SUMMER OF BLOOD: HAVE A NICE DAY

There is a gentleman named Roger Corman - perhaps you have heard of him? And if not, how is it that you care enough about movies to find yourself reading a film blog? For Roger Corman is one of the essential producers in the annals of American cinema, the very David O. Selznick of the B-movie set. He has been the driving force behind some of the most beloved crappy movies for over half a decade and counting - at 85 now, he's slowed down but by no means stopped - and launched the careers of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jim Wynorski. Jim Who? I can hear you asking, those of you at least who were raised with a modicum of taste and respect for your own dignity. The rest of you might now him from such titles as The Bare Wench Project, The Witches of Breastwick, and The Devil Wears Nada, but before he turned to pornographic blockbuster parodies in the '00s, he spent the '90s directing schlock action and horror pictures like Vampirella,* and before that, he spent the '80s making comparatively decent, one might even say watchable, movies, of which the most prominent and best-regarded was Chopping Mall in 1986, Wynorski's sophomore feature and the first where he teamed up with the aforementioned Roger Corman, and now we get back full circle.

Mind you, Chopping Mall was technically produced by Corman's wife Julie, and while I see no reason to doubt that she picked up a thing or two about filmmaking during her marriage (now in its 41st year) and doubtlessly did exactly what she was credited for, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to spot Roger's hand in the thing, not least because it was the premiere project for Concorde Pictures, the producer's new production company after he sold off New World Pictures in 1983. But there's also the unmistakably Cormanesque manner in which Chopping Mall feels for all the world like a bandwagon-jumper while tweaking the same formula it's allegedly copying so far that the end result feels somehow original, despite being intensely beholden to almost every single hidebound convention you could name; and the cunning manner in which the film marries cheapness with a zealous eye for making sure every dollar gets spent for the greatest aesthetic good (one of the key characteristics of early and mid-period Corman - Chopping Mall is among the very last films before he entered his late or "shitty" period - is his ability to get the most possible bang for his buck; he understands as few other producers do that the best way to get an audience's money is to make sure that audience is completely entertained by your product). I am sure Wynorski had something to do with it all, but I wonder if we ought to credit the future director of such deathless classics as 976-EVIL II with too much of the success for a movie as disreputably fun as Chopping Mall.

Or Killbots, as it was originally called, before a chilly audience response sent it back into the editing room, where it lost about a quarter of an hour, ending up with the decidedly sleek running time of 77 minutes. In the best B-movie fashion, hardly a second of that time is wasted; barely before we have a chance to realise we're watching a movie at all, we've seen a jewelry thief (Lenny Juliano) getting apprehended by a squat metal object, sort of like Johnny 5 from the same year's Short Circuit with more armor plating and a Cylon mask staring out menacingly with its bright red anonymity. And this situation has only barely registered before it turns out that we're watching a promotional film demonstrating the new killbots being sold by Secure-Tronics as fancy-ass new mall security guards that never fall asleep or surreptitiously read porn during their shift or nothing. And so on and so forth: by the ten-minute mark we already know exactly why a whole big mess of young people is camping in the Park Plaza Mall after it closes (but before the gigantic steel security doors close at midnight) and we can assume that several of them will run afoul of the mall's three shiny new killbots that have already murdered one of the security guards they were theoretically purchased to replace, after an errant lightning strike hits the central processor controlling their actions and disables the "don't kill people using the laser guns that, for some reason, have been installed on your chassis" command line. Ten minutes it takes to set all that up. I miss movies like that. Ten minutes into Transformers and we still hadn't met any of our protagonists.

Ruthless efficiency is admittedly not the same as a tight, smart script: the whole thing is absolutely lousy with places where what is cool is not the same as what makes a lick of sense (the laser guns, I think, are proof enough of that). And when we dust just a little bit of the sci-fi trappings, it's quite obvious that Wynorski and Steve Mitchell's script is taking nearly all of its cues from the slasher subgenre which was still inordinately popular in those days despite having long since exhausted whatever creativity and insight it might have once possessed. Though surely, adding murderous military-looking robots to a slasher picture couldn't help but freshen things up a bit, and even as I am certain that The Terminator looms rather large in Chopping Mall's DNA, it's to the filmmakers' credit that it never comes across remotely as derivative as I've just made it sound.

Or, for that matter, as derivative as I'm about to make it sound, because now it's time to Meet the Meat, and a more outstandingly indistinguishable cast of prospective victims is rare even in the rarefied world of '80s horror pictures. In the order that the film introduces us to them, we've got Alison (Kelli Maroney) and Suzie (Barbara Crampton, who forever became the stuff of '80s horror legend when she co-starred in Re-Animator), waitresses at an Italian restaurant in the mall whose owner we can assume once auditioned to play the voice of video game hero Mario, but was rejected for being too stereotypical; Alison is only kind of interested in attending the after-hours party that Suzie is spearheading, but her friend has dangled the promise of a single boy in attendance, and that's who we meet next: Ferdy (Tony O'Dell), whose uncle owns the Furniture King store where this shindig is to happen, and who has been invited largely as an insurance policy for his co-workers, Mike (John Terlesky), and Greg (Nick Segal), who is dating Suzie. Next up are Suzie's friends Linda (Karrie Emerson) and Rick (Russell Todd), a married couple - this fact is brought up only to have no bearing on anything else that will happen) - in which, get this, the woman is better with cars - a fact that, having served its sexist "ZOMG lady gearhead" purpose, also has no bearing on anything else that will happen, despite "we made a point of establishing that this character is good with engine" almost always being foreshadowing in these kinds of movies. Last up, and we don't meat her until the party itself, is Mike's girlfriend Leslie (Suzee Slater).

Mike, Leslie, Rick, Linda, Greg, Suzie, Ferdy, Alison; and since in grand slasher fashion, half of them only barely get names on-screen, and since they are barely individualised even in the reductive manner of '80s films, I took to calling them, respectively, Ex-Frat, Slutty McHo, Married Guy, Married Woman, Cameron from Ferris Bueller, Barbara Crampton's Character, Dweeb, and Obvious Final Girl (as befits the more complex personality of a Final Girl, she also got another nick-name: Frizzy Hair). And despite this, I still managed to get Greg and Rick confused half of the time.

So, in the Furniture King, the six normal couples fuck like monkeys while Ferdy and Alison, wishing instead to survive the coming massacre, sit fully clothed and watch the Corman-directed Attack of the Crab Monsters. Meanwhile, the killbots take down a second guard and a janitor played with joyfully hammy grumpiness by a cameoing Dick Miller (a longstanding Corman veteran). One quick trip to a cigarette vending machine later - Do you remember when smoking cigarettes inside malls was just something people did, and it was no big deal at all? Because I just barely do, and it still startles me every time I see a movie like this - and Mike and Leslie are both out of the picture, and it's not much longer before the six remaining kids are aware that something has gone incredibly wrong, and the mechanical death machines are breaking every single rule they came installed with in their zeal to keep the mall safe from the twin scourges of sex and alcohol.

The forty minutes or thereabouts that remain at this point play out much as you'd expect: they run this way, get trapped, run that way, figure out a way to destroy one robot at a time with much effort, somebody dies, and back and forth and so on. It could be junk, nay, it is junk, but junk with a twist: for Wynorski finds a place that is just winking enough, guided there I expect by the Cormans, that his movie plays not like a parody of itself, but with a breeziness that seems to pull the viewer aside just long to admit, with only a little embarrassment, "yeah, I know this is kind of stupid and clichéd, but come on, killer robots with laser guns - you have to admit that's fun". It is, at the very least, a movie that knows exactly how disreputable it is, and embraces that with a defiant shit-eating grin: its constant references to B- and Z-grade schlock of the past, much of it with a Corman connection, makes it almost like a proto-Scream, though with less snark. Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov cameo as their characters from the 1982 cult hit Eating Raoul, and there are visual in-jokes all over: movie posters on nearly every surface, and store names with heavy-handed cutesy names like "Peckinpah's Sporting Goods", though the one that made actually giggle and squee just a tiny bit was "Roger's Little Shop of Pets".

If it's not too much to claim that a film can be lighthearted with a body count that was, if not outlandish by the escalating standards of the mid-'80s, certainly a healthy list of dead bodies, then I should like to claim that Chopping Mall is just that: lighthearted and suffused with a sense of play. The deaths themselves are remarkably un-violent: several people get electrocuted or zapped by the laser, and the only big gore effect is an exploding head that cuts away quick as it can to disguise the obvious model (the quick cut also serves to give the moment a bit more shocking oomph). One character burns to death, screaming all the way, but what could be an upsetting moment is quickly smoothed over by a magic transition that turns her into an inert - though oddly, still screaming - dummy. And of course, there's the mere fact that the characters have such aggressively shallow personalities, which leaves us much less concerned that they are dying. It's a fun exercise in violent death and murder, in other words.

And this, as much as anything, is the Mark of Roger: if there's a single film that Corman ever made that is ultimately as mean-spirited and unpleasant as the great bulk of slasher films, I haven't seen it. Everything he ever touched has a definite flair of the Barnum-esque showman to it; not so far in the direction of sheer hucksterism as, say, William Castle would attain, but the foremost characteristic of a Corman film from his glory days is that it is, after all the blood and terror and horror and death, made in a spirit of utmost good cheer. He wanted to make the people feel good, and his movies are always as entertaining and well-made as his impossibly small budgets would permit.

So even if Chopping Mall has horrible characters played by almost uniformly poor actors; it's still made with a seriousness of purpose and a focus missing in most of its competition. The killbots themselves are a tiny miracle of low-budget production and design, legitimately menacing all the more because they don't seem to be off in some sci-fi wonderland, and because the puppeteers (and Wynorski, who provided their deep monotone, weirdly amusing voices) put so much little touches into their movements, giving these featureless, emotionless machines more legitimate personality than any of the humans involved.

It is a ridiculous film that is above ridicule, and a film that manages to gather up seemingly every current in 1980s genre cinema into one nimble package, in short, and despite a somewhat too-long Final Girl sequence, it does this all without ever dragging. It does not talk down to us, or assume that we are idiots - it knows that it is goofy, but it does not therefore mock itself or ask to be mocked. It is, I daresay, just about the best low-budget movie about killer robots destroying a shopping mall that can ever be produced, and it asks no more from us than that we allow that even this, in its way, is a small but real achievement.

