RATATOUILLE
Featuring the voices of Patton Oswalt, Janeane Garofalo and Peter O’Toole; Written by Brad Bird, Jim Capobianco, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg and Jan Pinkava; Directed by Brad Bird; Rated G [nothing really inappropriate]

Demonstrating that the clunky Cars was just a fluke, Pixar comes back with this superb example of the kind of storytelling that made it great back in its Toy Story days. This one tells the, oh man…tail of Remy (Patton Oswalt), a French rat who is not so quick to live up to the stereotypes of his kind being filthy, non-discerning disease carriers. No, Remy wants to be a chef, and finds his opportunity with a bumbling kid named Linguini (Lou Romano), a low-level kitchen assistant in a once-great Paris restaurant. Their pairing is hilarious, comedy worthy of Chaplin or Keaton, in which the rodent perches atop the lad’s dome (under his toque blanche) and tugs on strands of the boy’s hair to make him do his culinary bidding. The usual line-up of top-notch voice talent adds to the variety of the mix, with Janeane Garofalo a treat as Linguini’s objet d’amour, Colette, and Peter O’Toole so absolutely dead-on as the feared food critic, Anton Ego (who sums up criticism of all stripes in a fantastic monologue). Director Brad Bird, who turned in the leanly inventive The Incredibles for Pixar in 2004, is largely responsible for everything working so well here, the best example being that the movie is close to two hours long, and we do not spend a moment checking the time or not smiling. He and his team do Aardman’s Flushed Away one better, concentrating on some pretty grown-up themes that defy its G rating without testing it. Visually, it is nearly seamless, and it portrays Paris as the vibrant city it is, all the while making us hungry for all the great food they tease us with. It is details like these that help us feel the passion that Bird and company have for what they are doing, too, even if it comes in the form of the love a rat has for his spice rack.•••

Read our interview with some of the team behind Ratatouille.

“There’s nothing worse that seeing a film about football where the quarterback is wearing number 91,” says Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis of CGI touchstone Pixar, “or a golf movie where it’s obvious that the guy never swung a club.”

Lewis’s movie is not about football or golf, but authenticity is key to believing that a French rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) is the greatest chef in Paris.

To help pull off such a detail oriented feat, it helps to have a creative crew headed by someone with a reputation for unrelenting dedication to quality and vision. That someone was Brad Bird, whose first two films, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), have become critical and audience favorites, for both the their richness and for being anything but cartoonish.

“I know enough to go into any single area and explain what’s missing and what I need,” director Bird explains. “The heads of each department know best how, and it is the job of the director to have some sort of overview of the things that are important to pursue.”

Because an animated film takes so much time, as it takes 24 drawings for a single second of action, that makes for a whole lot of production time, whether the production is computer-rendered, like Ratatouille, or freehand, like the movies that Bird cut his teeth on when he was an animator for Disney in the 1980s.

“You only have X amount of time and resources,” Bird notes, “so if you got every single thing perfect-perfect-perfect, it would take five or six years to produce, so eventually, you have to finish. Even a painter will tell you that working on a painting too much can ruin it.”

“Deadlines make for good creative invention,” Lewis says, “and Brad knows what’s essential to communicate.”

Essential in helping the two Brads communicate to an audience was the right voice cast, especially their lead rodent.

“Patton was perfect for this part,” Bird says of the 38-year-old stand-up comedian, “and this was a difficult part to cast. We had a lot of people in on it, and nothing seemed quite right until him.”

“I guess Brad Bird heard my first album and said, ‘That’s the voice — you’re the guy,” Oswald says.

Bird would not have heard the album, however, if he had not been a fan of the liberal radio network, Air America, where he was a fan of Janeane Garofalo, who was at the time on Worcester native Sam Seder’s daily show. Bird cast Garofalo as the (human) female lead, Colette, and while neither Oswalt nor Garofalo are name-above-the-title commodities, that has never been the way that Disney’s Pixar has done things.

“Casting at Pixar is all about who is the right voice,” Lewis says, “as opposed to who’s a star.”

