In the Eye of the Beholder
Criticism is a funny thing. One person loves a piece of art and another hates it. Happens all the time. But today there's a particularly delicious example of this phenomenon to relish.
Robert Zemeckis' and Tom Hanks' big new CGI Christmas movie, The Polar Express, opens today nationwide and is reviewed in this morning's papers. Being a bleeding-heart-left-wing-media-elitist, SFist takes both the august New York Times and the venerable San Francisco Chronicle and took great pleasure in reading Manohla Dargis' scathing review of the movie in the Times, in which she likens Santa's toy-making facilities to "a munitions factory," his front door to "one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances," and his gigantic red gift-laden sack to "an airborne scrotum."
When we turned to the Datebook, however, we saw that the little man was jumping out of his seat for The Polar Express and that Mick LaSalle had just loved the movie, calling it "the first film in a long time to capture that ineffable whatever it is that people hope to find when they go to a Christmas movie."
What gives? Perhaps the clearest representation of the difference in these reviews (and probably the principle reason thereof) is the critics' divergent reactions to the new technique the film employs which allows the filmmakers to capture the finest details of an actor's performance and then use this information to create computer-animated characters. LaSalle writes, "The one profound limitation of animation -- the rigid faces that don't allow for emotional nuance -- is overcome through a new process that allows actors to record their performances digitally onto a computer. These performances -- the gestures, the subtleties of facial expression -- are then used as the template for the computer-animation process. ... The result is that 'The Polar Express' has better acting in it than it ever would have had as a live-action film." Dargis disagrees, claiming, "The largest intractable problem with 'The Polar Express' is that the motion-capture technology used to create the human figures has resulted in a film filled with creepily unlifelike beings. The five characters for which Mr. Hanks provided movement and voice ... certainly bear a resemblance to the actor in the way of a good special-effects mask. Yet none of the humans have the countless discrete fluctuations, the pulsing, swirling, twitching aliveness that can make the actor such a pleasure to watch on screen."
So anyways, SFist hasn't seen the movie, so it doesn't have a horse in this race, but we sure enjoyed reading the reviews of it. Say what you will about Mick LaSalle and Manohla Dargis, but we just love to read about "an airborne scrotum" when we're learning about a children's movie.