Unreality Companion: 3 Reasons Why I'm Still Nervous About Mockingjay Part 2

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

Despite everything stacked against it, Mockingjay Part 1 was a resounding success.  Not only did it achieve its expected public notoriety, but it unequivocally solved every issue that I had with the novel upon which it's based.  Although not my absolute favorite of the year, it's definitely up there and will likely stay up there when all is said and done.  And since I spent this week's Unreality article enumerating the reasons why Mockingjay Part 1 should have failed (but didn't), I thought that I would describe the cause for my continued unease while we wait the long year between now and Part 2's release.

They still split one novel into two films.  Yeah, yeah, I know that I specifically mentioned why this was the right decision (or at least a good one) for Part 1, but that's just it: it was the right decision for Part 1.  Although I assume that the same production team that made it work the first time around will be able to do so with the sequel, I cannot pretend that they're not treading extremely murky waters in the attempt.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 also seemed to be going on the right track, before Part 2 was little more than a two hour fight scene.  While Mockingjay has a lot more meat on its bones than the eighth Harry Potter, it could still start running thin on substance by the time that Katniss storms the Capitol.  In fact, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the entire film is essentially that one action sequence: Katniss storming the Capitol at the end of the rebellion.  Like The Deathly Hallows Part 2, it would still be an entertaining enough way to spend an afternoon, but that doesn't make for especially compelling material to revisit years later (or even months) later.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is still dead.  While it might have seemed more than just a little uncouth at the time, when the revered actor playing Plutarch Heavensbee died during Mockingjay's production, it seemed like the only thing that people were concerned with was how this would affect the films.  After all, Plutarch is an increasingly vital character in the last novel, a fact that would only be exacerbated by the fact that they were making two films from the source material.  Do you create a motion capture duplicate of Hoffman?  Do you replace him with another, invariably worse, actor (it worked for Dumbledore)?  Do you cut out his character entirely, or at least make him a largely behind-the-scenes presence - spoken of more often than he actually appears on camera?

It turned out that Hoffman had essentially finished his contribution to the film at the time of his death, so fans did not have to worry about what shape Heavensbee would actually take in the films to come.  But the devil's in the details: Hoffman was mostly, although not entirely, finished.  According to Lionsgate, there was a final emotional scene that had been planned, but not shot.  While the production company assures fans that it will be easy enough to alter and work around, I can't help but think of what cathartic possibilities we're actually missing out on, and how that will ultimately affect next year's film.

The novel's denouement is terrible.  I know that I am not alone in feeling this way either.  Some fans of the novel, myself included, were outraged about an especially manipulative scene that seems to exist for the sole, sadistic purpose of sucker punching both the reader and the characters.  While comparisons to Rue's death will doubtlessly come up in its defense, the two could not be any more dissimilar.  Rue progressed Katniss' character, the novel's (and sequels') plot(s) forward and was a completely earned tragedy.  The events of Mockingjay progress nothing (in fact, can progress nothing, given that the series is just short of over by that point) and seem to exist for the sole purpose of making sure that the story doesn't end too happily.

Another huge issue that has been threaded throughout the franchise is who Katniss will eventually end up with: Gale or Peeta.  Before Mockingjy, Katniss swore that she would never marry nor ever have children.  It was the one right that she was afforded and fully planned on exercising it.  It was a daring betrayal of romantic convention and made her decisions driven from something other than a flush-faced attraction to the dystopian hunks she was forced to interact with.  I was not upset that she ended up choosing somebody, but that the way the plot plays out, she is essentially stripped of any choice in the matter.  Sure, she goes through the motions of one vs the other, but it's not from a position of power, driven by a desperate loneliness and the fact that one of her two options was completely taken away from her.

I am still excited about the film and am sure that it will be a highlight in what's already shaping up to be a tightly packed year (Age of Ultron vs The Force Awakens vs James Bond anybody?).  Still, I'd be lying to myself if I could say with any confidence that the film will be able to overcome the shortcomings of Mockingjay the novel.  Here's to hoping, though.

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Netflix Update: What's Leaving Us in December 2014

In which I report on the upcoming changes to Netflix.

November's changes to Netflix was like having a crisis of faith.  So many fantastic movies were leaving, precious few of interest were being added.  One disgruntled subscriber that I spoke to declared it as the final straw, pulling the plug on Netflix for increasingly diminishing returns.  Several others, although they continued to pay for the monthly streaming services, expressed a growing concern that it was more and more frequently just not worth what they were paying into it. 

Although December is not a complete reversal of this trend of diminishing returns, it does go a long way to solve the issue.  There are a few noteworthy titles leaving at the end of the month, but they are generally ones that I can live without: either because I already own them or because, while I appreciate and enjoy them immensely, I'm not especially drawn to watch it all that frequently.  A few, admittedly, I haven't seen, but nothing that is so critically important that I feel compelled to have a frantic, last-minute marathon to catch them during the holidays.

Among the few that I intend to watch before it's no longer streamable is Imagining Argentina: a historical drama set in the last days of Argentina's brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983.  It details the brutal tactics that the state utilized against its own people - including torture, rape and the silent abduction over over 30,000 men, women and children.  It's one that Becky nominated for a Date Night installment, which is why I am sure that it will make it in under the wire.

The only other film that I am compulsively drawn toward is Chaplin, a biopic of silent filmmaker Charlie Chaplin starring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role.  I saw most of it when I was in high school - and really enjoyed it - although I never quite got around to finishing it.  In fact, before looking up what films were leaving Netflix, I didn't even realize that it was streamable!  It details the early days of film - when the medium was still struggling for critical acceptance - with historical accuracy and critical insight.

The Untouchables, Brian DePalma's 1987 crime drama, famously took a number of visual cues from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin.  That, plus just looking like an incredibly good film on its face, is more than enough reason for me to shoehorn it into my viewing schedule.

Oh, and Robocop 2, because why not?

Another notable departure in December is The King's Speech, a historical drama chronicling King George VI's struggle with public speaking that won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Picture.  The Stuff is equal parts social satire and legitimate horror, working despite the ridiculousness of its premise.  Event Horizon is a terrible, terrible sci-fi horror film that I only watched because of Jim Sterling's Movie Defense Force, yet one with a fairly interesting premise that might appeal to the more macabre Netflix subscribers.  First Knight is a solidly entertaining take on the King Arthur mythos starring Sean Connery and Richard Gear that certainly warrants a look if you haven't seen it already.

Mission: Impossible III - in which Tom Cruise squares off against the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman - is easily the best of its series and one of the more viscerally exciting action films to come out in recent years that doesn't involve superheroes.  Mr. Mom is an infinitely rewatchable comedy starring a recently unemployed Michael Keaton who is forced to be a stay at home dad while his wife's new advertising career takes off.  And School Ties is a drama in which Brendan Fraiser is discriminated against while attending a private prep school because he is Jewish (this was back when it looked like he was going to be a "respectable" actor).

The full list of titles that are leaving us is posted below.  What are you especially sad to see leaving us in the next couple of days?  What, if anything, are you planning on watching?  Share your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom.

November 26
The King's Speech

November 30
Black Moon Rising
The Boys Next Door
C.H.U.D.
Helvetica
House
House II
The Philadelphia Experiment
Transylvania 6-5000
The Stuff

December 1
1941
The Apostle
Audrey Rose
The Believers
Better than Chocolate
Blood & Chocolate
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Chaplin
The Choirboys
The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County
Coffee and Cigarettes
The Cold Light of Day
The Constant Gardener
Count Yorga, Vampire
Cry-Baby
Dirty Dancing
Double Indemnity
En la Cama
Event Horizon
Eye for an Eye
Fairy Tale: A True Story
First Knight
Five Easy Pieces
Foreign Student
Free Men
Funny Lady
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
The Girl from Petrovka
Going Berserk
The Great Waldo Pepper
House of Voices
How to Frame a Figg
I'm Not Rappaport
Imagining Argentina
Invaders from Mars
Ishtar
Joe Gould's Secret
Joe Kidd
Johnny Mnemonic
Killer at Large
King of the Hill
Lonely Hearts
Magic Trip
Magicians
Mission Impossible III
Minnie and Moskowitz
Monkey Shines
Mr. Mom
'night Mother
Night of the Creeps
An Officer and a Gentleman
Opal Dream
The Other Side of the Mountain
The Other Side of the Mountain, Part 2
Our City Dreams
The Paper Chase
Paradise Alley
The Parole Officer
The Pirates of Penzance
Prairie Love
The Presidio
The Promise
The Proposition
Reds
The Return of Count Yorga
RoboCop 2
School Ties
The Sci-Fi Boys
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Spice World
Star Trek: Generations
Swashbuckler
The Talented Mr. Ripley
They Might Be Giants
The Untouchables
The Vampire Lovers
Walker
Year of the Horse: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Live
Young Sherlock Holmes

