April 22, 2008

The Pixar Story

Reviewed by Martin Tsai
The Pixar Story, a documentary airing tonight on Starz, features the stuff fairy tales are made of. Best known for computer animations such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, the Pixar Animation Studios’ eight feature films all rank among the 150 top-grossing movies of all time at the domestic box office. The documentary traces the company’s Cinderella transformation from a peripheral division at Lucasfilm to its $7.4 billion sale to the Walt Disney Company in 2006.
John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and Steve Jobs are, respectively, the brains, the brawn, and the capital integral to Pixar’s success. Mr. Catmull was a researcher at the New York Institute of Technology who developed computer graphics, while Mr. Jobs, who co-founded Apple, was the risk-taker who stepped in when George Lucas wanted to spin off the division. But The Pixar Story mostly parallels the career of Mr. Lasseter, the animator who directed A Bug’s Life, Cars, and the two Toy Story films.
A lifelong Disney fanatic, Mr. Lasseter enrolled in the California Institute of the Arts to study with legendary Disney animators and he even worked at Disneyland while on vacation. Upon graduation, he landed his dream job as an animator for Disney. But the clock quickly struck midnight when his first short film led to a pink slip and his exile from the Magic Kingdom. But there’s a happy ending to his story: Mr. Lasseter was hired by Mr. Catmull for a position at Lucasfilm when the two met at a conference, and thus Pixar’s triumph-over-adversity tale commenced.
The Pixar Story aptly attributes the company’s success to the childlike playfulness and wide-eyed wonder of its films, while its chief rival, Jeffrey Katzenberg (of Disney and later DreamWorks), championed edgier animations that overflowed with pop-culture references and adult humor. But Pixar’s trademark pixie-dust whimsy is notably absent from this documentary, which was written and directed by Leslie Iwerks. Instead of the magic carpet ride one might expect, the TV special unfolds like a promo reel that might play before an annual shareholders meeting. It’s extravagantly overproduced and garishly over-scored, with extraneous digital effects and gratuitous archival footage signaling a production flush with cash — even when it’s presenting Pixar’s college dormlike corporate culture.
Another reason that the film looks like a promotional video is its one-sided fluff-piece approach. Pixar’s now-reconciled new corporate parent, Disney, is cast in the role of the antagonist, while the word “DreamWorks” is uttered exactly once in the entire film — never mind that DreamWorks’s computer-animated Shrek 2 is the top-grossing animated feature of all time. The Pixar Story also seems woefully dated considering the glaring omissions of its latest hit, Ratatouille, and the forthcoming WALL-E.
© Copyright 2008 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

April 18, 2008

Zombie Strippers

Reviewed by Martin Tsai
“It’s really not as bad as it sounds, and it’s only 90 minutes long,” Columbia Pictures publicist Shane Kidd sheepishly assured before a press screening of “Zombie Strippers.” He was being honest, but in a sense he was selling the film way short. Studios won’t bother screening a horror flick for the press nowadays even if it’s half decent. And this one does sound just awful enough that it might be great.
Indeed, the very premise of the movie taps into the most primal fear and desire deep within the psyche of every heterosexual pubescent boy, fraternity member and overgrown man-child: It’s the female flesh, of either the vital or decomposed variety. What’s more, the film seems to be the culmination of many recent cult favorites. It’s “Planet Terror” meets “Showgirls” with a splash of “Southland Tales.” 
“Zombie Strippers” takes place in the not-too-distant, post-apocalyptic future where nudity is outlawed. A government experiment goes haywire and turns its subjects into the living dead. An elite military unit promptly cleans up the mess, albeit not too thoroughly. The zombie virus finds its way to an underground gentlemen’s club, morphing slinky pole dancers into super acrobats and ratcheting up the viciousness of their already intense catfights. Meanwhile, the club must keep its deadly troubles hush-hush and on the q.t. in order to stay in business. 
If there’s anything gratuitous about “Zombie Strippers,” it would actually be its ham-handed social critique. While the film satirizes groupthink mentality like the best of its predecessors by George A. Romero, writer-director Jay Lee gleefully takes this a step too far (such as setting his film during a fourth term of George W. Bush’s presidency).
Mr. Lee is very successful, though, in perverting the iconic images of his headliners. Never has porn diva Jenna Jameson looked so spectacularly unappealing. It’s also a treat to see Robert Englund squeal like a little girl while on the receiving end of the nightmares he has so mercilessly inflicted upon us. “Zombie Strippers” doesn’t have the scratched-up, reel-missing pretensions of “Grindhouse.” Instead, the film happily wallows in a vat of Velveeta like a pig in slop. It’s the kind of B picture that Peter Jackson would make before he went all highbrow on us. 
Reprinted from The New York Sun. © Copyright 2008 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

April 14, 2008

The Take

Reviewed by Martin Tsai
Giving the classic wrong-man narrative a streetwise update, “The Take” transcends the standard modus operandi with plenty of style to burn. Its urban grittiness and textured compositions rival the works of Fernando Meirelles and Tony Scott. Also showcasing top-form performances by John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez, this assured first feature by Brad Furman is so expertly put together that it exceeds expectations in every way. If it were in Portuguese with subtitles, people would hail it as the next “City of God.” But instead it opens at Quad Cinema today before heading straight to DVD next month.
Felix De La Peña (Mr. Leguizamo) is the everyman protagonist, an armored truck driver whose route covers east Los Angeles. A hijacking is the obligatory extraordinary circumstance in which our ordinary hero finds himself, one ending with the criminals putting a bullet in his head and leaving him for dead. Felix miraculously survives the ordeal, albeit with serious brain damage that causes memory loss and a shift in personality. Meanwhile, robbery suspects and witnesses alike become targets for assassination – a development in the criminal investigation that casts suspicion on Felix himself. He must attempt to reconstruct his memory while evading pursuit by FBI agents (Bobby Cannavale and Matthew Hatchette) and the real thief (Tyrese Gibson).
Cinematographer Lukas Ettlin illustrates the predominantly Hispanic Boyle Heights neighborhood with saturated colors and grainy exposure akin to a thick humidity. The jittery handheld camera – occasionally whizzing in and out of focus – adds urgency to an intense plot. This visual vocabulary immediately brings to mind “City of God” and “The Constant Gardner.” But “The Take” doesn’t seek to induce the kind of liberal guilt Mr. Meirelles elicited through making Benetton ads out of the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi. Mr. Furman employs the pseudo-documentary technique simply to create a credible backdrop for a plot that otherwise requires considerable suspension of disbelief.
The screenplay by Jonas Pate and Josh Pate has some unsatisfactory loose ends, but it does paint a studied portrait of a brain trauma victim. Felix’s head injury and the resulting personality shift become a source of marital discord between him and Marina (Ms. Perez). While other genre films of this ilk would have treated this as a superfluous tangent, “The Take” invests several scenes to flesh it out. This is good news for the actors, and they certainly don’t disappoint. Mr. Leguizamo gives a performance with enough nuance that he never seems over the top even when the script calls for ticking-bomb rage or manic paranoia. In basically a thankless supporting role, Ms. Perez also stands out as the dutiful but suffering wife.
“The Take” winds up in the traditional foot race, which sets up a daring plot twist that ultimately fails to materialize. Instead of going all out for a truly unsettling, “Infernal Affairs”-style conclusion, the Pate brothers aim lower and reach for “The Departed.” But that’s nitpicking really.
Reprinted from The New York Sun. © Copyright 2008 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

Body of War

Reviewed by Martin Tsai
The documentary “Body of War” tells the story of 25-year-old Tomas Young. The sight of President George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble that was once the World Trade Center compelled the then 22-year-old Tomas to call up an army recruiter on Sept. 13, 2001 to enlist. Tomas’s rude awakening came during his fifth day on duty in Iraq, when a bullet hit his spine and paralyzed him from the waist down. He never got to live out his dream inspired by the film “Top Gun.” Instead his life resembled that other Tom Cruise movie, “Born on the Fourth of July.” The embittered war veteran now devotes his life to anti-war causes.
On one hand, “Body of War” attempts to address the travails of paraplegia. The production seems to have missed out entirely on the arduous physical rehabilitation process at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (which the far superior documentary on medics, “Fighting for Life,” does cover). But “Body of War” does offer frank discussions on sexual and urinary dysfunctions among paraplegics in a way that surpasses the likes of “Murderball.” These functions that able-bodied folks take for granted present major challenges for paraplegics. In one memorable scene, Tomas requires his mother’s assistance in inserting a catheter while he has to urinate under broad daylight in a van.
On the other hand, “Body of War” is just another entry in the endless parade of Iraq war documentaries. It intersperses Mr. Young’s narrative with C-SPAN footage from the House and Senate floors, beating the same points into the ground. The C-SPAN material seems like filler, because the film never establishes a connection between the two narratives – that is until Mr. Young’s climactic meeting with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who in the most nauseating, self-congratulatory manner declares himself as one of the “Immortal 23” who voted against the Iraq war resolution in the Senate. To this end, “Body of War” is tactless and pointless. The film seems more interested in preaching to the choir than changing minds, since it doesn’t even bother feigning the slightest hint of neutrality so as to avoid alienating those on the fence or on the other side of the debate. Throwing in a couple of original songs by Eddie Vedder doesn’t make it more worthwhile, when moviegoers are already weary of the onslaught of anti-war documentaries that all seem indistinguishable from one another.
Reprinted from The New York Sun. © Copyright 2008 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.