*In Good Company

Directed and written by Paul Weitz

In Good Company, as I understand it, was until literally days before its release to be titled Synergy. A more interesting title, to be sure, and probably more appropriate as well. Synergy (besides being also the name of the holographic svengali in the seriously-due-for-a-comeback Jem and the Holograms) is one of those quintessential meaningless HR buzz-words that, if you can stop being cynical for one damn minute, can actually be a pretty interesting, if not outright uplifting, concept that comes pretty damn close to actually making sense, damnit. Not unlike this movie.

Movies of this sort usually try to suss out the family at work vs. family at home thing by arguing that you can't be happy in one if you're happy in the other. In Good Company is bookended by trying to show that it is possible to be happy in both. To this end, the bad guy is played by Topher Grace, who plays one of those shallow, handsome, how-the-fuck-did-he-get-so-lucky ex-fratboy overachievers who are quickly sucking up every affordable apartment on the Upper East Side. I mean, Jesus Christ, am I the only one who wants to physically strike these people?

Of course, unlike in real life, things here are not so cut-and-dried. Topher Grace is actually pretty likeable here, and you feel bad at a few of his initial failures, and don't begrudge him some of his initial success. Plotwise, you can pretty much map it out based on the trailer. Old guy gets downgraded, new guy keeps old guy on because new guy knows he's in over his head, old guy is humiliated but plugs along, there's the obligatory sports scene, they teach each other a thing or two about life and business, and they wind up being friends. There's also a small romantic subplot involving the new guy and the old guy's daughter that seems a little tacked on, seems just an excuse to show pretty people being pretty together (though, to be fair, if that was indeed their intention, they succeed).

It's a little formulaic, but forgiveable. What saves the movie for sure are the nuanced performances from all principle and supporting. Both Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace are pretty good at portraying people who suddenly find things spinning rapidly out of their control, and Topher Grace can actually be pretty funny when he wants to be (apparently, his TV checks aren't big enough). Scarlett Johansson is radiant, of course, though unconvincing as an 18 year-old (especially given that we saw her convincingly playing 18 quite a while back in Ghost World, and convincingly playing 20-something two years ago in Lost in Translation, and because, as much as I hate to admit it, I've been so wholly brainwashed by all these tabloid stories about her and Colin Farrell and Javier Bardem and the like that I kept expecting her and Dennis Quaid to, like, start making out, or something). Malcolm McDowell, in an uncredited cameo, is appropriately, and hilariously, creepy. And, of course, there's David Paymer, who takes your basic Smykowsky role and, through intonation alone, somehow elevates it to something approaching its very own movie.

In short, a synergy of good performances, a smattering of outside-the-box thinking, maybe the reorganization of a few paradigms could have better maximized the revenue streams for this film. Might I suggest a team-building exercise, possibly in the form of a person-centered weekend encounter group?

Kudos to the Weitzes. I'd put this squarely in the "win" column, above American Pie, below About a Boy. And with any luck, we will continue the forgetting of Down to Earth.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Appleseed

Directed by Shinji Aramaki
Written by Haruka Handa, Tsutomu Kamishiro, Masamune Shirow (comic)

Ah, the double-edged sword of the CG-heavy sci-fi movie. On the one hand, their makers are usually so concerned with showing off all the cool things they can do that they neglect to tell a compelling story in an interesting way (I'm looking right at you, Wachowskis), and on the other hand, all the cool things they have to show off, frankly, don't look very good (again, Wachowskis).

In these respects, kudos to the makers of Appleseed of making a movie which is interesting, sort of, and also looks good, sort of.

Putting aside what I think I remember of the original Appleseed movie (wasn't this just a cop show?), the plot (involving the uneasy relationship between mankind and a new race of "bioroids"(cloned, synthetic human beings not unlike the Replicants of Blade Runner, complete with truncated lifespan), and the dying romance between a troubled ex-soldier and an even-more-troubled soldier-turned-cyborg-cop (Briareos, pictured above)) wound up having a bit more depth than your average PS2 game cutscene, and aside from some crummy water, fire, smoke, and broken glass effects (I've finally decided that CG programmers are NEVER going to get those right, so I don't even pay attention anymore), I must to say that much of the non-character animation was the best I've ever seen.

Much of the non-character animation was, in fact, as good as the character animation was bad, which is to say the character animation was extraordinarily bad. Their movements, which according to the credits was based on motion-capture, ranged from okay-that-was-weird to what-the-hell-was-that. The faces, also based on human models according to the credits, were as alien, frightening, and expressionless as porcelain masks (also shiny). Watching these faces reciting some already pretty bad dialgoue was...not something I'd like to see in another movie, ever.

You'll find a lot to be annoyed about in Appleseed, but with its complex (if a bit overwrought) plot and great non-character animation, it's certainly not as bad as it could have been. In fact, if you're way into either anime or sci-fi, it's probably worth a viewing. If you really want to see some engaging, human, intelligent, and well-animated sci-fi, though, you should watch the Ghost in the Shell movies, or better yet, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade or the criminally underrated Patlabor: WXIII.