The Secret Life of Pets

It’s fitting that The Secret Life of Pets opens with a Taylor Swift song. No offense to any Swifties out there, but her songs are pure pop. While they are listenable, catchy ear-worms, they probably won’t end up in the Great American Songbook. I love pop music and pop movies, but there is something inherently disposable about them. They’re meant to be entertaining in the moment but often lack the depth or weight necessary to stick around for the long haul.

It’s appropriate that The Secret Life of Pets begins with a pop song because it is a pop film to say the least. It’s filled with cheap puns, bathroom humor, and a loose, lazy plot that make it entertaining for the ninety minutes you and your kids are watching it. But then you walk out the theater and forget you ever saw it. Like gum that has lost its flavor or that Megan Trainor song you’ve heard sixty five times too many, you’re over it pretty fast.

The plot, as other critics have pointed out, is basically a retread of the first Toy Story film. Instead of Woody, the favorite toy being displaced by Buzz Lightyear and the two of them bickering their way into getting lost together, we have Max, the favorite dog who gets displaced by Duke, a newly adopted dog, and what do you know? They bicker their way into getting lost in the streets of New York.

They encounter street criminal cats, a subterranean gang of abandoned pets led by a homicidal bunny rabbit, and the continuing threat of animal control agents who look like they escaped from the Joe Dirt sequel. Simultaneously, Gidget, the cute Pomeranian from across the way with a crush on Max, rallies their mutual friends and leads a search and rescue mission to find her missing would-be boyfriend.

Besides the simple rehash of the plot, the other two elements that struck me with their lack of being striking were the voicework and character design. I’m a big fan of voice work in general – cartoons, commercials, radio – I think the human voice is one of the most powerful and versatile tools in the world. When an actor is properly cast and has the right talent, a voice becomes a character unto itself. It’s inspiring. But a miscast voice is more likely to be distracting or just plain boring. The comedian Louie C.K. plays Max and while C.K. is a brilliant social critic and comic as well as a talented if slightly limited live actor, his flat affectless voice is terrible for animation. You could fit his vocal emotional range through a drinking straw. Duke is played by Eric Stonestreet of TV’s Modern Family. His performance is so streaky and uncertain, it’s unclear if he just couldn’t decide what kind of character Duke was or if he recorded his lines months and months apart. There are other, very talented voice actors in the film including Jenny Slate and Albert Brooks, but the pedestrian script just doesn’t give them much to do. Albert Brooks as Marlin, Nemo’s dad, can evoke tears and laughter. As Tiberias, the red tailed hawk, the best he gets is a tired half grin.

The character design is equally uninspired. The different breeds of dogs are all recognizable as dogs but none of them are memorable or distinctive in any way. They are all the visual equivalent of Louie C.K.’s voice – present but unimpressive.

Even in summer when going to the theater is a good way to get out of the heat and occupy the kids for a while, I still think a film should be worth the price of a ticket. It shouldn’t be something that you’ll forget the moment you walk out of the theater. Unfortunately, uninspired forgetability is the most memorable thing about The Secret Life of Pets.  

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Crimson Peak

I’ve been playing catch-up the last couple of weeks, trying to see films from the last year or so that I meant to catch in the theater but just didn’t. In my personal movie marathon, I watched two films that were both perfect matches between director and subject material. Now, I’m a firm believer in auteur theory, the idea that a director has the ability to put his or her unique stamp on a film. I realize that filmmaking, especially in mainstream Hollywood, is a tremendously collaborative process involving hundreds of people and that it’s probably a little unrealistic to give too much credit to just one person. Nevertheless, in the realm of architecture, we talk about Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision for Fallingwater, the house perched over a waterfall in Pennsylvania, not the two hundred skilled craftsmen who actually built the thing. The director is essentially the architect of a film and what we end up seeing is often the vision that he or she wants more than any other single collaborator.

Anyway, the two film architects who found the perfect match of subject matter are Michael Bay with 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Guillermo Del Toro with Crimson Peak. I know it’s unusual to her the words Michael Bay and “perfect” in the same sentence unless the sentence involves the phrase “perfect piece of garbage,” but bear with me. 

