Short Take: "The Muppets", "The Adventures of Tintin".

Appealing to nostalgia might not be the best angle to use in a society where history is constantly relegated to a previous, usually inferior, level of existence, however this is exactly what The Muppets does and it does it magically. Based on the beloved characters made famous by Jim Henson in the late 1970s, the film tries to rekindle the memories of those who loved the Muppets, while introducing them to a whole new generation.
Injected with the fresh blood of director James Bobin and musical composer Bret McKenzie (two of the men behind the amazing Flight of the Conchords) and writer/actor Jason Segel, the movie is a pure labor of love, done by the people who grew up with these characters and who wanted younger people to get to know them.
The movie in a way is a fictitious version of its creation. When it starts we meet Gary (Segel) and Walter, two brothers who live in Smalltown, USA and who grew up loving the Muppets (one of the first scenes has them watching the show together in an episode with Steve Martin as a guest). Walter has a special reason for loving them more: he is a Muppet himself.
Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Adams) take Walter to Los Angeles so he can make his dream come true and visit The Muppets' studio, however once there, Walter is appalled to find out that not only is the lot practically deserted, but an evil businessman (Cooper) has decided to steal it and turn it into an oil refinery.
Walter sets out on a mission to get all the Muppets back together and raise the money to save the studio.
Call it a mix between a telethon (moviethon?), an old fashioned "let's put a show together" spectacle and a trip down memory lane.
The film goes the extra mile to put a smile on audience faces while paying tribute to the enormous legacy The Muppets have had in pop culture but more than that it works as a superb exercise in postmodern theories regarding memory and its direct relation with mass entertainment.
Many people may not remember when they took their first step or when their first tooth fell out but they're more than likely to remember the first time they watched their favorite movie or their favorite TV show. Why and how media has developed parallel to our sensory is perhaps a matter best left to anthropologists and sociologists, however the issue with this film is that it taps onto something similar to an imagined collective consciousness; its pleasures exclusive to those who feel at home watching The Muppets.
The film's meta elements wonderfully convey the nature of filmmaking and interestingly enough lead us to question the prevalence of film as a medium, for example how will future generations feel about the use of current celebrities as "stars"? The film itself makes a point - in some truly outrageous jokes - about the ups and downs of star power. If people fifty years from now think of Jack Black as a movie star, then the movie will have huge nostalgic power, however if they wonder who the hell the fat guy with the weird smile is, the film will prove a point. Either way The Muppets come out winners.

The Adventures of Tintin might very well be the best movie Steven Spielberg has made in a decade. Unlike his "live action" projects which suffer from his excessive use of sentimentality and his need to tie everything up with a lovely bow, this graphic novel adaptation is served from its source material's no-bullshit approach to entertaining, which is something Spielberg has truly excelled at.
Tintin reminds you of the Indiana Jones movies and some of his family classics like E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial because you can feel how the director is loving every minute of it. Motion capture seems to have opened up a door that he's kept shut in favor of more "serious" films. From its lovingly detailed opening sequence, to its wonderful homage to Lawrence of Arabia the film thrives with a restlessness that becomes truly addictive. The work of the actors is superb and the film has one of the most exciting sequences Spielberg has ever shot.
It's refreshing to see how medium experts are finding new life in modern techniques.

Grades:
The Muppets ***½
The Adventures of Tintin ***

The Social Network ****

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield

Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara, Max Minghella

Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rashida Jones

It should be ironic to think that a movie that deals with the creation of Facebook never seems to be aiming for our "like"s. Yet that's just what David Fincher does in his transcendental The Social Network; a harsh film that deals with the way in which we search for humanity in a world that's constantly trying to rob us of it.

The plot centers on Mark Zuckerberg (Eisenberg), the Harvard undergrad who patented what came to be the largest social club on Earth. We see him struggle with his awkward social skills, his relentless need for approval and success, and eventually with the lawsuits he got from people claiming he'd robbed the idea from them.
As played by Eisenberg, Mark is a complicated, trying to be complex, guy who seems to be looking for acceptance while being driven by overpowering ambition. When we first meet him, he's practically insulting his girlfriend Erica (Mara) but he reacts in a way that we understand he means to do no harm. His defense mechanism of using bitterness, sarcasm and asshole-ness have become his modus operandi.

When he's approached by the Winklevoss twins (played brilliantly by Hammer) who want him to take part in their new project, Mark's faux condescending reaches a turning point: we see this man has chosen his identity and like the website he would create, has decided to create a facade of who he is.

