Wednesday began with a look at Argentina’s submission for this year’s Oscars, THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (El secreto de sus ojos). Courtesy once again of our emcee, R-to-tha-Koehl, we learn that the director of this film, Juan Jose Campanella, has actually directed several episodes of Law & Order, and that this informs his film a bit, though it gets deeper emotionally, and has more violence. Bob says this is like the sort of movie Hollywood used to make, but doesn’t any more. After seeing it, I get what he’s saying in that the romance element is very old-fashioned in a way…but the violent crime aspect is totally modern. Though most of the movie takes place in the ‘70s.

Basically, it’s about…well…I seem to have misplaced the friggin’ press notes, so in my own inimitable style I will try to sum the whole thing up from memory. Beardy Guy who used to work in the DA’s office is writing a novel about his memories of that time, and he reconnects with the current DA, a Hot Chick he used to work with there but is now middle-aged and promoted (as signified by a bad hairdo and glasses). He wants her to critique his manuscript, and they end up remembering all the stuff that happened years ago surrounding an unsolved crime. Beardy Guy back then was partnered with Drunk Dude, who often said or did stupid stuff that would blow their cover, but was generally a good friend apart from that.

The crime was a woman who got beaten to death, and nobody could figure out by whom, even her husband. Beardy Guy looks in a few old photo albums, however, and sees that in more than one picture, there’s a Creepy Fuck who’s always staring at the dead woman. So the rest of the story is about trying to catch Creepy Fuck, but complications ensue, and of course Creepy Fuck may or may not be a red herring. Meanwhile, Hot Chick is engaged to be married, and Beardy Guy is jealous because he very subtly loves her too. I don’t wanna spoil the plot of the crime stuff, but it ultimately does involve Beardy Guy having to leave town, and leave the Hot Chick behind. Obviously, or he wouldn’t be coming back, as seen in the framing moments.

If this weren’t in Spanish, and had famous people in it, it’d be totally commercial here. I smell future remake. The crime stuff is compelling and suspenseful, and the dynamic between Beardy Guy and Drunk Dude is funny and touching. The way it ends feels like a weird attempt to imitate the climax of every SAW sequel, and that feels a little out of place…but the dynamic between the Guy and the Chick is underplayed sort of like in an old Humphrey Bogart movie. There’s no sex (naked dead girl covered in bruises doesn’t count – nothing appealing about that, but man, what a realistic-looking corpse), but there is violence, some of it gory, and gratuitous overuse of aging makeup.

This won’t win an Oscar. But if you like thrillers that have romantic elements, you should see it, definitely.

On Tuesday, left to my own devices, I might have gone to Harmony Korine’s TRASH HUMPERS, because I think he’s an exciting filmmaker even when he fails. But then I got offered a chance to attend a cocktail party for THE MESSENGER with Woody Harrelson, so of course I signed up for that and the movie afterward. I can’t say I was super-psyched to see a movie about Iraq War grief, having ejected the screener for last year’s GRACE IS GONE from my player after about 15 minutes. But Woody rocks, and his performance in ZOMBIELAND was one of the greatest characters onscreen this year, like Captain Jack Sparrow levels of greatness.

Seriously, Sony publicists, if you are reading this: WOODY for BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR. For ZOMBIELAND. Push that shit. The public WILL get behind you. Also, send me a screener.

I may appear biased because I wear a Zombieland hat, the coolest bit of swag I ever got for free…BUT it was the hat company that contacted me about that, independently of Sony. If you want to think that biased me, it is a free country. And a free country that made ZOMBIELAND a shit-ton of cash, I might add.

Anyway, the cocktail party was to be held in the upper lounge at the Roosevelt hotel, not the more populist one we rubes had been confined to. I came a bit early, rocking the Zombieland hat, and the security dude profiled me immediately, telling me to come back later, with a total note of disgust in his voice. Hotel security dude, BTW, not festival staff…you can tell by the fancy earpiece.

