I’ve been trying to think of the greatest FATHER-SON movies of all time. I’d have to say, that before tonight, my personal favorite was Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper’s THE CHAMP. I think my love for that film goes with my deep adoration for Wallace Beery, one of the ‘lost’ actors of time… Seems nobody remembers him these days. But for my money, beginning with THE CHAMP – he had a run, that few can match. GRAND HOTEL, FLESH, TUGBOAT ANNIE, DINNER AT EIGHT, THE BOWERY, VIVA VILLA!, and TREASURE ISLAND. However, it began with THE CHAMP. Ol Andy Purcell was one of those imperfect fathers that is rough around the edges… probably not the model for the fathers of today, but he had character and love and trust… and he’d fight any man alive to protect his son. Hell, Andy loves his kid so much he’d even do what’s right for the kid, even if it meant giving him up. But that movie is magic. It’s been my favorite Father-Son film for ages now. Saw it when I was about 7 years old, back when they used to run movies after the News on regular Broadcast Television. And right after the movie, the Star Spangled Banner would play and America’s might would be displayed, and the station would have reached a close of another Broadcast day, good night… Deeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww….. COLOR BARS. Ahhhh, how I remember the moment where television ceased to have programming. No more.

Today… well today was a big day. It started with my Dad waking me up to go grab dinner with my nephew before we (Dad and I) went to go see FINDING NEMO. I kinda hated going to see FINDING NEMO without my nephew, for weeks now he’s plopped up on my bed and had me show him the FINDING NEMO trailer as he operated the keyboard to ask me what every type of fish in the film was. THANKS PIXAR – yeesh. So like every grown-up, I started making up names. Anyway, it was just gonna be Father Geek and I at the screening… well, us and about 500 families and kids and critics – such odd company eh?

When I got to the theater, the line already stretched outside. By the time everyone was in the screening room, Dad was complaining about how it was too hot, and he just sat back in his chair and shut his eyes. I started talking with assorted villains in Austin. As the numerous give-aways began to crowd the screening, I realized… THIS WAS OVERKILL -- The kids were sounding like a gaggle of geese clamoring for cracker crumbs.

Then the trailers began, but because this was CINEMARK – they don’t dial their lights down, so the colors on everything is bleached out. If you like trailers – NEVER GO TO A CINEMARK!

1. FREAKY FRIDAY remake. It literally feels like the coming of the end of mankind. Doing a straight remake of FREAKY FRIDAY seems just so damn lame. Everything just looks vapid, empty and not very well thought out.

2. THE INCREDIBLES!!!! Dear God. When I announced that Pixar was going to be attaching a teaser trailer for the second coming of BRAD BIRD – yes, all caps is required when writing His name. He, who doth made THE IRON GIANT doth make again! The teaser trailer begins with various memorabilia of Captain Incredible, hero for all and all around swell guy I take it. First thing you notice about Captain Incredible’s press photos is his physique… He is chiseled of stone like a steroid blonde Jay Leno with a two foot chin. A paragon of hero-hood. The music… think… ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE! Yeah baby! Gah-Roove! Then… without warning… The Incredible Phone, with the patented lit up Incredible Logo. The hand of a God lifts the receiver – There is an Emergency. Only Captain Incredible can save them. The call has been made! --- The rest. Well, I wouldn’t ruin the rest for all the tea in China. Not even for all the Dallas Cowboy Cheerlea… ok, I’d spill, but you don’t have that type of swing, so go see the damn trailer in a theater and feel the magic of… BRAD BIRD!

Ok, next came the classic old school Pixar Short… KNICK KNACK. A real classic. The thing that makes PIXAR such a wunder-factory is the attention to details… Not in the CG, but in the timing, the characters, the gags and the simple truths about the story being told. In KNICK KNACK – it’s the old story about the guy that is left indoors always looking at the happiness outside he can never have. Oh sure, it’s done with humor and joy, but the fact is… it’s a real tale of futility and unrequited desires and passions. My only complaint… THEY GAVE ALL THE WOMEN BREAST REDUCTIONS!!!!! Ok, I’m not the biggest breast fetish guy in the world, but they’ve made these gals – A-cups MAYBE. Ya probably wouldn’t notice it, had you not seen the original, but right now, I’m kinda curious as to the change. As if, by having large breasts – you’re somehow a derogatory image for others to see. Now, perhaps if one of the girls had the tiny breasts and the other larger ones, you could show that it wasn’t the breasts that floated this Snowman’s carrot, but the very concept of companionship itself? Not sure, but I’m not a big fan for changing classic cartoons for some misplaced sense of modern moralities. Ceasing Pecos Bill’s cigarette roll in Disney’s classic chaps my hide. And the numerous changes and tweaks that Disney and Warners has made to classic cartoons, well, it has gotten on my nerves, and to see PIXAR do it… well, it was the one thing this evening that wasn’t perfect. Still a great short though!

