Tim Burton confects a lesser landscape of adolescent angst. His fans and Lewis Carroll’s may find this “fantasy adventure” with “political allegory” and “avant-garde visuals” in Disney Digital 3D not their tea or party of choice. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s adaptation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871) stars Mia Wasikowska. This 19-year-old Alice flees a garden party, tumbles down a rabbit hole, imbibes elixirs, converses with animals and consorts with scheming queens. A parchment scroll foretells she will behead a dreaded resident of Underland. Wasikowska here recalls Dakota Blue Richards playing the 12-year-old adventurer in “The Golden Compass” astride a fantastic galloping beast, and the 14-year-old sojourner played by Saoirse Ronan in “The Lovely Bones,” for whom a subterranean playroom was the portal to another dreamy realm. A charter member of a clique of the mad, the open-minded Alice entertains advanced ideas about propriety, arranged engagements and mercantile expansion in China. On the centenary of Carroll’s birth, G.K. Chesterton lamented: “Poor, poor little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others.” The Alice of our time is assigned duty as a role model for girls nudged to think about finance rather than fiancees. There ought to be more wordplay, like Alice’s disquisition on the use of the word “secret” that anticipates the ordinary-language school of philosophy at Carroll’s Oxford. Burton fails to make her plight nearly strange enough. Her odd new world is insubstantial and its inhabitants are uninteresting. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a major letdown, compared to inspired loons he’s played in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Sweeney Todd.” Helena Bonham Carter, though, is superb with her digitally-ballooned noggin as the Red Queen. With Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas and Tim Pigott-Smith in the flesh; and in voice only Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor. 109m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

(Hausu, 1977) “House” is so much stranger than “The Room.” “The Room” may be from another planet, but Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hallucinatory House” is from another universe, or, it’s like “an episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento” as distributor Janus Films inventively suggests. Attempting to capture the fanciful imagination of his 11-year-old daughter, Obayashi’s pop-art haunted-house freak-out featuring seven teenage girls manages to be both compulsively watchable and completely indigestible. It’s a buffet of strangeness, grape bubblegum meets sashimi meets Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Banana Splits.” The detached fingertips picking out tunes on a very hungry piano are one of the inspired nightmare images you’ll be repeating for weeks. Disembodied kung fu-kicking girl’s legs? The bursts of animation, including a demonic cat (seen on the stunningly bold poster) and tragically sweet pop are equally random. It’s glorious delirium and downright nuts. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“House” opens Friday at Siskel. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Fabrice O. Joubert’s “French Roast” (France, 8m) satirizes café life in Paris with the story of a businessman’s lost wallet and a second cup of coffee. Joubert’s beautifully dimensional CG animated world suggests the live-action work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, but the timing and crisply comic sound design bear worthy comparison to Tati. Nicky Phelan’s “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” (Ireland, 6m) finds a disoriented grandmother making “Sleeping Beauty” into nightmare material for her granddaughter. Lovingly paced with the comedy enhanced by the rolling Irish accents. Javier Recio Gracia’s “The Lady and The Reaper” (Spain, 8m) follows another nice old woman, this one awaiting the Grim Reaper with complications to come late one night. The use of space and light suggests the dourness of Shane Acker’s “9″ but bursts into speed and color and gaudy 3-D animation as the story kicks in. Nick Park’s latest Wallace & Gromit, “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (30m, UK) returns to the handmade style that Park’s fans remember best. The dashing duo have opening a successful bakery, “Top Bun,” at 62 West Wallaby Street, but the murders of other bakers leads to a murder mystery. The clockwork comic inspiration is largely inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Avant-Gondry,” the Siskel capsule for “Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow” begins, and it’s a good start for this heartening selection of seventeen animations by Al Jarnow, mostly from 16mm originals, whose work ranges from pieces for children’s television and personal, more “avant-garde” work. Jarnow’s 1984 time-lapse film “Celestial Navigation” is an enthralling experience: measuring the light that falls in an upstairs room, ideal and bright for an artist’s studio. But it’s also eye-widening to realize that Jarnow animated for “Sesame Street”: films like these, drawing on a wide range of animation and experimental traditions, were part of the currency of education not so long ago. They snuck, unannounced, into cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness, as several are uncannily familiar to anyone who would have seen them as but a child). “Cosmic Clock,” a hand-wash lovely, defines seconds and minutes then centuries and millennia as a young man with a stopwatch, lying at a lean on a hill overlooking a lake, considers eons as Jarnow’s gentle animation pencils away. A hypnogogic time capsule to savor. A half-hour documentary, “Asymmetric Cycles,” will be shown, too, following Jarnow’s creative process. 90m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)

“Celestial Navigations” shows Friday and Saturday at Siskel. The Numero Group releases a DVD in coming weeks that has a total of forty-five pieces, along with the documentary.

The Numero Group, primarily known as a record label, is venturing into new media with “Celestial Navigations,” a compilation of the work of Long Island filmmaker Al Jarnow, who’s created everything from children’s animation on shows like “Sesame Street” in the 1970s to trippy, experimental short films. “He has a really fascinating body of work,” says Numero Group’s Ken Shipley. “When we looked at it, we were like, ‘How can we piece this together the same way we piece a record together?’” Shipley says that the difficulty of putting together a film like this is comparable to the difficulties they face when putting together one of their comp records. “The life of a project tends to be about somebody being passionate about that discovery and driving it to the next place,” he says. “We have so many projects on our white board, there’s probably not enough time to complete them all in the lifetime of the label. A project is driven forward because someone becomes passionate about it.” Asked why exactly Numero Group decided to venture into film, Shipley shrugs, “For us it’s just, ‘Let’s make some cool shit.’” “Celestial Navigations” plays at the Siskel Film Center February 19-20. More info and footage from the film can be found here. (Tom Lynch)