When I did come back, Homeboy did NOT want to let me in, saying “NO PRESS.” This after I had been greeted at the door by a publicist friend, who said, out loud, “I see you RSVP’ed,” and then visibly checked me off. When another publicist friend confirmed me, the security guy was all, “I saw her just writing his name down right now,” like I hadn’t been on the list and she was somehow so in awe of my charisma that she just added me regardless. It took pretty much every single person in charge of the party to overrule the meathead’s press-hatred and get me inside. At which point I ate a clove of garlic on the appetizer tray that burned my throat and nearly choked me…I had thought it might be marinated, but the full-on raw wrath of that thing was vicious. I blame no-one but myself. Took a bottle of water to get it down.

Then some scotch. Scotchy scotchy scotch. Noobs don’t know that the upstairs Audi lounge not only includes a windowed bridge, but also an entire suite in the back where there is another bar. And this other bar actually had some booze other than the sponsoring brands of beer, wine, and vodka. I tapped out that scotch selection, you know it.

I did get to briefly talk to the movie’s director, though I didn’t have much to say without having seen the flick yet, but alas, no Woody. I was told he left for the bathroom and never re-emerged…later, the producer at the screening said he got a text saying something like “Nothing left in the chamber.” Seems he’s been busting his ass promoting the flick in many other time zones. Can’t blame the guy, but damn, I was hoping he’d appreciate my hat.

I don’t have a great deal to say about THE MESSENGER, but for the sake of those who might have shared my prejudices I have to note that it is a lot better than the first 15 minutes of GRACE IS GONE. It’s a flick about two soldiers who are tasked with notifying loved ones that their soldier relative has died in combat, but it doesn’t linger on sadness, focusing more on how the constant contact with grief affects those who must deliver it – Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster. Among those they have to talk to are grieving widow Samantha Morton and grieving father Steve Buscemi, who are both consistently great, as you must know. Also in the cast is Jena Malone, though I did not recognize her at any point, finding her final credit to be way out of left field. Maybe because she has a Natalie-Portman-in-LEON-THE-PROFESSIONAL hairdo.

A friend asked if this movie skews right or left, and I can’t say I felt either way. Grief is universal, and watching soldiers deal with complex emotions seems to me universal too. There is a moment where a particularly pandering twit, who is also obviously a liberal, makes an empty statement about supporting the troops, but I hardly see him as a synecdoche. You’re on the side of our two “messengers” – one of whom has strict rules about how you interact with the grief-stricken, and the other of whom makes rookie mistakes as far as breaking them…but may be more in touch with his humanity as a result.

It may sound like damning with faint praise to say that Foster is much like he always is, but it’s not…the guy is solid, and while I’d like to see him stretch his range someday, he is always believable in his emotions. Woody is probably stretched more than usual, and may surprise some…but I had the feeling he had this in him. He may get awards notice, and I won’t say he shouldn’t.

BUT….Zombieland is still where he rocked the fuckin’ casbah. Nominate that shit.

As the end credits finally wrapped up, a voice got on the house P.A. to tell us that the Q&A had been canceled. Woody, if I find out you were smoking a joint at the time, I’ma bring the zombie smackdown. Just sayin’.

IMDB lists six movies with the title PERPETUUM MOBILE. Who knew?

Oh, that’s right: Robert Koehler. The man knows stuff. Certainly more than IMDB when it comes to this movie. IMDB doesn’t mention that composer Michael Nyman makes a cameo (a relatively pointless one, but who cares) while wearing an outfit much like the one Bob had on while introducing the movie.

Also, courtesy of that introduction, all sorts of other info, like that the lead actor/character Gabino (Gabino Rodriguez), whose head looks like an editorial cartoon caricature of El Vez the Mexican Elvis, is a recurring presence in director Nicolas Pereda’s films. And that Pereda likes the cold, so he goes to Canada during the winter.

Bob’s enthusiasm was infectious on this one, though I may have just been in the right mood. In a slightly different mindset, I can see myself being impatient. I can even picture myself, perhaps as little as five years ago, not wanting to watch something like this. Bob seems to have a particular affection for movies that try to represent life as realistically as possible, with moments of really dry, ironic humor. PERPETUUM MOBILE and POLICE, ADJECTIVE are two of a kind in this regard.

