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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.

@15Feb2003 – We Are Many

There seems to be this revisionist history that the American people were fully behind military action in Iraq, when this was hardly the case.

Last year, I came across this Kickstarter project, We Are Many – a feature-length documentary film “about the never-before-told story of the biggest protest in history, on 15 February 2003, and its legacy, through the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. The day that saw an estimated 30 million people in over 700 cities around the world, gave birth to a new global social movement.”

I was compelled to participate because I was there (pictured with my friend Dave). A bunch of folks from the Albany, NY-area took buses down to New York City to protest the threat of war in Iraq, which nevertheless started the following month.

But I also contributed because there seems to be this revisionist history that the American people were fully behind that military action when this was hardly the case. Personally, I participated in at least 20 vigils, and at least one large rally in Albany before 15 February 2003 in protest against the warmongering talk.

The documentary, scheduled for the 10th anniversary of the rally, “will tell the real story.” You are invited to “share your own reflection and invite people you know who marched/were against the Iraq war to tell their stories too” at this site. Or go to the Facebook event page.

Oh, the most unlikely thing about 15 Feb 2003 is that, among that throng of thousands of people walking down the streets of NYC, I ran into my old college friend Uthaclena, his wife, and their daughter (who was celebrating her birthday that very day) who had come from an hour south of Albany to protest as well.

Slavery by Another Name PBS documentary

When you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human.

My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.

Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.” The movie notes the failure of the federal government, both after Reconstruction, and again in the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt, to stem the tide of forced labor.

As both the SBAN book and the movie made clear, the peonage system was, in many ways, far worse than the slavery before the Civil War. If one had slaves, one needed to protect one’s economic investment by providing some measure of food, clothing, and shelter. If one were a business, such as US Steel, leasing convicts, one could work someone nearly to death, or sometimes fatally, and then go lease someone else.

The speakers had no prepared comments but were just doing a question and answer period. Anyone who’s seen a Q&A knows that the quality of questions is all over the place. One person wanted to know why we never heard these stories before. Blackmon noted that the further away we are from it in history, the easier it is to look at it. In any case, there will be classroom material available to talk about this previously unknown, shameful part of the American postbellum past.

A question that intrigued me was, basically, how people could be so cruel to each other. The speakers noted that when you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human. This tied to another question about the new Jim Crow laws, which continue to incarcerate black people in disproportionate numbers; the speakers referred to Michelle Alexander’s book and other sources for further reference.

I must admit to laughing at a recent comment from the blog of SamuraiFrog “It’s Black History Month. So if you’re one of those complete idiots going on Facebook and whining about how having a Black History Month is racism against white people, please pick up a history book. And hit yourself in the head with it. Repeatedly. Until you black out.” The fact that THIS story has largely been missing from the history books makes the continued investigation of the lost black history, a/k/a American history, still relevant.