Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 8 of 11

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Part 3: Mary Poppins Returns, First Man, Cold War.
Part 4: Can You Ever Forgive Me?, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Part 5: Never Look Away, Mary Queen of Scots, Isle of Dogs, The Wife.
Part 6: Detainment, Marguerite, Skin, Madre, Fauve.
Part 7: At Eternity's Gate, First Reformed, Shoplifters, Capernaum.
Part 8:

Spider-man: into the Spider-verse

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Cast: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Zoë Kravitz, Lily Tomlin, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, Chris Pine, Nicolas Cage, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn

I loved this film so much. I wasn't expecting even to like it – an animated Spider-man film? Don't we get enough Marvel on our screens these days? – but Into the Spider-verse is no ordinary Marvel movie. It's a moving comic-book with clear references to the style of comic books themselves and an ability to use that style to generate quality humor. Spider-verse has fresh, funny jokes and an irreverent approach to the save-the-world obsessions of these types of films. This is a great movie. It's in my top 5 for the year.
Will Win: Animated Feature
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #4 out of 68

Incredibles 2

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Catherine Keener, Bob Odenkirk, Samuel L. Jackson, Huck Milner, Eli Fucile, Brad Bird, Sophia Bush, Phil LaMarr, Isabella Rossellini

Eh. This is totally forgettable. I think because it's basically a re-tread of The Incredibles. There are a couple of really great sequences – one with the little baby and a racoon that is cute and a great montage in which Mr. Incredible begins to succeed at being a stay-at-home dad – but... this is just not very inventive. The big plot-twists (and Incredibles 2 is for some reason invested in plot-twists) is obvious from the very beginning of the movie, and the action sequences aren't nearly as fun as they ought to be. This is harmless, but definitely a let-down of a sequel.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: Animated Feature
My Rating: #35 out of 67

Mirai (未来のミライ)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hosoda Mamoru

Cast: John Cho, Rebecca Hall, Jaden Waldman, Victoria Grace, Crispin Freeman, Stephanie Sheh, Daniel Dae Kim, Yakusho Kōji

This movie is perfection. If Spider-verse weren't as great as it was this would easily be my favorite animated movie of the year. As it is, it is in my top ten for this year. It is worth saying, too, that I tend to be biased against animated features. I consistently resist ranking them really high for some reason, but this year, we have Mirai and Spider-verse and I am in love. This is a gorgeously drawn and beautifully made film about family and history and learning new ways of being in the world. I know it's tough for most people to see right now – I got really lucky and was able to see a screening – but as soon as it is on DVD you're all going to see it and love it. I promise.

Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #6 out of 68

Ralph Breaks the Internet

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Phil Johnston, Rich Moore

Cast: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Gal Gadot, Taraji P. Henson, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, Alan Tudyk, Alfred Molina, Ed O'Neill, Sean Giambrone, Flula Borg, Timothy Simons, Ali Wong, Hamish Blake

Honestly I don't understand why stuff like this exists. Why people give things like this awards is even more unfathomable to me. This film is not funny at all, and it seems entirely designed not to make its audience laugh but to make us nod our heads in knowledgeable ways about how the world works. But who is this even for? In this film, Ralph, if you don't know, goes into a materialized version of the internet. Unbelievably, this image of the internet is not the least bit visually interesting. It's like these filmmakers didn't even try. There is more to say about Sarah Silverman's saccharine performance, about the stupid emotional lessons about friendship and betrayal that this film thinks it's "teaching" us, and about the ridiculous plot. But this is a phoned-in sequel that isn't worth anyone's time. Ralph is at the absolute bottom of my list.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 68

2018 Animated Movie Roundup

I have been puzzling over which films might be nominated in the five slots for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. Last year you might remember that voters scraped the absolute bottom of the barrel. So few good animated movies came out that the members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch unironically nominated The Boss Baby and Ferdinand as somehow equal in quality to Coco. Their hands were tied, though. According to the rules for this category, if a certain number of animated features is released in any given year, there will be five nominees. The threshold was reached in 2017, but the quality was not.

