ParaNorman (Chris Butler & Sam Fell, 2012, USA)

A young boy who can see and speak with the dead must save his Salem-esque town by resolving a 300 year old curse, which ultimately means learning how to forgive bullies. To be honest, I found it tedious for the most part, and intermittently grating. The stop motion animation is creepy and weirdly ugly. It was like looking at ugly carpeting for an hour and a half. A promising enough cast is wasted on recycled storytelling and unappealing animation. Really, the animation reminds me of that hideous animation you see these days on children's television programs. The basic shell of the story is compelling, but it's buried in so many cliches and under so many shrill characters spouting so much bad dialogue that even the things I liked about it started to wear thin. I have friends who liked this, so I guess other people like this sort of blander than Tim Burton childhood kitsch. I didn't see anything particularly interesting or engaging though.
D

Brave (Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, 2012, US)

I confess that I've never been particularly enchanted by Pixar films, and off the top of my head, I can't think of the last animated Disney film I cared much about. I guess for me, they're about as empty as an old Care Bears movie, but with less charm. Anyway, this film got attention for featuring Disney's first female hero. If Disney was trying to step into the modern age with this film, I can't say they met their mark. Sure, this princess is tough and can shoot an arrow straighter than any boy. But she's still a princess. And the main struggle is whether or not she'll be forced to marry some idiot she doesn't know. I guess it's interesting that the main conflict here is with her mother since research seems to indicate that it is usually other women who enforce social norms among women.

In this film, the fiery princess is something of a tomboy, much to the annoyance of her mother. She comes of age, apparently, although she seems pretty young here. All the same, it's time for her to choose the first born son from one of the three rival clans, and thus ensure further peace among the clans. She decides she's not going to cooperate and the mother tries to force her and the witch in the forest makes a spell which turns goes awry. Blah blah blah. It was marginally engaging, but eminently forgettable. I also thought the CGI looked like a video game. I can imagine children liking it though.
C

Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, 2012, USA)

Of the films I've seen thus far at the festival, this one may have been the most satisfying to me. It's a mesmerizing, beautiful, hauntingly animated phantasmagoria. Other than its patchwork quilt of animations and motley characters, the film really has an amazing soundtrack. It's so easy to talk about what you don't like. I should probably have waited to post this as I'm still feeling pretty giddy about it.
It's funny, well into the movie, I kept wondering if it was going anywhere and then deciding it didn't matter at all. The film does go somewhere. I really connected with this film and the issues it explores, even if I'm not a drinker. If you maim something it will come home to you some day.
I hope you get a chance to see this film on the big screen.
A

ETA: I can't stop thinking about the film. It had such a marvelous soundtrack. Also, the version I saw seemed grainier than the trailer on Youtube and I think it looks better that way.

happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C


I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A

How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders & Dean DuBlois, 2010)

Another overpraised mainstream movie I didn't get, I suppose. I thought it was a big boring mess. The animation feels as wooden and lifeless as the inconsequential plot. It occurs to me that the one curious thing about the movie is there weren't any adult female characters. I didn't believe the relationship between the kid and the dragon so much. And I guess I didn't really care about any of it. C-

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich , 2010)

Toy Story 3 is one of those movies about which I feel so at odds with the prevailing opinion about (even among my friends) that I start to psychoanalyze myself as a result. I thought this movie was at least as dull as the others. I found a couple of the toys cute and I liked the girl and thought the movie would have been more interesting if she had been closer to the center of it. I thought the ending was unforgivable schmaltz and I thought the plotting seemed almost color-by-numbers. I guess one thing that's always bothered me about this franchise is its aggressive lowbrow Americana. It's nostalgia and kitsch and the exultation of empty consumerism and smug bourgeois mediocrity. Whenever people talk about these movies I always think to myself, "Is this really how you want to program your children?" Fortunately, I've grown polite in my old age and I've learned to use my alienation as a springboard to the comforts of endless introspection.
As my best friend shockingly took to the defense of this film, I turned toward introspection. It occurred to me that I didn't care for any of these toys as a child. I got to thinking about how I didn't have many toys as a child, how we grew up in the middle of nowhere and how playtime meant going out and making believe in fields and forests or communing with horses, barn cats, and other animal life. This led me to my troubled childhood and something I've realized at least since high school, which is that I have always felt at odds with the physical realm. This is naturally a problem but although a film like Toy Story 3 calls a number of related issues to mind, I'm pretty sure I don't want any remedy nor any solution to which the appreciation of empty crap like this is part. D+

PS: Give me a hollow Care Bears redux over this quatsch any day. :-*

catching up...

I've been too slow to pick this thing up since my little road trip and my move decreased the time I spent online or watching movies. I'll probably hurriedly try to catch up with some of what I've watched in the past few months, just so I can continue to have a record of all that.

Last night I watched Storm, a German movie about a war crimes trial that played last year at the Chicago International Film Festival. I skipped it then because the reviews seemed rather tepid but I ended up enjoying it. It's basically about the how and why that all these unstable places like Bosnia are getting packed into the EU and what some of the costs are. I thought it was acted and produced well and as to the reviews that damned it for looking like a German made-for-TV movie, I'd say that German made-for-TV movies are often a lot better than what gets put into theaters. B+

Prior to that I had watched a 2007 German comedy called Mein Führer. It's basically about how Goebbels gets this Jewish actor out of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp so he can work as Hitler's acting coach. It's not quite as distasteful as it sounds but it didn't quite win me over either. It was all right. B-

I also watched this documentary called A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. Unsurprisingly it was about the coming oil crash. Like most of these documentaries it suffers for being a sort of introduction for people who don't know anything. As such, I thought it did a pretty good job and I felt like I learned a few things as well. C

The Silent Star is an old East German science fiction movie about this international team of scientists who head out to Venus after a mysterious cylinder is found at what was believed to be a UFO crash site. The lady physicist is naturally responsible for making sure everyone eats and aside from looking at a microscope a few times mostly just chases people around with jars of liquid nutrition. The main point is that that Americans are like the Venusians who destroyed themselves while trying to take over the world. Hiroshima is invoked about a half dozen times. It was interesting as a Cold War artifact. C-

After years of trying, I finally made it through Godard's overrated film Breathless without falling asleep. I'm not sure I really get Godard. I'm never sure of how I feel about the morality of his films and I don't often find myself caring about his characters. C-

I'm not sure why I enjoyed Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two, since it seemed kind of empty. I like Ludivine Sagnier and she was good in this movie, though not particularly mesmerising. I watched it while I was starting to come down with something so I could have been a little scrambled in the brain but I feel like there is something there worth liking that rises above the lurid subject matter. And I'm sure there's something to the ending but I was too tired to piece it together. B

Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam is yet another Nick Broomfield documentary that manages to be fascinating even while it makes you uncomfortable because there's something incredibly slimy about Broomfield. Aside from the fact that he's kind of gross, I felt like the film lacked a certain scope. He's always leading you down the garden path and fixating on one thing and ignoring a few other things. Instead of focusing on Fleiss's personal life so much, I guess I'd have liked to know more about her prostitution ring and her trial. C

Mary and Max is sort like Muriel's Wedding crossed with 84 Charing Cross Road and blended with Wallace and Gromit. I really liked it, though the second half lost a little steam for me. It's another movie I skipped at the film festival last year because of negative reviews... B+

The first time I saw My Winnipeg I had accidentally gotten drunk at lunch and I ended up passing out during it. I was really sad. What I saw coincided really well with my drunken feverishness but my good friend Mark, with whom I saw it, said it was just all right or something. I finally got the chance to revisit it the other day when I noticed Netflix had added it to their instant viewing selection and I really loved it. I love that deranged blend of fantasy and fact. A

This isn't going so well. I think I have the flu or something.

Beavers: IMAX (1998) / Muppets from Space (1999) / Jetsons: The Movie (1990)

My roommate and I watched this half-hour documentary about beavers on the projector tonight. I was sort of cynical and skeptical but it's really enchanting and fascinating and sort of wondrous. Granted I never watch these nature things so maybe it's old hat but I liked it. B+


My roommate put on Muppets from Space next. The Muppets and I were never really on the same wavelength. I'm having trouble focusing on this because now my roommate has put on Jetsons: The Movie and it's bending my mind with its awfulness. C-

The Flintstones is updated and blended with Avatar, Up in the Air, and a puke bucket. Tiffany is like a shooting star in a shit storm. The little Crayola-Care Bear-Ewok things in the asteroid are cute, too. D

February Update #3: Trucker/Princess & the Frog and the Animated Feature Oscar/Miracle Fish/Amreeka/Moonfleet/The Cove/Dirty Filthy Love

It's been winter doldrum season so I've sort of been slacking on this thing.
It's been a pretty uneven month, certainly last month was more fulfilling cinematically but I suppose I've filled in some gaps.

Trucker showed up on some end of the year lists and it caught my eye at the video store a while back and I finally got around to watching it a few days ago. Michelle Monaghan is a woman who had been married to Benjamin Bratt, seemingly a great guy, and abandoned him and her child. She works as a semi truck driver now and seems happy with her life of driving, drinking, and no strings sexual encounters. She has what seems like an ill-advised friendship with a married neighbor and after depositing him on his porch she stumbles home to find her ex-husband's wife waiting for her with the discarded son. It seems daddy is in the hospital with cancer and his wife's mother just died so she needs to go away for a few weeks and the mother is reluctantly stuck with her son who is naturally resentful. I guess you can imagine what comes next. The film is likeable. The mother's flight from the definitions the world has imposed upon her is understandable and the characters come across as authentic and compelling for the most part. There's an act of violence toward the end and I'm not really sure it worked for me. I love that it's about working class people, more or less, but it never really soars like Frozen River, as I hoped it might. B/B-

I finally watched The Princess and the Frog so now I've seen all the Oscar nominated animated feature films this year. I feel like this one is probably the weakest even though I think I rated all of them three out of five stars on Netflix, except The Secret of Kells, which I rated four stars. It feels like a Disney movie in sleepwalk mode. It's just a regurgitation onto a standard template with standardly unimpressive music. That said, it's kind of engaging in a slight way. It has the sort of charm I might expect from a well-done direct-to-DVD children's movie. I've never seen All Dogs Got to Heaven 2 but it felt like a sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven somehow. Maybe the music and the attitude. I feel like it makes sense that their first black princess would find herself in the middle of a sort of bland undertaking and, culturally, it's probably for the best. I'm just glad there wasn't a single rap in the whole movie because that would have been really gross. I liked the touch of bayou flavor in the music and the attempts at local color but it was kind of insipidified during Disneyfication, I think. C

On the subject of the Animated Feature Oscar, I'm not sure if I have a horse in the race. It'll probably go to Up, which I didn't care for all that much, but I'd probably have voted for The Secret of Kells. My second choice would probably be The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven't seen Mary and Max and the word I've heard on it has been very splintered but I kind of expected that to get nominated.

Miracle Fish is an Oscar nominated live action short film from what seems to be a much hyped Australian production company. It's about an eight year old boy who gets picked on at school because it's his birthday and all his mom gave him was this lame fortune telling fish thing that looks like it cost one to two dollars. It looks like you can currently buy 12 for five dollars on their website. In any event the rest of the class goes on some field trip or something and he sneaks into this sick room in the nurse's office and wanders out to find an empty school and eventually a gruesome surprise that is neither believable nor interesting. There was something I liked about it but it was generally dull and maudlin and insipid. C-

Amreeka is about a divorced Palestinian woman in the West Bank who works in a bank and lives with her mother and her teenage son. She and her son have to cross through this checkpoint every day and that's fairly miserable and increasingly frightening. They get a permit to emigrate to the USA she had applied for a long time ago and the son convinces her they should go because there is no future for him in Palestine. Things naturally don't go smoothly when they arrive in America but there's none of that forced Lars-von-Trier-esque torture that you might expect from this sort of thing. The kid has troubles at school; they and the cousins they move in with must cope with increasing racism; the mother can find only the most menial of jobs despite her education and her experience. It's a really lovely movie though and it's more bouyant than it sounds. There's something so real and beautiful and human and significant about it. It was mostly all the things I look for in a film. If I had seen it sooner it would likely made my top ten list or at least the honorable mentions. A

Moonfleet is a 1955 Fritz Lang film based on a popular English children's adventure novel from 1898. Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn it begins with an innocent youth arriving in a sinister English coastal city that seems to make a lot of money off various forms of piracy. The youth naturally finds himself mixed up in the den of thieves and in deep trouble from all sides. I sought it out because it's listed in John Kobal's methodology-challenged book of the Top 100 films of all time but I really don't think it belongs there. It's a decent film but it's not likely that it would even make my top 10 Fritz Lang movies, let alone top 100 of ever. Stewart Granger is kind of dreamy though, Joan Greenwood is appealing as George Sanders's sassy wife, and Viveca Lindfors is kind of electric in her brief, mildly lurid performance as Stewart Granger's gypsy-esque mistress but the story didn't really do it for me. C

I finally got around to watching the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove last night. The trouble with so many of these well-intentioned things is that they tend to overstep in their stridence. I think this movie escapes that pitfall though and it comes across as pretty veracious throughout. I think that's why it's so effective. It feels like the filmmakers are saying, "We want to level with you hear and we aren't trying to manipulate you except explicitly by showing you this video of a dolphin slaughter and letting you make up your mind." I like that the video is presented with only the sounds of the dolphins and that although the film is set up like a suspense movie it doesn't try to manipulate you with music and they never resort to the sort of hysterics that tend to alienate people from doing the right thing. It was a good and worthy use of time and resources. A

Lastly, the final film I watched in February of 2010: Dirty Filthy Love. It's a 2004 made for British television movie about a man (Michael Sheen) whose latent OCD and comorbid conditions sort of explode when his marriage disintegrates and he loses his job. He meets a plucky nut played by the fabulous Shirley Henderson, whom I've loved ever since I saw her in that Masterpiece Theater presentation of The Way We Live Now (2001). The nut recognizes his OCD and tells him to come to her support group and he does and it's well and then he has a breakdown when his wife gives him a false hope and then moves on. The movie's kind of out there--my boyfriend wasn't really paying attention to the movie and kept remarking that the movie I was watching was really weird--but it's really kind of good. It seemed like a generally honest depiction of a constellation of mental disorders and the acting was pretty good. If only we subsidized the film industry in the United States... It's kind of sad that our nominees for best picture are very often weaker than the average European made-for-TV movie... A-/B+

February Omnibus Update #3

The films I've watched since I watched Body Double, except The Blind Side, which I've already posted about: A Serious Man, The Secret of Kells, Bedrooms and Hallways, Not Quite Hollywood, Penelope, Bright Young Things, Rory O'Shea Was Here, Gitane Demone: Life After Death, Sandra After Dark, Kansas City, and California Split.

I had already seen A Serious Man in the theater. I made my boyfriend watch it because I felt like it was the only movie nominated for Best Picture for this year's Academy Awards that might deserve to win, except for Avatar. I was sick and I was tired when he was watching it and I wasn't paying close enough attention. It definitely had more magic in the theater than it even did coming across my roommate's projector. I like the way all the parts of the film fit in with its themes, like the way we don't get the answers to our mysteries in life and how the old ways of explaining the world were no longer adequate or relevant. I like the way it ends because it seems like the tornado mirrors the oncoming personal calamaties and augurs what's about to happen in American culture generally. B+/A-

The next morning I watched Oscar-nominated animated film The Secret of Kells. It's hand-drawn animation, which is nice. It's about a little boy in Kells abbey who becomes a sort of apprentice in the making of the book. The Vikings or somebody are stirring up trouble in the region and the abbot is scared and obsessed with his big gate. The boy meets a fabulous girl in the woods who seems to be a fairy. It's kind of enchanting but not really groundbreaking or surprising or breathtaking though some of the visuals are lovely. B

Bedrooms and Hallways was a movie I'd seen some years ago and mostly forgotten. It's your typical millennial British relationship comedy with alternative lifestyles and a mens' group and so forth. It's all right but I liked Love and Other Disasters better because Brittany Murphy was in that one. C

Not Quite Hollywood is a documentary about Ozsploitation films, which were basically Australian B-films from the 70s and 80s, mostly sex comedies and thrillers. It started off pretty fun and interesting but as it went on it seemed kind of tiresome and relentless. C-

Penelope is that movie where Christina Ricci has a pig nose. I thought it would be an inane Twilight Zone retread but it was actually more entertaining than that. I enjoyed it. C+

Bright Young Things is a somewhat entertaining film about sort of celebutante types in pre-War Britain. The actors are affable and the film is engaging but it's kind of so-so and doesn't have very much interesting to say. I certainly wasn't thrilled with the ending. C

Rory O'Shea Was Here is a British movie starring James McAvoy as Rory O'Shea, a Billy Idol type with muscular dystrophy who gets put into a residential hospital at the beginning of the film. It becomes a sort of buddy film as he makes friends with a guy with cerebral palsy, I think, and they move into their own apartment. I mostly appreciate this movie for even existing. I knew someone with MD when I was a child but I have to say I haven't thought about it much since then. It made me think about a reality I hadn't thought enough about before and that's great. B

Gitane Demone: Life After Death is a collection of various interviews with and performances by Gitane Demone in the 1990s. It's a 2-DVD set and clocks in around three and a half hours. As such a big fan as myself might anticipate, the best parts are when she's not trying to be all hardcore. There are some semi-successful experimental jazz performances that seem like a sluttier, less ambitious Diamanda Galas. The interviews are, at best, a mixed bag, but seem like a goldmine for aged gothboys like myself. There's a pretty good performance at a rock festival in Germany at the end of the first disc and a number of great performances on the second half of the second disc, although the sound quality is kind of bad and the guitars are pretty much uniformly too loud by half. Rozz Williams has a heavy presence in those performances on the second disc and I kept thinking how great it would have been if Rozz Williams would have had a side project with Eva O AND Gitane Demone. (With Paris on keyboards?) If you weren't a fan in the 90s, i doubt this video will change your mind. Strangely, some of the best performances are from her fetish phase and I love that album she made then but I found the performances a little tiresome, personally. Oh well. Somewhere between an A- and a D+.

The only thing they had at the merchandise table of the Sandra Bernhard show I went to over the weekend that I didn't already own was a DVD of this HBO special she did in 1996. An episode of this show called Sandra After Dark. It was a sad waste of $25, unlike the show, which was a fabulous use of $47. I only wish I had saved the money on the DVD and gone to see the show again the next night. The show is like this late night chat show except it's supposed to feel less like a chat show and more like a party. It hasn't aged well and I'm not sure why they'd be selling it at the show. Why not a DVD of Confessions of a Pretty Lady or some of the CD's she sells through her website? Oh well. Love you, Sandra! D

That brings us up to last night. I watched Robert Altman's Kansas City because my boyfriend put it on Netflix streaming and, as expected, promptly fell asleep. I like the cast but it's really not one of Altman's best. It's entertaining but just sort of okay. I mainly liked the way it plays against the genre and the audience's expectations thereof. Plus, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, and the pretty eyes of Dermot Mulroney. C

Then I put on California Split, the only movie I hadn't seen by Robert Altman that's available now for instant viewing on Netflix. It pretty much takes two actors I don't like very much, Elliot Gould and George Segal, and emphasizes what I don't like about them. I made it through 45 or 50 minutes before deciding I'd rather be asleep than watching this movie. D- EDIT: I went back and watched the second half of this last night. I found most of it relentlessly annoying but I liked the very ending enough to boost my rating to a C-

oscar nominated animated short films

Below are links to all five animated shorts this year. They were a lot better last year, I think. They're all sort of cute this year but none are particularly moving. I might vote for The Lady and the Reaper but it's hard to say since none of them really jumped out at me.

