reviews Archives - Page 9 of 16 - Ramblin' with Roger

MOVIE REVIEWS: 2012 Academy Award Nominated Animated Shorts

Morris Lessmore is a film that will be embraced by librarians and book lovers alike.

It was a Monday holiday. The daughter was at a friend’s house. But the Wife and I had a narrow window if we wanted to see a movie. In the time frame we had, we could really only go to the Spectrum and see the Oscar-nominated short animation films. My wife was wary because she had heard that a couple of these films were quite violent. In fact, only one was.

Dimanche/Sunday (Canada – 9 minutes)
Every Sunday, it’s the same old routine! The train clatters through the village and almost shakes the pictures off the wall. In the church, Dad dreams about his toolbox. And of course later Grandma will get a visit and the animals will meet their fate.
And the train is HUGE! But I didn’t see the point. I suppose there was violence in this story, but it was rendered so banally that it wasn’t particularly affecting.

A Morning Stroll (UK-7 minutes)
When a New Yorker walks past a chicken on his morning stroll, we are left to wonder which one is the real city slicker.
The winner of the BAFTA, the British equivalent to the Oscars, this shows the changes of people over time. THIS film is the one with quite violent images. Great last joke, though.

Wild Life (Canada – 14 minutes)
Calgary, 1909. An Englishman moves to the Canadian frontier, but is singularly unsuited to it. His letters home are much sunnier than the reality. Intertitles compare his fate to that of a comet.

This was visually beautifully rendered, with the backgrounds as paintings. Yet the connection with the comet (or more specifically, a painting of a comet) just didn’t work for me; the story would have stronger without it.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (USA – 17 minutes)
Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, [it] is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) [the directors] present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM Technicolor musicals…old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.
I instantly recognized the architecture of New Orleans. The movie also borrows from Pleasantville. It is a film that will be embraced by librarians and book lovers alike. My pick as the best of the five AND the one I think will win. My wife actually cried.

La Luna (USA- 7 minutes)
[This] is the timeless fable of a young boy who is coming of age in the most peculiar of circumstances. Tonight is the very first time his Papa and Grandpa are taking him to work…
This is the PIXAR short that will open for the movie Brave coming out this summer. Wonderfully whimsical.

There were four additional films, deemed HIGHLY COMMENDED, shown on the program, probably because the show would have otherwise been less than an hour long. I’ve linked to their individual webpages because the initial link does not.

Hybrid Union (4 minutes) by Serguei Kouchnerov
In the imaginary land of Cyberdesert, Plus and Minus struggle with a dependency on an outdated source of energy. The mysterious self-sufficient Smart presents a new challenge for Plus and Minus and forces them to form an alliance – The Hybrid Union!
I understood where it was trying to go, but wasn’t moved.

Skylight (Canada – 5 minutes) by David Baas
[It] is a mock animated documentary about the ecological plight of penguins in the Antarctic, possibly foretelling cataclysmic results for the rest of the world.
It is pretty much a one-joke story, and the faux jerky camerawork was more irritating than innovative.

Nullarbor (Australia – 10 minutes) by Alister Lockhart
An animated road movie set across the vast and barren landscape of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.
On a boring road, a young man can be arrogant and a bit stupid to boot. Liked it well enough. Probably not for small children, since it has a few mean images.

Amazonia (USA – 5 minutes) by Sam Chen
In the dangerous world of the Amazon Rainforest, finding a meal proves to be an impossible task for a little tree frog named Bounce. His luck changes when he meets Biggy, a blue-bellied treefrog who takes him under his guidance and shows him the ways of the jungle in this animated journey set to Beethoven’s Symphony No.8.
The music is incredibly important to the success of this film. And a great punch line. I would have nominated this over Sunday/Dimanche.

Video Review: Moneyball

I haven’t watched a movie on DVR/video in several months. One of the issues is that it becomes too easy to treat it like well, a video, stopping and starting at will, something substantially different than going to the movie theater and watching a film from being to end, without interruption.

Two things, though, converged to make the preferred viewing methodology possible last Sunday. A friend of mine who had Netflix received the Moneyball DVD in the mail, but would not be able to watch it over the weekend because she’d be out of town. Then my wife and daughter went to a play (at Steamer No. 10, for you locals), allowing me the opportunity to watch Moneyball as though I were at the movies. Well, not quite, with my 20″ TV screen, but otherwise, more or less the same. And I REALLY wanted to see this, having just missed it in the cinema.

Moneyball is the story of the Oakland A’s baseball team that competed in the American League with teams such as the New York Yankees, who had about thrice the payroll as the A’s.

Inevitably, not only did the poorer teams lose in the playoffs, if they got there at all, but their free agents tended to flee to the richer teams for the big contracts. Such was the case in 2001, when, after the A’s lost to the Yankees in the playoff, Jason Giambi signed with the Yankees and Johnny Damon with the Boston Red Sox.

A’s General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), once a big-league prospect who washed out, had difficulty trying to engineer a particular trade with another team. Beane identified the guy who essentially put the kibosh on the deal as Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who uses statistical information called sabermetrics to evaluate and select players for teams, a concept Beane embraces; the scouts and manager Art Howe (a scarily accurate Philip Seymour Hoffman), not so much. So the season became a struggle between concept and execution.

I liked this movie. It wasn’t jammed packed with excitement, except baseball excitement, but told a compelling story. It may be true that you don’t need to know the game to appreciate the narrative, but I know my knowledge of the game most definitely enhanced my enjoyment. Perhaps it was the aspect of rejecting the “conventional wisdom” and taking a chance on a belief system was that non-baseball fans related to, and I can definitely see that.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Iron Lady

I’m still theorizing that Meryl Streep will FINALLY receive another Oscar for this film.

