Today is Saturday so I put on my child’s favourite cartoon and go to catch some ever-evading sleep in the other room. Since she usually comes in every five minutes for water, biscuits, juice, chocs or kisses, after two hours of being blissfully undisturbed I think something is amiss and call her to my room.
‘What are you watching?’ I ask.
‘I am watching a cool movie. It’s a little bit scary. There are good men and women and some bad men and women. There is a huge monster. And all the nice people are going to hide. They protect little girls and shoot the big monsters and kill them every day. They shoot their hands, they shoot their feet, they shoot their tummies. It’s amazing.’
I realize she has turned on a grown up movie. I don’t understand how that happened – she is not computer literate at her age. My mouth is open.
‘How did you turn it on?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know’, her eyes turn into anime straight lines. ‘The monsters live in a cage’, she adds.
‘So what are the names of the people you are talking about?’
‘Oh’, she says with adoration, ‘the most beautiful one is Alice!’
Talk about epiphany. I run to the next room, and, sure as hell, my poor child has watched half of Resident Evil: Afterlife. Therapy, do you think?
From the makers of Ice Age series comes Rio, an aggressive assault of color and sound, and fortunately that’s where the aggressiveness ends. Unlike the latest ‘kid movies’ The Tale of Despereaux, Chronicles of Narnia, Alice In Wonderland, Rango, and many others, Rio can boast no dark or borderline subversive storylines, no double entendres or inside jokes, no subliminal messages anywhere in sight, which is liberating. Rio has no agenda. It is pure escapist fun. The 90 minutes fly by, literally, feet want to stomp and hands itch for an occasional tap on the knee, eyes water, sometimes with joy, sometimes with sadness, or maybe it’s the neon lucidity of the colors. This is pure joy as we know it.
I watched Rio in 2D and in Russian (for those who are raising their eyebrows up to heavens, I live in Minsk, Belarus) so the voice work of the actors and the wit of the dialogue flew over my head, and I am impatient to revisit the English version when it’s available in my neck of the woods. But even without those crucial elements, the picture is instantly engaging, thanks to the well-paced action and the viral jungle beats, the breathtaking visuals of Rio de Janeiro and the lush rainforests dripping green, orange, purple, blue and red.
Blu (voiced by the omnipresent Jesse Eisenberg) is the last male of a Spix's Macaw but mean bandits steal him from his Brazilian babyhood and bring him to frosty Minnesota (cleverly titled as ‘Not Rio’) anyway. Jewel (Anne Hathaway) is the last female of the same species. Need I continue?
Of course there is a delicious villain Nigel (Jemaine Clement); a frustrated father of seventeen toucan Rafael (George Lopez), who has a love-hate relationship with his family; a saliva-dripping bulldog Luiz (Tracy Morgan), clumsy and charming; a homeless orphan Fernando (Jake T. Austin), the most sympathetic human character here; and the comedic duet Red Cardinal Pedro (will.i.am) and Yellow Canary Nico (Jamie Foxx) who talk, rap, and sing like the world is going to end any minute. (The plastic miniature replicas of the main characters are immediately available in the most notorious fast-food restaurant near you so if you don’t want to be blackmailed into purchasing eight merry paper bags at one visit, it’s best to stick with sushi).
There are lots of falls and shenanigans, Avatar-like flights and chases (one with a classic motorbike and one with a skateboard, which is refreshing). There is a romance between the boring humans, Blu's spectacled owner Linda (Leslie Mann) and dorky ornithologist Tulio (Rodrigo Santoro), and there is a gorgeous carnival in the end. The eye-candy visuals will make everyone want to go to Rio. The charm and fun of the picture will make us revisit old time classics: I haven’t heard audiences laugh so heartily in a long time. The soundtrack, as juicy as the color-block fruit that’s casually lying around the streets of Rio or adorns the heads of the main characters, will have people on their feet.
Except for the clever line ‘It's good to keep it spicy’ referring to Blu and Jewel being chained together, Rio is unabashedly child-friendly. Instead of separating the children’s giggles from the grown-up sniggers, this family animation makes the two groups laugh together, which is rare. For Carlos Saldanha this was a long-time dream project, and his tender yet passionate love letter to Rio de Janeiro, is a jewel. It’s perfect for a restless four-year-old or a jaded forty-year-old, fed up with earthquake and tsunami news, and not looking for the depth of Up or the post-modern multivocality of Toy Story 3.
Like a devotee of happy ends and good old family animation formulas, I was looking forward to see a bunch of blue fluffy Spix's Macaw chicks flying around their happy new parents in the end. Whether I saw them or not, will remain a mystery, since such fun needn’t be spoilt and you will have to go and check for yourself. Take your kid with you. Or take out that kid inside.
It’s nice to get rid of old useless things, clean it up a bit.
It’s nice to put your thoughts into carefully labelled folders.
It’s nice to be able to get a bunch of pretty boxes and stuff them with shit that doesn’t look good on your front shelf, shit that people shouldn’t see when they walk into your living room: an expired discount card, a boarding pass of a former lover, a manual for an air filter, a present from a deceased parent, a torn pearl bracelet, two broken alarm clocks, a keychain icon, pins that are dangerous around children, candles that have magic powers, old buttons, measuring tapes that aren’t supposed to measure anything because, no, like hell, you are not fat. It’s nice to label the boxes: ‘Writing’, ‘Music’, ‘Other’.
It would be nice to meet people like that, with labels conveniently attached to their foreheads: ‘Procrastinator’, ‘Mother Theresa’, ‘Teacher’, ‘Paedophile’.
It’s nice to find a crisp 10$ note in all the mess and think that it must mean something.
It’s nice to get rid of the ugly old stuff and keep what is precious forever.
It’s nice to think that you meet this person on a Friday morning so you could meet this other person on a Monday afternoon so you could go and make this other person who would become a famous artist, or may be fry six million people alive just because they annoyed him.
It’s nice to organize and label. It’s nice to put the boxes on the front shelf, glimmering and neat, red lilies against laminated white, and pretend the stuff inside is just as neat and tidy.
For someone who writes in a second language, paper is a minefield and every day is the next level in a survivor horror game. If you are still alive, you are doing something right. Every day you doubt and self loathe and battle the cockroaches of letters on the screen, and you lose more than you win.
Luckily I have good teachers. I walk around all day looking for that expression that describes how one day you meet someone who turns an abstract notion into a concrete, visual thing, and just when I give up after frantic searches online and in the best dictionaries I have, a character from Desperate Housewives finally manages to ‘put a face on it’ and smiles that perfect suburban smile. I sulk and brood over whether ‘tear it up’ has a negative or a positive connotation, the dictionaries tell me nothing, then I stumble across metacritic, because the only movements I canmake at three in the morning are bumps and stumbles, so I bump into the review of Britney’s new album, if you don’t mind me calling it that, then into her new single, excuse my French, ‘How I Roll’, and as I cringe and writhe in my embarrassed skin, Britney teaches me that ‘tear it up’ can indeed be used in the most positive of meanings.
You ask questions. You get answers. But you hear only if you keep your ears open.
