PARANORMAN: I Wish I Understood You

ParaNorman (2012) – Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler – Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin, Elaine Stritch, Bernard Hill, Jodelle Micah Ferland, John Goodman, and Tempestt Bledsoe.

PARANORMAN is a ridiculously dumb title, but that’s the only thing this movie does poorly.

PARANORMAN is a very good stop-motion movie about two kids, separated by three centuries, who are demonized and ostracized by their community because they can talk to the dead. I love it when kids’ movies are smart, and PARANORMAN is a cleverly constructed tale that starts rather predictable but gains momentum as it barrels towards its highly effective conclusion.

At the center of PARANORMAN sits Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a kid who’s being ostracized by his town for being weird. Norman can see and talk to the dead, but the town doesn’t believe him, and thus mocks him for what they perceive as his strangeness. If it were just the kids in town, PARANORMAN would be following in the steps of numerous kids’ stories where our protagonist lives just outside of the normal path, but there’s a particular viciousness laid into Norman by his father (Jeff Garlin) that really sets this movie apart. Perry is all over Norman for being weird, and he delivers the most stinging attacks on Norman’s character. Kids are resilient, but when the harshest and most consistent abuse comes not from the school bully but your own father, it’s not hard to see why Norman spends much of the movie’s opening sequences with his head down. It’s a common theme in stories like this for the parent to not understand their child, but Perry is much closer to someone like Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon than simply a parent who thinks he knows what’s best for his kid.

At school, Norman gets FREAK painted onto his locker, and is the main target of the school’s bully, Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). When we’re introduced to Alivn, I was not feeling PARANORMAN. It’s early in the film and while I like the twist of Norman’s opening scene revealing that his grandmother is actually dead despite her sitting and watching TV with him, Alvin is rendered as a cartoonish bully. The physical appearances of these characters was a bit of a concern – we have the fat dad, who’s a bully at home, and the fat older kid, who’s a bully at school. I get nervous when films fall into the “good guys are attractive, bad guys are ugly” bit, and luckily, PARANORMAN doesn’t fall into that trap. Part of the film’s charm is that it renders its characters as exaggerated physical types, but then lets the characters overcome that type. Alvin, for instance, goes from bullying Norman to partnering with him when the dead start coming back to life.

The return of dead corpses back into the realm of the living is surprisingly gruesome and, for a kids’ movie, surprisingly scary. Clearly, the filmmakers of PARANORMAN like scary movies, and not just because they dot the film with allusions to John Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. I really think the filmmakers have set out to actually scare kids; PARANORMAN doesn’t just wink at horror movies – it is a horror movie. Scenes where the dead claw their way out of their graves, where the zombies attack Norman and his associates, and where reality is consumed inside powerful visions of the town’s past are actually pretty intense and much more forceful than I was expecting in a kids’ film.

I absolutely love how PARANORMAN uses history to set the foundation for the present. Blithe Hollow, Massachusetts is clearly an analog for Salem, the home of the most infamous American witchcraft trials, but the look of the town owes a great deal to Stephen King’s Maine or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. In the pure tradition of King and Hawthorne, Blithe Hollow is a town that looks quaint but hides a terrible secret. There are images of witches all over Blithe Hollow, but the images are largely of the wicked witch variety – big noses, green skin, cackling smiles. The town’s identity is built around the town elders catching and killing this witch 300 years previous, but when Norman gets to the truth of the matter through his visions, he learns that the “wicked witch” of yore is actually a scared girl roughly the same age as him.

It’s admirable that PARANORMAN has this reveal, because the way these “non-normative” stories usually go is that our protagonist is picked on, but over the course of the film overcomes the abuse to prove everyone wrong. Certainly, PARANORMAN offers this narrative through Norman’s arc, but with the little girl witch, Aggie (Jodelle Micah Ferland), the filmmakers show the dark side of that story arc, of what can happen if the protagonist can’t overcome the abuse – she gets unfairly singled out and murdered.

It’s interesting and telling about what the filmmakers want you to take from this story that Norman spends more time during this movie adventuring with Alvin than Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), the only kid at school that wants to befriend Norman. Neil gets picked on, too, by Alvin and his buddies, but he has a rosier outlook than Norman does about life. Norman, in fact, rejects Neil’s friendship advances several times before finally welcoming him in. The rest of the adventure crew contains Norman’s sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) and Neil’s brother Mitch (Casey Affleck). Both Courtney and Mitch are physically attractive people, and Courtney spends much of her time flirting with a non-responsive Mitch. The jock is a bit low on the IQ scale, so the film could be suggesting that Mitch simply doesn’t realize what Courtney is doing, but then at the end of the movie, he tells her that he has a boyfriend. Non-normative characters are often coded in such a way to allow non-normative kids to identify with them, but this is the first time I can remember a kid in an animated movie being explicitly gay.