Body Count: 9, not at all a bad number for a 77-minute picture with about $15 in the budget for gore effects.

FINAL FRONTIERSMEN

How can you begin to fuck up a movie called Cowboys & Aliens? As it turns out, the same way you fuck up Hot Tub Time Machine, or some people think you fuck up Snakes on a Plane (I myself maintain that the latter film was the best possible version of itself): by coasting on the awe-inspiring cheesy awesomeness of the title, and making something that delivers on what that title promises in the most unimaginatively literal way, while otherwise going through the motions of a particularly unexceptional plot. Though whereas Hot Tub Time Machine in particular compounded that problem by being not remotely what I think most of us would probably come up with if we were told to come up with a plot for that title, Cowboys & Aliens is quite possibly the most effective marriage of cowboys and aliens that we were likely to get, in the year 2011 anyway; I have no real argument against the film's execution of its concept other than that it is brutally boring, and perhaps it is the case that cowboys and aliens is a good idea for a comedy sketch or a video game, but not so much for a 118-minute feature film.

The story's genesis is absurdly long for such an elemental concept: in 1997, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg of Malibu Comics sold the idea to Universal Pictures, which was originally to be written and directed by Steve Oedekerk. He left, the project lied dormant for ages, Rosenberg adapted it into a comic book in 2006, it got revived with Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead, Jon Favreau jumped in to direct, Downey left, and finally, in early 2010, nearly a decade and a half after Rosenberg first conceived it, the film began production, ultimately to boast a fucking insane roster of A-list writers: besides Oedekerk, the story is credited to Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, two members of the equally huge team it took to get Children of Men off the ground (though they are here as Favreau's boys, having also contributed to the first Iron Man). Ostby and Fergus also worked on the screenplay, alongside the team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (J.J. Abrams protégés who also owe us all an apology for Transformers and its unholy sequel), with a final dusting of pixie dust courtesy of Lost show-runner Damon Lindelof. A sufficiently dedicated student of each writer's style could no doubt pluck out what elements each of them contributed - I think the Kurtzman/Orci material might include the asinine "alien gold-mining" subplot, but that is merely a guess - but I'm rather less interested in the specific famous people who worked on Cowboys & Aliens, than in the fact that with this much fame comes a concurrent amount of ego, particularly since all of these famous people are especially famous for their bombastic popcorn movie concepts, and the resulting screenplay is a slurry of all the ideas all of these people crammed in throughout a number of ill-merged layers of writing. How many of them got credit just as a contractual matter? I cannot say. But with six credited authors - seven if we include Rosenberg - Cowboys & Aliens never really had a prayer at turning into aught else but a catalogue of genre elements kludged together and thrown into theaters still all moist and drippy.

And what did these many men all join forces to perpetrate? A man with no name (Daniel Craig) and a strange device on his arm wakes up with no memory in the middle of the desert, and kills a trio of white scalp-hunters, taking their guns and supplies (whatever else is true about the movie, I admire in the extreme that it does not dick around getting started: Craig sits up, dazed and sweating, in the very first shot), and then arrives in the dusty frontier town of Absolution, New Mexico, where's he's patched up by the laconic preacher (Clancy Brown), before the slightly less-laconic sheriff (Keith Carradine) identifies him as the notorious outlaw Jake Lonergan, and is about to ship him off to Santa Fe to be tried, when the aliens show up and blast Absolution all to hell and steal several townsfolk. Since one of those townsfolk is Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), the sociopathic idiot son of the local cattle baron, Old Man Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), an angry and mean sort, presses Lonergan into his service as an alien hunter, since Lonergan's arm-thingy turns out to be the only weapon anybody has that can kill the aliens or their ships.

And from there: trekking backwards and forwards and up and down through the New Mexican landscape, shot with appropriately mock-Fordian pictorial awe by Matthew Libatique, while Harry Gregson-Williams's rousing, Western-ish score (much the best part of the whole movie) sets the scene for all number of grand events in which tough-as-nails frontiersmen use all their pluck and grit to combat the relentlessly superior technology of the aliens in front of them. There are a few Deep Dark Secrets to uncover, though not very many; an obvious one involving Ella, the unconvincingly pasted-on love interest played by a surprisingly not-anachronistic Olivia Wilde; an arbitrary one involving Dolarhyde, whose character is rendered largely incoherent as a result of all the jockeying about to make sure that Harrison Ford gets to play a bad guy who isn't actually a bad guy.

Favreau, who did such a bang-up job with the goofy techno-theatrics of Iron Man just three years ago, isn't dealt a very good hand, but he proceeds to screw things up anyway by treating Cowboys & Aliens with a suffocating degree of gravity; in one interview or another, he suggested that he was making a sci-fi Unforgiven, which isn't that far off the mark, certainly not in terms of how miserably glum it all was (in terms of quality, meanwhile... if what Unforgiven needed to be great was to have spaceships in it, then I assume Clint Eastwood would have damn well added spaceships), and I cannot help but wonder: is this where we, as a culture, have arrived? That a movie whose very title is Cowboys & Aliens should feel the need to quash its own sense of fun, of (dare I say) camp? Because a campy Cowboys & Aliens is pretty much the only thing I at least have ever expected or wanted since the project was first rumoured a decade ago or more.

Instead: drab action scenes with fairly addled editing (the film is generally plagued, in fact, by weak editing and, oddly, even worse sound mixing), and characters looking all intense and brooding like the story they're in is serious and haunting and epic, instead of a muddy mess of ideas and generic conventions that are not married elegantly, but simply stuck next to each other over and over again until the movie stops. That is, there is little that actually gets to the matter of how cowboys and aliens might regard one another; once the initial shock is over, the Westerners simply adapt to fighting the science-fiction invaders with no more sense of wonder or inspiration than marked the hateful Battle: Los Angeles.

Okay, alright; it's not nearly that bad. Really, it's just a more extreme version of Iron Man 2: Favreau is so intoxicated with a not-very-good story that he focuses all his energies on exploring it in boring little chunks, forgetting along the way to put any spark or life in what is, after all, meant to be a fun movie. And in the end, Cowboys & Aliens isn't bad, but just appallingly mediocre: joyless, airless, slowly scratching its way across the screen in big frowny moments until it ends. There are the odd charms: Ford at least is absolutely having a blast playing a grouchy old cowboy with a gun and just enough Han Solo in him that the vaunted "Ford vs. Craig" hype isn't completely wasted. But it's a small note of pleasure in what is otherwise one of the most perfectly flavorless movie in a summer that has done much to push the boundaries of the word "anodyne".

5/10

NB: And that, in 2011, a movie can get away with depicting Native Americans the way this one does? Absolutely precious.

THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND

The most interesting fact about Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is that its producer, Wendi Murdoch, is the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and that he exercised his, let us politely call it his "influence" over Fox Searchlight to make sure the film got a U.S. release. I do not claim that this fact has any salient bearing on the film's subsequent quality or political underpinnings (it pretty obviously does not), but only that Snow Flower is so otherwise devoid of any content worth talking about, either for the good or for the bad, that a bit of pointless gossip ends up being the only detail about the movie that distinguishes it enough for one to remind oneself that it exists at all.

Based on a novel by Lisa See, Snow Flower concerns two pairs of women: in contemporary Shanghai, the celebration of Nina's (Li Bingbing) appointment to lead her bank's new branch in New York City is cut short when her longtime friend Sophia (Gianna Jun) is hit by a car and hospitalised in a coma; this leads Nina to reflect miserably about how far apart the two of them have grown since 1997, when they were both teenagers who committed to be BFFs, a much more complicated process in China, where it involves signing contracts and such, resulting in what is known as a laotong relationship; when two women, fighting the good fight against a male-dominated society, bound themselves together as platonic heterosexual soul-mates. Nina's puts her career plans on hold, and throws herself into the task of finding out what her onetime best friend in all life was up to during the months since they've last spoken, and finds, among other mementos of a lost soul, a novel in manuscript, titled Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. It is a work of historic fiction, based upon the life of one of Sophia's ancestors in the Hunan province, a woman called Snow Flower, who lived in the early 19th Century.

Nina starts to read, and sure enough, the film clicks into a dramatisation of the novel, which finds Snow Flower growing up with her own laotong, Lily; the woman are played by Jun and Li, respectively. And as they go through their own lives, in which Lily proves to make a far better marriage and becomes a proper society lady, while Snow Flower, despite coming from better family, ends up with a provincial butcher. Through all this, the two women remain steadfast, until Snow Flower, realising that she is holding Lily back from reaching her true potential, deliberately sacrifices their friendship at dear personal cost to both.

In case the quaint detail that Li and Jun both do double duty didn't make it clear, allow me to spell it out: the stories of each pair of women reflect and comment upon each other in rather dominant ways, even in rather pat, trite, overdetermined ways, you might say. See's book contained only the historical narrative; the material in 2010 was added by Angela Workman, Ron Bass, and Michael K. Ray, largely by repeating all the plot of the original novel, and then adding in cell phones and the glamorous world of modern international banking. The resultant fact that the stories of the two friendships parallel each other in the most unlikely ways is hand-waved away in a letter from Sophia explaining how, as she wrote, she became aware the book was really about her and Nina, but the actual explanation is lazy screenwriting, figuring that if a story is too slight to fill up a whole motion picture, you can double it and, taa-daa! You've created probing self-commentary! Or something.

In the event, Snow Flower never quite works as a comparison of life in the 19th and 21st Centuries, for by dividing its attention between the two, it loses all focus - on the plot, on the different societies, on the characters especially, and while Li makes at least some effort to keep Nina and Lily as two distinct personalities, Jun is pretty much just playing the same woman in different costumes (and there's at least some narrative justification for doing that; Sophia seeing herself in the character she's writing, and all that), which just serves to exacerbate the sense that the movie doesn't do enough to distinguish its two plots, and justify the fact that both of them exist.