But I think maybe I get it now because I’ve moved twice in the past two years, and found the movers fascinating to observe. The first time, I got two total black stereotypes who were slow, had to listen to R&B the whole time, and took a dump in my new bathroom as soon as they got there, promptly parroting the John Witherspoon/NEXT FRIDAY joke: “I feel five pounds lighter!.” The second time, I got a Russian man and his teenage kid, who were totally no-bullshit.

PERPETUUM MOBILE is about a mover, in Mexico. He is sometimes honest, sometimes less so, but has interesting and varied encounters with different people. It’s an episodic format linked by the framing device of the fact that he lives at home and his mother gets steadily more exasperated with him.

I don’t think it’s a crowd-pleasing movie. It is a critic-pleasing movie. Will that be enough? I don’t know. But it is the sort of movie that we who write about movies get accused of ONLY liking at the expense of, say, Roland Emmerich films.

You just have to be willing to take this one as it comes, at whatever pace it chooses. And don’t get drunk beforehand (I didn’t; had I, this might be a very different review).

Monday at AFI was about one thing only: THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS. Sure, I could have dragged myself over earlier, but all that was playing was NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which I’ve seen, and a documentary about cinematographers, which sounded boringly self-reflexive.

So enthused was I about PARNASSUS that I had inadvertently RSVP’ed twice, which led to my being both invited and uninvited…but as it turned out, those two did not cancel each other out, so the invitation remained. There had been opportunities to catch the good doctor before, but I’d somehow blown them all…seeing it in the Grauman’s was worth the wait, even though I was stuck up against the far left wall via assigned seating.

It seemed to me that pretty much everyone in the rush line got inside, as I had ventured out earlier and seen Douglas Dunning fairly far back…I’d been wondering when the usual crowd of L.A. free-screening crashers would figure out what was happening! Anyway, I spoke to Douglas briefly, and he talked up his “producer” credit on VIOLENT BLUE. He was dressed in an unusually stylish white sportcoat, rather than the usual signature brown jacket. Later, when I was inside, I saw Douglas sitting in the back row, so I figured most of the line must have made it.

Terry Gilliam came out to introduce the movie, introducing many of his crew, among them his daughter, whom he introduced by saying something about “the good kind of child abuse…she abused me till I finished it!” (not an exact quote). Newcomer Lily Cole, Christopher Plummer, and Verne Troyer also showed, as Gilliam urged us “Lower your expectations!”

I find it difficult to do so with Gilliam…despite the minor disappointment of BROTHERS GRIMM, and the ambitious but irritating TIDELAND (that little girl’s dueling accents just bugged the crap out of me, much as I wanted to like the whole thing).

PARNASSUS may be one step back from classics like TIME BANDITS…but it is two steps forward from his recent output, and of a piece with his older fantasies even if not entirely of a budget and scope. The theme of storytelling within storytelling is more prominent than ever – think the puppet show Napoleon watches in TIME BANDITS, or the Munchausen-inspired play within BARON MUNCHAUSEN, and then imagine an entire movie about the troupe that always puts on the show.

It isn’t clear at first what exactly the show is supposed to be, though it involves a stage, and the elderly Parnassus (Plummer) in a lotus-positioned trance. At center stage is a prop mirror that can be walked through. This initially appears to be sort of a taboo thing that only obnoxious baddies and the uninformed take dubious advantage of, but ultimately it does seem that it’s in fact the main highlight of the show – enter the mirror, and you enter a world derived from your own personality, though this world is still mostly governed by the subconscious of Parnassus. “Mostly” in that the devil (Tom Waits) is also in there somewhere, and at a certain point the participant may be given a choice of easy temptation or harder road to enlightenment. The former, of course, results in soul going to Satan. The latter, mostly, in what appears to be a safe return for a usually happy participant who makes a cash donation out of sheer joy.

People with a lot more free time on their hands may nit-pick the “rules” of the mirror to death, since they don’t appear constant…but that’s part of the story too. Parnassus is engaged in a near-constant series of wagers with the devil, who, like a drug pusher, gave him the first one free. This devil, though, like Heath Ledger’s Joker, could be described as a dog chasing a car, who wouldn’t know what to do if he ever caught it. For this devil, the fun is in the constant baiting and ante-upping; every time he screws Parnassus over, he can’t resist making a new bet that allows things to keep going (and changes the rules), and Parnassus, like many a gambling addict, keeps hoping that this next roll of the dice will set him free. The most pressing bet, however, is the one that resulted in immortality, at the cost of Parnassus’ daughter (Cole) once she turns 16…and she is about to. The ante is upped again when the devil suggests letting her off the hook if Parnassus can, within the mirror-world, bring five souls over to his side before the devil can do likewise.