What really puts PARANORMAN over the top is the final showdown between Norman and Aggie. Norman doesn’t defeat her through a physical battle but by telling her the story of herself and allowing her to let go of her hate and anger and rediscover happiness. The animation through this sequence is top notch and the interplay between the two kids who can talk to the dead is outstanding. Norman clearly sees himself in Aggie, and when he learns the truth about her through a vision, he becomes her champion as much as her opponent.

PARANORMAN only did so-so at the box office ($60 million budget, $99 worldwide haul) and it’s easy to point the finger at bad marketing when a good film under-performs. This is a tricky movie to sell, though, because the things that make it great aren’t things you can put in an advertisement. PARANORMAN isn’t at its best in singular moments that can be cut out of the film and assembled together to make an effective 30-second TV spot; it’s at its best when it gets beyond the obvious and starts to open up its world and its characters to reveal that people (even dead people) are far more than their appearance.

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My latest book, STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE: THE CHRISTMAS OPERATION is now available for purchase in PAPERBACK and KINDLE formats.

SAFH is a kid’s espionage novella, but it’s also a tribute to the television shows I watched as a kid: The A-Team, Magnum PI, Knight Rider, Hardcastle and McCormack, Riptide, Dukes of Hazzard and generally any show where Post and Carpenter did the music. Recommended age? If you let your kid watch superhero cartoons or Knight Rider reruns, SAFH should be age appropriate.

Here’s the back cover description:

Jurgen the Gorilla. Throne the Lion. Bronze the Golden Eagle. Ray the Brown Bear. Bottle the Dolphin. Dev the Lynxwoman. 3 the Triceratops. Ptera the Pterodactyl. These eight stuffed animals make up the Return Squadron. For seven months they have worked together to return disconnected stuffed animals home. But now … on their final mission, the Return Squadron seek to steal the legendary Map of Everything. Before Christmas morning arrives, three of the Squadron will turn traitor, four will be stranded, and one will never see another Christmas.

ARGO: This is the Best Bad Idea We’ve Got

Argo (2012) – Directed by Ben Affleck – Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Clea DuVall, Kyle Chandler, Tate Donovan, Michael Parks, Richard Kind, Titus Welliver, Rory Cochrane, Bob Gunton, Zeljko Ivanek, Philip Baker Hall, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Why is it ARGO gets Oscar talk yet The Avengers doesn’t?

I’m being purposely obtuse, of course. I know darn well why Avengers doesn’t get any Oscar talk, but I raise the issue to once again bash on awards shows. The Oscars is supposed to represent the best in cinema, is it not? Both ARGO and Avengers are incredibly well made movies with incredibly smart scripts, fantastic directing, great acting … yet ARGO will get Oscar buzz and Avengers will have to settle for being the third highest grossing movie of all time. It reasons like this why I don’t bother with the Oscars, as they are more politically and PR-driven than an actual award of filmmaking merit.

All of that is prelude to my reaction to ARGO, a darn good movie from the engaging directing hands of Ben Affleck. I was prepared for ARGO to be a solid drama, but I was not prepared for it to be funny.

ARGO is a very funny movie, however, chiefly through the first half of the movie before settling in for a tense, suspense-filled second half. It’s a smart decision, as it’s the first half of the movie where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. Set during the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, ARGO tells the based-on-true-life tale of how CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) extracted six American diplomats from the Canadian Embassy in Tehran. Mendez’s plan to get them out is to create cover identities for the diplomats as a film crew for an in-production science fiction film.

There are a myriads of problems with this plan, not the least of which is that it depends on putting a fake science fiction film into production in order to fool the Iranian security forces who are scouring Iran to take any stray Americans hostage. The film gets its biggest laughs from the discomfort this plan raises in the Washington bureaucrats and the open-minded embrace from Mendez’s two Hollywood partners, make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Goodman and Arkin are fantastic together, with Chambers’ enthusiasm balanced perfectly by Siegel’s calmer demeanor.

The Washington/Hollywood split shows an interesting approach to casting in ARGO. The Washington scenes are quick-hitting, with plenty of known actors playing bureaucrats. Kyle Chandler, Titus Welliver, Bob Gunton, and Philip Baker Hall appear in a scene or two or three to question Mendez’s plan. None of these actors are playing characters as much as they are united in a kind of Gestalt of Dissent. Their job is to act incredulous, doubt Mendez’s plan, and make the CIA look smarter. In Hollywood, Chambers and Siegel become actual characters, allowing Goodman and Arkin to develop a wonderful chemistry in their shared effort to assist Mendez.

