SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
Written and Directed by Lorene Scafaria
Starring Steve Carrell, Keira Knightley and Martin Sheen


Penny: What is it about the end of the world that brings them all out of the woodworks?

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD gives new meaning to the term, “Disaster Movie”. Within moments of the film’s opening, it is announced that the world is coming to its inevitable end. This piece of information would ordinarily be pretty crushing, given that one of the very few things we all share in common is that we live on this planet. But the world that first time feature filmmaker, Lorene Scafaria (writer of NICK & NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST), is not like any world I know at all. In fact, it is so unfamiliar that I ended up feeling nothing instead. A society that feels so false cannot possibly inspire any genuine emotion.

When the news hits that an asteroid will collide and destroy Earth, and that all attempts to avoid this fate have failed, Dodge (Steve Carrell) is sitting in a parked car with his wife (played by Carrell’s real life wife, Nancy). She opens her door, gets out of the car, and without even looking in her husband’s direction, she takes off as fast as she can through a park. Dodge does not follow. He is devastated but what is he to do? Clearly, all the rules have changed now that there are only weeks to live. This is not so clear to everyone though. As Dodge walks around in a stupor, albeit an understandable one, he is surrounded by people who still go to work, go to the gym and go to dinner parties where annoying friends try to set them up on dates. It all felt so unnatural to me that I often wanted to yell at the screen to remind them all that the world was in fact coming to an end and they didn’t have time for all this stupidity.

Carrell is a great actor, capable of balancing sadness and comedy quite well, as is evidenced in films like, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and DAN IN REAL LIFE, and he does his best here to keep SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD alive long enough for anyone to care the apocalypse is still coming. Sadly, this disaster proves too big of a match for him. It certainly doesn’t help him any that he is paired opposite Keira Knightley, who, while lovely, is thoroughly mismatched opposite Carrell. Embarking on their road trip to help Dodge find his childhood sweetheart is uncomfortable and awkward to say the least. I would never in a million years choose to spend my final days on Earth with these two. It was hard enough to spend an hour and a half with them.

GONE

GONE
Written by Allison Burnett
Directed by Heitor Dalia
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Carpenter and Wes Bentley

When Jill comes home from her night job at a diner, she finds her sister not at home. After doing a thorough search of the house, she determines that her sister has been taken. This is a scenario she knows all too well, since she herself was taken, thrown down a hole and almost murdered the previous year. Convinced the same man has come back for her, but accidentally got the wrong girl, she goes to the police. The problem is they don’t believe her. With no assistance from the authorities and time running out, Jill takes matters into her own hands to save her sister’s life.

GONE is an interesting take on the serial killer genre. Keeping the audience in the dark about the true crime being committed here, while also expecting them to invest in a character who is very likable and has clear, seemingly unclouded motives is an excellent device. Amanda Seyfried is one of the few young female actresses today who would have been able to portray a character that lies her way through an investigation, but makes the audience believe her story. The remainder of the supporting cast seems to have been put together for maximum impact at the box office. Wes Bentley is in the film for only a few brief moments and plays a non-pivotal role, while Jennifer Carpenter plays a slightly more important part, but is in the film for an equally short period of time.

In the end this is a great thriller and a solid entry into the serial killer genre. While this isn’t a ‘must see’ for everyone, it should definitely be on the list for horror/thriller fans. GONE is available on DVD now.

Written by Trista DeVries
Editor-in-Chief
Toronto Film Scene

Review copy provided by eOne Entertainment.

BRAVE

BRAVE
Directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman
Written by Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
Voices by Kelly McDonald, Emma Thompson and Billy Connolly


Princess Merida: If you had a chance to change your fate, would you?

Not surprisingly in the least, Pixar’s 13th animated feature, BRAVE, is breathtaking from the very beginning. The sprawling Scottish highlands are already beautiful in their natural state but when Pixar uses their imagination and technical ability to recreate something, that place is reborn anew on screen. Ordinarily, they have the same ability to reinvigorate even the oldest of stories and this time around, they take aim at the very familiar princess archetype and while they do make BRAVE into an altogether compelling and rousing coming of age tale, I’m not sure I would call it an altogether brave effort.

Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly McDonald, who replaced Reese Witherspoon when she couldn’t do it, thank God) has always been more interested in playing with swords instead of playing with boys. Her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), encourages her while her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), strives every day to make her into a proper princess. In order to maintain the order of the land, Merida must marry one of the first born princes from the neighboring kingdoms, but Merida is adamant about not wanting to be any part of this. In fact, this is what Merida is best at, knowing what she doesn’t want as opposed to knowing what she does. This is why, when she pays a mysterious (and hilarious) witch to change her fate, she isn’t the least bit specific about how exactly she would like it to be changed. And so it is altered, but the question becomes, is this new path any better than the old one she was on or is it actually worse? And worse still, can Merida even make it back to her true path now that she’s embarked on this one?

