DISTRICT 9 [2009] - Dir Neill Blomkamp, USA

Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Screenplay: Neill Blomkamp

Running-time: 1 hr 52 mins

Genre: Sci-fi/Action


CRITIQUE:


2009 had been a momentous year for sci-fi. Unless you’ve been living underground for the past few months, the genre has witnessed a recent technological reinvention in the mainstream field with James Cameron’s technical-and-visual show-off Avatar and the cinematic resuscitation of the nearly-dying, if not dead, sci-fi franchise Star Trek. Throw in along with these lot District 9, a relatively unknown, lo-fi sci-fi. Coming out of nowhere and assembled in shoestring budget miles beneath Avatar or Trek’s gargantuan pile of bucks, on paper this stands no chance pitted against these behemoths. Then, turns out to only to smash the genre completely out of its evergreen park. Consider District 9, for once, an unexpected reinvention and revivifying of the tired clichés we know of many science-fiction films, where mostly all are located in glimmering Americana and alien invasions signal either a shot of the White House being laser-beamed to dust or thousands of Manhattanites gaping above at a sparkly spaceship. Well, forget those as District 9 directly plunges us into a post-apartheid South Africa where alien invasion doesn’t involve human carnage and hostility but rather a giant migraine for the Johannesburg government.


It is bracingly knowing, even courageous to suggest an allegory of Africa’s dark past, and where other sci-fi movies this year take place in space, (Avatar exploits Pandora, Star Trek hangs around black holes and Moon frolics around, well, the moon) District 9 is firmly rooted in our own terra firma, thrillingly mixing a pseudo-documentary aesthetic with a very grim socio-political commentary. Newsreels, staged interviews and shaky-cams, now in vogue in this post-Blair Witch and Cloverfield era, are employed to create a sense of urgency around the city ridden with alien immigrant, all of whom are fenced inside a decaying inner city slum reminiscent of the City of God favelas. The comparison is not without reason – gang crime, prostitution and blood-splattering violence litter around its streets. But unlike many sci-fi actioners, the prawn-like extra-terrestrials mean no harm and are racially shunted by a xenophobic government. Even its main protagonist (a multi-layered performance by newcomer Sharlto Copley, whose dialogues were mostly improvised) is a giddy, white-skinned and white-collared government-agent-cum-media-buffoon, more than willing to head the relocation of these slum insectoids, so gleeful yet malicious in his job, taking lengths to burning alien cocoons. But after being sprayed by a dodgy alien fluid, he transforms into a blithering, cowering half-human, half-blackened lobster on the run from the agency he works for.


But no matter how exciting the proceedings that follow, this is exactly where the film stumbles. First-time director Neill Blomkamp certainly knows his material and delivers it with sheer blitzkrieg confidence, but he later swaps intellectual urgency with a more prototype Hollywood commercialist man-on-the-run plot. In other words, the final half of the film is where things get blown up, as Wikus Van De Merwe suddenly becomes an all-action Transformer man to fight armoured tanks and a horde of military men to service the, well, Transformers generation. It’s caveat that is with justification common to many blockbusters, that is swapping real gravitas with some weightless, balls-out one of the film’s plotholes left gaping wide-open, including the origins of the machine, the nature of the mothership hulking over Jonnesburg, how humans manage to comprehend alien language filled with clicking sounds. And what about inter-species prostitution?


VERDICT:

This is big-minded sci-fi, ambitiously and thrillingly weaving bloody entertainment with socio-political resonance. But District 9 is half-conscious and half-moribund, taking the genre into an entirely new level at the first-half, and then becomes delirious and aesthetically unhinged in the latter.



RATING: B

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BROKEN EMBRACES [2009] - Dir Pedro Almodóvar, Spain

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar

Running-time: 2 hrs 7 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


There isn’t quite a name like Pedro Almodóvar in Spanish cinema. With an exceptional oeuvre encrusted with widely-acclaimed, high-class gems such as Bad Education, All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of Breakdown, perhaps it’s hard to bring up a name as formidable and as culturally and aesthetically important as Almodóvar. His every latest release is watched with anticipation by loyalist fans and trepidation by his detractors, and usually ends up as a critical darling. Such as his recent cinematic effort Broken Embraces, which is so deeply entrenched in the annals of narrative cinema that it’s very likely to be lapped up by cinéphiles anywhere around the world. He dazzlingly and daringly blends noir, romance, melodrama, thriller, farce and homage to the medium itself that anyone with a deep love for film could hardly be won over.


