Ten Movies I Liked, 2013

10 Films I liked, 2013

I can’t call this a survey of the 10 best films of the year, because I haven’t seen the totality of the year’s work.  (Pesky day job!)  Rather, here are 10 films I enjoyed.  It was a year when the basic experience of the movies, the emotional and empathic experience, seemed to remain undiminished: their capacity to make us think, to make us feel.  To freak us out, to get us hot.  To make us laugh.  To show us people faced with moral decisions and make us think about what we'd do if we were in their shoes.  To put us in other people’s shoes in the first place. 

1.           Before Midnight   “How long has it been since we walked around bullshitting?” Jesse asks Celine as they stroll along on a sun-kissed Greek island.  It’s been about nine years, actually, since “Before Sunset.” That film unfolded in “real time,” but then, time is one of the subjects of these movies.  It’s become a series, though it wasn’t planned that way, a collaboration between Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater.  1995’s “Before Sunrise” was about an enchanted evening when time seemed to be suspended.  That night left Jesse and Celine with an impossibly romantic image of the other.  “Before Midnight” is about what happens when that romantic image becomes a real person.  It’s also about middle-age.  (I’m the same age as Jesse and Celine, so these pictures feel personal for me.)  At one point Jesse and Celine sit and watch a sunset.  “Still here,” Delpy says.  “Still here.”  And finally, “Gone.”  Yes, the day will close, and yes, we’re only passing through.  But by the end of this film, after that bravura extended scene in the hotel room where everything seems to teeter on the edge of flying apart--breathtaking, excruciating, hilarious, heartbreaking--Jesse and Celine make the choice that they will see the day out together.  “Before Midnight” is more honest, more suffused with joy and sadness and truth, than anything else I saw this year. 

2.         56 Up              In 1964 a handful of British seven-year-olds from different backgrounds were asked, on camera, their views on life.  Originally this program’s point was to see if the seismic shifts of the 1960s meant changes for Britain’s class system as well.   We check back in with them every seven years, so that so that when we see the latest “Up” movies we’re also looking at ourselves, in a way.   Those kids we saw dancing happily to the new beat music at the end of “7 Up” are now 56. The Up Series is about the moments that make up a life.  It’s about love and the passage of time.  At the end of this film, however, I came away feeling like there has been a secret theme to this series all along: happiness.  It gladdened me to see that, for the most part, our “Uppers” have had a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.

3.           20 Feet From Stardom    A documentary about backup singers, this is also about dreams.   It’s the story of the role of black women in rock & roll.  There is much electrifying performance footage: Lynn Mabry with Talking Heads, Claudia Linnear behind Joe Cocker and George Harrison, Darlene Love doing a supercharged “Fine, Fine Boy” with a deliriously happy Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.  We see Merry Clayton, who recorded that apocalyptic vocal on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” make her (ultimately unsuccessful) bid for the front of the stage, performing a powerful version of Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” The filmmakers linger on Lisa Fischer (who’s taken that “Gimme Shelter” solo onstage with the Stones since 1989).  They enjoy basking in her otherworldly scat singing and her radiant smile just as much as we do. 

4.           Gravity               This year’s purely cinematic experience, a story that could only be expressed fully in the medium of cinema: not as a novel, not on the small screen nor stage.  Alfonso Cuaron’s elemental tale of survival put us in a spacesuit with America’s sweetheart, Sandra Bullock (in a fine performance), and cast us adrift in the cosmos.  We felt everything she felt, as she first accepted that she would die, and then chose to fight to live.  The thrilling images were vast, vertiginous; the sounds could be as intimate as a heartbeat.   

