The Screengrab : pixar

Cannes Roundup: Day One

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The Cannes Film Festival kicked off last night with the latest from Pixar, Up, and the early word is predictably positive. “Up possesses all the aesthetic and philosophical values that audiences have come to expect from Pixar: rich, intricately detailed visuals, un-snarky humor and a genuinely affecting story,” writes Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post. Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire calls it “a grand visual spectacle on a big screen, pulling viewers into a striking three dimensional world and eschewing the sort of visual sight gags found in typical 3-D movies.” The Telegraph reports a minor quibble: “I'm not convinced it needs to be seen in 3-D: the images are less distinct than is ideal. But the quality of writing, its delicious sound design, and the emotional punch it packs all make this one of Pixar's finest achievements to date.”

Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian does her best to reassure us that we aren’t missing anything by not being there. “Most news journalists I know have a love hate relationship with it. My day (I'm writing this Wednesday evening) is far from over – but at least I wasn't sitting up till 3am, like my colleague at the BBC Razia Iqbal, putting together a package for the Today programme. Mostly it consists of queuing, with some occasional shoving or sweaty rushing, spliced with trying to ask questions in enormous press conferences – but the mic rarely gets passed to you, because there are hundreds of reporters, from everywhere from Iceland to Hong Kong, also competing to get a word in.”

As he prepares for the Cannes premiere of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on May 24, Terry Gilliam speaks to The Independent about completing the project without Heath Ledger. “I suppose I’m in an interesting position because while I’m cutting the film I’m basically working with him every day and he’s fine; he’s in good shape…Ideas are floating around. Then finally we decided, ‘OK, let’s get three other people to take over the part’. And we were lucky because we have a magic mirror in this movie. Not every movie has a magic mirror. So you can very genuinely say that these other actors are different aspects of the character that Heath plays. And it works.”

Tales from the Golden Age, which will have its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section, has secured distribution from IFC. “I am very glad that IFC Films decided to stay close to me and continue the difficult work of presenting Romanian films in US,” said director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days).

Screengrab Predicts Summer 2009: The Toss-Ups (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

So, now that you’ve seen our consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits & the Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2009, here are the films that we didn’t know quite what to do with...

Andrew:

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (August 21)

This one hits theaters closer to Labor Day (and the start of the “quality” awards-bait season) than Memorial Day -- assuming QT actually finishes his grindhouse WW2 epic on time -- and the theaters it hits will probably be art houses rather than multiplexes, where nobody will be expecting the confusingly titled Basterds to rack up Pulp Fiction-esque "national sensation" numbers...but Tarantino’s latest seems like quite the odd duck nonetheless, with a promised ultra-violence sensibility that may have trouble finding its artsy splatter audience even WITH all the ass-kicking Jews and Brad Pitt’s funny southern accent.

BRÜNO (June 10)

Oh, sure...Borat was a national sensation, and the annoying guy in your office still says, “Niiice!” on a daily basis. But I’m guessing it was a lot easier for most Americans to feel “in” on the joke when Sacha Baron Cohen was making fun of them funny furriners than it will be to laugh at their own homophobic prejudices or their own knee-jerk PC responses to the heterosexual Cohen’s flouncing, mincing gay character. But then again, you know what they say about that whole “no such thing as bad publicity” thing...

Nick:

1) Public Enemies, because Michael Mann has yet to make an out-and-out summer blockbuster.

2) UP, because eagerness for Pixar’s latest has been especially muted.

3) Angels & Demons, because The Da Vinci Code craze seems to have subsided.

4) Julie & Julia, because its August release date implies that the studio thinks it has more limited appeal than Meryl Streep’s The Devil Wears Prada or Mamma Mia!

5) The Ugly Truth, because even though it’s the summer’s chief rom-com, it’s hard to imagine Katherine Heigl continuing to be a serious box-office draw.

Paul:

Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi fans are pumped for his return to horror, but will anyone else care? Will this be the film that finally lifts the box-office curse on summer horror movies?

Terminator Salvation- is there life for Terminator after Arnold? Will people pay to see the movie when they can just as easily watch the Terminator TV series at home? And can Christian Bale still reel in audiences now that his profanity-filled tirade has been heard by millions?

The Taking of Pelham 123- in a summer full of epic effects-driven movies, can audiences be bothered with an old-school hostage-negotiation thriller? And will MGM release a super-sweet new DVD edition of the original film just in time for the remake? Because they really should.

Year One- will a high-concept caveman comedy, even one starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, play in this age of improvisational laffers? And will there be zug-zug like in Caveman?

Public Enemies- is Johnny Depp really the box office draw Hollywood thinks he is after the Pirates trilogy? Can Michael Mann become bankable again after the subpar returns for Miami Vice? And in this era of Grand Theft Auto, will ticket buyers get excited for a fedoras-and-tommy-guns gangster shoot’em’up?

Bruno- can the least funny character from Da Ali G Show actually carry a film? Will people flock to laugh at the strange misadventures of a flamingly gay Austrian, or will they be scared off by the homosexuality factor?

Bandslam- is Vanessa Anne Hudgens still a draw even when she isn’t starring in High School Musicals? Will tween-friendly fare still do solid box office even during the summer movie season?

Taking Woodstock- is the August 14 release date occasioned by the 40th anniversary of Woodstock simply a symbolic gesture, or will nostalgia for the Summer of Love turn this into an unexpected late-summer hit?

Click Here For The Hits (Parts One & Two), The Bombs (Part Three) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Paul Clark

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yes, it’s that magical time of year once more...as my late lamented Grampa Joe would say, quoting his favorite Brooklyn poet: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers iz? All the boids is the on the wing...isn’t that absoid? I thought the wing was on the boid!”

All of which is neither here nor there...but the real point is we’re just days away from the start of the Summer Blockbuster Season (which, like the Christmas season, keeps starting earlier and earlier each year, what with the upcoming May 1 release of Wolverine, the May 8 release of Star Trek...heck, even Vin Diesel’s already had a summer blockbuster, and we’re barely into baseball season!

And, since Hollywood now refuses to wait until Memorial Day Weekend to start firing off its big guns, your pals here at the Screengrab have no choice but to launch into the fray with our second annual attempt to prognosticate the Top 5 Biggest Hits & Bombs of 2009!

Now, for those of you playing along at home, the rules are simple: the following “HIT” and “BOMB” predictions aren’t necessarily based on the sheer volume of money we think the following films will amass, but rather how their performance will ultimately be perceived by the Suits in Hollywood and the public at large. So, for example, last year we predicted Prince Caspian would be a hit...but it cost more and took in less than The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, so it was ultimately considered a disappointment. Meanwhile, Sex & The City, which...ahem...some Screengrabbers thought would bomb took in about the same amount of money as Caspian and was ultimately considered a hit because all the wimmenfolk liked it so much (and also because it didn’t cost a zillion dollars to produce, despite all the CGI required to bring the eerie Kim Cattrall character to life).

And so, without further ado...our picks for THE TOP FIVE HITS OF SUMMER 2009!

5. UP (May 29)

Paul:
There were several strong possibilities for the #5 spot, but in the end I kept coming back to Pixar, who has managed to balance high-quality output with great box office better than just about anyone else in Hollywood. Consider that all but one of their summer releases has finished among that summer’s top five, and that the one that didn’t -- 2007’s Ratatouille, probably the least kid-friendly Pixar production to date -- landed at #6. So yeah, they’re a pretty good bet, and this family-oriented film should continue their hot streak. The opening weekend for Up could be tight, considering that it’s competing with the second weekend of Night at the Museum 2, but it ought to prevail in the long run given the thin June slate and the expected strong reviews.

Andrew:
This one didn’t make my list because it's got a meh title, I can’t figure out what the movie’s supposed to be about, and I don’t sense a lot of Up excitement in the ether...but then again, I thought Wall-E would tank, too, so what the hell do I know?

Scott:
The pundits are fretting that the new Pixar movie will turn off the kiddies because it’s about an old person. (shudder) How are they going to sell Old Guy action figures? Well, I seem to recall these same pundits wringing their hands over the nearly-silent first half of Wall-E, too, so I’m sticking with the assumption that Pixar knows what they’re doing.

4. ANGELS & DEMONS (May 15)

Paul:
Here’s where things get a little more iffy. A big-budget, star-studded adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller would seem to be a can’t-lose proposition, especially given the blockbuster grosses of The Da Vinci Code in 2006. Yet so far, the buzz on this one has been surprisingly muted, perhaps because it’s hard to imagine too many people getting worked up over a follow-up to its ponderous predecessor. Nonetheless, expect advertising for this to ramp up over the next month, leading to a big opening weekend followed by strong grosses over Memorial Day, as people line up for this almost out of obligation.

Andrew:
Considering people keep going to see those fake Nicolas Cage Da Vinci Code knock-offs, I expect there’s gonna be an audience for the genuine article. Plus, I’m told everyone and their mother (especially their mother) digs Tom Hanks, and devout filmgoers and atheists alike can all get behind a conspiracy thriller about all the creepy, weird stuff going on behind closed doors at the Vatican, right?

Click Here For The Hits (Part Two), The Bombs (Part Three), The Toss-Ups (Part Four) and The Honorable Mentions (Parts Five & Six)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark

Wall Street's Concern: Can Pixar Keep Falling "Up"?

Phil Nugent — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Pixar Animation Studios has sort of a funny relationship to its parent company, Disney: in terms of artistic and critical repute, its the company's prestige boutique line, yet it's also one of Disney's greatest cash cows. Last year's WALL-E was the fourth of Pixar's nine animated features to win the Academy Award, an achievement that is even more impressive when you consider that Pixar's first three features were made before the Academy bothered to create a category for Best Animated Feature. But last month, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research came up with an unusual way of celebrating the impending (May 29) release of the tenth Pixar feature, Up: he downgraded the company's stock. As Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, this was part of an overall expression of concern from "two important business camps — Wall Street and toy retailers" - about the commercial prospects of Up. The movie, which was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and is to be released in 3-D, is about a 78-year-old man (voiced by Ed Asner) who, widowed and threatened with being moved to an assisted living facility, sets out for South America in a flying house powered by balloons, with an eight-year-old stowaway in tow. The naysayers fear that young audiences will find the aged protagonist and the lack of a prominent female character a turn-off. And the businessmen are expressing their lack of faith in the movie in a way that other moviemakers with strong critical reputations, such as Martin Scorsese, don't have to sit up nights worrying about: they're not lining up to produce lines of toys based on the film. "Thinkway Toys, which has churned out thousands of Pixar-related products since 1995’s Toy Story,” Barnes writes, "will not produce a single item."

