MovieMonday: The Boss Baby

What to say about this movie?  It's funny, yes, but it does push the envelope.

Its source material, a 32-page picture book, seems to be aimed at children whose family life is about to be upset by the arrival of a new baby.  In that book, the baby wears a onesie business suit, and the family's entire routine becomes a round-the-clock effort to keep the baby happy.  

In a very broad sense, that is the story of "The Boss Baby" movie.  Unfortunately there is not enough plot material in the book to sustain a full-length film.  This led to some amping up of story and action by the creatives at Dreamworks Animation, the outfit that gave us the Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar trilogies, among others.   

The movie opens with a heavenly fiction of babies being prepped for delivery to happy parents.  Then we meet a seven-year-old boy named Tim Templeton, a very happy only child. Tim's bedtime routine includes three books, five hugs, his special song and the full attention of both his parents.

Tim watches, aghast, as a baby wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase is dropped off by a yellow taxi at the Templeton home and is welcomed by his parents.  

From there it's off to unreality land.  

Tim learns quickly that the baby is not a real baby, but an obnoxious business executive from Baby Corp.  "You didn't go to business school, did you?" snarks the baby as the two battle.  

Turns out Boss Baby has been ordered to earth from the celestial baby factory, known as Baby Corp.  BB's task is to reduce the growing puppy slice of the family-love pie chart, an existential threat to the future of babies.  (Yes, I know, but stay with me here.)  Tim and the Baby Boss can't stand each other, but they agree to work together when the interloper promises to leave as soon as he has accomplished his goal.

Then, having dialed the wacky premise up to 11, the movie aims for 22.  There is an evil CEO (but I repeat myself) at the enemy company, Puppyco, with a complicated backstory and a new puppy initiative that Must Be Stopped. There are references to childhood things -- infant formula, pacifiers, fold-out books -- and then a mean babysitter in drag, a bicycle chase scene, a scramble through airport security, a charter flight of Elvis impersonators headed for Las Vegas and a Puppyco convention where Tim and Boss Baby meet their enemy.  

Theoretically, this is a children's story/movie, and so things work out fine.

Except this isn't really a movie for young children.  The young people in the theater where I saw "The Boss Baby" were between 12 and 14 and obviously were familiar with the Dreamworks Animation oeuvre. They laughed at every preview before the movie, and they laughed all through "The Baby Boss."  

They even laughed at the "Cookies are for closers" line, a play on an Alec Baldwin line in a 25-year-old movie based on a David Mamet play.  Mamet doesn't do kid stuff.  Would the children's mothers even have seen that movie, let alone remembered the line -- "Coffee's only for closers?"  I saw the old movie and have read the play since then, and even I had to look it up.

I used to be a child once, and I remember feeling deep envy for a school friend whose parents took the family to every single new children's movie.  

Now I'm thinking I maybe dodged a bullet. 

Movie Monday: The Jungle Book

The split-screen trailer above demonstrates the differences between Disney's two Jungle Book releases.  Both draw on Rudyard Kipling's India-based short stories about a boy named Mowgli who is raised in the jungle by benevolent animals.

The first Jungle Book, released in 1967, was the last cartoon movie supervised personally by Walt Disney.  It features full-length musical numbers and anthropomorphized animals acting like humans.

The newer Jungle Book's animal characters still speak English, but they look real and behave more like animals.  In fact, however, they are no less artificial than the animals hand-drawn on the thousands of cels that made up the original film.

What the current release represents is a giant leap in CGI (computer-generated imagery.)  The movie's only real elements are the actor who plays "man-cub" Mowgli and the animals' speech voiced by great actors.  Everything else, from the scenery to the action sequences, was created by hundreds of digital artists working in downtown Los Angeles.  The result is even more impressive than that of the 2009 megahit, Avatar.


Jungle Book 2016

This movie is great.  It feels real, it moves well, it has plenty of suspense and action and its satisfying conclusion involves coordinated action involving animals acting like animals and Mowgli using his "man tricks."  The original stories have been tweaked a bit to appeal to changing cultural mores -- mostly natural preservation -- and that works too.

I saw the movie in a regular theater and found it very satisfying.  Others recommend seeing it in 3-D, and it might be even more compelling in the imax format.

Kids will love it.  Grownups will too.  Just go.


Disney Marketing

I have talked before about Disney's marketing skills, and of course the Jungle Book release has been coordinated with theme park attractions and licenses for retail products.

But the company's more remarkable strategy may be an older one, the careful maintenance of the content it produces.  More on that tomorrow.

