Stuart Little

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I have always had copies of E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web on my book shelf. It’s surprisingly sexy to read them aloud to a partner in bed.

Decidedly less sexy is the 1999 movie adaptation of the world’s 14th most popular mouse (it’s a very informal survey, but how many do you think you could name?).

George Little (Jonathan Lipnicki) wakes up on the best day of his life: he’s getting a sibling! He wakes his parents by jumping on their bed; the movie is too polite to mention Mr. Little’s balls, but as far as I know, kids in the bed results in dad getting kicked in the balls 100% of the time. Anyway. Mr. and Mrs. Little (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis) are keen to give George a little brother, so while George is at school, they head down to the orphanage to browse the kids and see what’s on sale. Or, you know, “fall in love.” And they do fall in love with a clever little guy named Stuart, who just happens to be a mouse (Michael J. Fox). The social worker tries to discourage the match – adoptions outside the species rarely work, she tells them – but the Littles are not to be dissuaded. They bring Stuart home, clothe him with teeny tiny sweater vests, install the world’s tiniest plumbing fixtures, but tuck him into a normal yet comically oversized bed. There’s only one problem, really: George is terribly disappointed. He wanted a brother but got a mouse! Actually, there IS one member of the family disheartened than George, and that’s Snowbell the cat (Nathan Lane). Imagine being a cat with a mouse for an owner. Oh, the indignity.

So while George is quietly disapproving, Snowbell is actively plotting against him. It’s the nicest situation Stuart’s ever had, but it’s precarious.

Stuart Little is adventurous and colourful; the little mouse gets in exactly the sorts of mischief that kids will never fail to find entertaining. The story offers much less for adults, unless you’re prepared to read the “cross-species” adoption as a thinly-veiled critique of inter-racial adoptions, in which case the rich white family’s triumph is a little less palatable.

Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, Ray Romano, Albert Brooks, Ben Stiller, and Matthew Broderick were all considered for the voice of Stuart Little, but it ultimately went to Michael J. Fox, who gives him exactly the right amount of spunk and spirit. He’s a sweet little guy, and well-rendered; for a film that came out 20 years ago, the CGI holds up sufficiently well. I didn’t see this film at the time because it came out in direct competition with Toy Story 2. It didn’t do as well as that one, but it did make more money than Notting Hill, American Pie, American Beauty, or The Green Mile. It was, however, outperformed by The Sixth Sense (and about 10 others) but I mention that one in particular because believe it or not, M. Night Shyamalan wrote BOTH The Sixth Sense and Stuart Little, and was later revealed to have ghost-written another film that year, She’s All That. Surprise! Well it surprised me, anyway. And kind of made me want to rewind and reassess Stuart Little for a twist ending I didn’t see coming. But no. It’s just the cat.

Advantageous

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Gwen and her daughter Jules live in a near-future metropolis where economic disparity is increasing. There’s incredible wealth and progress but also increasing instability and hardship, and more and more, women are being pushed out of the workplace complete. Up until recently, Gwen (Jacqueline Kim) has been the face of a biotech company, but she’s been released from her contract for daring to approach middle age, and she’s finding that prospects have dried up considerably since she was last in the job market.

A single mother with not a lot of help or resources, Gwen’s primary concern is for daughter Jules (Samantha Kim). It feels vitally important, now more than ever, to set Jules up with the absolute best start in life, and a prep school will go a long way to getting things right. A school that Gwen can’t necessarily afford, even when she had a salary. But how will Jules fare in a world increasingly hostile toward her gender without a head start? Gwen casts about for options but finds only one – ironically from the company that’s just fired her. Their particular brand of bio technology is a procedure that would lift your consciousness into a young, beautiful host body. They’re still in the beginning stages and could use a “volunteer” to be the first civilian subject. If Gwen accepts, she’ll be young and beautiful enough to get her old job back. Two scoops with one cone?

Imagine explaining this to your kid. Mommy’s going to the hospital, and when she comes home, she’ll be a MILF. These arms that hold you, these lips that kiss you, these hands that soothe you will be no more. It’s nearly impossible for a small child to comprehend this, but it turns out that Jules won’t have the hardest time with this. Gwen suffers a huge mental hurdle trying to reconcile her past memories with her current body. And the surgery has left her different emotionally, too. Even her personality seems different. What will life be like for her now?