Because regardless of how much people show on Facebook, the truth is that it still remains a canvas where we paint our lives the way we want others to see them. Regardless of the nature of the contents, everything that's on Facebook is there because we know people will see it and more than that, we want people to see it.

Therefore Eisenberg's immersion into Zuckerberg is not as much an impersonation as it's an embodiment of a spirit. Not to say that he makes Mark just a symbol, because he infuses him with painful human traits, but he seems to be aiming more towards understanding what would drive someone to do the things Zuckerberg allegedly did; instead of focusing on representing the way in which he comes off in public.

This dialectic between what we are and what we show might be the center of the film. One that's already a strange beast for what it is on a technical level.

On one side we have Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, which recalls the fast paced exchanges of classics like His Girl Friday and anything Woody Allen has done. Despite the extreme quotability of the dialogs, the painfully funny jokes that Sorkin inserts in the most unexpected moments and the overall "movie" feeling of the way in which he constructs these characters, at the end of the film they are essentially human and real.

This, in combination with the supreme cast, make for an odd, but never awkward, pairing of clever wording and natural representation. Each character and each scene in the film have been structured in such a classic way that we understand what some people mean when they said that "they don't make them like they used to". The Social Network has the kind of screenplay that defies categorization: it can make you laugh, gasp and jump in excitement, yet with all of its wit and shattering sarcasm it's also the kind of movie that will break your heart.

When the film ends we might not understand more about the characters and the creation of Facebook (we certainly don't like or identify with most of what we've seen) but this is a movie where you leave the theater and have the impression that the characters' lives continued after the credits started rolling.

This isn't owed to the obvious fact that all of these people are still alive but the story is told with such urgency that it just can not be bound by celluloid.

This energy is owed to David Fincher, the maverick genius who has specialized in pushing the boundaries of what people are comfortable watching onscreen. His ability to extract cheap sentiment from even the most seemingly manipulative screenplay might be compared by some to extracting someone's soul.

Yet the truth is that Fincher is no demonic exorcist, in fact he's an avid student of what makes the soul what it is. He fools us by doing this, not in the way Hollywood has used us to (i.e. using melodrama and extreme manipulation) but by doing it in an almost procedural way. Fincher dissects everything until getting to the heart of it.

It's even more surprising that he grabs onto the very structure of Facebook to create his film. It might take several screenings to realize that The Social Network isn't very different from the site it discusses so much. Like Facebook we perceive mostly walls in which the characters express themselves.

We see Zuckerberg's obnoxious nerdiness, the Winklevoss' studly All-American poses and Eduardo Saverin's (Garfield) inherent goodness. Yet taking a deeper look at what lies beneath their facades, what they keep "private" so to speak, they become completely different beings.

Like Facebook, the film is selfcontained on an ever changing canvas that varies on mood, feeling and even state of sobriety.

Because of this, the site's creation during the film becomes less "geek talk" and more encoded language for these people's true identities. There is not much difference between the societal circles in Network and say the constricted, almost baroque stylistic choices of Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence.

Perhaps what Fincher is pointing to all along, is that despite the migration from traditional values to virtual ones, we're still essentially the same people, looking for the same things.

Our pursuit of happiness hasn't changed, what's changed is the way in which we conceal it. Whether we create corporations to get over the one that got away, or sink in eternal self pity and tragedy, The Social Network makes a case for what keeps on being our collective innermost fear: the curse of lifelong solitude.

While Watching "I Love You, Man"...

...I was delighted to see a Hollywood film that actually put some interest into friendship and wondered when did movies become so love-centered? (summed up beautifully when Jaime Pressly's character asks one of her friends "why does everything have to revolve around you?", to which she anwers "because I'm single!").
In this one the typical rom-com plot is tampered with when the guy (Rudd) already has the girl (Jones) but needs the friend to be his best man.
Enter Segel and all sorts of testosterone driven insanity and sensibility a la Judd Apatow.
The screenplay by director John Hamburg and Larry Levin pokes at both men and women and raises some fascinating ideas (the first half hour is laugh out loud funny!) but then the movie misses its aim and becomes so damn formulaic.
You know, just because you change the characters' genders doesn't mean you can get away with playing by the same rules plot wise (reason why I'm one of the only living people who seriously disliked "Brokeback Mountain").
Even if Segel and Rudd have awesome chemistry (unlike Rudd's with Jones...although that could've been on purpose) the last part of the film falls flat on its face declaring the only universal truth Hollywood has learned about men and women after a century of filmmaking: that we might indeed be from different planets.