HAVE YOU STILL GOT THE BEAST IN YOU?

DIRECTED BY SPIKE JONZE

STARRING: MAX RECORDS, JAMES GANDOLFINI, LAUREN AMBROSE, FOREST WHITAKER, CATHERINE O’HARA, PAUL DANO, CHRIS COOPER with MARK RUFFALO and CATHERINE KEENER

Through the ages, naughty-kid-films have always been about a titular protagonist (as in ‘Home Alone’ or ‘Dennis the Menace’) standing tall amidst the ruins he’s caused, in a mask of innocence. Yes, it’s a mask as ‘Garfield’ was right to point out. Grounding him won’t work, silent treatment would mean testing your own patience than his. Animated characters, on the other hand, have forever been well-behaved when painted pretty, twisted when not. Lightning McQueen came in sparkly red, the worst that Woody’s ever come across is a rip on his sleeve. Even Sully (from Monsters Inc.) was crafted to be loved, in both sound (where he was voiced by the warmth of John Goodman) and image. Randall, on the other hand, boasts of higher care in being made to look repulsive, same as Darla (the girl with the retainer in ‘Finding Nemo’); I won’t even have to tell you about the Vulture Vlad (in ‘Horton Hears a Who’) or ‘Chick Hicks’ (who wins the Piston Cup). ‘Lotso’ the bear could be the only exception.

In ‘Where the Wild things are’, however, we witness a double-breach. Max (Max Records) is not just mischievous; he's ‘out-of-control’. He lives in the igloo of his own wild world, growling at anyone who posed a threat. Intruders shall be spared no mercy. If you are a sister, he’d give you his heart only to break it anyway, with an addition of a sodden carpet that you won’t be able to tread upon for days. If you’re his Mother, he’d insult you in front of your new boyfriend. Plus, he bites. We don’t know if he’s a product of dysfunction. He likes being pampered, but his wild side doesn’t fill in for the absence of it; it’s a parallel existence. It’s an obvious fact, the child-fascination of power and its exhibition, often channelized into heroes and role models. Our Max is raw, though. And ruthless. He wouldn’t want to save the world – he’d rather break it to pieces before the Sun went down, for that would bust all his worries.

If our Hero is bad, we find his ‘wonderland’ to be worse. It’s deserts and destruction; dirt-clods and dreary creatures that reflect his age, rage and mental makeup. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) has a runny nose and is irritable like he has a cold. Alexander (Paul Dano) is meek and sounds the youngest. The two of them are partial manifests of Max himself. The rest are either objects of his fantasy or a childlike fear that his stupendous ego tries to outrun. Judith (Catherine O’Hara) and K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) could be his versions of ‘the Mother he thinks he has’ and ‘the Mother he wishes he had’. In Douglas (Chris Cooper), we see a Father, a mark of wisdom and unsurpassable levels of tolerance. In Ira (Forest Whitaker), it’s a pompous Uncle who likes to be the butt of a joke merely out of largeness of heart. Again, in his wife (Judith), we find the opposite. It’s just my opinion that he fashions a family out of them all, intimidated by some, inspired by others and influenced primarily by Carol, in whom he sees the part of himself he actively nurtures. His love is aggressive, his hatred bitter. “Don’t go. I’ll eat you up and love you so” is what he wants for a parting comment. A howl is better than the best of tears – his smile, even more. There’s no real evidence that his adventure was an actual trip and not a fantasy; it doesn’t matter either. For all we know, he could have run down an adjacent street and gotten back, scared of the dark. That’s just another story untold.

Maurice Sendak, the author of the picture-book that forms the basis of ‘Where the Wild things are’, oversees its production. The casting is perfect, its actors from all over the spectrum. James Gandolfini in his nasal tone is Carol personified, with a voice that whines even when terrifying. Lauren Ambrose adds serenity to her K.W, a character that endears by itself even otherwise. It’s the same with Ira, although he’s an added reflection of all that’s warm and friendly about Forest Whitaker. Catherine O’Hara, who played a reproachful mother in ‘Home Alone’ is back to nagging – no one can nag better than her! Paul Dano is distinctively young among the lot, like how Chris Cooper is specifically more serene. I try to take the place of the author for a second, watching his characters in the hands of his actors who know what they’re doing, in turn directed by a man who’s as crazy as he was when he wrote the book. Everyone is active in their efforts to lift their character to originality instead of playing an active stereotype. “Max is Max!” as Catherine Keener was so accurate to point out in an interview. The film in itself is organic – there’s nothing fictitious about it. It’s a real, human fantasy of a child who’s scared back into happiness after seeing what sadness and misery could do to a ‘wild thing’ like him. An essential nightmare that’s depicted to perfection.

