The first thing to point out, because it’s really amazing the more you think about it, it’s a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios’ 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It’s a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we’re watching as the story isn’t “actually” be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. […]
A review requested by Ben Verschoor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. I apologise for the redundancy. But it’s not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or BloodRayne. Or Street Fighter or Wing Commander. Or Super Mario […]
A review requested by John Grimes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Scout’s honor, I’ll get to the review part of the review in a minute, but I can’t go into without getting something off my chest, which is that Foodfight! is monstrously unattractive. I would swear at The Hague that this is the absolute ugliest bastard of an animated feature that has […]
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third and final chapter in the second most beloved series of children’s movies starring Ben Stiller and involving African mammals running wild, is better than 2009’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Let’s allow it to have that. God knows it doesn’t have anything else, and God knows as well that Battle of the Smithsonian represents a pretty eminently […]
I foreground pee-drinking not because it’s fun to take cheap shots (which it is), but because the film genuinely cares that much. Pee-drinking is the first thing that happens. We get the scene-setting as a portentous but oddly tinny-sounding narrator invokes “The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those who survived have adapted to a new world.” And then this spectacularly expensive motion picture […]
The Lego Movie has a third-act twist. Part of me wishes very much that it didn’t, but simply introduced the twist right at the start, since the reveal informs the rest of the movie in such a fascinating, pleasurably conceptual way. Part of me is very happy it plays it the way it does since it permits the movie’s awe-inspiring world-building to suck us in in such an untroubled, seductive […]
A Little Princess is, I guess, significant in that it ushered hot new Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón into Hollywood filmmaking out of nowhere, in 1995 (Sólo con tu pareja, his only previous feature, had screened at Toronto and made a splash, but never received U.S. distribution until 2006). But to me it is far more significant in that it was the first time that Emmanuel Lubezki lost a Best Cinematography […]
Monsters University is both cute and charming, and I at least found it to be not in the least ways unenjoyable while I was watching it. This is, apparently, where we are now, with Pixar Animation Studios. And note that I’m of the mind that Brave is a pretty solid movie that got a completely unfair rap, so there’ll be no post-mortems here. Pixar has been great before; Pixar will, […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Pixar Animation Studios’ love affair with franchising continues with their first-ever prequel, Monsters University. In keeping with my quest to have a review of every single Pixar film up on this blog, it seemed […]
Once again, the good people at Shorts HD have assembled the 15 short movies nominated for Academy Awards in three categories – Animation, Live Action, and Documentary – and once again given us the rare treat of watching shorts in a movie theater and being reminded that there are other ways to tell a cinematic story than as a two-hour Hollywood-style narrative. Sadly, this year’s crop of animated short films […]
We have arrived at a weird place in this voyage through Disney’s animated sequels: a film that isn’t a sequel, the original project that it’s not a sequel to wasn’t made by Walt Disney Feature animation, and the non-Disney non-sequel was not, itself, made entirely or even primarily by one of Disney’s own animation studios, but by Jade Animation in Hong Kong, a company that has done a good amount […]
The regular readers in the crowd know that I ordinarily spend a disastrously large number of words reviewing films in the Disney animated features canon, of which the new Wreck-It Ralph is the 52nd; and I will perhaps do that some day for this movie, after I have a chance to live with it for a while. In the meantime, though, we’re going to shoot for a nice, short, normal-sized […]