This sort of talk pisses Pixar off, partly because they've heard it before. A lot of salarymen thought that they'd never heard of anything less commercial than Ratatouille, with its implicit message that the secret to good food is having more vermin in the kitchen - at least until they got a load of WALL-E with its long, dialogue-free opening sequence and apocalyptic take on environmental neglect. “The worries keep coming despite Pixar's track record," Doug Creutz of Cowen and Company says, "because each film it delivers seems to be less commercial than the last.” And in fact, even though Ratatouille and WALL-E were indeed huge hits, their ticket sales showed a marked drop-off from the likes of Finding Nemo. (Meanwhile, Pixar's biggest success in terms of generating toys and other side marketables was Cars, regarded by most observers as the studio's weakest feature in terms of quality.) Pixar has been building support in advance of the opening by showing it to bloggers and other friendly parties. So far, the response has been rapturous, with some fans comparing it to the work of Hayao Miyazaki. No doubt just hearing that makes Richard Greenfield want to take it all back.

Nobody seriously expects Up - which is scheduled to be shown on opening night at the Cannes Film Festival, an unprecedented honor for an animated film, or a 3-D film - to just tank. The real basis for the money men's complaints seem to be that Pixar, as they see it, perversely refuses to go at the target with both guns blazing. Instead of concentrating all their considerable energies on films that can be easily be spun into long-running franchises and tapped into for merchandising lines, they keep coming up with these odd, one-shot ideas and executing them impeccably. The movies are hits, but they could be making mega-super-colossal hits, which were in fact assembly lines for turning out more hits. (It's worth remembering that the one time Pixar tried to play the half-assed ancillary merchandise game, grinding out what was meant to be a direct-to-video sequel to their first film, Toy Story, Disney took one look at the resulting feature and realized that it was too good for the purpose for which it had been made; the studio was obliged to release it to theaters.) When the Pixar people aren't busy making films, they generate quotes for reporters, such as Pete Docter's “We make these films for ourselves. We’re kind of selfish that way,” or Pixar co-founder and Disney's head Imagineer John Lasseter's oft-repeated, "Quality is the best business plan.” Lines like that must strike the marketing guys as if they were intended as knives thrust into their skeevy black hearts. The bottom-line folks in Hollywood have always been good for reminding those in the creativity division that, while movies can be art, making them is also a business. The Pixar complainers may be representative of a mindset that isn't embarrassed to talk openly about how vexing it is to them that some of the people who generate good business have the audacity to also care about their art.

Related Stories:

Trailer Review: Up

DreamWorks CEO Brags About New 3D Technology, Talks Shit About Your Daddy

Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At the 3-D screening of Monsters vs. Aliens I attended, there was a collective gasp from the children in the audience when the first image seemingly launched off the screen at us, and a cynical, “It took five people to write that?” from an adult behind me when the end credits finally rolled. My own opinion fell somewhere between those two reactions.

While generally more broad and less well-written than a typical Pixar film, the gang at DreamWorks Animation (under the direction of Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman) gives good visual in their latest, with everything from spaceships to red rubber paddle balls zooming towards (and, in correctly equipped theaters, beyond) the screen, as well as a series of cleverly conceived and executed action sequences: one, involving an epic battle on and around the Golden Gate Bridge, is especially breath-taking.

The story and characters, meanwhile, don’t go a lot deeper than the high-concept title: Reese Witherspoon voices a young bride-to-be named Susan, who transforms into a 50-ish foot woman called Ginormica after getting hit by a mysterious meteorite on her wedding day.

“Ginormica,” in fact, is the name assigned to Susan after she’s captured by a secret government agency tasked with containing the world’s creepiest creatures, including a brainless blob (Seth Rogen), a fish-ape (or possibly ape-fish) “missing link” (Will Arnett), a Brundlefly-esque amalgam of mad scientist and cockroach (Hugh Laurie) and Insectosaurus (Jimmy Kimmel), a giant Mothra-style insect several times larger than even Ginormica (and whose incoherent yowlings somehow required yet another celebrity voice). When evil extraterrestrial Gallaxar (a relatively restrained Rainn Wilson) invades, the U.S. President (a disappointing Stephen Colbert, badly in need of restraint) is convinced by General Monger (Kiefer Sutherland, channeling Larry the Cable Guy) to arrange a battle royale involving...say it with me now...monsters vs. aliens.

Along the way, there are plenty of (mostly) clever gags -- my favorite involving a thumb-less wedding guest -- and nice (if simplistic) messages about acceptance and girl power. Meanwhile, even those currently experiencing Rogen fatigue may get a kick out of the actor’s familiar stoner giggle issuing from a family-friendly blob...a character the husky Canadian was pretty much born to play.

And besides, griping that DreamWorks’ new offering doesn’t measure up to, say, WALL-E or The Incredibles isn’t entirely fair. Since at least the Jeffrey Katzenberg era at Disney, American mainstream animated features (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Coraline) have been consistently smarter, better crafted and more humane than most Hollywood product over the same period. If Monsters vs. Aliens is just an average kiddie film, then here’s hoping all the kiddies raised on such films will come to demand at least as much quality from the studios as their generation moves forward into adulthood.

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens
The Top 50 Movies of 2009

Trailer Review: Up (Trailer #3)

Paul Clark — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Normally, I’d write a paragraph about my feelings about this trailer. But considering this is the latest trailer for the newest Pixar movie, there really isn’t much that needs said. Just watch the thing already.

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

And the nominees are...

Bolt – Chris Williams and Byron Howard
Kung Fu Panda – Mark Osborne and John Stevenson
Wall-E – Andrew Stanton

Paul Clark Predicts: Wall-E

The Panda may have swept the Annies, but this award’s voted on by everyone, not just the animators. And it’s foolish to bet against Pixar.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Wall-E

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Wall-E

This one is as sure thing as there is at the Oscars this year; the 3D gimcrackery of Bolt and the overrated Kung Fu Panda don’t stand a chance against Wall-E, which really ought to have been nominated for Best Picture.

Should Win: Wall-E
Will Win: Wall-E

Nick Schager Predicts: Wall-E

Wall-E wins, or I throw something at the television. Or, at least, say something nasty under my breath.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Wall-E

Clearly Wall-E will win. It is this year's answer to An Inconvenient Truth. Only with animated robots instead of Al Gore.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Wall-E

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: KUNG FU PANDA! (No, just kidding...WALL-E)

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

And the nominees are...

La Maison En Petits Cubes - Kunio Kato
Lavatory - Lovestory - Konstantin Bronzit
Oktapodi - Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand
Presto - Doug Sweetland
This Way Up - Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

Paul Clark Predicts: Presto

It’s Pixar. Good enough for me.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Oktapodi

My time-honored rule in this category is always to pick the one with the funniest title. (And yes, I think Oktapodi is funnier than Lavatory – Lovestory, which may come back to bite me right in the ass...that or the fact I forgot Presto was from Pixar.)

Nick Schager Predicts: La Maison en Petits Cubes

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Presto

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: PRESTO

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

And the nominees are...

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water

Paul Clark Predicts: Encounters at the End of the World

Man on Wire is the best movie, but I think that sentiment for Herzog -- a newly-enshrined Academy member whose stock in Hollywood is higher than ever -- will take this. Besides, wouldn’t a Werner Herzog Oscar speech be awesome?

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Man On Wire

I can’t remember a stronger year for the Documentary Feature category...by which I mean I’ve actually heard of most of the films and the two I saw were great. I haven’t seen Trouble the Water (which by all accounts is fantastic and which I’m adding to my Netflix queue...right...NOW), and I’m rooting for Werner Herzog (if only for the peculiar, deadpan acceptance speech), but I’ve seen that little French tightrope elf on a dozen talk shows, so it seems Man On Wire has the most exposure...and, in the absence of a Holocaust documentary this time around, that may be enough to secure a win.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Encounters at the End of the World

It’s a terrific year for documentaries, and the trick will be predicting which one appeals to the Academy voters. Man On Wire has charm, Encounters at the End of the World is stunning, and Trouble the Water is one of the best of the Katrina documentaries; my guess is that AMPAS will go for the Herzog to compensate for his not getting any dap for his fiction films.

Should Win: Trouble the Water
Will Win: Encounters at the End of the World

Nick Schager Predicts: Man On Wire

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Man On Wire

In these post-Bush times we can look back on the Twin Towers and reminisce in a French way. N'est-ce pas?

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Man On Wire

I guess I'm the only one who thinks this is overrated. It's the sort of thing I probably would have enjoyed if I'd stumbled upon it on the Discovery channel or something, but the twinkly Frenchman got on my nerves after a while and all that build-up to, what, two still photographs? I dunno, give me Encounters at the End of the World – compelling characters, brilliant cinematography and that poor goofy penguin.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: MAN ON WIRE

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

And the nominees are...

The Conscience of Nhem En
The Final Inch
Smile Pinki
The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306

Paul Clark Predicts: The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306

I haven’t seen any of these, but this sounds like the sort of title that wins this category.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: The Final Inch

Again, I go with the funny name in this category. The Final Inch. Heh-heh-heh-heh...

Nick Schager Predicts: The Final Inch

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: The Conscience of Nhem En

I don't know anything about it, but it sounds very important.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: THE FINAL INCH

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

And the nominees are...

On the Line (Auf der Strecke)
Manon On the Asphalt
New Boy
The Pig (Grisen)
Toyland (Spielzeugland)

Paul Clark Predicts: On the Line (Auf der Strecke)

Sure, why not?

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Toyland (Spielzeugland)

Ordinarily, I’d go with the “funny name” strategy again, but this one’s about Nazis: ka-ching!!!

Nick Schager Predicts: Toyland (Spielzeugland)

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Auf der Strecke (On the Line)

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS: NO CONSENSUS!

Stay tuned for appearances by Viola Davis, Marisa Tomei, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the vengeful ghost of Heath Ledger as the 2009 Screengrab Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s a little risky looking forward at an entire upcoming year’s worth of releases and cherry-picking the promising-looking ones. It’s not just that many of the movies that are currently slated to come out within the next 12 months might get pushed back or shuttered altogether. It’s also the fact that as good as some movies might look on paper with their high-profile casts and extravagant budgets, they could very well end up awful. Just ask the makers of Town and Country.

That said, here (using the ever-popular “3 Up, 3 Down” format) are a handful of my most anticipated movies of 2009, along with three I’m dreading, and one wild card:

3 Up:

The Tree of Life

Marking the filmmaker’s quickest turnaround to date, Terrence Malick latest film comes a scant four years after his 2005 masterpiece The New World. That Malick has apparently decided to keep making movies is worth celebrating by itself, but that he’s finally getting around to his supposed “dream project” (which he’s allegedly been tinkering with for three decades now) is the stuff of Malick-fanboy fantasies.

Inglourious Basterds

Speaking of fanboy fantasies, it looks like Quentin Tarantino’s long-discussed World War II actioner is for real. Word from those who’ve read the script is that Basterds (Tarantino’s spelling) is all kinds of wanky, but don’t forget that people said the same about Kill Bill and Thunder Bolt Death Proof, and those turned out just fine. Not even Eli Roth’s acting could scare me away from this.