As talented as both Oswalt and Garofalo might be in coming up with material on the spot, they did not let loose, à la Robin Williams, and improvise dialogue.

“It’s impolite to change dialogue like that, because they are animating at the same time,” says Garofalo, who also lent her voice to Disney’s poorly received 2006 CGI comedy, The Wild. There was still a challenge for her, though, as she had to pull off a convincing French accent.

“The French accent made me nervous,” she says. “I don’t speak French, and I learned the accent entirely by listening to a CD of a French gentleman speaking English.”

Despite the Roquefort-solid performances by the voice cast, which also includes Brad Garrett, Ian Holm and Peter O’Toole, perhaps even more credit should go to the animators.

“Even if you shut off the dialogue, you should be able to see what the characters are feeling,” Bird says. “People don’t pay enough attention to animators; they are really good performers.”

While Bird, who says he is “known for being persnickety and staying with a scene,” is known for his dedication to a vision for every project he takes on, it is not a maniacal one.

“I’d love to say that I have this perfect vision that’s right every time, but I don’t,” he says. “If others can give you something different than what you’re asking, I’ll be the first to say, ‘Man, that’s perfect — why didn’t I see that?’ That’s why you have creative people on your crew.”•••

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD [PG-13]
The thought of a toned-down and more marketable PG-13 rated Die Hard movie is pretty offensive to some, and not just the blood-hungry fans of the particular brand of high octane, testo-infused ultra-violence that Bruce Willis helped engineer in the 1980s with John McTiernan’s 1987 original and clever knockoffs like The Last Boy Scout (1991). It is also not just because the defiant catchphrase, “Yippie-ki-yay, mother[humper]!” needs to be masked to be more family-friendly, muffled with a not-very-cleverly placed sound effect. Also, never mind that because of the lifting of the age restriction on admission, the fact that at least half the theatre at the Friday or Saturday night show that you attend will be filled with noisy, ill-behaved teenagers too grown-up for Ratatouille and too young to bring their gawky, hormonal selves to the drive-in so that you and your date can have a nice, grown-up night out. Really, it is the violence.

It is not the quantity of violence, though. There is not an undue amount, and enough to balance the endless expository dialogue and cracking wise by Bruce Willis, returning for this fourth outing as Det. John McClane, the New York cop whose coincidence with calamity cannot even be charted by the likes of C-3P0. This time, he has a sidekick, a computer hacker named Matt Farrell (Justin Long), who is marked for death by terrorists led by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) for his latent knowledge of their plot to cripple the country (and profit) via its reliance on insecure computers. Really, the violence is offensive not because it is present, but because it is sanitized and without consequence.

Compared to its three R-rated predecessors, this one, packed with ridiculous and indulgent physics-defying set pieces, is virtually bloodless and free of gore. The heavily choreographed kung-fu showdowns and plentiful car crashes result in the kind of engineered-to-be-entertaining rag doll thrown-from-the-wreck shake-offs that you would see in a piece of more obvious fantasy like a Looney Tune cartoon, where The Coyote plunges off a cliff (holding a sign that reads “Yikes!”), hits the ground at terminal velocity (in a perfectly timed cloud of dust), and is alive and well in the next scene (to strap an Acme rocket to his back to again chase the Roadrunner for the four ounces of meat he has on him). Likewise, in this clumsy and militantly uninteresting action extravaganza, there are no close-ups of any bad guy’s anguished face as it goes lifeless from loss of blood and massive trauma, no screaming motorists trapped in their burning cars, no one vomiting from the shock of a bullet to the kneecap. And if that wasn’t curiously bad enough, it is, as the kids would say (by instant message to the person next to them over their very bright cell phones in the row in front of you), hella boring.