Movie Monday: A Hologram for the King

This movie was aired first at the Tribeca Film Festival and somehow wandered across the Hudson River to a couple New Jersey theaters a week before its national opening last Friday.

It is one scattered piece of work.

The story is from the 2012 Dave Eggers novel of the same name.  (I did not read it: Middle-aged American executives' frustrations have been discussed rather extensively in our literature for almost 100 years now, and I was not drawn to the idea of another book plowing the same ground, albeit in a different setting.)  Critics liked the Hologram novel, but my impression is that readers were somewhat less enthusiastic.


Plot Metaphors

One thing that is striking is how many reviews of the movie reach for classic metaphors to describe its themes.

The main character, Alan Clay, is of course played by -- who else? -- Tom Hanks.  Clay and Hanks are both described as Everyman, the subject of a 16th century morality play that probably hasn't been staged in at least 200 years.  Alan Clay is a middle-aged executive who has lost his job, his marriage, his house and his ability to pay his daughter's college tuition.

This backstory is dispatched quickly in jerky shots and a quick-cut recitation from the Talking Heads song, "Once in a Lifetime." The other historical bit is a five-second recurring image in Clay's memory of the time he faced a roomful of blue-collar workers about to be fired when their Schwinn manufacturing jobs were outsourced to China.

Then it's on to Clay as Willie Loman in "Death of a Salesman," leveraging a brief encounter with a Saudi prince many years earlier into a long-shot assignment to sell a holographic system to King Abdullah Economic City, a massive enterprise just getting under way in Saudi Arabia.

After Clay arrives in Saudi Arabia, he becomes a character from the Samuel Beckett play, "Waiting for Godot." He is stalled at work, awaiting the arrival of King Abdullah to see Clay's company's presentation and fielding increasingly angry calls from his boss at the head office in Boston.

These metaphors may be the inventions of film critics trying to make sense of the uneven and not well-paced plot.

Then comes another metaphor drawn from the original novel -- a lipoma (a lump of unusual tissue growth) that has developed under the skin on Clay's back.

Clay's dismay continues until his lipoma is removed by a female doctor.  Then, finally, the king arrives and appreciates the company's presentation.  This is followed by the unsatisfactory resolution of Clay's marketing effort, which is explained (but not shown) in a few sentences.  The final act becomes an improbable love story that ties the whole project together.  At least that is the intention.

Observations

The film, perhaps like the book, observes but does not dwell on the relatively more challenging difficulties faced by people in Saudi Arabia.
        "We don't have unions here," Clay's driver tells him.  "We have Filipinos."
        When Clay remarks on a crowd he has seen as he is driven to his work site, his driver explains that the people have gathered to watch public executions.

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One thing I enjoyed about A Hologram for a King was its travelogue aspect, including desert views, exotic buildings and even an unplanned drive through Mecca, a holy city that is absolutely off limits to non-Muslims.  These pictures gave me a sense of a country that I am unlikely to visit in my lifetime.
          Then, later, I learned that the exterior shots were filmed in Morocco.  This is not surprising; Saudi Arabia is a tightly controlled country that almost certainly would not countenance the film's scenes of heavy drinking and a woman talking privately with a man who is not a relative.
          I should have known better.

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What most disappoints about the movie is that it bites off more than it can chew and isn't as coherent as it might have been.
         It is a film truism that a movie is more like a short story than a novel, and this makes sense to me. It takes 20 or 30 hours to read a book, and even when descriptive writing is replaced by imagery, most books have more plot action and character development than most movies can do justice in a couple hours.
         The Hologram movie compresses its main character's background so much that his existential crisis, his frantic grab for a very speculative job and his floundering in an entirely new culture lack sufficient grounding (the "before" of the story) in Alan Clay's past.  Several scenes and secondary themes probably should have been edited out of the script in favor of strengthening the overall narrative.

     
Notes

A Hologram for a King is set in the still-soft economic environment of 2010, but some of its elements, including the outsourcing of Schwinn jobs, happened much earlier.  This is a perfectly acceptable fiction convention -- conflating one company's woes with those of a major economic slowdown -- but it is a little bewildering if you know the history.

Another corporate phenomenon that occurred before the book's 2010 date was the promotion of holographic connections as the next big thing in corporate communications.  I had a minor role in a fund-raising effort for such a company.  The project manager was absolutely convinced that the technology would change the way multi-nationals did business.  This of course did not happen.
         Funny to encounter the idea in a book published years after teleconferencing and Skype had erased holograms from commercial memory.