In Almodóvar fashion, reminiscent to his earlier works Bad Education and Laws of Desire, Broken Embraces sets up a multi-layered narrative that swerves from two timelines, with Lluis Homar’s blind director revisiting his past forbidden fling with a beautiful call-girl-cum-actress-wannabe Lena (a scintillating, effervescent Penélope Cruz), who is in turn married to an old, decaying millionaire Ernesto Martel. This is the central conflict, with lust, betrayal, espionage and dangerous passions become the thematic undercurrents of this tale. And for those well-informed in cinema, these are the basic rudiments of the noir genre, to which Almodóvar’s film spectacularly pays reverence to, from dark classic Double Indemnity to even the earlier Hitchcock celluloid. From Cruz’s faithless wife to Homar’s director with a split personality Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine, these character and plot techniques refer back to the genre it assumes to embody. Which leads us to the core of the film. Whilst we undoubtedly admire Almodóvar’s aesthetic brilliance, he seems to wrap himself up with innumerable entanglements here that whence we get through the knotty tangle and arrive at the film’s conclusion, there’s a sense of disenchantment. For a film that builds so much on intrigue, slowly absorbing us into its depths, Almodóvar, then, ultimately lets us go with barely an emotional payoff. For we are left with a film about filmmaking, and we do not feel the central protagonist’s assemblage of work but rather Almodóvar hi-jinks.



VERDICT:

Pedro Almodóvar’s love-letter to noir cinema is passionate, ravishing and impeccably shot. Yet we are left dazed rather than overwhelmed, feeling as though Almodóvar owes us a much better pay-off and denouement. What starts off as gorgeously intriguing ends up as a self-indulgent and pompous.



RATING: B

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THE MOVIEJERK'S TOP 10 FILMS OF 2009




Another year, another handful of top-notch film selections. While some might argue that 2009 has been a bland year for filmmaking, the Moviejerk here disagrees. Alright, we haven't had truly staggering ones, in the magnitude of The Dark Knight or WALL-E, this year but we've had brilliant films in the penultimate year of this decade. The problem is the majority of them were pitched at the left-side of mainstream that many of us would have to stoop underground just to see them. I know, life sucks - and this is a year that saw a pointless heap after heap of brain-dead sequels (that's you, Transformers and Terminator), overrated comedies (hello, The Hangover), Sandra Bullock marshalling the box-office, not only once but twice with The Proposal and The Blind Side, and the arrival of James Cameron's much-fussed comeback, hitherto touted as the post-The Jazz Singer 'cinematic revolution' of our times, Avatar, which turns out to be half-true and half-bullshit. The revelation is a technological one, as visually pretty as a picture-postcard, but we don't want a recycled storyline, thankyouverymuch. And no, it does not even make it to my Top Ten list. There were far better American and European pictures, and they didn't even need a $300 million dollar mega-budget or an extra-dimension visual prettifying, but a dynamic fusion of a solid screenplay and panache in delivery. The same goes to the arthouse circuit, which arguably delivered films that rivet, shock, stun and even move us. Which lead us here to the list below. Now let's roll.



HONOURABLE MENTIONS
(in no particular order)




#10. ANTICHRIST - Dir Lars von Trier, Denmark

Perhaps it's easy to crassly dismiss this as a "big fat art-film fart", but there's no denying Lars von Trier's sheer daring and ability to stir up one hell of provocation in the modern landscape of cinema. Critically reviled and now considered to be the most walked-out movie in Cannes film history since Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Antichrist portrays misogyny, self-mutilation and domestic meltdown at its bleakest. Not to mention the controversial do-it-yourself clitoridectomy sequence, stomach-churning enough to make the Pope incumbent faint. Whilst many of the scenes are excruciating to watch, many seem to have forgotten Antichrist's central ethos - an extremist depiction of human agony in a godless alternate-reality. And what did we really expect of von Trier, who brought us Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, all of which are cinematic treatises to life? Jolly entertainment and show-tunes? Certainly not, for this dark, terribly elegant meditation on grief, human culpability and self-destruction only comes from an auteur who is fearless enough in allowing us to glimpse into the gloomiest side of our existence.