RECOMMENDED

Animators are licensed to toy with cause-and-effect. I wonder if particle physicists envy them. Or if embryologists wish they could invent the organic metamorphoses that mark so many animated films. Working with toy figurines, Belgian co-directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar take their twenty-episode 2003 TV series into a big-screen feature that packs delicious, delirious plot trajectories into a fleet seventy-five-minute tale of two birthday parties for Horse (voiced in subtitled French by Patar). Cowboy (Aubier) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) plan to build Horse a barbeque pit as a gift, but a bumped key on a computer keyboard adds a long string of zeros to their fifty-brick online order. The delivery of this mighty mass deforms the local geology of the tiny farm hamlet of the title. Adventures ensue underwater with aqualungs. One of the poles is terrorized by a giant mechanical penguin operated by scientists in white lab coats who lob jumbo snowballs with its metal flippers. Animals mobilize other animals as projectiles in combat. The comic machinery and manic whimsy all lead up to Horse’s next birthday as he courts a local equine, the music teacher.  “A Town Called Panic” is a giddy torrent of inventive detail wrangled with elastic logic by buoyant hearts. With the voices of Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont and François Neyken. 75m. (Bill Stamets)

“A Town Called Panic” opens Friday at the Music Box.

The high-treble irritation of “Alvin and The Chipmunks” (2007) is now doubled. The original trio of chirpy brother chipmunks hooks up with a female trio of conspecifics breaking into showbiz billed as The Chipettes. Global pop squeakers and animated critters Alvin, Simon and Theodore are on their own after two mishaps with wheelchairs put their live-action human caretakers in the hospital. Feckless slacker Toby (Zach Levi) sort of looks after the boys who enroll in high school. The message is sacrifice personal opportunity for the sake of sibling solidarity: a boy chipmunk is shamed for playing on the football team and a girl chipmunk is shamed for wanting to open solo for Brittany Spears. All six end up squeaking in sync and then sleeping in matched bunk beds. Betty Thomas (“The Brady Bunch Movie”) competently directs a contentless screenplay by Jon Vitti and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger. The only reason to see this is the off chance that the frequency of the chipmunks’ chatter kills head lice in kids and liquefies hardened earwax of their grandparents. With David Cross, Jason Lee and Wendie Malick; and the voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate. 91m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Novelist Barry Hannah says it well:  “I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure, and high exploration.”

And has that been what James Cameron’s been conjuring in his fevered imagination for as long as twenty years, a true ripper? Of all the things that can and will be said about “Avatar,” is that it’s the one 2009 feature drawing from the War in Iraq that could make a mint. While his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” is the best American movie about war in movies this year, and is racking up year-end critics’ nods, it didn’t blow up at the box office.

Even if James Cameron had spent $200 million-plus on a trainwreck the equal of the Icelandic economy, that would have been gratifying, even at the cost of encouraging the wisenheimers who, without seeing the film, invoked the Smurfs, “Ferngully: the Last Rainforest” and something called “Delgo.” All the pessimistic early jabber made it seem like this would be the in-flight movie that you would see on the way to become part of the Matrix. Of course, virtually no one had seen the movie until its Thursday night premiere in London and its staggered press screenings in the U.K. and North America. Then the lights went down, time passed entertainingly, the lights came up, the Twittering began, and within hours an embargo against reviews before opening day was lifted. Read the rest of this entry »

Walt Disney Animation Studios unfurls the brand banner with a wholesome hand-drawn animated musical about Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), a New Orleans waitress who kisses a glib frog claiming to be Prince Naveen of Moldania (Bruno Campos). What’s in it for her? Financing for the eatery she’s scraped and saved to open, to fulfill her late daddy’s dream. Surprise! Tiana turns into a frog too, thanks to the communicable spell by the nefarious Dr. Facilier (Keith David) that originally turned the handsome charming Prince into a frog. Out of their element, this bickering couple hop across the swamp in search of the blind 197-year-old Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) who can make things right with her nice magic. Along the way they pick up sidekick critters: a trumpet-tooting gator and a bewhiskered Cajun firefly. The frogs fall in love, and when they kiss at the altar deep in bayou, guess what? Co-directors and co-writers Ron Clements and Chicago-born Northwestern grad John Musker (“Treasure Planet,” “Hercules,” “Aladdin,” “The Little Mermaid”) create a quality kids adventure that celebrates family enterprise besides fairytale romance. This enjoyable tale earns its G-rating by limiting its oaths to “cheese n’ crackers!” Yucky yuks about bodily fluids are limited to lines about an amphibian secretion dissed as “slime,” although “mucuous” is the preferred term (rather like “sweat” versus the more polite “perspiration.”) Message on the side: the pampered and the privileged can overcome their upbringing and become better people. That’s just one of the nods here to Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night.” With the voices of Jennifer Cody, John Goodman, Jim Cummings, Michael-Leon Wooley, Terrence Howard and Oprah Winfrey. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Wes Anderson is seated at a table when I enter a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel and I immediately realize the room’s darkly patterned, deep green wallpaper matches Anderson’s green, narrow-wale corduroy suit, and almost as quickly realize he’s wearing, for a belt, a white polka-dotted green length of silk, mauve socks and Clark’s Wallabees. He’s less dressed than he is art-directed.

In his brisk, new stop-motion animated movie, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted with his friend Noah Baumbach from Roald Dahl’s sour little novel, Anderson even invests his titular Vulpus Vulpus (voiced by George Clooney) with a tan corduroy suit patterned after an earlier one of his own. Strangely, it may be the most “Wes Anderson” of Wes Anderson movies: the level of control in the adventures of an animal trying to sustain family life is exacting, but with comic detailing in sets and behaviors that matches the goofball dialogue and the interpersonal dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »