Ian McShane

Henry Selick’s ‘Coraline’ an Early Contender For Best Animated Film of 2009

BrianTT — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:45:43 -0700

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Henry Selick, the visionary director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach” has masterfully directed a mesmerizing journey into the world of imagination called “Coraline”.

Based on the beloved book by Neil Gaiman, “Coraline” is a nearly perfect stop-motion animated adventure featuring excellent voice work by Teri Hatcher, Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman, Ian McShane, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, and Keith David.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) gets a surprise in the stop-motion animated 3-D adventure Coraline, from LAIKA Entertainment for release by Focus Features.
Photo credit: Focus/LAIKA

Last year was an incredible one for animation with moving masterpieces like “WALL-E” and “Waltz With Bashir” and crowd-pleasers like “Kung Fu Panda” and “Bolt,” so it’s hard to say that “Coraline” would have been the best animated film of 2008, but it’s also easy to believe that we won’t see one better in 2009. It’s that good.

What immediately distinguishes “Coraline” is the creative team’s understanding that it is okay to honestly scare a young audience. Some of the best children’s fiction from “The Wizard of Oz” to Roald Dahl features genuine fear, something that modern filmmakers often forget. Selick and Gaiman are unafraid to send a shiver down the spine of their audience, children and parents alike.

The story of “Coraline” doesn’t need to be sugarcoated. It should feature some honestly terrifying imagery and Selick pulls no punches. It’s the fearless design of “Coraline” that sets the film apart from the very beginning. And that design looks amazing with the best Real 3D technology the cinema has yet seen.

The 3D world of “Coraline” has been brought to life to tell the story of an imaginative young girl named Coraline (often mistaken for “Caroline”) Jones. The impudent Coraline has moved to the first floor of a rental home with her writer parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman of They Might Be Giants) and is, like a lot of children, tragically bored.

After spending time dealing with the neighborhood kid named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) and visiting her upstairs neighbor, a drunken acrobat named Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and the pair of former stage stars (Jennifer Saunders & Dawn French) who live downstairs, Coraline finds true adventure behind a secret door in her own house.

In the Other World, Wybie (voiced by Robert Bailey Jr.) and Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) are drawn to a circus in the stop-motion animated 3-D adventure Coraline, from LAIKA Entertainment for release by Focus Features.
Photo credit: Focus/LAIKA

Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Alice in “Alice in Wonderland,” or the kids in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe,” Coraline enters a dream world that seems magical and inviting but hides secret dangers. Through the door, Coraline finds the “other world” with an alternate mother and father and far more entertaining versions of her housemates.

Of course, as with all of these fables, everything is not as it seems and Coraline soon realizes that she’ll have to fight her way back to the real world if she wants to survive.

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Interview: The Other World of Animation With Henry Selick

Slideshow: 21-Image Gallery For Henry Selick’s ‘Coraline’

“Coraline” features basic storytelling tenets of other fantasies but Selick and his team have found a way to make it all feel refreshingly new. Coraline herself is masterfully designed, a more expressive character than several of the human ones that we’ve seen so far this year. And Fanning’s excellent voice work goes a long way in making this heroine completely three-dimensional. For the record, Teri Hatcher is surprisingly good as well, getting to play both sweet and deadly in one film.

Most people will take the trip to the “other world” with Coraline because of the visual aesthetic of Henry Selick and they won’t be disappointed. The best compliment one can pay “Coraline” is that this world has been so vividly realized that there were moments when the story sucked me in to the point that I wasn’t focused on the technical accomplishments. I was just enraptured by the storytelling.

All that holds “Coraline” back from standing on the same pedestal as films like “WALL-E” and “Waltz With Bashir” are a few elements of Gaiman’s story that could have been tightened a bit and Selick is still more of an impressive visual artist than he is a writer of dialogue. The script could have used one more editorial pass. But these are minor complaints regarding an early contender for the Best Animated Film of 2009.

‘Coraline’ features voice work by Dakota Fanning, Dawn French, Ian McShane, Jennifer Saunders, John Hodgman, and Teri Hatcher. ‘Coraline,’ which was written and directed by Henry Selick, opens on February 6th, 2009.

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com

In Purely Exploiting Gratuitous Violence, Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Death Race’ Remake Kills All Comedic Value

HollywoodChicago.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:23:00 -0600

Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – While 2008’s “Death Race” makes no secret about being a remake of 1975’s “Death Race 2000” with David Carradine as the title character Frankenstein and Sylvester Stallone as his archrival Machine Gun Joe Viterbo, what’s perhaps less obvious but still clear is how the film steals from others.