Avatar

I toyed with several choices in this spot- including Pixar’s Up and Von Trier’s Antichrist- but in the end, I kept coming back to Jim Cameron’s state-of-the-arts space opera. It’s been twelve years since Cameron made his last fiction feature (nothing you’d have heard of), and I’m plenty curious to see the project that convinced him to come back. Say what you will about his movies- there’s no denying Cameron’s technical mastery and knack for cinematic grandeur, and I’m eager to see how he pushes the envelope again this time around.

3 Down:

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Two summers ago, I hated Michael Bay’s Transformers, the movie that disproved my seemingly ironclad hypothesis that no movie that contains giant robot fights could ever be boring. After that movie’s massive box-office success, Hollywood has responded with a wave of big-screen toy/cartoon adaptations pitched to adults who really ought to know better (coming in 2012: The Jonas Brothers are Voltron!). Is there any chance this will actually be good? Don’t bet on it.

G-Force

You folks already know how I feel about this one. The only way this could’ve possibly been good would be if Robert Smigel or Trey Parker and Matt Stone were behind it, making it as bizarre as possible, but that’s not going to happen. Sorry, G-Force, but my flesh’n’fur cavies could take you all on without breaking a squeak, sassy celebrity voices or no.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Yet another sub-Sandler product from the Happy Madison crap factory. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, except that the title character’s name is too close to mine to ignore. I’m hoping this falls out of the public consciousness quickly so that I don’t have to worry about "Mall Cop" jokes for the next few years. Why couldn’t the character be “Paul Blart: Nuclear Physicist” or “Paul Blart: Vascular Surgeon?” How about “Paul Blart: World’s Greatest Film Critic?” Okay, maybe that’s pure fantasy, but I can dream, right?

Wild Card:

Sherlock Holmes

I was a fan of the Holmes series in my youth, so part of me is excited for this, not only for the cast (Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are inspired choices to play the newfangled Holmes and Watson), but also because the filmmakers are using the classic A Scandal in Bohemia story as their inspiration. So why isn’t this one of my most anticipated movies of 2009? Two words, folks- Guy Ritchie. Maybe he’ll be able to keep his tendencies toward visual noise and narrative incoherence in check this time, but if Ritchie screws the pooch on this seemingly foolproof project, I’m going to be seriously pissed.

The Best of 2008: Leonard Pierce's Picks for the Best Movies of the Year, Part Two

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:45:00 GMT

5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)

Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats. But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children. I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t. But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI. And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, dir.)

If you ever want to flummox a music critic, ask him to describe one of his favorite new bands without comparing them to another band. Of course, Rachel Getting Married proves that the same can occasionally be said for movie critics: it seems impossible to talk about without referencing something else. It’s got the dysfunctional family dynamics of Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime; the comeback-kid story of The Wrestler; the hateful-misanthrope-as-vehicle-for-joyous-redemption jawn of a Wes Anderson film (only better) and the structure and form of the late Robert Altman’s best work (only different). With all of these elements at play, though, it never seems derivative of anything else, only reminiscent in the best possible way. In the end, Rachel Getting Married is its own film, familiar yet new and impressive, and carried along by some of the finest acting of the year, most especially from Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin.

3. CHE (Steven Soderbergh, dir.)

Steven Soderbergh keeps on making great movies, and never the same one twice. His latest is getting lots of what child care experts call “good attention” and “bad attention”; it’s certain that Soderbergh intended it that way, with its rigid formal structure, back-spasm-inducing length, difficult tonal shifts, and…oh, yeah, it’s a biopic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. It’s just as hard to figure out how much of the negative reception is due to political and moral judgment of the revolutionary Che Guevara as it is to figure out how much of the positive reception comes from those who valorize him, but taken purely as a movie, Che is hard to beat: it’s formally daring, adventurously directed, risk-taking, well-made, and held together by a powerful performance that shows its subject neither as a heroic rebel or a vicious murderer, but simply as a man so consumed by his cause that he didn’t know what else to do than keep fighting for it.

2. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, dir.)

There have been a number of exceptionally well-done documentaries in recent years about ordinary people dangling from the precipice of financial ruin in economically uncertain times, but successful narrative films dealing with the same subject have been few and far between. That’s largely because it’s hard to approach the topic in fiction without becoming didactic, maudlin, or treacly – and those challenges are certainly, and perilously, evident in Kelly Reichardt’s story about a young woman in brutally limited circumstances who loses her beloved dog while pursuing a slender chance at a decent job. But the miraculous thing about Wendy and Lucy is that it toes that line from its first frame to its last without ever tumbling down and making a mess of itself. That’s a testament to the top-notch script, the surprisingly deep direction, and the beautiful performance by lead actress Michelle Williams. No one could ever have predicted that an heir to the Italian neo-realist tradition would emerge in 2008 from America’s Pacific Northwest; that it happened is one of the year’s greatest surprises.

1. SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK (Charlie Kaufman, dir.)

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. I first heard him talk about his desire to direct way back in 2004, when I interviewed him for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when Synechdoche, New York was finally announced, I was full of dread. The video stores of America are choked with mediocre-to-bad movies by talented writers who decided what they really wanted to do was direct. I needn’t have worried: Synechdoche, New York is easily my favorite film of the year. Kaufman approached directing with the same meticulous, self-searching approach that he does writing, and the result is nothing short of astounding. The best movies, for me, are the ones that seem to completely rewire my head – that are so profound and well-crafted that they redefine my basic approach to their subject, form or content. Charlie Kaufman accomplishes that his first time out of the gate, and that’s the mark of a major talent.

ALMOST MADE IT: The Strangers, Doubt, Iron Man, The Wrestler, Bigger Stronger Faster*.

DIDN'T SEE THEM: Entre les Murs (The Class), Standard Operating Procedure, Lat den Ratte Komme In (Let the Right One In), Dear Zachary: A Letter To His Son About His Father, Trouble the Water, Full Battle Rattle, Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon).

PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married; Kristin Scott Thomas, Il y a Longtemps Que Je T'aime; Viola Davis, Doubt.

MADE IN 2007, BUT GREAT IN 2008: 4 Luni 3 Saptamani si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days); Paranoid Park; My Winnipeg; Une Vielle Maitress (The Last Mistress); Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven); Encounters at the End of the World; Chop Shop.

OVERRATED: Waltz with Bashir; In Bruges; Happy-Go-Lucky; Slumdog Millionaire; Kung Fu Panda.

Click for Part One

2008 in Review: Phil Nugent's Top Ten

Phil Nugent — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

BEFORE I FORGET: Writer-director-star's Jacques Nolot's measured, surprisingly affecting portrait of an aging gay hustler whose friends are dying off (as he himself enters his twenty-fourth year of being HIV-positive) and who lives in fear of losing the very memories that he's become mired in. A dry-eyed yet very moving experience, this French film arrived in theaters here in late summer and attracted about as much attention as most films do when they're not in English and include plenty of footage of men in their fifties and sixties with their clothes off.

CHOP SHOP Writer-director Rahmin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.

A CHRISTMAS TALE: Arnaud Desplechin's two-and-a-half-hour, bracingly grown-up domestic drama has all the things that make the holidays great: inherited terminal illness, drunken name-calling, childhood fantasies that would make Dr. Phil alert the FBI, adulterous yearnings, repressed family resentments, family resentments that couldn't be less repressed if they were spelled out on the side of the Goodyear blimp, and bitterly estranged siblings battling over which of them will get the bragging rights for the crucial donation to mom's bone marrow transplant. All that plus this classic Christmas Eve conversation between a drunken adult and a couple of kids: "Boys, you should go to bed." "We're waiting for Jesus." "But Jesus never existed." "We'll wait anyway. We want to see him"

THE CLASS: Laurent Cantet's improvisational take on the education system. See the Screengrab Q & A.

THE DARK KNIGHT: Because Heath Ledger's Joker convinced me that if I didn't include this one, he'd come back to talk to me about it. This one is also for the woman who was sitting behind me at the Empire 25 in Times Square, who, when Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon let his wife know that he hadn't really been killed by showing up on the doorstep in the middle of the night and the wife slapped him--Ka-POW!!-- across his sheepish face, said, "I know that's right!" and who, when the wife then grabbed him and kissed him while his cheek was still throbbing, whispered, "That's right, too."

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin's Head-On was one of my favorite movies of the decade. A pure charge of sadomasochistic romantic torment, it was by turns funny, angry, sexy, and heart-breaking, and it just seemed to flow as naturally as a spring brook. His newest multi-character drama isn't as ferociously inspired as that picture was; the plot is built on a string of coincidences, and Akin lets you hear the gears turning. But it's still one of the most remarkable dramas of the year, from a filmmaker who remains a man to watch.

THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Margaret Brown's jaw-dropping documentary about the parallel, racially segregated Mardi Gras cultures of Mobile, Alabama. Would make for the double feature of the year if paired with another remarkable documentary about race and Southern culture, Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN: This entry is partly a mea culpa. I first saw Abdellatif Kechiche's Franco-Tunisian family drama, a sprawling film with a basically simple story about an aged immigrant trying to start up a restaurant, when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the time, I wrote a review that emphasized my problems with it, especially my feeling that it sometimes left its performers stranded in needlessly meandering long takes that did not justify its running time of two and a half hours. I'm not quite ready to take all that back, but I have to admit that, in the six months since, parts of this movie have come back and played themselves over and over in my head when I was least expecting to think about them again, and that I can't say that about many other films I saw this year. It's just now opened commercially in select U.S. theaters, and damned if I don't feel like I ought to see it again now that I'm no longer suffering from festival fever. In the meantime, I sure wouldn't try to talk anyone else out of seeing it.

SYNECDOCHE, NY: The flaws of Charlie Kaufman's long, cluttered film don't look like much to me in comparison to its achievement: a comedy about all the ways that our obsessions with death and futility prevent us from getting anything done with the precious time we have here, which does full justice to this very depressing theme yet also manages to be very funny. People who fault Kaufman for excessive cleverness might as well be complaining that action movies promote antisocial behavior. Kaufman is clever; more than that, he's actually intelligent. And he's one of the few artists in movies actively grappling with what might just be one of the great concerns of the post-modern world: how do people smart enough to see all the reasons for believing that everything is hopeless stop using their intellligence to trip them themselves up?

WALL-E: The first quarter-hour or so of this Pixar haymaker constitute the most astonishing kind of triumph: a fully realized, scarily believable vision of Hell on Earth that I felt like I never wanted to leave, or at least never stop watching. If, once the plot kicks in, it settles down into a mere first-rate satirical animated love story with a kick, I'd hate for that to seem like a complaint.

