Sunday, February 25, 2007

Oscar Nominated Shorts -- Animated (2007)

R: This year is the first time (at least that we've noticed) that The Michigan has done special screenings of the various short films that have been nominated for Oscars. This means that I get to watch new animation twice in the span of a couple weeks. Sweet. The "Short Animation" category is one of the ones that I think still has some integrity, since there's so little money at stake. Of course, this also means that I get upset when the films are bad. Without further adieu...

THE NOMINEES!

Lifted: I thought this was pretty clever, fun, and such. It's unsurprising that Pixar put it together.

The Danish Poet: I would describe this film as "cozy." It's wonderful. And unusual, in that the narration may be the best part. While I don't believe that it was the best animated film made this year, it was certainly the best nominated, and Kate and I were both thrilled that it won.

The Little Match Girl: Note that the category is not entirely clean. If Disney makes a short, for example, they seem to get nominated, no questions ask. Some films are merely bad. There are lots of ways that animation can be bad -- the characters can be flat, the animation can be generic, the story can be dull, etc. This is all of that and more -- this film is actually obscene. They have not only applied the "Disney Magic" (which seems to involve using a team of about 100 "animators" to produce 10 minutes of film), they pulled the teeth out of the story. What bastards.

Maestro: Kind of cute. I'll notice that the nomination of a Hungarian makes the Oscars officially more "international" than the third round of the Animation Show.

No Time for Nuts: No, the rat-thing doesn't get the nut.

AND THE NON-MINEES!

One Rat Short:
The animation in this is, technically, absolutely stunning, though I thought the story fell kind of flat.

The Passenger: Yawn.

Guide Dog: Double yawn.

Wraith of Cobble Hill: Yaw- wait, this one is pretty good. The main character, a young hooligan, comes across quite clearly, and is an interesting fellow. This is a student film, and it shows in a few places. There were several things that I think were supposed to be clear to the viewer, basic geographic things, that didn't come across, or at least weren't clear when they were supposed to be. All the same, it had some emotional depth, which is nice. The thing that bugged me about this was that while I'd say it's very promising, it didn't seem developed enough to belong on the short list for the freaking Oscar. Who picks the short list anyway?

A Gentleman's Duel: Wow. I might have thought this was funny when I was 11. Or 10. Maybe. But probably not. What garbage!

FINAL THOUGHTS!

Lets try to make sense of this, then. Disney gets a spot, Pixar gets a spot, that other big CG studio will cough something up -- oh, and the NFB gets to submit something. Monkeys will then put together a list of other short films, chosen at random (soon, they'll be replaced by YouTube). One of those is chosen, again basically at random (don't try to tell me that Maestro is better than The Wraith of Cobble Hill), and the Academy then votes -- that last round of voting is the one that is more or less reasonable. Not perfect, but I think it's one of the few categories where watching the nominees is an easier way to figure out who will win than following the buzz. Or the money.

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Friday, February 23, 2007

Sweet Land (2007)

Let us hope we are preceeded in this world
by a love story.

R: The review of this in The Onion made me think that this would be, you know, subversive. Maybe I misread the review, but this really isn't the point. The film is sweet, without being overly so, and I'd say it's fairly conservative. It's certainly interested in the immigrant experience, and returns more than once to anti-German prejudice during WWI (not coincidentally, the director's name is "Ali Selim"), but it's basically a love story, and a good one.

It's based on a short-story, which comes across quite clearly. The different stories take place at three different times, and there are not just characters missing in those various times, there are whole generations that never appear. So while I love the things that are in the film, there were times when I missed the things that weren't.

One final observation: Lars (Tim Guinee) has apparently stolen his jaw and, heck, most of his face from Nathan Fillion, best known as Mal from Firefly. But it's not him! At least, that's what the internet tells me.

If you get the chance, I think this one is worth actually seeing.

K: Not being from the middle of the country, Ross missed the other wonderful thing about this movie--the scenery. This movie was beautiful in a big-sky, sea-of-land, prairie-newly-converted-to-farmland kind of way. And on the big screen, it will warm the heart of anyone who has ever loved a very rural place in the middle of the country. There is a love of land and home and family that pervades this movie, and feels like home to me.

Otherwise, Ross hit it on the head. This movie is sweet without being saccharine and nonlinear in an interesting, non-gimmicky way. It certainly makes me wish that I had been preceded by such a love story.

Summery: Worth seeing on the big screen, if only for the scenery.

Monday, February 19, 2007

The Animation Show 3 (2006?)