5.           12 Years a Slave Here is another tale of survival.  Solomon Northup (Chiwitel Ejiofor), a free, educated black man, a violinist, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.  He ended up deep in Georgia on the plantation run by a dissipated, sadistic man called Epps (Michael Fassbender), his fate to be some kind of crucible for Epps’ feverish shouldering of the “White Man’s Burden.”  In order for a period movie to work, the very atmosphere has to be right, from costumes and set design all the way down to supporting performances and the language, here written by John Ridley, adapting Northup’s 1855 memoir.  Here everything is right, so that raw white supremacy feels as natural and American as breathing.  The director, Steve McQueen, and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, create images rich in texture.  Alfre Woodard has only one scene, but it’s chilling.  Fanning herself on the porch, her smile never fades as she utters a chilling line: the curse of the pharaohs got nothin’ on what’s going to happen to these slavers.  And after a time we’ve seen so much brutality that we’re calling out for “Django”: for an avenger, for a cathartic bloodbath.  But this film shows the reality: the heroism was just to survive, and that left you feeling like no hero at all.  Actually, the picture it most put me in mind of is Pasolini’s almost unbearable “Salo,” about a group of fascists holed up in a castle in the terminal days of WWII, acting out sado-masochistic fantasies on the young men and women of the village.  Chiwetel Ejiofor’s expressive performance translates Northup’s inner life into visual terms.  Our friend Dwight Henry has a small role.  (Karolyn and I had the pleasure of meeting the great man at his Buttermilk Drop Bakery in New Orleans earlier this year). 

6.  Much Ado About Nothing Back when Joss Whedon’s TV shows “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” were on the air, I used to read about how his troupe would come round to the house and drink wine and perform Shakespeare for their own amusement.  His black & white staging of Shakespeare’s fin-du-siecle (1599) screwball comedy has much of that feel, and it’s all the better for it.  The actors are playing in the dress-up box a bit here, while also inhabiting the characters fully.  Whedon's happy lovers capture the spirit of Shakespeare’s fanfare, set to music by Whedon: “Then sigh not so, but let them go, and be you blithe and bonny, converting all your sounds of woe/into hey nonny, nonny."

7.  A Band Called Death  You should see this film if you’re excited about rock ‘n’ roll, or even if you’re not: it’s a really good story about three African-American brothers in early-70s Detroit who formed a band that the band’s leader, the late David Hackney, insisted on calling Death (though we learn that the name was conceived as anything but a nihilistic concept—in fact it was a spiritual thing that came to him as he reflected over his father's death—of  course everyone took it that way). The brothers played punk years before punk, and at a time when audiences had certain preconceived notions about rock 'n' roll as music white people played (not that that's changed too much).  Death was forgotten until Drag City re-released their 1975 album a few years ago.  The two surviving Hackney brothers remember their brother David as a visionary who insisted on being true to his vision, even though the audience wasn’t ready.  Now, four decades on, they’re out there playing the music again to excited audiences.

8.  Stories We Tell  All families have stories.  All families have secrets.  Sarah Polley, a director I admire (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”), made this film when she discovered that her father (the actor Michael Polley), who raised her after her mother died, is not her biological father.  While it’s a film about looking for the truth, what you have to keep in mind is that this is a family of actors and professional storytellers.  In a sense it’s their job to make us believe things that aren’t true.  Polley remains an artist, not some dull, objective receptacle of “truth,” and she doesn’t pretend otherwise.  Her instinct is to tell stories, to play, to play even with film texture.  (She creates “home movie” footage so skillfully that it’s jarring when she eventually pulls back the camera to reveal herself orchestrating the entire scene.)  This movie is also about how for each generation our parents remain essentially mysterious.  It’s about imagery as a form of memory.  And it's a portrait of Polley’s mother, a life-force who died too soon.

9.           This Is The End   Helming the director’s seat for the first time, Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg got a bunch of real-life friends (James Franco, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Emma Watson etc.) to play twisted versions of themselves.  It’s about how horribly these people would behave if the Rapture were actually upon us.  (None of them was shot up into heaven of course).  They have a lot of fun making fun of their own personas.  It’s a bit insular, presupposing that you know these people and their work.  While the special effects are funny, the laughs mostly flow from human-scale foibles like pretensions and vanity.  You can almost hear Rogen and Goldberg sitting around saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?”  And for the most part, it is. 

