“So old-fashioned as to look like something brand new, the stop-motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox is as recognizably a Wes Anderson film as any of his previous features,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Roald Dahl‘s 1970 children’s favorite about a fox clan and friends eluding human predators has been transformed into a tale of odd family dynamics stemming from the behavior of an eccentric patriarch.

The second talking-fox picture of the year, after Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, this one features not genital mutilation, but a leading character who gets his tail shot off. It also boasts some of the most gorgeous autumnal color schemes devised by someone other than Mother Nature herself, animal puppets festooned with actual fur, and a sensibility more indie than mainstream.

“The film’s style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season’s defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it’s a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.

“It’s a curious coincidence that Anderson and Spike Jonze, two of the more prominent musicvid-turned-feature directors, have kid-lit adaptations featuring puppets (albeit of vastly differing sizes) coming out simultaneously, and that both Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are strive for such hand-crafted, individualized looks. The films may have their problems, but the least one can say is that neither very closely resembles anything that’s come before.

“Mr. Fox is characterized by chapter headings that slide across the screen; trademark Anderson compositions that resemble storyboards and abundant lateral camera moves; a soundtrack that easily accommodates everything from The Ballad of Davy Crockett and the theme from Day for Night to the Beach Boys’ version of Ol’ Man River; and a hirsute male lead who would look right at home on the cover of GQ.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) wears a double-breasted, pumpkin-colored corduroy suit, a custard-hued sweater and two stylish wheat stalks peeking out of his breast pocket. His slim, trim wife (Meryl Streep) complements him perfectly, and when he tells her, ‘You’re still as fine-looking as a creme brulee,’ Anderson’s sophisticated following will nod with pleasure while their kids think, ‘What the heck?’

“As in Dahl’s 81-page yarn — whose pencil-sketch illustrations by Quentin Blake (in some editions) could not be more different from Anderson’s fastidious visuals — Mr. Fox’s pelt is desperately desired by three nasty farmers whose produce he regularly poaches. Boggis and Bunce and Bean, “one fat, one short, one lean,” launch all-out war on their adversary, digging down into his lair before recruiting snipers to shoot on sight.

“The geological precision with which Fox and his friends’ great escape is presented reps one of the film’s visual highlights, as they furiously dig through layer after layer of earth to stay ahead of their enemies’ onslaught. Along the way, Fox burrows up into the three men’s properties, from which he pilfers enough to prepare a giant feast, while the war continues to the point of becoming a televised siege.

“But the overarching drama doesn’t interest Anderson and fellow screenwriter Noah Baumbach nearly as much as the family issues. In contrast to the book, in which the Foxes have four largely undifferentiated kids, here they have but one son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who isn’t sure he can meet his father’s expectations. Joining them in flight are unassertive cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), opossum Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) and lawyer Badger (Bill Murray).

“Plainly set in England, the film maintains a linguistic divide between British-accented humans and American-accented animals.

“The thematic thread here pertains to the maintenance of one’s true personality and character strengths. When they have a child, Mrs. Fox gets her husband to promise to cease being a wild thing (apologies to Jonze) and become respectable. When he subsequently reverts to his old, buccaneering ways, Mr. Fox must do so surreptitiously, and when he’s caught in a lie, his wife is deeply distraught that he hasn’t really changed.

“But it’s his true character that wins the day, and it’s a trait Anderson clearly advocates through his own choices.

“Employing a deliberately unpolished, herky-jerky style that traces back specifically to Ladislas Starevich‘s 1941 The Tale of the Fox but also variously recalls the imperfect but imperishable stop-motion techniques in the silent The Lost World, the original King Kong and the work of Ray Harryhausen, Norman McLaren‘s A Chairy Tale and many others, the film achieves a feel that is at once coarse-grained and elegant, antiquated and the height of fashion.

“That said, individual scenes often go off in irritatingly self-indulgent directions, especially when they brush upon lifestyle issues, meditation timeouts and too-cute observations.”

The latest attempt to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise was announced last night by Variety‘s Michael Fleming. The plan is to put Star Trek‘s Chris Pine into the role of the analytical CIA hotshot, who has so far been played by three previous actors — Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.

(clockwise from top left) Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford.

Fleming wrote that Paramount and producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mace Neufeld are working with a script draft by Hossein Amini, based on an original concept” and “are still in deep development.”

