Totoro

My friend Michael and I both decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro last night for the first time. Michael is on a Japanese animation kick, and I'm going to see the stage production of My Neighbour Totoro in London in June and wanted to be prepared. Then we texted about it the next day. Here's what we said.

Michael: Just finished. I thought it was delightful.

Aaron: Yes, it was!! I love that cat bus. There was a little too much screaming little girls.

Michael: Oh I thought the whole time the screaming was going to be a fight for you.

Aaron: Little girls really do not need to scream that much. Hush up.

Michael: I was so immediately taken with Totoro, his little sprites, and their bus cat.

Aaron: Love that Totoro. And love his little leaf hat.

Michael: I didn't expect the plot to go in the direction it did. I expected more fantastical adventure and this was pastoral life interrupted by childhood fear. I also assumed Totoro would be a very different character. I can't remember the word for it, but his actions didn't seem to make normal sense. He was following his own whims and if he wanted to fly around on a top then baby, he was gonna. On a personal viewing level, it mattered a lot to me that the dad especially didn't scoff at the kids when they were insistent they saw Totoro. He honored it and said ok we better go show some respect!

Aaron: Your analysis here is wonderful. You're very right and I hadn't thought of all of this.

Michael: Tell me how it landed for you.

Aaron: In my viewing of kids movies recently I've been very preoccupied with the attitude the film takes. Most kids movies are not about the experience of being a child at all; they're about parenting. Totoro splits the difference by having two kids of different ages. 

Michael: This felt almost completely about the childhood experience. You're so right in the way the parental experience is so commonly the background reasoning behind plotting. 

Aaron: And Totoro himself is not the focus of this movie. The first supernatural figure we meet is the soot-mites, actually. And if we consider things that way, then the movie is much more about finding pleasure in the haunted house, learning to love ghosts, staying open to wonder and terror. Totoro appears at the bus stop when they're scared and lonely. He is a kind of embodiment of the scary figure in the dark or in the forest. But as it turns out, he's cuddly and helpful and magically gifted. (Contrast with the way Americans think about Jesus when they're kids.)

Michael: Oh that's such a good way to frame him. That lines up better with my surprise about him. He's unknowable, but it turns out to at least be in a fun way.

Aaron: What I love about Totoro (and maybe Miyazaki more generally) is its approach to the mysterious and unknown. He asks the child to head toward what scares her. In this case her mother's illness and a new house and her sister's absence.

Michael: I see that in a lot of his other work too. And the films don't demand the characters face those fears without flinching. The characters are allowed their breakdowns and acknowledgment of how overwhelming it all is. 

Oscar Nominations 2023: 6 of 9 (Animated Features)

For some reason, each of the animated feature films only received one nomination. Usually one or two get an Original Score nomination or an Original Song nomination, and sometimes screenplay nominations or even Best Picture, but not this year. The other key thing about 2023 – and every year – is that you can generally expect the movies to be split between the studios. This is why there's almost always a random Netflix nominee you've never heard of, one nominee from Japan, and another nominee from Europe in addition to the big studio usual suspects from Disney–Pixar and Dreamworks. I assume this is because the Animation branch votes in blocs. Anyway, here are this year's five nominees.

Spider-man: across the Spider-verse

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Jason Schwartzman, Oscar Isaac, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Jake Johnson, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Shea Whigham, Greta Lee, Amandla Stenberg, Jharrel Jerome, Andy Samberg, Jack Quaid, Rachel Dratch, Ziggy Marley, Jorma Taccone, Daniel Kaluuya, Mahershala Ali, J.K. Simmons, Donald Glover, Elizabeth Perkins, Kathryn Hahn, Ayo Edebiri, Nicole Delaney, Antonina Lentini, Atsuko Okatsuka, Peter Sohn

