Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known “Wallace and Gromit”—viz. Peter Lord and Nick Park. 

A family picture, it serves up conventional and wholesome humor as well as clay animation not exactly at its most attractive (I’m thinking of the chickens).  Oh well.  Nearly everything about CR comes off.  Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick manages the one-liners skillfully.  Consider:  it is a frightful, awful place, this chicken farm, and by and by the fowls find out they are to be ruthlessly transformed into chicken pies.  “I don’t want to be a pie,” blurts out a dumb but sweet chicken called Babs.  “I don’t like gravy.”  Even funnier are many of the nonchalant utterances of Rocky, an American rooster on whom the chickens depend for salvation.  I note that he’s American because all the other animated figures are British, which leads me to an observation:  Emanating from Brits, this picture depicts British know-all and American muscle (Rocky’s), but never American know-how.

Cover of Chicken Run

World War Z (2013)—Z stands for zombie—is a war movie.  Or, at any rate, it is until it reaches the World Health Organization facility where it proves itself to be a medical thriller as well.  But, yes, the film displays the continual military firing upon fast-moving zombies, as if Allied warriors were fighting supernatural Nazis.

At first, though, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) struggles to protect his family from the zombies in a well-executed busy street sequence.  Later, Gerry is called upon by his old employer, the U.N., to help look for a solution, and sheer mayhem and desperate soldiering follow.  An adaptation of a novel by Max Brooks, the story eventually becomes more far-fetched than it should—what makes Gerry so sure the people the zombies are leaving alone are sick?—but the good news is this:

1. The stupidity that exists in the entertaining Fast and Furious 6 does not exist here.  2. Director Marc Forster keeps the movie kinetically thrilling and visually compelling.  The looted supermarket stuff is an example, as are the shots of undead critters climbing the high wall of Jerusalem and soon getting shot at by Israeli aircraft.  Just as powerful, however, is a relatively quiet scene where Gerry tries to fend off a zombie at the WHO facility.

World War Z is quite the dreadnought.  But, hey, Mireille Enos (The Killing) has too small a part as Gerry’s wife.  Moviemakers, let’s see what Enos can do.  We’ve long been aware of what zombies can do.

Brad Pitt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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• World War Z Review

Written and directed by Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things (2003) is based on LaBute’s play of the same name.  What the four-character piece tells us is that amatory love is squalid, innocence is repulsively assaulted, and contemporary art—yes, there’s even something about art—or pseudo-art is ludicrous, sometimes hurtful, folly.  Indeed, it is something for the Messalinas of the world to obsess about.

Unfortunately LaBute has wrought a specious plot, thus causing a misshaping for The Shape of Things.  But at least the film isn’t frivolous or boring.  The bulk of the acting I l like since, for one thing, Gretchen Mol, like Rachel Weisz (the film’s Messalina), knows how to be nuanced.  Paul Rudd, on the other hand, does not quite convince as a man who changes into something other than a shy naif. 

Cover of The Shape of Things

Re Traffic (2000), I like this movie’s thoughtful rejection of the U.S. war on drugs, but not its relative lack of sophistication.  Michael Douglas’s newly appointed drug czar has a teenage daughter constantly hungry to shoot up, and Douglas’s wife (Amy Irving) has known about it for months without breathing a word to her husband.  Two DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) are stupid enough to let their sole informer in a big narcotics case get poisoned while eating breakfast.  A married socialite (Catherine Zeta-Jones), attempting to protect her little son from her drug-dealing husband’s creditors, knows exactly how to deal with assassins and aggressive pushers.  All this and more are too improbable to pass muster.  One critic complained that Traffic is insufficiently exciting, but in my view the trouble is that it’s naively, immaturely written.

It’s ambitious, though, however indifferent I am to director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s gussied-up style.  Not that this style is never powerful, what with its handheld camera, bright light and graininess.  It’s just that it’s rather showy and generally unnecessary—in truth, neither good nor bad.  By contrast, the acting is often superb.  Cheadle and Guzman, to give two examples, offer some nice variation and even nicer facial play.  Douglas and Benicio Del Toro are winningly manly, perfect as authority figures.

Cover of Traffic [HD DVD]

There is a lot of darkness in Francois Truffaut’s films, but he never had a well-developed sense of tragedy.  We see that in 1972’s Two English Girls.  He could certainly handle pathos, though, and we see this too in Girls’ terrifically lyrical framework.  The film tells of Claude, a Frenchman who slowly becomes amorously and then sexually involved with Muriel and Anne, the two English girls of the title.  It’s a lesser movie than Jules and Jim and even The Story of Adele H. (both by Truffaut) because it’s rather talky and most of the acting ranges from bad to mediocre.  But, like other Truffaut films, it is guileless, humane and personal—in its own way, rewarding.

Two English Girls (Les Deux Anglaises) is based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche.

(In French with English subtitles)

Two English Girls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)