This despite some very weird attempts to cram some kind of sociological undercurrents into the thing; director Wayne Wang (as prominently pointed out in the new film's ads, the director of The Joy Luck Club; a tacky piece of racial ghettoisation, when they could just as accurately have pointed out that he directed Maid in Manhattan) picks up the idea of foot binding and runs with it as far as a human being possibly could, with close-ups of bound feet, close-ups of little shoes, close-ups of modern day women in fashionable and dreadfully unhealthy shoes, and one scene set in an art exhibition involving representations of foot binding. And despite this incredible focus on foot binding, I cannot tell you what, if anything Snow Flower has to say about the act. That is bad, I guess, but its connection to the stories of Lily and Snow Flower, or Nina and Sophia, is largely limited to one mostly ephemeral plot detail early on.

And so it goes: the director has no idea what his film is about, and while it is beautiful in a fairly shallow way, thanks to cinematographer Richard Wong and production designer Molly Page, there's absolutely nothing "there". No social angle, no decent characterisations, no celebration of feminine friendships beyond the fairly obvious fact that they exist, and they are nice. And in despite of all this, Snow Flower clearly believes itself to be an aching, magisterial, heart-wrenching drama; you can tell that from Rachel Portman's weepy score and the long, dusky close-ups of the women looking sad. Unfortunately, just because a film announces itself as a rich tribute to the bounds of friendship, is not the same as it actually being such a thing; and this treatment of a lifelong bond of respect, admiration and love is merely slick and superficial, moving the stick figures in its center through the motions of friendship without seeming to quite understand the actual reasons why we make those deep, abiding friendships in the first place.

4/10

THE KIND OF A GIRL THAT MAKES THE NEWS OF THE WORLD

Errol Morris made his name as a documentarian on a run of captivating films about remarkably weird human beings: Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, but after the success of his mesmerising television series First Person in the early years of the '00s, he did as so many liberal filmmakers did in the dark days of the George W. Bush presidency, and made political films. The first of these, The Fog of War, is pretty much a good thing; the second, Standard Operating Procedure is pretty much obvious and superficial, the one and only non-fiction Morris film that I for one have essentially no use for whatsoever. But what the hell, it was 2008. That's the kind of thing that happened back then.

Still and all, it's extremely gratifying to find Morris back in his customary form with Tabloid, a movie whose title and milieu might make it seem like the director has fallen into a huge pot of luck, what with his movie making its limited release crawl through the U.S. right on the eve of Rupert Murdoch's fall from grace in Great Britain; but the reality of Tabloid is blessedly far removed from topicality or sociological import. We're back squarely and delightfully in character study land, with Morris training his famed Interrotron (a camera that lets him look directly into his subjects' eyes, while it looks like they're staring into the camera) on the story of Joyce Bernann McKinney, a North Carolina girl who was once Miss Wyoming and in 1977 and 1978 was at the center of a remarkable story of abduction, rape, and Mormonism spanning two continents.

The short version of the facts that everybody agrees on: McKinney fell passionately in love with a man a few years her junior, Kirk Anderson, a newly-minted Mormon Elder. When he was sent on his mission trip to England, McKinney was certain that the the Church had shipped him off to "save" him from their love, and accompanied by her friend, the late Keith May, a gym-rat bodyguard and recreational pilot Jackson Shaw, she jetted across the Atlantic to find him. After she made contact, the Mormons he was journeying with lost track of him, and from here on out, "facts" stop being something you can count on very much. According to McKinney, Anderson came with her willingly, and for a few days they enjoyed an especially beautiful kind of perfect love, until his religious leaders took him back and brainwashed him. According to Anderson's later account, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and raped. And this is not, incidentally, where the story begins to get really interesting, because as the British population grew captivated by the story, an honest-to-God yellow journalism war broke out between the Daily Express (which defended McKinney to the point that it depicted her on its cover as a literal nun) and the Daily Mirror (which scrounged up evidence of her secret life as a prostitute* in the States), and McKinney and May's subsequently fled from Britain. And what happened years later, to bring McKinney back to the public eye, is so god-damned weird that I do not want to spoil the surprise even a little bit.

The Morris who made The Thin Blue Line would be interested in finding out what the truth is beneath all this mess; the Morris who made The Fog of War would at least want to make us think about the inconsistency and unreliability of the individual's perspective. The Morris behind Tabloid, however, has much less sophisticated concerns: his film is often little more than staring with goggle-eyed amazement at the freak show in front of him; the film's title doesn't end up speaking to its intellectual concerns ("Tabloids are symptomatic of humanity's worst kind of prurient interests, and they are more concerned with spectacle than truth"), but to its tone and content ("Oh my God, what the holy hell is going on? This is so fucked up!"). I don't suspect that this is what he set out to do; I think it happened when he got to interview Joyce McKinney, an incredibly charismatic and happy woman who gleefully runs back and forth through her thoughts as they arrive in mostly chronological order, who laughs at her own jokes, who possesses a sense of storybook romance that would make a Disney princess look like a jaded hooker in comparison. That McKinney's version of events is frankly incoherent, nobody could doubt; but the conviction with which she believes it (and unless she is cunning to a degree that nothing else in the film suggests is even remotely possible, she clearly believes in the absolute virgin purity of every word that escapes her lips) is entrancing. I had expected, knowing that McKinney has since sued Morris over her depiction in the film (basically, her argument seems to be "how dare you use a contextual framework for my words, rather than simply releasing the raw interview footage to theaters"), that it would all be exploitative, but McKinney inoculates herself from exploitation by existing in a reality almost cotangent with ours, in which since absolutely nothing untoward happened, there is no shame or infamy in the story.

On the other hand, there may not be a better word than "exploitation" to describe what Tabloid is, given its rather free admission that what makes all this fascinating is how endlessly perverse it all is. The witnesses called in to give their version of events include Shaw and two journalists from opposite sides of the war who both had a good deal of skin in the game, (May is dead; Anderson refused to be interviewed, and in the process made the film better; it couldn't turn into a simple "he said she said" game). Peter Tory of the Express and Kent Gavin of the Mirror; each of them would make a good subject in their own right, as people tend to be when Morris turns his camera on just about anybody (Tory's fascination with bondage and Gavin's gleeful reminiscences about his incredibly sordid detective work prove, if nothing else, that McKinney isn't the only one with a certain perverse air; Shaw's fixation on how much he wanted to have sex with her in 1977 mostly just comes across as sad), but here they only serve to add an anchor based in something resembling the real world to keep McKinney's stories from floating right into outer space.

Morris changes up his style a little bit, relying on pointedly snarky pop culture ephemera (old sitcoms, a ghastly-looking Mormon propaganda cartoon) carved into the surface of the film using a smaller, grainier frame, to suggest in a somewhat halting way how life and media have caved into one another; it's honestly a bit more smug than revelatory, as is his mercilessly ironic use of onscreen text to emphasise certain words in the interviews, though I certainly appreciate that he's willing to play the material as the idiotic comedy it all was in life (all respect to the presumptive rape victim Anderson, but I think the likeliest version of events is the one forwarded by Troy Williams, gay ex-Mormon activist: a shy, flabby Mormon kid had sex, and liked it, and felt really incredibly terrible about liking it, and guilt did the rest) without resorting to making fun of anybody, although the line between making fun of McKinney and simply watching her speak about all the fascinating things on her mind is a narrow one.

I wonder, is that maybe the film's deeper point? McKinney, after all, doesn't see herself as an insane person; she views her loopy romanticism about men, about life, about dogs (but I said I wasn't going to spoil the end!) as perfectly reasonable, just like most of us assume that everything we think or do is at least reasonable, if not normative. Tabloid, perhaps, is the snotty mirror on all of us: push anybody's reasonable beliefs far enough, and they'll look like a ridiculous clown. And at the same time, even the most unreasonable things can be compelling and fascinating when they're told with passion and conviction. The film around McKinney isn't quite sure of what it's about, at times - it's probably the "worst", or at least most aimless, of Morris's films outside of the arid Standard Operating Procedure - but McKinney herself is the sort of arresting figure that you don't shake easily; and though she is a real-life woman, she's also one of the best movie characters of 2011.

7/10

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MODERN RELATIONSHIPS

Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: pretty much everybody can tell you how Friends with Benefits fits into the strange trend of 2011 fuckbuddy movies, but the idea of a mainstream romantic comedy that takes a look at less conventional relationship than "boy meets, loses, gets girl" is much older than even No Strings Attached. In fact, once upon a time, such films could double as cultural flashpoints, and not just disposable entertainment.

You know what they don't make any more? Zeitgeist movies. Movies about normal, contemporary people that make a big splash and are talked about all over, and if you expect anybody to take you seriously, you really had better form an opinion on the thing one way or the other. And I don't mean Event Pictures, like your Avatar or your Lord of the Rings or that sort of thing. You're expected to have seen those, of course, and to talk about them, but not because they have something important to say about The Times In Which We Live, but just because they are big and dazzling and fancy (and that, perhaps, is what they say about The Times In Which We Live). What we're missing are the movies like Easy Rider or Annie Hall or Wall Street, movies that become Events because they touch a sociological nerve - and don't think I'm waxing nostalgic here; two of those three examples I've just given are films that I have frankly very little use for. But it is an odd thing, how the movies in that vein that get made (for they are, of course, still getting made) don't seem to hit with audiences anymore; critics sometimes, but in the past, oh, five years, has anything besides The Social Network made much of an impact while being A Story About Today?

(My suspicion is that part of the reason we don't see movies like this much anymore is because TV has mostly co-opted the Zeitgeist in the sense I mean; but the distressingly reasonable idea that Jersey Shore is the modern successor to Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate makes me think that we're better off if Western culture just up and dies already).

These thoughts came to me while I was watching Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a film, like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy was released in 1969 (as was Hello, Dolly! - every cultural revolution has its pushback), and like those movies is so completely and utterly dated that it almost beggars description, and like those movies, became a talking point in '69 to a degree that it is literally inconceivable to imagine today: just try to envision Blue Valentine being a smash hit.

The film's reputation is such that, even 42 years later, there's still a good chance that you know what made it notorious back in the day (also that you could guess from the title): this is that movie where they have a foursome. And while that would remain a good way to market a picture today, it's worth pointing out how different things would have been back in 1969. This was only the second year after the dismantling of the Production Code, for starters, and thus the beginning of the age of nudity and frank sex talk in American cinema. It was also the end of the much-discussed Free Love era, and the script by Paul Mazursky & Larry Tucker (who'd contributed in a smaller way to the same movement with the previous year's I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!) plays unmistakably like an elegy for a movement that was clearly on its last legs, nor were they necessarily sad to see it go: it's at once more self-conscious and less romantic than e.g. Easy Rider, which seems aware in only a halting way that The Sixties are about to come to a crashing halt. The writers - Mazursky was also making his directorial debut with this picture, which history still regards as the high-point of his career (sorry, ) - strike a nifty balance between admiring the spirit and counter-cultural enthusiasm of its protagonists on the one hand, and recognising on the other hand that they're being a bit willfully stupid. I might sum up B&C&T&A by saying that it respects the mind-set of the counter-culture without being of the counter-culture; it is a film perpetually on the outside looking in.