I LOVE when female directors get behind science fiction. Advantageous is character-driven, and the details of the world they inhabit are cleverly dispersed. It’s low budget, so the effects aren’t what will keep you interested. But there are so many questions that will poke little holes in your soul. Gwen’s choice is a little extreme but the commodification of women’s bodies is apparently something we’ll never be able to stop talking about, and this film makes us confront the line that is so easily overstepped along the way. If this were merely about our obsession with youth culture it would be one thing, but this is also about a mother’s love, and the depths she’ll go to to ensure her daughter’s health and happiness.

The Guilty

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How many times in your life have you called 911? I hope the answer is none, but for some of you it will be higher than that, and chances are, it wasn’t exactly a happy occasion. Even if you’re calling on behalf of a stranger, you must believe that it’s an emergency situation, and those tend to be adrenaline-filled and on the harrowing side. I call 911 on a very regular basis, and I’m always grateful for the patient expediency of the person on the other end. Mining someone’s abject panic for important, potentially life-saving information, is not an easy thing to do. Distilling that information into its most salient components while managing someone’s fear and distress takes precision and control. Dispatchers will sound cool and confident on the phone, but that doesn’t mean their job isn’t getting to them. They assist people through the darkest of circumstances. They experience vicarious trauma. The Guilty is one of their stories.

Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is working what seems like a normal shift when he gets a call from what seems like a wrong number. A woman named Iben (Jessica Dinnage) is calling, pretending to be on with her young daughter. Because of his training, Asger manages to ask the right questions in the right way. Iben is making this phone call in front of her abductor, and trying to do it stealthily.

Asger gets more and more attached to the case as he speaks to Iben, to her abductor, to her daughter Mathilde who is not even 7 but home alone covered in someone else’s blood after having seen her mother be dragged violently away. He goes beyond the bounds of his position in order to fulfill a promise to Mathilde to get her mother home safely.

How do you think you’d stack up as a 911 dispatcher? They test for inductive (using specific observations to make broader generalizations) and deductive (using the info you’ve collected to come to a logical conclusion) reasoning, plus memory recall and the ability to read maps and a good old fashioned psych evaluation. And then there’s just necessarily personality quirks like the ability to be still in the face of chaos.

Asger is a flawed hero and not necessarily the best at his job. But he cares about this woman. Tonight, his job goes from hard to nearly impossible. It’s disturbing. The movie will break your heart in a million ways. But if you think it’s hard to watch, imagine how hard it is to live, to take these calls for 12 hours or even 24 hours at a time, day after day, weekends and holidays. It’s a lot to ask of anyone, and Asger is pure proof of the toll this job can take.

Jakob Cedergren is excellent, as he must be, acting almost exclusively against voices over the phone. Through the arc of one telephone call, he experiences a major shift, and almost every high and low on the human spectrum. Director Gustav Moller keeps things very simple and straight-forward, allowing the story’s natural tension to take centre stage.

Here And Now

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Vivienne (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a New York singer grateful to have made her living with music. She’s got a new album coming out and is embarking on a new tour, even if tickets aren’t selling as briskly as they used to. But a grim diagnosis from her doctor has her wandering around the city, lost in thought.

The whole movie takes place on this one bleak day. She’s introspective, pinballing between gratitude for the life she’s lived and regret for all the sacrifices she’s made in order to live it. A teenager daughter who’s been left in the care of her father (Simon Baker) is first among them. A visit from her critical, overbearing mother (Jacqueline Bisset) is ill-timed. Updates from her manager and her only real friend (Common) keep things in perspective.

I actually kind of love movies like this, where we get to know a person very intimately on such a significant day. And New York City is such a great place for wandering souls, a beautiful backdrop for anguish and analysis. The pace is deliberately slow as Vivienne meanders around, mentally struggling to balance the demands in her life now that she’s staring down the barrel of her own mortality.

The film works best when its female characters are interacting, and evaluating the bonds between them. Other stuff works less well, which makes for a frustrating experience, since the movie is just too slow to allow for scenes that don’ work. But Parker is committed, and Renee Zellwegger makes a surprising and crucial appearance, so it’s not all bad. It’s just terribly uneven, which, in fairness, is probably true to any day on which you’ve just been told you’re facing an untimely death. But since you and I are going to go on living, we deserve to do it with better stories better told.

Yesterday

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The inconceivable has happened. Struggling singer-songwriter Jack (Himesh Patel) has a terrific fan and manager in Ellie (Lily James), but nothing else. His dismal track record and the complete lack of interest from absolutely everyone else on earth has inspired his recent retirement from the scene. He’s done. Ellie isn’t totally keen on his giving up, but there you have it.