This would be Pine’s second franchise on top of playing Cpt. James T. Kirk in a second Star Trek film. “It is unclear whether Pine would make another Star Trek before the Jack Ryan film,” Fleming wrote. Pine “is separately in talks to team with director D.J. Caruso in the Paramount drama The Art of Making Money early next year,” he added.

Here are my cautions and concerns.

One, as Star Trek showed, Pine is convincing as a studly man of action and balls, but less convincing as a man of immense intellectual capacity, much less one of complex intellectual reach. Pine is basically a Baywatch-level actor. I realize that an actor doesn’t have to be a genius to play a genius, but he has to have the ability to make you believe that his character is, and I’m not sure if Pine is a good enough actor to sell himself as Charles Van Doren.

Two, the Ryan character is in fact a very bright fellow as well as someone who can handle the derring-do, which is why the Harrison Ford of 15 to 20 years ago (i.e., before he became Uncle Festus) was so good in Phillip Noyce‘s Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Ford was the Sean Connery of the Ryan franchise. I’ve lived with Ford for almost 30 years now, and I think I know who he is and what he can do and what he’s made of. And I really don’t think Pine carries the same heft. He’s not as tall, his voice isn’t deep enough, he lacks that air of seasoned authority, etc.

Three, if you use the Bond franchise as an analogy, The Hunt for Red October was Dr. No, Patriot Games was From Russia With Love and Clear and Present Danger was Goldfinger. And The Sum of All Fears was 9/11 meets Diamonds Are Forever or maybe The Man With The Golden Gun. The new Ryan franchise, I presume, will in a certain sense be trying to re-energize the way Casino Royale got the Bond franchise going again with…you know, Pine trying to fill Daniel Craig‘s shoes or whatever. Well, at least they’re both blonde.

An interesting thought and a diverting question for Wes Anderson came to me during this afternoon’s Fantastic Mr. Fox press conference (held inside the Dorchester Hotel’s grand ballroom) but moderator Dave Gritten shut things down before I had a chance to ask it. So I followed the talent — Anderson and voice actors George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, etc. — into a reception room and popped it straight to Wes.

“The great malady or affliction of modern cinema,” I said, “is conspicuous CG because all conspicuous CG, in the end, is essentially the same visual effect. The ultimate example of this today is Roland Emmerich‘s forthcoming 2012. Emmerich-styled CG distracts and dazzles, but it’s finally monotonous because it’s all one big digital maul, and so your eyes can’t trust it and in fact immediately reject it, resulting in a certain kind of emotional removal and cynicism.” (Inconspicuous or invisible CG is another matter entirely, and is often glorious.) “Werner Herzog has said the same thing, that perhaps the biggest challenge facing filmmakers today is to persuade audiences to trust their eyes again.

“And the thing I like the most about Fantastic Mr. Fox,” I continued, “is that even though it’s fanciful fakery, it’s fakery you can trust because it was made the old-fashioned organic way with stop-motion photography — the same technique that was used by Willis O’Brien and Merian C. Cooper in the making of the original King Kong — and is therefore, in the realm of movies about unreal things, selling something that is totally and honorably divorced from the 2012 aesthetic. So it’s entirely true and fair to call Fantastic Mr. Fox the anti-2012.”

Wes’s first response was, “What’s 2012?” Oh, you know…it’s that Roland Emmerich end-of-the-world movie, I said. Worldwide destruction, CG up the wazoo, coming out next month. “Gee, I haven’t heard of that one,” he said. “But yeah…it sounds like we’re the anti-2012.”

Those who see Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are without knowing how skimpy the narrative is in the original Maurice Sendak pictutre book “are excused for feeling a little let down,” writes The Gothamist‘s John Del Signore.

From Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are.

“But is there anyone who didn’t fall for Where the Wild Things Are as a child? The book casts a hell of a spell, and Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers miraculously succeed in recreating its elusive essence. This is a movie that makes you want to call your mother, and that’s not something you can say about most studio pictures. Not even Dr. Dolittle 2.

“Ultimately, Where the Wild Things Are stays interesting, despite its subdued narrative arc, because it’s an unabashedly heartfelt meditation on the primal emotions that overwhelm us in childhood. It floats along on the strength of its raw sincerity and sharp wits, and if at times it verges on sentimentality, the sentiment is not unearned. It’s rare for a big-budget movie to dare to be this melancholy without any bullshit, cloying contrivances.”