This is very very cool for all of its running time. It's unexpected and interesting, and it has more surprises up its sleeve than you can basically ever imagine. The animation for this film – as with the original – is inventive and almost shocking. It places different styles next to one another in such a brilliant way that it makes the totally incongruous seem natural. In many ways this is just a genius piece of moviemaking and more-than-worthy sequel to the first film, Into the Spider-verse. But... and this is a very large but... the ending drove me nuts. I went with a friend, and when it was over we looked at one another and said "shame about the ending". The filmmakers opt for a cliffhanger, but it feels inept, and because I wasn't expecting a cliffhanger, I was very disappointed by this choice. Still, this is a good movie, and I would say it's the favorite to win the Oscar (though it is not what I'm going to predict). Also, I have a question: when all of the spideys are in the world with all of the spideys instead of in their home-worlds, who's guarding the home worlds? They're just all hanging out in a different dimension and leaving their worlds to go to hell? I wouldn't mind this idea so much except that this Spider-man series sees the world as intensely dark and filled with peril. To take this series at its word, the world is on the absolute brink of ruin and evil. Anyway, it's something I've been wondering.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Feature

My rating: #34 out of 78

The Boy and the Heron

(君たちはどう生きるか)

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Ko Shibasaki, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Keiko Takeshita, Jun Fubuki, Sawako Agawa, Karen Takizawa

I really, really liked this and it's the highest ranking of the animated features for me this year. It's surreal and imaginative and beautiful and striking and magical. This is also an extraordinarily adorable take on the multiverse and the ways that grief fragments the experiences of our lives. I say adorable because this vision of the multiverse (and we had a few this year with Past Lives, The Boy and the Heron, Spider-man, and Robot Dreams) thinks about the different ways that loss affects us, and the different ways that those we love and lose can live on within us or around us. This is a film about family and legacies, but it's also about how we process the loss of a loved one. And it does that in typical, surreal, Miyazaki fashion, with goose-stepping parakeets and shattering castles and souls reborn. This is wonderful.

Will win: Animated Feature

Could win: N/A

My rating: #13 out of 78

Elemental

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Peter Sohn

Cast: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O'Hara, Mason Wertheimer

This is cute. It’s completely predictable in every imaginable way, but it’s kind of irresistible anyway. This is, first and foremost, a story of immigrants and growing up with immigrant parents, and although it would seem to indicate some kind of specific allegory for the immigrant experience of one group, it's trying to do something more inclusive and, perhaps (I'm not quite sure) more interesting. It's intensely clever in its world building, and I liked much of it, especially the world itself. It definitely has its problems, though. For one thing, the main character, "Ember", spends most of the film as an anxious ball of fire (if you will), and she's uptight and kind of annoying. The young water-man who loves her, "Wade", is perfect and understanding and does all of the right things. This makes for a movie that is off-kilter. She is hard to like and he is easy to like. I think it's just a kind of basic androcentric position that filmmakers often take. I think my other problem with movies like this (predictable romantic comedies, I mean... or maybe I mean animated movies that are aimed at young people) is that “doing the right thing” is so obvious. The audience knows what the right thing to do is way before the characters figure it out. This makes us feel good as viewers, of course – we are so much wiser than these fools/kids on the screen – but I find it very boring. And nothing like real life. And more often than not, parents are not quite as open to change as these narratives would like to imagine. But, hey, this is a fable about fire-people and water-people, so we can live in the fantasy.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #60 out of 78

Robot Dreams

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Pablo Berger

Cast: Ivan Labanda, Tito Trifol, Rafa Calvo, José García Tos, José Luis Mediavilla, Graciela Molina, Esther Solans