And then a bus hits him. And when he wakes up, the world is a slightly (enormously) different place: The Beatles never existed. They’ve been completely erased from history, and it seems Jack is the only one who remembers them. So he gets down to the business of recalling as many of the songs and lyrics as he can, and starts performing them as his own. And he’s lauded as a hero! Even poor Ed Sheeran feels inadequate in his presence.

He blows up. Turns out, some of those songs still hold up, can still impress our jaded 2019 ears. Yesterday, Hey Jude, Let It Be, Here Comes the Sun. Director Danny Boyle secured the rights to so many Beatles songs that it was easier for Sean and I to name the ones that weren’t included than were – you could make a pretty comprehensive Bingo game out of this if you were so inclined.

But the movie doesn’t touch on other important aspects. Wiping out The Beatles would do much more than negate their own catalogue. They’ve had a profound and immeasurable impact on all the music that’s come after them; pop music simply would not have evolved as it has without their contribution. And yet the movie features Ed Sheeran as himself, a singer-songwriter who names The Beatles as his own primary influence.

Himesh Patel is quite exceptional and an excellent choice for Jack. His voice is velvety and buttery – not an imitation of John or Paul, but one that does them justice, allowing the songs to feel familiar while still letting us hear them again for the first time. Still, despite the film’s obvious charm, it doesn’t quite explore all the juiciest nooks and crannies, nor can it reasonably reach the expectations set by the world’s most important and significant band. The film is a strange mash-up of parallel universe and a rom-com. It makes some strange and distracting choices. But it’s still worth a watch, because let’s face it: it’s hard to go wrong with The Beatles.

Anima

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A man (Thom Yorke, of Radiohead) is one of many people riding the subway in a dazed state, nodding off, sleep walking through life. Only his sighting of a beautiful woman (Dajana Roncione) sets him on a divergent path, going against the usual drudgery to return a forgotten lunch box to her.

Paul Thomas Anderson directs Thom Yorke in a 15 minute musical short, though Yorke isn’t exactly breaking into song, it’s more like an extended music video, a visual piece accompanied by hypnotic music that to be honest is really working for me.

The choppy, physical choreography has Yorke literally going against the grain, and it’s only when he finally reunites with the woman from the subway that the dance, choreographed by Damien Jalet, becomes playful, fluid, more intimate. The two carve out a private space in a world that is monotonous and homogenous. It’s hard to say if this world is dystopian, or if it’s meant to be interpreted on a more metaphorical basis, but images of competition and subjugation abound.

The piece ends with the two boarding a streetcar. Yorke again nods off, and it’s unclear if the whole that came before it was meant to be a dream, but even if it is, it’s taken him from the underground darkness (or artificially lit at best) of a subway and left him above ground, seated in a beam of sunlight.

You’re darn right it’s weird, unlike anything else you’ll find on Netflix. But that’s what I can easily love about it, and about Netflix. Netflix is a lot of things, and not all of them good, but it’s creating space for experimentation. With the sheer volume of output, it can afford to take risks, and it does, something that is increasingly rare if not already obsolete for movie studios. Not very long ago it would be nearly impossible for most of us to catch a short film, other than the ones that routinely screened before Pixar films (although I can’t be the only one to notice this absence before Toy Story 4). But Netflix now hosts, and in fact is creating, a whole host of out of the box content. How wonderful to let PTA do his thing. And no, Thom Yorke is no actor, but I can’t help but admire someone who will go out on a limb for art. It gets all of our creative juices flowing to see new and boundary-pushing things, which is what Anima is. At worst, all it costs you is 15 minutes, but it’s a literal tunnel out of oppression, an exploration of conformity, and ultimately, an expression and rejoicing of freedom.

The Kid (2019)

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So Rio and and Sara Cutler are a couple of old-timey kids living in a cabin with their folks, listening to their dad beat their mom to death as she pleads for the kids to run and hide. They do not. Rio (Jake Schur), though only 14, pulls a gun on his dad and kills him. That buys them only a few minutes because pretty soon their uncle Grant (Chris Pratt) is kicking in the door, ready to murder his little nephew in turn. This family has some major issues.

