Brave (2012)

For any of you who have ever been confused about the relationship between Disney and Pixar - Is Pixar separate? Is it a part of Disney? - "Brave" is where the two entities fully merge into one. It's a classic Disney animated princess film in the nimble hands of the wildly imaginative Pixar animators. It's one of the first times that, save for a few elements, I'm not sure that the Pixar style of animation made the film any better than a traditionally-animated film would have been. And, so that I get it out of the way quickly, it's an excellent film and now is not the time to decide where it fits in the Pixar canon and say that it's not one of their best (because it's not one of their worst, either).

One of the reasons why Pixar's computer animation style is worth it here is evident, oddly enough, in the wild, flame-shaded hair of "Brave"'s main character, Merida. I guess hair tends to be important to Disney princesses, but short of the hair in "Tangled," a non-negotiable plot element in that film, I've never seen such important hair as Merida's. It's literally a character in the film, and in that adult sort of way that one oggles in amazement over the continual improvements made to computer animation, it's the best hair I've ever seen on an animated female character.

But "Brave" is more than the sum of its heroine's hair. It's actually the story of how Merida (voiced with a light and lovely touch by Kelly MacDonald), is expected to placate the archery-loving, tom-boy nature fostered in her by her boulder-sized, bear-hunting father, King Fergus (voiced by Billy Connolly, who I'm convinced gets first refusal on any Scottish roles), to appease the call of family history and duty taught to her by her stern mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson, who joyously sells a thick Scottish accent). Merida, her queen mum explains, has reached the age where the first-born sons of the neighboring clans line up to compete for her hand in marriage. And in that traditional stubborn Disney princess way, Merida is having no part of it. Though in her defense, none of the three candidates are even remotely handsome or intelligent, and the film would have added some needed adult-like psychological content by saddling Merida with a decision to make here that is actually difficult.

Following a wildly entertaining scene is which Merida chooses archery as the format of the competition for her hand and then, in an act of wild embarrassment for her mother, shows each of the guys how it's really done, Merida selfishly storms away from her castle bedroom to brood and dream of a mother who is not so enamored with tradition and the expected roles of women. So when she meets a witch in a cottage in the forest posing as a wood-carver (her crow, one of the film's best characters, a dead giveaway), Merida makes a deal with her (Julie Walters) for the spell that any self-respecting young lady dreams of: Please make my mother change. But emotional young women are not always perfectly clear with their requests and witches are shifty, so though Merida quickly gets her wish, it's not quite what she's looking for. I don't want to spoil this with the details, because not knowing made me enjoy the film more, though I can't tell you that you won't see it coming.

Like any Disney princess movie involving a spell, "Brave"'s plot provides Merida with an opportunity to reverse the unexpected spell on her mother in two days' time, if she can only decipher the witch's metaphoric instructions, her mother in no condition to verbally assist her in the decoding. To add to the complications, her father is stuck back at the castle entertaining the three families who are growing increasingly impatient while waiting for Merida's marriage decision and begin to war with one another right there in the castle great room. And when King Fergus finally gazes again upon his transformed wife, she is unrecognizable to him - now something he hates.

Circling around the main characters of "Brave" are a chaotic mix of entertaining support players, including a long-faced clansman with Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" war paint on his face, a trio of mischievous, red-headed brothers of Merida, and, contributing frequently to this film's surprisingly frequent moments of naughtiness, a bazooka-chested nursemaid. 

What I found special about "Brave," especially sitting between my wife and my daughter while watching it, is that I'm not sure a Disney film has ever gone so deeply into mother-daughter relationships. Quite frankly, I've found the psychology underneath the whole Disney princess phenomenon to be quite damaging to young girls and have been relieved that my own daughter never lived and died on it, ditching her princess dolls years before her girlfriends did. The happy ending Princess Merida achieves by the end of "Brave" is much harder won than those achieved by her mouse house princess sisters. (Especially that Snow White, who has captivated little girls everywhere for over 70 years by laying in a coma...if that doesn't say something about feminism...)

My daughter wishes her mother was different: had different rules, wanted different things for her. She's stormed away and disobeyed. But "Brave" shows the consequences in quite scary detail without resorting to the kooky, crazy Disney villains of past films. And what restores the kingdom to wholeness at the end requires nothing less than that the queen and princess deeply, profoundly understand each other and respect each other. I think every mother and daughter should see this film together. And to make my viewing experience even more memorable, I not only went to "Brave" with my daughter and her mother, but also my wife's mother and her mother - four generations of clashing wills and estrogen-fueled disobedience.

Roger Ebert says that "Brave" "seems at a loss for what to do with [Merida] as a girl and makes her sort of an honorary boy." But with all due respect to a man who's opinion I treasure above most others, Roger Ebert does not have children.  And while "Brave" definitely comes closer to the traditional values of Disney's classic animated films, I don't agree that this shows signs of its Pixar partner losing its creative edge. Perhaps instead, it's a message that the two companies do belong together, do work well together as a true team. And maybe that took some bravery all by itself.

3.5 out of 4

Rock of Ages (2012)

In his liner notes for the Original Broadway Cast Recording of "Rock of Ages," the show's writer, Chris D'Arienzo, refers to musical theatre as "that wonderfully artificial non-reality where people dance around and break into song for no logical reason." Perhaps the only thing more absurd to D'Arienzo during his formative years in Michigan, he says, was the hair metal era: men with long hair, eye liner and lipstick who are straight!? So D'Arienzo said he sought to bring these two crazy worlds together, "an olive branch extending from the halls of the high school theatre department to the stoners in the parking lot."

Whether or not you enjoyed the stage version of "Rock of Ages" and whether or not you'll enjoy a filmed version of it depends largely, I think, on whether or not you find D'Arienzo's comment about his show as an olive branch to be a silly notion or poetry. And I don't think you'd find any poetry in it unless you lived it.

I lived it. I racked up countless hours of tech rehearsals as a member of the stage crew at my high school while rocking my acid-washed jeans. And while by then I had moved on a bit to R&B, I never forgot where I came from. And white kids from my neighborhood only liked R&B at all because Aerosmith and rock producer Rick Rubin introduced us to rap via RUN-DMC and Beastie Boys. Eddie Van Halen did the guitar solo on "Beat It." I loved that stuff, but as my love for music was in its most fertile bloom, as I was developing the habit of needing to hear music every day of my life, the cassette tapes said "Girls, Girls, Girls," "Look What the Cat Dragged In" and "Pride." Somewhere trapped in that awkward body was the same kind of kid dreaming of being a hair metal rock star that features prominently into the "Rock of Ages" story.

But this is not about me; it's about "Rock of Ages." And though I bring so much nostalgia to the table and came so pre-loaded to love the movie, I also try to be honest about what I see. So in the spirit of that honesty, let me say two things about "Rock of Ages":

1. "Rock of Ages" is a spectacularly average movie, veering wildly from moments of inspired genius to the kind of bad that elicits laughter from its audience - and not the good kind.

2. Tom Cruise makes "Rock of Ages," no matter how inconsistent or mediocre, worth seeing. I'll go one better. He deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. I will be furious if he doesn't get one. And the only reason why I'm not telling you he should WIN the Oscar is because it's only June. This is easily one of the most inspired performances of his career.

D'Arienzo admits that he wrote "Rock of Ages" to be patterned after some specific Broadway musical cliches, and Adam Shankman (who fared much better, if you ask me, with his stage-to-screen translation of "Hairspray") keeps most of those cliches firmly in place here, despite retooling the song list of late-80s glam metal and hard rock hits by about a third of the show's jukebox playlist and completely re-imagining the character of Stacee Jaxx, a metal god and lead singer of the fictional band Arsenal who is about to embark on a solo career. Whereas the stage show plays Jaxx as a little more pathetic and slimy, Shankman and Cruise truly capture Jaxx in a god-like aura, albeit one tinged with a dose of pathetic and slimy if you don't buy into the tao of rock-or-die.

Sherrie (Julianne Hough) and Drew (Diego Boneta) are two young wanna-be-singers working at the Bourbon  Room, a club on the strip in L.A. where Arsenal got its start and will now play its final show. The bar's owner, Dennis Dupree (a really awful Alec Baldwin - and I love Alec Baldwin - in an ill-fitting wig) gets taken for a ride by Jaxx's manager (played to smarmy perfection by Paul Giamatti, though frankly he's done this kind of part too many times now for me to be amazed by it), who swipes most of the profits. But then Sherrie and Drew hit a road bump in their relationship when...song, song, song, song, song...

