Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)

For the last decade, David Cronenberg has retreated from his body horror nightmares of modernity and moved into the traumas that inherently exist in life, well outside contemporary anxieties. The postwar kitchen sink drama cum shattered mental breakdown of Spider. The instinctual savagery of man displayed even in the title of A History of Violence. The histories made visible on bodies via gang tattoos in Eastern Promises. The formation, and potential inadequacies, of theories to explore the psychology of all of this in A Dangerous Method. The old monsters still remain, if they are not as visible. Where the mind tends to ooze out of suppurating wounds in prior Cronenberg films, the dynamic reverses in Spider to make the body horror internal as the body collapses into the mind. In A Dangerous Method, it is Keira Knightley herself, her jutting jaw and angular frame thrown into disarray as her illness complicates the work and professional relationship of its two psychiatrists.

Cosmopolis bridges the earlier, topical body horror with the abstract, unseen terrors of Cronenberg’s late period. Indeed, in this film, the monster may be the camera itself, an Arri Aflexa that renders a picture of undeniable ugliness. Black levels pool like ink, unreal colors bleed into each other, and attempts at old-school in-camera effects make some of Hitchcock’s laughable rear-projections look like location shoots in comparison. That this is all clearly deliberate does not, on the face of it, serve as a full defense of the garish unpleasantness of the frame, and those alienated from this alienating movie cannot be blamed much for pushing outside of it. Speaking for myself, though, Cosmopolis is just about the most enthralling film of the year, capable of sucking in a viewer into the same black hole that consumes the image and the strange (and even more strangely delivered) dialogue. Not explicitly an apocalypse movie nor a Death of Cinema picture, Cronenberg’s latest feels like both, as the sudden meaningless of money threatens to take the world (and film) with it.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

It never occurred to me in the initial round of trailers that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is based on the classic segment of Fantasia; with no hint of a connection in the first trailer, why would anyone? Only when I got to a theater early one time and saw one of those extended previews that starts before the actual previews -- can't they just shove all the regular ads for Coca-Cola and such into that space and devote some time during the coming attractions to spotlight a particular film? -- did the filmmakers mention in talking heads the source of the film's inspiration. When I heard that, all I could think was, "Why bother? Did anyone watch that animated classic and wonder what it would be like if Mickey were substituted for a nasally Canadian geek?"

This ran through my mind almost constantly as the film played. Director Jon Turteltaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are two filmmakers always in search of grand spectacle, yet the great irony of the finished product is that they manage to remove the magic of the original. Instead, they subject an audience to a disconnected series of sporadically stunning magic fights, not a one of which communicates the wonder or the seductive properties of magical powers.

The nasally Canadian geek in question is Dave Stutler, shown first as a 10-year-old who stumbles into a dusty magic shop on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty and meets Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old sorcerer who apprentice under Merlin (yes, the Merlin). Seeking the prophesied child who will rid the world of Morgan le Fay, whom Balthazar keeps trapped in a Russian doll-like device called a Grimlock. The sorcerer discovers that the boy is indeed the one he's sought for 1300 years, but an intervening attack from rogue sorcerer Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) results in the two wizards trapping themselves in a mystical vase and leaving a frantic Dave to try to explain himself to his peers, in water-soaked pants that the children take for proof of urination, no less.

This comprises the first 15 minutes of the film, and I've spared you the prologue in 750 A.D. and the thick exposition Cage has to deliver to a 10-year-old. Turteltaub and Bruckheimer's previous team-ups, the National Treasure films, made American history into something genuinely captivating for younger audiences; granted, they did so by turning history into fiction and sprinkling in an unacceptable dose of Dan Brown -- any dosage of Dan Brown is unacceptable -- but the cumbersome dialogue gave way to a believable enthusiasm for the subject, and the look of reverence and uncontainable glee on Cage's face as he pored over documents sold the film better than any of its action scenes.

Why, then, do the director and producer not extend the same care to the boundless opportunities of magic? When an older Dave (Jay Baruchel), having since suffered a breakdown over the immense shame of that event 10 years prior, meets Balthazar again and learns that he will himself become a sorcerer, he reacts with perfunctory skittishness instead of unvarnished excitement. Here is a nobody, a physics nerd who honed his genius partly due to his innate cranial capacity but also as a side-effect of hiding from the world after his ridicule, suddenly told that he can wield the power of a god, and the best he can muster is, "Sweet."

Baruchel is slowly but steadily gaining traction in my mind as a viable alternative to the Michael Cera/Jesse Eisenberg school of geeky detachment; he's endearingly awkward and believably sweet where Cera has an edge to him and Eisenberg falls somewhere in-between. But he's shackled here, unable to explore the emotions that would run through the head of the typical hero in training whose life turns upside down for the better. All he can do is make a few wisecracks, which he always backpedals out of cowardice in the face of stronger wizards, or women.

More tragic is the waste of Cage. To paraphrase Richard Roeper, the rule of thumb for the quality of Nicolas Cage's performance in any film can be directly tied to his hair: the sillier the wig, the more outlandish the performance. The Sorcerer's Apprentice bucks this trend, and that's not a good thing. Rather than the magnificently campy Nic Cage who commits to kitsch more completely than anyone, we get a neutered Nic. Despite the kooky nature of his character, a millennium-old sorcerer whose methods of training Dave in the ways of the "sacred art" recall Rip Torn's mad coach from Dodgeball, Cage heads in the opposite direction, turning his usual manic energy inward until he delivers every line with grave severity. Amazingly, Molina brings the camp more readily than Cage, all bored villain who kills anyone who remotely crosses him out of exasperation for the inanity of mankind. His snarled threats and incessant sighs of loathing are the film's only steady source of entertainment.

Nothing makes any blasted sense in this movie, and not in the way that would make for a better depiction of magic. Dave's proficiency with magic depends entirely on plot convenience: without a single lesson and only a vague instruction, the boy manages to take out a deadly sorcerer, then spends the rest of the film ineptly practicing and quitting magic out of frustration, only to intermittently control his powers with mastery. There's no logic to his progression, simply contrivance after contrivance that robs Dave's evolution of any meaning or weight. Even the moment that recreates the possessed broom bit of the original Fantasia sequence doesn't conjure memories of that animated masterpiece but raise the question of how Dave, who five minutes ago couldn't perform a single spell with consistency, can suddenly summon an army of the inanimate.

Occasionally, a funny line seeps through, such as the confrontation between Dave and a vain disciple of le Fay who made his living as a Vegas magician, in which the villain cannot believe that the boy doesn't know who he is. "Are you in Depeche Mode?" Dave asks the spiky-haired, New Wave-looking fool. The romantic subplot between Dave and Becky (Teresa Palmer), the girl he liked back in fourth grade before his breakdown forced him to transfer schools, exists mainly to give the villains some leverage against Dave and to prove that old point about love being what allows good to triumph over evil. The two do, however, share a surprisingly touching scene involving Dave's Tesla coil and the musical sounds its sparks emit.

But too much of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is somber, treating the ineffable wonder, the magic of magic, with the same solemn reverence afforded to history in National Treasure, fictionalized as it was. I haven't seen Nicolas Cage give such a lifeless performance in years; never before has he so blatantly looked as if he's only doing the job for the paycheck. I expected little from the film and was still disappointed, my eye occasionally catching on something of interest only to return back to the sheer dullness of it all. Everyone involved takes a narrative and emotional shortcut, avoiding anything that sticks in the mind in favor of silliness. I return to a scene in the film where Balthazar chastises Dave about distractions whilst wearing a hat that directs any and all attention onto itself. Somehow, the entire movie is in that throwaway moment.

How to Train Your Dragon

It is not enough to say that How to Train Your Dragon is the finest picture to roll out of Dreamworks Animation's studio, particularly given their nearly decade-long bath in the slop trough with a series of increasingly banal sequels and failed attempts at launching new franchises (who could forget Shark Tale, other than the people who saw it?). But the studio finally followed through on the initial promise of their early features -- Antz, the underrated Prince of Egypt, the first Shrek -- with 2008's Kung Fu Panda, and now they've put out a film that easily ranks among the finest achievements in contemporary animation, as well as one of the few delights of this young year.

One of those "the title says it all" flicks, How to Train Your Dragon is a high-concept family comedy executed nearly without flaws. It presents the small Viking village of Berk, situated on a craggy rock that barely yields enough tasteless crops to feed the populace and their sheep. Complicating matters is the routine invasion by dragons, who scorch the spare fields and seize livestock for their own gullets. Every Viking in the hamlet is raised to hate and kill dragons, and everyone excels at it.

