Batman! Hundreds of Beavers! The End.

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! Well, yesterday was….

I treated myself to Batman: Caped Crusader and Hundreds of Beavers.

Loved Batman and how could I not? I don’t think this is a hot take, but I do think I prefer the animated series to the live action adaptations. Actually, let me rephrase that. I prefer them to the Nolan and Snyder variations. Burton got it. Reeves got it. And by “it”, I man the absurdity of a billionaire dressed up in a latex bat-suit jacked to the max, and capable of all kinds of vigilante action. Don’t get me wrong; I love the Nolan/Bale Bats! I really do. But in many ways, they’re the least comic book-y of all the adaptations. Snyder’s is just too leaden to take too seriously, though I actually like Affleck in the role; old, dead inside, you know, Bruce after having done this stuff for too long. 

In any event, Bruce Timm and friends did good, is what I’m saying.

More importantly, Hundreds of Beavers!!! I routinely inveigh about what was lost with the onset of sound. Movies are a visual storytelling medium and yes, sound design and spoken dialog advanced the medium immeasurably, but I sometimes wonder if we forget from time to time, how unnecessary words are. 

Hundreds of Beavers from Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews is a worthy 21st successor to Keaton and Chaplin in which News takes the lead as an applejack producer in the frozen north whose livelihood is brought to ruin by a beaver eating though the legs that support the vats and propel our beleaguered hero to pursue and eventually excel at becoming a fur trapper who encounters tragedy, danger, and even true love. 

As I’d written earlier about writing about a comedy, it’s kind of useless. The bottom line is did I laugh? Yes, yes I did! Hard! Hundreds of Beavers is on Amazon and Apple+ and frankly, you should quit reading this and go cue it up. 

I’ll say this much about it. Tews is a terrific physical comedian and the choices the filmmakers made of using actors in plush costumes for sleigh dogs, wolves, and beavers was brilliant. The special effects were as good as anything I’ve seen (done with Aobe After-Effects!) and that weren’t there for verisimilitude but for purely cartoonish affect (as well as effect, but trust me that visually, Beavers owes as much to comic strips, cartoons, and video games as it does to Keaton or Chaplin). 

The humor runs from broad to subtle but at its broadest, the visual work is spot-on. Whether it’s Tews never learning not to whistle to avoid a woodpecker coming to drill him in the face or logs falling on beavers (and yes double Xs signify death here!), everything lands. Hard. I said that earlier, didn’t I? I repeat myself? Very well…

Then there’s just freaking sly stuff like dogs literally sitting around playing cards, the power-up icons that show up after Tews has made sufficient kills to get a new weapon, and the Roadrunner/Coyote dynamic that plays out between one and all. This may be the funniest film of the year and I really hope more people see it.

Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon can do no wrong. In fact, everyone in Joshua Oppenheimer’s ambitious The End brings their A game, but it’s a long slog in parts and when it does pick up, it only reveals the weak points. It’s a musical and while Moses Ingram and Bronagh Gallagher are known vocalists, it’s a ballsy move to have Switnton and company vocalize. They do well enough, but it began to beg the question of how this end of the world opera would play out if it were performed as an opera with real singers.

This, of course, undoes the conceit of the film, I suppose and again, no flies on anyone here, but tedium sets in after the first act and nothing really moves forward. It’s a kind of chamber piece in which a wealthy privileged family has survived an apocalypse and grown insular and absorbed in deep denial about truths and facts pushed down deep. When Ingram shows up from the outside, she’s met with suspicion, primarily by Swinton and Lennie James, the family’s doctor, each of whom applies pressure to Shannon’s Father to keep her out. 

Eventually, she’s accepted into the family and her dynamic barely shifts. I don’t know but that it feels as though Oppenheimer missed out on several, more compelling themes. Class is never interrogated and we’re stuck in a drawing room drama with a family of one percenters. Shannon’s character was in the energy industry and claims in the memoirs his son, played by George MacKay (so good in The Beast and 1917), that there was no definitive proof that fossil fuels contributed to global warming that produced their situation. 

There’s an avoidance of any discussion of race, though perhaps we’re to assume that the family isn’t racist because of the presence of the Doctor, but it seemed like there might be some indication that this might come up when Ingram’s Girl points out to MacKay’s Son that the Chinese workers he’s given smiles to in his diorama weren’t likely happy. He defends this by saying that they contributed to building a country and they should be proud of what they accomplished. There’s another implicit critique of his privileged and blinkered home-schooling when he parrots words about productivity and mansplains ludicrously before she shuts him down. 

It becomes readily obvious that Oppenheimer is looking at how people cope with the unthinkable and their complicity in it by telling them comforting stories and avoiding the truth over and over again until all that’s left is surface and platitudes. The dialog veers into the platitudinous and is often delivered flatly as is fo underscore how flat existence is for these enbunkered folk. But it’s all so self-consciously Arty. Art, Art, and more Art. It’s actually a quite suffocating flick but not in a way that hints at any existential depth beneath the surfaces of the characters. There’s a striking lack of interiority, which may also be partly by design.

The score is fine and Josh Schmidt (and Marius de Vries), in his first film score, delvers fine orchestration, but the songs are labyrinthine in composition and if there was a chance that a hummable tune was going to come out of this, I was wrong. Which is fine; not every songwriter is Sondheim, but Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg’s lyrics exist only to serve the narrative and it’s through those lyrics that we glimpse something of the inner lives of the characters,  but there ins’t anything to grasp hold of that captures the heart or the mind.

After watching Hundreds of Beavers that had no dialog, catchy tunes, and ribaldry and laughter, The End is that much grayer, despite its Big Ideas, great cast, and Art.

Postscript: To be clear, I didn’t hate or even dislike The End. It’s a bold idea that just needed more editing, more thought put into the script, and maybe just a real conflict in there somewhere.