BRAVE is efficiently told without a trace of fat to be found. And while there are no unnecessary distractions as a result, the whole thing feels a tad rushed and bit slight considering the pedigree putting it out there. That said, Pixar’s best efforts (especially for a film that changed directing hands, and subsequently changed direction drastically, half way through) do elevate BRAVE far past its minor shortcomings to be extremely enjoyable and exciting. Merida should stand strong and proud in the long line of great Pixar characters. She shows us and herself that our fates are living and breathing inside of us at all times; we need only be brave enough to see them and embrace them.

Be sure not to miss Black Sheep's interview with BRAVE director, Mark Andrews.

My Top 5 Pixar Films

This month, Pixar Animation Studios will release its 13th feature film, BRAVE. To mark the occasion, I give you my Top 5 favourite Pixar films. Aside from the CARS films, I'm a big fan of all the Pixar pictures, so it was tricky to narrow it down to five but when it came down to it, I knew these were my Top 5 all along.

In alphabetical order, they are ...

FINDING NEMO (2003)

Pixar's first Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature was also their first bonafide worldwide smash. Sure, they had success with all four of their previous releases but not compared to the staggering heights FINDING NEMO just kept swimming toward. I have been dying to watch it again for some time now but I am waiting for the 3D rerelease expected later this year to dive into this ocean one more time. Once you find yourself immersed in these uncertain, and breathtaking waters, the magic of Pixar, and director, Andrew Stanton, takes over. Waves of laughter, suspense, heartbreak and immense joy crash over you throughout the experience. In fact, it's so good, you kinda almost wish Nemo would stay lost just a little longer so you could stay under water that much for a few more minutes.

THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

I will freely admit that the first time I saw THE INCREDIBLES, from Pixar genius, Brad Bird, I missed large chunks of it because I was on a date and reasonably distracted. In all fairness, I was torn. Through the corners of my eyes, I could see that this was one, well, incredible piece of filmmaking. What I love about this film, aside from the phenomenal animation work, which goes without saying practically for all Pixar features, is how it skates so perfectly between the spy genre and a family film. It is as intense as any James Bond picture, with action sequences that put some big budget live action films to great shame, but it still has that unmistakable Pixar heart that makes it unforgettable. The only thing I don't get about it, is why we have not yet seen Mr. Incredible and family get the sequel they so rightfully deserve.

RATATOUILLE (2007) 

They said Pixar was crazy for putting rats in a kitchen and expecting people to show up in droves but they were wrong! Well, mostly anyway. RATATOUILLE had a hard time hitting the same success as some previous Pixar outings but like fine dining, this dish is just not for all. Those who love it though, and there are certainly many, know that this is one of Bird's finest works. The unlikely friendship between Remy, the rat, and Linguini, the chef, shows us that we should always dream and that sometimes, we need others to help make the loftiest of our dreams come true. The visual style of this Paris-set masterpiece is exhilarating and intensely well orchestrated; it demonstrates at all times just how much care Pixar puts into every frame. Like the critic in the film, feasting on this dish always makes me feel like a child again.

THE TOY STORY TRILOGY (1995, 1999, 2010)

By now, we can all acknowledge that Pixar redefined the notion of family film when they released their first feature, TOY STORY, in 1995. Not only did they give the world the first fully computer animated feature but they also reworked the genre so that the films that came after it would play, or at least attempt to play, to both parents and kids alike. And as audiences flocked to the experience, they quickly realized that this new style of animation was actually amazing to behold, and not clunky or limited as some believed it would be. The first sequel would break records around the world and by the time they got to the third film, by far the most accomplished and surprising in the series, Pixar had also shown the world that sequels, even the ones we don't think are necessary, can and should have great purpose. 

WALL-E (2008)

My heart melts every time I see WALL-E. Firstly, he is by far my favourite Pixar character. By the sheer nature of his being a robot, he is limited in his capacity to feel and show emotion but somehow, he exudes more love than most of the human beings I know or see on screen. His courtship with the beautiful EVE was so simple - all he wanted was to hold her hand really - and yet it was also so incredibly moving. In fact, it got me feeling things I forgot I knew how to feel. It also had me in total awe for the first half of the film, which is essentially silent. It was such a bold move to remove almost every trace of dialogue from a family film that it could only have been made and pulled off by Pixar. Some argue that the film loses focus once talking is reintroduced into the film but I would argue that those people just wish they feel as purely and as honestly as WALL-E does.

What's your favourite Pixar movie? Vote in the Black Sheep poll! (Top right corner of the page)

Also, click here to order any of the Pixar posters in this article.

Black Sheep Interviews Mark Andrews

PIXAR, THE BRAVE.
An interview with BRAVE director, Mark Andrews

Who would have ever thought that the studio who brought you rats in kitchens, robots in space and monsters in closets would be considered brave for telling a princess story? Yet, here we are. Pixar Animation Studios is set to release their 13th feature length animated film, BRAVE, this month, and all anyone can seem to focus on is the fact that for the first time in Pixar history, the protagonist is a girl.

