All posts by One Guys Opinion

Dr. Frank Swietek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dallas, where he is regarded as a particularly tough grader. He has been the film critic of the University News since 1988, and has discussed movies on air at KRLD-AM (Dallas) and KOMO-AM (Seattle). He is also the Founding President of the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics' Association, a group of print and broadcast journalists covering film in the Metroplex area, and was a charter member of the Society of Texas Film Critics. Dr. Swietek is a member of the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS). He was instrumental in the creation of the Lone Star Awards, which, through the efforts of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Film Commission, give recognition annually to the best feature films and television programs produced in Texas.
Now Showing

THE CAT IN THE HAT

Producers: Daniela Mazzucato and Jared Stern   Directors: Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Corloni   Screenplay: Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Corloni   Cast: Bill Hader, Xochitl Gomez, Tiago Martinez, America Ferrera, Matt Berry, Quinta Brunson, Giancarlo Esposito, Bowen Yang, Paula Pell and Tituss Burgess   Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Grade: C-

This animated take on the classic 1957 children’s book by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel is an improvement on Bo Welch’s misbegotten 2003 live-action version.  But that’s a very low bar: the Mike Myers movie was regarded as a disaster when it was released, and has actually gone down in people’s estimation since.

And in many respects this new effort by writer-directors Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Corloni doesn’t escape a similar fate for lack of trying: its hectic bombardment of noise and phantasmagoria goes beyond wearying to come close to unendurable.  But it was an inevitability that Seuss’s fable would be expanded to meet the expectations of today’s family audiences, reared as they’ve been on overkill; from that perspective “The Cat in the Hat” does what it probably had to in order to succeed in the current cinematic marketplace, as crassly annoying as fans of the source might find the result.

In this version, the Cat (voiced with maniacal glee by Bill Hader) is an employee of something called the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, and the bane of his boss Mr. Hoogenboom (Giancarlo Esposito, in full bullying mode), who’s furious over his proclivity for making messes of every mission to uplift unhappy children; a prologue shows the devastating aftermath of one recent disaster.  Convinced by Sherri (sweetly shy Quinta Brunson), the head of HR, that he must give the Cat one more chance before firing him, Hoogenboom assigns him to a tough case he’ll certainly fail.

It’s that of Gabby (intense Xochiti Gomez), a surly adolescent with an astronomical hairdo, who’s furious with her mother Carmen (America Ferrera, pleasant but barely present) for moving her, along with her younger brother Sebastian (chirpy Tiago Martinez, saddled with shouting “Whoa!” all too often as the action revs up) and their pet goldfish Waffles (Matt Berry, who’s given the best lines and delivers them wittily) to a new town.  They’re carrying their belongings into an apartment under the ever-watchful gaze of Patty (Paula Pell, shouting most of her lines), a landlord obsessed with a rulebook that includes “No pets!” and ready to evict at the least infraction.

Enter the Cat, whose ideas about creating fun expand those of Seuss’s original feline by a massive order of magnitude.  At first Gabby and Sebastian are more frightened than welcoming, and Waffles is obstinately set against him (especially after his own welfare is threatened).  But when Gabby finds out that the Cat has raided the Institute’s Supply Cabinet to abscond with a forbidden item called the Gobacker, a watch that can reverse time, she accepts him as an ally, thinking the device can return her family to the town where they’d previously lived (although despite being a talented trumpeter, she’s intent on giving up her life as a “band nerd,” which is what she’d be back there).  Cue the Cat’s transformation of an old couch into a vehicle that can take him, the kids and Waffles to surrealistic realms where all sorts of fantastic creatures dwell, appropriating the items stored within the cardboard moving boxes for inspiration.

So we’re treated, for example, to a marching band on a football field, made up of instruments playing themselves, and an underwater circus.  The underwater sequence also features massive pairs of Sebastian’s underpants floating around with anthropomorphic ambitions.  And, of course, there emerges along the way a gigantic monster intent on consuming all in its wake, which needs to be defeated if the world is to survive.