#9. BRIGHT STAR - Dir Jane Campion, UK

Jane Campion's return to form after a long artistic drought since her Oscar-winner The Piano is beautifully sublime. Not every film about an iconic poet remarkably handles this kind of material with such nuance, elegance and restrained beauty to match an artist's verbal poetry, especially John Keats' poetry. In the hands of a lesser director, Bright Star would have been mediocre, starchy and pretentious as many other stuffy period dramas. But in Campion's deft hands, this becomes a subtle, leisurely, often heart-rending, observation of a long-gone era of unabashed romanticism. Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish both deliver remarkable, understated performances, but it's Cornish's ultra-feminist Fanny Brawne that steals our hearts, and subsequently steals the entire show.



#8. [500] DAYS OF SUMMER - Dir Marc Webb, USA

The most delightful, totally unexpected sleeper-hit of the year. Depriving this from an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay is daylight robbery. Dumping run-of-the-mill romantic comedy tropes straight to the bin and favouring a non-linear narrative, [500] Days of Summer rethinks the 'boy-meets-girl' premise and delivers a genuinely effective screenplay that defies every clear-cut convention of the genre. The result is clever, funny, painful, wonderful and invigorating in a cinematic sense, conveying a self-conscious look into the nature of contemporary relationships, worthy of a latter-day Annie Hall. Despite of its perkiness, it does not even try to sugar-coat the central romantic trajectory, which leads us to the real clinch and bittersweet worldview of this film - that memory is fallible and that relationships are really like the seasons, they come and go.



#7. UP IN THE AIR - Dir Jason Reitman, USA

This smart, corporate satire is that rare thing that comes out from the meretricious, commercialist Hollywood arena once in a while. What seems to be a mere George Clooney vehicle is actually an engrossing, thoughtful, character-driven piece that has enough mainstream appeal without sacrificing artistic credibility, and, thank goodness, never insults our intelligence and emotional quotient. Director Jason Reitman of Juno fame manages to confront the material's heavy satirising and existential heft with an admirable lightness of touch, pitch-perfectly reflecting the central character's dilemma of his airborne existence, with Clooney's Bingham's mega-corporate bastard stuck in a limbo of human disjointedness. Fuelled by scathing humour, biting pathos and resonant perceptiveness, Up in the Air takes its place as one of American cinema's most memorable films in recent memory.



#6. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Dir Quentin Tarantino, USA

Historians, go pack your bags and take your moth-eaten history books away with you. Quentin Tarantino has just cinematically bastardised World War II albeit in gloriously entertaining and gripping fashion, perhaps in a way only a cheeky, sodding 'basterd' like Tarantino does. This historical reimagining of a Nazi-occupied France dismisses all mawkish memories and delivers a tightly-scripted, wish-fulfilment revenge saga that does not entirely undermine or totally disrespect the emotionality of the period, but rather creates its own self-aware celluloid universe that is giddily playful and simultaneously, cinematically flamboyant. Anyone expecting a war film ready to detonate in any minute in Tarantino's film will be disappointed indeed, as the real arsenal of armoury is rooted in its tense-as-hell dialogues, lovingly drawn characters (an exceptional Christoph Waltz as Satan-incarnate SS Col. Hans Landa, and a terrific Melanie Laurent as the avenging Jew Shosanna Dreyfuss), and a three-act narrative structured with art and almost maniacal dexterity.



#5. DEPARTURES - Dir Yojiro Takita, Japan

When this relative unknown and unheard of Japanese drama clamped down on the Oscar Best Foreign Film last year, many eyebrows were raised as it elbowed out other superb international films such as Israel's Waltz with Bashir and France's The Class. Departures may put-off a subtitle-phobic audience, but once seen - you'll never underestimate its haunting power. Quite rightly so, that Oscar was very well deserved, and this fascinating, deeply poignant, heartfelt work has the gentility of a sonata but with an emotional force of a requiem. For all its morbid subject matter (this is a tale about an ex-violinist taking up an encoffiner job via employment detour), it manages to be altogether light, tender, deep and profound, almost miraculously. Director Takita infuses grace in the art of sending-off with such a beautiful precision, reminding us that death is not for the dead but for the living. What's more remarkable is that for a film which is largely about dead-end jobs, death and dying, this is wonderfully life-affirming stuff. You'll weep buckets.



