How To Train Your Dragon

Refreshingly low on the pop-culture references and fart jokes that have made so many computer-animated films so far below par, DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon arrives with a heaping dose of sentimentality and a cadre of adorable beasts that would make it a huge hit if not for the lame title and even-more-lame marketing campaign that pass it off as just more of the same. The product itself represents a huge leap forward for the studio in the race to be number two behind Pixar.

One major problem with the film (and I’ll try not to extrapolate this into a wider point about where our culture is headed) is the humans. These characters - from their physical design and their dialogue right down to their cutesy names and B-list celebrity voice acting - just aren’t up to snuff. The film attempts a shaky balance between cartoonish and realistic in its design. The characters say "Oh my gods" (because they're Vikings) but also, "This is pretty cool!" (because riding dragons is cool). That it succeeds to the extent that it does despite this is a testament to the power of the story.

The skinny hero is Hiccup; his giant father is a dragon fighter named Stoick who, as though no one looked up “stoic” in a dictionary, shouts and complains constantly about his worthless son. One character suggests Hiccup’s only value would be as a toothpick for the dragons that nightly torment the Vikings’ village. Hiccup’s spindly frame contrasted with that of his spherical father is a nice attempt at a visual gag, but like Hiccup himself, it falls flat.

Sick of being an endless embarrassment, Hiccup is compelled to use his blacksmith apprenticeship to construct a contraption that he hopes will trap a Night Fury, the least-seen and most-feared breed of dragon. Inevitably, he succeeds and inevitably, he can’t bring himself to kill the beast. Instead Hiccup goes back to the shop to create a prosthetic wing to replace the one he damaged and restore the creature’s flight.

Hiccup dubs his pet dragon “Toothless” (his teeth are retractable) and the movie mines its considerable pathos from the ensuing scenes of their blossoming friendship. The twist is that the dragons are little more than overgrown, misunderstood puppies. The dragons, as opposed to the humans, are created with dimension and depth (and not just of the gimmicky, 3D-glasses variety, though some of those effects are admittedly neat). There is an abundance of imagination poured into the creation of a wide variety of dragon breeds, from fire-breathing to hut-crushing; at night the dragons are fearsome and shrouded in black but by day they are quirky in shape and size and wide-eyed such that we, along with Hiccup, will learn to love them. They like fish but detest eel and they love being scratched behind the ears.


How To Train Your Dragon follows a tried-and-true formula; it’s about a boy with a dangerous secret who has to teach his community of ignorant elders the error of their ways. As in E.T. or The Iron Giant, the adults fear what the child knows to be a simple messenger of love (much like the way the adults in the theater treated the film: with ignorance, and paying more attention to their cell phones). Dragon does what it can to ape those classics and where it ultimately fails is in its sense of danger.

There is no analogue to Spielberg’s hazmat-suited spooks or Giant’s communist scare; Dragon meekly strays from putting its protagonist in any palpable danger. Have the filmmakers seen Up? You’re supposed to raise your protagonist’s stakes by putting him in danger, even in a “children’s” movie. Especially in a children’s movie.

This is obvious from the beginning. The film opens with a spectacular dragon-on-viking battle (most of the scenic animation in the film, from the wafting clouds to the rocky outcroppings of the Vikings’ island home, is gorgeous), but we soon realize that while they set the houses on fire and steal all the sheep, the dragons aren’t interested in the humans. Even during the second-act reveal of the Big Bad Boss dragon, we witness a mass-feeding of … sheep, fish, and other animals. There is one major character with a couple of missing limbs, but he is played for laughs. To make matters worse, the dragons’ lack of interest in human flesh actually creates a decent plot hole. The film isn’t interested in inflating any real threat to its heroes. Pete Docter drew blood in the opening minutes of Up and WALL•E lived in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. How To Train Your Dragon makes great strides for populist animation, but with every Pixar success it's harder and harder to catch up.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

Armond White and The Greenberg Problem

The following piece, like Armond White's notorious review, only barely touches on the film in question. Accordingly, the Spoiler Threat Level is green.


How do you solve a problem like Roger Greenberg? Armond White isn’t interested.

In a fascinating debacle of life imitating art and the journalist becoming his own story, New York Press film critic and NY Film Critics Circle chair Armond White has launched himself into the position of being the most-discussed aspect of Noah Baumbach's new film. It started when White was allegedly "disinvited" from a press screening of Greenberg and an anonymous email began circulating calling for a critical boycott of the film as a response to the (alleged, again) censorship.

Or maybe it started in 1998, when White suggested that Baumbach's mother ought to seek "retroactive abortion" - a quip White has recently tucked between his legs, claiming it's "not a death warrant; its impact is in your inference." Or maybe it started much earlier, when White and Baumbach's mother Georgia Brown (film critic at the Press' opposition Village Voice) had a running feud that culminated on live radio with White, as he so often does, pulling his race card.

Several people have entered the debate, which has been more-or-less put to rest with White's inevitable screed against Baumbach and his films. In his piece at the Press, White posits himself as a lone warrior, a martyr in the futile battle between publicists and critics for free speech. In what he terms the "Greenberg problem", White discusses the rampant isolation of critics from their proper pedestals and throws around accusations of Nazism, fascism and communism.

He's unhinged, and he's losing much of what little cachet he had left as a responsible, intelligent critic. The best response I've read to all this is Walter Chaw's "Armond Hammer" post at the Film Freak Central blog. I agree with Chaw in several respects, most crucially in regard to this notion that if only we had more critics speaking their mind instead of the gospel of the press release - and if we had more respect for criticism as a viable art/science - White wouldn't seem nearly as crazy as he does.

