Star Trek

The buzz was up about STAR TREK 2009. Good for kids, good story, very moving. My kids are now 12 and nearly 10, and maybe because they're a bit older now, tweens in fact, I talked them into going. My husband read me the review from Kids-in-Mind, but no red flags. Violence and gore got a 6 rating from them—compare to the 7 rating given PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, which my kids saw over a year ago.

Besides, a younger friend of theirs had gone, and people were saying it's fine for kids.

Whoa, was I mistaken. Neither one of them liked the violence, the volume, the velocity—the three off-putting Vs of PG13dom. I don't know how Kids-in-Mind decided to rate the violence at 6. How could a man bound to a table to be tortured, a large insect forced down his throat, rate a 6? What kind of torture gets a 10? It feels like the world is getting less sensitive, but I'm becoming more grateful for my children's sensitivity.

My son is a particular fan of the MPAA ratings system—he even has it tacked to his bedroom wall. Because of him I've adjusted my attitude toward ratings. When I was single and living in New York, I once interviewed the director Abel Ferrara and recall his outrage that his teenage son might be prohibited from seeing whatever movie he liked. From his point-of-view it was a self-expression issue, and I agreed.

For my son, it's a self-protection issue. He values the ratings system because he's not ready for sexual themes, he doesn't like seeing cruelty, especially if it's aimed at animals, and Hollywood movies tend to overwhelm him with their explosions, constant orchestral climaxing, and endless chase sequences. He's the one sitting through the previews with his fingers in his ears.

Another reason my kids didn't go in for STAR TREK is that they lack the allegiance, formed over decades, to the series that my husband and I have. While we are not Trekkers, I for one spent a good deal of my youth with the crew of the Enterprise. Naturally I paid close attention to the women, the few there were: Nurse Christine Chapel, Yeoman Janice Rand, and the biggie: Lt. Uhura.

Uhura and the actor who played her, Nichelle Nichols, carry a lot of cultural heft. Nichols was one of the first Black women on a TV series not to play a domestic worker (Diahann Carol in the 1968 Julia was another trailblazer I watched without quite understanding, but maybe intuiting, the import—I was seven that year). An episode in which she kissed William Shatner broke a barrier. After the first season, she thought of quitting, but Martin Luther King, Jr. persuaded her to stay on, citing the impact she was having.

Her character never rose to the prominence many viewers would have liked, and struggled in relative obscurity even when STAR TREK crossed into feature film territory.

But it still shocked me, though maybe it shouldn't have, to see how little the capable Zoe Saldana has to work with in the new STAR TREK. While her brethren are given emotionally rich origin stories to add depth to their relationships, she is left with a gag about her first name and a running sex joke about her professional field of linguistics. It's implied that she wants to serve on the Enterprise in order to be near her boyfriend, Spock. Gone is the dignity of the TV version of Uhura, who once came upon a shipmate and began speaking Swahili with him (too bad he turned out to be a monster in disguise). I will never forget sitting in my suburban living room listening to Swahili and thinking it the most beautiful language I'd ever heard.

Preview + Review of Long-Awaited CORALINE

CORALINE is scheduled for release to theaters on February 6, 2009.

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars. He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones, and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on hand to answer audience questions.

My son wasn't sure he wanted to see a "horror" movie. 
So we headed into NYC with the plan that he would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a void, it feels like this is a movie partly about the animator and the animator’s art. These are the hands of the evil Other Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, but here they are, bare of fleshly trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline, you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios. It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of wonders. (And the wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the early other world scenes.)

Henry Selick’s Other Mother is a kind of ‘50s fantasy mom—she cooks brilliantly in heels, perfect make-up, and manicure and wears a stainless, starched apron. Other Father is affable, doting, and fun (aside from the saucy, riotous French and Saunders as the Misses Spink and Forcible, my favorite vocal performance is John Hodgman's as the Fathers Real and Other).

