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Relax—I interviewed a pilot once
Apparently I decided to inaugurate 2012 with cheering movies. The last thing I watched before the ball dropped last night was The Court Jester (1956), which B. had given me for Christmas, and I have just returned from The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
That was absolutely delightful.
It's got to be the first Spielberg I've liked in ages. I'm not really qualified to evaluate it as a version of Hergé—I haven't read any of the books in decades except for Tintin in Tibet (1960), which I discovered in graduate school was even better than I'd been able to appreciate at the time—but saving the odd in-joke like the shark-fin cut of Tintin's hair through the water or a chase scene involving a motorcycle and a jeep, it feels like the work of a director who was smart enough to stay out of the way of his material, which I realize is a funny thing to say about a medium in which almost nothing of what we see actually exists. The uncanny valley is adroitly avoided by the visual design: the textures are realist, but the characters have the proportions and intermittently the physics of a ligne claire drawing, so that we can be looking one moment at a microexpressive wince and the next at a plane crash designed by Rube Goldberg. And it is not that the animation allows Spielberg to stage the kind of action sequences that would not be possible in a live-action film, because if you can afford a computer nowadays, you can stage anything you feel like; it's that it allows the kind of action sequences that would never pass in a live-action film without being stupid. An obvious example involves alcohol fumes, a subtler one a tank wearing a hotel. (Seriously. It barges into the increasingly katamari chase scene with no explanation whatsoever, like a surrealist's kitchen sink; it never gets explained and everyone's fine with that.) At one point a character regains consciousness with a small ring of canaries around his head. We are not sure how to take this; the film has so far skirted the overtly cartoony, but then again Hergé drew his characters drunk with their heads full of squiggles and spirals, radiating multicolored stars when in pain. The canaries are still there, tweeting and circling. And then the owner of the pet store comes out with a net and begins trying to catch them, muttering annoyedly while the character sits dazed on the sidewalk out front of his shop. The film is full of moments like this, which are not so much gags as a kind of endlessly inventive appropriation of anything to hand. Shots dissolve through empty bottles into telescopes, from wave-glints to glasses; the knuckles of a handshake become camel-trodden hills and desert sands thunder apart into a raging sea. You begin to look at the ordinary objects in any frame and wonder what might be done with them. And it is never mechanical. After the fact, I started thinking of comparisons like Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. I don't know if I should try a second viewing before I go quite that far, but it's an impressive reality of stuntwork for a bunch of pixels.
And there are characters under it all, or I wouldn't bother with this review. Jamie Bell is an earnest, ingenious, tenacious Tintin who is not above moments of annoyance or despair, as indeterminately boyish as the comics in both looks and voice; he can be a cool-headed ace reporter and a cheerful holy fool within seconds of one another (and sometimes simultaneously, as in the subject line of this post) and most importantly, he's never dull. I had never pictured Captain Haddock with a Scottish accent, but apparently Andy Serkis really can do anything. He was my favorite character, so I had been slightly worried. (I think I imprinted on his swearing.) They match beautifully and will no doubt generate reams of fic I can ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teenybuffalo to filter for me. Daniel Craig should be allowed to play silky villains more often, because it took me at least a third of the film to recognize him; it was body language more than voice that finally did it. I think I would have liked Thomson and Thompson better if they had been played by actual Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, not just their motion data. The credits are lovely: an animated Tintin adventure in silhouette, complete with written sound effects. I liked the cameo by Hergé.
There is obviously a sequel. What's even nicer is that the film feels as though it is itself a sequel to the previous story, which we just didn't happen to see. But if Spielberg makes either of them, I'll go. When I bought my ticket tonight, I wasn't expecting that.
That was absolutely delightful.
It's got to be the first Spielberg I've liked in ages. I'm not really qualified to evaluate it as a version of Hergé—I haven't read any of the books in decades except for Tintin in Tibet (1960), which I discovered in graduate school was even better than I'd been able to appreciate at the time—but saving the odd in-joke like the shark-fin cut of Tintin's hair through the water or a chase scene involving a motorcycle and a jeep, it feels like the work of a director who was smart enough to stay out of the way of his material, which I realize is a funny thing to say about a medium in which almost nothing of what we see actually exists. The uncanny valley is adroitly avoided by the visual design: the textures are realist, but the characters have the proportions and intermittently the physics of a ligne claire drawing, so that we can be looking one moment at a microexpressive wince and the next at a plane crash designed by Rube Goldberg. And it is not that the animation allows Spielberg to stage the kind of action sequences that would not be possible in a live-action film, because if you can afford a computer nowadays, you can stage anything you feel like; it's that it allows the kind of action sequences that would never pass in a live-action film without being stupid. An obvious example involves alcohol fumes, a subtler one a tank wearing a hotel. (Seriously. It barges into the increasingly katamari chase scene with no explanation whatsoever, like a surrealist's kitchen sink; it never gets explained and everyone's fine with that.) At one point a character regains consciousness with a small ring of canaries around his head. We are not sure how to take this; the film has so far skirted the overtly cartoony, but then again Hergé drew his characters drunk with their heads full of squiggles and spirals, radiating multicolored stars when in pain. The canaries are still there, tweeting and circling. And then the owner of the pet store comes out with a net and begins trying to catch them, muttering annoyedly while the character sits dazed on the sidewalk out front of his shop. The film is full of moments like this, which are not so much gags as a kind of endlessly inventive appropriation of anything to hand. Shots dissolve through empty bottles into telescopes, from wave-glints to glasses; the knuckles of a handshake become camel-trodden hills and desert sands thunder apart into a raging sea. You begin to look at the ordinary objects in any frame and wonder what might be done with them. And it is never mechanical. After the fact, I started thinking of comparisons like Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. I don't know if I should try a second viewing before I go quite that far, but it's an impressive reality of stuntwork for a bunch of pixels.
And there are characters under it all, or I wouldn't bother with this review. Jamie Bell is an earnest, ingenious, tenacious Tintin who is not above moments of annoyance or despair, as indeterminately boyish as the comics in both looks and voice; he can be a cool-headed ace reporter and a cheerful holy fool within seconds of one another (and sometimes simultaneously, as in the subject line of this post) and most importantly, he's never dull. I had never pictured Captain Haddock with a Scottish accent, but apparently Andy Serkis really can do anything. He was my favorite character, so I had been slightly worried. (I think I imprinted on his swearing.) They match beautifully and will no doubt generate reams of fic I can ask
teenybuffalo to filter for me. Daniel Craig should be allowed to play silky villains more often, because it took me at least a third of the film to recognize him; it was body language more than voice that finally did it. I think I would have liked Thomson and Thompson better if they had been played by actual Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, not just their motion data. The credits are lovely: an animated Tintin adventure in silhouette, complete with written sound effects. I liked the cameo by Hergé.There is obviously a sequel. What's even nicer is that the film feels as though it is itself a sequel to the previous story, which we just didn't happen to see. But if Spielberg makes either of them, I'll go. When I bought my ticket tonight, I wasn't expecting that.