Friday, December 4, 2009

And the fox says...

So we go all year long without a single movie featuring a talking fox, and then in one single month, we get not one, but two talking-fox movies. In keeping with our "let's combine two movies with particular similarities for hilarious results" tradition - which we will examine more deeply in our upcoming podcast - let's consider combining Wes Anderson's wonderful "Fantastic Mr. Fox" with Lars von Trier's Lars von Triers-y "Antichrist." One of the foxes is a mischievous little rascal, the other a harbinger of doom - will they get along? Will they fight to the death? Will they get into zany hijinks with one another? Will chaos, as one fox posits, truly reign?

Oh, and it gets spookier - Willem Dafoe gets to face off against both versions of talking fox. What a lucky fella!

One thing should be said about these foxes, though - unlike in von Trier's "Manderlay" (during which John C. Reilly walked off the movie when he found out a live donkey would be killed on-screen - hmmm, I wonder how much he enjoys Godard's "Week End") - there is no visible cruelty to animals in "Antichrist." (Being in a Lars von Trier movie doesn't legally count.) There is, however, extraordinary cruelty to genitals. Where's the humane association for genitals, and why aren't THEY on the set of every movie? But I digress.

Aside from "Fantastic Mr. Fox" - which really is - and "Antichrist," none of my other new reviews feature talking animals of any kind. But we do have our second postapocalypse of the month, though John Hillcoat's disappointing "The Road" isn't quite the massive upgrade over "2012" you might expect. (OK, fine, it's a major upgrade, but only because "2012" is a piece of shit.)

And in keeping with our "devil" theme, there's Ti West's "House of the Devil," a classically executed throwback horror flick ... well, for about an hour, until it goes off the rails. Finally, there's a surprisingly bland effort from James McTeigue and the Wachowski bro--, er siblings, "Ninja Assassin."

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