Janelle and I saw Coraline on Friday, but my reaction was conflicted enough that I needed a couple of days to process my thoughts.

One of my biggest cinematic pet peeves is that Tim Burton gets so much of the credit for Nightmare Before Christmas, which was written by other people and directed by Coraline director Henry Selick. Hopefully, with Coraline, Selick will start to get more appreciation, because it really is a brilliant piece of work.

Coraline is a 3-D stop-motion dark fairy tale based on a novel by the great Neil Gaiman. I haven’t read this novel, but I like everything I’ve ever read from him. The eponymous Coraline is a snarky girl, neglected by her parents, and stuck in an ancient rooming house in what looks like the middle of the Pacific Northwest wilderness. Finding a mysterious hidden doorway, she travels to a mirror-image of her life, where the apartment building is filled with wonders and her Other Mother and Other Father are waiting to dote on her. The only problem is, everyone here has black buttons sewn onto their eyes…

I love stop-motion animation. The intricacy and vividness is captivating, even more than CGI. Coraline probably has the best stop-motion I’ve ever seen. The motion is fluid, but not as perfect as CGI. Maybe I’m alone here, but I think seeing a hint of the figurative seams (in the way water is animated, for instance) makes animation more real, not less. Especially seen in 3D, this film has some absolutely breathtaking moments, even though wearing the 3D glasses over my regular glasses lead to a little eyestrain by the end. And my God, this movie has mood — long before we meet the button-eyed Other Mother, there’s an ominousness to Coraline’s adventures.

But the screenplay seemed really lopsided — a little too slow and exposition-y at the beginning, and then rushed at the end as Coraline has to deal with a series of puzzles and obstacles. In fact, during the last 30 minutes, I couldn’t help but think of old-school hunt-and-click computer adventure games (“You have found two of the three lost eyes! Find the last one to open the door!”). And yes, I know the reason for this is that both the movie and the old games were inspired by similar source material. It’s still distracting. Which is all really strange, because while I don’t think Neil Gaiman is a master of dialogue this kind of storytelling is his bread and butter. (The Sandman story where Lucifer abandons hell and all the gods and angels have to deal with it is one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.) I’m really curious to see how it’s handled in the original novel.

So in the end, I didn’t love Coraline as much as I’d hoped I would. Maybe in my second viewing, I’ll be able to just ignore the story and enjoy the brilliantly imaginative world the movie lets us into. But for now, I find it oddly unsatisfying.

The past few years, I’ve invariably spent much of November in a moody funk. It’s not only my birthday month (which always reminds me I’m not as young as I’d like everybody to think I am), but it’s the first month of deep Vancouver gloom. I wake up before sunrise, go to work surrounded by the looming glass-and-concrete towers of Yaletown reflecting the grey sky back at me, and go back home in darkness again. As much as I love Vancouver, my prairie-bred brain always battles the idea of a sunless winter.

This past weekend was cold wind and pouring rain. I spent Saturday watching TV Carnage and reading about Richard Nixon’s tastes in film, but by Sunday morning, I needed to get out of the house. So I went to my gym and then walked down the street to the Fifth Avenue Cinema to take in a matinee of Slumdog Millionaire. The theatre was nearly full and I ended sitting at the back, next to a 40ish English woman who struck up a conversation with me about India and Danny Boyle. She told me she didn’t know much about the movie but had been to India several times. I told her I was planning to go there with my girlfriend once I finish my degree, and she warned me, as does everybody who has been there, that it was “intense”.

I often end up talking to people when I go to movies by myself, which is kind of odd, because I’m generally more cooly polite than friendly with strangers.

Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamel, an Oliver-Twisty character from the slums of Mumbai. He ends up on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, where each of the questions happens to fit like a puzzle piece into his experiences. It’s a neat and intricate bit of plotting, which could have been gimmicky or precious, but Danny Boyle manages to use it as a scaffold to hang the loose and flowing tale together. The story itself starts grimly, almost wallowing in picturesque misery, but actually shows itself to be more of a fairly tale by the time it’s done, with a noble protagonist, evil villains, and a beautiful princess to be rescued. It’s the kind of movie that makes you grateful for your own cushy life, but still leaves you smiling at the end even if it is all really kind of sentimental and preposterous. And frankly, the whole thing is gorgeous: the slums are fetid, but filled with life and motion, train stations are filled with colour, and by the end, we are in 21st century Mumbai, sprouting soaring skyscrapers.

In the end, I found the slick, crowd-pleasing aspects a bit unsatisfying, but I still enjoyed watching it despite myself. Probably endorphins from my workout before the movie. As the credits rolled over a Bollywood dance sequence, the English woman asked me if I still wanted to go to India and I told her I did, more than ever. Then I walked outside and it had finally stopped raining and a slash of mountains and blue sky was visible.

