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Vampire yarn dies a death as Mr Fox soars
25 October 2009 By John Maguire, on film
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
Directed by Paul Weitz
Nationwide, 12A
Rating: *
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson Nationwide, PG
Rating: ****
The Cove
Directed by Louie Psihoyos Light House, PG
Rating: ****
Limerick writer Darren Shan’s series of 12 books, collectively known as Cirque du Freak, tell the story of an ordinary young teenager inducted into a travelling freak show as a half-vampire. From their first publication in 2000, the books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 30 languages.
The film, adapted from the first three books by the director Paul Weitz (About A Boy) and screenwriter Brian Helgeland, struggles to tell a stand-alone story, treating the first instalment as little more than a preview for the adventures to come.
Newcomer Chris Massoglia plays Darren Shan, a squeaky clean, apple-pie American teenager who gets good grades, obeys his parents and carries with him all the compelling interest that description suggests. His best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson) is a darker prospect, the restless, troubled son of divorced parents who is obsessed with vampires.
When the spooky Cirque du Freak comes to town for a one night only grand performance, Steve convinces Darren to sneak out, promising a night of weird and ghoulish excitement. As soon as the show starts, Steve reveals to Darren that he recognises the ringmaster, Larten Crepsley (John C Reilly), as an ancient vampire from one of his many books on the undead. Darren, for his part, is fascinated by Crepsley’s rare pet spider, a super intelligent arachnid with a fatally venomous bite.
When Steve approaches the creepy vampire backstage, and begs him to turn him into one of the undead, he is rejected. His pique turns to anger when Crepsley then takes Darren on as an apprentice, killing him before bringing him back to life, and training him in few vampire-specific supernatural tricks.
Steve, for his part, becomes allied with the head of the Vampireze, a kind of bloodsucking subsect led by the grotesque Mr Tiny (Michael Cerveris).The suggestion prolonged throughout the film is that both young men are somehow destined to lead opposing sides in a future vampire war.
What sounds reasonably coherent when sketched as a synopsis of the early plot highlights, is anything but in the finished film.
Weitz’s uneven, underdeveloped characters and overworked, unforgiving plotting quickly collapses into a morass of narrative dead ends, motiveless decisions and an overcrowded ensemble cast (including Salma Hayek, Patrick Fugit and Willem Dafoe) who simply disappear into the background.
The special effects work, often the real draw for teenage audiences hungry for eye-popping distraction, is hopelessly underpowered and poorly executed. There is no trace of the lovingly crafted worlds of Pixar or Potter. Staging his gothic carnival in awash of purple light and dry ice, Weitz is taking his inspiration from the Hammer horrors but the results look underwhelming, muddy and uneven.
A special mention is reserved for the editing and sound mix; Cirque du Freak is filled with jumpy cuts, overstuffed montages and graceless transitions, failings further exposed by atone-deaf score. The result is an unattractive hodge-podge, a vapid coming-of-age story about generational angst between fathers and sons, dead and alive, crammed to fit into a vainglorious studio blockbuster.
In a curious coincidence, director Weitz’s brother Chris was given the same chance to build a fantasy franchise with The Golden Compass, the first of a proposed trilogy of films based on Phillip Pulman’s His Dark Materials books. The commercial and artistic failure of that film meant the next two instalments have been quietly shelved. The same fate surely awaits Cirque du Freak.
* Writer and director Wes Anderson rebounds from the back-to back commercial disappointments of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited with his first animated film, The Fantastic Mr Fox, made in the director’s signature fastidious manner using old-fashioned stop-motion techniques.
Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book about a family of wily foxes and their woodland friends eluding the predatory attentions of the local humans has been transformed by Anderson, co-writer Noah Baumbach and a team of dedicated animators into an idiosyncratic, charmingly hand-crafted tale of family dysfunction and middle-class tedium.
The second talking-fox film this year, following Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, The Fantastic Mr Fox opens at the same pace it maintains throughout: breakneck. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) and his beloved vixen wife (Meryl Streep) are out hunting chickens when they are caught in a trap.