This year, however, we're in a different situation. Early in the year, Wes Anderson's gorgeous (if twee) Isle of Dogs came out, and in June Pixar/Disney released Incredibles 2 (which does have a really awesome sequence where a baby fights a racoon but which ends up being only just fine). And here we are in December and Spider-man: into the Spider-verse, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Mirai are all in theatres.

There are even two additional contenders for this category, as far as I can tell. Those are Nick Park's Early Man and Milorad Krstić's Ruben Brandt, Collector (which I want to see whether it gets nominated or not).

* * *

Through a stroke of sheer luck I managed to see Hosoda Mamoru's Mirai. It's playing in select cities (this week it's Oakland, Tucson, Vancouver, and a few others), and as soon as I heard about the movie I googled it and it was playing in Tallahassee, where I live. It screened twice only in one weekend via Fathom Events, and I secured myself a ticket knowing nothing about the movie.

...And it is one of my favorite things I saw this year. Mirai is the story of little two-year-old Kun, whose parents bring home a baby sister. The little boy is inevitably jealous, as his parents divert some of their attention to the little girl and away from him. In the world of Mirai, however, Kun is visited by a few impossible guests, including his sister as a middle-schooler. (The title of the movie, Mirai, is the girl's name, but it also means the future. In Japanese the title is a pun: 未来のミライ – Mirai from the Future.)

This is a magical, deeply moving film. It starts off simple, with the smallest of problems, but it becomes a gorgeous meditation on family connections, what we pass down through our familial lines, the histories of our ancestry, and the importance of letting small things go in favor of big relationships. I fell in love with this film and I can't recommend it enough.

* * *

And then there's the sequel to Wreck-it-Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet. The original film came out in 2012, so I have to confess to forgetting whether I liked it or not. This is actually why I keep a blog in the first place, because I can never remember why (or sometimes even whether) I liked a movie or not. In any case, I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet and thought it was very, very stupid.

It's worth saying, I think, that one of the reasons I really disliked this movie is that I think Sarah Silverman's acting is very bad. John C. Reilly is great – he's always great – and he plays his big, dumb character with sincerity and sensitivity. But Silverman is doing this phony little kid voice that a) doesn't sound like a little kid at all and b) sounds like an adult's commentary on a little kid. It's as though the entire performance is a kind of tongue-in-cheek critique of how stupid little kids are. (And I don't think kids are stupid at all, so I don't understand why this movie thinks they are.)

What annoyed me about it so much is that Ralph Breaks the Internet thinks its audience is stupid. The jokes are all stupid, the "lessons" it has to "teach" are all stupid, and although it purports to be a movie about the internet, it has nothing interesting to say about the internet at all. It is simply filled with a bunch of things we already know about the internet. Its plot is all clichés and its sentiments are all hackneyed. I haven't seen a lot of movies I've hated in 2018, but this is easily the worst thing I've seen all year. It doesn't even try to be a good movie.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a complete and total waste of time. (Oh, I finally looked to see whether or not I liked the original Wreck-it-Ralph. Turns out, I didn't. I ranked it 73 out of 87 in 2012. Right below The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey.)

* * *

But why keep trashing Ralph Breaks the Internet when I could be talking about how fucking awesome Spider-man: into the Spider-verse is?

This. Movie. Is. So. Cool. There are numerous things to say about this, and I think the plot is inventive and fun, but Into the Spider-verse is, after all, a superhero movie, and so you already know the plot. An evil bad guy with lots of money or lots of spunk has invented some insane device in order to do something or other and destroy the world in the process. There is one small way to stop him, and stop him we must! Save the world! As you can probably surmise, the world does not get destroyed and the villain does not succeed. But this is just the plot, and if you've come to Into the Spider-verse for the plot, you're here for the wrong reasons.

The importance here is on the visuals, which are the coolest I've seen in maybe the last five years. This film is endlessly inventive, totally bizarre, and completely delightful. It has an awesome soundtrack, but mostly it just looks so cool. Into the Spider-verse replicates the look of a comic book in fascinating ways, as though you're inside a moving comic book. I saw it in 3D and I think that's an absolute must. The movie uses several comic book devices as it tells its story, and it continued to surprise me, throughout its entire length, including during its (very cool) end credits sequence.

I can't recommend this movie enough. I've put it at #3 for the year – above most of the year's "best" movies, including Roma, A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, and Black Panther.

On Faith

I have thought for a long time that belief in a god and belief in extraterrestrial life forms were similar phenomena.

I was obsessed with watching The X-Files as a teenager and one thing that struck me about Mulder's total belief in extraterrestrial life was that it was akin to – in fact, Mulder stressed its identity with – faith considered much more broadly. Mulder had faith that he would see his sister again, that aliens existed, that his conspiracy theories were correct. In any case, a belief in something that no one else believes makes certain demands upon a subject: faith demands a kind of willful labor, where one actively rejects or at any rate suspends the beliefs and convictions of others in order to pursue one's own course.

In many ways, Ridley Scott's Prometheus manages to conflate this belief in aliens and belief in god. For many of the characters in Scott's film, belief in aliens is identical to belief in god because these characters believe that beings who are not human created humanity and somehow communed with humanity until some great fall of some kind when humanity fell out of favor with these creator-aliens.

I have noticed that a number of my friends were disappointed with Prometheus. And there are, I might point out, numerous reasons to be disappointed with it: its cliché plotting, its at times downright awful dialogue, its shallow characterizations, its far-too-numerous but never-surprising plot twists.

But, well, maybe it's because I don't see a lot of relatively well-made movies like this anymore (too much Michael Bay), or maybe it's because Prometheus is much smarter than most movies made in this style – even if you disliked the movie, you will have to admit that the film demands that you do a lot of thinking while you are watching it – or maybe it's because I am fascinated by the enormous (indeed almost overwhelming) amount of rape-imagery in the film, but I rather liked Prometheus. And I mean this in a kind of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol kind of way. My expectations were not very high, and I found the film enjoyable.

As for all of this talk of aliens and gods and faith. It is here where the film lost me. Forced caesarians performed to remove alien bodies from the abdomens of human women: now that's fascinating. Meditations on the origins of humanity and why our "creator" has abandoned us: no thanks. I know this matters to a lot of people and many are curious about this subject – people spend their lives studying this subject. I sympathize, and anyway people ought to be free to spend their time as they wish. But I honestly don't understand these questions. They don't resonate with me.

So for me, Prometheus stops being smart as soon as we start asking why our creator abandoned us. The important questions for me in the film are: Why does this android want me to gestate an alien life form? Why would this non-human biped go to sleep for thousands of years inside of a ship on a planet far removed from the humans it spawned? How does this bizarre alien life form work to evolve so quickly? What is that black slime in the urns? Why are the urns laid out in weird rows? What's with the giant metallic humanoid face? These questions are interesting to me. Why did daddy stop loving me? is not.

Best Animated Feature 2007

I hate when it's been a long time since I blogged about movies, because then I have a backlog of films to talk about and I have to post about four movies at once. The real reason I have to do this is because I've been watching (as you might :-) have noticed) far more movies than is normal for me. This probably a) because I'm kind of bored with the Robert McRuer book I'm reading and b) because I'm feeling very, very lazy of late.

I also have not been watching any 2007 movies lately. They just haven't been interesting me for some reason since I got back to Florida. But I have remedied that, and two of the movies below are actually from this year and have appeared on the 2007 list to your right:

First off, the movie that is sure to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars next February: Brad Bird's Ratatouille. It's a brilliant piece of animation, with some wonderfully memorable characters. It's also absolutely hilarious, and the laughs are all gotten through clever, well-thought-out jokes. There are no easy gags here. (The character that had me laughing the hardest was the Peter O'Toole-voiced food critic Anton Ego.) And the film is definitely a Brad Bird movie, by which I mean, that Ratatouille is more of an action movie than anything else. It's also a movie about food, and some of the food fixed in the film is downright brilliantly conceived. There is a reason this little rodent chef becomes the toast of Paris. He really knows what he's doing. Pixar, too, has done it again. You're going to love this movie.

Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (Indigènes) is a war movie similar, in a lot of ways, to other war movies of the late 1990s, especially Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The film follows four Algerian soldiers who have been recruited into the French army in World War II. The soldiers, despite hard work and loyalty to the French, are consistently passed over for promotions and never given leave, while their white compatriots are both promoted, and frequently allowed to visit their homes. There are no boats take them back to Algeria, one white colonel argues, but he is then reminded that "there were boats to bring them here." I have to confess that I got a little worried while I was watching this film. I was afraid it was going to be a rags-to-riches story like USAmerican filmmakers are known for where the Algerians fight hard and some of them die, but they prove their loyalty to France in the end and everyone in France recognizes what a mistake they've been making all along, even though it's too late to reward most of the Algerians for their service because so many are dead. But the ones that are still alive are rewarded and celebrated and take their place beside the white people who have treated them with contempt for so long. The movie didn't go in this direction, thankfully. And the parallel scenes to Saving Private Ryan serve to point up this difference in a way that is truly ingenious (the end of the film is the best part). Instead of a redemptive end to the film, the Algerian soldier we follow returns home to his poorly furnished flat and sits on his bed alone. And then we find out in a title card that the French government is still refusing to pay these Algerian soldiers their pensions after all these years. It's a powerful message after all, even though the film tends toward the conventional.

Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger is brilliant. This film is from 1975 and it stars Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider (she of Last Tango in Paris fame). It's a superbly photographed mystery that follows Jack through Africa to Germany and finally to Spain, where the last hour or so of the film is spent, soaking in the Spanish scenery. It's a movie about identity and fleeing the lives that we build for ourselves that trap us. The Passenger has long been forgotten, but was released again in theatres last year and has now made an appearance on DVD. You should definitely check it out. The last nine or so minutes of the film is a single (virtuosic) shot that is both shocking, confusing and compelling. I loved this movie.

Umberto D. is a classic Vittorio de Sica movie, from about the same time as Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief. It is almost as well known as those two movies, but it is significantly different as well in some interesting ways. Umberto D. follows a depressed old man, who is contemplating suicide, and it seems to be a sad movie about a disaffected character in the way his earlier movies were. But Umberto D. is really a kind of comedy, or, at the least, it has a happy ending. The old man in the film is, finally, kind of ridiculous and funny, at least that's how I see him. He is a sad man, or thinks he is a sad man, but all of his sadness is a kind of silliness, really, and the film ends upbeat, with a celebration of the man's relationship to his little dog, Flike. You know how I feel about the elderly, so I couldn't totally sympathize with this old codger, but I kind of think De Sica had that in mind.

Terrorism Is Afoot

I always assumed in addition to my friends and the people I have invited to read my weblog, that it would be read by people who were not made aware of its existence by me. It's fine. If you'd like to read, you certainly may. I welcome it, in fact... and feel free to comment if you get the urge. I'd love to hear from you. I make no secret of this weblog. But if you are going to use this weblog to sabotage the work and relationships of others, I advise you not to. It's just not nice.

And now for news of the weekend...

On Friday, I left work and booked it to Hacienda Heights to see my friend Scott in The Diary of Anne Frank at Los Altos High School. Los Altos is doing something right. I don't mean that the show was brilliant or anything: it was far from it, but this place was packed. I have never seen so many people at a high school theatre performance. It was quite something. I was literally the last person to purchase a ticket. How is it that a depressing high school show about Jewish internment can have a bigger audience than a hilarious comedy at a university with really cool special effects. What is Los Altos doing right that the publicist at CSUP is doing wrong? I ask you.

Scott played Mr. Frank. He was excellent as usual. I really hope this young man studies acting somewhere when he goes to university. He has so much potential. I don't particular care for Anne Frank, but Scott's performance had me actively holding back the tears. I have to say, though: weird choice for a high school play.

On Saturday, I watched Empire of the Sun, which might be my favorite of all of Spielberg's movies. I know that I have trashed Spielberg repeatedly in this space and elsewhere, and I still think that he deserves a lot of the bile I chuck his way, but Jaws and now Empire of the Sun, make me really appreciate ol' Steven. I still dislike A.I. and E.T. and The motherfucking Terminal, but Empire of the Sun is beautiful: surreal and dreamlike, but hugely emotionally affecting with an interesting political core. A good portion of the film is a redux of James Clavell's King Rat, but damn the script (by the superb Tom Stoppard) is good.

After Empire, I met Wahima in La Verne and we saw The Incredibles, which has charm for days and is unbelievably clever. Everyone has seen this movie and everyone loves it, so I won't say anything more than I loved it too and I think it is a lock for the Animated Feature Oscar and will probably get an original screenplay nomination, too. Machine washable, darling: that's a new feature.

I visited my parents after the Brad Bird flick and we finalized the Christmas letter. My family cracks me the fuck up, I swear. Michael and Debs went on and on about how dad ought to take out his Chinese furniture store joke. They think it's too much of a non sequitor. Aside from the finer points of comedy in the Christmas letter, we discussed national politics, other Christmas logistics, and the huge fight during the NBA game on Friday night. My dad suggests that President Bush send Colin Powell and Jimmy Carter as his envoys to create lasting peace between Palestine and Israel. This sounds like a great plan to me, but we all know it won't be happening.

Then I went to see The Foreigner. It's a lot better. Chris seems worse, but that is to be expected, I suppose. The audience liked him well enough, I guess. Tori has sped up a lot and her performance is much funnier because of it. The one joke I put in the show got a huge laugh, so I felt good about that. The show is much the same as it was when I first reported on its progress in this space about two weeks ago. It has the same strengths and weaknesses I thought it had then. I still think Jensen is the strongest voice in the show. Matt Guerra is still wonderful. And I still think Brittney, Tori, and Rick are giving good—if unremarkable—performances. The dialects are much stronger, and I only detected a few errors: almost all of them Gelvin's.

Busy day, Saturday. After the show Linda drove me out to her new house in Cathedral City (Palm Desert). It's lovely: more lovely than you can imagine from my words. The best description I can give is that it looks like a picture out of the Pottery Barn catalog. It's truly beautiful. At any rate, Tori, Brittney, Catherine, Peter, Matt, Linda and I drank wine and sat in the hot tub late into the night. I drank (in this order) Shiraz, more Shiraz, Zinfandel, and Merlot (I was plastered by this point and just didn't care.)

Today I woke up, showered, had coffee and some eggs and after sending the girls and Peter off to their matinée of The Foreigner, Linda, Matt, their cats and I headed calmly back toward Los Angeles County. We stopped for coffee near the outlet malls on I-10, and I made a quick excursion into the Club Monaco Outlet where I purchased both a hat and a hoodie for under $25. I will be returning to the outlet mall when I have more time. They had $20 jeans there. It's like shopping in Canada! On our way through Riverside County (Banning and such) there must have been 3-5 inches of snow on the ground. No joke: snow—lots of it—on the ground in California. There was snow on the goddamn palm trees. I have never in my life seen anything like it. It was so cool. And then the snow just stopped around the San Bernardino County line: it was so weird.

Today I finished last week's Sunday Crossword (this is 2 weeks in a row, people!), made the grocery list for Thanksgiving, randomly cleaned, paid some bills and finally watched John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood, which, if I may say, is no Do the Right Thing. Nevertheless when Tre hands Furious the gun and Furious holds his son, I started to cry: a lot. This really moved me. I guess it just hit me how much this boy had lost and how much he needed his father to hold him in that moment. The hug also held all of Furious's hopes for his son. With that hug he declared victory on the Hood.
But... except for the hug and a couple of other nice moments (that Morris Chestnut is a looker, ain't he?), I thought the film was really preachy: maybe even extremely preachy.

Why am I not finishing my apps to Berkeley and Davis? Is it because I think I won't get in, or is it because I think I don't need to try that hard? Whatever it is, it is procrastination. I just can't get up the energy to go and finish all of this application stuff. I feel so... inadequate.

Just so you know, I have busted out my Xmas music. Feel free to do the same. And if you happen to burst into Burl Ives' "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas," while standing in line at the grocery or the coffeehouse, just ignore the bewildered stares of others. It's the fucking holidays. Bring cheer to the lives of others! Cheers.