I’m not in a position to decide upon the suitability of the film for its younger audiences. They might not understand, they might even get bored for there’s nothing ‘lively’ about the film save for a soundtrack that’s so good-natured that it’s fun. I’m sure, however, that they’d learn two things. One: It’s not cool to be destructive. Two: love or the expression of it is nothing to be ashamed of. To the parent, it’s an opportunity to cherish their little brat even more in an invitation to a world away from everything that’s calculative about adult life. The film works best, though, for those who still haven’t outlived the wildness in them, for they’d come out beating their chests, roaring and howling like their little Hero.

Quite like how I did. What about you?

MIDWAY

DIRECTED BY JASON REITMAN

STARRING: GEORGE CLOONEY, VERA FARMIGA, ANNA KENDRICK, MELANIE LYNSKEY, JASON BATEMAN

It’s a good thing that the writers (and director) started with trying to give us a hang of the whole thing, because, for all I know, there are the excessively air-sick people who might not take to the frequent flying over here, or might take to it in a wholly adverse manner. And what with the finesse in everything, from wearing of suit-tie to the clapping-shut of cases, and not to mention the swirl of trolley-bag, backed by a voice-over by the protagonist, ‘Up in the Air’ begins (and one can very well say that) to be a rocket-ride of sorts. But you know it has to tire down and maybe even cease to be, some time, because that’s what they’re advocating, and by ‘they’, I mean the people who are in it: The names of Ryan Bingham and Natalie Keener.

It’s a very nice set-up: very tight, prospective. A man who does things solely for the love of doing it, and who doesn’t do the rest because he sees no point in them, finds a woman who could be an exact match, a mirror-image potential, in exactly the terms she herself mentions to him in a profanely humourous way got me asking one thing, straight out: Could what’s growing between them be called ‘love’, or could it even be related to it in the most obscure way possible? That’s precisely what’s expected of me, I guess, and by asking it, I had fulfilled the entire point of that aspect of the film. The other aspect, the ‘exterminator’ outfit, with the accompanying guilt, sounding more in the kid than the mentor, who has enough behind him to look grave and battle-worn and say “that’s what they do all the time”, is unquestionable, citing its genuineness. It is never said that they like what they’re doing: Ryan flies and that’s pretty much all he sees in the whole thing, because he’s the no-attachment-no-belonging person who finds some nice shoes that fit him. Natalie does what she does for the sake of a guy who is only to leave her. It’s a sordid turn to a solely-professional, career-related progression of plot. And it is intended.

I could have done with a little more perspective. Everything’s fine, I mean, the whole ‘nostalgic trip’ is no guessing game, you know for sure it’s about to come, all the flying has got to crash there some time, because that’s where one finds the ground. And here, risking sounding like a fan of ‘Hannah Montana: The Movie’, (which I definitely am not) I wished we could have crashed a little harder, or a little longer, whichever could have left a better mark. Probably this portion of the film is fine and it’s Ryan that’s to blame, saying so little about what he has in mind, merely being suggestive, through alterations in his pet ‘backpack theory’ in course of time, and we get to see a transition coming up all along that we fail to see how Ryan is evolving to bring that about, only because it’s not shown. Having established him as a person who has a clear idea about why he’s doing what he’s doing, and having helped us get in pace with the whole of his character, it feels more than hurtful when wounded at last shot: It feels juvenile. It is tough to digest that a man like Ryan couldn’t have seen that coming, because I didn’t, and I had a feeling that I was living like him all through. Infidelity (in so called ‘practicality’) is said to have been subtly written in, but it only served to be a road-block, at least to me. I could have done with a more ‘to the ground’ twist to the tale, an ‘in the face’ sort than to have presented the vixen as vile: I can never digest that, it’s ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ all over again, for me.