And that's true from the very opening moments, a series of helicopter shots flying over a pristine stretch of California mountains, while the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah plays with agreeably straitlaced irony. Eventually, the camera closes in on The Institute, a place where the upper-middle-class goes to learn the hippie lifestyle - this means, in practice, naked people parading about - and though Mazursky and cinematographer Charles Lang choose to keep their camera mostly close to the characters, always on the same level and from the same perspective, that opening feeling that we are invading this space never quite goes away; even those same intimate close-ups are somewhat probing and invasivef, as if we're peering in real close to try to understand who these people are, that are not like us.

We're here to see two people in particular, and we know who they are because their names make up half the title: Bob Sanders (Robert Culp), a documentary filmmaker looking to learn about this strange place that teaches people how to be more in touch with what they feel, and his wife Carol (Natalie Wood). They're introduced as part of a circle in which all the participants are encouraged to say whatever they feel, and to own that, and so on; and by the time their trip to The Institute is over, Bob and Carol are deeply committed to the principals of free love and self-knowledge that they've learned there.

Thy are, in this way, set against their best friends, Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice Henderson (Dyan Cannon), a couple like the Sanderses in most important ways: the same economic class, the same social circles, their children (a single boy in each case) are about the same age. Ted and Alice are impressed by their friends' newfound sense of harmony; and then they are vaguely disgusted by the degree to which they seem so eager to flaunt convention when Bob sleeps with a woman on a business trip to San Francisco, telling Carol about it, both of them seeming incomprehensibly nonchalant about the whole thing. Eventually this culminates in a trip to Las Vegas where, on the spur of the moment, the Hendersons decide to try their best to follow their friends' example, and the stage is set for an orgy, though as orgies go, it's not the most well-conceived or effortlessly performed. And this would probably count as a spoiler, if it wasn't the only thing that everybody who's ever heard of the film knows about it.

Anyway, the end point of the film is of decidedly less specific importance than the journey: this being 1969 and all, B&C&T&A is largely a character study, the kind of movie that was in vogue for a while and occasionally still crops up, in which the filmmaker trusts that if the parts are rich enough, and the actors skilled enough, we'll be enthralled just to watch fictional people working through their lives like you or. Mazursky was lucky, therefore, to get four such excellent performers working on his project, for the movie lives and dies based on their ability to quietly suggest the inner workings of a human mind; Wood is the best at this, particularly in the scene where she finds that she isn't actually jealous that Bob had an affair - and Culp's quickly-stifled disappointment at her non-reaction is the best moment in his performance - but each of the actors gets more than one chance to shine, and what would seem, to describe it, as a laundry list of scenes cranking along one after the other (here's where Ted clamps down on his envy for Bob, here's where Carol doesn't realise that she's acting superior to everybody, here's where Alice won't admit to her therapist that she enjoys sex), feels in the event like a coherent arc for each of the four, and all thanks solely to the investment of the actors; Gould and Cannon, the more obscure of the four when it was new, scored Oscar nominations, and not undeservedly as such things go.. It's all slightly acting exercise-ey, in spots, a bit too obvious who is trying to get what out of the other character, but for what amounts to a 105-minute visit with people discussing pop-sociology with one another, it ends up being far more entertaining and nuanced than you might imagine possible.


It's appealingly funny and somber by turns, though not especially robust in either of those directions, and its social satire is so very specific that it doesn't inherently hold much value other than as a time capsule. But those characters, and the intent way that the camera follows them, and the cross-cutting that pulls them apart and puts them back together (the last scene - I don't really want to spoil it - is an extraordinary study in how to use character eye-lines to create a mood and reinforce or dissolve the bonds between individuals), and especially the generally good-natured feeling of the thing - Mazursky's commitment to letting these characters make their mistakes without judging them for it - leaves the film touching and lovely even after its moment in the sun has long since past. It seems kind of hard to believe that in 1969, it was celebrated for its boundary-busting raciness; what has lasted isn't the fascination with celebrity skin, but the sensitive, sensible humanity underneath it all. It may be a slender little movie, but it's not a slight one.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: BABY DOLL

It remains somewhat perplexing to me that the Child's Play films have supported such a robust (by horror standards) fandom: the first movie got by on a certain amount of uncanny atmosphere, and the second on a healthy measure of disorienting absurdity, but the classic trilogy coasted by almost solely on the strength of two things: the design of the murderous doll Chucky, and the vocal performance of the same by Brad Dourif. And yet, when Bride of Chucky rolled around in 1998, there was a measurable portion of the series followers who were put off by the jokey new tone that writer Don Mancini and director Ronny Yu introduced, seeing it as a violation of the "real" Chucky pictures. Things only got worse six years later, when Mancini made his directorial debut with Seed of Chucky, which tanked with critics and horror fans, and all on account of how the movie pushed the series all the way into out-and-out comedy; nay, not just comedy, but a wildly idiosyncratic blend of the most tasteless kind of gross-out comedy with a particularly acidic satire of Hollywood culture.

Seed of Chucky is a hybrid with admittedly few natural constituents, so the film's lack of success is hardly surprising; though as someone who A) thought the original Child's Play were already far too ludicrous to take seriously as horror, B) enjoys a good cheap shot at show business, and C) never says no to pointlessly disgusting gore effects, I'll admit that the film's failure is more than a little disappointing. Films as calculated in their perversion as this are rare indeed, and though it's not always successful - there's a Britney Spears joke that dies the most lingering death that a bad joke can suffer, for starters - the fact that Mancini and franchise producer David Kirschner were willing to go there at all speaks tremendously well of them.

As the last film took its cues from Scream, so does this one springboard off of Scream 2: the first act revolves around the production of a film based on the murderous doll from the first four pictures, titled Chucky Goes Psycho. The human lead of the film is Jennifer Tilly (Jennifer Tilly, who played the villainous woman and doll Tiffany in the last film), once a famous sexpot who is starting to fall apart in her age, and is reduced to taking whatever crumbs the industry will give her. We don't start out here, though: the first scenes of the film takes us to the International Ventriloquists Competition in Glastonbury, where an asshole ventriloquist named Psychs (Keith-Lee Castle) is tormenting his dummy, none other than the sentient doll born to the psychopathic Chucky and Tiffany at the end of Bride of Chucky; a gender-indeterminate collection of Disneyesque yearnings given the hurtful name of Shitface (Billy Boyd). Plagued by dreams in which it keeps killing people, Shitface longs to have a normal, loving family, and so it immediately manages to have itself shipped to Los Angeles, the minute it spots Chucky - sporting the same "Made in Japan" stamp as his child - on an Access Hollywood episode about the production of the Chucky Goes Psycho picture.

In California, played by Romania, Shitface quickly finds its parents - or rather, the puppets made for the movie in their likenesses; the "real" Chucky and Tiffany are still mouldering somewhere in New Jersey, one assumes. At any rate, voodoo curses don't care about that sort of thing, and Shitface accidentally uses the Heart of Damballa - the slightly-more-convoluted MacGuffin introduced in Bride of Chucky to replace the contrivance of the first three films - to resurrect its parents' souls. And while ordinarily, the revival of Chucky and Tiffany would be the cue for an expendable meat bloodbath, Seed of Chucky isn't looking to be ordinary.

The rest of the plot gets so enthusiastically warped that I don't quite know how to synopsise it, even if I was willing to spoil some of the film's best gags: the short version is that Tiffany decided to give up killing, like an addiction, for the sake of her child, to Chucky's great dismay; the dolls decide to impregnate Jennifer Tilly and stick the kid's soul - with Chucky preferring a boy and Tiffany preferring a girl, they can't agree on a new identity for Shitface, who is called either Glen or Glenda, depending on the circumstances (that little shout-out to schlock cinema history is one of Mancini's more obvious jokes) - inside the fetus ASAP, while Tiffany lays claim to Tilly's own body; meanwhile, Tilly is aggressively hunting for the role of Mary, mother of Jesus, in a new biblical epic directed by rapper-turned-filmmaker Redman (Redman).

Whatever else can be said about Seed of Chucky - whether it is funny or crass and broad, whether its embrace of the campiness of its subgenre is bracing and brilliant or just pathetic, whether its gore is wickedly tasteless or shallow - there is one thing that cannot be denied or ignored or downplayed: Jennifer Tilly gives every inch of herself to this movie. History is littered with celebrities making fun of themselves in self-referential roles; what Tilly is doing in this movie isn't playfully making fun of herself, but committing to a depiction of herself that is so merciless and savage and lacerating that one would be concerned for her psychological well-being, if only the results weren't so goddamned funny. The film's idea of Tilly is a brutal takedown of all washed-up C-listers, carping about how people more famous than they are get the best parts ("I could have done it without the Wonderbra", she fumes about Julia Roberts's turn in Erin Brockovich, and damned if she doesn't have a good point), cramming herself full of junk food, prostituting herself to play the Virgin Mary, as pointed out be her horrified assistant Joan (Hannah Spearitt). "Tilly", as a fictional construct, is a pathetic, sad-sack, monster of ego, and Tilly, the real-life actress, plunges deeper into the worst parts of the character than just about any star of any bloody-minded Hollywood satire I can name. It would be an excellent performance in any case; that it doubles as something so twisted by meta-narrativity, that it turns it into an act of sheer heroism. "I'm an Oscar nominee, for chrissake, and now I'm fucking a puppet!" she cries at one point, and in that moment comedy, satire, and self-loathing all coalesce into a perfect singularity

That is, as I say, the basement level of appreciation for the film: the point at which even the most hateful hater must (or at least ought to) concede that there's something special going on. For myself, I find quite a lot else to love about the movie, whether it's for noble reasons or completely prurient ones. For starters, a lot of it is just damn funny, sometimes in the broadest way possible, and often only because Dourif and Tilly's line deliveries are pitch perfect. "I am pushing, you little starfucker!" isn't a natural laugh-line, but Tilly made it hilarious. Freed from even the vestiges of serious horror priorities that formed the narrative spine, if nothing more, of Bride of Chucky, the actors and Mancini find quite a lot of pitch-black, warped delight to be mined from these characters, and it would be awfully easy to descend into a listing of all the dialogue that made me quite literally laugh out loud, but I'll content myself with one exchange: "Is Mummy ill?" asks a concerned Glen/da; "The courts thought so" is Chucky's response, spoken by Dourif with just the perfect amount of shrugging in his inflection.

