The voices of George Clooney and Meryl Streep as parents in a family of foxes in a new animated movie are more entertaining than anything heard in a new live-action tale.
Clooney and Streep play characters in "Fantastic Mr. Fox," a very funny and engaging bit of whimsy from director Wes Anderson ("Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"). The film is based on the popular children's book by Roald Dahl, and is co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, who has also directed very good work, including "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding."
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" has been created using the process known as stop-animation. Character dolls (in this case, a mix of animals and humans) are made to move one millimeter at a time, frame-by-frame. The original 1933 great ape King Kong was a stop-animation wonder.
Anderson has said that the Dahl work is the first book he owned as a child, and it remains a favorite of his. In the movie, the suave and slick Mr. Fox (Clooney) has given up raiding chicken farms for a life of domestic bliss with the adorable Mrs. Fox (Streep). He writes a column called "Fox About Town" for the local newspaper. She turns the tree they call home into a lovely living space.
They have a klutzy son named Ash, who is not the athlete his dad wishes he were. Mom doesn't care; she's as happy as any animal could be.
However, since you can't keep a good (and larcenous) fox down, Mr. Fox, working with his old partner in crime, Kylie the opossum, decides to pull one more heist, which is a caper plot as old as movies themselves. He's going to commit a vast chicken-napping, which will set him up for a long, long time. Or so he believes.
Enter three of the meanest industrial farm tycoons on the planet -- Boggis, Bunce and Bean -- who are given British goon accents, so you know they are remarkably unpleasant thugs, if not quite total imperialist monsters. Soon everything in the once-comfy world of the Foxes, not to mention the lives of their animal friends, is disrupted by a range war between zany critters and cruel humans.
Fortunately, the situation is rife with material for hilarious schemes and situations and contributions, beginning with ideas from a badger who's a lawyer and is voiced by Bill Murray, and conniving assistance from a rat voiced by Willem Dafoe.
Through it all, Mr. Fox must win back the respect of his wife, watch his son desperately try to be helpful, and stem the anger from all the other animals whose lives his actions have disrupted.
One of the wonderful things about "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is that the audience, especially the adults, has to stay alert to catch all of the peripheral action. There's stuff going on at the sides of the screen and in the background that is every bit as enjoyable as what will be the primary focus of your attention.
The film is suitable for children, and it offers some very clever comments that kids might not comprehend, but so what. Anderson has made a spirited adventure, brimming with delicious dialogue and a genuine sense of family.
As much as I like everything about the feature, I especially enjoyed the character and voicing of the opossum as done by a gentleman named Wally Wolodarsky, who is a jack-of-all-trades in the movie business, having acted, written, produced and directed.
The musical soundtrack is eclectic to the point of brilliance. How about "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," Cole Porter's "Night and Day," works sung by Burl Ives, and one that really got my attention, The Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man"? Any movie that features a Stones' song begins a winner and can only go downhill. Happily, the hill becomes a mountain of merry entertainment.
"Fantastic Mr. Fox" is one of the best pictures of the year.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, and not in a good way. "Old Dogs" is an abomination, a moldy story that's been told in so many different forms, it would take a true genius to make the premise unique. And trust me, there are no true geniuses involved in this mess.
Oh sure, Robin Williams was once off-the-wall brilliant, and he still can be amazing and funny. And John Travolta certainly can lay claim to being talented. One would think that this might be a terrific combination of actors. How these two read the wretched screenplay by David Diamond and David Weissman and said yes to doing it is beyond me.
The finished film has been sitting around for a while -- somebody at the Walt Disney Studios realized how bad it is -- but now it's been dumped into the holiday marketplace.
Like many efforts before it, "Old Dogs" tosses children into the unsuspecting laps of adults, as with Diane Keaton in "Baby Boom" (not bad, actually), or Ted Danson, Steve Guttenberg and Tom Selleck in "Three Men and a Baby" (overrated).
The contrived idea here is that Williams had sex with a woman (Kelly Preston) to whom he was married for only 24 hours. Seven years later, she hands him twins he didn't know he fathered. She wants him to babysit the precocious children because she has to serve two weeks in jail after being arrested in a protest demonstration. The hoped-for comedy will rise out of two adult men tending to the kids.
Sorry, but I never thought it was comical that men couldn't change diapers, let alone not be able to come up with things to do while babysitting. And believe me, I've changed diapers and have babysat, never once at wit's end. Travolta's a man-about-town bachelor, who is partners with Williams in a sports marketing business. Some Japanese businessmen want to sign a deal with them.
The always glib and uninteresting Seth Green is Williams and Travolta's associate, who will translate for them, although you know the Japanese men understand English quite well. By the way, why do they keep giving these "mature" roles to Green, who, although he's 35, looks like a Munchkin and can't act in a way that makes us believe anything he says or does. Of course, he might have made a good Hobbit.
As things do in junk like this, the comedy flows not from characters, but from situations that are only -- possibly -- humorous once, as when you've seen them in the preview. Golf balls in crotches? Been there, done that. Wrong drugs ingested so that everything turns to liquid? Check. Somebody gets something caught in a car's trunk lid? It's here. Alas, in this case it's Rita Wilson's hand. Funny? Not at all, although somebody thought it was.
Williams has done his stoned monkey routine so often, it's like watching a senile old coot reliving his life in a mental institution.
"Old Dogs" is not so much directed as it is thrown together by Walt Becker. His idea of a comic thread is to have almost everybody Williams and Travolta encounter think they are gay dads. Their repeated denials slowly become homophobic, and believe me, both actors should know better. Perhaps Becker's too much of a hack-for-hire to know better.
Cameo appearances abound, including Matt Dillon, Bernie Mac, Justin Long, Amy Sedaris and Ann-Margret. I hope they did it to maintain her Screen Actors Guild health benefits. Alas, Mac is no longer with us.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 1 2009 |