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Extra, Extra!: Meet Wonder Woman's Director

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

Warner Brothers' peregrination for a Wonder Woman director has finally come to an end.  At first viciously criticized for not even so much as considering a woman to helm their premiere superheroine's solo film, they eventually focused their efforts on three extremely capable females: Kathryn Bigelow, Mimi Leder and Michelle MacLaren.

For my money, Kathryn Bigelow - the Academy award-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty - would have been an ideal choice.  She's an incredibly talented and high-profile director who would have given a project that smacks of playing catch-up to Marvel's well-established and highly profitable cinematic universe an air of artistic legitimacy.  Her most recent and most celebrated projects have all been tense, action-packed dramas that exude the same sense of somber, grounded realism that Warner Brothers, for better or for worse, seems Hell-bent on dousing the films in their cinematic universe with (call it "The Dark Knight aesthetic").  She would have come to the project with a uniquely androgynous perspective: feminine, yes, but grounded in traditionally masculine interests.  And given that Wonder Woman is born into a warrior nation, who better to depict this than a woman who has made a career out of depicting martial narratives.

Mimi Leder would not have been an especially good, nor an especially inspired choice.  She directed her way through the 80s one TV show episode at a time, finally breaking into film in the 90s and early 2000s, only to slip back exclusively into television in 2001.  While her TV resume is certainly extensive, none of it seems to be in line with what would be expected out of a Wonder Woman film: adult comedies and situational dramas.  Her actual filmography has been a mixed bag that likewise inspires little confidence: overly saccharine melodramas like Pay It Forward paired with lesser action films like Deep Impact.  While she certainly would not have been an abominably bad choice, she hardly has the talent, experience nor profile that Bigelow would bring to the project.

Michelle MacLaren on the set of Breaking Bad.

The third candidate, and the one who will actually be taking on the project, is Michelle MacLaren (pictured above).  Like Leder, MacLaren has made a career through directing and producing TV series episodes and made-for-TV movies.  But it is here where the comparison between them ends.  Whereas Leder was known for working on shows such as Shameless and ER, MacLaren is best known for her work on Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones: tense, exciting, character-driven dramas that have garnered her significant critical praise - associating her more with Bigelow both stylistically and in terms of narrative content.  And, unlike Bigelow, McLaren's projects have often incorporated aspects of unreality more in line with the Wonder Woman franchise: monsters, magic and melee-driven action.

While admittedly not my first choice, her status as what is essentially the poor man's Kathryn Bigellow means that she is perfectly suited for the task that she is being entrusted with.  And while Wonder Woman is a stretch from the journalistic realism of Bigelow's preferred narrative, it is well within MacLaren's proven talents.

Besides, it would be a good change of pace to get a few more gal's in the directors chairs of major films.  Maybe in a few years Kathryn Bigelow and Sofia Coppola won't have to share the same gender-set spotlight as Catherine Hardwicke for lack of superior alternatives.

Do you think that Warner Brothers made the right call with their new director?  What are you hoping for (or fearing to see) in the upcoming Wonder Woman movie?  Share your thoughts and comments below.

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The Weekend Review: The Wind Rises

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

There is a risk with certain movies - with certain director's last movies - to expect too much from them.  It's not enough that they're good, they have to be great: a swan song that encapsulates their entire, decades-long filmography in only 90 minutes and ultimately justifies their lack of future films.  Anything less than perfect is a disgrace, and even perfection is a bitter-sweet reminder for what has left us.