Then…

FINDING NEMO

Back in October of 2002, the rather joyless and evil man named Mr. Beaks (I kid, he’s actually a sweet potato) had this to say about FINDING NEMO:

“FINDING NEMO, based on a rough work print screened for a very receptive recruited audience last night, appears to be shaping up as one of Pixar’s *less* wonderful efforts, meaning it might only make my Top Ten list for next year rather than cracking my Top Five.”

What a difference 8 months of fine tuning near perfection does within the Dream Factory that is PIXAR FILMS! The addition of Thomas Newman’s note perfect score. The layers after layers of sound design by man-god Gary Rydstrom. The tightening of the film by David Ian Salter, making all the gags hit, all the emotions land. Then you have the magic of Pixar. What’s the magic of Pixar? It’s their collective genius and their willingness to listen to and give advice to help the team accomplish magic. A team, that on this film is headed by Andrew Stanton, but includes the astonishingly hilarious story beats and gags of Joe Ranft. The gaze of John Lasseter, he knows story, knows magic by pushing pixels here or there. Then there’s all the layers of shadow and light that all the different render-folks bring to play. Yup, 8 months on a near perfect film with this team… well it achieves perfection, yet again.

Does FINDING NEMO take my personal crown from Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper’s THE CHAMP as the best FATHER-SON film of all time? Well, at the very least, it shares it.

It is as if, Pixar stole my genetic coding and created films specifically to trigger each and every emotional impulse I have. I declared TOY STORY 2, best film of its year. MONSTERS, INC. I hailed as having more pure imagination and creation than perhaps any film of that year. FINDING NEMO truly has the potential to be my personal favorite PIXAR film thus far.

I won’t call it the Best Pixar film based upon a single viewing, that would be childish, but I do recognize the sheer overwhelming feeling of love I have with this film, as well as the personal resonance of the “Father-Son” story that played me like that Boba Fett doll I sent off for back in 1978… literally till I fell apart.

What about the film works? Everything.

The story on the surface would seem to be rather simple. In fact, you could say it is summed up best in the title, FINDING NEMO, but then you watch the film and all those layers begin to hit me… And that simple tale of a Father seeking a lost son, well… suddenly the title FINDING NEMO is no longer simple at all.

On a sheer physical level, the film is about FINDING NEMO, about Albert Brooks’ distraught father clownfish named Marlin finding his son, Nemo, who was captured by a diver and taken to parts unknown, for reasons unknown. A kidnapping story. However, I would hold that 30 seconds before Nemo was captured, Nemo was lost. When he said to Marlin, “I hate you,” that’s where this quest begins internally for these characters. Where Marlin has to come to grips with who he is as a father, why Nemo hated him, what is he doing wrong, if he finds his son, would his son even care? Then there’s Nemo. Nemo’s finding himself here too. He’s having to look within who he is, to see if he really loves his father, if he can admire him, wanna be like him. To find out for the first time in his life, who is Nemo without Dad? Is he a scared feeble handicapped fish without nerve? Is he a reckless disobedient brat deserving of the situation that he now finds himself in?

These are all questions to a large degree that we have to ask ourselves at various levels in our lives. Are we defined by the strengths and weaknesses of our parents? Who are we without them? If we hate our parents, how will we be any different when we have kids to raise of our own? The sorts of questions we ask about ourselves that give us our personal identity, our sense of family and ultimately the directions we choose in life.

Yeah, I know, these are fairly simple ideas we’re talking about, but then… if they’re so damn simple, why do so many in this world spend so much damn time in therapy trying to figure out basic things like resolving guilt regarding a feeling you have about a parent, child or whatnot?

For me, I saw the film as an allegory for the time in my life where I was kidnapped by my mother, forced to live an entire culture away from everything I knew and loved in Austin, and forced to come to grips with who I had to be without my father. The story of fighting to get back together spanned the most dramatic and traumatic period of my life. The point where I found my individual identity, my feelings about both parents and the direction I knew I wanted to take in life. How both I and my father fought to make that reality real, and the communal triumph we’ve shared in this enterprise known as life.

Everytime I travel without the old man, I get a sense that he’s worried about what’s gonna happen to me. None more so, than when I went to China on crutches for two weeks. He asked me not to do stupid things like attempt to climb 900 steps of a Ming Dynasty Temple just to see Gordon Liu do Kung Fu with Uma Thurman, but when I got to those steps, I swallowed my courage and against every better instinct and doctor’s warnings and the concern of all around me, I did it. And I got to the top, and I saw Gordon Liu do kung fu with Uma and I saw that view from the top of that temple, heard those cicadas and it was beautiful.

For Nemo, he’s been told his whole life that he’s not strong enough, that he’s got a deformed fin, that he’s not a good enough swimmer, that the ocean is a terrible place of death and carnage and you’ve got to be constantly aware or DIE! All that the boy has ever known has been protection and security and now… He’s completely on his own and there is nobody to watch out for him.

For Albert Brooks’ Marlin – he’s always been a doubter. He’s just a little clownfish in a big ocean. A safe home, family. That’s all he’s ever wanted and his life is so small now. Just him and Nemo. Nemo is all that keeps him from being alone in this world, that keeps his life from being pointless. He’s petrified by fear, fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of not being strong enough, smart enough, fun enough. As Kitty Farmer would point out on the wonderful Jim Cunningham’s patented Life Chart, Marlin’s life answers are in the negative FEAR side of the chart. And that’s Baaaad.