And then there are the places where it's funny and smart: a riff on the wildly over-referenced "Here's Johnny!" scene from The Shining, the punchline of which I absolutely refuse to give away; the implicit mockery of the sober-minded family drama routine reflected in Glen/da's aching earnestness in the face of Chucky and Tiffany's apocalyptic violence (Boyd's vocal performance is amazing: sweet and simple enough that it's honestly not even that hard to feel sorry for the poor little mutant); just about every moment in which Tilly and Tiffany interact. There are the places where it's funny and smart and shockingly dark: Tiffany's attempts to give up killing involve a 12-step program, but making amends with those she's wrong proves rough when the widow of one of her victims starts to break down on the phone.

Above all, there are the places where it's just fucking with us, trying to push our buttons because why not? and sometimes being outrageous is its own reward. John Waters cameos as a paparazzo whose chief function in the movie is to spy on Chucky masturbating, with a thoroughly wicked grin on his face as much as to say, "I'm John Waters, and I approve this depravity".

Setting aside all of that, it's a remarkable piece of craftsmanship: in his first and only go behind the camera, Mancini proves entirely adept as a director; hard to say if he could actually do a horror film or a genuine thriller, but he does an exemplary job staging the zesty gore effects, at least. Meanwhile, the three dolls look dumbfoundingly good, better than ever before, with an incredible range of expressions that switch back and forth within seconds, just like a real human actor. It's all done with puppetry, too, and among the figures playing himself is Tony Gardner, one of the actual puppeteers, and before gets decapitated in a remarkably flashy way, we get to see plenty of loving close-ups on the mechanics of the puppets; the filmmakers' tribute, five films in, to the great artists who have always been the heart and soul of the Child's Play movies.

What it is not, however, is anything resembling a legitimate horror film, or a proper sequel in any customary sense of that word. Mancini and the actors and the crew obviously knew what they were up to, but nobody else seems to have done the same: a whole new distribution arm, Rogue Pictures, was created because Focus Features and Universal didn't know what the hell to do with the thing. It underperformed and continues to suffer a reputation as just a bad, bad movie, largely from the same people who are able to muster up any kind of nostalgia at all for the insipid Child's Play 3. And that's not un-fair, because Mancini isn't really pulling any punches: Seed of Chucky is quite mean at times in its pursuit of celebrity culture, of the business of filmmaking, of the pointlessness of derivative horror, and even of its own existence, which is acknowledged (if only elliptically) as part of the whole awful mess as the rest of it. "Gawd, can you believe it's another Chucky movie?" the script groans over and over, and it's not a shock that the people who might pay to see another Chucky movie were put out by that kind of statement. But it's that same ballsiness that makes Seed of Chucky such a racous treat, and one of the best examples of its genre in the whole of the '00s. Whatever the hell genre it ends up being.

Body Count: 13-ish, the series record: I say, "-ish", because three of them don't count at all, coming as a quick punchline, and one of them is a fake death in Chucky Goes Psycho, and two them are a dream sequence. And the ultimate fates of Chucky, Tiffany, and Jennifer Tilly are altogether too hard to parse.

Reviews in this series
Child's Play (Holland, 1988)
Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)
Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)
Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)
Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)

COURTESY OF THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE

Two things are immediately notable about Captain America: The First Avenger. One is that it has the most unnecessarily particular title of any comic book movie since X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The other is that it's actually fun to watch, which shouldn't be noteworthy at all, but in this age of darker, edgier comic book movies (plus juvenile filler like Green Lantern), "fun" is nothing to take for granted.

Anyway, "fun" isn't even the half of it: I'll go so far as to say Captain America is the best superhero movie since the banner year of 2008, and the most purely enjoyable of them since that summer's effervescent Iron Man. As befits a movie set during the more earnest and gung-ho days of the Second World War, Captain America commits itself with serious purpose and breezy tone to the important business of dazzling us with the adventures of an everyday dude who gets to become incredibly awesome, all of it untouched by even the slenderest whisker of cynicism; I half-expected somebody to shout "Gee willickers, Cap!", and I am entirely disappointed that they didn't.

One would not expect this from screenwriters Christopher McMarkus & Stephen McFeely, who have their fingers in all three of the milquetoast Chronicles of Narnia pictures; nor necessarily from director Joe Johnston, peppered with the likes of Jurassic Park III and The Wolfman. But push back far enough, all the way to 1991, and we arrive at the Johnston-directed The Rocketeer, and it all starts to make sense: for its flaws, and they are not small ones, that film was the last blend of high-spirited pop fun with WWII that was anywhere near this successful. Johnston admittedly doesn't do very much but stay out of the way: out of the way of the actors, and the bantery dialogue, and especially out of the way of just about the last A-list superhero to get his very own feature (unless you're counting the 1990 Albert Pyun film, in which case, shame on you).*

The story is agreeably stripped down: in 1942, the tiny, physically incompetent Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) wants to join up to fight Nazis, but he can't. Still, his unflagging determination impresses a scientist, Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci), working on a top-secret military project, and so it is that Rogers is chosen to receive a serum that turns him into a muscular, unearthly strong super-soldier, fighting for freedom under the name Captain America. On the other side: Erskine's last experiment, the super-evil supergenius Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), who for reasons that become obvious halfway through if they weren't already goes under the nom de guerre Red Skull.

Everything else is just gilding, though a lot of it is awfully good: the matter of Rogers's training under the prickly Col. Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), his slow-burning flirtation with British intelligence agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), and his assembly of a squad of highly competent misfits, beginning with his old buddy from the streets of Brooklyn, "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Given how much of the film consists of explosions and gunfire and glowing blue magic cubes imported in a throwaway line from fellow Marvel empire-builder Thor, it's sort of crazy the degree to which Captain America ends up being mostly a character piece, largely because of the cast involved. One must go back a very long way, and I'm not sure if one will ever find a stopping place, in search of a live-action superhero movie that is so well-acted, across the board; I am tempted to say, "Evans notwithstanding", and yet I'll admit that given his function is to play a big old teddy bear of a patriot and street kid, he does a pretty damn good job of it; certainly, the preening ass who made Fantastic Four worse than it had to be is nowhere in evidence.

And if he is, anyway, still the weak link (he alone seems not to have a handle on how to play "it's the 1940s"), that has a lot to do with the people he's surrounded by: the sharp Atwell, finally making the movie that (fingers crossed) will pick her career up off the ground, and Dominic Cooper doing a pleasantly bright Howard Hughes impression as the man who will one day father Robert Downey, Jr. Then over here, we have four men, sturdy character actors all, each vying to give the most satisfyingly goofy performance they can that remains totally serious and totally respectful of the material - which, given Captain America's origins in the brassy four-color pulp of the 1940s, the proper respect naturally includes a certain amount of goofiness. But between them, Tucci, Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones, and Toby Jones as Johann Schmidt's fawning weapons designer, all hit the exact same sweet spot of being broad caricatures that are nevertheless exactly right for the material; no small amount of what makes Captain America a bubbly comic book movie, and not a mordant and moody comic book movie, is that Weaving's portrayal of the villain is such a cartoon, right down to an accent that has just enough Werner Herzog in it that you can tell Weaving is doing it on purpose.

Also: beating up Nazis, one of the few sub-classes of movie villains that can never get old to watch them get mowed down by the dozens, because they are just that evil - and anyway, these Nazis aren't even regular Nazis, they're some kind of especially bad Nazi that gives Hitler himself the heebie-jeebies; they even have their own more-evil Nazi salute. But as I was saying, part of what lets Captain America click along so brightly is that Johnston and the writers don't bother to bring the sensibility of the project up to 2011, but entrench as far as they can in 1943, a time of greater romanticism than now. The film's recreation of the period is alarmingly good: Anna B. Sheppard's costumes are an absolute treat, particularly the evolution of Captain America's own uniform from a dead-ringer for the first comic book version into something that looks plausibly period-appropriate but much less trite. The film's idea of New York, courtesy of famed production designer Rick Heinrichs, is as sweetly nostalgic as an old photo, and his depiction of all the more comic-bookish locations, the labs and lairs and so on, look just futuristic enough - from the early '50s, say - that they ring as true even if it's unlikely that anybody from the period would have thought them up. Alan Menken and David Zippel contribute an absolutely perfect song, the daffy U.S.O.-flavored "Star Spangled Man". The effects are all 2011, of course (though inconsistent; there's a shot of a train that looked so bad I can't imagine it ended up in a real Hollywood moving), and the scale of the fighting is nothing like it would have been in a '40s movie, but Johnston slows the action down far more than most modern blockbuster directors would have taken it, and the heart of thing is anyway mired firmly in pop culture of 70 years ago, when things were not simpler, but people did their damnedest to act like they were.

So, all in all, a giddy, deliberately undemanding lark, with lots of in-jokes for the faithful (the magazine Captain America Comics #1 even puts in a cameo), and a tone pulled right from Indiana Jones (there is a sly jab at Raiders of the Lost Ark in one of the very first scenes that's so subtle it almost has gone by before you notice it). It's not perfect - the editing and sound mix have the definite feel of something that was rushed to completion, on top of the inconsistent CGI - but it's so much fun, and Johnston's treatment of it so light and fluffy, that the imperfections are easy to shrug off. All of the action setpieces are playful, the best of them being Rogers's first foot-chase after his procedure, a nice, stripped down bit that tells us an awful lot about the character and the place (Rogers is so concerned with doing right he doesn't even realise that he's suddenly all kinds of strong until it's done). The only place the film bogs down, in fact, is where it ceases to be Captain America and becomes The First Avenger: the bookending scenes in the modern day (added, we are told, by Joss Whedon, writer-director of the forthcoming The Avengers) are not in anything like the same emotional register as the rest of the movie, and the final scene (besides the de rigeur bonus scene after the credits) in particular simply does not work, particularly given the clanging delivery Evans gives to the film's final line - I can imagine ways of saying it that do not make me want to die, but he does not choose one of them. Better by far to let the film be what it wants to be, a bubbly bit of old-fashioned summery fun, with big, elemental characters and a distinctly non-auteurist sense of how to make a good, straightforward story. Instead, it gets stuffed into a corporate flow-chart; but they do not ask my opinion of these things.