10.         The World’s End

Another movie where a bunch of mates sitting around saying “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” got their vision up onto the screen.  It’s about the end of the world as well, and about my generation, sort of.  It’s by the team who made “Shaun of the Dead”: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who co-write and star, and Edgar Wright, who directs.  These guys are the same generation as me.  The story is about a group of estranged old friends, settled into a middle-aged rut, who reunite to finish the pub crawl the never finished 20 years ago, when they were young and invincible.  Pegg plays the selfish, charismatic rebel (the “cock”) who used to cheerfully get them all in trouble back in the day.  The filmmakers establish characters and a story and an everyday world, so that by the time the jolts come, they really jolt.  (You know this crew wouldn’t stick to a straight story).  I like the idea that the Starbuck-ization of English country pubs is the advance warning of an alien invasion.  Actually, the idea that human beings are being steadily replaced by robots would explain a lot.  While this movie eventually becomes repetitive, it's mostly a pleasure.  Features an early-90s Britpop soundtrack, the music of the characters’ youth.  (And ours, some of us).

I should also mention Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Die Welt, Despicable Me 2 (for most Minions madness), The Harvest, Blue Jasmine

--December 13, 2013

The Harvest

Karolyn and I popped over to the 49^th Chicago International Film Festival and caught the world premiere of “The Harvest,” the latest work from two Chicago guys, actor Michael Shannon and director John McNaughton.  It’s a psychological story.  By that I mean it's about the relationships between the characters, but the funny thing is, you won't get the true meaning of the glances and words, the actions and shifting loyalties, except in hindsight or on a second viewing.  Writing about this one depends more than usual on not giving too much away.  Suffice it to say that the writer, Stephen Lancellotti, who attended our screening, has created a story with (urban) mythic resonance.  It's all pretty implausible, probably, but if we learned anything from Hitchcock it's that we probably shouldn't worry too much about plausibility, at least in the movies.  (And you won't if you had fun with McNaughton's last picture, 1998's "Wild Things," which I did.)        

We meet Katherine (Samantha Morton) when she pulls down her surgeon’s mask.  She’s just saved a boy’s life: he was hit in the chest by a well-hit baseball.  Her own son, prepubescent Andy (Charlie Tahan) is gravely ill.  A frail, bedbound boy, he can barely lift himself from his wheelchair to his bed, whence he watches the cornstalks grow just outside his window.  His mother has charged him with guarding “his” harvest, and so he watches for crows, rapping on the window to ward them off.  She homeschools him and pretty much keeps him cut off from the outside world.  She even discourages him from trying to walk on his own. 

Shannon plays Richard, Katherine’s husband.  He’s kind of a big kid himself: a bit slow maybe, with his big furrowed brow, but not without a mordant humor, his eyes sad, lip softly bit as if biting back an interior life.  Something in his psychological makeup allows him to go along with Katherine, but only up to a certain point: he gives her pushback about her zealous overprotection.  For her part, while she's the steely boss, she can break and be needy by turns.        

Through Andy’s window comes bold, intrepid Maryann (young Natasha Calis, excellent), as if answering the wish for a friend he didn’t know he had.  She lives just through the woods with her grandparents (Leslie Lyles and a moving Peter Fonda).  She’s just moved to town, still raw from her parents' death in a car accident.  She is a girl of action, and pretty soon she’s sneaking him outside to play.    

 

Katherine regards Maryann with a look so icy it’s like being under a mile of frozen ground.  But why?  Maryann’s company is so obviously good for Andy.  Is it jealousy?  Before long Maryann is playing detective.  Of course, nobody will listen to her about what she’s discovered (she's just a kid, after all, although Fonda does get off a good “groovy”), and I won't tell you here, except it's not good.     

A more expressive director than McNaughton might have pushed this material into horror or melodrama or even camp (which is where he took his "Wild Things," come to think of it), but his unexploitative, relatively flat style here allows the story to remain in the realm of the psychological, though shading into horror.  Like the film itself, Morton’s Katherine inhabits some twilight between psychological thriller and horror movie.  She evokes iconic performances like Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom, Kathy Bates in “Misery,” and Faye Dunaway as “Mommie Dearest.”  Isn’t there something a bit sexist by now, you might ask, about this trope: a maternal power whom the rebel (often a man) must fight?  Maybe, but here it’s balanced by brave Maryann’s girl power. 

At the question and answer session, Shannon, generally laconic in temperament, declared that “The Harvest” is about love.  Really about love, he stressed, not like some Ryan Reynolds/Rachel McAdams movie that "I would probably hate.”  (Now, I happen to think Rachel McAdams is a doll, but that's me.)  It’s a love gone horribly awry, but still: it's about a mother's love.  I suspect this is what is what Morton latched onto to play Katherine, to make her pathetic as well as scary.  There are moments when we actually sympathize with her, and it's because of this mad love, as well as the cosmic unfairness of it all (which is maybe what's driven her mad): she has the power to save other children’s lives, but not her own.

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

--November 18, 2013

Blue Jasmine

This year’s Woody Allen picture showcases an unlikely ensemble cast led by Cate Blanchett.  She plays a woman who calls herself Jasmine.  When we first meet her, she’s buttonholing an old lady on a plane, running down her life story for her captive audience at the very moment when she’s lost her equilibrium, her home, her life.  She's a bundle of nerves, deep in denial.  We watch her unravel from there.     

To structure his story, Allen weaves past events in and out of the present moment, so that the past informs the present and the present informs the past.  In fact, in its treatment of memory the film seems to be remarkably spot-on.  A night or two ago I fell to flipping through Diane Ackerman’s An Alchemy of Mind, her book on "the marvel and mystery of the mind," and it seemed to speak to what's going on in Jasmine's tortured mind in this movie. 

Telling stories about what happened to us is the way we cement memories, Ackerman writes.  However, the source of a memory can be slippery.  Are you remembering something that really happened, or are you remembering the story you've told yourself?  As Jasmine keeps telling herself (and anyone who will listen) “Blue Moon” was the song that was playing when she and her husband, Hal, met.  She's trying to secure that moment, even as her life falls away around her.         

Jasmine, who has a tremendous amount of class-anxiety, shot to the top of the social strata by marrying Hal (Alec Baldwin), a money manager.  Turns out he was playing a Ponzi scheme with his investors' cash.  As Hal, Baldwin is guileless, likeable: you can see why nobody knew what he was up to (or, in some cases, didn't want to know).  

Jasmine touches down in San Francisco, intending to drop her bags on the doorstep of her sister Ginger.  Ginger is a happy, sweet working-class girl who Jasmine secretly feels is "not too bright."  She's played by Sally Hawkins, a delight.  Hawkins modulates the effusive spirit that marked her unforgettable turn as the unsinkable Poppy in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (unforgettable to me, annoying to others), and convincingly transmutes her thick London accent.  She is such a smart performer, and, I think, quite fetching. 

Both sisters were adopted.  They couldn't be more dissimilar physically, temperamentally.  Jasmine is blonde, blue-eyed, tall, with classical cheekbones.  Ginger looks a bit daffy with her big front teeth.  They're a bit like duckling and swan.   

San Francisco is a character in this picture, just as Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and London have been over the last decade.  (Woody the NYC man continues to roam.)  To signal the status attained by Dwight (Peter Skaarsgard), an aspiring congressman whose aw-shucks demeanor hides a social climber every bit as pitiless as Jasmine, Allen pans across the bay to the stunning view of the Golden Gate bridge from Dwight's porch.   

(At one point Jasmine walks all the way from the piers to Oakland and back.  Karolyn, who knows San Francisco, looked a bit askance at that, even given what a sweaty mess Jasmine is at the end of her journey.)    

As played by Bobby Cannavale, Ginger's boyfriend Chili is a physical, vibrant presence, so much so that the evocation of Brando doesn't feel like a stretch.  (Some are calling “Blue Jasmine” Allen's answer to “A Streetcar Named Desire.”)  He's tasteless, vulgar, strong; his body carries the implied capacity for a rough tumble of some stripe.  He's the type of guy ladies are calling a “douche” these days, I'm given to understand.  Still, he’s good-hearted and good-humored, and his love for Ginger is pure. 