I get the idea that Marlin had very protective parents, he’s got all sorts of complexes due to never living life in the first place. Now, Albert Brooks is one of the funniest men on the planet, but his character here… it’s a dramatic performance. It is strange how the lack of arms or legs meant nothing to me here. Brooks’ voice and the animation of Marlin so perfectly meld and are sold that by 3 minutes in, fish talking at me just seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Brooks is tremendous here, he’s certainly always sold intellectual neuroticism right up there with Woody Allen for me, and here he nails it and personally I sensed more honesty in this character than in any of his live-action roles.

If I had my own paralyzing fear in this movie it had to do with the character of Dory. My general gut feeling about Ellen DeGeneres was that I loathed her. I’d never seen ELLEN, but I hated her in CONEHEADS, MR WRONG and EDTV. I remember once wishing she would just GO AWAY – during the height of all the business about her and Anne Heche’s relationship. Typically I don’t pay attention to celebrity relationship stuff, but it seemed everywhere I turned there it was. And everytime I heard her voice it grated me. I could discern Ellen’s voice within two words and could hit the mute button with my eyes closed. I never for a second wasted an ounce of thought that she could possibly one day play an absolutely perfect character that I would love completely… But then, I never could have imagined the character of Dory.

Dory is a lost person.. ok, strike that, Dory is a ditzy Blue fish, but is played like a lost person. Like Leonard Shelby, Dory has this condition. A condition of severe short term memory loss, and the film could have been a non-stop painful series of MEMENTO gags, but with every bit of the originality that Christopher Nolan envisioned that ingenious character, Andrew Stanton carved out Dory. She is desperate for direction in life. Unlike Leonard Shelby, she has no revenge scheme, no driving memory that forces her to adapt a discipline that gives her a life to live, for no other reason, but to serve that driving obsession. She’s seeking that obsession, but never knows it. She has never had direction, purpose or reason for being. She’s a lady out in the big ocean swimming in circles talking to herself wondering why she’s her, what has she forgotten and where she is going and why? She needs someone to live with, in the history of required co-dependents, she’s the model.

By the end of the film, she has a scene with Marlin that may very well be the best damn confession of love since Holden McNeil had Alyssa Jones at “I love you”. Those words are never spoken. Love is never uttered, but I’ll be damned to a pit of scalding coconut oil to baste and roast throughout eternity if that scene isn’t all about love. Absolutely beautiful. Two characters, drab backgrounds and one BLUE FISH acting the hell out of the moment.

The film is filled with absolutely brilliant characters that are always smarter and better realized than you’d ever assume at first glance. Always deeper than any cast you’ve ever met, and the resources they pull from making Eric Bana a Hammerhead shark or having Dame Edna Everage be the voice of Bruce (aka JAWS) is priceless. Willem Dafoe as a tough hard case dreaming of escape in a dentist’s aquarium… genius. Getting folks like Geoffrey Rush and Elizabeth Perkins to sell small but essential characters is key, but also having characters like Joe Ranft go crazy and even the director himself.

Which reminds me. Not only did Andrew Stanton conceive, write and direct FINDING NEMO, but he plays a character that… well, it’s just priceless. His Crush, the sea turtle… a character of great age, a thrill seeker and a father of many over many years, in many ways he’s the spirit animal for Jeffrey Lebowski, the Dude. If The Dude has a spirit animal, it is Crush, the Sea Turtle. I get the idea that Crush abides, as the Dude before him. I don’t know about you, but I wallow in that thought. The idea that out there in the currents of the world, blazing by the world there’s this turtle ya see, and he’s been there before you were born, before your father and your grand father and your great grand father, and he’s raising this new kid, that’ll be there in those waves swimming and thrilling to life after your great great grandkids go bald. There’s something about that just got me. Got me something fierce.

I think it is fitting that I’m ending this review talking about a Coen Brothers character, because there’s a lot in common with the films of Pixar and the films of the Coens. They’re peculiar movies, odd works of genius that skew the world at that perfect angle to make it all look so much better than the daily doldrums would have us believe. They both imagine and envision and enlighten and amuse all at once. The fact that PIXAR does it for a larger audience and that the Coens do it for a particular audience doesn’t worry me a bit. That both exist for us to enjoy is a blessing. Filmmakers that make perfect films, big… small… Perfect all the same. FINDING NEMO is absolutely perfect.

Take loved ones to see the film and talk afterwards. It’s all about the price of love and the lengths we go to preserve it. A film that is entirely artificial, but made with more soul, heart and care than any film that we ever get to see today. Absolutely precious. Our world is dangerous today, barracudas everywhere, but just because they’re out there, doesn’t mean we cease swimming.

OH! One last thing. The legend of father montage might be the single greatest edited and conceived sequence of film we see this year. Absolutely breathtaking. Wow!