“It is weird,” BRAVE director, Mark Andrews, tells me when I ask him if the attention his main character’s gender is garnering, is at all strange to him. “It’s not like we have a big dry erase board that says, ‘Pixar films until 2025: Girl picture, giraffe picture, something in Saudi Arabia!’ If we focused on that aspect, on marketing, on what we haven’t done, then we would be playing to that instead of playing to the strengths of the character and the story.”

These particular strengths are what Pixar has come to be known for and this can be at least in part attributed to their incredibly organic attention to detail. “We are more focused on building something from the ground up instead of hitting some bar or some expectation,” Andrews tells me of the Pixar philosophy, when we meet at Toronto’s Casa Loma, during the BRAVE press tour. “We’re still very much in the canon of Pixar, which is to say you’re going to get something where you don’t really know what to expect, but trust us, its gonna be good.”

The film had just screened, to great fanfare, for Toronto audiences the night before. Naturally, Andrews wore a kilt to the event. In what is now a great Pixar tradition, a number of the film’s animators, along with Andrews, spent a couple of weeks in and around the highlands of Scotland to take in the scenery. Andrews considers this research pilgrimage to be invaluable if you want to get out of your head. “You have to go, you have to touch everything to get here,” Andrews motions toward his heart at this point. “And once I get here, then I can get it on to a page or into a painting or tell somebody else about it because I can give them these details to hold on to. You get to the character of it all.”

Andrews, hard at work

The character everyone is talking about is Merida, a red-haired fireball of a character, as bullheaded as she is fearless and forward thinking. Not only is Merida, voiced in the film by BOARDWALK EMPIRE's Kelly McDonald, the first Pixar girl but she’s also a princess at that. “Disney’s done the princess, y’know, a lot,” Andrews jokes boisterously. “We knew we had a princess. It serves the story and raises the stakes but we knew we were making an anti-princess. She’s everything a princess is not.”

Taking on a princess in a long line of princesses, while still making sure to make the character modern and relatable to today’s crowd, meant tweaking the formula a little. “Being a princess and being a woman are very different things. It’s not this old adage that you have to be saved, that you have to fall in love to be complete,” Andrews states with the pride of a father. “Merida’s not questing for happily ever after. She’s discovering who she is and how she fits into this world, on her own terms.”

Merida marches to her own beat

And so even though I began all of this by pointing out how odd it is that there is so much focus on Pixar first’s in BRAVE (add first fairy tale and period piece to the list while you’re at it), as opposed to the film itself, Andrews is happy for the attention nonetheless. “I kinda like that everyone is gravitating to the specifics about the film so that when they see it, they’re going to see it’s so much more than just a picture about a girl.”

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED
Written by Derek Connolly
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Starring Aubrey Plaza, Jake M. Johnson, Karan Soni and Mark Duplass


Darius: There’s no sense in nonsense, especially when the heat’s hot.

Whether you’re spending your time running away from it or whether you’re constantly obsessing over every tiny detail from it, the past inevitably leaves its mark on everyone. Of course, there are also those who take it all one step further and build elaborate and unstable time machines from whatever parts they can piece together at their disposal. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is about that guy. Well, it’s about more than that but more importantly, it is also one of the simplest and most sincere indie comedies I’ve seen in some time.

In the mid 90’s, a classified ad was placed in an issue of Backwoods Home magazine, enlisting assistance for a time travel experiment. The ad asserts that the man placing it has successfully traveled back in time already but that subsequent trips cannot include a safety guarantee. It is clear that whoever placed it had to be a colorful character but so would the person who would answer an ad like that have to be. This is what inspired novice screenwriter, Derek Connolly, to write his first screenplay. By having three journalists - well, one lazy as all hell journalist (The New Girl’s Jake M. Johnson) and two overworked interns (Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza and relative newcomer, Karan Soni) - investigate the ad and subsequently the man behind it (Mark Duplass, half of the directing team behind CYRUS and JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME), all the characters have to come to terms with where they are in their lives by acknowledging their pasts and how they’ve written them in their minds.

Of course the implication of the title is that going back in time, or facing the past if you will, is potentially hazardous to your health. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED may be slight in its scope but under the direction of first time feature filmmaker, Colin Trevorrow, the entire cast brings their own depth to their characters, making for a pretty warm and endearing movie. You never know where its going to go next but wherever it brings you, you can rest assure it will be a surprisingly funny and realistically touching place. If only the future could provide that same guarantee, right?

IN DARKNESS

IN DARKNESS
Written by David F. Shamoon
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Starring Robert Wieckiewicz

Clocking in at 144 minutes, EUROPA EUROPA director, Agnieszka Holland’s latest, and Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, IN DARKNESS, is no easy journey to endure, especially if you have any difficulty with dark, cramped spaces. This is the story of what are now known as Socha’s Jews, a group of less than a dozen people who hid in the sewers during WWII in Lviv, Poland. Leopold Socha (played on film by Robert Wieckiewicz), a sanitation worker, helped them at first for money, but as time progressed, 13 months of time, he comes to know a more humane side of himself. By taking to the sewers, Holland has crafted a frank, honest look at humanity’s ugliest period.