HONORABLE MENTION: Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son about His Father, Encounters at the End of the World, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Full Battle Rattle, The Go-Getter, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Iron Man, Jellyfish, Kung Fu Panda, Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Milk, My Winnipeg, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Paranoid Park, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Slumdog Millionaire, Summer Palace, Taxi to the Dark Side, Trouble the Water, The Unforseen, Up the Yangtze, The Visitor, Water Lilies, Waltz with Bashir, The Witnesses, The Wrestler

BEST MOVIE RELEASED IN THE U.S. IN 2008 WHICH, FOR SOME REASON, EVERY CRITIC IN THE U.S. PUT ON HIS OR HER TEN-BEST LIST FOR 2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

BEST RESTORATION/BEST RE-ISSUE: The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie's legendary 1961 documentary-style look at the Native American subculture of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. Not as great as the first two Godfather films, which also got a handsome and timely restoration, but that was going to happen anyway. This was more of a happy surprise.

BEST FILMED THEATER: the "avant-garde" production of Hamlet in Jellyfish; the kids' play in A Christmas Tale

BEST SCENE OF A COUPLE OF GUYS BURIED IN PROSTHETIC MAKE-UP GETTING BOOZED UP AND SINGING ALONG WITH BARRY MANILOW: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

REALLY GOOD TV: The HBO film Longford, Generation Kill, Breaking Bad, the last season of The Wire, the last episode of The Shield, Sarah Palin on the interview circuit, and The Drinky Crow Show on Adult Swim

GREAT PERFORMANCES: Jeffrey Wright, Columbus Short, and Eamonn Walker in Cadillac Records, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, and Chiara Mastroianni in A Christmas Tale, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch in Milk, Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder, Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in Slumdog Millionaire, Juliette Binoche in The Flight of the Red Balloon, Viola Davis in Doubt, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen in Happy-Go-Lucky, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in Vicki Christina Barcelona, Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, NY, Patricia Clarkson in Elegy and Married Life, Michelle Williams in Synecdoche, NY and Wendy and Lucy, Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, James Franco in Pineapple Express, Richard Dreyfuss in W., Kristen Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Kathryn Hahn in Step Brothers, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Tea Leone in Ghost Town, Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jane Lynch in Role Models, Richard Jenkins, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass in The Visitor, Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs and A Girl Cut in Two, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, Famke Janssen in Turn the River, Greta Gerwig in Baghead, Jeanne Balibar in The Duchess of Langeais

BEST USE OF ZOOEY DESCHANEL: The unofficial muse of the Screengrab got the royal treatment in The Go-Getter, a too-little-seen road comedy that marked the writer-director feature debut of Martin Hynes, previously best known as the star of the 1999 short George Lucas in Love. The movie, which also features terrific work by Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, Bill Duke, Judy Greer, Nick Offerman, and its young star, Lou Taylor Pucci, doesn't introduce Deschanel's character unscreen until midway through, though she keeps in touch via cell phone, so the audience gets to have its collective ear tickled by the entrancing sound her voice before being premitted to gaze upon her ethereal loveliness. Slow to turn up in theaters and too quick to vacate them, The Go-Getter was actually completed in 2007, the same year that Deschanel appeared on the small screen in a guest appearance on the increasingly rotten Weeds that came to exactly nothing and as Dorothy as the stinko Wizard of Oz-as-sci-fi-fantasy miniseries Tin Man. This year, she graduated to big-studio movies that sought to exploit her freshness and talent in the name of shoring of has-been directors (in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) and tired stars (in The Yes Man with Jim Carrey). No wonder the poor kid's looking to break into music.

SHE'S JUST A GIRL WHO CAN'T SAY NO: In Boarding Gate, Asia Argento ran drugs, escaped a hail of gunfire on a motorcycle, got drugged and raped (off-screen) by a bunch of Japanese businessmen, choked Michael Madsen with his own belt only to discover that he kind of enjoyed it, handcuffed Madsen and shot him in the head, and traveled to Hong Kong to find herself at the mercy of Kim Gordon, all nice work if you can get it. She also slipped into black underwear and matching fuck-me shoes to pose for the poster, holding a big-ass gun that she was going to have trouble concealing in that outfit. In The Last Mistress, she told dirty stories about herself and made eating ice cream look as if ought to count as a violation of the Patriot Act. In Mother of Tears, she swam through an underground sea of sewage and gore, got paralyzed, became psychic, witnessed the murders of her friends by ghouls who throttled women with their own intestines and shoved phallic pikes between their legs until the pointy ends came out their mouths, splattered a woman's head like a cantaloupe during a train ride, and hung out with Udo Kier. That last was one was directed by her father. I can't for the life of me decide what that makes it all better or even worse.

BEST INSIDE SNAPSHOT OF HOLLYWOOD: Nina Davenport's documentary Project Filmmaker began with the actor Liev Schreiber, who was planning to make his first film as a director, Everything Is Illluminated (2005), based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a report about the effects of the Iraq War and saw a 25-year-old Iraqi, Muthana Mohmed, explaining that he wanted to be a filmmaker but the Americans just blew up the country's film school. In a fit of liberal guilt, Schrieber magnanimously sent word that this lad was to be found and hired and brought to the Czech Republic to work on the set of his major studio production. And Schreiber was so impressed with his own gesture that he further instructed that a documentary would be made to record this inspiring episode in annals of the brotherhood of man. The next thing anyone knew, there was a sullen, pissed-off young Iraqi on the set, telling Davenport's camera how freaked out he was to be "working for a Jewish director of a Jewish movie defending the Jewish theory"--that would appear to be the "theory" that the Holocaust happened--and bitterly complaining that while the most important scenes were being filmed, he was made to remain in a trailer, "mixing the snacks." Davenport seems a little overly taken with the notion that Muthana's story parallels that of Iraq itself since 2003, and way too taken with the idea that there's some larger comment to mae about the culture at large that metasized in Baghdad: at one point, she cuts from actual footage of carnage in Iraq to gruseomely made-up extras lying in heaps on the set of Doom, a movie based on a video game, whose star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, arranged to sent Muthana to film school in London after the little fella's love affair with Liev Schreiber went the way of all flesh. By the end, Davenport herself is trying to explain to Mohmed that she can't continue to shell out money whenever he says he needs it and complaining that he's gotten his hands on her footage and is "holding it hostage." Early on, Liev Schreiber's associates say that Mohmed simply didn't understand the mechanics of how a smart operator makes himself "indispensible" to a director and so uses his time on a film set as a career stepping stone. But they can't say he didn't learn as he went along.

MOST EFFECTIVE MINDLESS SCARE MACHINE: The Strangers

SHITTIEST-LOOKING MOVIE OF THE YEAR: It used to be that back when filmmaking on almost any scale was an incredibly expensive, physically demanding enterprise, low-budget indie filmmakers and proud amateurs who either couldn't afford or achieve decent lighting or camerawork could be counted on to point to the butt-ugliness of their work as proof of their artistic integrity. But recent technological advances have made films that can't meet a certain level of visual polish harder and harder to come by. JCVD is worth pointing to as a real match of form and content, yoking its single, solitary, half-bright idea--let's get all meta with Jean-Claude Van Damme!--not just to a slack and unimaginative execution but to a visual style that makes it look as if Dario Argento had rubbed entrails all over the camera lens, or that the entire country of Belgium had neglected to pay its light bill. Here's to director Mabrouk el Mechri for kickin' it old school.

NOT ALL THAT: Baghead, Ballast, Be Kind Rewind, Che, Doubt, Frozen River, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, A Girl Cut in Two, Heartbeat Detector, I Serve the King of England, Momma's Man, The Pool, Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Standard Operating Procedure, Stuck, Tell No One, Trannsiberian, W., Wendy and Lucy

Trailer Review: The Tale of Despereaux

Paul Clark — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ever since I began dating a single mother, I’ve become more conscious of upcoming kids’ movies than I ever needed to be before. The ever-reliable Pixar and Miyazaki notwithstanding, this naturally means wading through a lot of dreck, as when I took the boy to (ugh) Beverly Hills Chihuahua when mom came down with the flu. So I’ve learned to value movies geared to kids that actually look like they have some value. And while The Tale of Despereaux may not appeal to adults who don’t have kids to care for, to me it looks pretty worthwhile. For one thing, I enjoy the look of the animation, which is somewhat lusher and more picturebook-ish than most computer-animated films nowadays. But I also like the voice casting here- instead of filling the roles with caffeinated comics and encouraging them to ham it up, many of the voice actors actually sound like they’re underplaying. Besides, how can I not love an animated movie in which Screengrab fave Richard Jenkins provides a voice? I end up getting dragged to a lot of kids’ movies nowadays, but The Tale of Despereaux is an exception- a family animated movie I’m actually looking forward to seeing.

DVD Digest for November 18, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, some of summer’s biggest hits arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season, along with a handful of choice classics.

DVD of the week: With all the care Pixar devotes to creating their theatrical releases, it’s amazing that they have any time left for their DVDs. However, Pixar’s DVD editions are almost invariably first-rate, and this week’s release of WALL-E would appear to be no exception. We begin, of course, with the razor-sharp transfer of the movie itself, which comes directly from the digital master, making it arguably crisper than could be found in the theatre. But that’s only the beginning, with two animated shorts (one seen in theatres, the other a DVD original), featurettes on the film’s sound design, visual design, music, character design, and more. Finally, there are a number of features on WALL-E that take viewers into the world of the film, including a documentary about the movie’s robotic cast, and short films about the nefarious “Buy N Large” corporation from its inception to their Earth Exit plan, and beyond. Needless to say, WALL-E is an ideal DVD for kids, but it’s also a must-have even if you don’t have a family to buy for this holiday season.

Other recent releases coming to DVD this week: Ben Stiller’s Hollywood action satire Tropic Thunder (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn and friends in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a quartet of acclaimed indie films- Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Image); the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia); Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (Genius); and Audrey Tautou in Priceless (First Look).

On the classics front, the big release this week is David Lynch: The Lime Green Box Set (Absurda), which includes the new-to-DVD Industrial Symphony No. 1, plus the remastered Eraserhead, a Lynch-approved 5.1-surround version of Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, The Short Films of David Lynch, Dumbland, along with new extras for Elephant Man and Wild at Heart, the Eraserhead soundtrack, and a “Mystery Disc” full of exclusive Lynch goodies. Or if you’re looking for something a little more “classical”, pick up the new Criterion editions of Martin Ritt’s masterful adaptation of the John le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or the French swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Also worth mentioning is the release of Fred Schepisi’s long-unavailable classic of Australian cinema, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Ryko Distribution).

In a slow week for TV on DVD, the most noteworthy title is Bones Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week presents the most definitive argument that Blu-Ray has really arrived, with a plethora of mostly crappy Blu-Ray only releases. The exceptions are Curtis Hanson’s pretty-good Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (Universal) and the Neil Gaiman-scripted Mirrormask (Sony). But other than that, it’s looking pretty dire, with the Martin Lawrence double feature of Blue Streak (Sony) and National Security (Sony), Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (Sony), and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Sony), which if nothing else remains the most definitive cinematic statement about the ongoing war over teen horniness. I’m for decriminalization, by the way.

Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Paul Clark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

After Monday’s Trailer Review of the teaser for Pixar’s Up, most trailers would be a letdown, and this one is no exception. Yet taken on its own terms, Monsters vs. Aliens looks pretty fun. For years, Dreamworks has been Pixar’s most ubiquitous rivals in the CG animation market, but while films like the Shrek franchise and Shark Tale relied far too heavily on easy pop culture references for their humor, they’ve been getting better in recent years, re-positioning themselves as the Warner Bros. to Pixar’s Disney. I like that the cast here is somewhat less star-studded than most previous Dreamworks Animation releases- Reese Witherspoon is top-lining of course, but the most of the other cast members they went for comedic talent rather than box-office clout. That said, the combination of Seth Rogen, Stephen Colbert, Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, and even Hugh Laurie (such a perfect Jeeves) is pretty irresistible. It remains to be seen whether this is any good, but what can I say, I laughed, especially at the “Susan” gag.

Trailer Review: Up (Teaser #2)

Paul Clark — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Sure, the animation is gorgeous and the Pixar wit is certainly in evidence, but do you know what I love most about this trailer? It’s that the protagonist isn’t especially likable. In most Hollywood movies, the main characters are sympathetic because the filmmakers clearly want you to love them, and by extension their movies. This goes double for movies pitched to audiences, where more audience love means more ancillary profits from toys and lunchboxes and video games. But Pixar, once again, is thinking outside the box- the central character in the story is a cranky old man who concocts a plan to make his house fly away so he can escape the people in his life. Of course, it remains to be seen if this will work, but remember, these are the guys who took a story about a rat chef and a movie about a robot who can only say two words and turned them both into critical catnip and box-office gold. And hell, even if the old guy softens at the end, I have faith that the Pixar geniuses will make that work too.

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Notable individuals die all the time, and we react with varying degrees of sadness or indifference when their names appear in the weekly obituary sections of magazines like, say, Entertainment Weekly or Time.

But every now and then, a celebrity death truly shocks us, because we really, truly thought the individual in question had already died sometime in the late ‘80s.

Occasionally, though, we react to celebrity death with the heartfelt regret usually reserved for people we actually knew. I moped around for days after heart failure claimed Glenn “Divine” Milstead in 1988, and the 2006 loss of Robert Altman felt like the passing of a beloved, crotchety grandfather.

Paul Newman outlived them both, surviving to the ripe old age of 83. In fact, by a strange coincidence, Wikipedia just informed me that Newman and Altman were both somehow born in 1925, which simply doesn’t compute in my perceptual reckoning of things. How could Newman be older than Robert Altman, or my father, or...or Robert Redford, ferchrissakes? Intellectually, of course, I knew he was old: his film career started way back in 1954 with The Silver Chalice, though I always (erroneously) associated him more with the Baby Boomer class of Nicholson and Beatty, thanks to ‘60s and ‘70s classics like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yet, even as Newman aged before our eyes into one of cinema’s grumpy old men in films like Twilight and Road to Perdition, it somehow never registered that he was actually old old. I mean, the man drove freakin’ race cars! How can he be gone while Cheney continues relentlessly on?

Alas...and yet, my Screengrab colleague Phil Nugent has already written a fine memorial tribute to this impressive humanitarian, salad dressing mogul and celebrated paragon of “the Hollywood Elite,” and so we come not to bury Paul Newman but to praise him, and the Top Ten films we’ll always remember him by.

10. THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958)

This Dixie-fried melodrama, directed by Martin Ritt (who later re-teamed with Newman for Hud), is supposed to be based on the writings of William Faulkner. As a treatment of a great American author it's a soap opera, but as a soap opera it's one hell of an overripe Southern-Gothic sudser, with Newman (modeling the latest in sweat-stained wifebeaters) and a cast that includes Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Anthony Franciosa making with the wild-eyed ravings in cracker accents that might have been delivered to the set in ten-gallon drums. In addition to its shameless entertainment value, it has a special sentimental place in Newman's oeuvre for marking the on-screen meeting of our hero and his offscreen heroine, Joanne Woodward. The plot revolves around a deal that Newman's hungry drifter, Ben Quick, makes with Welles' bloated paterfamilias, Will Varner, to win the hand of Varner's daughter, played by Woodward, who Will fears will otherwise marry poorly to a girly man played by Richard Anderson, AKA TV's Oscar Goldman. In the movie, Woodward remains stoically resistant to Newman's hard-bodied charms. In real life, not so much, and the two of them, who had met two years earlier while understudying the leads in Picnic (at a time when Newman was still inconveniently married to his first wife) reportedly spent much of the shoot making up for lost time. They would work together another dozen or so times, in co-starring gigs and in movies where Newman directed Woodward, but this is the movie that preserves the priceless and unforgettable sight of two very hot people first fully celebrating how hot they were for each other.

9. THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

One of the most amazing things about Paul Newman’s career was how long he was able to get away with working as a leading man. Well into his sixties and seventies, when most actors -- even A-list stars -- tend to be cast in father or mentor roles to nursemaid younger talent, Newman was still flashing those famous cobalt blues, attracting the women, and carrying movies on his ever-capable shoulders. Best of all, he made it work. Yet in his last two decades, Newman also took on several interesting supporting roles. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Road to Perdition, and in his final theatrical film, he voiced Doc Hudson, the gruff paterfamilias of the town of Radiator Springs, in Pixar’s Cars (let’s forget Message in a Bottle, shall we?). But best of all was his work in the Coen brothers’ sadly under-appreciated The Hudsucker Proxy. In this Art Deco take on a Preston Sturges-style comedy, Newman might seem an ill fit for the role of Hudsucker Industries vice-president Sidney J. Mussburger, the sort of corporate fat cat that might once have been played by Akim Tamiroff. But damn if Newman isn’t a treat to watch. Having built a fruitful career on his ability to make acting look easy, here he takes the opposite tack, giving a performance as stylized as any he’s ever given. In lesser hands, it might have felt like overacting -- look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in the same film for proof. But Newman pulls it off magnificently by somehow under-playing the role, never turning the character into an excuse to twist his (invisible) mustache. Instead, he simply turns the patented Newman charm back on itself, showing it used to an entirely different end. Who could ever forget the way he punctuates seemingly half his lines with a grunted “sure-sure”? In The Hudsucker Proxy, Newman gives us a tantalizing hint of what an irresistible character actor he might’ve been even if he hadn’t been so genetically blessed.

8. SLAP SHOT (1977)

It was asking way too much of Slap Shot for lightning to strike a third time. Hell, it was asking too much of The Sting for lightning to strike twice – and yet the second pairing of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill, following the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved to be a giant hit as well, satisfying critics and audiences alike. But Hill’s third go-round with Newman in the lead role didn’t have a William Goldman writing the screenplay, and Robert Redford probably wouldn’t have played particularly well as one of the Hanson Brothers, so the two of them went it alone. The story of the final days of a fading, brawling, largely out-of-control minor league hockey team wasn’t as successful as the previous two films, and it certainly didn’t garner the same level of critical praise. But though some great supporting performances and a funny, filthy script by Nancy Dowd played their part, it’s undeniably a testament to Paul Newman’s undying charisma and likeability as an actor that a lot of people would name Slap Shot as their favorite of all his movies. Newman (who featured as one of his most lasting traits the appearance that he genuinely enjoyed what he did for a living) is clearly having a ball as the foul-mouthed, dysfunctional player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (a character partly modeled on the notorious John Brophy). The role even spilled over into his real life: he complained to Time, seven years after the movie premiered, that since playing Reg Dunlop, his language had been “straight out of the locker room”.

Click Here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Thursday Morning Poll for September 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With the year two-thirds over, we thought it was a good time to look back at some of the most acclaimed titles of 2008 so far. But while IMDb users and tough-talking bands of blog commenters are largely in agreement that The Dark Knight is pretty much the greatest thing ever (or at least since The Shawshank Redemption), it might come as a surprise that the Screengrab readership does not concur with this opinion. To wit: in last week’s poll of the top five best-reviewed major releases of 2008 (according to Rotten Tomatoes), the winner was Pixar’s latest contemporary classic, Wall-E, which brought in 39% of the vote. Furthermore, The Dark Knight actually tied for second (22% of the vote apiece) with a film that was never released on more than fifty screens at any given time, last year’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. As for me, I cast my vote for the James Marsh’s thrilling documentary Man on Wire, which came in a solid fourth (17%) but at least fared better than Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner The Counterfeiters, which garnered no votes whatsoever.

This week, in conjunction with my colleague Andrew Osborne’s run-down of the biggest hits and flops of the summer, we get your opinions on the hottest tickets from the last four months. As you might have guessed, two of the titles this week were also included in last week’s poll, but we’re hoping that perhaps some of you Iron Man fans out there were waiting for your chance to cast your vote here. So, which of the summer’s biggest box-office winners was your favorite?

Favorite of this summer's biggest blockbusters? | BuzzDash polls

In addition, we’d like to know how many of the summer’s reigning blockbusters you managed to see.

How many of the blockbusters in question did you see? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS (1992 & 1995)

Even now, The Spirit of Christmas is funny as hell (and, uh, REALLY dirty...so if you haven’t been fired already, you might want to think twice before clicking the above clip at your workstation, unless of course you work in a Tourette’s ward). But way back in 1995, before Trey Parker and Matt Stone were famous, before South Park was a basic cable staple and before Stan, Kyle and Cartman were allowed to curse like cardboard cut-out sailors in their R-rated big-screen debut, this short (commissioned as a video Christmas card by a Fox TV exec who’d seen Parker and Stone’s college short “Jesus Vs. Frosty”) was a jaw-dropping revelation, a blend of comic provocation, pop culture geekery and relatable humanity that became the animators’ signature style when the cult popularity of their seemingly primitive debut catapulted them to infamy.

THE WRONG TROUSERS (1993)

One of the risks with animation is that the work it takes to create a finished film will bog down the story the film tells. But this has never been a problem for the films of Nick Park. With his beloved characters Wallace and Gromit, Park created some of animation’s most enduring films, which use a veddy British sense of humor to leaven some truly awe-inspiring flights of fancy. Nowhere is this more the case than in the second Wallace and Gromit adventure, The Wrong Trousers, which finds the dotty Wallace taking in a new boarder, with disastrous results. Armed with plenty of sound effects but only a single speaking role, Park tells his story almost completely through his images with a visual flair and storytelling efficiency that puts most features (animated or otherwise) to shame. The film even builds to an action-filled climax so assured that it reportedly inspired David O. Russell at one point when he was editing Three Kings. The Wrong Trousers demands multiple viewings -- not only because you might miss something the first time around, but also it’s hard to pay attention to Park’s bravura technique when you’re being so thoroughly entertained.