8/10

WE SHOULD LOOK FOR SOMEONE TO EAT AND DRINK WITH BEFORE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO EAT AND DRINK

In 2005, director Michael Winterbottom collaborated with actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on A Cock and Bull Story (if you, like me, live outside of Great Britain, append Tristram Shandy to the front of that title), a backstage drama about a failed attempt to adapt Laurence Sterne's highly experimental 18th Century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which Coogan and Brydon played highly fictionalised versions of themselves as antagonistic egomaniacs fighting for prominence within the fake film's fake production. Five years later, the three men teamed back up for a sequel of sorts: a six-episode comedy series for BBC called The Trip, in which Coogan as "Coogan" and Brydon as "Brydon" once again find themselves thrown together under circumstances that are rather less than cordial; Winterbottom proceeded to reduce the three hours of the original into a 107 minute feature, largely completed as a way of letting those of us in the rest of the world get at least a flavor of the thing, although in the event, the feature film version premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before the series it was based on started airing in Britain. Because things being straightforward is no fun at all.

A sequel, if only because the characters Coogan and Brydon are so clearly recognisable from A Cock and Bull Story, though there's no other sort of continuity between the two projects, and they're pursuing largely different concerns. Gone is the dense meta-commentary on stardom and filmmaking, in is a much more straightforward tale of professional rivalry and the existential terror of hitting the age where you don't get to keep imagining that you're young enough that you can be successful later. The plot, which is as thin and willowy as they come, finds Coogan begging Brydon to accompany him on a trip to the North of England as part of a restaurant tour that Coogan is undertaking at the request of The Observer; the trip was originally meant to be a fun thing for him to do with his much younger American girlfriend Mischa (Margo Stilley), but since she's gone back to the States to take a break from their relationship, that plan has gone a bit wrong.

This kicks off a largely-improvised six-day trip from restaurant to restaurant, from one cozily fussy hotel to the next, during which Coogan waxes and wanes in his impatience with his traveling companion, who insists on spending every waking moment trotting out his celebrity impersonations. The two men bicker about what makes for a good impression, about whether impressions are a valid form of comedy in the first place (certainly, Brydon seems quite content with the career he's built out of them), and at times of relative peace, enjoy one another's company in full-on improv sessions, filling up the long car trips with bantering word play that drifts from barely-hidden contempt to good comradeship and back. Underlying all of it is Coogan's frustration that his American agent (Kerry Shale) can't find him any parts in big Hollywood movies or TV shows (given that real-life Coogan's U.S. work includes Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, it's hard to say whether movie Coogan is getting the better deal or not).

The shortest way to describe it, in effect, is "two comedians engage in a dick-measuring contest on a road trip", and The Trip is pretty much the funniest version of that scenario that could exist. There's a scene in which the two actors break down how to properly impersonate Michael Caine that is, without doubt, one of the best comic bits about making comedy that I have ever seen, for example. But that being said, the film is slightly broken by its trip from series to feature; I have yet had the chance to see the television version, but its little sibling is paradoxically too long and repetitive, and far too rushed and insubstantial. I have little doubt that watching The Trip in six 30-minute chunks, and not all at one time, is a far more satisfying way to go about it: the film version so blatantly wears its episodic nature on its sleeve, breaking things up with title cards proclaiming each new day, and by the fourth time this happens, it's hard not to be a little restless with the sure knowledge that, here comes another scene where Brydon does impersonations and Coogan mocks him; then a sequence where they eat overly-fussy food that neither of them seems to entirely understand (the biggest open question to me about the whole film is whether or not Winterbottom was satirising foodie culture or trying to show off how wonderful everything looks, with all the attention he pays to the bustle in the various kitchens; some combination of the two, presumably, but to what degree it's hard to say), and then it all ends with a bit where Coogan shows off his travel guide-level knowledge of the various landmarks and geographic features of that day's journey. Broken up into actual episodes, this would undoubtedly have felt less draggy; meanwhile, the film largely jettisons what I am told is the series' more reflective, elegiac moments, undercutting the characters' feelings and psychology in favor of emphasising all the funny bits. Which goes very badly for the film when the whole plot ends up turning on Coogan's thready relationship with his son, who is introduced so arbitrarily that he doesn't even seem to matter right up until he matters a hell of a lot.

That is my way of saying, not that The Trip no good, but that The Trip should be so much better, and I have the hope that it is better, in its natural environment. For the parts of The Trip that work, are unendurably hilarious: Coogan and Brydon - the actors, not the characters - have the kind of easy rapport that most romantic comedy leads will never know and could never dream about; scene after scene rolls by of them just tossing lines back and forth like champion-level tennis players, and if The Trip ends up feeling over-long and repetitive, not the least reason is because there comes a point where one is simply worn out from laughing. Even some of the undernourished "serious" parts work: a scene of Coogan trying and failing to copy Brydon's "small man trapped in a box" routine in the privacy of his hotel room is funny on the face of it, and desperately sad underneath: the blustering, sardonic actor confronting in private his awareness that he's not as successful as he likes because he doesn't understand what other people like to laugh at, reduced to aping a comic bit whose appeal completely evades him.

Moments like that make The Trip a wonderful treat to watch; they also make The Trip all the more frustrating, by implying a much richer and fuller experience than we get in this butchered version. As comedy, this can't be topped, but it's hard to love it all the way when it keeps pointing out how essentially hollow it is.

7/10

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: BRITISH CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Warner's humongous summer tentpole Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Disney's barely-released Winnie the Pooh represent two very different ways of catering to a family audience, the one a splashy effects-driven adventure, the other so gentle it nearly floats away. They are not, however, the only two ways of adapting a classic work of kiddie lit to the screen, as proven by a recent film that attempted to strike a middle way between effects-driven excess and fealty to its source material .

For a work so central to 20th Century English-language literature that the very title has become a shorthand for a personality type, J.M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan, and his subsequent novelisation Peter and Wendy has proven surprisingly resistant to filmed adaptations. This is partially for the thoroughly pragmatic reason that Barrie turned over the rights for the piece to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and that institution has done a phenomenal job of keeping a watchful eye over their property. Yet it seems like there should have been more of a cinematic presence for the story than a 1924 feature supervised by Barrie himself, the iconic 1953 Disney animated film, and a smattering of TV movies made in a few different countries (one could also theoretically count the 1991 Steven Spielberg film Hook, but that's at least a touch ridiculous). To put it another way: there were more adaptations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by the end of the 1920s, counting all the shorts and the like to have stolen ideas from the book, than there have been adaptations of Peter Pan to the time of this writing.

In fact, there was not a single theatrical live-action, sound version of the play released until 2003, and it is with this version of Peter Pan that we shall now concern ourselves. Considering how, until this point, there had been barely any filmed version of the story to speak of, certainly none that could plausibly be called "definitive" - this was the very official version wherein Peter Pan himself was played by an actual boy, and not a tiny woman, for example - it would perhaps have been enough for director P.J. Hogan, who co-wrote the script with Michael Goldenberg, to have simply attempted a completely literal treatment of the story; instead, in keeping with the spirit of the times, Hogan's version is what we might call the "darker, edgier Peter Pan", though darker & edgier means something different in the context of a PG-rated family film than it does in the case of e.g. a superhero reboot. Functionally, the act of bringing Peter Pan up to date for a modern audience meant one thing above all else: fill it the hell up with sex.

Not actual sex. That would have been illegal: Jeremy Sumpter, who plays Peter, was 14 when the movie came out; Rachel Hurd-Wood, playing Wendy, was 13. But the chief change Hogan made to the text, which wasn't really even a change at all, so much as a foregrounding of themes already present in the material, was to strongly emphasise the degree to which Peter Pan is a parable about the onset of puberty, that lovely period of grotesque mental trauma, of fascination with and terror of one's suddenly very inescapable sexual urges. "I don't want to grow up", the clarion call of Peter Pan for over a century, has usually been depicted as a fear of responsibility and the boredom that comes along with it; but there's really no way to deny that reading the whole thing as a metaphor for the way that little boys start to be really darn confused by little girls, and the way that little girls start to be really darn irritated by how much little boys act like morons. It's just that historically, adults don't like very much to think of 12-year-olds as budding little sexual beings - certainly Barrie, stalwart Edwardian gentleman that he was, wouldn't have been able to wrap his mind around the idea - so that idea that Wendy gives Peter some very funny feelings, and vice versa, has been largely ignored in the popular treatments of the story (I will not pretend to have much or any knowledge in the field of Peter Pan scholarship), outside of the celebrated bit about the kiss that turns out to be a thimble when Wendy loses her nerve.

So kudos, I guess, to Hogan for really digging in deep to this rich vein of subtext, and playing it out every which way he could: by inventing a few new plot points that allow Wendy to play Peter off of his nemesis Captain Hook (Jason Isaacs) as not just an existential threat, but as a grown-up competitor for her attention and affections (and since, following tradition, Isaacs also plays Wendy's father George Darling, the idea that she's using him as a means of ginning up sexual jealousy with Peter finds a kind of ickiness that I'm happier not thinking about); the customary plot thread in which Peter's diminutive fairy friend Tinker Bell views Wendy through a lens of specifically sexual jealous is ramped up considerably, not least by the mere casting of the inordinately sexy Ludivine Sagnier.

But all that being said, it's not like this is some pornographically excessive version of Peter Pan that's all about hormone-addled teen rutting. That's just the way that Hogan stamps it as a product of its specific era. In the main, the film is exactly what it presents itself as being: an attempt to capture all the whimsy and fantasy of the play in cinema, using all the best technical toys available to a filmmaker given an excessive amount of money in 2002. The result is a somewhat unsteady mixture of Barrie's sweet-unto-cloying language and fantastic conceits with a distinctly more modern wackiness, but on the whole it's a pleasant thing, if hardly the definitive treatment of the source material - which, at any rate, it doesn't really pretend to be.