To say that I was excited to see The Wind Rises, legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki's last film before his retirement, would be a profound understatement.  His films helped open my eyes to the possibilities of non-Western films: to animated epics involving primordial animal gods, exiled princes, goldfish princesses, fire demons, cursed fighter pilots, mechanized castles, otherworldly day spas and friendly neighborhood spirits.  It was through him that I first understood that epic scope did not mean abandoning intimate narratives, that riveting scenes of action did not have to come at the expense of quiet, meditative shots of characters simply being.  Films didn't just have to be one thing.  They could be flashy at times, subdued at others, seething with intense emotion when such things were called for and yet become fully at peace with their own existence when all the fighting was done.

And this - his decidedly last film - was unique in his filmography: not a fantastical tale of gods, monsters and ethereal spirits, but a historical biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed many of Japan's World War II fighter planes.  Unique, and yet not so far removed: blurring the lines of reality and imagination to create an impossibly, fantastically rendered reality that both does and does not belong to our otherwise mundane existence.

So when I finally saw The Wind Rises on Saturday - this final outing from one of the world's most visionary directors - it would have been easy enough to despairingly label it a failure unworthy of Miyazaki's last film.  But that would have been disingenuous to the truly amazing film that he did produce.  Even if it is not quite what it could have been, it is never-the-less as filled with Miyazaki's trademark love of life and the ugly yet beautiful world that we find ourselves in.

Jiro Horikoshi is a brilliant Japanese engineer whose boyhood fantasies of flight and Inception-esque shared dreams with renowned Italian aircraft designer Count Giovanni Caproni have driven him to to a simple end: to build beautiful planes.  But with the coming second World War and Japan's wealth disparity demanding the country's attention, he is forced to compromise his pure dream by designing fighter planes and bombers: machines that exist only to kill and be shot down.

Despite its decidedly realistic narrative, Miyazaki succeeds at incorporating his trademark style into what could have otherwise just been yet another historical biopic.  His understated fantastical flair touches the film with just enough unreality to make it feel like a wholly unique experience.  While it makes sense that, in his own mind, the two would easily blur (such as the image above, where his papers fly around the office from some unseen gale of the imagination), they do so beyond the bounds of his mere dreams and daydreams.

As Jiro describes his dream of a sleek, near-frictionless airplane capable of shattering current airspeed records to his engineering team, we see his vision swoop down from above in the office.  While lesser directors would have left us with that glimpse of Jiro's vision, Miyazaki presses even further - having Jiro's coworkers follow its progress with their eyes, hurriedly duck down when it dives and exclaim in enthusiastic awe about the shared vision for the project that they just had.  Even their hair and clothes intensely rustle, as if they actually did just have a near miss with a plane zooming over 200 miles an hour past them.

While Miyazaki does go further than what probably any other director in his position would have, I can't help but feel that even he was playing it too safe.  These were, for me, the absolute highlight of the film: his mad scramble to perfect aviation technology and how his mind brought his fantastical creations to life in an equally fantastical way.  I would imagine that, being out of his traditional depth of high fantasy, Miyazaki opted to keep his biographical narrative more grounded in realism than he would have otherwise.

While that is a respectable position to take - even responsible - it was not the correct one.  A film can be stylistically unreal while still being no less realistic.  Igmar Bergman proved this with his entire filmography, especially films like Persona and Wild Strawberries.  Even the Japanese film Perfect Blue managed this in the late nineties.  Last film of no, Miyazaki should have gone for broke with The Wind Rises and merge the fantastical and the mundane so completely that the two would be virtually inseparable from one another.

Miyazaki's films have always dealt with the horrors of war and the ideal of peace.  Princess Mononoke depicted a pointless and horrific war against nature itself, resolving that one should live alongside the planet, not attempt to dominate it.  This brought out more obviously in Howl's Moving Castle, which graphically depicted the military bombing civilian targets and the film's title character alternates the entire film between conscientious objector and defender of the defenseless.

The Wind Rises addresses this theme in the most nuanced way imaginable: not from the perspectives of either the bomber or the bombee, but from the man designing the weapons being used.  Jiro is an idealistic, pacifistic man who only wants to create beautiful planes that can improve peoples' lives - a goal shared by his idol Count Giovanni Caproni, who really just wants to build commercial planes to transport people across the Atlantic.  When working out how to make his planes faster, his first suggestion is to remove the guns (something that his military-backed employer obviously won't allow).  The film ends on a haunting meditation of his and Caproni's life's work: "airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams waiting to be swallowed by the sky."