R: As many of you know, I'm antsy for animation. I actually spent a year in Russia studying animation criticism (insofar as that field exists), and, since my graduate student lifestyle doesn't permit pilgrimages to Annecy, The Animation Show is one of the highlights of my year. Now that you know what a long-winded post you're in for, let's look at this year's selections.

Rabbit: I thought this was an intersesting way to open the show. My initial reaction was "cute, if only they'd bothered to animate it." In the end, I have to agree that the reference to the moving arms and legs that might appear in childrens books complimented the feel of the film. Not my favorite, but I can at least respect it.

City Paradise: A major problem in modern animation is that the computer makes it easy to (a) generate complicated images and (b) move them in very crude ways. The thing that the computer cannot do is, well, animate -- the intricate process by which actual movements are created, and coalesce into a performance, well, it takes a lot of hard work. And talent. While this film contains some mildly interesting images, the animation is terrible. Now, we could argue about whether this in some sense constitutes a new kind of video art which isn't animation, but has its own merit -- but then we'd have to admit that, taken on its own terms, this film just isn't effective. Oh well.

Everything Will be OK: This, I have to say, is a marked improvement over Don Hertzfeldt's contribution last year. One of the things that animation can do convincingly is present a character's view of the world. I think this is a fantastically difficult thing to do with live-action film, at least to do convincingly. The closest a live film comes to doing this, that I can think of, is Tarkovsky with Mirror, but the result there is notoriously obscure. In animation in general (and in this film in particular), the result is much more transparent. Hertzfeldt is able to deftly switch back and forth between the more objective presentation of the narrator and Bill's subjective experience, and the transitions are darn near seamless. Whether the film deserves all of the lavish praise its received is a separate question -- I'd say no, but it's definitely one of the best films they're showing this year.

Collision: My initial reaction to this was "wow, it'd be way better as a web page." Abstract animation is a huge world of possibilities, and this explores... pretty much none of them. Boo. A quick perusal of Hattler's webpage reveals liberal use of the word "visuals," which is a word more appropriate to anime fan-boys than artists. Double boo.

Nine: This, at least, was well-animated. I felt that it was missing something, though. I had long arguments with my professors in Russia about whether a film had to have an "idea." My feeling was that this was a crude, reductionist way to look at a work of art. Their feeling was that a work of art without a, well, without a point, was empty. Guess who convinced whom. While the animator here created effectively created both a world and individual characters within it, I think it had the emotional depth of Jurassic Park, from which I believe it stole several shots. It's too bad. On the other hand, Don Hertzfeldt got his start with (admittedly) brilliant gags, and look how he turned out.

No Room for Gerold: Now this, I loved. Not much to say besides that.

Davey and Son of Goliath: My first reaction to this was that it was actually produced by the guy who does "Moral Orel," but I was wrong -- it just looks like it. Let me back up for a second. I like Adult Swim. But one shouldn't confuse the shows produced for Adult Swim with animation. They're more like, well, like comic books. There was a time when animation felt very short, both because the typical film was 10 minutes long, and because things tended to happen more "suddenly" then they did in live action. I think that action movies and commercials have sort of reversed this -- the 10 minute films of way back when would feel very slow today, precisely because they consist of shots that are long enough that you can see something move. But I digress. I thought this was neither clever nor well-animated. I give it a double "boo."

Guide Dog: Conventional wisdom has it that Bill Plympton is totally the best thing ever. The truth is that Your Face is pretty good, and it's all downhill from there. You can take much of my rant about shots that are 0.7 seconds long where nothing moves and insert it here. Though I'll admit that the dog is kind of cute.

Eaux Forte: Absolutely gorgeous. This is one that I want to rewatch, since I don't think I got it all the first time. On the other hand, that suggests that there's something to get, doesn't it?

Versus: Freakin' hilarious. This is one of the most enjoyable pieces in the program -- shame that there aren't any details about it in the program. Consider this evidence that I do like funny animation!

Overtime: This was, I think, my favorite film in the show. Roughly, a puppeteer (~Jim Henson) dies and his puppets (which all look the same, and look like stripped-down versions of Kermit) take over his house. And, well, his body, ala Weekend at Bernie's. So this works on a fairly obvious level -- puppet and puppeteer are reversed, and a good time is had by all. The film is more than clever, though, it also has some depth. These puppets were both created and controlled by their puppet master, and they convey the mix of affection and anger toward him that one might expect. In short, they act, as the characters do in really good animation.

Dreams and Desires:
I really enjoy watching Joanna Quinn draw -- the style here is rather different than that in When the Day Breaks, which was in the previous Animation Show, but it's still recognizably her. It's not really fair to compare this to When the Day Breaks, which stands on its own, whereas this is (I think) properly part of a series of shorts, but I'd be remiss if I didn't take this chance to at least plug it, since it's absolutely brilliant. Dreams and Desires is good too.