Ah...the film doesn't give a shit, so why should we? Because none of this matters without Cruise's Jaxx. As I said before, Cruise is that good. There will be some debate, I suspect, as to whether or not Cruise's work is a caricature of an inebriated rock star or the dramatic embodiment of one. Though its clear that Axl Rose was Cruise's primary inspiration - and he nails Rose's mannerisms down to his constant state of being tipped at a 30-degree angle to the right - I truly believe that Cruise took this role dead seriously. He's funny as hell, but that's because Cruise works his ass off for it (and when we first see Jaxx, he's quite literally ass-less). Jaxx travels eccentrically in an oversized yak fur coat with a monkey named Hey Man and greets women by grabbing one of their breasts as only a rock start could get away with without being accused of sexual assault. (He pulls this off with follow-up remarks about the quality of their...hearts.) But even with how funny he was, I saw Cruise as the one serious thing in a sea of silly. He grounds the film and gives it humanity. How much you understand Jaxx, consequently, depends a lot on how much you understand Jon Bon Jovi or Brett Michael or David Lee Roth or Vince Neil or Sebastian Bach.

I have so much respect for an actor who clearly puts in the work, and Cruise has done that. He's studied the moves and the fashion, the attitudes and the behaviors. And to top that, he studied guitar and voice, competently pulling off everything from Guns N' Roses "Paradise City" to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive." But mostly, Cruise accurately portrays the pure sexuality of an 80s hair metal front man, disciples all of Jim Morrison. His tight leather pants are constantly unbuttoned/unlaced at the top, the sweat always glistening in a trail down his lower back. One can almost smell the gin and perspiration whenever Cruise is on screen. He gives the film a level of pure sexuality that is shocking for a PG-13 film because it feels so much dirtier than anything that is actually said or shown.

Sadly, the blessing of Cruise is a curse, because "Rock of Ages" noticeably sags whenever he is not around; you are constantly waiting for his return. Hough and Boneta are attractive and bland; we can buy their innocence and their dreams but they are every boy and every girl (though perhaps that's by design). A scene involving Baldwin and Russell Brand as his best friend permanently decimates the memory of REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling." Catherine Zeta-Jones appears as a character not in the original show, and for good reason. As the wife of the mayor, she's trying to shut down the smutty strip and its loose morals. Her musical numbers are fun - remember, she won an Oscar for doing some snappy musical numbers a few years ago - but her presence here makes Bryan Cranston's work as the mayor unneeded and ridiculous; the film's plot is too light to hold the weight of the stories involving Brand and Cranston and so neither come off as remotely believable. And then there's the incomparable Mary J. Blige, who shows up for the last third of the movie to blow the roof off the musical numbers but is otherwise wasted here.

It doesn't seem like Shankman made the same definitive decisions about the film as a whole that Cruise seemed to make about playing Jaxx, and so "Rock of Ages" is all over the map with moments of camp and competence, placing it far below filmed musicals like "West Side Story" and "Chicago" and somewhere around "Nine" and "Rent." And for all of the song swapping and medley repackaging he did (check out the differences between the cast album and the film soundtrack on Amazon), couldn't Shankman at least make the decision to retire the use of "We Built This City"? First of all, that song is the LEAST hard rocking song on the planet and always has been. And second, the song was so prominently featured in last year's "The Muppets" that its more than gotten its wear in its second life. Let's be done with that one!

I could go on and on about the inconsistencies of "Rock of Ages" and dream about what it could have been and what it wasn't, but it does me more good to focus on what it is. And for me, it is a reminder of my formative years, a cinematic love-letter to the three greatest loves of my life (music, movies and musicals), and a showpiece for an actor who's never given the credit he deserves. And for those reasons alone, star rating or what not, I had a blast watching "Rock of Ages." Any movie about people who are filled with music and desperate to live out days with songs in each one can't be that bad by me. So thank you, o mediocre film musical, for reminding me that when there's music, heaven isn't too far away...

2.5 out of 4

Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012)

In terms of memorable animated characters and a viable franchise to rival something the Disney studio might produce, perhaps Dreamworks came the closest with its attention deficit-addled band of homesick zoo animals from the Madagascar films. Huge moneymakers all, the franchise taught my children to "move it, move it" and that it's okay to love someone who isn't thin ("I like 'em big, I like 'em chunky"). And now, thanks to the third installment, my son is obsessed with afros. Who knew something so corporate and mainstream could be so oddly counter-cultural?