If I can really fault the film for anything, other than simply not blurring the lines between reality and fantasy enough, it's that its more interesting story of aeronautical engineering is interspliced with a far less interesting - and completely fictitious - account of Jiro's personal life: of the woman he loves, her (fictitious) death by tuberculosis and the precious little time that they had together.  While none of it was bad per se, it was considerably more dull than the rest of the film, sometimes bordering on feeling as contrived as it, in fact, was.  I would have much preferred an increased focus on Jiro's professional story.

Despite not being Miyazaki's best film, it is easily his most nuanced and mature: a perfectly poignant note for him to end his career on.  The animation is as breathtaking, his characters as endearing and his narrative as engaging as they ever have been.  This is a must see for fans of the director, its medium, dramas and film in general.  It is a film instilled with an infectious love of life, positing that "le vent se lève! / Il faut tenter de vivre!" (The wind is rising!  /  We must try to live!").  I give the film a high 7.5 out of 10.

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Unreality Companion: The False Nostalgia of the Muppets

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

In this week's Unreality article, I expressed my complicated feelings toward the Muppet franchise as a whole and The Muppets (2011) in particular.  As I mentioned in the article, the Muppets were those fuzzy, rainbow-colored puppets from the seventies that my grandmother liked to watch reenact A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island and The Wizard of Oz.  Despite my negative predispositions for the franchise, The Muppets is ultimately one of the most memorable and enjoyable films to come out of 2011.

But I took a lot more away from watching their 2011 film than a newfound appreciation for a band of anthropomorphic puppet comedians.  The Muppets was ultimately a nostalgic experience for me - which is of course ludicrous, since I have absolutely no nostalgic connection with the characters.  As a kid, I would elect to leave the room rather than having to suffer through their family friendly antics and continued this strict quarantine until earlier this year (when I just had to know what the big deal was about the movie).

But looking back the film's narrative construction, the eventuality of this false nostalgia is both obvious and inevitable.  As I have already mentioned, The Muppets was a meta-fictive justification for its own existence: coming to stark terms with the reality of their lack of Twenty-First Century relevance and defiantly proving otherwise.  The reason why this creates phantom sentimentality is because of the narrative perspective that the film adopts: not one of the jaded humans who have outgrown the Muppets, nor even the underdog puppet troupe themselves, but Walter - an outsider who grew up worshipping them as idols.

You see, we don't actually need to care about The Muppets.  All we have to do is care about Walter and we will empathically adopt his worldview for the film's hour and a half run time.  And what does Walter care about more than anything?  That's right: the Muppets.

As we watch his wide-eyed adulation of the Muppet Show, him trick-or-treating in his Kermit the Frog Halloween costume and his over-joyed freak-out when he can finally tour their studio in person, we experience a life lived loving the Muppets.  It doesn't matter that the life isn't our own, just that we experience it in the first place.  By the time he uncovers the plot to destroy the Muppet studio and commits to reuniting the Muppets in a last-ditch effort to save it, we are 100% on board with him,

During the telethon, when each Muppet brings out his or her most iconic act to raise the necessary funds to save their old studio, we experience a nostalgia-like feeling.  It is not necessarily because we grew up watching and loving these acts - it certainly was not that way for me - but because we watched Walter grow up watching and loving them.  Walter is the conduit through which non-fans of the show walk away feeling as if they have revisited a childhood favorite that still holds up well after years of neglect and disinterest.

I can imagine some people waking away from this film feeling emotionally manipulated.  While that it not necessarily untrue, I feel that it is disingenuous to what actually happened.  It would have been easy to make a film that plays to a legitimate sense of nostalgia; while the franchise has been skirting the edge of mainstream awareness for decades, it still has a loyal, if unprofitable, fan base.  I mean, they did make 6 theatrical films, 2 made for TV films and a slew of spin-off TV series well into the Twenty-First Century.