Caught between the two is…Heath Ledger! Yes, in an irony only slightly greater than that of Kurt Cobain swearing in song that he didn’t have a gun, Ledger’s last movie turns out to be all about whether his soul will go to Heaven or Hell. When he initially appears here as a mysterious amnesiac, he is hanging by his neck as if dead, though a magic flute in the throat and some mysterious runes on his head seem to be behind his ability to revive. Once picked up by Parnassus’ daughter, against the wishes of her father, Ledger’s Tony proves to be a natural salesman, and a potential trump card in the upcoming wager. Unless, of course, he’s actually playing for the other team?

Gilliam’s films have frequently been about the triumph of imagination over dark realities, but here, more strongly than ever, he suggests that imagination may just as easily damn you as save you (and that reality may not be so dark when compared to the worst kinds of imagination), which may be an outgrowth of the critical and commercial savaging his last few films (including the unmade DON QUIXOTE) received. The mitigating factor is that he also shows that there can be a nobility in loss, so long as it happens for the right reasons.

It’s a lot of set-up to take in, and for a while, it feels like the film will never get going. Dr. Parnassus’ attempts to reveal his own backstory are constantly, frustratingly interrupted when all we want is to get them out of the way so the plot can really start…I wouldn’t be surprised if Gilliam found this kind of tease hilarious. Maybe it will be on second viewing.

Other critics I talked to complained about the CG, which Gilliam didn’t use prior because it didn’t effin’ exist yet. I think it’s beside the point – some things can only be done in CG. A river lifts up into the air, becomes solid, and morphs into a Tom Waits-faced cobra…tell me, on a reasonable budget, how do you do that without CG? Sure, there’s the stop-motion route of the Michael Keaton snake in BEETLEJUICE, but stop-mo takes a long time, and they probably didn’t have it.

As for the hastily improvised story device that allows people to change appearance in the mirror world, thus allowing Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to balance the acting account of the late Ledger, it is a gimmick, but a workable one, particularly since all three actors gleefully do their best to impersonate their dead pal without being overly reverent. Ledger himself adopts an English accent that occasionally slips into Australian…he is as you remember him, although I would defy anyone who didn’t know to pick out any noticeable Joker mannerisms, which makes last year’s Oscar-winning role feel all the more impressive in hindsight.

Whatever my reservations, and they are only few, I welcome back the Gilliam of old. I don’t wanna say that filmmakers should never stop trying new things…but I don’t like when doing so causes them to lose the magic they once had. It’s good to see it return, even at 80% strength.

POLICE, ADJECTIVE is, for me, this year’s version of 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS in that it’s a Romanian film playing AFI that came with a really nice post-show dinner attached to it for those of us who are deemed important critics (this time of year is the one season where it’s actually really good to be in this line of work to any degree). I think the publicist was the same for both as well, and they also both feature Vlad Ivanov, whom LAFCA gave an acting award to for his role as an abortionist in 4-3-2 (as we hipsters like to call it, yeahhhh, uh-huh).

It’s a very slow-paced movie at first, and I have to admit that initially my mind wandered (though I did notice the graffiti in the small Romanian town depicted, that among other things makes conspicuous mention of John Cena and the Chicago Bulls). It’s the story of  a cop, but told in a realistic fashion that depicts his work matter-of-factly and mundanely…this cop is no action hero, just a guy whose workday is slightly boring, and who comes home and has hilariously pedantic arguments with his wife about the meaning of words.

This seems like a diversion at first, but the movie’s big payoff hinges on the definition of words, and involves the poor sap’s boss. It is worth the wait, if absurdist humor is your bent.

The Q&A afterwards involved the director, Cornelio Porumboiu, and film critic Robert Koehler, a programmer for AFI Fest this year who is also known for his Variety reviews. I like Bob and respect him — he knows more about the current international cinema scene than any other critic in LA, I’d wager — but he cannot say much in a concise fashion. So when he asks the director a question, he’ll speak for about a paragraph’s worth of information, analyzing the movie and essentially working out his written review right there and then, before finally concluding with a question like “Did you feel pigeonholed as a director of absurdist movies?”