Everyone, that is, except Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), son of the clan chief, Stoick (Gerard Butler). In a demimonde filled with bulky warriors, Hiccup is a scrawny geek, eager to please his peers and especially his father but unable to join in the fighting. So, he builds contraptions to compensate for his utter lack of muscle mass, and during one raid he uses one of his weapons to shoot down a Night Fury, an incredibly agile type of dragon so deadly that no one has ever managed to kill one. When he tracks down the wounded beast, however, he cannot bring himself to slay the poor thing, even though it would catapult him into fame.

Dreamworks, as the other major 3D animation studio of the last decade or so, always finds itself in competition with Pixar, which is like forcing the Police Academy films to compete with Dr. Strangelove. Where Dreamworks has a leg up, though, is in the company's more lenient attitude toward realism. Pixar movies occasionally hit a snag when the precise construction of their worlds come into conflict with the exaggerated character models, but Dreamworks is so inherently goofy that it gives itself a broader range. With Dragon, the studio finally takes advantage of this. The Night Fury, Toothless, looks strikingly different from the other types of dragons seen throughout the film, including a bulldog-like reptile and a two-headed beast, one of which emits inflammable gas that the other sparks. The equally outlandish Viking models, from Stoick's friend and Hiccup's watcher Gobber (a very game Craig Ferguson) to the sexy young brute Astrid (America Ferrara), who appears to have the same physique as Hiccup but can hurl axes and swing swords with the adults, stress the animators' attempt to detach us from the (often ridiculous) need for reality in the most surreal form of the most surreal medium of art.

They succeed wildly. Dragon's opening sequence is one of the most dynamic action pieces to grace a modern animated picture, so visceral that directors Chris Sanders and Dennis DeBois structure one shot in such a way that it appears as if a handheld camera was documenting the action. They also give enchantingly anthropomorphic traits to Toothless without losing his sleek, beautiful form (memorably, the animator turn his reptilian slits into heart-melting doe eyes). With this film, Dreamworks breaks wholly from the lame pop culture references and limp sight gags that propelled their limp, deflated mid-Aughts works: the humor comes from the situations and the characters, and these people feel so real that at some point you stop wondering why the Vikings speak with a smattering of Scottish and American accents led by a young'un with a nasally Canadian whine. Tedious as celebrity stunt casting is, these actors become these cartoons because they're allowed to speak lines that give themselves, and each other, depth and identity.

Most importantly, How to Train Your Dragon captures that feeling of uninhibited flight better than any other film that comes to mind. The montage of Hiccup and Toothless coming to trust each other and learning to fly together is nothing particularly original in construction, but in execution it becomes as spellbinding as the flying scenes in Avatar and magical as anything in Pixar's canon. By damaging Toothless' tail fin and rendering him incapable of flight on his own, the writers create a symbiosis between the dragon and Hiccup, who designs a replacement flap that he controls, thus giving their bond an extra dimension and their aerial acrobatics a mutually invigorating experience that is magnified on the audience. Whether gently soaring among the clouds or banking and careening in rapidly edited chases, the flight scenes are gripping, transporting and undeniable proof in the power of animation to transfix crowds of all ages -- I heard nary a peep from the engaged children in my theater, and the most enthusiastic response I heard leaving the auditorium came from an elderly couple behind me.

As with all the other movies currently slapped with a 3-D filter, one can easily enjoy the majesty of How to Train Your Dragon in two boring old dimensions. Yet I was struck that the most memorable and lasting image to take advantage of the 3-D, compared to its usual role in adding a cheap, hollow thrill to action scenes, involved Hiccup holding out his hand for the first time to pet Toothless. The directors used the gimmick to call attention to the emotional and thematic crux of the film: by showing how pre-conceived notions vastly differ from the truth and how they often lead to trumped-up fear and disgusting violence, How to Train Your Dragon suggests that the next generation might just be a little less violent and a little more willing to learn about someone or something before acting. What a fantastic message (and a fairly understated one, for a children's film), particularly in a time of increasingly extreme rhetoric being casually used in America based on fear and ignorance. Furthermore, Sanders and DeBois weave this theme into much of the film's other dynamics, preventing the contentious father-son relationship between Stoick and Hiccup from becoming too staid and adding a layer to the budding romance angle between Hiccup and Astrid. Funny, touching, insightful and as thrilling as the best of animated features, How to Train Your Dragon bypasses the hackneyed soundbite of "Fun for the whole family!" by reminding us that any animated film worth its salt should always fit that bill.