to focus on well-rounded characters. It's still fun, but it feels like a well-made trifle rather than a work of genius. But if that's the biggest complaint I can make about it, we're still in pretty good hands.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1470

We Can Be Heroes, Forever And Ever

Year: 2014

Director: Don Hall & Chris Williams

Cast: Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Daniel Henney

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I doubt all hope is lost for traditional animation. The last hand-drawn Disney animated feature was Winnie the Pooh in 2011, not quite long enough ago to start carving the gravestone yet. But it is quite apparent that CGI animation is in vogue and we'll just have to go with the flow. It's true that Walt Disney Studios hasn't sufficiently produced digital animated pictures that in any way match the style and aesthetic of their early Golden Age work, but The Princess and the Frog was traditionally animated and look where that got them. It was decent, but nowhere near a masterpiece.

In today's world, we're just going to have to accept the computers for the time being and take the films as they come. Disney is far from its Renaissance in the 90's and while the films certainly have a higher baseline of quality than other studios, nothing has been quite as enduring a classic as The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. Since its last traditional feature, Disney has given us Wreck-It-Ralph - a decently charming pop culture-laden parable, and Frozen - a strikingly uneven, quasi-feminist, wildly popular half-musical that didn't even give Jonathan Groff a real song, the lunatics, what were they thinking. 

Neither of these films could be considered failures and both of them are quite amusing in their own right, but not really up to snuff with the reputation of the studio that produced them.

Big Hero 6 doesn't necessarily break the mold in that regard with its stock situations and comic booky sensibilities (this is the first Disney animated film to be based on a Marvel property), but within those parameters it leaps and bounds ahead of its peers. With a story holding the emotional weight of a cannonball, a nonstop pace, and a team of effortlessly diverse, effortlessly relatable characters, Big Hero 6 gives us hope for Disney's dawning age of Behind the Keyboard animation.

From Gus the Mouse to a computer mouse, we can't stop the company from evolving.

Big Hero 6 takes place in the futuristic city amalgam of San Fransokyo, which (in a filmic cliché I'm all too pleased to indulge in) becomes a character in and of itself as the story progresses. Bot-fighter Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) is a precocious wunderkind, a savant, a prodigy, whatever language you want, really. His brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) wants to encourage him away from illegal bot-fighting and gambling so he takes him to his laboratory at the local university, where he meets young geniuses from around the world who are working in the field of robotics.

Said geniuses include Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), a nervous, straight-edged giant who specializes in laser technology; Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), a peppy chemistry genius who has somehow managed to survive in the world despite being made of toothpicks; and Go Go (Jamie Chung), an edgy rebel whose area of expertise is magnetic travel. Said geniuses adamantly don't include Fred (T. J. Miller), a school mascot who's best friends with all of them and has all the stereotypical traits of a stoner but with the edges blast-sanded off by the Disney corporate machine.

[ACT ONE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] Following a student showcase in which Hiro applies to the school using a team of microbots that he invented, a fire erupts. When Tadashi runs inside to save his beloved Professor Callaghan (James Cromwell), he perishes in an explosion, leaving behind his little brother along with his creation - a cheery robotic health care provider known as Baymax (30 Rock's Scott Adsit, possibly the last man I would have expected behind the mic). When an unknown villain in a kabuki mask steals Hiro's microbots and begins using them for sinister purposes, Hiro must team up with his brother's friends to defeat him and save the town from total destruction.

Kabuki puns are harder to come up with than you think. Feel free to submit one in the comments.

But Baymax's endearing cuteness and eagerness to help Hiro overcome his trauma are more than just a pandering marketing ploy (though this is Disney, so we can't pretend it wasn't intended to function that way - the corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the cuddly). He functions simultaneously as a manifestation of Hiro struggling to overcome his grief and the remnants of Tadashi's altruistic spirit that remain on the earth following his departure from the mortal coil. It's a clever device but not so complex that it will go over its young audience's heads. The film's simplicity is a virtue, providing the ever sought-after link between adult situations and feelings and gleeful childish storytelling.

Some might say that the subject matter is a little too dark for youngsters, and they might be right to a point. Sitting through this movie without having a single tear well in your eye is a challenge on par with eating just one Lay's potato chip. But there's another side to the argument. We all want to protect our children from the bad things in life (look at me, pretending I'm old enough to actually have kids - what a tool), but that's not always possible. We can't prevent a kid from losing his or her parent or guardian and being forced to cope with a tough situation. 

It's films like Big Hero 6 that help children understand that loss can be heartbreaking but overcoming it and pulling oneself together is an important part of life. Hiro is a role model for any struggling kid, and the fact that he's Japanese-American (or, if we're engaging with the singularity of San Fransokyo... Jamerican? Americese?) is another brick in the still all-too-white media wall demonstrating that, despite our differences, the human experience is universal and we can triumph over adversity.

I don't know about you, but I'd want my kid learning that.

I'd also like my kid to learn how to power punch, but that didn't tie into my thesis.

So all that thematic stuff is nice and good, but on the surface level, Big Hero 6 is just as entertaining. From the second it starts, the pace of the film never flags, alternating between solid character moments (even the minor roles are engaging and lively) and action sequences that for the first time in a long while access the potential of the animated medium to provide sights and movements that live action photography is incapable of rendering.

Perhaps this is because it is based on a comic book, but Big Hero 6 relishes being a cartoon. It's still set in the real world realm of physics, but it pushes the envelope of what animated realism can mean in terms of action-adventure superhero movies. The showstopping action sequences bring a fresh eye to the medium and create a villain that has actual menace. At no point do you feel that he is not capable of actually hurting the characters, which raises the stakes so high that they reach out of the screen (side note: this film is not recommended for vampires).

Or adorable-haters.

The film's design combines modern comic book stylings with Japanese architecture and anime aesthetics to great effect. And despite anyone's potential qualms about the inherent ridiculousness of the portmanteau "San Fransokyo," the city itself only wows. Japanese animation is a huge influence on today's young artists and that new cultural ideal permeates Big Hero 6, combining the best parts of the art of two very different styles to provide a vibrant new world.

The plot is about as generically American as one can get ("We're just wimpy nerds, but we can learn to believe in ourselves and harness our unique skills as part of a team."), but the atmosphere is undeniable. It's a new type of family film sandwiched firmly between where we've been and where we're going. And it's a thrillingly fast-paced, delightfully funny glimpse at the future of animated film.

It's not perfect. It's a tad too meta in parts and there's a supremely jarring Fall Out Boy song shoved haphazardly in the middle, but Big Hero 6 is a ton of fun with a meaningful message wrapped inside. Highly recommended for children, adults, and humans everywhere.

And I just can't wait for the Big Heroes Avenging the Galaxy crossover in 2025.

TL;DR: Big Hero 6 isn't as high caliber as a Disney Renaissance film, but it carves its own path with nonstop fun and delightful characters.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1429