50/50 (Jonathan Levine, 2011)

As I walked out of 50/50, I was struck by the realization that it didn't get funny until the protagonist got cancer. If nothing else, that speaks to the unorthodox nature of the film. No matter, young Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gets cancer after only a few minutes of awkward establishment. 50/50 is your usual Apatow-style funny/sentimental movie but with cancer, to which some might reply, "Remember Funny People?" This is different. Where Funny People used the threat of an illness to prompt a reevaluation of life and career. But Adam Lerner is not George Simmons. He's too young to have a life to reevaluate. He's still building the career he can look back on later. As Adam says during a breakdown late in the film, he's never even told a girl he loved her.

That flecks 50/50 with an affecting quality I'm not sure is fair but cannot deny hit me hard, especially in its last 40 minutes. Based on screenwriter Will Reiser's own bout with cancer at 24, the film clearly displays the guidance of someone who actually lived this life rather than looking for some easy quirks. That is not to say that the film doesn't suffer from some questionable touches, but at least it takes its subject seriously, even when it's milking cancer for laughs.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, an inspired casting choice that makes instant and thorough use of the actor's gangly physique and boyish but sharp face. He's so thin and spry as to be the last person you'd expect to get sick, but when he gets the diagnosis of a rare, genetic form of cancer from a persistent backache, Gordon-Levitt's frame suddenly looks horribly suited to the harsh regimen of chemotherapy. Jonathan Levine's camera often remains tight on the actor's face throughout the film, everything around him woozy from his delirious despair, and the young man's face grows sallow and sunken over the course of 99 minutes while remaining uncomfortably young, like Sleeping Beauty preserved in youth but hanging near death.


Helping Adam cope with the news is his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), who sees cancer as the ultimate weapon in scoring chicks and pushes Adam to get laid to the point of myopia. Rogen plays his usual, ingratiating but well-meaning quip-machine to the hilt here. He can barely contain his glee when he catches Adam's stuck-up girlfriend cheating, and he openly uses his friend's serious ailment to get dates. But if Gordon-Levitt uses his youthful looks to grimly ironic effect, so too does Rogen undermine his own image. Beneath his almost stupefying disregard for his friend's health lies the suggestion that his self-centered attempts to show his friend a good time is nothing but a front for how desperately he wants to avoid thinking about losing who may be the only person who talks to him.

Kyle is just one of a cast of characters Adam must look to for guidance and grounding, and 50/50 plays much of its emotional weight on its supporting cast. Anna Kendrick plays an implausible psychologist-in-training whose blatant lack of professionalism in handling Adam hits the brick wall of that huge, blinding smile, making up for a complete lack of believability with something better: presence. Even less convincing, and without the offsetting humanity, is Bryce Dallas Howard, as ever playing one awful note. As Adam's girlfriend Rachael, she is self-absorbed and selfish to the point of cartoonish bitchiness, so utterly unlikable that we hope she leaves when Adam gives her the chance to walk away when he learns the diagnosis. The film denies Rachael the possibility of being an actual human being, thus avoiding the pathos and depth of a decent human being forced with the difficult choice of having to care for someone you might not know that well. Rachael wants to stay even after being thrown out, but she's given no reason for this and thus only seems more of a stereotype, clinging to Adam just to feel like a good person.

But no one compares to Anjelica Huston, who plays Adam's mother. Huston has to defend her sanity on two fronts, on one side caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken husband as he loses total grip on reality and trying to connect with a reserved Adam on the other. Huston gets the most organically funny lines of the film, and her constant fidgeting and fussing carries a deep pain that tinges even the silliest moments of her overbearing nature. Huston excels at playing matrons who place their reputations and power dynamics over warm connections with their children, but the flashes of pure panic and anguish playing out over her hollowly made-up face tear that Stoic matriarch image to shreds. Diane has nowhere to turn, and Huston perfectly captures the feeling of a woman terrified of losing everything but forced to keep it together for the sake of others. It's a career highlight for Huston, and a performance equaled by few this year.

Admittedly, 50/50 is spotty. Too much of its humor between Adam and Kyle feels standard, and both of Adam's romantic interests don't have enough three-dimensional strength to be much more than contrasts for each other at polar ends of stereotypical females in film. I was also unsure about the use of Alzheimer's as a further emotional punch, though I understood the point of including that sideplot long before Kendrick literally spoke it aloud.* But I loved the gallows humor of Adam's chemo sessions with two older patients played by Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer, who playfully tease the kid with grim predictions to mess with him. And while the tonal shift of the final act gives way to almost total despair, Gordon-Levitt's harrowing descent into pure terror and his breakthroughs with friends and family make for some honest tear-jerking. Gordon-Levitt is so affecting, so raw, that he retroactively makes up for many of my earlier quibbles, and I couldn't get 50/50 out of my head for hours after I saw it.

*Having said that, Serge Houde's performance is one of the few horribly believable portrayals of Alzheimer's I've seen lately. The look of spaced-out absence and perennial curiosity he knows not to try to satiate because he'll just forget it is all too real for me and my experiences with my grandfather. When Adam tells his father he loves him late in the film, Houde's uncomprehending face and gentle but neutral one-word response was so familiar I burst into tears.

Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

This villain, Lord Shen (Gary Oldman, proving he can be just as great a bad guy with just his voice as he can in the flesh), immediately sets the film apart from the first by presenting not simply a stronger beast than the tiger who fought against our heroes the last time but a less strong but more graceful creature. An albino Indian peafowl, Shen swoops and twirls, feathers hiding knives that fly out with every flourish, and his mad fury makes these metal showers all the more overwhelming. Yet Shen is also resentful of his lack of force, and he devises cannons from gunpowder as a means of overcoming any fighter superior to him.

Thanks to a prophecy foretelling his fall at the hands of a warrior of black and white, Shen ordered the genocide of pandas years ago, the act that led to his banishment. This, of course, links him to Po, now living the high life as the Dragon Warrior in the Valley of Peace. When Shen's wolves ransack the valley for spare money for the lord's war machines, Po gets his first hint of something deeper with a vague emotional trigger that prompts a memory he does not understand. Later, when Shen kills a great kung fu master with his weaponry and takes back Gongmen, Po and the Furious Five head out to stop him, Po nursing ulterior motives of learning more about the buried identity being unlocked in fragments.

At times, Po's story is a bit too broad and convenient: rewriting the unremarkable Po of the first film to be seemingly the last panda left alive on Earth opens up too many questions. Why did no one ever say anything about his rarity? Did word of a great panda warrior not reach beyond the valley and find its way back to the paranoid Shen? As for Po's relationship with his adoptive father, Mr. Ping (James Hong), the panda slips in and out of total idiocy as he seems both to know that a goose obvious isn't his biological dad and be shocked when Ping finally says it out loud. Po's attempts to find himself through his scattered, subconscious memories would have worked better had the audience not already been told upfront about Shen's extermination of pandas.

Nevertheless, Kung Fu Panda 2 has such sure grasp of emotion that even the holes and redundancies opened up by its script do not truly detract from the film. Po's struggles with identity lead to introspective moments from himself and Mr. Ping, who steals the film with Hong's quivering, almost pleading voice seeking to keep his son's love (he brought nearly everyone in theater, regardless of age, to tears). Furthermore, the repeated flashbacks can be distinguished from each other by looking at the first segment as a matter-of-fact, if folkloric, description of events while the later attempts by Po to piece together his broken recollections show his emotional response to that atrocity and his quest to come to terms with it.

However childish this makes me, I will always be in awe of great animation. Given that I cannot even draw basic outlines with any definition or even linearity (ask anyone I've given one of my strange, pointless comics as a jokey present), I can hardly wrap my head around the sheer number of man-hours and creative collaboration it takes to put together an animated film, either by hand or on computers. That's why I got so frustrated with so many of Dreamworks' projects: why waste all that time and considerable effort on the Shrek films, the movie equivalent of the "Now That's What I Call Music" series? Long passages of Kung Fu Panda are so well-rendered, so enthralling in background and movement and action that I walked out of the theater with barely four pages of notes on a small notepad I cannot see and thus leave massive amounts of white space on each page.

From the bombast of Gongmen City to the mercurial flow of Shen (all swift, slinking movements with bursts of peacockish pride and infinite madness), the animation reflects the style and tone not only of contemporary action cinema but classical Asian art. The animators also use a number of traditional, 2D scenes for flashbacks, and these feel like old Chinese paintings come to life. They could have made the whole film like this, so striking were the 2D interludes. My one complaint is that it was animated like a modern action movie, meaning that active editing occasionally dips into excessive editing, not capturing the full grace and dance of martial arts to instead go for quick flashes of swords and fists. Yet I had a clearer grasp on the space-time relations of characters in even the most complicated scene than I do with most live-action films these days, and director Jennifer Yuh Nelson knows when to pull back and give us a clearer view of the action.

A bit too open at times about trying to magnify the heart and the visual inventiveness of the first (not to mention so predictable that the prophesied victory could have been foretold by the audience as much as any soothsayer), Kung Fu Panda nevertheless manages to do so without becoming to unwieldy and disjunctive. It may not quite reach the simple, pure pleasures of its predecessor, but this film will likely emerge near or at the top of the heap of this year's Summer of Sequels. My love of animation necessarily means I must confront my hatred of children, and one of my unspoken criteria of a great animated film is that it does something to stop kids from making noise.

I might have to amend my cynicism: Kung Fu Panda 2 not only didn't silence children, it made them make different kinds of sounds. They just so happened to be split between riotous laughs, exclamations of wonder and joy, and sniffled, occasionally bawled, tears. That's a greater range of emotional response than this year's slate of hollow, derivative blockbusters is likely to offer. If Dreamworks keeps this sort of thing up, I'm going to have to find a new punching bag. They've finally started acting like a group of professionals with creative drive and vision, and the results over the last few years have been beautiful—let's just look the other way with the upcoming Puss in Boots, shall we?