Though the “Death Race” story has a different book cover, Jason Statham’s character as Jensen Ames and then the masked Frankenstein can be directly correlated to (as just one example) Nicolas Cage’s character in 1997’s “Con Air”. We’ve certainly seen this before: a man who’s supposedly in the slammer innocently and has a monster axe to grind.

Navigator Case (Natalie Martinez) arrives from the women’s prison in an action-thriller set in the near future with the world’s most brutal sporting event as its backdrop in “Death Race”.
Photo credit: Takashi Seida

While films today can be rewarded for being quality remakes of compelling yesteryear memories, 2008’s “Death Race” not only disappoints in its unoriginal ripping from other films but ultimately loses face in its mission merely for unadulterated and gratuitous violence.

“Death Race” is yet another film along the lines of so many second-rate Hollywood products we see today feeling pressured to blow stuff up bigger and badder while servicing the human need to fantasize in the utterly ridiculous. All the while, a weak story is slapped on top of what essentially just amounts to an anthology of big booms.

Sometimes films succeed in being pure entertainment and don’t attempt to have underlying meaning or instigate inspirational change. When they do, though, they’re most successful when their fundamental purpose at least has some redeeming value.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) drives Frankenstein’s Monster in an action-thriller set in the near future with the world’s most brutal sporting event as its backdrop in “Death Race”.
Photo credit: Takashi Seida

The unfortunately simple message of “Death Race” merely says we’re living in a time and place where financial corruption can allow us to prostitute ourselves to charge $250 to watch one guy violently off another for our viewing pleasure. In the film, 70 million morbid viewers take the plunge.

To keep our sanity and our hope in this day and age, we have to believe our society won’t ever bow that low.

Perhaps the most interesting choice for “Death Race” was to send it entirely astray from “Death Race 2000” in its lack of comedy. The 1975 version was only part violence and very much part comedy, too. This time around, though, there’s also no presidential plotline.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) kills time in his prison cell in an action-thriller set in the near future with the world’s most brutal sporting event as its backdrop in “Death Race”.
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Instead of winning the 1975 death race for the chance to meet the president, the modern version offers the winner the chance to leave prison.

Frankenstein’s Monster is attacked in “Death Race”.
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

The relatively unknown supporting character Frederick Koehler in this “Death Race” is actually one of the most standout and appreciated roles in the film.

While not exactly comic relief, he plays a memorably tense character named Lists who essentially serves as Wikipedia for Statham’s race-to-the-death driving team.

As for the decision to cast Joan Allen in 2008’s version, we can only pray that she doesn’t continue her current line of typecast roles any further.

Playing the warden in “Death Race” is directly akin to her Pam Landy government character in 2004’s “The Bourne Supremacy” and then again in 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum”.

While her character is no surprise based on her past work, the opposite can be said about Tyrese Gibson’s role in “Death Race”. The real-life model plays Statham’s archrival Machine Gun Joe Viterbo as well as an Old Navy model trying to sell ultra-luxury chic on a fine designer’s runway.

With a strangely unnecessary homosexual spin scripted for Gibson’s character that doesn’t make any meaningful sense as to why his sexual orientation would even matter, even though he attempts to sell you on being a man who gets down and dirty you’re still afraid for him to break a fingernail.

RELATED IMAGE GALLERY
View our full, high-resolution “Death Race” image gallery.

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More film reviews from critic Adam Fendelman.

One of the film’s one and only redeeming values is its decision to cast Statham as the title character.

Following his work on 2002’s “The Transporter” and then 2005’s “Transporter 2,” his ability to sell grit continues to get the job done here. Statham will deal his Frank Martin character a trilogy in 2008 with “Transporter 3”.

Famed filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson (who directed and wrote “Death Race” and also directed 2004’s “AVP: Alien vs. Predator,” 2002’s “Resident Evil” and 1995’s “Mortal Kombat”) continues playing to the darkest parts of the human heart and filling them with sludge.

Anderson in 2009 will next attempt to butcher a film version of “Castlevania” based on the beloved video game.

“Death Race,” which is written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, stars Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson, Natalie Martinez, Ian McShane, Max Ryan, Jason Clarke and Frederick Koehler. The film opened everywhere on Aug. 22, 2008.

By ADAM FENDELMAN
Editor-in-Chief
HollywoodChicago.com
adam@hollywoodchicago.com