Tots learn an inconvenient truth
by Michael Phillips (buzz@boulderweekly.com)

An Inconvenient Truth for the juice-box set, Arctic Tale has my 6-year-old son very interested in the concept of helping polar bears and walrus pups and other wildlife live better, longer, icier lives. So how bad can it be? The film has turned him into a good little eco-fellow. It might be temporary, but I hope not. He's turning off lights around the house when they're not needed. He's saving up for a hybrid car. He thought the film was "not bad — better than I thought it was going to be."

That about says it for me too. Queen Latifah narrates the feature, lending an easy authority to such aren't-those-walruses-cute? lines as "And what family doesn't have a scary uncle?" (That's actually a pretty unsettling line.) Arctic Tale is destined to be compared to March of the Penguins. It is destined to be the movie you rent when the penguin movie is out. It follows the tastefully dramatized hard-knock lives of Nanu the bear cub, whose young life intersects with that of Seela the walrus. Both species, and many others, have been imperiled by the melting of the polar ice cap.

The film, a National Geographic-funded affair, comes from co-director and principal cinematographer Adam Ravetch. Along with the other director, Sarah Robertson, and screenwriters Linda Woolverton, Mose Richards and Kristen Gore (daughter of Al and Tipper), Ravetch arranges the footage to tell a clear, trackable, perpetually threatening story of intertwined bear/walrus destinies. Movies like this are ruthless about toying with your food-chain sympathy. But the real battle in Arctic Tale is between the shrinking Arctic ice kingdom and everyone on Earth hastening the unwanted thaw.

Wordless, narration-free sequences work better than the story-dependent ones. A shot of the ice shelf bobbing and scraping up against another chunk of ice conveys a sense of fragility, as well as sheer tonnage. The narration labors too hard to warm up and hook the kids. But by the end, even a documentary-averse 6-year-old has learned a few things. Watching bear cubs and walrus pups struggling to survive against increasingly tough odds, and on ever-slushier ice shelves, has both its shamelessly manipulative side and its dramatically necessary side, as handled here. This proves one thing: Unlike global warming, some stories really do have two sides.

—Tribune movie critic

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A dusty star
by Michael Phillips
(buzz@boulderweekly.com)

Stardust has its moments, most of them plot-unrelated. The highlight is a patter routine wherein Robert De Niro, as a cross-dressing pirate, haggles over the price of some fenced goods with a disreputable fellow played by Ricky Gervais. The way these two negotiate back and forth it's like Faerie Kingdom vaudeville, a distant cousin to the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane routines in The Princess Bride.

Most of Stardust, alas, has no time for such detours. The story began as an illustrated novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, debuting as a four-part DC Comics project in 1997. Its mid-19th century hero is young Tristan Thornee, described by the author as "a gangling creature of potential." He promises to deliver a fallen star into the hands of his beloved, who, like Tristan, lives in an English village separated by a stone wall from the magical land of Stormhold, ruled by a dying king whose sons vie for the tracks of faerie land. There the horizons are further darkened by a gaggle of witches, for whom a fallen star holds the secret of eternal youth. Already I'm losing track, but that's how it is with me and anything more elaborate than Go, Dog. Go!.

Struggling to get out from underneath Daryl Hannah's Splash hair, Claire Danes takes top billing as the star woman, Yvaine, whose earthly fate is one of many plot strands in a narrative that had an easier time of it on the page. Danes is an excellent actress, and something of a star herself. (If the film version of Shopgirl were any better, her performance would've been widely recognized for what it was: a moving embodiment of dashed and then fulfilled hopes in a romantically diminished era.) But this is not an especially interesting interstellar role, and Danes struggles to make this diva who fell to Earth memorable.

The cast of Stardust is, indeed, a starry one, with Peter O'Toole allowed a few seconds of screen time as the dying king (nothing compared to what he does, with voice alone, in Ratatouille) and Rupert Everett playing one of his patented fatuous Prince Charming types, this one a ghost. To mixed results, the screen adaptation amps up the roles played by De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. The latter swans around in thick hag makeup, when she's not appearing as her suspiciously ageless middle-aged self. She's not bad, but Pfeiffer rarely surprises you with a line reading; nothing ever gets tossed off or sped up or delivered with a little topspin.

Directed and co-adapted (with Jane Goldman) by Matthew Vaughn, Stardust piles on the conflict and the bombast. It invents a showdown between Tristan and Lamia the evil sorceress (Pfeiffer) that goes on and on and on. The scene depicting De Niro's closeted pirate mincing around to Offenbach's famous Orpheus cancan goes on as well, and it makes you wonder if some things simply weren't meant to be.

Author Gaiman has acknowledged the influence of C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books, and at the center of Stardust lies the tantalizing notion of what lies beyond everyday experience. Such notions of parallel-universe magic have to be worked out visually, in ways that cannot be left entirely to the digital effects teams. While Vaughn's gangster film Layer Cake had some force and stylish meanness going for it, as well as a good performance from Daniel Craig, judging from Stardust the director is a rather heavy-handed fantasist.

You end up clinging to the little payoffs, such as De Niro's encounter with Gervais, or the sight of Mark Williams' innkeeper, recently transformed into a goat and gnawing on a towel, or Kate Magowan's vibrant, too-brief appearance as the mysterious slave girl in the Faerie Market. It's the big stuff that doesn't really work, at least well enough to be called special.

—Tribune movie critic

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