This is a movie about African-Americans, but it’s not “an African-American movie.” It’s an American movie, about a rambunctious family that has no more problems than any other family but simply happens to discover and grapple with them in about forty-eight hours. What’s surprising is how well Whitmore, the director, manages to direct traffic. He’s got one crisis cooling, another problem exploding, a third dilemma gathering steam, and people exchanging significant looks about secrets still not introduced. It’s sort of a screwball comedy effect, but with a heart.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
PG, 76 m., 1993
Chris Sarandon (Jack Skellington), Catherine O’Hara (Sally), Glenn Shadix (Mayor), Paul Reubens (Lock), William Hickey (Evil Scientist). Directed By Henry Selick. Produced By Tim Burton. Screenplay by Caroline Thompson and Michael McDowell.
The movies can create entirely new worlds for us, but that is one of their rarest gifts. More often, directors go for realism, for worlds we can recognize. One of the many pleasures of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is that there is not a single recognizable landscape within it. Everything looks strange and haunting. Even Santa Claus would be difficult to recognize without his red-and-white uniform.
The movie, which tells the story of an attempt by Halloween to annex Christmas, is shot in a process called stop-action animation.
In an ordinary animated film, the characters are drawn. Here they are constructed, and then moved a little, frame by frame, so that they appear to live. This allows a three-dimensional world to be presented, instead of the flatter universe of cel animation. And it is a godsend for the animators of Nightmare, who seem to have built their world from scratch—every house, every stick and stone—before sending their skeletal and rather pathetic little characters in to inhabit it.
The movie begins with the information that each holiday has its own town. Halloweentown, for example, is in charge of all the preparations for Halloween, and its most prominent citizen is a bony skeleton named Jack Skellington, whose moves and wardrobe seem influenced by Fred Astaire.
One day Jack stumbles into the wrong entryway in Halloweentown, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of preparations for Christmas. Now this, he realizes, is more like it! Instead of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins, there are jolly little helpers assisting Santa in his annual duty of bringing peace on earth and goodwill to men.
Back in Halloweentown, Jack Skellington feels a gnawing desire to better himself. To move up to a more important holiday, one that people take more seriously and enjoy more than Halloween. And so he engineers a diabolical scheme in which Santa is kidnapped, and Jack himself plays the role of Jolly Old St. Nick, while his helpers manufacture presents. (Some of the presents, when finally distributed to little girls and boys, are so hilariously ill-advised that I will not spoil the fun by describing them here.) Tim Burton, the director of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and the Batman movies, has been creating this world in his head for about ten years, ever since his mind began to stray while he was employed as a traditional animator on an unremarkable Disney project.
The story is centered on his favorite kind of character, a misfit who wants to do well, but has been gifted by fate with a quirky personality that people don’t know how to take. Jack Skellington is the soul brother of Batman, Edward, and the demon in Beetlejuice—a man for whom normal human emotions are a conundrum.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Tim Burton film in the sense that the story, its world, and its look first took shape in Burton’s mind, and he supervised their filming. But the director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.
Working with gifted artists and designers, he has made a world here that is as completely new as the worlds we saw for the first time in such films as Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Star Wars. What all of these films have in common is a visual richness, so abundant that they deserve more than one viewing. First, go for the story. Then go back just to look in the corners of the screen, and appreciate the little visual surprises and inspirations that are tucked into every nook and cranny.
The songs by Danny Elfman are fun, too, a couple of them using lyrics so clever they could be updated from Gilbert and Sullivan. And the choreography, liberated from gravity and reality, has an energy of its own, as when the furniture, the architecture, and the very landscape itself gets into the act.
Parental Advisory: The movie is rated PG, maybe because some of the Halloween creatures might be a tad scary for smaller children, but this is the kind of movie older kids will eat up; it has the kind of offbeat, subversive energy that tells them wonderful things are likely to happen. As an adult who was not particularly scared by the abduction of Santa (somehow I knew things would turn out all right), I found the movie a feast for the eyes and the imagination.
What’s Cooking?
PG-13, 106 m., 2000
Alfre Woodard (Audrey Williams), Dennis Haysbert (Ronald Williams), Ann Weldon (Grace Williams), Mercedes Ruehl (Elizabeth Avila), Victor Rivers (Javier Avila), Douglas Spain (Anthony Avila), A. Martinez (Daniel), Lainie Kazan (Ruth Seeling), Maury Chaykin (Herb Seeling), Kyra Sedgwick (Rachel Seeling), Julianna Margulies (Carla), Estelle Harris (Aunt Bea), Joan Chen (Trinh Nguyen), Will Yun Lee (Jimmy Nguyen), Kristy Wu (Jenny Nguyen), Jimmy Pham (Gary Nguyen), Brennan Louie (Joey Nguyen), Kieu Chinh (Grandma Nguyen). Directed by Gurinder Chadha and produced by Jeffrey Taylor. Screenplay by Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges.
Thanksgiving is not a religious or patriotic holiday, and it’s not hooked to any ethnic or national group: It’s a national celebration of the fact that we have survived for another year, we eat turkey to observe that fact, and may, if we choose, thank the deity of our choice. We exchange no presents and send few cards. It’s on a Thursday, a day not associated with any belief system. And it nods gratefully to American Indians, who have good reason to feel less than thrilled about the Fourth of July and Columbus Day.
What’s Cooking? celebrates the holiday by telling interlocking stories about four American families, which are African-American, Jewish, Latino, and Vietnamese. They all serve turkey in one way or another, surrounded by traditional dishes from their groups; some are tired of turkey and try to disguise it, while an Americanized Vietnamese girl sees the chili paste going on and complains, “Why do you want to make the turkey taste like everything else we eat?”
These families have been brought together by the filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, an Indian woman of Punjabi ancestry and Kenyan roots, who grew up in London and is now married to Paul Mayeda Berges, a half-Japanese American. Doesn’t it make you want to grin? She directed; they cowrote. All four of the stories involve the generation gap, as older family members cling to tradition and younger ones rebel. But because the stories are so skillfully threaded together, the movie doesn’t feel like an exercise: Each of the stories stands on its own.
Generation gaps, of course, go down through more than one generation. Dennis Haysbert and Alfre Woodard play the parents of a college student who would rather be a radical than a professional, but another source of tension at the table is the presence of Haysbert’s mother, who casts a practiced eye over her daughter-in-law’s menu, and is shocked that it lacks macaroni and cheese, an obligatory item at every traditional African-American feast.