Friday, January 22, 2010

Fantastic Mr Fox????

Whoever heard of this flick?? It's in my queue now!

First of all, Fox is a beautiful piece of visual storytelling, based on a book by the peerless children’s author Roald Dahl. Its lead roles are voiced by two of Hollywood’s very few genuine stars at the height of their powers—George Clooney and Meryl Streep. The stop-action animation is downright artisanal. We need good popular filmmaking in this country; otherwise, it’s all dumb-guy fart comedies and brainless action sequels. Well, here it is. Support it.
Even more importantly for our purposes, the film dramatizes the brutal and arbitrary power of industrial meat giants—and depicts a daring (and successful) revolt against them. As conjured up by Anderson, Dahl’s “equally mean” farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, are stand-ins for larger-than-life, yet quite small-minded, U.S. meat moguls like Don Tyson and “Bo” Pilgrim. The film’s end—which I won’t spoil—is a wry commentary on vertical integration and consolidation in the food industry.

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