 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is the based-on-real events story of the band of security contractors assigned to a secret CIA installation near the American diplomatic compound that was attacked in Libya on September 11, 2012. The underdefended compound is attacked and set ablaze. The visiting American ambassador, Chris Stevens, gets separated from his security detail and dies of smoke inhalation. Everyone retreats to the CIA installation which then falls under attack too. The battle that lasts the night is chaotic and frightening. Rather than easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, the whole thing is a shifting mess of gunfire, shouting, ambiguous vehicles driving up to the battle and then driving away, and inexplicable lulls in the action. In its lack of elegant staging and comprehensible action, I assume it is probably one of the most authentic depictions of what an actual night battle in a country filled with insurgents might actually be like. This works for Michael Bay because they guy could never film a comprehensible fight scene to save his life. He got his start in music videos and never evolved past his love of image and disinterest in coherent story. In 13 Hours, it works perfectly because the story isn’t meant to make sense. The result is visceral and surprisingly effective. It’s not a partisan film, so don’t watch it expecting a political comment on how the U.S. government did or did not act. But do see it if you want to see the extreme circumstances under which brave, dutiful men and women acted that night. 

 The other perfect pairing was Guillermo Del Toro and the most gothicy gothic ghost story of all time, Crimson Peak. Del Toro is a master visualist who never lost his child-like fascination with ghosts, gore, and haunted houses. Crimson Peak is a supercharged blast of  gothic elements – neglected kids locked in an attic, secret pregnancy, specters and phantoms wandering through shadowy halls, a massive haunted house sinking into blood red earth, weighed down by secret sin. It’s kind of the Swiss Army knife of gothic stories – it’s got everything. Because Del Toro directed it, every visual aspect is refined and beautiful. You’re simultaneously grossed out and mesmerized by his combination of extreme violence and gorgeous production design and cinematography. Del Toro just loves movies, particularly scary ones, and his affection is on full display throughout the gory and definitely not family friendly Crimson Peak. If you like films as beautiful as they are horrifying, this film is the perfect combo. 

Finding Dory

Brothers and sisters in the congregation, I come to you today as a once fiery believer who lost his faith for a time but is now coming back into the fold. I speak, of course, of my faith in Pixar, the once infallible digital animation production company. During their eleven film streak of near perfection, it seemed as though Pixar saw all, knew all, and made all good movies. There was a season for Toy Story and a season for The Incredibles, a season for Ratatouille and a season for Wall-E.  And lo, I was a believer. But then, the company (and therefore its audiences) spent a season wandering in the valley of the shadow of the sequel. Cars 2, Monsters University, and the should-have-been-straight-to-DVD-garbage spinoff Planes shook me. Yea, verily.

But recently it would seem that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Pixar, and digital light once again fills its body. The Good Dinosaur was solidly good. Inside Out, while a little maudlin for much of the film, was touching and brilliantly envisioned. Now comes Finding Dory, what could have been another miserable, slavish money grab but instead is a funny, moving story executed with best-in-the business animation. There is reason to have hope and possibly faith in Pixar once more. 

Finding Dory returns to the characters and setting of Finding Nemo a year after the events of the first film. Nemo is still in school, Marlin is still a worrywart, and Dory is still endearingly, maddeningly forgetful. The film kicks into gear when Dory finally remembers something about her past. She suddenly remembers that she had parents – loving, protective parents who spent their lives trying to compensate for her near total inability to remember – anything. So the film becomes Dory’s quest, assisted by Marlin and Nemo, to return home and find her parents.

Their search leads them to the California coast and an aquarium called the Marine Life Institute, which turns out to be Dory’s original home. The team gets split up and a good chunk of the film is spent on Dory attempting a prison-break-like escape from the aquarium while Marlin and Nemo try to break in. 

Ellen Degeneres again voices Dory with her halting, idiosyncratic delivery that conveys a combination of innate goodness and sweet naiveté. Degeneres is hardly the person who’s voice you would think of as evocative and moving, but her performance as Dory is exactly that. It’s sweet without being saccharine and funny without being clownish or ironic. 

The other performance standout is Ed O’Neil as Hank, an octopus that helps Dory escape the acquairum. O’Neil’s voicework is crusty and grumpy but also vulnerable and longing. His voice combined with the ingenious visual depictions of the seven-legged octopus make Hank one of the best, most memorable animated characters to come along in years.

The best Pixar movies are ultimately about family relationships, their necessity and the tensions inherent in them. Finding Dory, like the Toy Story films, A Bug’s Life, and Monster’\s Incorporated, again demonstrates that family is as much something we make and choose as it is something we’re born into.

But specifically, Finding Dory makes a profound statement about parenting. When she’s a child, Dory’s parents lay out paths of shells that all lead back to their home to help her find her way back. When adult Dory returns, she finds a shell house with dozens of paths spread out in every direction, obviously left by her parents in hopes that she would find her way to them. That image and the idea behind it sum up most of what is important (to me at least) about being a parent. It’s lovely and powerful and was enough to make me at least a cautious Pixar believer again.