#4. AN EDUCATION - Dir Lone Scherfig, UK

On paper, this feels familiar. A coming-of-age tale of a girl learning her lessons from the 'school' of life, which does not really involve books and Shakespeare and Austen. Thanks then to an apt and sophisticated direction by Danish director Scherfig, allowing An Education to shake off from its narrative trappings and reach a subtler, wiser ground. Perhaps being pitched directly at the threshold of pre-sexual revolution Britain keeps this film resonant and alluded with the sexual politics of the time, with themes of rebellion, adultery and self-awakening prods the fringes of the storyline without crammed with an on-your-face depiction. This restraint is a wise choice, and it remains focused on the nucleus, the central beating heart that keeps this film emotionally and exhilaratingly alive in the form of Carey Mulligan. It's a gracious, charming and tactile performance as the ever-precocious Jenny, wise beyond her years yet as foolish as the last mistake she had made. Indelible and satisfying.



#3. THE HURT LOCKER - Dir Kathryn Bigelow, USA

Here's the greatest cinematic lesson of the year: Kathryn Bigelow teaches ex-husband James Cameron how action films are done, with aplomb. The Hurt Locker is so thrillingly orchestrated to adrenaline-rushed levels that it almost makes you sweat watching it; the desolate, dust-beaten hell of Baghdad, and just around the corner, a half-concealed network of bombs that could blow off at any moment. It is compellingly tense, and Bigelow makes the most out of the Hitchcock principle of thrill-cinema. But this could be just any other Iraq-war picture, except that it isn't. Possibly the most superior movie ever made about the Iraq excursion, and now catapulted into one of the finest war movies, precisely because it's not really about war. Bigelow eschews geopolitics, hectoring and 'war-is-futile' melodrama to ruthlessly portray men and masculinity in the face of situations bigger than their egos. That at the hint of recklessness, everything can go wrong. That at the absence of conflict, they are just common civilians defunct of their capabilities. Jeremy Renner delivers one the year's best male performances, veering from heedless idiot to villain to hero to an existentially pained human being. "War is a drug", and that perhaps gives us more insight than most recent headlines we ever read.



#2. THE WHITE RIBBON - Dir Michael Haneke, Austria

Michael Haneke's latest work is without a doubt the year's most enigmatic, chilling and teeth-gnashingly maddening. At its core, it's as a whodunnit yarn without the obligatory concluding exposé, a puzzling riddle without a solution and a ghost story without ghosts. Yet it's darkly haunting, exceptionally pitched and never presumptuous enough to dare to answer its own questions. This may be an antithesis to the commercialist, mainstream spunk (it's a nearly three-hour film, wholly filmed in austere black-and-white with a cast of unknown), but you've got to admire Haneke's masterful orchestration of the elements he pull off in this film - the vignette-like narrative strand, the slow-burning mystery, the rigour and meticulousness of his framing and cinematography. Above all, as a typical Haneke film never undermine his audience's thinking power, we are left to ponder where does evil really come from? Maybe it stares at you in the face of innocence. Maybe they give out homilies among the crowd whilst punishing their children at home. Maybe they inspect their daughters with a stethoscope and molest them in the process. Or maybe they are those who love deeply yet never once reciprocated. Evil has a face in The White Ribbon, and it is human - half-consciously harbouring revolt and vengeance, kept at bay yet ready to instigate the sins of their fathers to the next generation. A powerfully and profoundly disquieting portrait of decaying humanity.



#1. UP - Dir Pete Docter, USA

How could an animated film about a helium-buoyed house possibly make it as the number one film of 2009? It's really simple. Pixar's Up is worthy for its sheer simplicity, for its exceptional ability to make us smile, laugh, cry with delight, weep into our tissues and emerge from the odeons like a newly-reinvigorated individual; for squeezing an entire lifetime in a beautiful, wordless five-minute prologue yet never sacrificing an inch of depth; for carving a totally unexpected hero out of a grumpy, curmudgeonly widower and for making us care for this old guy so immensely that for the entire running-time, we forget Carl Fredricksen is just a computer-generated conglomeration of pixels. This may not be flirting around a WALL-E ground-breaking status, but Up is on an almost entirely opposite scale. Where WALL-E is a romantic story of robots who have more humanity than Darwin's species, Up is a love story of humans in a slowly-becoming robotic world. Not to mention that the other counterpart of the love story is deceased does not really enliven things up. But Pixar does this miraculously and immaculately, and this is perhaps the studio's most mature work to date, with the nature of ageing, death, terrestrial loneliness and emotional baggage serving as the film's undertow. And don't even get started with those talking puppies and bonkers prehistoric bird - they are whimsical yet appropriate nods to the Arthur Conan Doyle serials of the 20's, providing Carl's zeal for adventure. It's really a wondrous tribute to anyone who hasn't given up on something. Especially those people whom this recent generation has chucked into elderly homes, ignored, neglected in abodes or shunned from the streets. Most supremely, this is their generation's vindication, teaching us mere younglings to respect our elders. As Carl Fredricksen epitomises, his entire house tethered on his back, that love can transcend even mortality whilst never overlooking those who are still left with us.



Catch you all again soon, next year. Rock and roll, 2010.

The Moviejerk (c) Janz : February, 2010.


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THE ROAD [2009] - Dir John Hillcoat, USA

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron

Director: John Hillcoat

Screenplay: Joe Penhall

Running-time: 1 hr 51 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Let’s admit, apocalyptic movies are highfalutin concepts. It’s a self-satisfied genre populated by films that usually require budgets of epic proportions, demolition of famous global landmarks (cue blowing up of the White House, or the crumbling of Eiffel Tower into pieces), total abandonment of tourist attractions subsequently beset by a horde of undead creatures, generally cataclysmic events to which people like Roland Emmerich, George A. Romero and Will Smith specialise in. The over-familiarity of the genre has only very little room for new additions to work around with, but John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s doomsday novel The Road fortunately sidesteps the genre’s redundant elements. Here, there are no landmarks to blow up, cities to inundate with waves and obligatory shots of vast masses of anguished humans clawing each other in desperation. Instead, Hillcoat delivers something sparse, admirably restrained doomsday portrait, wherein all that apocalyptic stuff are just backdrop hints. There’s an opener that involves a blazing fire that we never see, and fast-forward to a scorched, ashen Earth with nature looking like post-inferno cinders. Surviving humans roam the ground, feeding on whatever flesh they come across, including their own species.


At the core of this story is a road journey of two central characters we know as Man and his Son, whose survival lies on a gun with two bullets and, of course, each other. It’s a fascinating backbone of the film, and the relationship between the Father and Son is touchingly portrayed by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee, but where The Road focuses on these two empathetic figures, it lacks a rigid structure in plotting, making this often aimless and wandering. Both traverse across this God-blasted world and reach the coast (as many other doomsday flicks, characters tend to head towards continental coastlines for some deliverance), stumbling across cannibals, innocent difters and pitiless crooks, and then finally resolving into a finale that doesn’t quite deliver the emotional wallop we’ve been expecting throughout. What was supposed to be a deeply poignant ending ends up feeling contrived and presumptuous via your typical Hollywood cheapo raise-your-spirits sentimentality.



VERDICT:

John Hillcoat’s The Road has some admirable restraint and noteworthy performances, but this post-apocalyptic journey often wanders aimlessly, free from a rigid structure that doesn’t quite nail the emotional wallop it promises at the onset.


RATING: B-

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FISH TANK [2009] - Dir Andrea Arnold, UK

Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

Director: Andrea Arnold

Screenplay: Andrea Arnold

Running time: 2 hrs 03 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Andrea Arnold’s sophomore feature Fish Tank is both gruelling and astonishing to watch. It is largely a film about the bleak and the banal, a 15-year old potty-mouthed teenager living in an equally expletive-ridden, booze-fuelled sinkhole Essex estate, and whilst it’s certainly not the first time we’re lobbed at with a British kitchen-sink drama (try browsing through Ken Loach or Mike Leigh) but Arnold’s voice and vision are thoroughly compelling that it’s hard to imagine this without winning 2009’s Grand Prix in Cannes.


In Fish Tank, there are neither angel fishes nor gold-hearted Nemos but only sharks that prey on each other, especially with the weaker ones. So its heroine is compelled to turn into a villain to defend herself from the vicious mauling around her. Dancer-wannabe Mia is entrapped in this gloomy council estate with an ex-prostitute for Mum and a little scumbag as a younger sister. This is a place where heads aren’t used to think but to verbally assault or headbutt somebody else vile. Friendships are betrayed, an alliance always shift, and even Mum, when not guzzling gin and sucking up cigars, brings a new boyfriend home – there’s nobody to depend on so Mia is better off wandering alone. But all is not entirely washed with grimness. Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis in a fiery, powerful, intense central performance), despite of her aggressive nature is such a well-drawn character that can render one brimming with empathy.


Teetering between adolescence and womanhood, she’s in a state of inner turmoil that tries to grasp the significance of her existence and her sexuality. Her dancing practices in small, cramped room overlooking the sprawl of Essex is a touching idiom of how smothered and claustrophobic her life is despite of the vast openness. This search of one’s self comes to full tilt when he meets her mother’s new boyfriend, a simmering, charismatic yet dangerous Wickes-worker Connor (a magnetic turn by Michael Fassbender), whose scenes with any trace of bare skin is sensually captured by Arnold’s camerawork from the perspective of Mia. In fact, the film is emotionally alive between Mia and Connor’s interplay, making the scenes electric with tension. His tenderness, which veers from paternalistic to sometimes harbouring menace, baffles Mia as she finds herself gently yielding to his charms. She becomes wordless and gentle, perfectly articulated by Arnold’s camera giving the film a sense of poetic realism.


VERDICT:

If Fish Tank doesn’t break your heart, then you probably have no heart at all. This is compelling, intense, authentic, compassionate and poignant British realism at its supreme height. Arnold directs with grit, grace and poetic justice, supplemented with Jarvis’ ferocious yet achingly human central performance and Fassbender’s mesmeric turn. Rank this one along with the celluloid of Loach and Leigh for vivid social studies.



RATING: A-

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FANTASTIC MR FOX [2009] - Dir Wes Anderson, USA

Cast: (voices) George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Michael Duffy

Director: Wes Anderson

Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach

Running time: 1 hr 27 mins

Genre: Animation/Adventure/Family



CRITIQUE:


Let’s face it – it is quite hard to mistake a Wes Anderson film. No other director has as much singular style as any American filmmakers these days as distinctive and instantly recognisable as Anderson’s cinematic art-stamp. He has done brilliant if madcap things to the dysfunctional-family genre what Tim Burton has done to the Gothic oddities. Consider, then, for a moment his latest cinematic stamp Fantastic Mr Fox, an adaptation of a Roald Dahl children’s classic. From a director who brought us a body of work that enlivened American independent filmmaking, from Rushmore to The Royal Tenenbaums, films that fused vintage-style with an ironic hipness palatable to a modern host of young, trendy cinema-conscious audience, it seems a strange choice to follow his quirky efforts with animation. This time, picking up one of children’s literary giant as Spike Jonze did to Where The Wild Things Are, Anderson has hit the marks. The result of this choice of medium has further enhanced Anderson’s vision, and his old-fashioned, stop-motion animated foxes are wonderful creatures to behold.


Ignore his last cinematic toils, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, which were both plainly style and madcap whimsy over substance. Fantastic Mr Fox is easily Anderson’s best film since The Royal Tenenbaums, incorporating his knack for offbeat characters, droll, dry humour and familial angst and turmoil, all laid out with a ravishing autumnal background palette and infused with 60’s folk rock soundtrack. The animation is refreshingly anti-pixels, as compared to Pixar’s pixel-perfect glossy CGI vistas, favouring a hand-crafted look rather than digitalised – with each foxes replete with their own fashion style, bristling furs and trademark movements – although they all look weird when they break out dancing. Anderson has also a keen eye to the minutest of details, his backdrop teeming with gorgeous autumnal backdrops, the wild countryside contrasted with the farmer’s orderly farmlands. Yet it’s not only visual details, the cast is impressively assembled. Whilst star-power is heavily laden on its posters, they never overpower the weight of the film. George Clooney’s sardonic suaveness gives Mr Fox a droll voice teetering between filial responsibility and middle-age existentialism. It also has Meryl Streep deadpanning all throughout as Mrs Fox, the voice of reason in this tale with a blend of the sensible, ironic and mod-chic. There are other standouts, too. Jason Schwartzmann as the son Ash is painfully insecure and neurotic yet very witty; and Willem Dafoe is incredible in his cameo voice-lending as the Mexican-slurring rat. Watch out for the Sergio Leone-inspired finale, too. It’s quite a delight.



VERDICT:

After a tiring two-hander failure of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson comes back to his surreal yet offbeat form in Fantastic Mr Fox – an utterly delightful, hip, breezy fox caper that achieves a right blend of entertainment, droll humour, stylishness and substance. Above all, this is a film that’s guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, bringing out the kids in adults and vice-versa.



RATING: B+


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