Game Over:
I thought this was a nice way to end the show -- not profound, but certainly a lot of fun.

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Friday, February 16, 2007

*My* Masters of Comedy List

K: In a previous post, I complained about the Masters of Comedy series, which seemed more like the MASTER of Comedy (Woody Allen) and friends. So here's my list (I marked the ones that are retained from the Michigan's series with a star)...


--The Bird Cage (the original)
--Arsenic and Old Lace
--Adam's Rib
--Sleeper*
--Monty Python and the Holy Grail
--Blazing Saddles*
--Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
--Annie Hall*
--Being There*
--Brazil
--Overboard
--Art School Confidential
--The City of Lost Children
--The Big Lebowski


There are several things to note about the above list. First, no director is represented more than twice...and then only if there are two very different films. Secondly, my list is all over the map, comedy-wise. Admittedly, it's a little short on stupid comedy and a little long on the surreal, but I did say that it was my list, so there you go.

Any comments? Additions? Deletions?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Sabrina (1954) and Thoughts on Digital Projection

R: The Michigan definitely treats us right. Free chocolate? Check. Free champagne (pardon, "sparkling wine")? Check. Classic film? Check. If you haven't seen Sabrina, check it out.

What you'll see will probably be a DVD. And, unfortunately, it will look as good as what I saw. Because we had a digital screening last night. Kate called it, I protested, "surely they wouldn't! Not in the main theater!" And, as usual, she was right. The title credits came up, the whites were blown out, the edges of the letters were jagged, and there was plenty of digital noise in the background. The light tones were particularly blown out in this transfer, which was a problem throughout the film and particularly hurt several scenes.

Now, I'm no enemy of the digital revolution. Those who know me well know that I've spent an embarassing amount of time arching various bits of animation from VHS to digital formats, and take great pleasure in the various tricks one can use to get rid of the deficiencies of tape. I'll even stand for digital projection of films that were shot on digital -- it's a cheap way to do things, and films like Crossing the Bridge wouldn't get made any other way.

But Sabrina wasn't shot on digital, it was shot on glorious film, and we're far, far away from digital projection being an adequate substitute for film. This is one of the reasons we go to The Michigan -- to see something that we can't see curled up at home. We can tell the difference, and I hope the folks making decisions at the theater can tell the difference too.

The V's: Volver (2006) and Venus (2006)

R: Right now there are two "V" movies running at the Michigan, Volver and Venus. They're both good, which is nice, since we had a bit of a drought for the last month or so.

Volver is a film by Spanish director PEDRO!, also known as ALMODOVAR!. All of the publicity around his films has this tenor, suggesting that he is, among other things, a folk hero, a powerful lover of women, and perhaps a fascist, in whom all the hopes and dreams of Spain, nay, humanity, are bound. In case you can't tell, I'm tired of hearing about ALMODOVAR!.

All the same, I enjoyed the film. I feel like it moves pretty effectively between several genres over the course of the film. Without spoiling anything, I found the principal transition eerily smooth. I'd like to make a much sharper statement about what's good about it -- bright colors! great performances! -- but mostly I enjoyed this intertwining of styles.

K: I also liked this film a lot. I was expecting to find it irritating, since the poster screams PENELOPE CRUZ! IN THIS MOVIE! ISN'T SHE GORGEOUS? DID WE MENTION IT STARS PENELOPE CRUZ?!

But actually, it was great. The whole film is kind of surreal--in the traditional sense that is. Dreams have the amazing tendency to make extraordinary events seem completely reasonable. This movie does the same thing--it had a way of making the most unreasonable transition seem completely normal. Penelope Cruz is great and the rest of the cast is even better. I will note that they are also fantastically ordinary-looking compared to Cruz and Yohana Cobo (who plays the daughter). But rather than being distracting, the contrast is just...surreal.

My feeling is that this film is worth seeing on the big screen--both because it is striking visually, and because the dark theater seems to add to the ambiance.


R: Venus was also quite enjoyable. Or perhaps I should say "respectable." This is a film that could easily have become too sweet, too nice, with the heart of gold completely overshadowing the dirty old man. Peter O'Toole remains interesting till the end, sweet and sympathetic, but not overly so.

K: I couldn't have said it better. Old men in movies are often sweet, harmless, and more than a little off their rocker. O'Toole is sweet, but he is sharp and certainly not harmless. The role has great dignity and shows that people don't stop being themselves just because they get old.

R: If you're only going to see one "V" movie, we recommend Volver, but only because Venus will look just fine on DVD.