Film Review: "The Adventures of Tintin"

Let it be known, that the Spielbergian adventure flick has not gone out of style. Three years after he stained his career image permanently with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", Spielberg puts out two films this year. One of them is the Oscar play, as much expected and maligned by myself. But to be perfectly honest, it's always been his more commercial plays that caught my attention, which is an ironic reversal of how things usually work. It's when he's not searching for meaning, and rather searching for thrills, that he strikes his strongest films, and also his weakest, but they are anything but banal. How is he the exception to the rule? An experience in cinema that is both his gift and his bane.

"The Adventures of Tintin" isn't an explosive return to greatness for Steven Spielberg, but it is a rollicking ride of a film. Based on the Herge comic series, the first film in Spielberg and Peter Jackson's co-operative film trilogy spends no immense amount of time establishing the Tintin character. From the first minute after the uppity animated opening, he's shown as eager, ambitious, and pretty much your zero qualms protagonist. Does he need to be a lot more? No, but we would damn sure like him to be. If Herge never gave him ample dimension, writers Steve Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish could have taken a bit of license with this one. But it's never really distracting, so there's that.

Those We've Forgotten...

So it does look like this following week is going to be moderately simple in approach. I'll hand out my weekdaily clips of films coming out this week, and then pretty much try to find something to talk about or comment on in the meantime. Today, that happens to be a piece that Alex Carlson, founder of Film Misery, published today on his reworked list of the greatest working directors. Entertainment Weekly did a similar list, but they skewed far too much towards the popular. You could tell that Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorcese, and David Fincher would be closer to the top, so I found Carlson's list to be revealing in more than one way.

For one thing, he keeps heavyweights like Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, and Sam Mendes in 20-11 range, rather than pushing them to the front. For another, I had quite honestly forgotten that some of these directors had work coming out this year. For example, do you remember Alexander Payne? No reason you should, expect that he directed Sideway, About Schmidt, and Election, three of the most interesting films released around the turn of the millennium. He has another film coming out this year, The Descendants, starring George Clooney as a man trying to reconnect with his two daughters as he deals with a developing schizophrenia problem. In a world of ten nominees for Best Picture, tell me with a straight face that's not going to be nominated.

Speaking of ten nominations, for years David Cronenberg has been just outside of the five, with fascinatingly dark films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. How he hasn't gotten a nomination yet is far beyond my vision. He is re-teaming with Viggo Mortensen for the third time on A Dangerous Method, the story of famed psychologists Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). I expect another wonderfully textured and hopefully grisly feature from Cronenberg. The list goes on to feature obvious legends such as Danny Boyle, Woody Allen, Guillermo Del Toro, and Quentin Tarantino, but there were some directors I had honestly forgotten about. Check out the list here, and comment on your thoughts over at Carlson's site.

First Look: Adventures of Tintin

At this point, I can't help but beg such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis to just stop making animated films 100% from motion capture. Not only does it drain the characters of any emotion whatsoever, but it costs more than to make a simple Pixar/Dreamworks style animated feature. All this money is going towards a film that will likely feel too strange for audiences to truly embrace. I must admit, I was kind of looking forward to seeing what Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson would bring to The Adventures of Tintin, but I'd much rather see a couple of live actors do their best with the work than a few puppets made out of moist CG-clay. It pains me to see once great directors brought down to such a demeaning form of filmmaking. Anyway, here's your first look at Stephen Spielberg 2011 animated adventure, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. Yes. That seriously is the title of this film.

The Hobbit: Green Means Go!

Fret no more, for The Hobbit has now officially been given the green light by Warner Bros.Studio! The studio that put the Harry Potter series on a straight trajectory towards success has finally gotten things in order for both adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic novel to be made. And if things weren't already perfect in the moment, Peter Jackson is now officially set to fulfill his destiny and direct the completion (or rather the beginning) of what he started over ten years ago. Production on the film, based on scripts written by both Peter Jackson and former director Guillermo Del Toro, is set to begin in February. In honor of such news, I'm going to dust off my old DVD shelf and sit down to watch the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. What else could I possibly be doing with my weekend?