LUXO JR. (1986)

Other animation studios might make as much money as the geniuses at Pixar, but no American animation outlet can boast their critical cachet, a testament to the care with which they make their films and their ongoing quest to pursue new horizons. Even in their early days, Pixar was always experimenting, something that was in evidence as early as their second short film, Luxo Jr. Partly out of necessity, director John Lasseter and his team of animators didn’t use any of the cute animals that dominated the Disney model of animation, but rather a pair of everyday desk lamps. But while this decision was no doubt due to the fact that living creatures are much more difficult to animate via computer (a problem Pixar has long since resolved), Luxo Jr. nonetheless finds life in its inanimate protagonists. By finding possibilities for personality in the handful of possibilities presented by the lamps -- little more than a bulb, a swiveling head, a hinged arm and a base that hops around (complete with a power cord tail) -- Pixar established a knack for animating seemingly limited characters, something that would serve them well later on with such creations as Toy Story’s Mr. Potato Head, Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski, and even WALL*E and EVE. Pixar still cranks out a new animated short in conjunction with their features, but none they’ve made since has had the same level of charm as Luxo Jr.

NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN (1940)

Alas, not all old-school animation techniques have managed to survive. When husband-and-wife Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker created pin-screen animation- which involved manipulating a screen holding hundreds of thousands of pins and photographing the images a frame at a time- they couldn’t have known that their painstaking process would only end up being used on roughly half a dozen projects. But while pin-screen ended up requiring more work than most filmmakers were willing to give, it’s hard to argue with the results. In Alexeieff and Parker’s very first completed pin-screen short, Night on Bald Mountain, there’s a kind of expressiveness that can’t be found in any other form of animation, a smooth yet eerie sort of shadow play that, in the cast of this particular short, suits the material perfectly. It takes some searching to find Alexeieff and Parker’s other works (their best-known effort can be found at the opening of Orson Welles’ The Trial), but for fans of animation, it’s well worth the effort.

FAST FILM (2003)

Given the time required to make an animated film today, it’s understandable when animators use computers to aid them in their work. Still, it’s bracing to see an animator who attempts something impossibly ambitious without resorting to digital assistance. Perhaps the best recent example of this is Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, a thirteen-minute piece from 2003 which integrated images from classic movies into an animated framework. Watching moments such as the one in which various movie-themed boxcars race down a track, it’s easy to think Widrich accomplished them with CGI. But think again- Widrich printed over 65,000 frames of film onto sheets of paper, folded the sheets into various three-dimensional objects to be placed into the image, and shot them in the proper frame order. Granted, after a while all the virtuosity on display here becomes a little overwhelming. But that seems a small price to pay for a work of such jaw-dropping ambition.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features (Part Four)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001)

This unusual Japanese film is arguably the most original and affecting movie yet from the Japanese director Satoshi Kon, whose other credits include Tokyo Godfathers and the wigged-out TV series Paranoia Agent. The title character here is Chiyoko Fujiwara, an ancient and reclusive film actress who consents to a rare filmed interview with her biggest fan, Genya Tachibana, a documentarian who once saved her life on a film set when he was a boy. As the actress, guided by the heavy-set, worshipful Tachibana, goes over the events of her life and career, they become inextricably mixed with scenes from her films and with Tachibana's own memories. (He sees himself as her devoted protector.) The film has some similarities to Kon's first feature, Perfect Blue, but without the murder-thriller plotting, and the violence and sexual nastiness that have stuck Kon with a reputation as Mister Kink. What's left is a dream about the movies and how they shape the memories and lives of those who make them, and those who watch them.

TOY STORY 2 (1999)

The third film from Pixar, which credits Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich as co-directors alongside the busy John Lasseter, is one of those rare sequels that actually deepens and enriches the original. Partly this is just because the technology had already made great strides in the four years since the first Toy Story changed the face of animation. The visages of the human characters were no longer a freakishly hideous roadblock to enjoying what the computer animators were always able to accomplish when creating characters (toys, insects) with the appearance of hard plastic surfaces. By the time of Toy Story 2, their ability to play with the human form had improved to the point that they were able to cariacture it: the movie's villain, the fat, infantile collector (voice, inevitably, by Wayne Knight) who thinks that toys are for "appreciating" and profiteering (as opposed to being played with) is the nastiest, funniest potshot ever taken at geekdom from within the confines of a movie that might have been expected to kiss geekdom's ass a little. More importantly, the collector character paves the way for the humanoid triumphs of The Incredibles and the second half of Wall-E.

NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)

Technically, this epic sci-fi adventure predates the creation of Studio Ghibli, where its writer-director, Hayao Miyazaki, would go on to hatch such triumphs as Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Castle in the Sky. But it definitely laid the groundwork for what was to come. It was the first feature on which Miyazaki worked as both director and writer (adapting the screenplay from the manga series of the same name that he was working on, which was begun a couple of years before the movie went into production but wasn't completed until after its release) and it served as his introduction to several major collaborators. It also established key elements of his work, ranging from its plucky young heroine to its creator's aircraft fetish, that would become very familiar to Miyazaki fans in the coming years. And in its environmental message and apocalyptic imagery, it's an especially close cousin to one film where he really kicked out the jams, Princess Mononoke. An overseas sensation, Nausicaa was first seen in America in a badly dubbed, incoherently re-edited, much shorter version (called Warriors of the Wind) that was put out by some people who we should pity for the torments they will eventually endure in Hell. In 2005, the real movie was finally made readily available on our shores thanks to DVD.

YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

The animated feature as sixties pop banquet, and if it's one of the many contenders for the title of First Full-Length Music Video, that wouldn't be an insult if more music videos had employed a spirit half as playful to go with their eye-popping visuals. With its happy mix of styles from all over and a script that delights in punning wordplay, it has the feel of a commercial job that turned into a labor of love for the many different talents involved, ranging from the director, George Dunning, a Canadian who never worked on anything as high-profile again, to Love Story author Erich Segal, one of several fellows credited with the screenplay. Amusingly, the list of people who worked closely on it does not include the Beatles, who were required to cough up a few new songs for the soundtrack but otherwise were too busy working on that deathless masterpiece Magical Mystery Tour to do anything but drop by the studio long enough to film the live-action epilogue, without question the worst and most easily dispensable thing in the movie. Most of the songs were already well-established hits from earlier albums, and their speaking voices were provided by various actors. At one point in the middle of the production, the cops showed up and hauled off the free-spirited dude who was providing the voice of Ringo; it turned out that he was a deserter from the British Army. After his departure, the rest of Ringo's lines were done by Paul Angelis, who was already playing both George Harrison and the head of the Blue Meanies. Although they appeared to love it as much as everyone else after they saw it, the Beatles' attitude about the movie while it was being made can perhaps be gauged by the title of George Harrison's contribution to the soundtrack, "Only a Northern Song"--a reference to the publishing company that had been formed to handle Lennon/McCartney compositions. (At the time, the title and such lyrics as "It doesn't really matter what chords I play/ What words I say or time of day it is/ As it's only a Northern song" might have been taken as a hint that Harrison was getting fed up with having his own songwriting career treated by his bandmates as an afterthought.)

Click here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, & Part Five.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Feature Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, according to our very own Scott Von Doviak, Star Wars: The Clone Wars may not exactly be on the short list for this year’s Best Animated Feature Film Oscar, although, to paraphrase Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman, awards, critical praise and boffo box office were never really the point, since the movie, essentially, "was targeted to a specific audience for specific reasons [i.e., to promote the upcoming Cartoon Network series of the same name]. We accomplished that mission, and it will continue in another medium."

That crazy dreamer! Just goes to show that, when it comes to animation, even studio execs can get swept up in the magic that happens when pencils, paint, pixels, Plasticine modeling clay or paper cut-outs meet persistence of vision and insane amounts of patience.

According to our old friend, Wikipedia, “The earliest form of animation is a 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta which has five images painted along the sides. When the bowl is spun, it shows a goat leaping up to a tree to take a pear.” (And, ironically, scientists have since determined the bowl actually received better reviews and a higher per-screen average than The Clone Wars...but I digress.)

Anyway, the aforementioned bowl may or may not be included in NEXT week’s list of The Screengrab’s all-time favorite animated shorts, but in-between then and now (get it? get it? I’m here all week! Try the veal!) please join us for a very special Screengrab salute to the greatest animated features of all time!

PINOCCHIO (1940)

It’s possible my family would disown me if I didn’t include this classic of old-school Disney animation since, according to legend, this is the movie that my grandfather Joe took my grandmother Louise to on the night he proposed. (Awwww!) Personal family history aside, it’s hard to argue with Pinocchio as a prime example of traditional American cel animation. Oh, sure, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had scarier witches, The Jungle Book had Louis Prima and Bambi traumatized an entire generation, but Jiminy Cricket is one of the all-time iconic animated characters, Monstro the Whale is pretty fucking bad-ass, the Pinocchio nose bit launched a zillion stand-up routines and political cartoons and, between my grandparents’ love story and childhood memories of melancholy end-of-the-weekend episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, “When You Wish Upon A Star” is embedded deep enough in my DNA that all the shitty cover versions and cynical Disney ad campaigns from then 'til now still haven’t managed to dislodge its pure, essential sweetness from my black little heart.

FRITZ THE CAT (1972)

The film that opened up brand-new horizons for scores of boomer spawn that accidentally stuck this in the VCR, mislead by the cartoon cover. Fritz, a Village denizen in a turtleneck sweater, discusses James Baldwin, scores with NYU chicks, starts a race riot and smokes a whole hell of a lot of grass. This was the first animated feature to be rated X. Yet the cartoon depictions of bathtub group sex amid pink clouds seem rather tame in this post-Britney age. The film is based on Robert Crumb's eponymous comic. However, Crumb did not like the film much. He felt it was, "really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi's confusion, you know. There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way."

AKIRA (1988)

Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s epic film adaptation of his own bestselling manga series isn’t just one of the best animated features of all time; it’s also one of the most important. Simply on its aesthetic merits, Akira is a winner: the cyberpunk-suffused story of a near-future Tokyo plagued by gangs and facing the threat of an uncontrollable teenage psychic is visually stunning, packed with detail, and suffused with unstoppable energy. The script is deep and complex, but never so deep that it gets in the way of the dynamic action sequences; every frame seems to burst with color, motion and power. It’s also well-acted, well-written, and surprisingly sophisticated in its use of music and sound. But beyond its merits as a film, it truly opened up the gates for “Japanimation”; what was previously the occupation of a relatively small number of hobbyists became the obsession of a whole generation of fans. Future anime productions would find millions of new admirers, and older movies and TV series would gain a brand-new audience, often leading to their first-ever home video releases in the west. The runaway popularity of Akira likewise lead to a new interest in manga comics, as fans of the movie tracked down the comic it was based on, establishing a new and insatiable western audience for Japanese serial comics. A live-action remake is currently in the works and scheduled for release sometime in 2009, but even if it can capture the thrilling visual imagery of Ôtomo’s animation, it can’t hope to duplicate the massive cultural impact of the original.

