BunnyHug

I have a strong suspicion that many of the glowing reviews for this film come from shills. If not, then I'm baffled. As my friend said, "There went ninety minutes that I'll never get back."

The best part of the film is the title sequence, which was very slick and set the right suspenseful mood. After that, things went quickly downhill. The acting is workmanlike, the script is full of clumsy dialogue, and the direction is riddled with embarrassing clichés. (For instance, during the final showdown, which of course takes place in a dark house during a thunderstorm, we are treated to a flash of lightning suddenly revealing the silhouette of someone on the doorstep -- twice!)

"Keep Your Distance" tries to be a character-driven suspense film, but the problem is that the characters are insubstantial and unlikable and there is no suspense. I knew who the culprit was from the beginning, simply due to Ebert's "law of economy of characters," but I didn't know why. At the end of the film, I still didn't know why. The clues that we are given, when they are finally deciphered by the characters, turn out to be mostly irrelevant.

This is one of those films that you're either going to love or hate. It's stagey and stylized, which I think adds to the atmosphere of the fantasy opera, but others will find offputting. No attempt is made to hide the fact that the sets are just that, sets, made up largely of curtains and painted backgrounds. However, camera effects are used to highlight some of the magical and symbolic moments. The balance between stage and film is, in my estimation, just right.

There are highly imaginative touches throughout the film, especially during the Olympia act. The most comical of the stories, here it is given a nightmarish aspect too. The ballroom scene (with the "dancing" mannequins) is cleverly done and the destruction of the doll is startlingly graphic.

While the Olympia act emphasizes dance, the Giulietta and Antonia acts (here shown second and third, respectively) are somewhat more static and the emphasis switches to the atmosphere of the sets. Giulietta inhabits a convincingly dark, gothic Venice; Antonia appears to live in a Grecian ruins, symbolizing the state of her health.

Various alterations have been made for reasons of style and length, but there are two that I find questionable, and both relate to the character of Niklaus. First, nearly all of his singing has been cut, leaving him to do little except stand on the sidelines and occasionally roll his eyes or make a brief remark. Second, he is never identified with the Muse, not even in the epilogue. Without being familiar with the opera, the audience would have no idea why a supposedly male character is played by a woman. Since the Muse is gone, her message -- that "love makes us great, but suffering makes us greater" -- is also missing. Instead, we are left merely with a depiction of Hoffmann's downfall. Even aside from the missing Muse, the epilogue feels rushed and anticlimactic. If running time was the issue, it would have been better to cut the pretty but irrelevant Dragonfly ballet from the prologue.

These criticisms aside, the film is imaginative, original, and daring in its unconventionality. Even if you don't like it (as I did), you surely must admire it.

This film is technically impressive; the dinosaurs are placed onto real backgrounds fairly well, the skin textures are good, and the lemurs' fur is surprisingly realistic. The story is simple, the characters a bit bland. Aladar shows none of the quirks one might expect of a dinosaur raised by lemurs, and in fact the lemurs barely figure in the film at all. The "journey to safety" is a time-tested plot element, but here it seems to lack the necessary epic quality and thus the payoff isn't very rewarding. ("Oh. They reached the fabled valley. Seems like they only set off about a day and a half ago.") Still, the movie might have succeeded as eye candy even with these flaws, if not for one serious problem: the character design. Take a photorealistic dinosaur, and then stick a rubbery, anthropomorphic face on it, and the result is jarring. Aladar's (and the other dinosaurs') small mouths, flexible lips, and front-set eyes looked really out of place. (In fact, I thought Aladar bore an unnerving resemblance to John Travolta in heavy makeup, and if I'd wanted to see that, I'd have gone to Battlefield Earth instead.) The type of caricature that looks fine in cel animation looks distractingly creepy in CGI. I flinched inside every time Aladar pursed his cow-like lips in thought. Disney either needed to go with entirely realistic dinosaurs (as in the excellent "Walking with Dinosaurs") or lessen the realism of the film as a whole (as in "The Land Before Time.")