You know what? I’m going to come out and say it: I’m not a fan of the gag-based comedy movie. 90 minutes of formulaic wackiness is at least 60 minutes too much. Leave that for TV. 30 Rock may well be the funniest gag comedy on TV since the Conan years of The Simpsons, but a 30 Rock movie is about as necessary as a Simpsons movie. If you’re going to make me sit still that long, you have to make me care about the characters. I don’t have to like them, but you have to give me something to hang on to.

Happy times, indeed, that we live in that this opinion seems to be catching on. Judd Apatow didn’t invent the raunchy, sentimental, character-driven comedy, but he drove it straight into the mainstream like a crazy fat man in a garbage truck, and the results have been just as awesome.

Kevin Smith actually can claim to invent the raunchy, sentimental, character-driven comedy, but in Zack and Miri, he gets a big boost from the Apatow crowd in the form (finally) of actors who can make his dialogue sound like they come from actual people, rather than a series of Kevin Smith mouthpieces (Smith regulars show up in supporting roles, which they mostly nail, especially Jason Mewes). Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks bring their underachieving, cheerfully foul-mouthed characters to life, and make their relationship sweet and touching, even when it becomes obvious where it’s going to go (i.e. around the time the opening credits end). It doesn’t hurt that Smith manages to achieve a much higher hit-to-miss ratio than usual on the laughs, and that he obviously has a lot of affection for the world of no-budget filmmaking. In Smith’s world, there’s not a lot of difference between making an indie comedy in a convenience store and making a porno in a coffee shop.

Role Models, meanwhile, manages to inject a little mainstream into the David Wain-led group behind Wet Hot American Summer. Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks (again), Jane Lynch and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin from Superbad) are among the Apatow players who show up here. Paul Rudd is a miserable, sarcastic energy-drink salesman who ends a particularly bad day by impaling his ad-truck on a statue. (My kind of guy, in other words.) As punishment, he and co-worker Seann William Scott are court-ordered to mentor dorky Christopher Mintz-Plasse and hilariously vicious Bobb’e J Thompson. Paul Rudd is co-writer and while it’s really an ensemble movie, it’s also really about his character, who is awesome when he’s walking around delivering snark like a UPSnark deliveryman, but less awesome when he’s learning life lessons. Unfortunately, he spends a lot of time learning life lessons. I don’t know what it says about me that bitter sarcasm brings a smile to my face and personal growth leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it does. Fortunately, even when that stuff’s going on, the movie brings on the funny on a pretty regular basis, so I can almost forgive it. Actually, I can forgive it — for Jane Lynch’s line delivery alone. “I’m not here to service you, I’m here to service these young boys.”

“Well, here we are on the road.”
“Yup, that’s where we are, all right.”

A big part of my cinephilia is the search for the new and unexpected. I’ll take the bold and original over the well-crafted but trite any day. I actually watched Two-Lane Blacktop for the second time last weekend with my brother and as with my first viewing, I’m not sure what to think of it, but it really stuck with me. It’s an existential road movie starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two Zen gearheads who enter their 55′ Chevy in a cross-country, winner-take-all race with Warren Oates (who’s brilliant as a garrulous phoney) and his brand-new GTO. But the race never really gets going and all three men get side-tracked by a bed-and-car-hopping hitchhiker (Laurie Bird). Turns out it’s all (spoiler alert!) just an excuse to get these four characters on the road in search of America, themselves, and the meaning of life.

It’s incredibly ambitious and feels haphazard, but somehow also clear-eyed. I still haven’t managed to wrap my head around it, but I plan to be giving it a third and fourth viewing in the not-too-distant future. What I do know is that it’s pure cinema: sound and speed and loneliness and poetry played out on the American landscape.

But if you’re still not sold, here’s Richard Linklater’s list of things to love about Two Lane Blacktop. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look through my Pauline Kael books to find her review.

You know, there was a time, in the late nineties and early aughts when it just honestly looked to me like there was nothing really new and original in quote-unquote “mainstream” movies. Not that everything was universally bad, it was just universally been-there-done-that. Even comedies. Especially comedies. But the best of the recent Judd Apatow-produced comedy mill — The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad and now Forgetting Sarah Marshall — have managed to make a whole new genre out of what should have been there all along. Comedies about awkward social/dating/sex situations in which everybody’s more-or-less a real person, and nobody’s really a “good guy” or “bad guy”, they’re all just people, who sometimes do or say the wrong thing or act at cross purposes. And are really fucking hilarious. Case in point: the douchebag rock star romantic rival. In any other movie, that’s all he would be. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he’s a douchebag rock star romantic rival who also turns out to be a cool, likeable guy. And who gets some of the best lines.

Only problem is, movies like this make it hard to watch funny but lesser comedies like Tropic Thunder and not feel like something’s missing. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay.