Soul

Soul is really sweet. It's a little too cutesy for me to truly love it – rather in the vein of Inside Out. Like Docter's earlier film this seems like an entire movie about teaching a life lesson to a teenage kid. This one's lesson is that there isn't one purpose in life. We don't know what we're going to be good at or what impacts we're going to have; so we need to be careful not to discount the great things around us that don't conform to our idealized version of ourselves. And we need to avoid getting stuck in a dream that is hampering us. This is, quite honestly, an excellent lesson, and this is a very charming movie, but I wouldn't really say it is for adults. 

Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, QuestLove and Rhodessa Jones (!) are all great.

Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 4 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Sicario

3 Nominations

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (Unbroken, Prisoners, Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Original Score: Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything)
• Sound Editing

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Victor Garber, Raoul Trujillo, Julia Cesar Cedillo, Bernardo Saracino, Maximiliano Hernandez, Lora Martinez-Cunningham, Edgar Arreola, Rio Alexander

I tried to stop hating this movie, but every time I think more about it I hate it more. It's exciting to watch, with many good performances, but what this message has to say about violence, about torture, about war, about international action, and about the violence perpetrated by our government is (to my mind) reprehensible. Still, I am glad that Jóhann Jóhannson got a nomination here. His score is interesting and creepy and metallic, and I am glad the Academy is recognizing scores like this. Roger Deakins' photography is gorgeous, as always; one day he will finally shoot a movie that people can really get behind and he can win an Oscar. This is thirteenth nomination. He's never won. But we might ask ourselves, as Judith Butler does in Frames of War, "As we watch a video or see an image, what kind of solicitation is at work? Are we being invited to take aim? Are we conscripted into the trajectory of the bullet or missile?" It is clear to me, as Butler says a little later, "that such visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective." Sicario celebrates violence, torture, and USAmerican exceptionalism far too much for me to have enjoyed watching it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #51 out of 62

Steve Jobs

2 Nominations

• Actor: Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)
• Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet (The Reader, Little Children, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Iris, Titanic, Sense and Sensibility)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Fassbender, Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Perla Haney-Jardine, Makenzie Moss

Steve Jobs! I never wrote about this movie; I kept meaning to, but I just never got around to it, I guess. The thing is I really liked it. I thought it worked very well in its own way, and I loved the performances – Fassbender and Winslet, but also Katherine Waterston and Michael Stuhlbarg. Jobs is a fascinating figure, and the movie peels him apart and demonstrates how personal life and career (for a creative type) are so intertwined. I am not sure I know why people disliked this movie as much as they did, but I will say that it's structure is really stagey. It is as though Steve Jobs was a stage play that somehow found its way to the big screen, but Aaron Sorkin didn't seem to bother to update it so that it would work for film. This is mitigated somewhat by Danny Boyle, but no one could make this screenplay less of a stage play. It's embedded in the structure itself. Each of the film's three acts takes place in basically the same location, and we begin each of the acts by jumping forward in time many years so that the audience spends the first couple of minutes of the act figuring out when we are and what has happened in the interim. And then we watch what happens with Jobs in the minutes leading up to a new product-launch. One of these happens at the end of each act. At one point in the film, Jobs complains that "It’s like 5 minutes before every launch everyone goes to a bar, gets drunk and tells me what they really think." This isn't so much a line that describes how Jobs is feeling as a line that describes how Sorkin's screenplay works. That's exactly what happens in the film. Still, in many ways this is an interesting history of the technological advancement of the last 30 years and some of the people who made that happen, and, as I said, I loved the acting.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Supporting Actress
My Rating: #20 out of 62

Inside Out

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Pete Docter (Up, WALL·E, Toy Story), Ronnie del Carmen, Josh Cooley, & Meg LeFauve
• Animated Feature

Director: Pete Docter

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone, Bobby Moynihan, Josh Cooley, John Ratzenberger, Rashida Jones

This is a really sweet children's movie, or, I guess, a movie for adolescents. It didn't really feel aimed at someone like me, so I have to say that I was sometimes bored in it. It was a little too cutesy and generic for me – the image above is a great example of the CandyLand way the film is designed. But everyone seemed to really like this movie, and I expect it to win the Oscar for Animated Feature. As much as filmmakers have tried to shift the perceptions of people toward animated film, most people still seem to see animated film as made for children (perhaps I include myself in "most people", as well). Inside Out strikes me as definitely not a film for adults, but adults have seemed to enjoy it, so I guess my initial impression is incorrect. I've linked above to where I have written a little about this, so I won't belabor the point, but I just never bought into the geography of the world inside the little girl's brain. It seemed at all times to be arbitrary, that is, the writers, at any given moment, would have been able to fix the problem – let the train leave just a little later and take Joy and Sadness back to central command, or whatever it is called, or let Joy and Sadness jump into the little memory chute that sends memories back up to HQ like Rob Lowe's shirt getting caught in that pneumatic tube in Tommy Boy. And a few times the writers did just adjust the rules of this brain-world whenever they wanted – the sequence where Bing Bong helps Joy escape the area of the little girl's brain where things are forgotten forever might pose a few questions for us such as: why can't the writers just make the wall of that place just a little lower? and: If that location means that things are forgotten forever, how is it that one is able to leave that place at all?
Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #38 out of 62

Ex Machina

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Alex Garland
• Visual Effects

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson

I was definitely into Ex Machina, and I wrote a meditation on what I see as the important depths of the film's amazing screenplay, that I recommend you read if you've seen the movie. I am really happy about these two nominations – I don't think it can win an Oscar in either category, but Alex Garland has written a couple of great screenplays in his career so far: 28 Days Later... and Sunshine, a personal favorite. He deserves this nomination and deserves to be more widely recognized for his work. Obviously Gleeson, Isaac, and Vikander are all having a great year, too, so that's excellent. If only there were an Oscar category for choreography: I want to nominate the dance sequence in Ex Machina for an Oscar (even if it would lose to Cinderella). In any case, if you haven't seen Ex Machina, you really must. It's an exciting, deep thriller.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 62

On Happy-Sad Feelings and Memory in General

At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat, but with, perhaps, the goal in mind of some sort of identity with others who felt the same way I did, here are a couple of thoughts on Inside Out.

First, it strikes me as rather odd that internet list-makers and such evaluate Pixar movies vis-à-vis other Pixar movies. I do realize that there is a clear studio brand here, and that one can begin to chart a kind of shift when Pixar and Disney joined up together, but wouldn't it make a little more sense to evaluate, say, a Brad Bird movie against or alongside another Brad Bird movie, and then a Pete Docter movie alongside another Pete Docter movie? Why is the Pixar brand itself so often the overriding conceptual frame with which we evaluate these films? For the record (since I brought it up), Docter directed Inside Out, and Docter's previous films for Pixar as director have been Up and Monsters, Inc.

Inside Out is kinda smart about feelings. It powerfully charts the way that society demands that we all be happy all of the time, and how we also (at least a lot of us, a lot of the time) want to be happy all of the time. And the film teaches its audience that it is totally ok not to be happy all of the time, that sometimes you feel sad and that feeling sad is the best way to get through a real problem. Throwing happiness at a real issue or trying to push through and see the bright side of every thing is not always the best way to process that thing. Where Inside Out heads, to take it even further, is not just to a place that says that it's ok to be sad, but also to teach its audience that some of the best memories are both happy and sad, or are complex mixtures of a whole range of feelings. Experiences are not made up of simply one emotion.

If you're reading this and thinking Yeah I know, then you're reacting the way I reacted to the film. What Inside Out does well is make these things really clear for a teenage or adolescent audience, and I'm glad it did that. But I sort of understood the message way earlier than the film wanted me to understand the message.

I also just didn't understand the spatial elements inside the brain of the little girl. The film set up a whole set of rules for how the girl's brain worked, but I felt like it didn't really play by these rules. Where are we? How does an emotion get sent into a different area of the memory, anyway? If something is forgotten forever how, exactly, does one get out of that space of forgotten-forever? I was frustrated by all of this: this purse of core memories, all of the spatiality in which the movie was so invested. I just didn't get it.

The movie does some really great things, though. Inside Out tells us that as one gets older, memories that were once very happy become sad memories. And Inside Out illustrates beautifully what it is like to lose a personality when one is a teenager and has trouble making sense of one's own self.

Still, I couldn't help but feel like this abstracting of this emotional world (which was actually a concretizing of the emotional world), seemed unspecific and often generic. Happiness, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, Anger. That's all this movie thinks there is?

Monsters! ...in an Adventure with Fraternities

It's not that Monsters University is a bad movie. It's just... unimaginative and feels rather tired.

Don't get me wrong; it has a couple of good jokes – the hippie guy singing folk songs in the quad, the mild-mannered mom who listens to death metal, the Carrie homage, and, well, I'm sure there were a couple more but right now I can't remember them – but most of MU is a parade of knowing winks to an audience who has already seen 2001's (totally brilliant) Monsters, Inc.

There are also the sentimental life lessons that so many "comedies", particularly other Billy Crystal films (one thinks immediately of City Slickers or Throw Momma from the Train or Mr. Saturday Night), feel that they need to teach us instead of spending more time telling jokes and making us laugh. In Monsters University these pearls of wisdom include:

1) The cool people are not really that great to hang out with and are actually a little mean. Instead of trying to spend time with the cool people, look at the group of nerds with whom you are stuck: some of those guys are pretty interesting, even if they are totally socially awkward.

2) Being a total control freak and a nerd really pays off in the end.

3) Sometimes you actually can't be what you've dreamed your whole life you wanted to be. A little cyclopean monster who resembles an olive with legs is not scary, no matter how hard he wants to be.

4) And last but not least: friendship, man. That's where it's at.

Now I'm not saying all these sentiments aren't lovely, I just wish I spent more time in the movie laughing and less time "learning" lessons like these. I put learning in quotation marks, because no one here is actually doing any learning. When a movie spends most of its running time confirming my beliefs about children, friendship, morality, teamwork, etc., and telling me things I think I already know, I generally start to feel that there is a problem. There are lots of new things to be said about friendship. And there are lots of new things to be said about popularity, homosociality, teamwork, nerdhood, and social awkwardness. But Monsters University sticks with the old clichés.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 12 of 13

Paperman

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: John Kahrs

This is a really sweet little picture with a very old heterosexual love plot. Content-wise Paperman reminded me of the opening sequence of Pete Docter's Up: it's a whimsical, fantastic little love story with a happy ending and a healthy dose of magic. And the movie has a just-say-no-to-the-9-to-5 attitude reminiscent of Pretty Woman, but really the sentimental idea that our day jobs are keeping us away from true love and having fun is not really restricted to Garry Marshall. In fact, it's a rather widespread sentiment. The animation of Paperman is what I loved. It kept me in mind of last year's Oscar-winner, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Paperman is gorgeously realized and beautifully animated... and it will probably win the evening's Oscar.

Will Win: Animated Short Film

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #3 out of 5

Adam and Dog

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Minkyu Lee

This is the most beautiful of the five films. It's the Biblical Adam and Eve story – the pleasures of Eden, the joys of naming the animals, the fall from the favor of G-d, and the expulsion from the Garden – but Minkyu Lee has added a dog to the narrative and the results are gorgeous. We follow the dog as he meets the animals and explores the forest; we watch the dog learn to fetch and play and love Adam. And when Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden at the end of this short film, Lee finds the dog to be the wisest of all creatures on Earth... and the most generous. The film ends with a moment of grace that I found deeply moving. Adam and Dog really ought to win the Oscar. Its animation is beautiful, its narrative is simple and touching, and I found its mercy and forgiveness profound.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Short Film

My Rating: #1 out of 5

Fresh Guacamole

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: PES

Imaginative and cool, this film is about food and gambling and hipster magic. It is delightful and will make you want to run to the nearest grocery store to pick up some avocados, onions, and jalapeños. At least that's what it did to me.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #4 out of 5

Head over Heels

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Timothy Reckart

This is a sweet story about the ways that we slowly drift apart from the people we love and the difficulties of bridging the chasms between us once they've formed. Head over Heels's answers to these difficulties were a little too easy for my taste, but the storytelling is clever and I loved the metaphor upon which the film is built.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #2 out of 5

The Longest Daycare

1 Nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: David Silverman

I didn't get it. I mean, I get the narrative. Little girl learns about caterpillars turning into butterflies and then saves a caterpillar/butterfly from being turned into art. But the beginning of this film is about the ways that our individualistic über-Capitalist culture promotes the well being of some children while leaving others, whom it deems less talented or less special or whatever, behind. The Longest Daycare begins with this sentiment but then gets distracted by butterflies, and I just don't see how the film's two halves go together.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #5 out of 5

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 8 of 13

Wreck-it Ralph

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Rich Moore

Cast: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jane Lynch, Jack McBrayer, Alan Tudyk, Ed O'Neill, Dennis Haysbert