Coraline's real world parents, by contrast, are familiar to us as contemporary, overworked telecommuters (fortunate in that sense, they write at home on gardening) who share the work of their life equally, don’t exactly excel in the kitchen, and don’t have much time for their daughter.

That Coraline's creativity will rival the Other Mother's is intimated by a lovely scene that is not in Neil Gaiman’s book. Having returned from an early foray into the other world, Coraline finds her apartment empty; her parents have not come home from work and grocery shopping. Newly arrived in a strange place, friendless and now abandoned by her parents, she goes to bed alone, making pillow-people versions of her mom and dad to comfort herself—the Other Mother isn't the only one who can conjure power from a doll. I think Coraline's realization that they're not coming back is the scariest moment in the story (though Gaiman's protagonist is pretty brave at this point, as I recall). Henry S. wisely lingers long enough for us to feel her loneliness and her sadness.

A resourceful adventurer who is, like too few movie protagonists—even at the dawn of the 21st century—a girl, Coraline would be perfect if not for Henry S.’s addition of a boy to come to her aid in her time of need. Or so I thought when I heard about him. But Wybie (nicknamed "Why Be Born" by Coraline—I guess Henry S. knew some of us would resist), who gives Coraline someone other than a (really cool) cat to dialog with, adds a melancholy element to the other world, where he is more expressive for his muteness.

When my son and I came back up the Hudson River the day after the screening, and made our report to his sister, she said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I do want to see Coraline.” I look forward to seeing it again with her.

We were too shy to ask for a shot of Henry S. with Ray, but here he is after the Q&A. Be sure to view through your 3D glasses.

I'll be blogging more thoughts on Coraline on my other blog, Oswegatchie. Look for the Coraline tag.

Women. We'll Settle for Half.

That's the official t-shirt of an organization called See Jane, founded by Geena Davis to correct the remarkable continuing disparity between male and female characters in programming aimed at young people. Incredibly, the entertainment industry needs more studies and data to convince it that girls, and female smurf-like characters and animals and so forth, are still largely missing from the sewage system that is mass media. Such activities keep the Annenberg School in business, I suppose, but sheesh, we all know TV and movies are male-dominated stories told from male perspectives with a pink bow slapped on here and there, and rather frequently a dead mother, to make us shed a tear. What a crushing bore! If it weren't for the exceptions, many of them celebrated right here at Alternative Films for Kids, we'd give up. But the exceptions shine so gloriously that we, like the good people at See Jane, prefer to keep pushing for improvement. Davis spoke about See Jane recently at the National Conference for Media Reform. (After watching Geena, have a look at the amazing keynote by Bill Moyers).

More good news for girls: Henry Selick is now in production with an animated screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. This is a story about a girl. That's it! No boy sidekick, no brother, and very few male characters to distract from the strength, determination and loving maturity of the girl who travels to the dark side on a rescue mission and finds her way back again—without a Frodo, a Skywalker, a Buzz Lightyear or a Sully to help her.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Not Independent, I just feel like writing about it and it's my blog after all

Tim Burton doesn’t need me to send people to the box office, but I’ve loved his recent work too much not to have a say about his latest alter-ego, and there’s no reason to leave things to film critics who work way too hard to be hip, ironic and smart all at once, like Anthony Lane ironizing in The New Yorker:

“The new Tim Burton movie stars Johnny Depp as an ageless weirdo, whose magical skills are matched only by his hangups about where he came from and how he is supposed to make friends with regular people. The film is called ‘Edward Scissorhands.’”

Sorry to pick on Anthony Lane but it’s too late to be reviewing CCF; maybe not too late to review a review of it.

Lane is right in seeing shades of Scissorhands in Willy Wonka, the latest of Tim Burton’s creative-genius-cum-social-misfit characters. Jack Skellington, Ed Wood, Batman and Beetlejuice are all here, but most of all Edward Scissorhands, who is referenced in everything from the production design of Charlie’s house, with its caving-in roof, to the grid-like orderliness of the town, to the scissors in Wonka’s hand when he cuts the ribbon to his factory, to the association of snow with love and creativity, to the tinkling incidental stylings of Danny Elfman.

