Funny People

Mao's Last Dancer:

A few years ago, the book Mao's Last Dancer replaced Wild Swans as the must-have for every culturally-concerned, middle-aged woman in Australia. It's the autobiography of Li Cunxin (Chi Cao), a Chinese ballet dancer who travels to America. It's a fascinating story with inherent elements of love, politics, ambition and - naturally - people in tights. Sounds like perfect fodder for a film, doesn't it? It should be.

Veteran Australian director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant) has missed something here because technically - this is amateur hour. The events and story lack flow, the characters are drastically underdeveloped and the cinematography looks like that of a midday movie. At one particular low point a tense argument ends with Elizabeth (Amanda Schull) casting herself melodramatically onto a couch, exhaling in a caricature of soapie-style acting. Not only did this moment lack the desired emotional intensity, myself and a few fellow audience members actually laughed.

All this said, the dancing on show is incredible to watch and well-worth the price of admission. But Beresford has fallen into the trap of every film that requires an artist to learn acting, rather than an actor to take on the discipline. As with Centre Stage et al, there is easily as much wood in the cast as in the stage. We only get a sense of the characters' personality when they dance and we're not any closer to knowing them when the credits roll than when we started.

Mao's Last Dancer is an odd film, perfectly capturing the spectacle and drama of ballet - without being particularly dramatic or spectacular.

Up:

What is there left to say about Pixar? Up is brilliant, another one hit clear out of the park. It's the latest feature to come out of the studio that brought us pretty much every great 3D animation ever.

As with all the previous Pixar offerings, they've spent just as much time on story, theme and screen-craft as they have on the seamless animation. This is why they're leagues ahead of almost every Dreamworks animation - Kung-Fu Panda being the notable exception. This story of a lonely old man, Carl (voiced by Edward Asner) who still clings to a spirit of adventure, hits every beat with perfect precision. We get the slow and nearly dialogue-free explanation of the loss of his wife, which carries a sad poignancy that would make even Clint Eastwood's bottom lip quiver. Then it's an extended repartee between Carl and Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai) as they fly off in the old man's house, lifted by a mass of helium balloons.

These filmmakers know what they're doing. Rather than trying to draw adult audiences in by using jokes which go over kids' heads, they simply work to bring the kid out in every adult. All we can do is sit back and enjoy the adventure.

Up is slightly too dark for the very young but Pixar's broad-ranging appeal is always going to risk losing one extreme demographic. But it's fun, funny, perfectly voiced and will hold you in its grip from beginning to end.

The short film preceding it, Partly Cloudy, further showcases the studio's incredible ability to tell a children's story without using dialogue.