Ginger’s ex, another big lug, is sympathetically played by none other than 80s shock comic Andrew Dice Clay.  (In the narrative Jasmine tells, he beat Ginger.)

Though “Blue Jasmine” is more light tragedy than comedy in tone, its comic moments flow from class differences.  Jasmine can barely stand Ginger's loud kids, or Chili's crew who come over to watch the fight.  The funniest scene in the movie is the ill-advised "double date" where Jasmine is introduced to Chili and his dorky pal Eddie (Max Casella), who instantly comes down with a crush on Jasmine.       

But even if Ginger and Chili's sartorial choices are played for laughs (and their look really is something to see), “Blue Jasmine” is notable for Allen’s warm look at working-class culture.  Ginger’s home, a walk-up apartment, is warm and cozy.  (I fell to musing about how space itself denotes class.  Ginger lives in close quarters, whereas Hal and Jasmine's opulent apartment, shown in flashback, is vast, roomy.)  Ginger and Chili are happily, playfully physical with each other.  Ginger's dalliance with Al (Louis C.K.), a guy she meets at a party, happens only because Jasmine constantly tells her that Chili is low class, a "loser."  

Cate Blanchett is one of the greats, of course: she's willing to make herself really ugly here.   I won't forget her withering, indeed murderous, glares from beneath lowered brow.  I was going to say Jasmine is deeply unlikeable, but maybe she's more pathetic.  Though she wants to "make something" of herself, maybe become an interior decorator, she's too strung out and insecure.  She can't just take pleasure in living, like Ginger does.  Of the prospect of a job working as a receptionist for a dentist (Michael Stuhlberg), she proclaims, “It’s so menial.”    

There is very little score in "Blue Jasmine," as usual with Allen.  His camera is observational, quiet, almost serene.  Its stillness somehow intensifies the performances, and gives some moments an almost dreamlike feel.

"Blue Jasmine" is not as rich as, say, "Hannah & Her Sisters" or "Crimes and Misdemeanors."  Neither is it a whimsical pleasure, a fantasy like "Midnight in Paris" and "When In Rome."  Still, it will probably turn out to one of Woody’s more memorable late films.  I haven't stopped thinking about it.  

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

--August 30, 2013

Twenty Feet From Stardom

“And the colored girls go,

doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo…”

This line from Lou Reed’s classic “Walk On The Wild Side” leaps out as the song plays over the opening credits of “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” a new documentary about backup singers and, more broadly, about dreams.  It’s a line that makes some people “uncomfortable,” as Lynn Mabry, one of the backup singers who’s meant a lot to me personally, says with a knowing smile.  She knows Lou is just keeping it real.  The idea of this invigorating movie is, let’s let those "colored girls” tell their stories.

It’s a story the movie charts from the golden age of the backup singer in the 60s and 70s, through to their decline in the modern era.  Along the way there is plenty of electrifying performance footage.  We see Ms. Mabry in action with Talking Heads in “Stop Making Sense,” one of the more important films in my young life.  The implicit point that movie made—that black women are an indispensable part of the community—surely molded my politics, as well as stirring the adolescent Scotty P. in other ways.  We see Claudia Linnear singing with Joe Cocker on the “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour and with George Harrison on the Concert for Bangladesh. 

The director, Morgan Neville, has produced an impressive body of music films about everyone from Pearl Jam to Ray Charles to Iggy and the Stooges to Leiber & Stoller.  In fact, what makes this documentary transcendent is that he gets the drama of the music.  When Merry Clayton returns to the studio where she sang the most galvanic backup vocal ever (in the middle of the night! in hair curlers!) in 1969, the filmmakers allow those tickling, eerie notes of “Gimme Shelter” to trickle in as though from the walls, and we rock fans break out in goose flesh.  We know what’s coming: a vocal that makes real every apocalyptic vibe Mick and Keith ever imagined.  “Rape! Murder!!” the young Clayton screams on the soundtrack as the filmmakers let the music fall away, leaving her voice naked.  