She chooses the opportunity to tell Fox she is expecting their first cub, and makes him promise to give up his dangerous, chicken-stealing ways and settle down. Twelve ‘‘fox years’’ later, their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is a weedy, self-conscious teenager, further embarrassed by the arrival into the den of a talented, athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, the director’s brother).
In deference to his wife’s more refined tastes (she’s wears an apron and dabbles in landscape painting), Fox has forsworn his hunting instincts and taken a job as a newspaper columnist.
But Fox’s instinctive appetite for pullet-poaching has returned. With the help of a dimwitted opossum (Wally Wolodarsky), Fox plans his ‘‘one last big job’’, robbing the three nasty farmers, Boggis and Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon), ‘‘one fat, one short, one lean’’, who live on the opposite hill. Tired of the impudent fox raiding their supplies, the farmers resort to increasingly desperate measures to capture and kill him, eventually putting all of the woodland creatures (including Bill Murray’s Badger and Willem Dafoe’s Rat) in danger.
This being a Wes Anderson film, much of the joy comes from tuning into the director’s unique visual sensibility. Unlike the seamless, polished imagemaking of the computerised animations, The Fantastic Mr Fox pursues a roughly hewn aesthetic that gives enormous energy and wit to proceedings; as stylised and inventive as anything Anderson has done previously.
The stitch-perfect costuming, brilliantly textured character design and gloriously autumnal backgrounds aside, there are a plenty of highlights: Mr Fox and his chums burrow through geologically precise soil strata, our woodland chums hide from the humans in a vast cider-bottle warehouse, they stage their climactic shootout in a gorgeous facsimile of an Olde Worlde British village, complete with sushi bar and courier service.
It might be a cartoon, but Mr Fox is still an Anderson film through and through, with the same attention to detail, eclectic soundtrack, airily witty dialogue and chaptered storytelling that have delighted his fan base in the past. They should be delighted again, even if younger audience members might find much of the precious chatter about existentialism, creme brulées and yogic meditation unfathomable.
Incidentally, when I met Anderson during the publicity tour for The Life Aquatic, he was wearing the same copper-coloured corduroy lounge suit that Foxy sports in the film. If you share the director’s taste for fine retro tailoring, you might just like The Fantastic Mr Fox.
* The passionate, brilliantly produced eco-documentary The Cove opens in the Japanese town of Taiji, where former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry is now based. In the 1960s, it was O’Barry who captured and trained the five dolphins who played the title character in the international television series Flipper.
But since the show ended, O’Barry has devoted himself to protecting these highly intelligent, self-aware creatures. This undertaking has brought him to Taiji, a town he describes as ‘‘a little like the Twilight Zone’’.
There, a small number of fishermen use a remote inlet as a dolphin slaughterhouse, hunting thousands of the mammals each year. Schools of dolphin are herded by a flotilla of fishing boats into a small inlet, hidden from sight of the main road.
The fittest specimens are sold to oceanic theme parks around the world. The rest are slaughtered, with their mercury-tainted meat sold on an unregulated market.
The barbaric nature of their hunting methods, and the high levels of toxic mercury in the resulting meat, mean the fishermen and the town officials will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their industry secret.
Undeterred, O’Barry joins forces with National Geographic documentarian Louis Psihoyos to get to the truth of what’s really happening in Taiji. Under the eyes of the antagonistic locals, they recruit a small team of underwater sound and camera experts, special effects artists and divers who undertake to surreptitiously film a dolphin hunt. The result is a provocative mix of ecological filmmaking and investigative journalism that unfolds as a thrilling heist movie.
The Cove is a suspenseful and brilliantly-positioned documentary that puts the killing of the Japanese dolphins into an economic, political and historical perspective.
There are no cute voiceovers, facts strewn PowerPoint presentations or complex scientific arguments - just scenes of senseless slaughter, painstakingly captured by hidden cameras.
E-mail The Guide editor,Helen Boylan, at theguide@sbpost.ie
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