incredibles 2
Forget Batman v Superman (if only I could!), T’Challa vs Killmonger, or Thanos taking on the Most Ambitious Crossover Event in Cynical-Marketing-Extravaganza History. The greatest superhero fight in recent memory comes in Incredibles 2, in which the central super-hero family’s toddler, Jack-Jack, takes on a raccoon in the backyard. With the wit and invention of classic Tex Avery set-ups, the two pint-sized tyros trade an everescalating series of blows, the baby unleashing an improbable, hilarious collection of thusfar-unseen powers —laser eyeballs, teleportation, multiplication— upon a rodent who just wanted to raid the garbage can.
With comic-book blockbusters now being entirely assembled via CGI, Incredibles 2 makes its best case for artistic success not as Pixar animation, but as straight-up action-movie; the film’s cartoonish style not disguising a host of action sequences that feel more real than anything offered in any expanded superhero Universe. In the 14 years between his original Incredibles and this eye-popping sequel, director Brad Bird has verily embodying the merging of formerly-distinct cinematic styles, moving from animation to live-action and back again. Having conjured up ridiculous stunts and Cruisian set-pieces with 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, here Bird brings the lessons he learned —and the fight-choreographers he worked with— back into the Pixar world.
And, so, you get not only the all-timer toddler-on-raccoon rumble, but a brilliant, breathless runaway-train sequence that outdoes Solo’s recent stagecoach set-piece, even as it recalls the climax to Marge vs. the Monorail. And, then, there’s a lurching, throttling, kinetic fight —between the Incredi-mom, Elastigirl, and the would-be villain, the tech-themed Screenslaver— staged in a strobing room of psychedelic, hypnotic light. The grand villainous plan and the final save-the-city-from-imminent-destruction finale doesn’t measure up to those heights, but by then you’ve been worn down: Incredibles 2 a morethan-worthy comeback.
The initial Incredibles is considered, essentially, mid-tier Pixar, not measuring up to the beloved studio’s wonders of animated art (like Wall-E, Up, or Bird’s own Ratatouille), but better than, like, Cars. In its knowing commentary on super-heroes, its hyper-stylised meta-cartoonishness, its cutesy depiction of an aw-shucks America with one foot still in the Atomic Age, its ridiculous roll-call of fringe heroes/villains, and its situation of the super amongst the domestic, Incredibles always felt, to me, like a straighter take on things already depicted —already nailed— in the great early seasons of The Powerpuff Girls (especially the episode Supper Villain) and its secretly-actually-really-incredible 2002 movie.
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But, in the years since, Hollywood has shifted wholly towards the world of The Incredibles, superhero movies becoming the default model for popcorn blockbusters. In 2004, Iron Man was still four years away; meaning Bird’s riff on superhero-families and legalities was stuff familiar for comic-book fans, unfamiliar for big-screen treatment. Returning to such a changed landscape, Incredibles 2 situates its story amongst its popcorn movie peers. It’s not just bigger, bolder, and more ambitious to follow the rule of sequels, but to take on the superhero industrial complex. And, when Elastigirl offers “I’m not all dark and angsty” in protest at a proposed rebranding, it’s not hard to read the reference to reboot culture.
The story, here is standard superheroes-have-been-outlawed stuff, with the Parr family, robbed of their right to be super, attempting to live in domesticity. Elastigirl is lured back into action by a nostalgic industrialist, leaving Mr Incredible back home with the kids, the idea of a stay-at-home dad somehow still seen —35 years after Mr Mom— as sit-com scenario. Violet is full of teen-girl angst, Dash struggles with maths homework, and Jack-Jack is a toddler, needing to be watched like a hawk; what’s a dad to do!
Eventually, there’s a villain whose motivation is a trenchant rebuke of contemporary society —they see relying on superheroes as a kind of victimhood, hate social trust in both heroes and technology, and utilise people’s thrall to their devices to enact their grand plan for taking over the world— and, by the end, a grand super-hero team-up, in which we all realise that going it alone is no match for family/friends/a team/gathered-IPs/etc. The narrative of Incredibles 2, when parsed for theme and meaning, and critiqued for daring and invention, is nothing much, really. But what ’til you see a baby take on a raccoon, in a fight for the cinematic ages.
foxtrot
The foxtrot is a dance in three steps, and Foxtrot, in turn, is a film in three acts. In his lon-gawaited follow-up to his trapped-in-a-tank cine-memoir debut, 2009’s Lebanon, Samuel Maoz delivers a narrative in three distinct sections. In the first, bourgie Tel Aviv parents receive that nightmarish knock on the door from IDF officers, and told that their son has died; only, suddenly, there’s been a mix-up. In the second, we see their son at a remote military output depicted in symbolist shades: the soldiers living in a shipping crate slowly sinking into the mire. In the third, now the parents are really mired in grief, their lives having fallen apart.
For Maoz, this grand work of art is told in such a fashion to depict “the foxtrot dance of the traumatic circle”, and how Israeli society is caught in a vicious circle of military service, war deaths, trauma, grief, repression, hostility. The film is a study of a traumatised family, the three acts embodying father, son, mother. Maoz chronicles the mundanity of military service —and of tragic loss turned quotidian baggage— but directs the film with genuine lyricism; the highpoint being an animated interlude, digging into the male psyche of the film’s father (Lior Ashkenazi, doing fine work). He’s also fond of eye-of-God overheads, camera floating above the fray; evoking not just the divine, but, Maoz says cynically, Israeli political leadership. Either way, people are victims not just of war, but of forces beyond their control.