White was responsible for the most high-profile take-down of Precious, something for which I want to hold him in high regard. One man's insane rant is another man's sermon.


But re-reading White's "review" after seeing the film in question - a relatively quiet, simple story to have stirred up all this gunk - it's pretty clear that for all the talk of critical dialogue and free speech, White barely seems to have watched the (admittedly imperfect) film at all. I'd also say that for a writer who so frequently brings up issues of race (White calls J. Hoberman's reprinting of White's own words a "racist lynching by white critics of a black critic"), he's hedging unbearably close to anti-Semitism. In comparing Greenberg to Zelig, he draws a dangerous link between Greenberg's ethnicity (and the character, onscreen, explicitly eschews his Jewish heritage) and his social standing. Also, if I were Armond White, I'd try not to use phrases like "Indian-giver".

Greenberg has, arguably, two protagonists. Ben Stiller is a self-possessed jerk who gets involved with a girl who's unhealthily submissive, both sexually and emotionally. It's a pretty honest portrayal of both types - you'll likely cringe at the way he treats her. I don't think it's incidental that Baumbach opens his story with Greta Gerwig's Florence and doesn't introduce Roger for about fifteen minutes. We're meant to sympathize with both of our very-flawed heroes, but to suggest that the film "coddles" Roger Greenberg is simply inaccurate. Greenberg is an asshole, to be sure, and if there's something I truly admire about Baumbach's films it's his relentless posing of the asshole as the hero through the prism of daring semi-autobiography. To view his work as a whole, you might say Baumbach's thesis is "Assholes are people, too." The challenge of his films, and some (The Squid and the Whale) are more successful at this than others (Margot at the Wedding), is in engendering sympathy for a jerk. To dismiss the entire body of work as a lionization of anti-social behavior and a series of love letters to a bunch of pricks is, well, dismissive.

For White to assert, as he so often has, that Baumbach is himself an asshole ("You look at Noah Baumbach's work, and you see he's an asshole. I would say it to his face.") represents either a totally cross-wired auteurist theory or a trans-generational grudge. Did The New Yorker run a review of a Baumbach film written by a friend and former employer of Baumbach himself? If so, that's probably a conflict of interest and it likely shouldn't have gone to print. But for White to suggest that scenario as a violation of journalistic ethics while at the same time freely admitting to his decades-long grudge with Baumbach's mother seems exposing of a deep hypocrisy.

This all brings me back to a point that Walter Chaw put better and more succinctly. White is a crazy, raving loon and also a crucial member of the critical community. We need more like him and we need more people in intelligent oppostition to him. But in refusing to take the film on its own merits, White is falling on his own sword and letting the publicists win.

Dogtooth [Kynodontas]

Dogtooth is a fable about a Greek family steered by a grievously misguided - yet, we must admit, loving - patriarch into a clandestine system of games and rules that will inevitably break down in a terrifying manner.

There are two girls and a boy, all fully grown, living with their mother and father on a not-quite-luxurious estate with a finely-groomed lawn and in-ground pool surrounded by fifteen-foot walls and bushes to keep the family in and the outside world out. Nobody is allowed to leave except the father, who holds a desk job at a factory and brings home supplies. These rules are so ingrained that when given the opportunity, the boy will stop at an open gate, touching an invisible boundary with his toes.

The two parents coach the children to fear and misunderstand the world they've never seen and have only heard about. They teach them intentional malapropisms (asked to "pass the telephone" at the dinner table, the mother hands over the salt) and when an airplane flies overhead, they toss a small toy plane in the yard and tell the kids that it fell. A cat is a monstrous animal that will tear you apart with its jaws and talons; the kids are taught to bark on all fours in case one ever shows up.

No one has any names, either. The three children are simply the boy, the older girl and the younger girl. He, she and she.


Framed by the varying perspectives of all five family members, writer-director Giorgos Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Fillipou stir up a remarkable mixture of unmitigated terror and sympathetic innocence. Comparisons to Michael Haneke's exercises in suspense are apt - from pretty much the first frame to the last there is a palpable dread, punctuated (not perforated) by shocking instances of violence. From the increasingly bizarre and supremely abusive games the children are forced to act out to the insidious leak of catalysts from the world outside their fence, Dogtooth is a gripping, provocative ticking clock. It's also the first movie in ages that's actually made me, for one brief moment, involuntarily bring a hand up to block my eyesight because I couldn't bear to watch what was unfolding.

It gets to the point where, as terrible as their lives are, you find yourself almost (almost) rooting for the father's experiments to continue successfully just so the twenty-something-year-old children can be kept safe. This, then, leads you to consider that very primal definition of "safety", which maybe (maybe) results in the kind of twisted logic that led the father and mother to develop their scheme in the first place. If you never let your children leave the house, you never have to worry about them talking to (or having sex with or learning from) anyone you don't want them to. But almost anything can be a weapon of dissent in the right circumstance.

There's room for an allegorical interpretation, but I can't presume to come up with the correct one and it's unnecessary besides. Dogtooth is effective even as a story about something as simple as a father trying to maintain control of his family and watching as an exponential increase in entropy destroys his carefully constructed system and wrests his kin from his hands.

These kids, of course, were lost long ago, as soon as the mother and father began their experiments. There will be no saving anybody here; what could be described as a 'Sopranos ending' is merely a tacit acknowledgment that if any of these characters tries to save themselves or each other, it will only make things worse. It's pretty damn bleak, and it's gonna stick with you.