French Roast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbFhATUfuow

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
http://www.grannyogrimm.com/#/the-film

The Lady and the Reaper
http://212.227.136.88/press/

Logorama
http://www.garagetv.be/video-galerij/buzzing_bees/De_kortfilm_der_logo_s.aspx

Wallace and Gromit: A Case of Loaf and Death
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=49816402

It's like, they're all sort of entertaining but none of them have the magic of last year's nominees.

Summer Hours / Of Time and the City / 9 / Peter and the Wolf

The other night I watched Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours. It's been on all these critics' lists but it always sounded dull or severe or heady or, mostly, like it would be one of those off-putting movies that expect us to get all worked up about the petty concerns of people with too much wealth. Fortunately, it wasn't quite what I feared it sounded like. The story is basically that the matriarch of a French family has a birthday party with her three children and their families there and there's a lot of talk about her uncle, a late famous artist, and the art collection, housed in the country house where she lives, because she's getting older and so forth and recognizes she's going to die. Once she dies, the children need to decide what they'll do with the house and the art. Whether they keep things or sell them. And it's really about how you have the one son (Charles Berling) living in France who's still attached to these things, then the other son (Jeremie Renier) who's working for PUMA in China, and then Juliette Binoche as the daughter whose life is in America now. I mean, it's really about the way the French have to come to terms with their heritage as they're moving toward the future. And, as an American where most things are so new, where my pre-War apartment building seems older than most things anywhere you go, I kind of identify with the grandchildren in the movie who don't have a choice about holding on to their heritage. I guess one of the questions is about the value of heritage. I feel like the movie doesn't really put forth a strong opinion on the subject. That it's more a document of a transition from one era to another. It's really lovely though. I particularly love the scenes with the matriarch and with the housekeeper. I also feel like the cinematography is amazing. The light in the movie is exquisite. And I like the way the light has such a different quality based on where they are. It kind of seemed to change after the mother died. It was like things felt so lyrical and then came to feel more modern, and then at the end there's this party with some grandchildren at the house and it almost makes you think of children playing about in some old ruins or something. I guess this movie made me feel very present in the passage of history. A

As for Of Time and the City, I don't think I was in the right mood to watch it. It's sort of an experimental documentary about Liverpool, England. I've heard it described as a film essay, so maybe that's what it is. Aside from the feeling that I might have already seen it before on Sundance in my last apartment where I had cable television, the main thought I had while watching the movie was, "I could be watching Derek Jarman's The Last of England instead." I think I'll have to watch it again but I'm not sure it worked for me, aside from it being fun to pick out the literary quotes and things. C

Then last night we watched 9, the animated science fiction thing produced by Tim Burton. My boyfriend thought it was cliché and that there wasn't enough plot or character development. I think my roommate agreed with him. I really didn't though. I liked that it was kind of spare. It reminded me of when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum with my old roommate and I said it was the best one and he said it didn't have enough plot, whereas I felt that it was the best one precisely because it didn't waste time with all these plot conventions which aren't usually ever that interesting anyway. In most cases, I'd rather be spared unconvincing dialogue and phony relationships. I liked this movie. I thought the original short was kind of nice as well. B

After that we watched the Oscar winning animated short film Peter and the Wolf (2006). It's the music and the story by Tchaikovsky. It was nice. Cute, right? The music was nice. The duck was darling. The cat was funny. It was charming. I didn't really connect to it though. C