With his continuing stories of outsider-artists, Burton has created something contradictory and, to use one of Wonka’s favorite words, “weird”—a series of personal blockbuster films. CCF, which is as surely about cinema as it is about candy, wrestles with this contradiction on the thematic level: how can someone so far-out be such a screaming financial success? Wonka, like Burton, is a wild, sometimes brooding talent making it in a bottom-line world, and while it isn’t cool anymore to talk about capitalism, it’s hard to keep from mentioning CCF’s many inconsistent messages about assembly-line production, wage slavery and machines/squirrels/Oompa Loompas vs. people. Burton and screenwriter John August are content at film’s end to leave most of Charlie’s town unemployed, supplanted by automation and “imported” workers from an undeveloped country willing to work for chocolate. (A chocolate Walmart Empire? Yes, you should be disturbed!)

But CCF is mostly about Wonka’s relationship to Burton’s other misfits and to Burton himself. Here, Edward Scissorhands has found success and fame, but something is still missing, that little thing called love, and whether, and how, it can co-exist with artistic flow. Finally, Edward has found his way out of isolation, if not out of his castle.

When Charlie leaves his crooked house and his endearing family (an only child with—count them!—six supportive parents to Wonka’s bitter single father) and enters the factory with his ticket-holding peers, the movie faithfully follows the book’s trail of cautionary disappearances, one misbehaving child after the next. The other kids are archetypal variations, children gone bad at the hands of distant parents. They all have some kind of exaggerated attachment disorder, and it will be up to Charlie and Grandpa Joe to show the worst case, Willie Wonka himself, out of his suffering. As in the book, children will be sucked into tubes, turned into blueberries and sent down garbage chutes, but the source of evil, and this is really elaborated in the movie, is an absence of appropriately nurturing parents: instead, they are rigid and distant, permissive and distant, controlling and distant. The failure of those who don’t “win” the Factory gambit is a failure of intimacy. (It's a failure of imagination too, of course: what does one do with a child all day? Park it in front of the TV, feed it, sign it up for competitive sports, give it presents.) The consequences suffered by those who don’t pay attention to Wonka, as Dahl wrote it and as underscored in this version, are not so much penalties exacted by him as the natural consequences of choices those families have made from the beginning.

Wonka knows this: we see him eye his charges shrewdly throughout the tour (one nice transition cuts from Wonka’s face to all the children and their guardians minus Wonka, seen from behind in the pink dragon boat; another shot lingers on Veruca Salt’s father, a nut factory owner, and Willy as they lock gazes). He pretends not to know their names and histories, although he obviously does his research and the film’s opening shows us how dysfunctionality takes only a quick newsclip to spot (of the ticket-holders, only Charlie is spared the pre-tour media blitz). Shying from Violet Beauregarde’s mother to sit by Charlie and Grandpa Joe (who unlike the other parents is roughly a contemporary of Wonka’s own father), Wonka offers Charlie a ladleful of chocolate, because he looks so hungry.

As for the other children, well, where they’re headed was a foregone conclusion when they opened their mouths on TV and told the world how they won, whether it mattered to them, and why. “There is no doubt that [Wonka] despises them,” writes Lane, “and that raises questions as to why he has lured them, with promises of candy, into his edible home.” In order to find just one like Charlie, is why. In order to befriend someone who knows that candy doesn’t have to have a point, but that there is a point to having a family.

It is Charlie who heals Willie’s rift with his father and gives him another try at having a family. And though Willie credits an Oompa Loompa with inspiring the psychoanalytic revelation that leads to his union with the Buckets (“I need a hair/heir!”), it’s Charlie who’s the real therapist, asking Willy leading questions throughout the tour: do you remember being a child, do you remember your first candy—finally giving his blessing to Willy’s genius (“It doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”) What distinguishes Charlie from the other children is that he's treated like a person instead of a child; he's treated as a responsible member of his household. Burton himself has said Wonka hates children, but he flees from people of all ages; he's misanthropic. He likes Charlie, and Charlie is a child. Age is not the issue.

Like J.M. Barrie's gossipy friends in Finding Neverland, Lane has insinuations to make about Willy Wonka. (The Michael Jackson overtones imputed to Depp by so many viewers seem to me to lead nowhere, and distract from the story). True, Depp’s Wonka may be outlandish, androgynous, even foppish, but that doesn’t make him a sexual creep. One of the ways Burton won my trust was in the casting, through the relationship Johnny Depp and Freddie Highmore carry over from Finding Neverland. Another way he won it was by first making Big Fish, another fable about father-son reconciliation, in which the threatening atmosphere ultimately has to do with unconsious fears and the demands of the tall tale. In Big Fish, Burton is not about creeping us out; the eeriness heightens the everyday, common love that turns the wheels of the story. You can’t move the audience without a little friction, some gray areas, some uncertainties. But does Wonka try to lure a child alone with him into the Whipped Cream room? No.

Not that Depp’s Wonka should appeal to everyone, he's twisted and subversive in the Roald Dahl tradition, but I don’t think Depp and Burton have a nasty or sadistic intent. I didn’t react that way, and neither did my highly-sensitive children. Lane, reminded by Depp’s performance of Oscar Wilde, Michael Jackson and Tootsie (I guess because Lane thinks Depp’s fake teeth make him enunciate like Dustin Hoffman in that film), asks, “Where does moral tutelage end and sadistic farce begin?” The answer is that, as usual in his work, Burton gives us more, a fable wrapped in a fairy tale. There are moral lessons but there is magic, darkness, beauty and transcendence, too.

Hollywood is woefully short of new fabulists; children’s animation is often stuck in the land of irony and allusion, and there isn’t much in the way of live-action fare for anyone under ten, so many of us are grateful for this story in which the two little boys—Charlie and Young Willy—possess gifts young people (girls half the time, but don’t look to Burton for that) bring into the world and then, too often, have crushed out of them: the power to heal and the power to create. People keep asking “Why the Wonka backstory?,” but I like how the boys communicate across the years, both of them heroic and resistant to dominant culture in their own ways, and in ways that are not stereotypically masculine.

As for their foils: Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, Mike Teavee and Violet Beauregarde are recast in this version of CCF as more than deadly sins, they are authoritarian party-poopers, parental stand-ins who heckle Willie Wonka mercilessly about the practicality of his inventions. If we're not sorry to see them go, maybe it's because we have no trouble signing on to Wonka's tests. Will they listen to his ground rules? That's one test. The other is uniquely an addition of the film's, and characterisically Burtonesque: will they tolerate Wonka's creative excesses, his impractical, even useless dreams? “That makes no sense,” Veruca says of a Wonka creation, and Mike Teavee pronounces everything at the factory “totally pointless,” dissolving, in image and voice, into Wonka’s rejecting father, who echoes from the past, “Candy is a waste of time.”

Candy is a waste of time. So is filmmaking, unless you can make “buckets” of money at it. One of the joys and vicissitudes of the creator, whether candymaker or filmmaker, is that the artist’s imagination gets a vigorous workout while the consumers—the gluttonous Augustus Gloop, the full-time spectator Mike Teavee—consume. One person’s exuberant play is someone else’s addiction. Although the Wonka-as-director theme plays out during the entire factory tour, it is in the TV room scene that Burton makes the association to visual confections and their passive spectators (us) most explicit. Can we all be Wonkas or must most of us just sit and watch all the fun? In Burton’s other films, there is room for only one Misunderstood Creator. This time he moves over and makes room for another, a boy whose imaginative fancies are fueled by happiness instead of torment. As he proved with the big-hearted, forgiving Big Fish, Burton has matured.

