Grin and Bear It: PADDINGTON

Based on Michael Bond’s popular picture book of the same name, Paddington is a movie about a bear cub who speaks English, wears a red hat and blue coat, and likes marmalade. You’d think that’s not a lot to hang a feature film upon. But in a pleasant surprise, the result is easily the best live action talking animal family comedy since Babe: Pig in the City, though that might say more about the usual level of quality in this particular subgenre than anything else. In the movie, Paddington and his bear family are CGI creations that at first look creepily real, more Country Bears than Alvin and the Chipmunks. But once I got used to looking at him and his interactions with a real human world, the more adorable he became. He’s an inquisitive little guy, pluckily charging forward hoping for the best. That’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a pleasant, affable, likable little thing, funny, fuzzy, warm and goodhearted.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw) grew up in darkest Peru, where he was taught about London by his aunt (Imelda Staunton) and uncle (Michael Gambon). They had become Anglophiles after an explorer (Tim Downie) visited years earlier. After an earthquake destroys their jungle home, Paddington is sent off to London in search of a better life. His aunt lovingly places around his neck a note asking the recipient to take care of this little bear. It’s a softly downplayed immigrant story, with the bear washing up on London shores in need of help making sense of a new place, but with plenty of qualities – a killer marmalade recipe, for one – that’ll enrich the lives of those he meets. There’s some quiet metaphor work going on, especially with the cranky neighbor who worries about bears moving into his neighborhood.

Paddington’s found by a sweet family who take him to stay in their house that appears to be on the same street as the Banks in Mary Poppins. It’s definitely a Poppins set up, with a free-spirited mother (Sally Hawkins), stuffy all-business father (Hugh Bonneville), and a daughter and son (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin) who are having troubles of their own. Then in comes Paddington, an openhearted, open-minded little fellow who quite by accident brings the family closer together. It’s a film that has lots of dependable bits of family film plot mechanics, from the boring dad who’s softened up by the events herein, to the kids who find a friend in a magical guest, to a protagonist who’s thrust into a new world and, despite some difficulties, learns to love it.

But it’s all so sweetly done, and writer-director Paul King brings a kind sense of humor and lovely visual style, from intricate whimsical production design, to Wes-Anderson-esque dollhouse constructions, to clever cutting and crisp wordplay. The funniest joke is also the simplest: no one finds the talking bear strange at all, and treat him like they would a human child. There are amusing sequences in which he slowly destroys his surroundings while attempting a simple task, wrecking a bathroom or covering himself head to toe in tape. My favorite was a chase scene in which the bear floats by a schoolroom studying Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. “Exit pursued by a— ” “Paddington!” The amusing slapstick and cute misunderstandings are bolstered by an undemanding plot and a troop of fine British actors (the leads, as well as Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi, and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles) who kids growing up on this movie will later recognize if they ever catch up on old BBC programming or the films of Mike Leigh.

I’m not sure if a film so sugary English, with nicely small character moments and a charming shaggy tone, needs a villain, but Nicole Kidman plays an ice cold taxidermist about as well as she could. She’s a Cruella de Vil type with a Hitchcockian blonde bob, strutting about wanting to add a talking bear to her collection. Her scenes are few, and of a slightly different tone than the sentimental slapstick culture clash comedy elsewhere, but such pro forma kids’ film villainy is the impetus to finally bring all the characters together in support of the bear they’ve come to love. And by then, I’d also found much to love in Paddington, and was glad to see the film resolve so neatly.

Dawn of the Zed: WORLD WAR Z

Hollywood’s latest rehearsal of total worldwide destruction is World War Z, a globetrotting zombie film that approaches the zombie problem as a plague to be contained and cured. It has more in common with the techno-thriller novels (turned films, usually) of Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain – than the gross-out shock satire horror films of George Romero – Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead. In the detail-oriented, goal-driven throughline, we follow a representative of the United Nations played by Brad Pitt travelling through countries ravaged by zombie attacks hot on the trail of Patient Zero and, hopefully, a way towards understanding the outbreaks in order to stop them. The film is grimly satisfying, hopping from one nice suspense sequence to the next, treating the destruction soberly and the stakes with a sad weight.

It works because of the humane star power of Pitt. He’s playing a role that Robert Redford or Warren Beatty would have played if it was made in the 1970s with, say, Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack behind the camera. Pitt’s aged into a still, strong, warm everyman persona very well. In this film he’s a man defined by his profession, a humanitarian, and his family, a wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove). His crisis-activated goals dovetail easily. He wants to keep his family safe and stop the developing worldwide calamity as best he can. That’s easier said than done, which gives us more than enough reason to root him on as he reluctantly leaves his family in the care of a refuge ship and flies around the world in a military plane, stopping in various countries, trying to trace the outbreak back to its source. At each stop, zombie attacks are inevitable. He meets character actors (like David Morse, Peter Capaldi, and Fana Mokoena) with helpful information (or not) to impart and traces the mystery as far as he can. Then zombies swarm into the picture in moments built out of small jolts and massive setpieces, and we’re off to the next stop.