In the early 60s black women made records that burst with the life force, those great “girl group” records auteured by Phil Spector, “pocket symphonies for the kids.”  In a moving scene Neville reunites Darlene Love, one of Spector's greatest singers, with her old group, the Blossoms.  Though they’re now in their 70s and they haven’t sung together in over 40 years, when they sing it’s so glorious that tears sprung to my eyes.  We learn that it was actually the Blossoms who sang “He’s a Rebel”; we’ve always thought of it as a Crystals record, because Spector put it out that way.  Indeed Spector sabotaged Love’s career again and again.  She is as high-spirited as ever, but her expression turns wistful as she sits in the studio and listens to her voice as a young woman.  By the 80s she was cleaning houses when she heard a radio blast out her own atomic “(Christmas) Baby Please Come Home.”      

Then there is Lisa Fischer.  She’s a “freak of nature,” someone says.  Indeed, listening to her otherworldly scat makes you rethink the verb “to sing”: this is the sound of the heart and soul resonating with the universe.  The filmmakers linger on her.  They like to hear her sing, and to bask in her smile, just as much as we do.  She has sung backup for Luther Vandross and Sting, and the Stones have taken her out with them on every tour since 1989.  (She takes the “Gimme Shelter” solo every night and acts as a foil for Mick.)  When we see her standing anonymously in line at FedEx, it’s hard to reconcile this rather nondescript woman with the full-force gale we see performing onstage with the Stones. 

Whereas Fischer seems in full control and authorship of her vision and sexuality when she performs, not everybody is.  It won't stop any presses to learn there was exploitation of backup singers by male music geniuses.  There’s great footage of Ray Charles and the Raelettes, and even though it’s not mentioned in the film, I couldn’t help thinking of that old adage: to be a Raelette, you had to “let Ray.”  Indeed, watching the Ikettes’ turbo-charged booty-shaking now, a male viewer feels conflicted.  You’re stirred, but then you think about Ike Turner’s bald exploitation and the mood sours. 

I guess the issue with sexuality is always whether it’s self-expression (or even self-exploitation, what the heck). After all, Claudia Linnear posed for Playboy in the 70s for a photo spread titled “Brown Sugar,” and she doesn’t seem to have any regrets.  In fact, according to some Ms. Linnear was the inspiration for the Stones’s “Brown Sugar,” though some give those props to Martha Hunt (also in this film).

So why didn’t some of these great singers “make it”?  Of the stars interviewed, Bruce Springsteen offers some of the most thoughtful comments, talking about the leap it takes to make that walk to the front of the stage, measuring the distance not just in steps but in conceptual terms as well.  To put your vision out there takes a certain ego, Springsteen admits with a chuckle. 

For some, like Tate Vega at Motown, their solo careers just never caught fire.  That was also true of Merry Clayton herself, though we see her sing a powerful version of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” right at the time that black women were standing up in America.   (As Ms. Clayton notes with acid in her voice, she made it a point to sing the hell out of Lynryd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” as well.)

Some are still working on their dream.  There is Judith Hill, who sang backup for Michael Jackson, plays the piano and writes and sings, and by the evidence in this film is a terrific artist.  Karolyn tells me she was on “The Voice” as well. 

Most of these women seem happy.  Lisa Fischer says she’s “good” with her life.  Fittingly, there is a final, stirring “Lean On Me” led by Darlene Love, with Ms. Fischer, Jo Lawry from Sting’s band, and Judith Hill backing her up.  What does it even mean to “make it” in life, anyway?  Sometimes almost enough has to be good enough.      

Black women have played a key, and too often unsung, role in rock ‘n’ roll.  This movie adds a missing piece of that story.  Maybe it will even kick-start some careers.  And it sends you out of the theater on a high, with Darlene Love in all her glory singing a supercharged “Fine, Fine Boy” onstage with one of her disciples, a deliriously happy Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

--August 8, 2013

Despicable Me 2

For Minions maniacs!  This new animated comedy from Illumination Entertainment is a charming children’s movie with a lot of heart.  It rejoins the hapless Gru (Steve Carell), ex-would-be evil genius and current single dad.  In the first movie he found love when he adopted orphans Margot, Edith and Agnes (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Baier and Elsie Fisher, respectively); they revealed a big softie's heart.  

