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Slick
chicks: The Triplets of Belleville.
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Loony
Toon
By Shawn Stone
The
Triplets of Belleville
Directed
by Sylvain Chomet
The delightful animated feature The Triplets of Belleville
begins with an anarchic, ’30s-style black-and-white prologue
introducing us to the titular singers—three sisters belting
out close-harmony swing in a nightclub—and sets a wonderfully
weird tone. Fred Astaire is attacked by his own shoes. Django
Reinhardt plays guitar with his feet. Josephine Baker gets
the men in the club so hot and bothered, they turn into monkeys,
storm the stage and devour her banana costume. All the while,
the unconcerned triplets keep singin’ and swingin’.
One of the many pleasures of cartoons created in the long-ago
and faraway era before TV is that they weren’t strictly intended
for children. Horny skeletons chased Betty Boop to the hot
jazz sounds of Cab Calloway. Hilariously tormented or confused
characters—including “stars” like Daffy Duck and Porky Pig—committed
suicide as a comic punchline. From Tex Avery’s buxotic Red
in the Red Hot Riding Hood series to the borderline
obscene sight-gags that pop up regularly in Bob Clampett’s
’40s masterpieces, these darkly funny takes on sex and violence
made animation a pleasure for adults. Sure, there’s plenty
of contemporary Japanese anime for grownups, but most of it
is sci-fi or action, not comedy. French director Sylvain Chomet’s
bizarre Triplets lives up to its wacky prologue, and
revives, honors and extends this subversive comic tradition.
And, since it’s rated a sort-of family-friendly PG-13, it’s
great for the kiddies, too.
The story is about a sad-eyed boy named Champion who lives
with his grandmother and dog on the outskirts of Paris. His
one happiness is his bicycle, so grandma encourages and supervises
a training regimen that, as years pass, makes Champion into
a contender for the Tour de France. Fate, in the form of the
French wine mafia (their motto is In Vino Veritas)
intervenes, however, and Champion is kidnapped and taken across
the sea to “Belleville” for reasons too strange to explain.
Grandma and pooch follow, and have the great luck to meet
up with the now-elderly triplets, who help in the search for
the lost Champion.
The triplets are a brilliant creation—three senior chicks
who still have rhythm, consider themselves sexy and are blithely
unconcerned that the world has not only passed them by, it’s
turned into something rotten. They’re too cool for school.
They don’t make the best of what they have, they make like
what they have is the best. This includes roasted, boiled,
skewered or frozen frogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The characters are wittily drawn: Champion looks like something
out of Ren & Stimpy, with a grotesque biker’s body
and long French nose; the mafia dudes are walking, box-shaped
goons; the dog is all flesh and nose; and there’s a fawning
waiter so obsequious that he’s incapable of standing up straight.
The backgrounds are endlessly fascinating. There’s no dialogue,
either, so there are no subtitles for Americans to squirm
through.
The process of finding and freeing Champion is absurd and
inventive, and the ending, while happy, is not too sweet.
And that’s something—just extracting the excess sugar from
the story makes Triplets notable.
Love
and Barf
50
First Dates
Directed
by Peter Segal
Reuniting The Wedding Singer sweethearts Adam Sandler
and Drew Barrymore, 50 First Dates managed a Valentine’s
Day massacre of the cineplex competition. But date-night moviegoers
be warned: You’ll have to wait out a substantial amount of
crud before this lowbrow comedy gets its fluffy ingenuity
in gear. The worst part is the entire first half, starting
with a homage to the studly allure of Henry Roth (Sandler),
a marine veterinarian on Maui who womanizes vacationing lonely
hearts. He meets his match in short-term romance when he falls
for Lucy (Barrymore), a cheerful art teacher who can’t form
short-term memories. The best part of the film is how it sails
to a happily-ever-after without cheating on its flimsy premise.
Since the film features Sandler in affable, rather than obnoxious
mode (Peter Segal, director of Sandler’s Anger Management,
takes the opposite tact here), there’s a menagerie of other
characters to provide with the film with gross sight gags
(such as copious projectile vomiting from a sarcastic sea
lion), puerile mockery, and crude one-liners. Henry’s assistant,
a horny Russian bisexual (Lusia Strus), gets the worst of
it (including the high-velocity vomit), but Rob Schneider
as a horny Hawaiian pool cleaner is also on hand for unfunny
cut-ups, mostly concerning his privates. And the gutter-mouth
comments from an old Hawaiian man aren’t nearly as adorable
as the director seems to think. Even so, the film’s calculated
blend of cutesy and tacky has its moments (most of them belonging
to Henry’s pet penguin), and Sandler and Barrymore are in
sweetly childish synch. Henry hits on Lucy in a café over
waffles and is unexpectedly smitten. At their next breakfast
rendezvous, however, he’s firmly rebuffed by Lucy, who has
no clue who he is (a year previous, her short-term memory
was demolished in a car accident). Due to the patently ridiculous
precautions of her protective father and steroid-addled brother
(a slumming Sean Astin), Lucy isn’t aware of her condition,
or even the passing of time.