Now I get it. All the reviews that say that Meryl Streep is great as Margaret Thatcher, first female Prime Minister of England, in The Iron Lady, but the film, not so much, are pretty dead on. This movie starts off with a way-too-long bit with the aging Thatcher talking to her dead husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). It flashes back to the young Margaret Roberts (Alexandra Roach), daughter of a grocer with political ambitions, supported in this effort, at least in theory, by young Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd). Then back and forth between the elderly Maggie’s recollections and Thatcher (Streep) dealing with policy- often represented by stock footage of real events in the real MT’s 11-year rule. It’s a mess, yet Streep’s presence redeems it, but only somewhat. I think it would have been a better film of the older Thatcher recalling her past as she wrote her memoir, not trying to assume what’s going on in her presumably demented mind.

My wife, who saw it with me at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on Saturday, felt kinder to the film. It may be because she was actually IN England during the Falklands War and had a Member of Parliament as one of her instructors at the time. Also because the film did address the issues of a woman being discounted. My wife liked the not-perfect makeup Thatcher applied, or her awkwardness wearing heels. There is a makeover scene which is my personal favorite.

What WAS interesting to both of us, though, was the series of struggles to balance the rights of unions with the desires of management, the fight over the fairness of the tax code, and the ability of the government to find the money for war even in a period of austerity; if I didn’t know better, I’d say it could have been the United States in the second decade of the 21st century.

I’m still theorizing that Streep will FINALLY receive another Oscar for this film. She has been nominated 14 times as best lead actress, and won once, for Sophie’s Choice, which came out in 1982. (She’s also 1 for 3 in the supporting category – 1979’s Kramer v. Kramer). It may be cynical, but I think that race still matters in Hollywood. It’s fairly clear that Octavia Spencer will win as the best supporting actress for her role as a maid in The Help; she got the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, and probably some others. Meanwhile, Viola Davis won the SAG for best actress, but Streep won it from the GGs. I just don’t think the Academy is going to select two black women for major awards in the same year. I could be wrong; I’ve surely been wrong before. And Streep is deserving, but so is Davis.
***
Meryl Streep says her top priority when playing a character is to convince the other actors that she is who is playing.

MOVIE REVIEW: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie’s virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here – just be prepared to blast for them.”

While my wife was at a Tupperware party last weekend, I walked to the Madison Theatre in Albany to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. While ostensibly starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, the real lead is young Thomas Horn, as a quirky nine-year-old who starts a quixotic quest all over “New York City for the lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.”

I was a couple of minutes late, and the film (actually the previews) didn’t actually begin until the moment I walked into the room. Eventually, three others also saw that show.

The good news is that the flashback relationship between the boy and his father is compelling. The bad news is that the quest is too damn long and detailed. The story requires the boy, largely in monologue, to go from place to place, initially on foot. When he gets an unlikely assistant in his grandmother’s renter, it’s not much help, since the old man is unable to speak. The boy had been tested for Asperger’s syndrome, “but the results were inconclusive.” This is not to say that the actor was lacking, only that the story was.

During the trek, one of the people in the theatre started texting. While I found this incredibly rude, I could almost understand it. I swear the movie, which runs 2:09, could have trimmed 12 minutes of the search with little lost. Yet, in the end, there was a compelling and moving payoff. I just wish the movie had gotten to it sooner.

After I visualized this piece, I read Mick LaSalle’s review, and I realized that he said better than I the virtues and especially the flaws of the movie. “Slog” is a good term. Yet, as he notes, “much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie’s virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here – just be prepared to blast for them.”

This was nominated for Best Picture this week? Really?

Incidentally, Entertainment Weekly has made note of some vague similarities between this film and Hugo – a young man loses his father, and tries to find a key/lock to solve the mystery of the father’s.
***
Thomas Horn was a Kids week winner on the game show JEOPARDY!, which aired 8 July 2010.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Artist

It occurred to me that the last three films I’ve seen were all about the cinema.

Shortly after I saw the black-and-white, mostly silent film The Artist at the Spectrum in Albany the weekend before last, someone asked me what I thought of it. “It’s very clever,” I said. “But is it good?” “It’s the best silent film I’ve seen this century.”

None of this is to say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the film; more to the point, I would see it again. It’s fun, it’s well-acted, and particularly so, precisely because it IS a silent film, though with music, and the actors have to convey so much sans dialogue. It’s just that there are not that many contemporary films to which I can compare them. Which, in and of itself, makes the fact that it even got made a brave and remarkable feat.

The Artist is the story of silent movie star George Valentin (French actor Jean Dujardin) in Hollywood circa 1927. Will the advent of the talkies mean the end of his career, in favor of younger talent, such as the pretty extra Peppy Miller (Argentinian-French actress Bérénice Bejo)? As their fortunes change, their fates, and the fate of Valentin’s dog (Uggie), remain intertwined.

Dujardin, in particular, has to convey a whole range of emotions. Bejo was also wonderful; some suggested that she was too “modern” for the specific period, which may be true, but I think the French writer-director, Michel Hazanavicius (Bejo’s husband) was trying to convey the difference between the old and the new. He even picked the song ‘Pennies from Heaven’, which appears in the film in 1929 but, as the credits clearly show, dates from 1936; this matters not a bit. The Golden Globes nominations for Bejo and two for Hazanavicius and the win for Dujardin were totally warranted. Kudos also to actors John Goodman, who played the movie mogul Al Zimmer; and James Cromwell, who was Valentin’s loyal assistant, Clifton.

It occurred to me that the last three films I’ve seen were all about the cinema: Hugo, My Week with Marilyn and now The Artist. And the book I read was about film critic Roger Ebert. Next time, a NON-movie movie.