The mayhem began in 2005 with "Madagascar," in which a core group of zoo animals from New York City who dream of something more break out of the zoo and end up in crates, transported to the titular country. Then, in 2008, Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) tried to head home and instead ended up in Africa in "Madagascar: Escape 2  Africa." While the original film gave us adversaries via a delightfully shifty band of penguins, the sequel is notable for the addition of King Julien, Sasha Baron Cohen's insane lemur with a 90s pop music obsession.

And here we are now with "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted," which picks up right where part two leaves off as the penguins have rigged a plane to leave Africa and head back to the states but have, big shocker, decided to leave their fellow zoo animals behind. Thus, part three is the "going home" installment of the film, but before the more bohemian adults out there start to panic about a film who's message is "entrapment in a zoo cage is a perfectly wonderful existence for a large wild animal from the African savannah," know that the majority of this film focuses on one significant detour en route back to the States: the circus. Yes, friends, that's right. The only institution that treats exotic animals even more poorly than a zoo becomes the vehicle through which Alex and company attempt to work their way back the Central Park Zoo.

In this third installment, the character of Marty really pulls front and center, though via a subplot of mildly comic and gentle racial stereotyping, it's so that the black guy can sing about afros. Yes, it turns out that Marty is tickled polka-dot about being involved in a circus, though his compatriots are apprehensive. And who wouldn't be? This circus is bizarre in that it is entirely animal-run, a convenient plot point for those concerned about the way people mistreat circus animals. (Another attempt to PC this plot element is the conspicuous absence of elephants, perhaps the very symbol of three-ring abuse tactics.) No, in this circus, the animal abuse is self-inflicted and relegated mainly to a Dostoyevskian Bengal tiger named Vitaly, whose glorious past was made famous by his lubing himself with olive oil and diving through hoops of decreasing size, his great career all but ending when the hoops got to be the size of wedding rings and he asked to have them set on fire.

Most of the new characters - the zoo crew - are voiced in such a way that their celebrity vocalists are all-but-unrecognizable: the thick Russian accent of Vitaly coming from Bryan Cranston, the gentle purr of a hot jaguar coming from Jessica Chastain. But two of the new characters elevate "Madagascar 3" to new heights, making it perhaps my favorite of the franchise.

The first is Captain Chantel DuBois, a cunning and rubbery officer of Monte Carlo's animal control who will go to Inspector Javer-like lengths and beyond to apprehend our gang, a place for Alex's head prepped and ready on her office wall. DuBois is voiced by Frances McDormand, a fact that almost arrives as a pleasant surprise when the credits roll, thanks to her thickly comic French accent. DuBois is one of the funniest villains I've seen in an animated film in quite some time. She's as menacing as a cartoon villain needs to be but nowhere near as scary for kids because of the way this film puts her through breakneck-paced action sequences.

The other great new character, oddly enough, is a circus bear. The bear looks and acts like a real bear, not a cartoon one, and Julien ridiculously and inexplicably falls in love with her. And you'll be shocked at how that silly subplot ends up giving the film some of its only moments of poignancy or heart.

In many ways, "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" defies criticism in that it's designed to entertain the kids for 80-some minutes and does nothing short of that. It's so frantically paced that the film feels like it's over in far less than that amount of time, and where its filmmakers clearly demonstrate a lack of understanding of how to vary a film's pace, they certainly get comic timing, as the film is frequently and regularly entertaining enough to make adults laugh as much as the kids do.

I did not see this film in 3-D; you really have to convince me to spend that extra money on a format I rarely see as successfully enhancing a film. But from other reviews I've read, the 3-D option of this film is actually worth the extra dollars, and I'm sure that a climactic Cirque du Soleil sequence near the end of the film is where that 3-D earns itself.

There's been a lot of talk in the press that this third installment of Madagascar is the greatest of the three films. I guess I could agree to that, though to me, all three films are at about the same level of quality. I wouldn't say that "Europe's Most Wanted" is in any way some kind of breakthrough or improvement from either of its predecessors. But I will say that it kept my kids out of the hot sun in a cool theatre for a little bit, and it kept their attention that whole time. And unlike some of the other movies my kids drag me to, this one was decidedly painless, whether I'll remember it or not.

3.0 out of 4