Olyphant as the grudge-bearing baddie, leads the foot-dragging snooze patrol, which is only helped slightly by Long’s comic relief. Olyphant’s brooding, mysterious schtick may have worked on “Deadwood,” but here we are left hoping for a contrived plot device, like one that will bring Alan Rickman back (from the first movie) as Hans Gruber’s vengeful brother, “Fritz.” Even Willis slouches, with Underworld director Len Wiseman’s slavish adherence to the Die Hard blueprint a tired bit of self-cannibalism. It is all diluted to the point that the formula is as simple as making ice cubes, only this franchise has chilled for so long that what should be a cool summer is flavored suspiciously like a decade’s worth of freezer-burned leftovers that should have been thrown out as soon as we forgot what they tasted like in the first place.•••

THE TOP 5 REJECTED
‘DIE HARD’ SEQUEL TITLES

5. Die! Die! Die Hard My Darling!
4. A Day No Pigs Would Die Hard
3. Never Too Young To Die Hard
2. Die Hard & Harderer
1. It’s A Die Hard-Knock Life: The Musical

SICKO [PG-13]
Michael Moore’s latest “docu-tribe,” as he calls it, may be a return to his hungrier and much funnier Roger & Me days, but the man has also grown up a lot since then, something that shows in the form of a social conscience. Thankfully, he does not turn the show, about the ills of the American health care system, into his own personal An Inconvenient Boo-Boo, instead sharing the stories of regular Americans who have become slaves to the whims of the bean counters of our for-profit care system. What he does turn — and quite smartly — is the third act climax. When he firsts mentions 9/11, our first reaction is to roll our eyes and assume that he is going off-point and returning to his rabid Fahrenheit 9/11 self, but instead, he uses the once glorified 9/11 rescue workers as a keen example of how the system is so hopelessly backass. He takes some of the sick and floundering ones to Cuba (illegally, too)…where the medical facility at Guantánamo gives free medical care to the enemy combatants in the War On Terrorâ„¢. Yes, some of this is manipulative and selective in its presentation of certain facts and truths, but what isn’t? Moore accomplishes what he sets out to do, and that is to call attention to the fact that the system as it is needs a big reset, and that we need to take care of our own before we can hope to take the next step in evolving as a nation and as a species. –Robert Newton

EVENING [PG-13]
Fateless director Lajos Koltai’s brilliant eye coupled with The Hours author Michael Cunningham’s refined screenplay, performed wonderfully by a storied, Oscar-fueled cast adds up to a lush and lovely story, a gorgeous family portrait spanning 50 years in the life of a New England clan. The regal Vanessa Redgrave is lovely as the elderly, ailing matron Ann, with Claire Danes (Shopgirl) fantastic as her darling, free-spirited young proxy. Mamie Gummer (The Hoax) looks eerily like her mother, Meryl Streep, who gracefully plays the older version of Ann’s friend, Lila. Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine) is a great ball of angst as Ann’s youngest daughter, Constance, with Hugh Dancy (Elizabeth I) a standout as Ann’s lost love, Buddy. Not forced like the similar sobber The Notebook, Koltai and Cunningham go to places of deep emotional resonance here, and they seldom stumble into the well-worn territory of the soap opera, a danger that any story of this kind faces. Their unassuming time capsule is a heartfelt tribute not only to mothers and other family, but also the lasting connections to others that sharing any time in one’s life can bring. –Elizabeth Meyer

1408 [PG-13]
It may seem like an extended cast-off from last year’s “Nightmares and Dreamscapes,” but this dark thriller — which Stephen King may or may not have come up with while waiting on line at the deli — is effective enough. It has the utterly likable John Cusack as a grieving father who debunks haunted houses for a living, though when he stays in a New York hotel with a legendary “evil room,” he finds himself a believer in things that go bump in the night shift. There are some nice exchanges between Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager, and Swedish director Mikael Håfström (Evil) layers the tension nicely and rations the scares pretty well, even if ultimately, the movie is a creepy tale about little more than an evil hotel room. –Klaus Hummersumpf

RACHEL CARSON’S SILENT SPRING [NR]
The latest release from WGBH’s “American Experience” series illustrates the lasting impact that a book can have on American history. Rachel Carson’s controversial 1962 publication of Silent Spring was one such book, having found the right combination of doomsday poetry and scientific research to galvanize the American public against the pesticide industry (specifically, DDT) and to launch the modern environmentalist movement. The story of both the writer and her work is told through a series of interviews, most notably with Ms. Carson’s personal assistant during the writing of the book and with the former Secretary of the Interior, who participated in a Senate hearing on pesticide use. Disturbing images of trucks spraying chemical clouds inside suburban neighborhoods and schoolrooms are enhanced by Meryl Streep’s voice-over of selected passages. Ms. Carson is portrayed here as a heroic idealist, battling cancer and personal defamation to decry the destruction of wildlife, perhaps the first of many such environmentalist Davids to square off against a corporate Goliath. However, while her personal history ended with her death shortly after book’s release, the demonizing of DDT continued long beyond then. This is why is disappointing that this documentary does not attempt to address the claims of scientists more than forty years later who assert that the banning of DDT use in third world countries may have inadvertently caused the deaths of millions from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. –Chris Mellen

BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON [R]
Anyone who thought that Wes Craven’s original Scream was the last clever commentary on horror films needs to check out Scott Glosserman’s promising debut, a horribly wry mockumentary about a charming, up-and-coming killer (played with great snark by Nathan Baesal of “Invasion”). Glosserman covers all the bases of murder how-to, from choosing a victim to choosing a menacing disguise to glorifying one’s own visceral legacy, and it all plays out with the kind of self-aware, excised tongue-in-lacerated cheek that would be cliché if the movie had not been written with so much knowledge of and affection for this downtrodden genre. Anchor Bay’s presentation is full of their usual value-added content, including a commentary by four of the actors, a making-of and the entire screenplay as DVD-ROM content. –Robert Newton

EATING OUT 2: SLOPPY SECONDS [NR]
If you put all the writers from “Will & Grace,” “Queer As Folk” and “The Big Gay Sketch Show” in a room to deliberate over the sheer fabulous nature of this slightly amateurish comedy, and they would come back unanimously with, “Man, that sure is gay.” No speculation as to whether or not they would like it, though anyone can tell that the micro-budgeted guerilla production is not Shakespeare. The Victor/Victoria storyline has gay college boy Jim Verraros (”American Idol”) pretending to be straight to buddy up to an on-the-fence nude model Marco Dapper. The most biting material comes out, forgive the phrase, during the scenes where a “formerly gay” support group convenes, though the best scenes are between Verraros and longtime John Waters staple Mink Stole as his mother. It is all cheeky enough fun, even if this first gay sequel ever’s subtitle describes it best. –David Meyer

GRAY MATTERS [PG-13]
“Quaint” is a word that can be used to either praise or deride something, which is why it is a good one to describe this romantic comedy, the directorial debut from prolific unproduced writer Susan Kramer. It stars Heather Graham (Bobby) and Thomas Cavanagh (”Ed”) as cohabitating metropolitan siblings, and when he falls for the lovely Bridget Moynahan (Lord Of War)…and so does she. It is all so conveniently cute and cloying, while at the same time, exudes an old school, Fred-and-Ginger charm. A wickedly funny supporting cast boosts it a lot, including Molly Shannon (Year Of The Dog) as Graham’s neurotic co-worker, Sissy Spacek (North Country) as the out-there therapist and Alan Cumming (”The L Word”) as a wisdom-dispensing cabbie smitten by Graham. –Elizabeth Meyer

BLACK SNAKE MOAN [R]
Bluesman Samuel L. Jackson detains poor white trash Christina Ricci to rid her of her sinful ways in this deep, dark drama from Hustle & Flow writer-director Craig Brewer.

DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE [NR]
This Oscar nominated doc may at first glance appear to be about the predatory Nile perch, but widens its scope to include the downtrodden Tanzanian people, poached by the richer and more powerful.

DEAD SILENCE [R/NR]
“From the creators of Saw” may be like saying, “Warts, from the people who brought you cold sores,” but this horror flick about evil dolls that kill is just the movie for those who like movies about evil dolls that kill.