The director basically answered that he makes the stories he wants to tell…then looked apologetic, like he felt bad his answer was shorter than Bob’s question. It proceeded like that, with Bob making good points about how the camera acts as a voyeur the way audiences are voyeurs, and Cornelio basically agreeing with him.

The after-party at Cafe Des Artistes involved some very nice fish, though had I seen how much bigger the chicken dish was, I’d have ordered that. Bob got so immersed in talking with everyone that his courses came faster than he could keep up, and at one point had all three in front of him at once. The lavish bar was all free, so I indulged.

This may have hampered my enjoyment afterwards of the movie CASTRO, which has nothing to do with Fidel or San Francisco — it’s about a guy running from people who keep failing to catch him. Also, he seems to be borderline suicidal, and his ex-wife is one of the pursuers. I never really figured out the whats and the whys, especially why I should care. Coulda been my drunken mood, though.

I forgot to tell a HILARIOUS JOKE based on night one before.

Two blonde chicks sat in the row in front of me for Fantastic Mr. Fox. They were in outfits designed to maximize their boobs as the focal point of everything.

And they ended up sitting in seats 9 and 11.

INAPPROPRIATE JOKE: It made sense that they were in seats 9-11, because tower #1 was exploding in my pants.

APPROPRIATE JOKE: It made sense that they were in seats 9 and 11, because that averages out to a perfect 10 each.

The next movie I saw at AFI Fest was Joe Dante’s THE HOLE in 3-D. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have a major distributor and has been doing the festival circuit.

Dante said that Roger Ebert told him it was the best 3D he’d ever seen, which still proved to him that 3D sucks and no movie should be shot that way. Ebert is tedious on this topic; if you don’t like 3D movies, DON’T GO SEE THEM! Most are available in 2D also. Maybe not for critics at press screenings, but critics have to see lots of stuff they hate anyway.

THE HOLE is about this single-mom-led family that move into a nice suburb to find a deep dark hole of evil in their basement. There’s also a hot chick who lives next door that the two male kids make friends with, but the older boy never even kisses her, probably much to the relief of the pre-teens this movie is aimed at. (Pre-teens with cojones, mind; this is a HORROR movie for kids. Nothing inappropriate, but it might scare the sensitive.)

Anyway, the big infinite hole starts belching out evil stuff, including a scary clown doll from POLTERGEIST and a dead girl from THE RING. Remember, this is aimed at kids who haven’t seen those movies and don’t know the meaning of the word “derivative” yet. Ultimately, the finale involves the surreal world found inside the hole, and it looks really cool in 3D. If not for the effects, it would be mediocre at best, but the 3D things make it fun enough to watch.

The next movie I saw that night was WAKE IN FRIGHT, also known as OUTBACK. Originally released in 1971, on a Sunday during a blizzard,as director Ted Kotcheff, told us, this movie had been lost for some 30 years, discovered 5 years ago ina  Pittsburgh warehouse marked for destruction.

Kotcheff, a Canadian director best known for FIRST BLOOD and WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (Take a moment now to wrap your head around those disparate credits…no-one believes me when I tell them) went to the Australian outback to make this movie, based on a novel that he really responded to. The print has been fully digitally restored, and it was a real treat to watch it on the big screen at the Grauman’s Chinese. It’s the sort of movie they don’t make any more, and ONLY made in the ’70s.

In the Aussie desert, a teacher named John Grant (Gary Bond, never famous for much else except UK TV shows) takes a holiday, intending to travel to Sydney, escape with the girl he loves there to England, and never look back; we learn that teachers are often stuck due to having to pay a $1000 deposit so they won’t flee whatever crappy town they’re assigned to.