TOY STORY (1995)

Nowadays, the word “Pixar” associated with a movie is practically a guarantee that we’re going to get a smart, funny, technically astounding animated film that will be enjoyable for both kids and adults. But back in 1995, before Toy Story was released, there was a certain feeling of dread that accompanied the announcement of its production. We’d all seen computer animation, and to be honest, we weren’t all that impressed. It was thought of as a heartless, soulless medium, the playground of technicians, not artists. And at the very least, it wasn’t something that Disney Studios – the people responsible for the greatest animated features of all time – should be associated with. Once we actually got a look at it, though, all fears were laid to rest: Toy Story was a revelation. Its visuals were light-years beyond anything we’d seen at the time; it’s certainly been surpassed on a yearly basis since then, but even viewing it now, it’s hardly an embarrassment. But aside from the technical revelation of what computer animation was capable of, the story was downright terrific. It was driven by its characters, not its gimmicks; and, avoiding the trap that would befall many of its followers, its humor was driven by situations and not empty pop-cultural references. Though the precedent it set of using already-famous celebrities instead of established voice actors to voice the characters was a bad one, here the choice is unimpeachable, as Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn, and even Tim Allen give performance perfectly attuned to their characters. Combine all of this with a timeless story and a terrific score by Randy Newman, and you begin to realize how Pixar got its sterling reputation in the first place.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four; Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Sarah Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Where the Wild Things Aren't

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It seemed like a match made in heaven. The classic Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are and the one-time video wunderkind who brought a sure-handed touch to offbeat Charlie Kaufman material in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Throw in a screenplay by lit-hipster Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and what could go wrong? But Spike Jonze’s $80 million adaptation of Wild Things appears to have gone off the rails.

According to Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times, the movie “was originally slated for release this October but got pushed back to the fall of 2009. Last week it disappeared entirely from the Warner Bros. release schedule, a sign of continuing troubles. The script got good early reviews. But for months the Web has been pulsing with rumors and in-depth accounts that when Jonze had a research screening last December, kids in the audience were crying and fleeing the theater--not exactly the reaction the studio had hoped for.”

Apparently one big problem is that the young boy at the center of the story is “almost entirely unlikable, coming off as more mean-spirited and bratty than mischievous.” Then there’s the matter of the wild things themselves, originally a mix of actors in furry suits and animatronic puppets. No one was happy with these critters, who are now being replaced by (of course) CGI wild things.

This is not the first time an adaptation of Where the Wild Things has run into trouble. Disney attempted a version in the ’80s, with none other than Pixar maven John Lasseter at the helm. Check out Goldstein’s story for a clip of test footage from that never-made cartoon.

Related:

"Toy Story" Trilogy in 3-D

Charlie Kaufman Does Not Save His Urine in Jars

Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball? This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year. That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.

My top five:

1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film. That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule. The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made. Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence. An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial. Or vice versa.

2. Shine A Light - Is it a testament to Martin Scorsese's skill as a filmmaker, or the Rolling Stones' skill as musicians and personalities, that his documentary about them has proven to be one of my favorite movies of the year, despite the fact that I long ago lost interest in them as a band, and wouldn't go see them in concert if you paid me? Perhaps that's not so surprising -- Scorsese, after all, has been following and filming the band for decades, and much of the appeal of Shine a Light comes from the effortless way he edits together his own footage of the Stones and old archival material taken by himself and others. To top it all off, he blends this compelling historical material with a contemporary performance so overwhelming that it almost convinces a skeptic like me that the Rolling Stones are still a band that matters.

3. Iron Man - As a lifetime comic book nerd, I had to sit through decades of neglect, followed by decades of failure, for Hollywood to start getting superhero movies right. While I've always been partial to DC comics, Marvel was the first to get it right, with the two initial X-Men movies; then, with the first two Spider-Man films, I was able to relax and say, finally, somebody gets it. With this year's release of Iron Man, Marvel -- now producing their own product with the Marvel Films studio -- continues to get it right: it's a near-perfect superhero film by a director (Jon Favreau) who clearly adores his source material but knows what to jettison to make it work on screen. Add tons of humor, exhilarating action scenes, and an incredibly charismatic lead performance by Robert Downey Jr., and you have one of the best movies of the year.

4. Assassination of a High School President - Yes, one of my favorite movies of 2008 has Mischa Barton in it. Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are. Not yet in wide release, this clever satire, disguised as a teen comedy, Brett Simon's clever, twisting neo-noir travels some of the same paths as obvious predecessors like Brick, Election and Rushmore, but does so with an intricate and well-carried-out plot and an overall thematic twist that's a lot more cutting than it appears to be on the surface. Not a perfect film by any means, Assassination's reach exceeds its grasp, and it has some clunky tonal problems throughout. But a game cast, some terrific dialogue, and a funny, confident presentation does a lot to compensate for its flaws, making it one of the better festival finds of 2008.

5. Bigger, Stronger, Faster*- I've probably seen more documentaries this year than I have narrative feature films, and one of the standouts, both in terms of subject and execution, is Chris Bell's Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (asterisk in the original). Bell, a former steroid user himself and one of a family of three brothers, all of whom are juicers, has made a movie where the real villain isn't the concrete thing of steroids (which, in fact, are shown, if not as beneficial, at least as not nearly as harmful as TV 'experts' and their drummed-up hysteria would have us believe), but the abstraction of a country that will forgive anything if it ends in victory. Filled with images both inspiring and grotesque, it does what good documentaries do: presents us with the situation and lets us decide what it means and what to make of it.

RUNNER-UP: The surprisingly great first two-thirds of The Strangers.

MADE IN 2007, BUT NOW PLAYING: My Winnipeg; The Band's Visit; and, especially, Paranoid Park.

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

Andrew Stanton's Retro-Futurism

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice. "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description. He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus. It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page. It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film. I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies. Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it. And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI). He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues: forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

By the way, I can't be the only one who thinks of Wally Gator when this film is discussed, can I? I can? Okay, never mind.

Separated at Birth: "Wall-E" and "Silent Running"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although Wall-E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumball, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Both Wall-E and Silent Running posit a time when mankind has completely squandered the natural resources of its home planet, though Silent Running never gives you a look at what Earth itself has come to. Set entirely in space, it stars Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a crew member aboard the Valley Forge, a vessel that has been tending the last surviving gardens in an orbiting greenhouse dome. After Dick Cheney ascends to the presidency, orders come in to blow up the domes and return to Earth. Lowell is the only person who seems troubled by this, and in the end he takes command of the ship and sets off into deep space so that he can tend his garden without being hassled by the man. He has to kill his three fellow human crew members (Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, and Jess Vint) in order to pull it off, a detail that the movie doesn't linger on but that gives it a tough edge that makes it genuinely provocative and perhaps saves it from squishiness. Like Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, it can be taken as an implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism. (It should be noted that Trumball devised an out for himself with the movie's soundtrack, which raises the possibility that Dern's character has been driven insane from having to listen to Joan Baez trilling in his ears.)

Of course, there's always been a glass ceiling on the number of people in the audience who were prepared to root for Bruce Dern even when he's on his best behavior. The real heroes of Silent Running are Lowell's helpers, the drones--pint-sized, waddling robots that he whimsically renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones seem to grow their own eccentric personalities after Lowell has liberated them from their lives of anonymous drudgery and programmed them to concentrate on tending the garden, and when one of them "dies", it seems to matter much more than the deaths of Lowell's mostly cretinous human companions. To realize his concept for the drones, Trumball actually went low-tech: the robots are suits (weighing some twenty pounds each) that were inhabited by double-amputees. The character of Wall-E, in turn, is unmistakably a drone as re-imagined by Chuck Jones and liberated from live-action gravity. (Although Pixar is still technically an arm of Disney--maybe the only arm that works with any reliability--Wall-E and the accompanying short film Presto, about a stage magician with a hungry rabbit, makes it more clear than ever that if the company's contract is with Uncle Walt, its artists' hearts and souls belong to classic Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace.)

Silent Running isn't the solid knockout entertainment that Wall-E is. Originally produced for Universal's doomed early-seventies "youth division", it is a searching and sometimes fumbling film, but one whose weaknesses are redeemed both by its sweetness and the incongruously razor-blade-chewing presence of its leading man. It is in some ways a movie made for the sake of a central image, and that image--the leafy green forest in the glass dome floating silently in space, carefully preserved and safe where no man can see it, or despoil it--can still give you shivers. (Unfortunately, so can Joan Baez.) It's an oddball personal movie, but Wall-E isn't the first mainstream picture to take inspiration from it: the drones had a strong effect on the look and behavior of Star Wars's R2-D2. In turn, Pixar hired Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known as the "voice" of R2-D2, to provide the same for Wall-E. Whatever else they don't have in common, these movies could all be said to share a core language--a language of clicks and beeps.

Screengrab Predicts: The Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

5. KUNG FU PANDA

This one's pretty easy to explain: (1) Kung fu. (2) Pandas. It's got something for everyone! (LP)

Plurality Opinion: Dreamworks' annual summer animated movie doesn't have the built-in audience of the Shrek franchise, but it should still do good family business for the three weeks before Wall*E hits screens. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I haven’t seen that Panda on any big plastic soda cups yet, but maybe I haven’t been hanging out in the right fast food restaurants or convenience stores. This movie just squeaked onto our list as a result of numerous split votes elsewhere...but who knows? Maybe panda is the new penguin! (AO)

4. IRON MAN

Another gamble here, but one worth betting on due to it being the first high-profile summer release. Iron Man isn't an icon like Batman or Spider-Man, but Paramount has done a bang-up job promoting the film, and the re-emergence of Robert Downey Jr. as a high-profile leading man is the kind of story that can do wonders for a movie's public awareness. (PC)

3. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Come on, like it could possibly be anything else. Indiana Jones is one of the iconic characters in cinema. Who's not looking forward to this? Add to that the fact that the film's got next to no competition for the month or so after it's released and this is the one to beat. Here's hoping it's actually good. (PC)

Memorandum Opinion: I'm going to call this as a slight box office disappointment that nevertheless cracks the top five. Indy's heyday was a long time ago, and even Lucas and Spielberg seem to be trying to downplay expectations. (SV)

Dissenting Opinion: First of all, that title is just way too long. Titles more than 20 letters long are for artsy foreign movies. Second, is there really that big an audience for this outside of hardcore geek circles? The key demographic for summer action flicks wasn't even born when the LAST Indiana Jones movie came out. (LP)

2. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN

Advance word is that the second in the Narnia series outdoes the first in terms of pacing, script, and special effects, but my guess is that it'll succeed because conservatives bitched so much about the previous movie not getting enough attention that America will guiltily drag themselves to see it just to shut them up. (LP)

Dissenting Opinion: The last installment in the Narnia franchise was a blockbuster, but that was released in December. In a more competitive summer season, it should have a solid opening weekend before getting trounced by Indiana Jones. (PC)