PRIDE [PG]
The prolific Terrence Howard plays an inner-city swim coach in this pool-warming sports drama, which also stars Bernie Mac, Kimberly Elise and Tom Arnold.

SHOOTER [R]
This post-9/11 Fugitive, directed by Antoine Fuqua of Training Day, has former government sniper Mark Wahlberg on the run after an assassination plot gone awry. Read our interview with Fuqua and Wahlberg.

EVAN ALMIGHTY
Starring Steve Carell, Lauren Graham and Morgan Freeman; Written by Steve Oedekerk, Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolow; Directed by Tom Shadyac; 96 minutes; Rated PG [for mild rude humor and some peril]

It is the single most expensive comedy ever made, estimated to cost somewhere around $175 million. So, where are the disclaimers?:

Steve Carell (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is an able enough substitute for Jim Carrey, but even the most versatile comics can only do so much with a script that too often feels like a glorified thumbnail sketch. Carell, the gifted star of “The Office,” returns as Evan Baxter, the news anchor who is now a U.S. Congressman, elected on his empty “Change The World” platform (which smells slightly of “Think God” from Oh God! Book II). The screenplay is not so much dedicated to bringing Evan around from materialistic suburbanite to God’s selfless shepherd as it is to being a showcase for the three credited writer’s favorite jokes and visual gags. With an ark full of animals (ordered by chronically cool God, Morgan Freeman), there are certainly plenty of opportunities, only most of the attempts that the team makes are way broad or involve poop.

One thing the movie solidly achieves, though, is the establishment of a sense of our being a part of something bigger — something beyond ourselves — even if it is only in dribs and drabs. Like in The Santa Clause (to which this movie owes a minor conceptual debt), it makes the skeptical and disillusioned want to believe, if not in God, then some kind of benevolent order from the chaos of life. Like the touchy-feely Pay It Forward, this one is more talk of such lofty concepts, and less following them through to a satisfying end (that does not involve an outtake reel).•••

ONCE [R]
Not only will this Irish delight prompt adventuresome moviegoers seeking relief from the summer onslaught to say, “Holy cow, I just sat through a musical!”, but will also find themselves adding more often than not, “and I really liked it, too!” It is a simple story of a street musician (or “busker”), played by Glen Hansard of the Irish rock band The Frames, who meets a lovely Czech immigrant, played by lovely Moravian singer Markéta Irglová. While they are both romantically unavailable – he is estranged from his girlfriend and she has a husband back home – they connect with music…and such beautiful music it is. Hansard and Irglová released the album The Swell Season in 2006, from which most of the music here comes, and it is all so gorgeous and true. The two are a natural together (and the 18-year-old Czech sweetie is especially remarkable, especially considering she has never acted before), and we cannot help but feel a voyeuristic thrill in thinking we are privy to something marvelous developing between them. Writer-director John Carney blends the elements together almost seamlessly, and it all adds up to one of the most memorable and atmospheric musical movies ever made. –Robert Newton

A MIGHTY HEART [R]
Once in a great while, a film comes along that cuts to the very core of its viewers, and Michael Winterbottom’s harrowing drama recounting the tragedy of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the events surrounding his death in Pakistan in 2002 is one such film. Expertly portrayed in the up-close-and-personal vérité style that Paul Greengrass used so effectively in 2006’s United 93, this film is told from the perspective of Pearl’s wife Mariane, played by an affectingly emotional Angelina Jolie. Winterbottom again displays his mastery of the dramatic retelling as the audience — the majority of whom are already aware of the ending — will find themselves hoping against all hope that this version of the story will have a happy ending. The strength of the film lies in its ability to weave a tale of grief and loss and to do so objectively. The authenticity of the film is startling and the terror it occasionally inspires genuine, but no fingers are pointed and no political undertones surface. When the inevitable does occur, there is a scene in which Jolie is wracked with grief – and it is one of the more visceral and heartbreaking scenes captured on film in recent memory. Mariane Pearl once said that Daniel Pearl was in constant pursuit of truth, and Winterbottom’s film is an honest and fitting tribute to that undying spirit. –Gregory Johnson