Word: films
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Parini's historical novel, Leo Tolstoy is played in grizzly glory by Christopher Plummer. Helen Mirren portrays the mercurial Mrs. Tolstoy, Countess Sofya, who fears her husband - and their fortunes - will be carried out on the shoulders of sycophants. The pairing of these two giants explains why the film, which doesn't open nationwide until February, is making a brief Academy-qualifying appearance in theaters...
...more problematic. Anderson’s work has always been deeply moralizing—whether on the resilience of family or the fidelity of close friendship—but here he trivializes Fox’s recklessness. The casual way that he endangers and deceives everyone in the film, or how he neglects his own son to an almost condemnable degree, is never answered for. Instead, “Fantastic Mr. Fox”—dramatically revised from Dahl’s book—ends ambiguously, with its characters unchanged and the danger yet present. More puzzling...
...that “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a light, lovely, and clever comedy that finds the director’s vision coinciding with pure entertainment for the first time in years. A stop-motion animated riff on Roald Dahl’s classic book, the film reunites Anderson with frequent screenwriting collaborator Noah Baumbach (director of “The Squid and the Whale”), casting George Clooney as the title character in a war for land and life against a trio of demonic factory-farmers. Clooney is the latest in a line of charismatic paterfamilias?...
...sure, the market for films typically branded ‘for kids’ has expanded in recent years, and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” anticipates an audience ready to take the film on its own terms. But in the spectrum between the aestheticized nostalgia of Spike Jonze’ “Where the Wild Things Are” and the ambitious visual and emotional scope of the latest releases from Pixar Studios, the film feels slightly ill at ease. By any standard other than its source material, “Fantastic Mr. Fox?...
...those terms that it asks—merely those of an open mind—the film has considerable mileage. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a small wonder of mise en scène, richly crafted and painstakingly choreographed, allowing for the total control over composition to which Anderson always seemed to aspire in his earlier films. Anderson’s decision to shoot an animated film comes as no real surprise. It’s the natural end of a fascination with vibrant color schemes in his films in general—a runoff from...