Movie Reviews: Living in Emergency, Micmacs, The Painter Sam Francis

MARMADUKE Brad Anderson’s long-running saga of the melty-looking Winslow family and the gangling, interfering Great Dane that should’ve been put to sleep ages ago gets a film treatment, and once-mute Marmaduke now has expressive, CGI-arched eyebrows and a voice provided by Owen Wilson. Relocated from Kansas to Orange County by master Phil (Lee Pace), Marmaduke tries to fit in at the new dog park. It’s like “high school for dogs,” explains a helpful mutt; why a dog would explain something in these terms is unclear, though it prepares us for an off-the-rack HS movie plot, as the hermitic one-panel strip opens up to a canine social world with its own strata, topped by purebreds, which Marmaduke must negotiate. In the parallel human B story, Phil spends a lot of time working to provide for his family. That thoughtful ’Duke sabotages Phil’s professional life, but the rest of us can hardly forget the workaday world in this haze of Dog Gone Awful puns (“It’s raining cats and us”), surreal set pieces (“A surf competition for dogs?”), sound-track poots and a Sam Elliott–voiced mongrel maiming a dogcatcher offscreen, while Fox secures the rights to Hägar the Horrible. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)

GO   MICMACS An exploded grandfather clock of a movie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s intricately antic Micmacs hurls gears, gizmos, and other trash-heap objets d’art at the audience. It’s aggressively, whimsically retro, like a heaping second helping of his 1992 black comedy, Delicatessen. Instead of the enchanted fairyland of his smash hit Amélie, Jeunet burrows into the Parisian scrap-yard lair of the Micmacs, a band of outcasts without superpowers but who have ingenious uses for old junk. Movie-quoting video-store clerk Bazil (Dany Boon) joins them after a nasty encounter with a bullet; that, plus his father’s prior land-mine mishap, has him vowing revenge on two rival arms manufacturers. Quicker than you can say “Yojimbo,” the Micmacs spring into action. Magnets, alarm clocks, string and jars of wasps are the Micmacs’ preferred weaponry — the team embodies Jeunet’s love of the handmade and the improvised, which he then pits against the cold technology of the munitioners. (Though, in one concession to our times, Jeunet does allow the Micmacs to use YouTube.) Allusions are made to recent European arms deals in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but Micmacs is more fantasia than violent revenge tale. And its pleasing curlicues — like a bouquet of spoons— linger long after the predictable outcome. (Brian Miller) (ArcLight Hollywood, ArcLight Pasadena, The Landmark)

ONDINE A bad drunk dried out into a luckless loner fisherman, Syracuse (Colin Farrell) lives for visits with Annie (Alison Barry), his wise-beyond-her-years crippled kid stuck in the custody of her still-boozing mom. One morning, Syracuse pulls up his net and finds a shivering woman — or is she a mermaid? — and soon his fishing fortunes change. While Annie hits the books looking for a mythical explanation, her dad falls in love with the mysterious creature, who calls herself Ondine (Alicja Bachleda). Writer/director Neil Jordan gradually builds up the possibility of fairy-tale magic in an identifiably real world, and then systematically knocks it down. This might have played as a welcome correction to today’s brand of contemporary indie film, which pairs poverty and whimsy neatly, if Ondine didn’t indulge in its own modern-movie claptrap. Eccentric yet unwittingly carnal, prone to atonal gibberish, Ondine is a grade-A manic pixie dream girl, bringing a curmudgeonly outcast back to life with her kindness, tolerance and perfect breasts. Ciphers aside, Ondine effectively sustains a mood of a hazy melancholy most affecting when nothing much is happening: Colin Farrell has the Best Enigmatic Stare in current cinema, and Christopher Doyle’s gorgeous cinematography, all foggy blankets of blue and green, gives Syracuse’s uncertainty a tangible texture. The spell is broken with the plot’s final twist, which suggests that the film’s core mystery wouldn’t have been much of one had Syracuse been a fan of Icelandic ambient band Sigur Rós. Yes, seriously. (Karina Longworth) (Landmark)

THE PAINTER SAM FRANCIS The name in the title belongs to the California-born artist who, set up in Saint-Germain-des-Prés during the 1950s, was at the vanguard of introducing and selling American abstract expressionism to a European audience. This biography doc, from Fluxus associate and all-purpose avant-garde hanger-about Jeffrey Perkins, was 40 years in the making, built on the foundation of a 1968 shoot of Sam Francis at work, pulled along by his brushstrokes, stopping to flagellate an in-progress canvas. For aficionados, the evidently rare footage of Francis squatting on hairy thighs, scampering ahead to stay intuitive before intellectual, will justify the film. But if we learn something of the painter’s “from-the-solar-plexus” process here (“It’s so easy!”), the portrait of Francis — from a ’73 sit-down interview with the sapped and wary artist, none too charismatic in his reticence, and postmortem interviews with family and colleagues — doesn’t articulate enough to explain the film’s epic gestation period. Only an opaque outline of the subject comes through — monomaniacally productive through illness, five times married, no candidate for Father of the Year — and Francis finally impresses, mostly, through his masquerade of Grand Artist sartorial effects, a big Salon des Refusés mustache, and the mien of a feudal Japanese Zen painter. (Nick Pinkerton) (Monica, Playhouse)