But while they would invariably have a built-in audience who would happily go to theaters to see the next Muppet movie, this film did something altogether different.  It was able to energize its viewers into an enthusiastically vocal fan base - instilling them with a lifetime of nostalgia for the franchise in less than two hours.  A simple nostalgia property wouldn't have been so critically well received, such a force at the box office nor spawn a similarly well-received sequel (and, if rumors are to be believed, a second sequel and a new TV series as well).

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The Weekend Review: Big Hero 6

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

For as lackluster of a job as it actually is, working for AMC is not without its benefits.  Being able to see any film that I want to for free lead me to seeing The Book of Life while it was still in theaters and kept my wallet from bearing the burden of seeing Interstellar.  Most recently it got me to go to Big Hero 6: a film that I probably would have waited before its DVD release to see otherwise.

Fourteen-year-old Hiro Hamaada is a robotic prodigy who wastes his genius on hustling participants of illegal, back alley robot fights.  Hating to see his little brother's talents squandered, Tadashi Hamada convinces Hiro to enroll in the Sanfransokyo Institute of Technology by introducing him to his eclectic group of friends and their current scientific endeavors.  But after Tadashi dies in a fire at the university, Hiro becomes convinced that it was no accident.  He retrofits Baymax - his brother's health care robot - into a super-powered fighter and joins with his brothers friends - electromagneticist GoGo, chemist Honey Lemon, laser spectroscoptist Wasabi and school mascot Fred - to bring his brother's killer to justice.

Although some have lauded Lucy as the most thematically pro-science film of the year, that honor unreservedly is held by Big Hero 6.  While most superheroes are creatures of physical prowess - think Superman, the Incredible Hulk and Thor - the Big Hero 6 are all defined by their intellectual attributes.  With the possible exception for Fred (whose heroics are based on his experience as a costumed mascot for the university), each character's powers are derived from the scientific discipline that they study.  Gogo's Flash-like speed and agility are based on her research in creating frictionless electromagnetic axles; Honey Lemon's versatile assortment of chemical bombs are based on her research as a chemist; Wasabi's light saber-like blades are based on his study of lasers; Hiro's integration with and upgrades to Baymax are based on his uncanny knowledge of robots.

The film also gives us the best justification of superheroics since Uncle Ben's famous mantra of "with great power comes great responsibility."  Before Tadashi can run into the burning auditorium to rescue people that he knows for a fact are still inside, Hiro grabs him and begs him not to go: it's obvious suicide.  With quiet resolve, he tells his little brother that "someone has to do something" before running in to his death.

The rest of the film deals with Hiro coming to terms with Tadashi's death with startling frankness for a PG-rated film.  When he accidentally activates Baymax, the robot insistently gets to work at improving Hiro's emotional state: helping him uncover the mystery surrounding the fire that killed his brother and assembling the Big Hero 6.  He does the latter not as part of a crime fighting crusade, but because contact with friends and loved ones can help Hiro work through his depression.  His insistence that "Tadashi is here," coupled with the test footage of Tadashi building Baymax, is perhaps the best realization of the lasting legacy of loved ones since The Lion King's revelation of "you see, he lives in you." 

The characters are all uniquely well-written, ranging from overly personal, emotionally disinterested, obsessively compulsive, lackadaisically zen and interpersonally distant.  Even Baymax, a character whose every trait is defined by pre-programmed responses, is as endearing and as memorable of a character as his human companions.  In some ways, however, this highlights the one problem that cropped up with the movie: its brevity.

Disney seemed so hyper-focused on how long a children's movie aught to be that they were blind to how long this one in particular should have been.  It's the same templated mind-set that nearly resulted in "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" - a cinematic highlight that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song - being cut from The Lion King for runtime concerns.  I can't help but feel that an extra fifteen or twenty minutes would have made the film perfect: giving us more time with Tadashi's friends before he died, watching them interact with the ambitious young Hiro and more fully displaying their commitment to him as being something better defined than as an abstract obligation to a deceased friend.