Three or four hours ago I did a six-minute sitdown with Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson. One of the topics was Chris Lee‘s 10.11 L.A. Times piece that discussed complaints from Fox dp Tristan Oliver and director of animation Mark Gustafson.

One important-sounding point Anderson made was that Lee talked to Oliver, Gustafson amd himself last June, when relations were a little bumpy. The vibe smoothed out considerably after that, he says. On top of which he spoke to Oliver after hearing from Lee and repeated what he’d been told Oliver had said, and Oliver said he’d been misunderstood or misquoted.

An hour or so later Fox costars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman did a square-table sitdown at a pub on the outskirts of town (i.e., Great Missenden).

The Fantastic Mr. Fox junketers are visiting Great Missenden, the home of author Roald Dahl — small village, slightly chill air, about 40 kilometers northwest of London. I have a very short break between interviews and cups of cider so I’m posting these. Nothing of any substance until this evening, and even then…

“Dahl probably wrote Mr. Fox as an animal version of himself.” — quote from Fox voicer Jason Schwartzman.

“I’m seven years old now and my father died at 7 and 1/2. I don’t want to live in a hole any more.”

Adjacent to Great Missenden train station — Tuesday, 10.13, 11:25 am.

Facsimile of chair and writing tray that Roald Dahl wrote from for God-knows-how-many-years.

Roald Dahl’s home — Tuesday, 10.13, 1:05 pm.

Absolutely loved roaming around on foot yesterday and re-acquanting myself with the Underground. (It’s been two or three years.) Going on a mandatory junket jaunt to Roald Dahl’s home outside of London, which probably means no filing until I return to the hotel at 6 pm or thereabouts. (Using AT&T air card is out of the question.) This evening’s gathering will be at the Cross Keys in Covent Garden at 9 pm.

Midway during Monday afternoon’s search for new VOIP headset/earphones.

Wellington Arch — Monday, 10.13, 6:10 pm

“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson says in response to gripes from dp Tristan Oliver (among other co-workers) about (a) having insisted on an unconventional approach to shooting the stop-motion feature and (b) on-set absentee-ism.

“In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach,” Anderson tells correspondent Chris Lee. “The simple reality is [that] the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.'”

For what it’s worth, if I were directing a stop-motion animation flick I’m not sure I’d want to hang out on the set for weeks and months on end, endlessly futzing with models.

My approval of Jonathan Parker‘s (Untitled) is due (a) to a helpless affection for any ultra-dry comedy that refuses to even glancingly suggest that audiences may want to laugh, (b) a modest primal attraction to Marley Shelton, augmented in this case by a zingy-sparkly performance, and (c) an admiration for dp Svetlana Cvetko, whose work I wrote about in a July 2008 piece about a short film called On A Tuesday.

Last night Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that Tab Hunter Confidential, a yet-to-be-shot doc about the actor’s closeted life in the ’50s and ’60s, “is being shopped for distribution.” Based on Hunter’s 2005 autobiography in which he first spilled the beans, it’ll be directed by Jeffrey Schwartz and produced by Allan Glaser (Hunter’s partner) and Neil Koenigsberg.

Yesterday’s announcement about Mike Nichols‘ selection as the next AFI Life Achievement Award recipient allows me to re-post a Nichols tribute that I recorded last April at the Museum of Modern Art. It was hosted by MOMA film curator Raj Roy and featured four legendary Nichols collaborators — Meryl Streep, Elaine May, Nora Ephron and Buck Henry.

The biggest problem with strong>Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, in the view of Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, “is not the look of the costumed creatures but the manner in which they speak.

There are fine creative inventions in the film, he adds, “but nothing much is ever at stake, causing a story that begins in dynamic fashion to slowly devolve to the level of fleeting whimsy.”

‘

Things is “fleet of foot, emotionally attuned to its subject and instinctively faithful to its celebrated source, and it earns a lot of points for its hand-crafted look and unhomogenized, dare-one-say organic rendering of unrestrained youthful imagination. But Jonze’s sharp instincts and vibrant visual style can’t quite compensate for the lack of narrative eventfulness that increasingly bogs down this bright-minded picture.”