And so Henry must woo her from start over and over again,
a challenge he takes on with increasing decency and devotion.
The film’s preposterous concept—taken from Groundhog Day
but sans the metaphysics, or any other higher function—is
played out with a nonchalant sincerity that works surprisingly
well. Henry spends inordinate amounts of time creating videotapes
to fill Lucy in as to the progress of their relationship,
and by date 23, he’s convinced that she’s subconsciously remembering
him. At this point, their oddly trusting relationship pulls
the film back from the offensive line of crap culture. Barrymore’s
radiant insouciance brings out the winsome best in Sandler’s
smarmy simplicity, while the film’s marginal charm is due
solely to her ability to blithely deflect the vulgarity she’s
surrounded by. The audience should be so lucky.
—Ann
Morrow
Mission:
Improbable
Catch
that Kid
Directed
by Bart Freundlich
Because, generally speaking, American audiences won’t bother
to see anything remotely “foreign,” Hollywood can Yankee-fy
countless European films, with appropriate changes of venue
and character names. Such is what happened with Catch that
Kid, a shot-by-shot remake of a 2002 Danish movie, directed
with a workmanlike attitude and little enthusiasm by Bart
Freundlich. Despite its swiped origins—funny considering it’s
a bank-heist movie—Kid is a somewhat pleasing fantasy
for the youngster set.
Tomboy Maddy (Kristen Stewart) is obsessed with climbing;
she rappels up the side of her town’s water tower on an almost
daily basis, while the boys at the nearby go-cart track, owned
by Maddy’s father Mr. P. (Sam Robards), silently admire her
cool ability and latent good looks. Two such admirers, grease
monkey Gus (Max Thieriot) and computer geek Austin (Corbin
Bleu), are her particular best friends, but also guys that
she, in her burgeoning maturity, seems at the precipice of
dumping, especially given their continuing attempts to get
her interested in boring matters like “Which of us would you
like to have as a boyfriend?” Unfortunately, Maddy has to
use her hormonal influence over Gus and Austin in order to
enlist their aid in robbing a bank to get money for Mr. P’s
life-saving operation.
Yes, dear reader, the information in that last sentence seemed
to come out of nowhere, and indeed, except for Mr. P’s telltale
waving away of “another one of those headaches,” the onslaught
of sudden, incurable illness and Mrs. P’s (Jennifer Beals)
frantic efforts to raise the $250,000 necessary for its remedy,
feels contrived, not so much because it’s yet another movie
mystery illness, but because we haven’t gotten enough of a
feel for the supposed friendship and camaraderie shared by
the three preteens. Given that, when Maddy coolly tells each
of the boys, separately, that she loves him and only him,
it comes across not so much as a childish prank born of extreme
necessity, but of something crass and far more disturbing
for a girl of Maddy’s age to pursue.
Again, given the lack of background into Maddy’s, Gus’ and
Austin’s friendship, their pre-heist planning and the actual
execution of the theft itself feel hollow. Gus and Austin
could be anybody, really, whom Maddy could have convinced
to come along for a share of the dough. The only truly funny,
believable shtick that occurs is when Maddy, on orders from
a frazzled Mrs. P., has to baby-sit her toddler brother Max
on the night of robbery. At one point, the security strobe
seems to go kerflooey, creating momentary panic for Gus and
Maddy—turns out Max, sitting on Austin’s knee at the control
panel, has gotten hold of the multibuttoned gizmo, and is
having the time of his life with it.
There’s a sour taste to this movie, as if Freundlich couldn’t
be bothered to make it click. This is too bad, since it clearly
has winning elements. What I liked most of all was the fact
that Maddy, Gus and Austin seem like real kids, the kind we
saw in, say, ET, who ride bikes (or, in this instance,
go-carts) and hang out outdoors (as opposed to the mall),
and who dress like children who have never heard of Abercrombie
& Fitch or Britney Spears.
—Laura
Leon
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