Everyone seems to love Wreck-it Ralph except for me. What's happening? It's odd to me that this film is even nominated in this category when the far superior and much funnier Rise of the Guardians was left off the Animated Feature list this year. Ralph is the story of a video-game bad-guy who wants to be friends with all of the heroes of the video game after work-hours. Trouble ensues. He befriends a young glitch in a different video game and from there the plot becomes your standard dumb-older-man-meets-young-spunky-girl narrative where the guy learns all sorts of things (mostly "how to open his heart") from the young girl. The young girl herself, incidentally – and this is always how it goes – doesn't need to learn anything, but her pure, innocent, childlike affection manages to work its way past his crusty exterior. Zzzzz. This was all done so much better in 2001 in 2D (and this year in 3D) by a film called Monsters, Inc. In any case, Wreck-it Ralph feels like a re-tread to me. Retro video-game references spice it up a little bit, and Beard Papa has a cameo, but mostly I was bored.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Animated Feature

My Rating: #53 out of 63

ParaNorman

1 Nomination

• Best Original Screenplay

Director: Chris Butler & Sam Fell

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Elaine Stritch, Jeff Garlin, Tempestt Bledsoe, John Goodman

ParaNorman is really similar to Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. Both titles feature puns. Both films are about kids fighting Halloween monsters. Both are about kids who are "different" from the rest of the kids around them. ParaNorman was released in August and Frankenweenie had an October release, but Burton's film appears to be the favorite among voters. Frank(enweenie)ly I preferred this zombie comedy by Chris Butler and Sam Fell, though both films are pretty great. ParaNorman is about a young man who sees ghosts. He is a weird kid – and is subject to all sorts of bullying at school and at home – because he talks to the dead people in his life, communicates with dead dogs, and gets accosted by his strange, shifty, snaggle-toothed uncle. Then zombies attack the town and Norman has to come to the rescue to communicate with the undead and figure out how to solve his town's zombie problem. It isn't just that the weird, bullied kid turns out to be the town's savior (that plot has developed into a familiar trope) but that he has visions, which we get to see, and that friendship and his relationship with his sister and his bully are more important in ParaNorman than any rigorously gendered love plot. The heterosexual love plot is avoided completely in the movie, and the entire thing is inventive and charming, perhaps even... paradorable. (Forgive me.)

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #16 out of 63

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Peter Lord

Cast: Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Salma Hayek, Jeremy Piven, Anton Yelchin, Brendan Gleeson

In Britain this movie was called The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists!, a title I much prefer to The Pirates! Band of Misfits, but I don't suppose that matters much. Pirates! is very funny – in the vein of Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-rabbit. Plus the side characters are Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria. There are lots of laughs to be had using those two as antagonists to a pirate captain. Still, there are odd things about this movie. For example: Why is there so much computer animation in a stop-motion picture? The two styles jar when placed next to one another. And why is the Pirate Captain never given a name other than the Pirate Captain? Surely a funny name could have been fabricated. Honestly, though, I think this film is probably worth your time. It's rather delightful even if it looks odd.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #33 out of 63

Kids' Movies

I saw two kids' movies in the span of a couple of days. That is, I saw two animated movies in the span of a couple of days. One is definitely a kids' movie; the other is too, but it is also, definitely, something else...

Pete Docter's Up is charming and frequently funny and always sentimental. I liked it a lot because it has the same Pixar magic we've gotten used to with delightful features like Ratatouille and The Incredibles. Up is not as good as either of those two pictures, but it has some delightful, magical moments all the same.

Up is the story of an old white man who, in order to keep a promise to his deceased wife, transports their old family home from the middle of the city by tying thousands of balloons to the grate in the fireplace and floating it to South America. This is the stuff of movie magic: a rainbow of translucent balloons sailing by the windows of city-folk, busying themselves about their days. The rest of the film is much more conventional. In fact, the rest of the film is essentially one of the oldest movie narratives there is; to wit, a curmudgeonly, misanthropic old man meets a young kid who depends on him completely, and so the old man shows his true colors—invariably the feelings owned by a heart of gold—which had (but you knew this) been there all along, they just needed someone to love.

Conventional though it is, Up is at times breathtaking, frequently very funny, and nearly always visually (if not narratively) imaginative.

Henry Selick's Coraline, on the other hand, is totally completely brilliant from start to finish. The look of the film is stunning (it will remind you, immediately, of Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas); the visuals consistently intrigue, even when the plot is interesting enough that they don't need to. The voice talent—Keith David, in particular—is stellar.

The story... is the story of a horror movie, basically. Coraline is never disturbing enough that it would be inappropriate for children, but it is incredibly unnerving almost at all times, and visually... visually the movie is just wonderful. Again and again and again my jaw dropped in disbelief at the things that Coraline puts on the screen. It's a beautiful movie, well worth your time. Compared to Up, Coraline knocks it out of the water.