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Mary and Max

Column: The Word on Films | Date Published: Wednesday, 13 May 09 | Author: Mark Russell | | 2 years, 9 months ago

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Mary and Max is a film that traverses loneliness, mental illness, love, growing up, homosexuality and friendship; in plasticine. It’s the feature debut for Harvie Krumpet creator Adam Elliot and focuses on the written correspondence between eight-year-old Australian girl Mary and middle aged New Yorker Max, a man who feels no connection with the human race. He moves through life misunderstanding them and being reciprocally misunderstood. When he receives a chance letter from Mary all the way over in Australia, he comes to realise that maybe there is a person he can talk with. For her part, Mary has found a guide to help her through a world her parents are unwilling to explain and ill-equipped to face.

Elliot has created a brilliant harmony between the claymation and his story. The bleak and surreal look of the characters and their environment sets the tone of the piece. As the events unfold and Mary and Max lose their already flimsy support networks, all that’s left is the unconventional friendship they share.

Unfortunately, this all eventually becomes a drag. Dipping a toe into a vast well of cinematic pessimism is always a fun momentary trip but you need a reprieve. These guys never really get their heads above water. They learn and grow at a snail’s pace and the story crawls with them. Mary and Max looks great and has some superb moments but will make you count the rays of sunshine in your life.

	Dragonball Evolution: Once upon a time, there was this crazy Japanese cartoon series called Dragonball that rocked the socks off every weekday morning. It featured weird alien characters, fight scenes that stretched over many episodes and an odd white supremacist streak that saw black-haired, black-eyed fighters turn into blonde-haired, blue-eyed fighters as they got better. This Hollywood adaptation – Dragonball Evolution – has mostly ignored these first two elements but has hyped up the third, making the main star, Goku (Justin Chatwin), white. Goku’s not the sharpest katana in the dojo as he seems not to have noticed his own ethnicity is at odds with his clearly Asian grandfather. Luckily there’s a wave of inconsistencies, plot holes and good old fashioned deus ex machina (read: where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from-???) moments to distract us into a similar level of cluelessness. This film is terrible. There’s about five minutes worth of plot and even this manages to contain massive gaps in logic. An evil alien named Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) has escaped his inescapable prison deep within the earth, where he’s been kept for two thousand years by very powerful magic. This incredible getaway sounds like something you’d show or explain to the audience, doesn’t it? Nope, he just got out – we don’t know how. Anyway, he wanted to destroy the earth before… just, ‘cause he did. But now he has a reason, and it’s a good one… ‘cause of the inescapable prison, which wasn’t so inescapable in the end. Goku has to fight him. And get his dragonballs. And there’s this girl he likes. Who’s with a real dickhead jock. But it’s okay ‘cause Goku beats him in a fight. And she realises she doesn’t like jocks. She likes weedy, kinda-biracial karate kids. Oh yeah and Chow Yun Fat’s here. He’s a dirty old man. But he can fight too. But Goku’s got more potential. Unlike this story. Did I mention the white kid hasn’t noticed he’s got an Asian grandfather? Dragonball Evolution is only eighty minutes long but makes you earn every second. Watch it if you’re a ridiculously hardcore fan of the series, or if have sworn to sobriety and want to find a new way to punish your brain.
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	Let The Right One In: Very rarely does a film manage to horrify, move, amaze and disturb you – all during one five-minute scene. But Sweden’s Let the Right One In is one such film – poignant, sometimes terribly violent, and full of some beautifully sad moments. Young Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a solitary young boy, bullied at school and just a little bit odd. When he meets the soulful and elusive Eli (Lina Leandersson) in a playground one night, the two soon form what would usually be an innocent and sweet friendship – except that in this case, ‘twelve-year-old’ Eli is actually a vampire (and not the brooding, ‘vegetarian’ kind). She kills unapologetically and calculatingly – but is not without her fair share of inner turmoil. Oddly enough, the relationship between Eli and Oskar, while often perplexing, still manages to be sweet in its own way. Let the Right One In takes you out of your own world and transports you right into Oskar’s. The cinematography is magnificent – sometimes striking, sometimes bleak, but always using the snowy landscapes to their best advantage. The visuals of Let the Right One In wonderfully accentuate this unconventional story of ‘childhood friendship’. Sometimes (quite often, in fact) you’re not entirely sure what’s going on -what the characters are thinking, where the film is going or what it’s alluding to. This is part of what makes it memorable – the questions you’re left asking and the theories you begin forming. There is a lot of ambiguity to this story. Let the Right One In is a unique and sometimes confronting film. When combined with flawless atmosphere and clever direction, the result is a film that will resonate with you for days – one that is as confusing as it is intelligent, as beautiful as it is horrific, and as sad as it is triumphant.
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