Loosely based on a novel by Max Brooks, the film’s troubled production caused it to take on screenwriters like a sinking ship takes on water. The end result gives story credit to such heavy-hitters as Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom), Drew Goddard (Cloverfield), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). That makes it hard to say who I should credit with coming up with tremendously effective sequences like the opening in downtown Philadelphia in which a traffic jam erupts in violence, or the late-night rainstorm attack on a darkened runway, or the scene in which a tidal wave of zombies scramble like ants against a protective wall meant to keep them out. Director Marc Forster, used to helming prestige dramas (Finding Neverland), likable mainstream oddities (Stranger Than Fiction), and widely disliked Bond films (Quantum of Solace), along with editors Roger Barton and Matt Chesse, have somehow created a film that’s slick and propulsive all the same. Some combination of rewrites, reedits, and reshoots has left the film shiny and slick, with little evidence of behind the scenes squabbles.

Creepy and overflowing with horrifying imagery both on-screen and, more often, implied, World War Z has such an overwhelming approach to its devastation that it’s wise to keep it small on a scene to scene basis. We get the impression that calamities are occurring without needing endless shots of total disaster to understand. (Though there is one of those big disaster-movie control room maps that light up the biggest problem areas in red. I always like picking out my area of the country on those things just to make sure I’d be caught up in any given mess.) As we dash around the world following the main mission, I appreciated the matter-of-fact global respect on display here as characters from different countries and backgrounds get to be real people instead of stereotypes. Also appreciated is the way in which the filmmakers understood and valued the effect of the large-scale havoc they conjure. It’s not cheapened into a tunnel vision hero’s tale with collateral damage brushed aside as long as the wife and kids are fine in the end. The burden of stopping this plague weighs heavy on Pitt’s shoulders.

And this is no usual zombie plague of shuffling undead. The zombie effects are modern and twitchy, the once-human creatures swarming like deadly insects and chattering their dead jaws with bone-snapping sound effects. This makes for a primal, animalistic dread in their heavily-CG pack behavior, but it’s never mined for the kind of body-horror, living-dead drama so successfully vivid in Romero’s films or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel. Here the zombie virus is nothing more than an existential threat. It could be anything, even the flu of Soderbergh’s Contagion or the aliens of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In fact, WWZ often plays like a clever cross of those two better films. But it’s also a competent success all on its own, a kind of gripping summer blockbuster that kicks up a great deal of mood and suspense in moments intense and frightening, before fizzling out slightly into the end credits. The effect doesn’t linger, but it’s strong and engaging enough while it lasts.

In Anticipation of Year's End Lists

I didn't get a chance to write about these movies when they were released this past summer so I'm taking this opportunity to briefly comment upon them before the deluge of Oscar titles arrives in my town. With the end of the year fast approaching you'll probably be hearing more about these titles through top-ten lists and Oscar nominations, so I'll waste no more time before throwing in my two cents about them.

By now, Miyazaki may as well be Japanese for magic, for magic is exactly what his films generate, in their layered beauty and easy fantasy that are totally absorbing. With Ponyo, Miyazaki has crafted another beautiful, fun, exciting, tender film. This time around, the plotting is so simple (it’s aimed at very young children) but the fantasy is so complex that there is a bit more of a wheeze to the exposition. But that’s almost secondary, and it doesn’t drastically distract, from the (typical for Miyazaki) effortless fluidity of the imagery positioned perfectly on the border between man and nature, real and unreal. The characters are adorable and the message is strong and sweet, making this perfect viewing for children and those charms aren’t lost on me either. There’s a magical trance-like quality to the exquisite minutia and vivid imagery that slowly draws me in. It’s confident, captivating filmmaking of the Miyazaki kind.

Armando Iannucci's In the Loop follows an eccentric ensemble of low-level political figures who may just decide to go to war if they ever stop endlessly circling the central debate with petty semantic parsing and furious flurries of insults, invective, and bile. It’s painfully familiar evil bureaucracy, but the movie is a non-stop laugh machine, sending wave after wave of quotable dialogue towards the audience in rapid-fire, profusely profane bouts of eloquent swearing. It’s not above a well-crafted sight gag either, like the sequence which follows a supposedly secret meeting that keeps growing in attendance, even after the committee switches to a larger room. The best of the consistently funny cast is Peter Capaldi as a spin doctor who storms through the movie insulting and complaining about anything that moves with the most creatively, wickedly hilarious vulgar metaphors I’ve ever heard. One of the most fascinating moments in the film arrives late in the plot when, in the U.N. meditation room, he stops talking and we get a chance to look at his face as he realizes, for the first and only time in the entire film, that he’s speechless, revealing most starkly that behind the flurry of words, there’s ultimately nothing. And that very nothing is what takes us to war.

There is so much suspense in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker that the further it went on, the longer the tension mounted, the more my stomach twisted in knots. By the time the movie was barely half over, I was sick to my stomach. The movie is so completely immersed in the day-to-day work of an American bomb squad in Iraq, with great performances (especially by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, who are in almost every scene) and set-pieces all the way through, that it adds weight to the skillful summoning of sickening dread. It’s by turns unexpected, exciting, chaotic, scary, violent, and eerily beautiful. We are only given one sequence, late in the picture, with the luxury of being on the home front, away from the chaos of war, and it arrives with the force of a rug being pulled out from underneath you. The jump cut from the shimmering sands of the desert to the sterile, flickering fluorescent lights of a grocery store is as disorienting a cinematic moment as I’ve felt all year, one that helps the film say much more about the effect of war on soldiers than any Iraq War movie to date.