This is much better than the cuteness of Elemental. Pablo Berger's film is a very cute story about coping with loneliness and meeting a friend instead. Or perhaps it's about falling in love instead of friendship. Actually, yes; it's about falling in love. There are several wonderful things about this. First, it's done as a film without dialogue; there's sound, of course, so it isn't a silent movie, but the whole thing is done without anyone talking. Second, this movie is called Robot Dreams, and it is quite literally that. It lives in the multi-verse world that so many of this year's films live in, where we are inside the dreams of a robot for some of the film's running time. These dreams are sweet and sad and sometimes wonderful. The whole thing is inventive and delightful, and then it takes a turn in the third act. This turn is nothing short of extraordinary, and because I wasn't expecting it, I still feel surprised by the wistful regret and wisdom that Robot Dreams offers its audience. It's a really lovely movie. Now, let's talk about release dates. I do not understand why a distributor would release a movie for a single week in theatres in December so that it can qualify for the Oscars and then not release the film in wider release during the six weeks it's nominated. Literally Robot Dreams will never be as popular as it is right this second, and yet Neon is planning to release the movie in May or June well after either The Boy and the Heron or Spider-man: across the Spider-verse will already have taken home the Animated Feature Oscar. Why? What is the logic here? It makes absolutely no sense to me. So, anyway, this is impossible to see on either a big screen or a streaming service right now, and actually it makes me kind of mad. (Mind you, I'm annoyed with the distributors of Io Capitano and Perfect Days, too; Cohen Media is doing this in addition to Neon.) And I really don't like bootlegging things – they actually deserve my money – but I got frustrated and found the movie here.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #49 out of 78

Nimona

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy, Lorraine Toussaint, Beck Bennett, RuPaul, Indya Moore, Julio Torres

Oh dear. I wrote my thoughts on this already here. This is very gay, and I'm glad it's very gay, but it's also predictable and boring and has some "very important" lessons it's interested in teaching us. No thanks. As much as I like gay things, I would like them to be better than this.  I will say that I love Riz Ahmed and I love this very gay cast (except Chloë Grace Moretz; I haven't forgiven her for this really offensive act of outing she pulled in 2018), but Nimona is not a good movie. My friend Caleb says that the original graphic novel is very good, and he even mailed me a copy, so I'm gonna read that and hope it's better than this nonsense. I recommend that you do that too.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #76 out of 78

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano

One of My Favorite Films of 2017

A Ghost Story is one of my favorite movies of the year. Right now I have it at #2. It's a beautiful film.

A Ghost Story is a haunting, mysterious fable about longevity, about what lives on after us, about letting go. It also manages to be whimsical in lots of ways, and to rethink what we even mean by a ghost. The image of the ghost with the sheet over its head and holes for eyes is a very old one – a child's image of a ghost, or perhaps a Hayao Miyazaki image of a ghost. This is childish or whimsical; it's even sort of silly. But it turns serious quite quickly, even haunting, and there is an extraordinary payoff to its sheet-over-the-head aesthetic.

David Lowery's film is a kind of fusion of Kelly Reichardt, Tsai Ming-Liang, Terrence Malick, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it was just my cup of tea. The thing is, it doesn't feel derivative. It feels totally original and fascinating, and once you think you've figured it out, it goes further, into uncharted, strange territory.

(One warning. This is not a long movie at all, but it is a slow, contemplative film. If you don't like Reichardt, or Tsai or Weerasethakul, you will be annoyed by this movie's pace.)

The film's third act is my favorite section of the film. These parts of the film are about time and waiting and being. At one point we seem to project thousands of years into the future and then jump back another thousand and start again. A Ghost Story wonders what it means to live on, to live with, what it means to be in the first place. This meditation is about how people (or things?) haunt us – it is a ghost story, after all – but it is itself haunting, as we might think about how we are going to live on or what came before us or, indeed, what we are in the first place.

I loved this movie.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 13 of 14

The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Hideaki Anno, Miori Takimoto, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masahiko Nishimura, Stephen Alpert, Keiko Takeshita, Mirai Shida, Jun Kunimura, Shinobu Otake, Nomura Mansai (except that they all spoke English when I saw it, so: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Stanley Tucci, Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, Jennifer Grey)

This is apparently not going to be (as has been reported) Miyazaki's final film. We should all breathe a sigh of relief at this. The subject matter of The Wind Rises is not Miyazaki's usual fanciful content, so I was sort of worried that The Wind Rises wouldn't be as magical as his previous films. I oughtn't to have worried one bit. This is a film about an artist, and his visions of what he can create are told through beautiful, fanciful dreams that feel like nothing but magic. It is gorgeous. The score is beautiful (and really should've taken Philomena's spot – who remembers that score?), but what's really on show here are Miyazaki's beautiful vistas, intriguing ways of looking at things, memorable quirky characters, and fanciful storytelling. This is a director who tells us that a couple is falling in love by having them fly paper airplanes to one another from the ground to a third-story window. The planes in flight are breathtaking, and the film itself becomes about what it is like to love something, to dedicate your life to something only to have it destroyed by something else (the military, illness). This is beautiful stuff and is easily my favorite in the Animated Feature category, not that that means it's going to win; it hasn't a prayer.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win:N/A

My Rating: #21 out of 82

Ernest et Célestine (Ernest & Celestine)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Dominique Maurin, Anne-Marie Loop

I don't get to see this before the Academy Awards, and my bet is that most people won't have seen it. It, frankly, looks adorable, and captures the look of the children's books on which it is based (the books are by Gabrielle Vincent and you can see them – some are even translated into English – here). French animation has soared in this category recently, and it has become a safe bet for a nomination almost every single year, though (it would appear) not for the win. Films like Une Vie de Chat, Persepolis, and Sylvain Chomet's superb L'Illusionniste and Les Triplettes de Belleville have all gotten nominations, but none has gone on to the win (despite L'Illusionniste's superiority to almost all of the films – animated or not – that were released in 2010). Ernest et Célestine is released in the U.S. today, so if you live in a city bigger than mine you may have better luck than I catching this picture. 
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

The Croods

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Kirk DeMicco, Chris Sanders

Cast:Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman

I liked this film more than most of my friends did, and I liked it mostly for the kinds of lovely visuals you can see in the image above. The Croods is a silly little story, with characters who are, for the most part, unattractive (they are cro-magnons, after all). The plot covers a family who are running away from the splitting of the supercontinent Pangaea. It is, more importantly a story of learning new things – adapting to new technologies and new ideas. It is about parents learning to listen to their kids and kids learning to listen to their parents. In the ideology of this film, the parents don't know the best way to do things, but they have much bigger hearts than the children. All of this is sort of sweet, and the tone is tongue-in-cheek enough that it didn't make me groan too heavily at any point. And then there is the art design! It is gorgeous. There are millions of bizarre little creatures and plants that look like something out of a prettified Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel painting. The Croods is worth watching for these inventive visuals alone.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 82

Monsieur Hulot Est Vivant!

I find myself biased against animated films, generally. This isn't that they aren't good films. There have been some really great animated movies in the last ten years. This year, I really liked Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon, for example, and last year I was a big fan of The Princess and the Frog. I like animated movies, in other words, and I see most of the ones that get good reviews.

They almost never, however, rank very high on my end-of-year film rankings. For a while I have wondered why this is, and I have been given a bit of grief over it before -- this was probably around the time of Les Triplettes de Belleville and Finding Nemo. But I think that my anti-animation bias is mostly due to the subject matter of many animated films. Of course there is Miyazaki, and I love John Lasseter, but even when these films are not about children per se, they frequently feel geared toward children.

All of this rambling is a preface to me telling you that I adored Sylvain Chomet's L'Illusionniste. Absolutely adored. And I didn't feel this way about Les Triplettes; L'Illusionniste is a whole other kettle of fish.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it is a Jacques Tati film. That fact, to me, already makes the film a must-see. If you have loved Tati's films in the past you cannot miss L'Illusionniste. Chomet has adapted a Tati script from the mid-1950s that had never been filmed by Tati himself. The adaptation is lovely! The main character is a down-on-his-luck magician named Tatischeff (Tati's own given name) and though he is an animated character, he possesses the unique gangliness, awkward gait, and seeming obliviousness that easily identified Tati's Monsieur Hulot. In other words the film's star is immediately recognizable and lovable on the instant.

