Welcome to the House of Crouse. It’s a magical day around here. Not only do the cast of the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them drop by–including Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne–then we have a Warren Beatty sighting. As fans know Beatty sightings are as rare(and precious)as Bismuth Crystals. He and Rules Don’t Apply star Lily Collins swing by to talk about the movie and the film’s unusual production. Abracadabra! C’mon in and sit a spell… we’re pulling rabbits out of hats today!
It’s re-make a rama at the multi-plex this week. Kong is still doing big business and two other retreads are joining it on theatre marquees. The Producers started life as a very funny film by Mel Brooks starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel. Thirty years later a musical version of the story of the worst play ever mounted on the Great White Way helped revitalize the real-life Broadway. Unfortunately I don’t think the film version of The Producers will work the same magic in movie theatres and reverse the slump that theatres chains have been experiencing this year.
Fans of the stage version of The Producers will be pleased to have a faithful adaptation of the musical, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and several of the original Broadway cast, but stage and film are two different mediums, a fact that seems to be lost on director Susan Stroman. As a choreographer Stroman has a shelf full of Tony awards and has worked at the very highest levels on Broadway. As a film director she is a great choreographer. Her film version of the play feels like she simply pointed a camera at the stage and yelled action. There is little effort made to open the film up and take it outside the proscenium arch. When the movie does stray from the box-like confines of the stage we get our best sequences—a chorus line of elderly women on walkers in Central Park and a lavish production number for Broderick’s “I Want to be a Producer” number.
Lane and Broderick bring considerable charm and energy to their roles, but it feels like they are playing to the back of the house rather than to a camera. Ironically, The Producers, a story so rooted in the tradition of Broadway, would have benefited from a more Hollywood treatment.
Rodents have a long distinguished history on the big screen. There’s Ben, the leader of a pack of vicious killer rats who inspired the 1972 movie of the same name, Stuart Little an orphaned mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox, and written by Oscar nominee M. Night Shyamalan in one of his less sinister moods. Ratatouille starring Remy the gourmet rat, Ron Weasley’s Scabbers the rat from the Harry Potter movies, The Rescuers’s Bianca and Bernard voiced by Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart and Master Splinter the radical rat who is also the father figure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One rodent, Mickey Mouse even won an Academy Award back in 1932. Add to that list Despereaux, a big eared mouse with even bigger aspirations in The Tale of Despereaux a new animated film starring Matthew Broderick and Dustin Hoffman.
The movie, based on the Newbery Medal winning series of children’s book by Kate DiCamillo, begins its convoluted story with Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) a charming merchant marine rat who inadvertently scares the Queen of Dor to death. After the King banishes rats from the kingdom forever he is cast out to the underworld of Ratland. Meanwhile the movie’s hero, a misfit mouse with huge ears named Despereaux (Matthew Broderick) has also been expelled from his home only to end up in the dungeon of Dor castle. As he schemes to escape his underlying qualities of chivalry and loyalty emerge and his fate becomes intertwined with that of Roscuro, a bumbling servant girl (Tracey Ullman) and the castle’s princess (Emma Watson).
That’s the Reader’s Digest version of the story. It’s amazing how many plot points the filmmaker’s were able to cram into Despereaux’s 90 minute running time. The comings-and-goings of all the characters may confuse younger viewers but shouldn’t challenge 8-12 year old kids. I think, though, that most children regardless of age will be taken with the characters and the elegant animation.
Despereaux doesn’t feel like other recent animated hits like Shrek, which relies on pop culture references as a source of humor or even the brilliant WALL-E with its environmental message. Despereaux is more old fashioned than that; more like a “Once upon a time” Grimm’s fairy tale. The humor in the film comes from the characters and the situations, not belch jokes or double entendres.
Layer on top of that uniformly excellent voice work from an all-star cast which includes Matthew Broderick, Emma Watson, Dustin Hoffman, Tracey Ullman, Sigourney Weaver, William H. Macy Kevin Kline and Stanley Tucci with important messages about being yourself and redemption and you have, in a season filled with heavy weight dramas for adults like Revolutionary Road and Doubt, one of the few all-ages movies for the entire family.
To fully appreciate WarGames, the Matthew Broderick film now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special edition DVD, you have to cast your mind back to a time before computers dominated everyone’s work space. It’s a Cold War thriller about a teenager who unknowingly kicks off the countdown to World War III by playing a computer game. Made at a time when computers were still perceived as strange, high tech gizmos it played on people’s distrust of technology and perceived Russian threat.
These days the movie plays like The Brat Pack Meets Dr. Strangelove. It remains an engaging thriller, well constructed and acted, but the technology involved now looks so out of date, so hopelessly archaic it harkens back to a time when calculators were considered high tech.
It all looks terribly dated but director John Badham sticks to a traditional and timeless thriller set up, concentrating on character rather than the technology. It’s a smart approach that keeps the intrigue front-and-center, making the ancient looking computers secondary to the overall story. This focus on plot and procedure keeps the story fresh despite being a quarter of a century old. The technology angle is all rather silly and seems really alarmist to today’s eyes, but in an age of identity theft the idea that computers can cause harm is still relevant.
Matthew Broderick shines as 17-year-old David Lightman, a social outcast who uses his technological skills to hack into his high school’s computer to change his grades. Opposite him is Ally Sheedy as the perky Jennifer Mack, David’s teenage crush who gets caught up in the action. Also look for Dabney Coleman as a cantankerous computer-reliant defense specialist.
It’s been a quarter of a century since “Shall we play a game” briefly became a popular catchphrase, and while WarGames doesn’t strike the technophobe-Cold War-chord it did back in 1983 it does stand up as an entertaining teen thriller.
SYNOPSIS: Allan Alda is Arthur Shaw, a Bernie Madoff character whose Ponzi scheme defrauded his clients out of millions of dollars. Among those burned were the employees of his luxury high rise. Having lost his pension plan, the building’s manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) concocts a plan to break into Shaw’s apartment and steal his $20 million stash. When his posse of employees prove to be less than criminally adept, Kovacs brings in an old friend and ex-con, Slide (Eddie Murphy), to help.
Ratings:
Richard: **1⁄2
Mark: ***
Richard: Mark, it’s nice to see Eddie Murphy in a movie that allows him to drop his beloved family entertainer guise and bring back some of the bravado that we loved in movies like 48 Hours. It’s just too bad the movie feels like it was made 30 years ago. Despite its Bernie Madoff storyline it feels old-fashioned.
Mark: Of course it feels old-fashioned. It’s an Eddie Murphy movie circa 1990. If not for the hairstyles, you could almost believe it was an unreleased film from that era finally freed from some legal limbo. But you have to admit, it’s great to see Murphy doing the kind of work he should have been doing over the last two decades. So, sure the plot feels hackneyed. But it’s the fine ensemble cast that makes this thing click. My favourite? Matthew Broderick. Yours, Richard?
RC: For me it was Michael Pena. Great comic timing, perpetual dazed look on his face. He and Murphy were the high points for me. It was interesting, however, to see Ben Stiller as the straight man to Murphy’s wisecracks. Loved hearing Murphyisms like, “I will blow your face clean off your face!”
MB: Well, I haven’t liked Stiller in anything for quite a while, and I appreciated his comic restraint here, penance perhaps for all his shameless mugging in those Night at The Museum movies. I will admit the whole enterprise does have a retro vibe, including Tea Leoni and Alan Alda in key roles, but Gabourey Sidibe freshens up the cast in a comic turn a million light years from what she did in Precious.
RC: She is a pleasant surprise. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the actual robbery, despite a few twists here and there, was completely unbelievable. I don’t mind suspending part of my disbelief but the sheer lunacy of the crime took me out of the movie.
MB: I went with it because it was fun, if not credible. But I must say I enjoy the irony of any film that critiques the class system in America starring actors each worth half a billion dollars.
Welcome to the House of Crouse. It’s a magical day around here. Not only do the cast of the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them drop by–including Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne–then we have a Warren Beatty sighting. As fans know Beatty sightings are as rare(and precious)as Bismuth Crystals. He and Rules Don’t Apply star Lily Collins swing by to talk about the movie and the film’s unusual production. Abracadabra! C’mon in and sit a spell… we’re pulling rabbits out of hats today!