Wonka’s response to the stifling little girls and boys he mistakes for his p-p-par-unmentionables is a series of childish outbursts. “Mumbler!” he shouts at Mike Teavee. “Seriously, I cannot understand a single word you’re saying.” They don’t speak the same language, and it’s no wonder that Wonka, the boy who felt so misunderstood he ran away from home, grew up to conclude, “A family is not conducive to a creative atmosphere.” Or is it? That’s the transformation we see with this Willy Wonka, and that’s what makes it a family film.

We Pause for a Moment to Rail at Hollywood

"Which was your favorite character?" My daughter asked me of the film Madagascar, which we saw today. Huh. A favorite. Well, there was basically one female character, a hippopatamus whose job as a character was to support the friendship of the male leads, a lion and a zebra. The zebra's conflict was that he needed some adventure and the lion's conflict was that he was hungry. At the risk of sounding like a humorless feminist, which I often am, I'm just a wee bit bored-to-death with male leads, their male sidekicks, and the females who get a corner of the screen to use staring at the dudes.

My son had been counting down the days until the opening of Madagascar. We had arranged to see it with a friend my children, his mother and his three-year-old brother. Much excitement leading up to it.

My spirits sank as I noticed, while checking showtimes and arranging to meet our friends, the PG rating "for crude humor." "Uh oh," I said into the phone to the other mother without thinking. "Here come the fart jokes. Or worse, if the script is really bad." When I hung up I turned to my son, who had tears in his eyes.

"I'm not going," he said with a choked voice. He really hates "juvenile humor," the provenance of adults with creative limitations who somehow managed, when history named this branch of comedy, to get juveniles blamed for things vulgar. For an hour he argued for staying home. "I won't like it."

"Look," I said. "There are websites for parents where they detail all the things about a movie that might be a problem for parents or kids. I can go read one of their reviews."

"I don't want to know what the problems are."

"That's ok, I'll read and report back to you without the details."

So I read the review on Kids-in-Mind, a site with a numbered rating system for sex and nudity, violence and gore, and profanity that intends to "enable concerned adults to determine whether a film is appropriate for them and their children according to their own criteria and values."

From their review it sounded like Madagascar would have the usual male-dominated cast, with one female in a principal role, the cliché mild-elder-woman-who-beats-up-a-ferocious animal...and we wouldn't be getting away without a fart joke or two. The only value of mine it seemed to support was that the giraffe gets an acupuncture treatment. All right!

And there would be some "name-calling," Kids-in-Mind noted, including "pansies."

The "profanity glossary" on the site says "Words or expressions that are used to denigrate and insult one's racial or ethnic background, gender or sexual orientation: Examples include the N-word, various anti-Semitic terms, and anti-homosexual terms like fa**ot."

In my book, "pansies" is anti-homosexual, so I wrote and told them so (nonsensically, it's also pejorative for "nonviolent").

To my surprise Kids-In-Mind wrote right back, said 'right you are,' and changed their designation of pansies to "derogatory." Which is why I'm plugging their site, which has been helpful to me on other occasions with the Highly Sensitive Viewers at my house. (Who until today, by the way, had never said "that sucks." Thank you so very much, whoever thinks a kid's movie can't do well without a PG rating.)

Hollywood should have purged itself of the anti-gay thing long ago, so why does it persist? And, aside from: 1) the occasionally-enlightened Pixar, which throws girls crumbs like Dory (Finding Nemo) and Jessie (Toy Story 2) and 2) the women's liberaton allegory Chicken Run, which in any case had to cross the Atlantic to be screened in the land where women's suffrage was first won (1869, in Wyoming Territory), why are female cartoon personalities nearly always one-dimensional, often ruled by sex jokes or shunted to the side?

If a female buddy movie starred a zebra and a lion, would they have to drive themselves off a cliff at the end so audiences wouldn't be too threatened by the awesome power of female buddyship? Please!