On the way, he winds up in a  small town known as “The Yappa,” where friendly-but-scary locals insist on buying him drinks, and he gets sucked into a gambling game that involves the flipping of two coins. On a roll, he gets cocky, and loses all his money, thus keeping him from getting to Sydney…but the locals are so damned friendly, he winds up going from place to place before ending up at the rudimentary desert shack of alcoholic country doctor Tydon (Donald Pleasance) who takes him kangaroo hunting (footage used from actual kangaroo hunts), encourages the drinking of beer 24-7, and kangaroo meat-eating. A few days of debauchery strip the trappings of civilization from John, but he soon realizes he’s losing himself.

The movie is pitched as a thriller, but it isn’t quite, except inasmuch as everyday life thrills. It is a bit of a cautionary tale, and will resonate with anyone who has been ever-so-slightly peer-pressured to drink more than normal and act a bigger ass than usual. Like many ’70s flicks, it’s about what makes a man, and doesn’t offer easy answers. One of the bets things I’ve seen on a big screen this year.

Asked afterwards about his research, director Kotcheff recalled being in Australia and going out to bars to get a sense of things. He said he and his DP were in the middle of the desert when they saw a bar in the middle of nowhere, and though he was advised against it, he went in. Looking at the time like a hippie with a huge mustache, he wasn’t exactly macho looking.

A local, seeing him, yelled out, “Hello Stalin!”

Kotcheff toasted him and moved along. The guy repeated, “Hello STALIN!” The bar went quiet.

After thinking for a second, the director responded, “Unfortunately, I can’t have a conversation with you, because I’m dead.”

It took the guy a second, but once it sunk in, he laughed, went “I love a guy with a sense of humor!” and bought him a beer. Ever afterward, whenever Kotcheff would enter a bar anywhere and get in any trouble, someone from that outback bar would be there and intervene on his behalf.

The movie riffs on this type of thing big-time, with Jack being offered a beer by a local even though he’s just started one; he is expected to chug the one he has and accept the follow-up immediately.

I imagine a DVD release is inevitable; get it when it comes.

Since there’s no pay involved, this might be a very prolonged process like the TNA post. I’m gonna try to keep my reviews as such brief and to the point, as much as is feasible.

AFI Fest kicked off Friday night in the Grauman’s Chinese with Wes Anderson’s FANTASTIC MR. FOX. More on the movie in a bit. First, some things that have drastically changed about AFI Fest:

It’s now at the Chinese rather than the Arclight. There are a lot less movies, and for the most part they only show once. The audience choice award seems to have been eliminated, as I have not been handed any of those paper ballot things so far. And in the boldest move so far, all of the tickets are free.

Now, as an elitist critic who likes my festival privileges, the free ticket thing makes me little better than the likes of you commoners, so it doesn’t improve my lot, but you, if you live in LA, should be taking some fucking advantage (like my friend Dan Sedan, who’s been indulging big-time), and not taking this for granted. Because here’s the thing — I’m not sure they’ll do it like this again.

Why? Because L.A. being L.A., it really feels so far like people are taking the free tickets and then not showing up. All the people in the rush lines have been getting in, which is great for them, but indicative that movies are not filling up. There’s no incentive to buy passes. And nothing so far has been 100% full as far as I’ve seen, which is unexpected.

Also, how often do you get to see festival flicks on the motherfucking Grauman’s Big Screen? Shit is rockin’. The selection of movies is REALLY GOOD so far too. Let me emphasize that — REALLY GOOD — because in a couple of paragraphs I’m about to really whine about the minor stuff.

The nature of the thing means that sponsors have paid for the whole thing already. And one of the ways I think this has been achieved is that Dunhill cigarettes are involved. Their logo isn’t onscreen or on any of the material, probably due to legal restrictions on cigarette ads, but they had ads on the table at the opening night party, and cigarette girls going around offering coupons to anyone whose ID ran through a scanner as positively over 18. I don’t imagine cigarette companies get offered sponsorship opportunities much in Hollywood, so they probably had cash to spare.

One of the people I spoke with at the opening, a beautiful multi-tattooed lady, works for an escort service. No idea if they hooked up a sponsorship there — probably not — but why not?

Volunteers still don’t seem to know very much. On both nights of the fest so far, I’ve been sent back and forth between various desks (during which time you also have to deal with people who tell you you can’t walk here or there, even as others are telling you you can), and one time a guy took my ID and forgot to give it back to me; when I reminded him, he didn’t even remember that he’d taken it! Dude had just set the thing down on a stack of booklets where anyone could have grabbed it.