‘You are where you belong, and you’d better belong there’. It’s loud and clear that it’s Ryan’s cue to get back to where he belongs to, where he’s from (“I’m from here”. I loved that line), a ‘back to ground’ sort for the one who flies, it’s just that I only felt that a man like him wouldn’t suffer in the first place, to know. The film is filled with its moments, and Anna Kendrick hardly has her tongue off her cheek, (the girl who so effortlessly made us hate her in the 2007 independent, ‘Rocket Science’) and proves to be a charmer all the way, making wonder why she didn’t get her statuette. The ‘earthlings’ have a lot to say in the less they say, although the ‘misfits’ could have made themselves clear (or maybe they have, I don’t know). ‘Up in the Air’, otherwise, is a level cruise, with a little bump and a hurtful bruise.

"GOODBYE, SOLO"

DIRECTED BY RAMIN BAHRANI

STARRING: SOULEYMANE SY SAVANE, RED WEST, DIANA FRANCO GALINDO

Larger than life is a tagline one should never associate with ‘life’, and that is the irony I find in critical response to Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani’s third venture. Maybe life has just one way of presenting itself and it’s us humans who corrupt its uniqueness with perceptions of our own, but ‘Goodbye Solo’ perceives for itself: A hundred and first, of sorts. And it is not exhilaration or a sense of triumph that I feel when a film on such lines comes my way or if I seek it, but rather an urgency to sit and think. That’s precisely what ‘Goodbye Solo’ inspired in me.

Solo is ambitious. He desperately wants to get out of the streets of Winston-Salem, but he doesn’t mind the skies over it. In fact, that’s where he wants to be: Serving people on a plane. That’s what he does when he thinks he’s sure that no one’s looking, and that could be right for all we know, because his wife Quiera is busy enough nursing herself and yelling at him, his step-daughter Alex (an extremely adorable Diana) hardly makes eye-contact, and his friends are often too sedated to notice, and this isn’t a bunch of negatives heaped on everyone else. Neither is it a glorification of a misplaced protagonist. It’s life: As plain, and as simple.

But there’s William the ‘old dog’, and he’s pretty much the watchful eye for everyone except himself, only that he hides it beneath the wrinkles and streaks of graying red hair, never to be caught in the act, although uncovered at a point of time. He has his share of cheek, although it takes a hell lot of time and an equal amount of provocation to get that out of him, he drinks like the sobriety he is, he is reminiscent of his times and virtually lives there, with the Harleys and Hank Williams and less complicated telephone sets. He has money in a bank account, only to spend on films at Marketplace Cinemas, a place he frequents (not without reason), and on a far more ‘adventurous’ task that has his negotiate with the cab-driver who flat-out doesn’t want to be one.

One can never explain ‘love’, one can never theorize the intensity of certain affections and the existence of the same. Solo might be one who dreams about the sky, but it doesn’t take a rival to bring him to the ground, nor does an equivalent ambition. It’s surprisingly the lack of it, and he cannot see why it is so. He finds he can never comprehend William, because he’s just not like him. Solo speaks of attachment, and family to him is ‘fun’. William wishes to be alone. It is a love story that has not been touched, and we know that Solo would never get to William, and we know that Solo, on his part, would never cease trying. We know October the 20^th can never be stopped from coming, and we know for sure, that ‘Blowing Rock’ is not exactly a picnic spot one would plan to camp in. But we still watch it: Not with a degree of empathy one would relate to other films with fairly similar themes, but as a detached, separate person in the thick of things. Not through William’s eyes, not through Solo’s, but through the tiny opening on the camera-phone that Alex so incredibly operates, which happens to be the only way you get to see the world as it is.

I wouldn’t touch upon anything that Ramin Bahrani was part of, because I know that what is, is only because he intended it to be so. That’s why Souleymane keeps saying, “I appreciate it”, and that’s why he’s so very far from being a good actor. Because we’re all bad actors who forget our lines and ask for time to rethink about what we were about to say. William wouldn’t give it to him, for his head and his pocketbook are brimming already. It’s a clear-cut void, one facing the back of the other, a glass wall in between. Thinking things is the most they can do.

Maybe I could be wrong. Perhaps there would be a time when Bahrani would require a revisit so he could get back to what he was, get back to his brilliance. This, is not that time. This is the ‘brilliance’.