It’s called the Something and is related, in a way that won’t be revealed here, to Seuss’s original Things, which jump out of the red box the Cat brings into the kids’ apartment, their flaming blue hair and red pajamas intact.  But there aren’t just two of them; there’s a whole platoon in various shapes and sizes.  And they communicate in their own special language, which consists of clucking sounds combined with rhythmic slaps to their bodies, presumably intended as a counterpart to the gibberish spouted by minions, in hopes of generating a spinoff.  So the pandemonium isn’t confined to the imaginary realms to which the Cat and his clients travel, but infects the apartment as well, much to the infuriation of picky Patty. 

Inevitably there are lessons to be learned from the frantic mayhem, the most obvious being the motto “Live Laugh Love” written on a poster incongruously found in that landlady’s apartment, which in the end she’ll learn to embrace in one of the finale’s obvious turns.  But, of course, the main effect of it all is on Gabby, who’s taught to appreciate how loving her mother is and how she fostered the creativity the girl has unwisely chosen to renounce but, thanks to the Cat’s intervention, renews instead, picking up her trumpet once more.

As for the Cat, not only is Hoogenboom’s plan to get rid of him foiled, but he’s primed for a series of sequels—as the end credits self-referentially suggest are already in the planning stages.

Rivinoja and Corloni have put a lot of effort into the movie—too much, in fact, given the overloaded scenario—and so does the voice cast, which also includes Bowen Yang and Tituss Burgess, as well as the artists at Warner Bros. Animation, who gussy up the visuals with different templates to suggest the varying locales and timelines (some scenes are done up in black-and-white, others in 2-D looking color format and most in obviously computer-generated style).  It makes for a production design by Aidan Sugano that’s too anxious to call attention to itself, something that can also be said of the ever-busy editing of Dan Molina as well as the score of Lorne Balfe. 

In fact, the failure of this new “Cat” is one it shares with the 2003 one, though not to the same fatal degree: it just tries too hard, becoming frantic and bombastic.  That’s proven by what’s probably its most memorable moment, when, in that underwater circus, Waffles is being induced to do a trick (“jumping” through a hoop the kids are holding aloft).  He glides almost noiselessly, across the screen, so slowly that it plays like a welcome pause in the mayhem, an oasis of calm amidst the incessant badgering surrounding it.  You can’t help but chuckle.

But the kids might just get bored before the next round of nonstop raucous shenanigans and supposedly naughty jokes.  That’s what they’re now primed to expect, more’s the pity.     

Now Showing

A TALENT FOR MURDER

Producers: Gabrielle Tana, Mickey Liddell, Pete Shilaimon, Jim Robison, Kurt Martin, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Troy Lum, Andrea Occhipinti and Stefano Massenzi   Director: Anton Corbijn   Screenplay: Joanna Murray-Smith   Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, Brid Brennan and James Faulkner   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

Although they generate a good deal of tension, Patricia Highsmith’s stories are less mysteries than character studies, and the author, who died in 1995, was certainly a character herself, a fiercely misanthropic lesbian with a pronounced racist streak.  She was also a brilliant crafter of tales of deception and unease whose prose resonated with icy precision.

In “A Talent for Murder,” adapted for the screen by Joanna Murray-Smith from her two-character 2014 play “Switzerland,” Highsmith is played to brutal perfection by Helen Mirren, made up by costumer Gabriella Pescucci to look like quite a close approximation of the original.  She’s also a hard-drinking heavy smoker who’s definitely unwell (she’d die later in the year in which the story’s set).

The conceit is that she’s being dunned by her American publisher to write a sixth installment of her so-called Ripliad, crime novels detailing the career of charming but murderous Tom Ripley, the sociopathic antihero she introduced in 1955’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and continued to follow through four additional books, the last appearing in 1991.  The first representative they’ve sent to her Swiss home to persuade her has disappeared (though the film suggests that he escaped her house in disarray and was later in custody at the airport). 