Peter Pan being more of a concept than a narrative, and a well-known concept at that, I'll just run through the plot synopsis quickly: in London, in the first decade of the 20th Century, the three Darling children, Wendy, John (Harry Newell), and Michael (Freddie Popplewell) are thrown into crisis when their parents, George and Mary (Olivia Williams), begin to wonder if Wendy is becoming too much of a young lady to keep living the frivolous life of a girl with a Newfoundland dog as a nanny. This is equally distressing for the magical boy Peter Pan, who eavesdrops on Wendy's stories every night, and so he flies the three siblings away to Neverland, his magical world of boys' own adventures, where there are jungles and mermaids and Indians and pirates, led by the cruel Captain Hook. All sorts of dazzling adventures ensue, ending with Peter and Hook in a showdown over the fate of Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys, young English lads that Peter has stolen away over the years, that they might not have to grow up. It's not exactly the same as the original (there is a new character, Aunt Millicent, who has no obvious function but to provide a role for beloved actress Lynn Redgrave), but the heart is there.

To create this magical world, the effects experts at ILM spend a huge pile of money (the official $100 million budget figure is widely held to be under-reported) building a version of Neverland that is blatantly artificial and absolutely perfect in its whimsy; production designer Robert Ford contributes more to the final effect of the movie than P.J. Hogan does, so absolutely present are his delightfully crazy ideas (the depiction of outer space, between London and Neverland, is my favorite part, with planets and nebulae all crammed together like big plaster balls in a playground), and so lovingly does Hogan foreground them. Indeed, my first impression of the movie was that it was essentially Moulin Rouge! for children - and that was before I found out that they shared a cinematographer, Donald M. McAlpine - given how absolutely unreal everything looked, and given the disorientingly energetic treatment the director gives to everything, visually.

If there is one major flaw in this Peter Pan, in fact, it's that Hogan's direction is a bit too urgently Big and Zany and Wild, particularly in the early going (actually, I expect it's more that one gets used to it as it goes on, though zaniness is better-suited to Neverland than to the streets of London, for a certainty), without the sense one gets with Baz Luhrmann that he's doing it all for some coherent purpose. He delights in using direct address shots, actors staring right into the camera, often as it rushes into their face, and it doesn't take a lot for this to become wearying: used sparingly, this can be one of the most bracing images in cinema, but when it gets splattered all over every moment of a movie, it becomes quickly apparent why it rarely is done. And more times than I can immediately recall, the production design is the focal point of an image at the expense of the characters, as if the director simply wanted to gawk.

In fact, I can easily imagine this Peter Pan being a bit of a grind, but for one thing: the cast is phenomenal in every respect, particularly the key roles of Peter and Hook. Sumpter is unaccountably brilliant, and it seems criminal that he hasn't been in anything of particular note since then; a stint on Friday Night Lights is pretty much it as far as prestigious projects goes. Not a fair fate at all for a young man who so perfectly evokes the dichotomy of Peter's two dominant modes: a petulant, cocksure asshole who cares not a whit about anyone else around him, and a sensitive child crippled by fear of things he can't control and terrified that somebody will find out. As for Isaacs, his portrayal of Hook as a weary middle-aged man, not a raving monster, is right in keeping with the film's thematic concerns, and though I think he does too much to differentiate the pirate from Mr. Darling, thereby muddying the whole point of having one actor play both parts, it's a great piece of subdued character acting from a man who has too readily fallen into the trap of being "that guy who doesn't make much of an impression in the Harry Potter films".

I won't lie: I could do with a little more human feeling and a little less spectacle in my Peter Pan. But at least this one doesn't have a gigantic racist musical number about Native Americans. And the actors are always there to keep things grounded whenever Hogan gets too excited about his effects and sets. It's not the best version of this story imaginable, but it's certainly the right film for the time it was made: combining sentiment and garish overstatement in a blend that works in spite of itself, a proper early-'00s popcorn movie; that it manages to do right by Barrie and even freshen up the edges of his achingly familiar work is the difference between this being a decent enough movie and a genuinely good one, a minor success, but one that deserves much more respect and attention than it has managed to scrounge up in the years since its release.

DISNEY ANIMATION: A VERY IMPORTANT THING TO DO

When John Lasseter, artistic godfather of Pixar Animation Studios, was put in charge of pretty much the entire animated output of both that company and its new parent, Walt Disney Animation Studios during the merger of those two companies in 2006, it was at least partially with the hope that he'd be able to do something to reverse the incredible, and incredibly fast, decline in the Disney brand name, which had gone in only about ten years from the instant-classic smash hits Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King to embarrassing misfires, bordering on sick jokes, like Treasure Planet, Chicken Little, and their ilk. Whether this new mission included the directive, "make more old-fashioned movies", we can reasonably doubt, yet it is undeniably the case that Lasseter's tenure as Chief Creative Officer resulted, fairly quickly, in a deliberately conservative return to form. After forcing a course-correction onto Bolt, Lasseter oversaw the production of two old-school Disney Princess films, The Princess and the Frog and Tangled; the former of these did double-duty as the grand resurrection of traditional, cel-style animation, a form that had been left for dead by every major American animation studio, Disney itself having abandoned their roots after 2004's Home on the Range.

Three times makes a tradition, they say, and so it is with the third film in this chain of self-conscious throwbacks, Winnie the Pooh. Animated once again in the much out-of-favor 2-D style that at present can be found nowhere else in mainstream American cinema (blessedly, the great Japanese animators all seem mostly unimpressed and continue to use cels and cel-style animation like they have for decades), it is a sequel of sorts to the 1977 Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which was itself a compilation of three already-produced short films based on several stories from A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

(For ease, I'll henceforth refer to the two films as, respectively, Many Adventures and Winnie the Pooh).

Between 1977 and 2011, something terrible happened to the silly ole bear. First came the 1983 short Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore, which was a significant step down in quality from its predecessors, but still managed to be perfectly charming and engaging; and from there, things went straight to hell, as Disney decided, in its infinite wisdom, that Pooh's infantile intellectual prowess meant that he was clearly of value only to very small children, and so launched a media blitz the likes of which they have never since attempted for any of their characters, not even the arbitrarily-ubiquitous Tinker Bell. Multiple TV series, several videos, a few dodgy features made by DisneyToon Studios, and lots and lots of preschool toys, and Pooh had become tied, seemingly irrevocably, to Disney's attempts to control your children's minds from birth.

Lasseter saw this state of affairs; he did not like what he saw. And thus was Winnie the Pooh willed into existence. For the first time since 1983, the studio was going to adapt Milne's stories directly, rather than cramming the author's characters into marketing-driven scenarios; the animation style was going to hew as closely as possible to the very particular aesthetic of the original shorts. Without sacrificing Pooh's new status as the Disney character of choice for the youngest members of the family, the new film was to appeal just as strongly to the older fans of Pooh and Tigger and Eeyore and all of them. In short, the film was to thread the needle of being at once a nostalgia trip and a bright new entertainment for people of literally every possible age. That it completely succeeds at this is a miracle enough; that it manages, along the way, to actually improve upon Many Adventures in some respects is nothing less than a sign of the Second Coming.

Yes! Improves upon one of the very best Disney features ever made! My words may sound heretical, but I only speak the truth. No, Winnie the Pooh is not a "better" film than its august 1977 forebear; that would just be a silly thing to claim altogether. But it is much, much closer than even the most optimistic among us would have dared to guess.

Pulling from three Milne stories, Winnie the Pooh begins when the steady-voiced Narrator (John Cleese) observes that the perpetually hungry teddy bear of the title (Jim Cummings), the favorite toy of Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter), was about to wake up on the day he was going to do something important. What this is, the Narrator will not tell us, nor Pooh, so as not to ruin the surprise; but a few possibilities present themselves. It may, on the one hand, have something to do with how the ever-gloomy donkey Eeyore (Bud Luckey) has lost his tail; and it may, on the other, be related to the terrifyingly opaque note Christopher Robin left for his animal friends: "Gon Out | Bizy | Back Soon". Unable to make any sense of this scribbling, Pooh takes it to the wisest animal he knows, the loquacious Owl (Craig Ferguson), who announces to the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood with horror that Christopher Robin has been kidnapped by a hideous, massive monster called the Backson. In short order, the rest of the friends - neurotic Piglet (Travis Oates), sensible Kanga (Kristen Anderson-Lopez), her excitable son Roo (Wyatt Dean Hall), joylessly mature Rabbit (Tom Kenny), and of course, the indefatigable enthusiast Tigger (Cummings, pulling double duty) - make plans to catch this wicked beast, breaker of toys and destroyer of gardens, but Pooh is still committed to the only goal he's had in mind all day: to quell his constant tummy rumblings by finding a pot of honey, anywhere he can.

Two things leap to my mind, at least, when I mull over that story: the first is that, all in all, not a hell of a lot happens; not even passing the 70-minute mark, Winnie the Pooh is not just insanely short for a wide-release film in 2011, it's the shortest Disney animated feature since the 1940s. The second is that, compared to Many Adventures, the newer film has a much more protracted narrative arc. This is no accident, after all, for Many Adventures was never meant to be a single plot: it was combined from three short films, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, and the join between each of the shorts was accomplished in the brutally straightforward manner of having the narrator announce that the story was over, on to the next one. The episodic structure of that film didn't hurt it, given how the material is inherently more about the sense of one incident or moment, rather than the flow between moments. Winnie the Pooh doesn't try terribly hard to avoid being episodic, of course, and by virtue of being based on three separate Milne stories, the episodes have fairly neat beginnings and endings, but there is still the sense of everything taking place within a proscribed measure of time, and to a distinct climax. It is, in fact, like one of the three shorts, only tripled in length, and one leaves having felt like the thing was a unified whole, a sensation that is absolutely not found in watching Many Adventures.

This results in an even better side effect than mere narrative coherence, which is that, unlike its predecessor, Winnie the Pooh is really very much about Winnie the Pooh himself. The narrator himself confessed, in introducing the third sequence, that it's "mostly about Tigger. But [Pooh's] in it". And as a Tigger partisan, this never bothered me much, but it is still gratifying to see a film that is, above all else, about Pooh, following one day in his life and culminating in one simple triumph he makes that day. For Pooh is a very special fictional character, and though someone might prefer Eeyore, or Owl, or Tigger, or Piglet, or whomever, those characters could never anchor their universe. They can only exist as reflections of Pooh himself.

In the Disney marketing scheme, all the toys and shirts and mugs and the like favor Tigger, Eeyore, and Pooh (one can find Piglet merchandise, but it's not as common). The implication seems to be that you can be either a Tigger person, or an Eeyore person, or a Pooh person, and this division seems reasonable enough: Tigger is unbridled enthusiasm, braggadocio, self-confidence, and bluster; Eeyore is pessimism, pragmatism, caution; Pooh represents the point in between them, mixing joy and appetite with a stiff sense that things can go to hell at any moment. But it is not reasonable at all, really: Tigger and Eeyore are both dysfunctional, polar personalities. Only Pooh Bear, with his simple happiness about everyday things, avoids the mindless mania of a Tigger or the crippling depression of an Eeyore. His is the best way through life, straightforward and down-to-earth; The Tao of Pooh is only somewhat a novelty book, after all.

By which I mean to say: what a grand thing that Pooh gets to be the star of his own movie for once. If the Hundred Acre Wood is a metaphor for all of life, and it certainly is, as far as a six-year-old British child is concerned, Pooh is our stand-in, and it is well to see him get his own Pilgrim's Progress, such as it is.

Winnie the Pooh, like the films before it, and like Milne's writing before that, is chiefly a story about how children understand the world; and like those, it takes this duty very seriously. Not least among the deep and abiding pleasures of the movie is how it shows that, in 2011, mainstream filmmakers are still capable of treating children and childhood with the utmost gravity and dignity. The plot specifics of Winnie the Pooh require at every point that all of the characters be, essentially, ignorant; not in the way of a stupid grown-up, played for a clown, but in the manner of the very young, who still have much to learn and much time in which to learn it. So even if Pooh frequently acts in a way that we and the narrator know to be completely wrong, we never sit in judgment of him or mock him for his idiocy; the filmmakers (a platoon of writers, led by co-directors Stephen J. Anderson, of Meet the Robinsons, and first-timer Don Hall) love Pooh, and they treat him with respect even when he gets things wrong. We laugh at him, but our laughter is indulgent, not accusatory; for we want Pooh to be wiser than he is, just as he himself wishes.

There's a resilient undertone throughout the film of words, as physical objects and as concepts and as signifiers; Winnie the Pooh is absolutely intoxicated with literacy and wordplay, despite all of the characters being borderline illiterate. That's the sort of mentality that drives the project, a fascination with things we don't understand yet - it's the "yet" that matters. Pooh is a bear of little brain, as he is the first to own, but he doesn't use that as an excuse to stop being curious.

Now, everything I've just said is true of many books and movies, and not just Winnie the Pooh itself; the extra challenge facing the 2011 movie is to be all those things while also paying tribute to the 1977 classic that has been one of the foundational texts for three generations of children. In the United States, at least, the film was advertised with a trailer that, unusually for a Disney film, used a song that wasn't written for the film, "Somewhere Only We Know" by the British indie rock group Keane, and in this song there is the line, "I'm getting old and I need something to rely on". Let us forgive Keane for their gross violation of grammar; it had to rhyme with "gone". The point is, though this line does not itself appear in the trailer, it perfectly sums up the function of Winnie the Pooh for the adults in the audience, people for whom the incredibly guileless childhood fantasies of Christopher Robin are long distant.

Winnie the Pooh isn't only a good Pooh narrative, it's a good continuation of the exact world created by Many Adventures, one that reminds us of how much we loved a different movie while also making us love the new one. It's a damnably hard line to walk, and a great many sequels have failed spectacularly to manage it; and it is not the case throughout that Winnie the Pooh does so perfectly, though it makes a more than credible effort. The challenge making something that would, as closely as possible, recreate the look and sensibility of a 34-year-old classic, while having enough personality of its own that it doesn't come across as completely ossified could not have been an easy thing to attempt.

Visually, the film is a remarkable success. The three original shorts were all made during Disney's xerography phase, and that means a lot of sketchy pencil lines; while the Pooh films are probably the best-looking of the films of this era (only One Hundred and One Dalmatians competes), they're still hobbled by the enforced cheapness of that aesthetic - which, I am aware, some people love. I am not one of them. The new film, made with the same software by Toon Boom that Disney first tried out in The Princess and the Frog is much cleaner and brighter and smoother. Almost to the point of distraction, in fact, but the clarity of the colors and shapes is very much to the new film's benefit, as is the decision to use obvious CGI effects as infrequently as possible, as infrequently as they've been used in any Disney film since the technology became available, in fact - only in one dream sequence is there a preponderance of noticeable CGI.

The character animation itself is something more of a mixed bag. The animators in the 1960s and '70s who oversaw the originals were some of the greatest practitioners of their craft ever; and though the animators working on Winnie the Pooh try very hard to mimic their work, it's not always consistent. One of the two best characters, undoubtedly, is Pooh himself, supervised by Mark Henn, who wouldn't ordinarily seem like an obvious successor to Frank Thomas, but who buries his ordinary tendencies in favor of re-creating Thomas's subtle facial expressions and movements (Henn also supervises Christopher Robin, who is certainly much more typical of the animator's work, especially in his bright, big eyes). The other great piece of animation is Tigger, with Andreas Deja filling in for Milt Kahl (like Kahl, who animated Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, Deja has had previous work with a big cat; he is responsible for Scar in The Lion King. The degree to which either Shere Khan or Scar is an appropriate precursor to Tigger can be debated); Deja doesn't try quite so hard to copy the earlier work, but makes Tigger his own without violating the essential spirit of Kahl's animation, though he gets relatively little to do.

The other characters are somewhat less faithful to their originals, particularly Eric Goldberg's Rabbit and Dale Baer's Owl; they are neither of them untalented men, but come from a different tradition; Baer especially turns Owl into somewhat too modern of a comic figure, with big reactions that remind one of a TV comedy or a latter-day Don Bluth picture. It's not "bad", precisely, and I appreciate that these animators make the characters their own; but when Owl is the only character mugging like a bad comic, and Rabbit seems so weirdly slapsticky compared to everybody else, I must wonder what went wrong and where, that they mesh with the whole so poorly.

It's much the same story vocally: some excellent work, some that feels a bit out of place. In the former category, Cummings' work as Pooh is old hat by now - he's been the character's voice since 1988 - and while he's not quite Sterling Holloway, not that anybody could be, his take on the character is warm and right. Cleese, as the narrator, doesn't even try to sound like Sebastian Cabot, but he also doesn't try to sound like John Cleese, and his simple, friendly baritone is exactly right. Similarly, Bud Luckey (you might recall him as the sad clown in Toy Story 3) isn't trying to copy Ralph Wright's Eeyore, he's simply playing Eeyore, and the results are wonderfully dour.

On the other hand, Craig Ferguson's Owl, while a fine take on the character, sounds nothing like Hal Smith, and it takes a great deal of getting used to it. Cummings's Tigger, meanwhile, is everything his Pooh is not: he's trying and failing to imitate Paul Winchell playing the character, rather than playing the character himself, and it comes across forced and uncomfortable; he has been in charge of Tigger for a solid 20 years now, but I for one have never grown to like his approach to the character.

In fact, Tigger is on the whole not handled very well in Winnie the Pooh, outside of Deja's animation, and it's maybe a good thing that he's not in it very much. He has the same general behavior, but he's just not right; a little bit more of a braggart and less of an enthusiast, a jolly bully rather than a maddeningly cheerful force of nature. It's like the difference between Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV and the man named Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor: if you squint, it looks like the same character, but he just feels wrong somehow. Anyway, Tigger is much sidelined; other than a song where he tries to convince Eeyore that without a tail, he can become Tigger Two, the character gets little to do. It's a little reflective of the situation with Pooh merchandise, in fact, which used to be heavy on Tigger items, but in recent years has grown much more Eeyore-ey. I am uncertain if I'm happy that I know that.

The characters, that is to say, aren't exactly the character they used to be; but then, 2011 is not 1977. And in all the important ways, Winnie the Pooh is a tribute to the first film's success without being a tired retread. There is the matter of Zooey Deschanel's performance of the iconic title song: different enough to be startling at first, but then again, her voice is so lilting and immature that she makes the thing work, in spite of and because of the ways it is not the exact version we're familiar with. The rest of the new songs, by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (the former's kiddie musical bona fides include Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon) aren't exactly hummable - but then, are most of the original songs hummable? I mean, sure I can hum "Up, Down, Touch the Ground", but I can't imagine wanting to. And more importantly, the songs are light and buoyant and fit the characters well.

Best of all, though, is how Anderson and Hall remake the aesthetic that was so bold and fun in the original film, with the conceit that the characters are in a book and can interact with text. At one point, a frustrated Narrator shakes the book and even turns it upside down in an attempt to wake up a drowsy Pooh; later, the character use letters that have fallen down - but I would not want to ruin one of the movie's best surprises. This film's version of "Heffalumps and Woozles", a song about the terrible Backson, matches and betters the earlier number's phantasmagorical imagery, by taking place entirely on a chalkboard (it's the best moment, design-wise, in the film). In fact, the film is so excited about playing with its reality that it even manages to top Many Adventures, which was already one of the most post-modern of all Disney films - not a hard thing to achieve. It breaks my heart that Gopher didn't show up (he's not in the book, you know): as far as this film goes in that direction, I imagine the writers could have found something special for him to do.

It's too late to make a long story short, so let me just sum up: the 2011 Winnie the Pooh which should have just been a lazy brand name cash-in, is instead the most sincere and thoughtful kids' film that could possibly have been made at its point in history. We're supposed to be hip now, and clever and referential and everything; Winnie the Pooh is none of those. It is instead wise: wise about who children are, and who they will become. Far from being a flimsy attempt to mine past success for a quick buck, it is the sweetest and most seductive example yet of Disney's serious attempts not just to re-do what worked once, but to learn from history, to understand why their classics became classics in the first place. If Lasseter is only looking to turn the animation studio into a reflection of its former self, well, as long as the results look like this, more power to him.