Reliable Pixar adds 'Ratatouille' to its gourmet animation plate

Seven films into their once-shaky partnership, the Disney-Pixar marriage has produced nothing but gifted offspring.

Now, Oscar-winning director Brad Bird, the 49-year-old animation whiz behind "The Incredibles," intends to continue Pixar's remarkable run — "Finding Nemo," "Monsters, Inc." and the "Toy Story" flicks, etc. — by giving rodents a good name.

There's a pint-sized cook who makes even Rachel Ray look big, and we meet him in "Ratatouille." It's the tale of a gourmet rat named Remy, who wants to be recognized as a great chef.

Opening here Friday, the movie features the voice of Patton Oswalt as Remy, plus those of Peter O'Toole, Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm, Brian Dennehy and Brad Garrett.

Summer already has one fine animated film on view in "Surf's Up," but there's always room for quality. And Pixar is as safe a bet as there is in the film industry. Why? Because they insist on doing their very best. Because they put themselves in the place of a demanding audience member. Respect for craft, respect for you.

"All the way through the production, you have night sweats," said Bird at a recent press junket. "Especially in the early part, when questions aren't answered yet. I think if you ask any Broadway veteran, the ones who survive the best are the ones who still get butterflies. If you start getting smug and start thinking, hey, I've got this thing licked, then they're bound to stumble.

"So I view the feeling of fear as a respect for the audience, because I don't want to serve up the same old refried meal. The problem with animation is too many people are making the same movie," he said.

"There's nothing wrong with the medium. The medium is as big as the sky, but you have to go to different places in the sky. You can't just go to the same cloud and expect people to get excited about it, with the jabbering sidekicks and the pop references and the hit pop songs."

Technology, he adds, has never been the answer.

"The same answers to making a good movie are the answers that were around 80 years ago. You've got to have characters people care about and stories that are both surprising and satisfying."

'Drive Thru'

Greg Browning, creator of the "Drive Thru" film series, brings his latest to the American Theater tonight for shows at 7 and 9.

"Drive Thru Caribbean" follows surfers Donavon Frankenreiter, Benji Weatherley, Pat O'Conell, and Kalani Robb, plus Aussie aerialist Yadin Nicol, as they "get wrapped up in some serious hijinks during their search for waves on the thousands of islets, reefs and cays strewn through the Caribbean." It's humor and derring-do in equal measure.

The local Las Olas surf shop is hosting the premiere as part of the store's grand opening. Tickets are $6, and can be obtained at Las Olas or at the theater box office.

Browning, a Encinitas, Calif.-based filmmaker, is the director of "Drive Thru South Africa" (2006), "Drive Thru Central America" (2004) and "Drive Thru Australia" (2002).

Cast and crew surfed the "secret" reefs in Puerto Rico, communed with Rastas after "scoring warm-water perfection" in Jamaica, ripped the Soup Bowls of Barbados, cavorted with dolphins and exulted in the freedom of the waves.

"Anything and everything happens on a Drive Thru," says Browning. "You really can't anticipate any of it ... you just kind of go with the flow."

'Ragtime' it ain't

Most movies on the 19th-century immigrant experience in America do not feature giant vegetables as key elements of the plot, which is just one of the charms of Emanuele Crialese's transoceanic odyssey "Golden Door," winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.

The story focuses, however, on Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato), an illiterate Sicilian widower with-out means who is pondering the possibility of emigrating to the U.S. — for him, terra incognita — with his elderly mother and two young sons.

All he knows of the country comes from tall tales told by neighbors and a few fanciful novelty postcards that reached his remote little village. But what images.

Mammoth tomatoes as big as cows, carrots the size of canoes and the inevitable money that sprouts from trees. Who wouldn't be dazzled?

Titled "Nuovomondo" ("new world") in Italy, the film re-imagines the emotionally and physically arduous voyage from a primitive Old World enclave to the daunting modern metropolis of New York, and envisions it as a rebirth. Ellis Island is "the golden door" into America through which they must pass. But are they really prepared for what they will find?

Francesco Casisa and Filippo Pucillo star as Salvatore's sons, with Aurora Quattrocchi as his mother and Charlotte Gainsbourg a mysterious, regal Englishwoman among the immigrant peasants.

Beyond the performances, it is Crialese's alternative view of the portal that was Ellis Island that may be most compelling.

Palin's palette

"Michael Palin is not just one of Britain's foremost comedy character actors, he also talks a lot," says old Monty Python teammate John Cleese. "Yap, yap, yap he goes, all day long and through the night. Then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary."

While Cleese's post-Python years have been marked by occasional film appearances and a fortunemaking sideline in humorous corporate training flicks, Palin has invested much of his time indulging his wanderlust, shot for numerous TV documentaries for PBS and varied cable networks. Writer, comedian, novelist, actor and playwright, he also pens a good memoir.

Witness the upcoming "Diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years," wherein Palin finally understands why devoted fans of films such as "Monty Python and The Holy Grail" and "Monty Python's Life of Brian" still revel in quoting whole stretches of movie dialogue verbatim, and in character.

Due out in September from Thomas Dunne Books, Palin's diaries begin in the late 1960s, when he began writing for a spate of hugely popular British TV programs. Monty Python was waiting in the wings.

He recounts how Python emerged from the rather distorted minds of some inestimable wits and shares stories of their attaining cult status, the troupe's world tours, their battles over censorship and how, individually, the Pythons went their separate ways.

Palin also chronicles his early travels from the period, before he got paid to explore some of the planet's more exotic locales. The package is perceptive and funny, characteristically intelligent, and just a little cockeyed.

Bits and Pieces

Tom Perrotta, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his script for "Little Children," one of the past year's best films, and also wrote the novel on which the film "Election" was based, returns with his sixth and latest book, "The Abstinence Teacher," a social satire that tackles sex education and religion. It's due out in October. ... Writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako's "Bamako" is an examination of the plight of modern Africa, set in the courtyard of a Mali building where pro-western lawyers duel Malians in a mock trial over control of their own national and cultural destinies. ... Jonny Lee Miller stars as '90s cycling champion Graeme Obree in the biopic "The Flying Scotsman." ... Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney star in Australian filmmaker Ray Lawrence's "Jindabyne," an adaptation of the Raymond Carver story about four fishing pals who go on a trip, discover a dead woman floating in the river — and fail to report it. ... The most talked about indy film in New York so far this year has been the re-release of a 1977 picture, "Killer of Sheep," a drama set in the Watts section of Los Angeles where a slaughterhouse worker finds himself growing inured to the brutality of his job. Henry G. Sanders stars. ... A rather aimless satire of the television industry, "The TV Set" isn't exactly getting the plaudits that its stars David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver and Ioan Gruffudd ("Amazing Grace") might have hoped.

Quotable Quotes

BRUCE WILLIS, on choosing roles: "Fifty percent of the time I'm right, but 50 percent of the time I'm just as wrong. I've made just as many mistakes in choosing as I have successes. I really don't know more than anyone else does. I still don't know what I'm doing. I'm still learning how to act. Every film ... you have to put on a different set of clothes, a different set of armor, a different set of acting muscles. I've learned that that's the process."

CHARLES CHAPLIN, on balance: "I have seen intelligent people fail on stage, and dullards act quite well. All intellect and no feeling can be characteristic of the arch-criminal, and all feeling and no intellect exemplify the harmless idiot. When intellect and feeling are perfectly balanced, then we get the superlative actor."

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