Affleck does a wonderful job contrasting the deadly seriousness of the hostages with the absurdity of creating the fake movie. While I’m sure it would have looked incredibly bad if the news got out that the CIA was in Hollywood getting Adrienne Barbeau to sign on for a movie they didn’t intend to make, it’s great fun for us and a smart creative decision to balance off the heaviness of the situation in Iran. Or worse, that they were putting on an elaborate reading of the movie for the press, with actors in full costume, just to try and get a notice in Variety in order to fool the Iranians. It’s a bit of weird world that we live in, of course, that sees us paying money to eat popcorn to see a story that exists because hostages were taken, but this is part of the way we cope with the hardships endured by previous generations.

Chambers and Siegel display a very cinematic attitude towards the plan, which is to say, that despite the gravity of the situation half a world away, they seem to enjoy playing junior spies. Chambers has a quip for every situation, and Siegel has a laid back, dry sense of humor. Both of these approaches allow Affleck to play Mendez as a rather boring dude. He’s serious about his work (which he needs to be), and Affleck sees no reason to give Mendez a bunch of over-inflated histrionics to make himself stand out. It’s a very understated performance, which allows his few fireworks moments to have a greater impact.

As I mentioned, it’s this first half of the film where ARGO stands out from other political thrillers. The back half is solidly put together and delivers a fair amount of tension, but it’s nothing that you can’t find in a whole host of other movies. Once Mendez hits Iran, ARGO is simply an extraction movie. To go back to the Avengers comparison, that script is much more complicated than this script, yet both of them do exactly what their respective movies need. The back-half of ARGO doesn’t need to be complicated because we’re already invested in the story. Really, the big star of the back half of the film isn’t Mendez or the hostages, but Bryan Cranston’s Jack O’Donnell.

O’Donnell is Mendez’s supervisor and at the start of the film he brings Mendez into a meeting wit the State Department, but encourages him to not get involved. State wants to run this situation, and O’Donnell is happy to let them do it. Mendez can’t help picking apart all of the various ideas that State has come up with to get a hostage out, as they’re the kind of ideas that sound good from a distance but would fall apart up close. (Like wanting to give the six hostages bikes so they could peddle for a border that is, as Mendez reminds them, several hundred miles away.) When Mendez comes up with his plan, State is hesitant to even listen, let alone sign on, but Mendez and O’Donnell’s sales pitch leads to two of the film’s best lines.

Both are from O’Donnell. On the way in to see Vice President Mondale (Hall) and another diplomat (really, the names of the diplomats and politicians are completely unimportant; as I said earlier, they work together to provide the Gestalt of Dissent), O’Donnell tells Mendez that talking to these two is going to be like “the Muppets talking to Statler and Waldorf.” Once inside the meeting, Mondale is skeptical and openly wonders if they don’t have better ideas, to which O’Donnell replies, “This is the best bad idea we’ve got.”

It’s O’Donnell that has the best dramatic scenes in the back half, too. After telling Mendez that the White House has called off the plan, Mendez stews on it (he takes a bottle of alcohol from the Canadian embassy but barely touches it), and then decides he’s going ahead with the plan anyways, White House be damned. This causes all sorts of problems for O’Donnell because Mendez’s plan needs his help. Specifically, O’Donnell needs to get the seven plane tickets out of Tehran confirmed before Mendez gets to the airport, or they’ll be all dressed up with nowhere to go. Cranston is fantastic running around Washington getting these tickets verified (he needs Presidential approval) and there’s a good bit of tension in Tehran with Mendez and the hostages getting through security. There are a couple beats that come off as trumped up, such as the tickets not being approved when Mendez checks in, but then appearing 30 seconds later, or Siegel and Chambers getting back to their office just as the Iranian security guard was pulling the phone away from his ear, but they don’t hurt the film in a significant away.

Indeed, even though I knew everyone was getting out, Affleck and his team do an amazing job creating as much tension as they do about what is essentially seven people getting on a plane. Affleck uses a lot of close-ups and a lot of contrasting frantic Iranians with nervous Americans, but it works really well.

Since I don’t watch awards shows, I don’t have any way of handicapping ARGO’s chances for getting nominations, but this is a very good movie. It is a quiet movie, though, that seems destined to be lost between the summer’s noise and the winter’s emotion. The only kick I get out of awards is that I realize that if people I like getting nominated or even win, that means there’s a greater chance I get to see more of them. There’s been a critical response around ARGO that Ben Affleck has arrived as a director. We see that Warner Brothers has taken notice, as Affleck was rumored to be in consideration for the Justice League movie. Both of these are good things for me because I like Affleck as a director. I see ARGO much less as a sign that he’s arrived, and rather as a sign that he’s established himself as a director who makes movies I want to see, as much for the stories he chooses to film as the way in which he assembles them.