But L'Illusionniste is also a Sylvain Chomet film. It is a comical movie, but it is also deeply sad. Chomet's balance of these two is flat-out masterful. The film manages to juggle a persistent nostalgia (the film's star is, after all a beloved icon who has been deceased many years) and a delightful, often breathtaking sense of whimsy with a rather sad plot about a man with outdated skills looking for work in an unkind economy. This is also a movie about regret: a kind of love-letter to or hopeful vision of a more generous mode of parenthood.

For L'Illusionniste is, at heart, a film about parenting; it is not, however, a film about children.

It's also a film about being poor, about how much things cost, and about how children don't understand the sacrifices parents make.

And it is also a movie about magic: illusions, sure, but also noticing the magic around us all the time. Parenting is itself magical in this movie, and Chomet asks us to see the labor our parents do to support us, the worry they expend for our safety, the dreams they give up to nurture our dreams, as quiet, unacknowledged miracles, little bits of magic that grace our lives every day.

L'Illusionniste displays Chomet's characteristic style. Some of the characters are intentionally (if rather beautifully) grotesque, and there is less dialogue than in a silent film.

Instead of dialogue the movie is filled with powerful standalone images, beautifully choreographed farcical sequences, and delightful non sequiturs; these accumulate to form a whole that is emotionally arresting and whimsically transportive. It is easily one of the best films of the year.

Two New Ones

If you care about movies, and you do, you know you do, you need to see District 9, the new film from South African director Neill Blomkamp.

It is, of course, important to remember that District 9 is kind of gross. In fact, it's actually pretty disgusting. I went with my roommates and both of them thought they would need to get up and leave the theatre at different parts of the film. District 9 is not for the weak-stomached.

But man is it good! Blomkamp's film follows a man who is working for a governmental coalition who is trying to move a group of aliens who have settled in a slum in Johannesburg. The movie begins by following this guy (who's kind of a loser) on his errands through the alien slum. Then, weird stuff starts to happen. I am not going to spoil this for any of you who haven't seen it, but for my money District 9 is the most intriguing, visually compelling, consistently inventive science fiction film since Danny Boyle's Sunshine.

Now, I have heard a lot of talk about how District 9 is a social commentary about (variably) racism, the third world, poverty, and government corruption. For me the film doesn't have much to say, really, about any of these topics. The aliens in District 9 are fundamentally (by which I mean essentially) different from the humans in the movie. They do not share DNA patterns. In this way, of course, the differences between aliens and humans cannot be likened to differences between humans of different races. I mean, white people are not biologically different from people of color. I guess for me District 9 doesn't need to be "about" anything. It is just a kick-ass film, filled with suspense and tension, interesting characters, loads of surprises, and an inventive plot.

I also saw the new Miyazaki film, Ponyo and was underwhelmed. Comparing Ponyo to Miyazaki's previous work is, I realize, setting the movie to a very high standard, but Ponyo just doesn't hold up. It is, of course, visually stunning, but the plot of the new film is basically Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. It differs here and there, but not by much, and I just never really dropped into it.

Quick Reviews I Haven't Posted Yet

I'm behind on telling y'all what I've been seeing lately. All of a sudden I have things to do and projects to work on and friends who want to spend time with me. So here we go

Theatre:

Swan Lake, in a fabulous, completely thrilling production by Matthew Bourne returned to Los Angeles and is at the Ahmanson now (or will be until Sunday night). I saw it in the highest seats in the theatre and in a packed house last Thursday night. I totally loved it. Matthew Bourne is a genius, if a bit self-conscious, and the production is superb. This show is awesome and not to be missed. Thankfully, you can all get it on DVD since the show is almost ten years old.