People get mad at Wal-Mart for indoctrinating employees, but this is what happens when you don’t. Maybe there should be a compromise: next year, rather than making the festival free, make it cheap, and with the extra income from it being not-totally-free, pay some of the volunteers to know their stuff, and actually talk to each other so they coordinate.

Anyway, back to the movies.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX is indeed fantastic. It’s a one-of-a-kind, one of the year’s best, though it definitely has echoes of other themes that are currently prevalent. Like UP, it has animals that speak English, yet can suddenly, abruptly revert to idiosyncratic animal behavior, usually to humorous effect. Like WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, it takes a beloved childrens book and stays mostly true to it while at the same time being very much of a piece with the director’s unique style and way of looking at the world.

But unlike Wes Anderson’s other attempts to branch out — I’m thinking of the awkward action sequences in THE LIFE AQUATIC, which I liked but not as much as this — FANTASTIC MR. FOX is a rollicking, kid-friendly animated adventure, albeit one full of ironic dialogue and bizarre non-sequiturs that will fly over the young ‘uns’ heads.

I’m curious how the estate of Roald Dahl let this slip past them, as they’ve been notorious control freaks ever since the late author dissed WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, even though he himself wrote the script. Tim Burton’s re-attempt at that story was forced to stay slavishly faithful in script, though Burton tacked on a new, out-of-character ending and Depp’s performance really missed the mark. And I was talking to Henry Selick earlier that day and at the after-party, and he said they’d been fairly rigid about JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH’s fidelity too.

But apparently they’re doing press for this one, which is a good sign. The book is so short that it necessarily has to be embellished; as a young boy in the men’s room loudly detailed afterward, the entire third act of the movie is new. Plus the animals are all American now, though the villainous human farmers remain English. Culturalism!

I should note for those who don’t know that FANTASTIC MR. FOX is done in stop-motion animation, using actual furry models. Our protagonists are anthropomorphic subterranean mammals who live much like people, wearing clothes, holding down jobs, and so forth, but also behaving according to their nature, which is to say that Mr. Fox steals and kills chickens from nearby farms. (Birds aren’t anthropomorphic in this world; they’re food. And domesticated dogs simply act like dogs, not people. Plus apparently, foxes and badgers and so on speak and write in English that can be understood by humans. Yet it all works. Maybe not logically under geek-level analysis, but instinctively, on a kid-level, sure.)

Mr. Fox is voiced by George Clooney, in a casting nod clearly designed to draw mileage from his Ocean’s heist movies. Retired from the farm-raiding business after he inadvertently puts his wife (Meryl Streep) in danger, he writes a newspaper column that nobody reads. Hoping to improve his family’s life, he stretches his finances to buy a large treehouse, but the new place just so happens to be right next door to three of the richest and most nasty farmers in all of…England? or whatever country this is meant to be. Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, respectively own farms full of chickens, geese, and apple cider. The movie makes gun-toting Bean the main baddie, as voiced by Michael Gambon, whereas I seem to recall the book assigning equal evilness.

Some reviews have said that this is very much of a kind with Wes Anderson’s other movies, but it is and isn’t. It’s arguably his most commercial movie to date, and certainly his laugh-out-loud funniest…in many of Anderson’s films, the humor is such that you don’t quite know if you’re meant to laugh or not, while here there is no doubt. But it does feature many familiar voices from his usual gang: Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzmann, and even Anderson himself does a little voice-acting.

Bottom line, though, is that it’s great, giving UP a run for its money as best animated film of the year. It’s distinctive, artistic, and lovable. To me, anyway…many of my colleagues on the way out seemed skeptical.

Little disappointed that the after-party’s only food was Baskin Robbins ice cream cake. The recession hits home. I was hoping for mini-burgers at least.

Pure pomegranate juice to mix with the free vodka is nothing to sneeze at, though. And the bartender had the Graham family motto “Ne Oublie” tattooed on his arm…a very distant relative, it seems. His shirt said “The Villain,” which I asked about – could this be a reference to James Graham, Earl of Montrose, being the villain in the ROB ROY movie, as played by John Hurt?

Nothing so cool; the shirt was randomly assigned.