Whatever film he directs next will be a film I’m already lined up to see.

MONSTERS, INC.: There’s Nothing More Toxic or Deadly Than a Human Child

Monsters, Inc. (2001) – The 4th Pixar Animated Feature – Directed by Pete Docter – Starring John Goodman, Billy Crystal, James Coburn, Mary Gibbs, Jennifer Tilly, and John Ratzenberger.

Until I watched Cars 2, MONSTERS, INC. was my least favorite Pixar movie, which speaks to the high quality of the company’s animated features because I do thoroughly enjoy this film. What I dislike about MONSTERS is that it lacks the emotional punch of Pixar’s other films, and feels narratively lighter than the rest.

Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and MONSTERS isn’t a bad movie. It plays like a modern Abbott and Costello movie in many ways with its arguing pair of friends in the lead of a simple story made complex by the characters themselves, rather than by the plot. MONSTERS would have been a much simpler and shorter movie if Sully (John Goodman) had simply turned Boo in to the proper authorities rather than trying to put everything back in place before he got in trouble.

Where MONSTERS succeeds first is in its inventive set-up. Sully is a monster. He lives in Monstropolis. His job is to scare kids.

That’s all pretty standard. It’s the reason why the monsters scare the kids, and the manner in which they end up in the kids’ various bedrooms, that works. The monsters need the kids to scream, because the screams are the energy source that powers Monstropolis. Sully isn’t scaring kids just because he’s a monster and monsters scare kids, but because it’s his job. He works at a factory called, yes, Monsters Inc., where he takes a regular shift on the Scare Floor.

The Scare Floor is brilliant. The monsters and their technicians line up in a row on the floor and have doors brought to them on an overhead wire delivery system. All of the doors are kept in a separate room and brought to the floor when the technician calls for them. I love watching the process of machinery work and the system here is both wonderfully complex and wonderfully simple. When the door lands on the Scare Floor its attached to the factory’s trans-dimensional portal, the monsters open it and they pass through into children’s bedrooms to collect their scares.

There’s a growing problem at Monsters, Inc., however, in that kids are becoming harder to scare. It’s a nice acknowledgment that kids are growing up faster than they used to, but the best twist is that the monsters are every bit as afraid of the kids as the kids are supposed to be of the monsters.

Monsters, Inc. has a strict “no touching” policy, informing their employees that even the briefest touch from a child can kill them. When a human sock comes through the portal on the back of one monster, all heck breaks loose. The Child Detection Agency (CDA – an analogue for our CDC) arrives in massive numbers in their full-suit protective uniforms to put Monsters, Inc. on lockdown, seal the sock off, flash fry it to dust, and de-fur and de-contaminate the offending monster.

We get this as prelude to the main plot of MONSTERS, which is when a little girl Sully names Boo follows him from her bedroom back into Monstropolis. Sully avoids having the de-furring treatment because he finds the door on the Scare Floor after hours. Sully checks inside the room to see if a monster is in there and Boo attaches herself to him and comes back through. Before Sully can successfully replace her, Randall (Steve Buscemi) sends the door back to the vault. Randall is Sully’s rival for the top scare score, though the enmity really runs from Randall to Sully until Randall’s dastardly plot is revealed.

While Sully and his technician/best friend Mike (Billy Crystal) are trying to get Boo back to her world as they avoid the CDA, they uncover a plot between Randall and Mosnters, Inc.’s owner Henry J. Waternoose III (James Coburn) to extract screams by force. The company is in trouble and Waternoose has turned to the dark side to save it, the company’s well being trumping his use of morals and ethics.

Sully and Mike get exiled to the Himalayas, where they meet the previously exiled Abominable Snowman (John Ratzenberger). The look of the Snowman is clearly modeled after the Rankin-Bass “Bumble,” and a nice nod to monsters of days gone by. The newest exiled citizens of Monstropolis argue over what to do – Sully wants to get back and Mike wants to endlessly complain.

The final act is a series of exciting chase sequences using the doors to hop all over the globe as Sully and a returning Mike save Boo, take down Waternoose, and invent a new energy supply – children’s laughter.

MONSTERS, INC. is a good film, but it’s a tasty snack more than a meal. I like it, I own it, I watch it every so often, but the inventiveness of the first 20-30 minutes (including a very well-made opening titles sequence) is quickly consumed by a squabbling buddy film/action movie. It’s not Pixar’s best but it must be remembered that “not Pixar’s best” is still better than most everyone else’s.