Now the girls think it's time their dad found himself a girlfriend (and them a mom).  Will Gru find love with Lucy (Kristen Wiig), a whimsical secret agent with the the “Anti-Villain League,” whom Gru meets when she kidnaps him by tasing him with a laser gun and hurling him into her car, which hurtles along until it plunges off a dock, becomes a submarine and drops to the bottom of the sea to the underwater headquarters of the AVL's head honcho (Steve Coogan)?  (I suppose there have been odder beginnings to great relationships.) 

It seems the AVL hopes to enlist Gru to fight an evil plot by his old nemesis (and competitor for the arch-villain title), El Macho.  They suspect he is posing as "Eduardo," (Benjamin Bratt), who runs a Mexican restaurant at a nearby shopping mall.  Gru may need the help of Dr. Nefario (Russel Brand), his answer to "Q," who's back as well.       

But the great attraction here is those lovable, loyal Minions!  Gru's crack henchmen, they’re in the great tradition of the Keystone Cops.  They look like sawed-off Twinkies or yellow Tic-Tacs, they wear goggles and overalls (except for the cross-dressers Stuart and Phil), and they speak in an oddly mellifluous babble.  Careening, falling, tripping, jostling and joshing, knocking each other around, pouring gasoline on every fire they are called on to put out before rallying to somehow save the day in spite of themselves, the madcap Minions make for mightily merry movie-time.  There is even some Gizmo-to-Gremlin business here, when El Macho shoots the Minions full of a kind of steroid that turns them into his big, purple, freaked-out (albeit still uncomprehending) goon squad.  Karolyn and I are quite tickled by the little yellow fellows.  In fact, as to the question of whether "Despicable Me" or its sequel is the superior film, I have to give the nod to Part 2 in that it feature more Minions mayhem!    

As Gru, Steve Carrel performs in a funny accent of unidentifiable provenance, with a nod to every great movie evil-genius voice, from the Bond films to Dr. Strangelove.  For an actor a voiceover performance must be a collaboration of a rather unique kind.  You're collaborating not just with the director as usual, but with your animated avatar as well.    

Seeing an animated film reminds us that, whatever else it is, a movie is at heart a story told in pictures.  Colorful and kinetic, the movie takes full advantage of the cartoon medium.  There is a lot of Roadrunner in the filmmakers’ game.  While the animated world of "Despicable Me 2" is mightily inventive, I wouldn't say it quite as impressively rendered as, say, the one in “Rango,” nor does it have the handmade quality that made "Coraline" special.  Still, there is plenty of visual wit and wimsy.  I like the way Gru's house looms up, comically dark, shoehorned into the white-picket fence suburban neighborhood.      

An animated comedy must have a couple great set pieces, and here we get that domed mall--its own universe--where Gru and Lucy go undercover in search of El Macho's true identity.  Then there is El Macho's lair itself, perched precariously on top of a cliff, the site of the great showdown and also a party for his son Antonio (Moises Arias), a self-absorbed cool kid whom Edith thinks is dreamy.  I liked the party hats: sombreros made of crispy tortilla.  You just chip off a piece, reach up and dunk it in the guacamole moat running around the crown. 

Once again the directors are Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud and the screenwriters are Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul.  These are grownups making entertainment for children: professionals and adults, but adults who never lost their sense of childlike wonder and fun.  (Coffin and Renaud perform many of the Minion voices themselves.)  Good children's films can probably only be made by people who have managed to maintain that very tricky balance.  In our audience the kids seemed pretty delighted.  

And when we as adults laugh at the Minions, or delight at Gru's antics, we're giving an affectionate nod to the child that's still there in us.  It's good to see his or her smiling face.  I've got to admit that it even got a little dusty in the theater at the end when Gru finds love and happiness again.    

Oh, and I should say: the Minions singing All 4 One's “I Swear” is worth the price of admission by itself.  When they take the chorus it sounds like they’re singing “underwear.”

Rating: ***1/2

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

--July 30, 2013