SECOND HELPINGS: The Incredibles (2004)

When this film came out, I was irked by the number of people who thought that describing this film as ‘incredible’ was witty. I was still in college when I got around to watching it and, rather than seeing it as an homage to comic book teams, I viewed this film as a rip-off fusion of the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Had I known anything about Watchmen at the time, I probably would have been screaming rip-off of that too. Now that I’m older and wiser, my opinion of this film has improved significantly. Still though, I can’t help but feel that this film is just a smidge overrated.

I still have no reason to complain about the quality of Pixar’s animation. The textures and environments that they create really make you wonder at times if all action-oriented films will be done exclusively with CGI someday. Nothing seems impossible anymore with this production company. I’m not convinced yet that Pixar is very good at animating human characters in a realistic way, but The Incredibles gets a pass because it’s a faux-comic book movie. Anyone who’s looked at a comic book knows that most take at least a few liberties with dimensions and proportions.

Teams of superheroes are nothing new and three of the four members of the Parr family suiting up have powers just like three of the Fantastic Four. The filmmakers do throw freshness into the mix pretty well through juxtaposing our main characters’ abilities and their impact on a real-world setting. Thwarting bad guys causes some very real wear and tear on the people and buildings caught in the crossfire. Some of this juxtaposition is pretty subtle while some of it is used for immediate sight gags.

Overall, I can see now how The Incredibles pays homage to comic book superheroes but there is also a lot of satire involved. It’s got to be a pretty fine tightrope walk to poke fun at comic book conventions while including a number of them in your film. The balance may be uneven at different times but this film never gets too cynical nor too fanboy rah-rah on us. Syndrome, the film’s antagonist, has a few moments where he gets very mean-spirited and dark but he is usually yanked out of full-blown maniacal villain mode in a humorous way. Whether this makes that momentary intensity acceptable is up to you.

While The Incredibles looks great and is a lot of fun to watch, it is remarkably violent for a family film. I recall docking The Black Cauldron quite a bit for being very un-Disney with its darkness and creepy imagery but I think level of violence, peril, and intensity in this film surpasses even The Black Cauldron. You can try to argue that this is a Pixar film and that my Disney branding is inaccurate, or that the nature of the film’s subject, comic book superheroes, requires a higher level of violence. The tell-tale mark that justifies my criticism is this film’s PG rating. That tells you that this film is not appropriate for the entire family.

If you have little ones, particularly boys, what will they retain from this film? What will they reenact? Will it be the wholesome lesson of family togetherness and teamwork or will it be the high-flying kicks, punches, and action sequences? I’m not condemning this film for the violence but I do think a little less of it. It’s still a fun, feel-good kind of movie but it is one that I’ll have to think long and hard about sharing with my daughter. Putting all that danger and violence in context is a tricky thing.

ORIGINAL RATING: 3 out of 5

NEW RATING: 3.5 out of 5

Raising Arizona (1987)

If ever you wondered what inspired movie and TV show writers to cram endless amounts of intellectualism into characters of decidedly average means and intellect, this absurdist comedy is almost certainly on each and every list. I am sure that there have been numerous witty films using the same character-dialogue pairing as Raising Arizona. Given how near-sighted much of the film and television industries have been recently when looking for inspiration, however, the popularity of this early Coen Brothers film makes it an easy target for imitation.

Herbert “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) is a petty thief who speaks like a literature and linguistics professor. Every time he is arrested for robbing convenience stores, he flirts with the same policewoman (Holly Hunter). Over the course of several arrests, he learns that she is newly single after a painful breakup with her fiancé. Upon his latest release from prison, he proposes to his beloved Ed (short for Edwina) and the two marry and settle down in a trailer in the middle of the Arizona landscape.

The pair is desperate to have children but they learn that Ed is infertile. Given Hi’s criminal history, adoption is also out of the question. After seeing a story about a local business tycoon and his wife celebrating the birth of quintuplets, Hi and Ed plot to kidnap one of the youngin’s under the logic that these people have more kids than they need or can manage. Keeping and caring for the child prove to be a challenge as Hi and Ed are beset by the police, a demented bounty hunter, and two of Hi’s bumbling prison pals who just escaped and are looking to make a quick buck with the reward money.

The nice thing about Raising Arizona is that it never plays out under false pretenses. From the very beginning, the characters’ behavior and the writing makes it clear in no certain terms that this film is not to be taken seriously. The trouble with this approach is that it doesn’t guarantee that some viewers won't try to take it seriously anyway. On the flip-side, this absurdist nature of this film’s comedy doesn’t allow for audiences to turn off their brains and chuckle it up for an hour and a half. You do get to turn off a great portion of your brain while taking it all in, but you also need to turn on a very small, specific part of the brain that doesn’t get used often enough.

Nicolas Cage espouses his lines with a dreamy, gentlemanly swagger. His prison pals speak in a similar manner but are nowhere near as eloquent as Hi. Ed, on the other hand, speaks a more normal language. She gets her moments of wordy glory but her common tongue and her spitfire personality plays well against Hi’s drifter-esque mentality. It’s the collision of these attitudes, speech styles and behavior that generate most of the laughs.

Some will find the wordplay over the top and unnecessary. But I ask you, what would this film have going for it otherwise? It would just be a kidnapper comedy with outlandish characters that don’t make sense. If nothing else, the Coen’s verbose script acts as a gateway to accepting the rest of the film. If you can gel with the script, all the gags and situational humor will be easy to digest. If you can’t get past the dialogue, you’re less likely to swallow everything else.

Much of the physical comedy is recycled from nearly a century of cinema silliness. The execution of these gags is always where comedy films rise and fall. Raising Arizona makes them work. The corny, pseudo-intellectual dialogue butters you up enough that everything else in this film is funny by default. The Coen Brothers know their broad target audience will already be having fun with the film and they continually go for broke with what moviegoers typically expect from a comedy.

Is it perfect? No, but you’ll most likely laugh your way through any logical flaws (if you really are determined enough to apply logic here) and other minor mistakes. That is the sign of a classic comedy that will be appreciated by generations to come. Raising Arizona is a fine blend of blue-collar and elitism, the likes of which may be imitated for years to come but never successfully replicated.

RATING: 4 out of 5