Stabbing him in the face buys Rio and Sara a little time: they go on the run. But trouble finds them yet again when they wake up having spent the night in a shared hideout with Billy The Kid. (Dane DeHaan). Billy The Kid was an outlaw and a gunslinger, wanted for theft and murder and other fun things like that. But if having a known murderer sharing your pillow isn’t bad enough (just kidding: they didn’t have pillows), Billy has also attracted the attention of a local sheriff, Pat (Ethan Hawke). Pat’s a little obsessed with bringing Billy to justice, and after shooting an innocent horse in the head he gets Billy to surrender, and he gets two orphans with a questionable back story as a bonus (Rio and Sara are understandably a little reluctant to confess their crime to the long arm of the law).

Cue a road trip via horse and buggy, half filled with orphans hitching a ride to their nearest known relative, and half filled with outlaws on their way to the gallows. Billy shows the kids more kindness than the sheriff does, and an uneasy alliance shifts the power dynamic in curious ways.

Which actually makes it sound not half bad, and that’s true. It’s not half bad. It’s all bad. Okay, so technically it’s well-framed enough that it looks like a series of Louis L’Amour cover shoots. If your grandpa is more literary-minded than mine, you might not know that Louis L’Amour is the male equivalent of a romance novel. They’re country western novels with cowboys who spit and grunt and ride off stoically into the sunset. And instead of Fabio on the cover, it’s tough looking cowpokes with 5 o’clock shadow and a piece of wheat chaff between their lips.

The movie sidelines female characters and has mixed messages about whether we should look up to Billy The Kid or de-mythologize about him. But aside from a few nice moments, this movie is just blah enough to get away with its flaws because I’m quite confident this film will go unwatched with or without my help. But for the record: do not.

The Hummingbird Project

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Not that the world needed another ode to American greed, but here goes.

Vince and Anton are cousins who work in high-frequency trading for Eva Torres. Eva (Salma Hayek) is interested in finding an even higher frequency: on the stock market, traders who could get into the best deals even a fraction of a fraction of a second faster would ultimately have a huge cumulative advantage worth billions of dollars over time. Vince (Jesse Eisenberg) thinks he can one-up her, so he leaves, taking coder cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) along with him.

Their scheme involves digging a fiber-optic line in a straight shot between Kansas and New Jersey. And I do mean straight: through mountains and rivers and Amish country if necessary. Their plan means buying land and thwarting government agencies and raising millions in funding from greedy investors. It also means staying one step ahead of ex-boss Eva, but don’t think for a second she’s going to let them get away with this.

Alexander Skarsgard is nearly unrecognizable as a socially inept, worrywart brainiac who must be micro-managed by his bolder cousin. Jesse Eisenberg continues his one-note symphony, bringing the same manic chipmunk energy he brings to everything because he literally can’t do anything else. And to be honest, not only am I over it, I don’t have room in my life for being bombarded by a neurotic asshole. It’s too much.

The script isn’t doing much for me either. It’s single-minded in its pursuit of success, and boring as hell. All this wheeling and dealing: haven’t we seen this a hundred times before? And it ain’t exactly subtle. For every shot of aggressive drilling and invasive construction, there are literal scenes of both amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. You can practically feel an anthem swelling somewhere. But the characters are in fact caricatures: Vince is the hyper-achiever, Anton is the Beautiful Mind, and Eva is the Bond villain.

There is no such thing as cinematic drilling. Or fascinating drilling. Or interesting drilling. It’s just drilling. So unless you’re into some weird engineering porn, this movie is really not suitable for viewing. I think there might have been some potential for satirical commentary buried deep in there somewhere, but in this one case they didn’t drill deep enough. The Hummingbird Project is ultimately shallow, and you only wish its runtime was operating at a higher frequency so you could put this one to bed already.

The Nutcracker And The Four Realms

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You’d think I’d have more of an affinity for this, as I once played Clara myself, in a school production. But I suppose any kinship I felt with the role died when I saw film-Clara flopping around in one sumptuous, gauzy, beaded gown after another, while I spent the whole play in a floor-length flannel nightgown.

Clara (Mackenzie Foy) has recently lost her mother, Marie. She is further aggrieved to find that the “one last Christmas gift” her mother has left each of the children is for her rather useless without a key to open it. Her godfather (Morgan Freeman) would seem to hold the answer, but just as she finds the key at his home, it is squirreled away (or perhaps I should say moused away) into a parallel world – into which of course she follows, without a second thought to the state of her beautiful dress, which she clearly doesn’t deserve.