I cannot wait for a director's cut of the film to come along and solve that one issue that I found with the film, because everything else about it is no less than fantastic.  It is a mature film that handles mature themes deftly enough that they can be understood and internalized by a very young audience without fear that it will be too much for them.  Hiro's first flight with the newly upgraded Baymax is as thrilling as hiccup's first flight with Toothless and Baymax's physical comedy is on par with WALL-E's wordless humor.  It is as exciting as any other film to come out this year and is easily one of my favorites of 2014.

The best way that I can endorse this film is to simply describe the how the seven-year-old that I saw it with reacted.  He was on the literal edge of his seat the entire movie: wide-eyed and mouth sluffed open.  He thrillingly cheered during the fight scenes - so much so that we had to quiet him down - and reflexively noted how sad Tadashi's death was.  The smarter-than-necessary script kept him constantly trying to predict what was going to happen next and who the villain in the Kabuki mask was.  He left the theater excited and smiling and completely enamored with the cuddly white robot cum superhero.

As for myself, I give the Big Hero 6 an incredibly high 8 out of 10, with the distinct potential that a longer cut of the film will bump it up to 8.  In a year of uncharacteristically strong animated features, Big Hero 6 is easily one of the best.  Although it's not quite up there with The Lego Movie nor The Book of Life - at least right now - it is an absolute must see for children, families and superhero fans.

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Unreality Companion: Interstellar

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

As I mentioned in this week's Unreality article, viewing Interstellar caused me to retrospect on the state of its type of film.  What better way is there to expand upon that retrospection than to turn that critical observation onto the film that caused it in the first place?

Humanity is on the brink of extinction.  Generations of waste have transformed the Earth into a  global dust bowl, while a mysterious blight gradually lays waste to the world's crops.  Only corn remains, and even that is starting to succumb to the disease.  Humanity's only hope is a last ditch exploratory mission into a wormhole at the edge of our solar system: leading a scientific crew to a new galaxy with three potentially habitable worlds to lead a planetary exodus to.

It is safe to say that Interstellar is the science fiction film of the Twenty-First Century - a century, mind you, that includes Gravity, Inception, Children of Men, Looper, District 9, Avatar and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Now,  don't get me wrong, I loved Gravity.  It's exceptional direction, phenominal lead performance, adherence to scientific realism and scene-stealing special effects easily make it a high point of its genre.  Interstellar, however, makes Gravity look like its retarded little brother drawing stick figures in the dirt.  It is hands down the better written, better directed, better acted and better visualized film by impossibly wide margins.

Interstellar is perplexingly both Nolan's most ambitious and most restrained film to date - striking a delicate balance between the obvious showmanship of Incepion and the subtle mastery of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Its surprisingly straight-forward narrative is neither prone to expansive, scientific exposition nor blunt spectacle, preferring to sit back and let the strength of its stunning cosmic visuals, uncharacteristically subdued Hans Zimmer score and profoundly talented cast each take over the stewardship of the film in turn.

Just as the film is scientific without devolving into a dramatized science lecture, it is humane without lapsing into sap or schmaltz.  It presents a man who is forced between potentially saving all mankind and definitely raising his family to die on Earth.  He is forced to confront the heartbreaking reality of those he hurt despite his best attempts to save them, as well as the cloying possibility that his motivations were more selfish than he could ever admit to himself.

What is honestly most compelling for me is that the film has the courage to settle into its own narrative - taking its time to show the realities of its near-future Earth so as to illustrate the completeness of its plight.  We understand Murph's resentment of her father not because the film tells us, but because it shows us: shows how close they were on Earth and how desperately alone they are when seperated from one another.

In any less of a year, Interstellar would have proudly and immediately claimed the title of my favorite film of the year.  In 2014, however, is has to settle for third place (behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past).  It is a triumph of Twenty-First Century filmmaking and a testament to the power of humanity's ambitions beyond our terrestrial home.  Even though I still prefer The Dark Knight, Interstellar is easily Nolan's most maturely and evenly helmed film to date, not to mention the one that benefits most from his unique vision.  I give the film an easy 9.5 out of 10.

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The Weekend Review: The Book of Life

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

As I have settled into a second job at AMC, I have unfortunately laxed in my CineMantic duties, an oversight that I hope to immediately correct.  Ironically, however, my newfound menial wage slavery is the exact reason why I was able to see this post's film in question, so it's not without at least some redeeming merit.