1. THE DARK KNIGHT

There's pretty much no way this thing will bomb. Even if it had a bad director, a crummy script, an unpopular main character, and a poorly-designed set, geeks would flock to it in droves. But it doesn't have any of those things, AND one of its stars died mysteriously during filming! That's money in the bank, people. (LP)

Let's see: blockbuster sequel, over a solid year's worth of hype, extensive viral marketing campaign, hugely popular hero and villain, and to top it off, a much-buzzed final complete performance by Heath Ledger. Even non-Batfans are going to want to get a load of his Joker, which should push The Dark Knight to the top of the heap. (SV)

Batman is back in the public's good graces after the awesomeness of Batman Begins, and this one's got the most popular of Bat-villains, The Joker. And sad to say, but the hype around the late Mr. Ledger's performance will only help the movie's chances at the box office. (PC)

HONORABLE MENTION:

HANCOCK:

Will Smith. July 4. Action, comedy, superheroes, you name it. It's got practically everything one could ask for from a midsummer release. (PC)

WALL*E

Here's where things get a little less certain. Sure, WALL-E is a Disney/Pixar release, with all the family cachet that implies. However, it may not be as cuddly as some of the family favorites Pixar has made in the past. Still, this is the highest-profile family-friendly release of the summer, so this is the one to beat. Besides, if Pixar can strike box-office gold with rats in a kitchen... (PC)

TROPIC THUNDER

Historically, August is the time when comedy re-emerges as box-office gold. After months of blockbuster bloat, audiences will want to laugh again, and this movie- starring Ben Stiller and newly-hot Robert Downey Jr.- looks to have the most potential for success. (PC)

AMERICAN TEEN

An instant America’s sweetheart cuddly “rebel” poster girl and a trailer that’s so John Hughes accessible that megaplex audiences may not realize it’s a documentary until it’s too late to get their money back may turn this Sundance fave into an indie hit (at the very least) and maybe even a real live mainstream smash. (AO)

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

If the rabid anticipation of this flick by the teenage dudes at my last family gathering bears any relation to the feelings of teenage dudes across the nation, this could be a sleeper hit. Plus: Apatow. (AO)

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

With a combination of everyone's favorite annoying jackass, Ashton Kutcher, and a title drawn from an ad campaign predicated on date rape, fatal drug overdoses, and dead hookers, how can it miss? (LP)

***

The above list reflects the combined, weighted picks of four of our resident Screengrab know-it-alls. Below, our original ballots:

Leonard Pierce

1. The Dark Knight

2. Kung Fu Panda

3. Speed Racer

4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

5. What Happens In Vegas

Scott Von Doviak

1. The Dark Knight

2. Iron Man

3. Hancock

4. Prince Caspian

5. Indiana Jones

Paul Clark

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2. Hancock

3. The Dark Knight

4. Wall*E

5. Iron Man

Andrew Osborne

1. Indiana Jones

2. The Dark Knight

3. Prince Caspian

4. The Pineapple Express

5. American Teen

-- Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Trailer Review: Wall-E (Full Trailer)

Paul Clark — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ever since the original teaser for Pixar's upcoming Wall-E appeared last summer, I've been a little unsure of how I felt about it. Naturally I was expecting it to be beautifully-animated and fun, but compared to some of Pixar's modern-day classics the whole thing felt a little, I dunno, minor. Well, I must say that this most recent trailer has cleared up most of my doubts. For one thing, I like where the story is going — the idea of taking a robot who's been alone for centuries and then throwing him into the mix with others is inspired and holds a lot of potential for both comedy and pathos. Also, as the voiceover states, Wall-E has a lot of personality (more than, say, Johnny 5 anyway) — more than just a goofy bucket of bolts, he's cultivated a real eccentric worldview during all his time alone, and this trailer really brings that out. For all the gorgeously-designed and rendered animation on display in the trailer, it's the small touches that sell it, like the bit where the other robot gets stuck in the automatic door and reaches out to Wall-E for help, and Wall-E misinterprets this as a chance to introduce himself. I guess it serves me right for underestimating Pixar — put me down as being excited for this, almost a year after I should have been.

Oscar Shorts, Part 2: Best Animated Short Film

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

More often than not, the winner of the Best Animated Short Film category seems like a foregone conclusion. With such major Hollywood players as Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky in the mix, it can be hard for the up-and-coming animator to compete for the prize. But this year is different. There’s no big animation studio in the mix, which should make for an interesting Oscar race. In addition, there are a number of worthy nominees in the race, so one hopes quality will be the primary factor in voters’ decisions.

At a time when Hollywood animated features all seem to boast a similar visual aesthetic — largely a modified CGI take on the classic Disney style — it’s good to see diversity in this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated shorts. Consider the Russian entry, My Love, animated in a painterly style with plenty of swirling brushstrokes. This style is a good match for its classically-bound story, set in czarist Russia and inspired by Turgenev. My Love, directed by Alexander Petrov, is a poignant evocation of first love, and a rich and rewarding film.

The film with the broadest mainstream appeal is Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, which also boasts the best backstory of the five nominees. In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and persuaded him to do a short interview, and almost four decades later Levitan and Raskin have turned that interview into a film. If only the film itself were so interesting — Raskin’s style is shallow and uninspired, literalizing Lennon’s remarks by matching them with sub-Gilliam visual equivalents. As far as films like this go, it pales in comparison with Chris Landreth’s 2004 Oscar-winner Ryan, which was similarly inspired by an interview but made for compelling cinema with its expressive style and bittersweet tone. By comparison, I Met the Walrus is a stunt.

Also taking its cue from a dearly departed musical master is Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s Peter and the Wolf, a new take on Prokofiev’s classic. One of three stop-motion films in competition this year, the film follows Peter and his animal friends into the forest where of course they meet a wolf. The story is nothing new, but the animation is impressive. I especially liked the backgrounds, full of gnarly trees and dark corners, but the characters were fun as well, my favorite being a fat, mean cat who looked suspiciously like Orson Welles as Falstaff.

I was somewhat more mixed on the French stop-motion nominee, Même les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven). Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse’s short tells the story of a priest who tries to convince an old miser to buy a machine that will guarantee him entry into heaven. The animation is good-looking, but the filmmaking isn’t particularly inspired, and the pacing feels rushed. In the end, Pigeons is more or less a one-joke movie, not up to the high standard set by some of the other nominees.

Finally, the third stop-motion entry and the best of this year’s nominees is Madame Tutli-Putli, which follows the titular mousy heroine as she experiences a number of strange events on a bizarre night train. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s film is light on story, but overflowing with style. In addition, Madame Tutli-Putli is a masterpiece of tone, perfectly capturing the forlorn feel of an overcrowded train car, as well as moments of humor, suspense, and visual poetry. Madame Tutli-Putli is perhaps too obscure for the Academy voters — pessimist that I am, I anticipate that they might go for I Met the Walrus or Even Pigeons Go to Heaven. But it’s a wonder, and I expect that it’ll still be watched long after the other films have been forgotten.

Animated Film Awards Announced: "Ratatouille" Takes the Cheese

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The 35th annual "Annies" awards, held in Los Angeles by the International Animated Film Society, has given a slew of prizes, including the top award of Best Animated Feature, to Pixar's Ratatouille, thus making it the No Country for Old Men of films about gifted culinary-minded vermin. The film's writer-director, Brad Bird won for Best Director and Best Screenplay; the film also took home prizes for Best Music, Best Character Design, Best Character Design, Best Storyboarding, and Best Voice Actor: Ian Holm, who played the villainous French chef Skinner, and whose thorough deservingness of this award can perhaps be measured by the fact that I myself saw the movie twice and didn't realize until I saw this announcement that I was listening to Ian freakin' Holm! Awards also went to a couple of Ratatouille spin-offs: the movie's animated video game and the short film Your Friend the Rat, which features characters from Ratatouille and is included in the movie's DVD editions. The awards for Best Animated Effects and Production Artist went to the penguin-hits-the-waves movie Surf's Up, possibly because whoever labels the awards just got really sick of writing "Ratatouille." The Best Animated Feature award is seen as a strong indicator of which film is liable to take the Academy Award in that category, though this year it may not be as strong an indicator of Ratatouille's chances as the fact that if Bee Movie wins instead, we're gonna burn Los Angeles to the ground! The society also celebrates excellence in the field of television animation; notable winners this year included Seth Green for directing the Star Wars episode of Robot Chicken and Ian Maxtone-Graham and Billy Kimball for writing the episode of The Simpsons that lampooned 24, choices designed to set an army of geeks somersaulting past Forbidden Planet at noon with Roman candles held between their teeth. The society also its Winsor McKay career achievement awards on independent animated filmmaker and animation historian John Canemaker, Disney filmmaking veteran Glen Keane, and Ren and Stimpy's dad, John Kricfalusi.

Trailer Review: WALL*E

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:15:00 GMT

As buzz has had it for over a decade now, Pixar really is the true successor to the Disney animated feature dynasty. They’re fast approaching their silver anniversary as the most critically and commercially adored animation studio in the Western world. With the exception of A Bug’s Life — which is pretty standard kiddie-picture fluff despite being beautiful — their reputation is flawless. From the look of this trailer for WALL*E, Andrew Stanton’s directorial follow-up to Finding Nemo, it looks like Pixar’s poised to make their most exciting work yet. It isn’t that their quirky subjects du jour are mechanical, that territory having already been covered by Cars. It’s that it looks like the movie is going to be largely devoid of dialogue. The studio’s no stranger to silent animation but this would be their first full length feature to forego an imminently quotable script voiced by recognizable celebs. Ballsy stuff. Color us excited.

You can check out Empire’s exclusive trailer here.

"Toy Story" Trilogy in 3-D

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

In recent years, Disney has become notorious for tinkering with the cherished contents of its vaults; you could kill a year or so by just comparing all the various "restoration" versions of Fantasia. But Pixar, the computer-animation division that has been responsible for many of the company's biggest hits and most of its critically revered creative muscle since the mid-1990s, has seemed to be too busy moving forward to spend its time and money fretting over its back catalog. Now it's been announced that the 1995 Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film and first release through Disney, and its fine sequel, the 1999 Toy Story 2, will be "remade" in 3-D, in anticipation of the eventual release of Toy Story 3, scheduled to be made in 3-D. John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and current chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios who directed both films, says that "We thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way. . . 3D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way." It certainly represents an upgrade for Toy Story 2 in particular — that project was originally supposed to be one of the "direct-to-video" sequels that Disney routinely puts out after it's had a hit, but the movie was repositioned for a proper theatrical release after it turned out that Pixar was unable to sink to the usual Disney level. The 3-D Toy Story will be released in the fall of 2009, with Toy Story 2 coming out early in 2010 and the all-new TS3 scheduled to appear in summer of that year. The situation is slightly reminiscent of the re-release of the gussied-up versions of the first three Star Wars movies in 1997, in anticipation of the 1999 appearance of The Phantom Menace. Except that, you know, we have faith in John Lasseter.