KITTIE

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• Brian says:

  November 21, 2012 at 12:11 am

  I read this part:
  “What then tran­spires is how Pi learns to share his space with the tiger, who has a human name (longish story), and how they forge a tacit (the tiger can­’t talk or any­thing) bond (or so Pi comes to believe) in order to make it to land and safety and some­thing oth­er than canned food or hard-caught fish. Aside from hair-raising face-offs between the tiger and the emo­tion­ally upen­ded Pi (who lost his whole fam­ily in the ship­wreck, so it’s under­stand­able), there are a lot of scenes in which the char­ac­ters’ sur­round­ings are imbued with a ter­rible sump­tu­ous­ness, visu­al evoc­a­tions of the scar­ily awe-inspiring vast­ness of life and space.”
  and I imme­di­ately flashed on some­thing like Carroll Ballard’s adapt­a­tion of THE BLACK STALLION, which I like a lot (in pos­sible tone and spir­it, I mean, although it obvi­ously is using a dif­fer­ent visu­al palette). Thanks for the great review– this actu­ally makes me a lot more curi­ous to see the film than the rather tacky ads had.

• MSK says:

  November 21, 2012 at 12:23 am

  meow!

• Oliver_C says:

  November 21, 2012 at 5:02 am

  A shame­less shout-out (and thank-you) to my friend Joe Strike, some­time anim­a­tion journ­al­ist, who invited me to a celeb-stuffed pre­view screen­ing of ‘Rise of the Guardians’, which deserves a much less gen­er­ic title, one more awe-inspiring than (ahem) owl-inspiring.

• David Ehrenstein says:

  November 21, 2012 at 9:15 am

  I LOVE Kitties – and smokin’ hot Indian boys. So what’s not to like?
  Actually it’s a chil­dren’s film, and as such not bad. The 3‑D is lovely.

• Kurzleg says:

  November 21, 2012 at 12:13 pm

  Very intrigued by this film. Other reviews I’ve read were less dis­missive of the spir­itu­al angle. I sus­pect that has some­thing to do with the sym­pathy the review­er brings to the table. I appre­ci­ate that Glenn dealt with this in a dis­clam­at­ory (is that a word?) manner.

• Brian Dauth says:

  November 21, 2012 at 2:09 pm

  “I under­stand that second-guessing the artist is poor crit­ic­al prac­tice. But that fact remains that this con­ven­tion, which was always pretty pat­ron­iz­ing to begin with, has ossi­fied into cliché, and the movie suf­fers for it.”
  Glenn: you are not second-guessing the artist. You are pla­cing a form­al device he employed in its his­tor­ic­al con­text and then giv­ing your response to its use. That is good crit­ic­al prac­tice that far too few crit­ics prac­tice (or even com­pre­hend). At least you got the memor­andum that Romanticism and High Modernism are dead and that art objects exist and engage­ment with them occurs along historical/social/cultural con­tinuums. No apo­lo­gies necessary.

• Clayton Sutherland says:

  November 28, 2012 at 2:57 pm

  Just saw this last night.
  I totally agree with you, Glenn, re: how they handled the “altern­ate” ver­sion of the story. I actu­ally star­ted zon­ing out dur­ing that bit; they should’ve handled it in visu­al mont­age or some­thing, because con­vey­ing it through dia­logue rendered it rather impersonal/ineffectual.
  The film was also less visu­ally impress­ive than the ads sug­ges­ted (I guess they showed most of the “money shots” in the last trail­er). The com­pos­i­tions were fine, but the col­ours did­n’t pop the way I expec­ted them to. And, for the most part, aside from a few lunges from Kittie at the cam­era, I stopped noti­cing the 3D effect after the first act. I tilted the glasses down to see that there was a blur effect hap­pen­ing, but when I put them back on it just did­n’t register in any mean­ing­ful way; the images wer­en’t layered enough. I find this to be the case with most 3D films; the last one that really clicked with me in that regard was “Hugo”. That many theat­ers don’t offer a 2D option pisses me off to no end, because I’m tired of pay­ing the premi­um, even on Cheap Tuesdays.
  Anyways, per­haps the book is dif­fer­ent, but I found the film to be a rather facile med­it­a­tion on reli­gious belief. Kittie was very well rendered, though…I’ll give it that.