So the publisher sends a second employee, young Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) to cajole Highsmith to sign a contract.  She’s hardly welcoming, initially insisting that he leave immediately but, once he shows his intimate knowledge of her work (and presents her with a variety of gifts, including a magnificent knife she adds to her prized collection of weapons), permits him to stay the night.  He finds the initials of his predecessor carved onto the bed in the guest room, and awakens to find a cut on his neck, perhaps left by a knife.

Highsmith explains that she’s suffering from writer’s block, and while both insulting Ridgeway and taking pleasure in discomfiting him, invites him to collaborate in fashioning what amounts to a new Ripley story.  In Murray-Smith’s opening up of the play, he assumes the role of a Ripleyesque character who sets his sights on Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), an American tourist in Rome modeled on a young woman of that name Edward had met on the train.  This “Ripley” learns of the fortune Clementine would inherit if her uncle Douglas (James Faulkner) and Aunt Peggy (Juliet Stevenson) were removed, and acts accordingly while cunningly romancing her. 

Simultaneously Edward becomes involved with the real Clementine, who’s also having to wait for an inheritance.  A conflation of the fictional, cultivated Ripley and the real, social-climbing Ridgeway occurs, reaching an apogee when Highsmith prods Edward to come clean about how he became an orphan.  By the time that Edward meets Clementine again on the train back to the States, one wonders whether he isn’t planning a very Ripley solution to both their problems.

Edward’s story also introduces a wonderfully Highsmith-like character in Kathryn Grierson (Brid Brennan), Peggy’s best friend, who’s accomplished the rise from poverty to high society herself and brittlely advises Ridgeway on how to improve his game to succeed at the same ambition.  Their brief conversation is as finely honed as the longer ones between Edward and Highsmith. 

Toward the close, it must be said, “A Talent for Murder” goes too far in its search to surprise; a scene involving Highsmith, Ridgeway and that spectacular knife comes out of left field, and pretty much falls flat.  But for the most part its mordant take on the cat-and-mouse formula Anthony Shaffer used in “Sleuth” works fairly well, especially as the fusion of Ridgeway and Ripley becomes evident: the question turns on who is the cat, and who the mouse.

Highsmith devotees will probably be divided in their reactions to the film; some will appreciate it as a deft homage to the author, while others will consider it a deficient effort to replicate her literary voice.  One can be fairly certain that she would have hated it; she despised almost all the adaptations of her stories, of which there were many, and one would expect no less disdain over such a portrait of herself, however cleverly fashioned.    

What’s undeniable is the skill of the stars.   Mirren brings delicious venom to Highsmith, the malicious delight in her eyes as she tosses a slight smile at her intended victim making us complicit in her game.  Ehrenreich is the real surprise here, matching Mirren beat for beat in what’s in some ways the more difficult role, since he’s actually playing two people, and capturing the complexities of both of them.  (Coming shortly after he received stellar notices, and a Tony, for his performance in the Broadway revival of “Becky Shaw” makes 2026 a banner year for him.) Cooke’s elegant naïveté fits both Clementines to perfection, and among those in support Brennan is a model of chilly calculation.  All benefit from the expertise of director Anton Corbijn, whose work here reflects the excellence of “A Most Wanted Man” rather than the pretentiousness of “The American.”

The film is also a good-looking one, with Dimitri Capuani’s production design especially effective in its approximation of the interior of the Highsmith home and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography capturing it, and the exteriors with which Murray-Smith and Corbijn have opened up the play, in finely-judged visuals.  Andrew Hulme’s supple editing keeps the shifts from “fact” to “fiction” smooth, while Dickon Hinchliffe contributes a score that adds winking notes to genre conventionality.

“A Talent for Murder” works precisely because it has fun both mimicking and toying with Highsmith’s peculiar literary approach and playing on the grotesqueries of her psyche, shaped, as the script explains, by a terrible relationship with her mother but taken to horrendous extremes by the woman herself for reasons professional as well as personal.  The result is an engaging divertissement that will appeal especially to Highsmith aficionados but should provide pleasure beyond her circle of admirers.