Mother Courage and Her Children at Cal Poly Pomona's Theatre Department (my alma mater and on-again-off-again employer) was dreadful. It's a shame, too. Many of my former students were in the show and there is a lot of talent in the department: it just needs to be trained and tapped in the right ways. Letting the actors loose with little to no direction and giving them Brecht to speak is no way to teach a group of young actors anything, unfortunately, and that is just what happened with this production. It's closed, now, thankfully, so let's all start putting it behind us and move on to something more closely resembling good theatre.

Old Movies:

Terrence Malick's Badlands, his first feature film, is a really good film about disaffected youths (there are so many of these). I saw this movie after seeing Malick's other three (later) features, so I can only really watch it through the lens of Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World. So to me, Badlands is a fascinating piece about the loss of innocence and our ability to be controlled by forces around us; led, if you will, by those who are stronger than us. I don't necessarily mean forced or raped or anything like that, but just influenced, by will perhaps, by those we love and those who wish to affect us (and maybe even those who don't want anything from us.)

Carol Reed's film noir piece The Third Man is widely considered one of the best in the genre. It stars Joseph Cotten mostly with Orson Welles appearing eventually. Most everyone has seen this movie and I know I'm sort of late to the game on this one. I liked it, and it's rather good film noir, but not quite black and white enough for my taste (too much happens during the day). I kept wishing someone slightly stronger than Cotten was leading me around that the script was a little more hard-boiled. It's written by Graham Greene, so I should've expected it to lean toward the Romantic, and perhaps that's placing an unwanted requirement on the film. I don't know; once you've seen Robert Siodmak's The Killers, I don't think there's anywhere to go but down. Still, Welles is great, there are some really cool lighting moments and the chase scene at the end is awesome.

Movies from 2005:

Zhangke Jia's The World is a slow-paced Chinese movie that reminded me a lot of Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn. The World is not quite as slow as that, but it sure takes its time. It follows several people around a theme park in Beijing that (get this) has replicas of monuments and buildings from all over the world. The main character performs in these huge extravaganza shows that are not like anything so much as those enormous dance shows staged by Lorenz Ziegfeld in the early part of the Twentieth century. It's mostly about consumer culture and how Capitalism is ruining China, but it's often touching and powerful. The end is awful and a huge letdown, but I liked it more than I disliked it. #63 out of 85 films.

And this morning I finally got to see Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, which everyone should go see. It's easily the best animated film that came out last year and should undoubtedly have won the Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards (but then, they didn't hand out Best Picture correctly, either, did they?) I loved this movie. It's absolutely bursting with awesome vistas and new-fangled magic. It's powerful and moving and it had stolen my heart after the first twenty minutes. It also features the voices of Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bale and (!) Billy Crystal. Rent this one for sure. Miyazaki is the mastermind behind Spirited Away and I think I may like Howl's Moving Castle even better than that film and that's saying a ton.

Movies from 2006:

Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), which was France's entry for Best Foreign Language Feature last year, totally sucks and it shouldn't have even been nominated. It's a cheese-ball pile of silliness with few redeeming qualities. It will probably be one of the worst movies on my list for 2006. Joyeux Noël is full of hokey laugh-out-loud sequences that require all suspension of disbelief but ask to be taken with complete seriousness. More than once I said "Give me a break!" out loud in the theatre and had to be shushed by strangers. This film is allegedly based on true events, but I didn't believe a bit of it.

Thankfully, I followed up Joyeux Noël by going to see last year's winner of the Oscar for Foreign Language Film: Gavin Hood's Tsotsi. And let me tell you, this movie deserved its award. It connects to the audience immediately and never looks back. I couldn't help but love the anti-hero at the center of the film and I wanted him to succeed more than anything. Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the main character is mesmerizing and compelling. There is no way to watch this movie and not fall totally in love with him. Go see it.