Framed by a museum tour guide telling a Día de los Muertos story to a group of disinterested, trouble-making students, The Book of Life follows the lives of three Mexican friends: the progressively minded María and the rivals for her heart - the heroic Juaqin and the romantic Monolo.  The two gods of the afterlife - paramores La Muerte, the affectionate ruler of The Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, the mean-spirited ruler of The Land of the Forgotten - make a wager about which boy will marry María.  If the Xibalba-backed Juaquin succeeds, he and La Muerte will trade realms with one another, but if the La Muerte-backed Monolo succeeds, Xibalba will forever cease to meddle in the affairs of mortals.  To ensure that his champion wins the contest for him, Xibalba gives Juaquin The Meddle of Everlasting Life, which bestows its bearer with immortality and invulnerability - an artifact that the murderous bandit king Chakal will stop at nothing to acquire for himself.

This is undoubtedly the most Mexican film I have ever seen.  And I don't mean that because the infinite magnificence of the universe looks like a sombrero, the Earth wears a magnificent moustache nor that Mexico is said to be the exact center of the universe.  When I say that it is the most Mexican film I have ever seen, it's because it earnestly, unironically and entirely embraces Mexican culture and society on every level of its production: from its almost exclusively Hispanic cast, to its true-to-form depiction of Día de los Muertos and surrounding beliefs and iconography, to its uniquely vibrant art style.  While it does poke some kid-friendly fun at the culture, it is neither derogatory nor stereotypical - going exactly as far as The Lego Movie's Brickberg went at poking fun of mainstream American culture.

Xibalba and La Muerte bet on the romantic destiny of Maria, Juaquin and Monolo.

Going into the film, I was under the impression that the animation style, in which all of the characters were rendered to look like highly detailed puppets, was a artistic gimmick: different for the sake of being different.  And although it undoubtedly goes a long way in making it a unique and memorable viewing experience, it actually serves a very real narrative function within the film.

Remember, although the story of Maria, Juaquin and Monolo is the central narrative focus, it is itself merely a story told within a larger frame story: a group of delinquent students touring a museum on Día de los Muertos.  The frame story is rendered in simple 3-D animation - visually identical to Tangled or Frozen.  Just before the narrative shifts to the tale of Xibalba and La Muerte's wager, however, one of the children uncovers a box of dolls that represent each of the internal narrative's characters: dolls whose design is identical to the character design of the majority of the film.  The animation style serves the exact same function as Christina Applegate's occasional voice over narration.  It is a physical reminder that the story we're investing ourselves in is just that - a story - being told to us from a vastly different setting by and to a vastly different set of characters.

Note how dramatically this scene looks from the one depicted above.

The animation is most breathtaking when the story shifts from the land of the living to the Land of the Remembered.  Sequences in this second setting (or third, counting the frame story) are magnificently rendered in low-key illumination.  Light seems to spill brilliantly from the building themselves, starkly set against the the the black-and-rose petal sky.  The combination of neon-colored illumination, sharp definition of the landscape and impossible set design force every building to pop against the background, seemingly in something altogether beyond 3-D rendering.

Undoubtedly, this is Guillermo del Toro's The Nightmare Before Christmas - a uniquely animated film that, although he did not actually direct it himself, has so obviously been guided by him as a producer that people will mistakenly attribute him as the director whenever the subject comes up in casual conversation.  Never mind how incredibly well-directed the film is in its own right, Del Toro's guiding hand completely steals the show.  Who's Henry Selick?  Exactly.  The same goes for Jorge Gutierrez.

If not for Justice League: War, this would be hands-down my favorite animated film of 2014, beating out even The Lego Movie's uncanny brilliance.  The animation is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen, the writing is intelligent and the production as a whole successfully toes the thin line between playfully self-aware and offensively derisive.  Although the message is hammered in more than just a little bluntly in its closing moments - even for a kid-centered film - the fact that it is a kid-centered film can mostly forgive that fact.  In what will undoubtedly be its final run before The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 pushes it out of theaters for good, I would strongly suggest that anybody who can so much as "merely stomach" animated films to see this before it leaves the big screen forever.  I give the film a high 8.5 out of 10 (nearly, but not quite, a 9).

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