Anyway, this other world is apparently one of her mother’s making, imaginatively speaking. There are four realms, and she meets 3 of the 4 regents right off the bat: Shiver (Richard E. Grant) of the Land of Snowflakes, Hawthorne (Eugenio Derbez) of the Land of Flowers, and of course the Sugar Plum Fairy (Keira Knightley) of the Land of Sweets. These three regents worship Clara as the daughter of their beloved Queen Marie, and wail upon learning news of her death. They confess that the Queen has not been around in sometime, and these 3 realms are at war with the fourth: Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren) of the Land of Amusements.

Sugar Plum (Keira Knightley, using a grating Mickey Mouse voice and sporting drag queen eyebrows for unknown reasons) explains that they can use Marie’s machine, which turns toys into people, to win the war, but they need the key. Yes, the very same key that Clara is already hunting, the key stolen by the legion of mice and now in the possession of evil Mother Ginger. Clara must retrieve the key with only the help of a kind nutcracker named Philip (Jayden Fowara-Knight).

The Nutcracker is of course famously a ballet, and there is but a single scant scene of dance, starring the ephemeral Misty Copeland, which is probably the best stuff in the movie. The rest is really nothing special. It’s almost as if, the more they inflate it with CGI effects, the more magic leaks out. It’s drained of the life and wonder you may have come to expect from The Nutcracker. This one is clunky – often quite mesmerizing to look at, but the directors are depending on literal hypnotic focus on the visuals since the story, which diverges wildly from cannon, just doesn’t hold up. It’s almost amazing how unexciting a land of imagination can be made to feel, and I wouldn’t mind if co-directors Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston both had their directors cards revoked for such a failure. It’s toys come to life: the wonder is baked right in!

The Nutcracker has been around since 1892 and now accounts for 40% of a typical ballet company’s annual revenues. It’s been done to death in both movies and television: Barbie did a version. The Care Bears did a version. Mickey and Minnie did a version. Tom and Jerry did a version. And they were ALL more successful that this one, which cost over $120M to make, but you can’t put a price on heart, and this movie just didn’t have it.

Running For Grace

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Hawaii is truly one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its history hasn’t always been so.

A new doctor (Matt Dillon) arrives at one of Hawaii’s coffee plantations just as the Spanish flu is indiscriminately taking life left and right (circa 1920). On one bad day, two women succumb: the wife of the plantation owner, leaving her daughte rGrace motherless, and an unmarried Japanese migrant worker, leaving her mixed race son Jo motherless. Jo was the kind of kid who brought shame at the time, so they thought, so Jo’s mother had always hid his existence from the other workers, from everyone. Now there’s no one to care for him; he’s alone in the world. Until the doctor shows up, and has these crazy notions that children should be fed and such.

Turns out Jo is pretty useful to the good doctor. Although the workers still fear the kid, he’s a useful translator and ingratiates himself to the community. Fast forward to: Jo is now a young man (Ryan Potter), and a fast one – “the medicine runner,” they call him, useful, perhaps indispensable as a conduit between the migrants and the doctor. One day, while Doc is in town, ostensibly on a pharmaceutical run, but actually petitioning yet again to adopt Jo despite stringent, racist laws that would have otherwise, the owner’s daughter Grace (Olivia Ritchie) is injured, and Jo offers up his own services as the doctor’s apprentice. The owner is not having it, but then, he doesn’t even approve of the white “country doctor” either, and it’s only the memory of his wife’s death that allows the appointment to take place. Pretty soon erotic temperature-taking is taking place, and all the flirting that can be mustered from either side of a muslin curtain. But the owner soon dispatches a “proper” doctor, Reyes (Jim Caviezel), who of course is a big white jerk.

Running For Grace is an ironic title considering what a slow burn it is. No, wait, burn implies it ever gets some heat, but even Hawaii’s volcanoes do little to light a fire under this story. Ostensibly it’s a forbidden romance between two young people who could never be together, but that’s only a superficial disguise for yet another white saviour movie. Jo, though he has proved his worth tenfold, is still an illegitimate bastard with no last name. Doc, though unsuccessful in adopting him, insists that they are family, and that’s enough. Which is a nice sentiment, except the implication is that Jo would not be enough without him, that Jo’s mother was not enough, that his actual biology and parentage are not enough, and that only his association with the white doctor has legitimized him.

You mustn’t even feel torn about this movie because it’s not good no matter how you look at it. The script is as awful as Jim Caviezel’s charleston: truly, deeply terrible, unpolished, embarrassing, even. It’s best if you just cut a wide berth around this stinker, lest its stench permeate your reasonable standards.