Is it just us or can the Academy's infatuation with The Artist be felt even in categories where the film isn't nominated? Grant Orchard's The Morning Stroll, about a chicken stopping a passerby on a city street dead in his tracks, first in a time when films were referred to as moving pictures, then in our present day, and finally in a post-apocalyptic tomorrow where zombies have come home to roost, is cute up to the point that its artistry adopts the very ADD it increasingly thumbs its nose at throughout. A sweeter, more quaint vision, Patrick Doyon's Sunday is in essence also a study of human routine, only this one waxes nostalgic on the different world children and adults inhabit without a shred of condescension. Both Terrence Davis and Bill Plympton would love it…and we know how many Oscars each of those filmmakers have. Continue Reading »
This past Sunday's episode of The Simpsons, in which Bart won a Golden Globe and Oscar for his short film Angry Dad, parodied Pixar, awards season, Martin Scorsese's cinephilia, and more.
One of New Zealand's biggest cities lay in ruins Tuesday after a powerful earthquake toppled tall buildings and churches on a busy weekday.
Every two weeks, titans of the mediasphere give Nerve their music recommendations. This week: Our own Sal Cinquemani tells us which five albums we should be listening to right now.
Maryland Senate committee approves same-sex marriage bill.
What would Justice Clarence Thomas say if he found a pube in his Coke?
The Muriels, says Jim Emerson, boast a longer awards presentation than the Oscars. This year's ceremony is now being hosted at Our Science Is Too Tight. Congrats to us for getting third place for Best Web-Based Criticism!
The government of Colonel Muammaar el-Qaddafi is beginning to falter.
Kevin Lee and Steven Boone on the Digital Do It Yourself (DDIY) Wave:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
In the five years since this category, which was previous known as Best Sound Effects, was bumped up from three to five nominations, it has matched up with the Best Sound Mixing slate for four out of those five slots every year. Except this year. Only Inception and, somewhat more puzzlingly, True Grit managed nominations in both fields this year. Which either goes to show the ever-widening quality gulf between the sort of effects-laden blockbusters that get cited here and the more nuanced work that earns nominations in the other category. Yeah, yeah, Salt, which got nominated for Sound Mixing, is a dozen times worse—and noisier—than any movie nominated here this year. No one said the patterns were infallible. Especially not this year, in our confusing, post-The Hurt Locker era. Continue Reading »
How to explain How to Train Your Dragon winning 10 Annie awards? Maybe Pixar was right that the group's voting procedures are stacked in favor of DreamWorks Animation movies, or maybe they're not and the voting body decided to punish Pixar for not making an effusive awards push for Toy Story 3. Since the highest-grossing film of 2010 doesn't exactly need to remind anyone of its existence, or excellence for that matter, and since Kung Fu Panda inexplicably laid waste to Wall-E at the Annies two years ago, we think Pixar might have Annie's number. Whatever you think, though, it seems unlikely that How to Train Your Dragon will best Toy Story 3 at the Oscars given the larger AMPAS voting body that will dutifully null any DreamWorks-versus-Pixar drama that may carry over into the Oscar race. There's also Toy Story 3's five nominations to How to Train Your Dragon's two. In short: We don't see Oscar pulling a Grammy here. With a nomination for Best Picture, Toy Story 3 losing this award would be as much of an upset as, well, Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year.
Even though some were pegging Logorama as a possible upset over A Matter of Loaf and Death in this category prior to last year's Oscar ceremony, I didn't think the former's crude hipster snark would resonate with voters as significantly as the humanist warmth of Nick Park's most recent Wallace and Gromit adventure. That it did in the end may bode well for Let's Pollute, a six-minute snarkfest about pollution so oversaturated with sarcasm it made me want to mix my cardboards and plastics out of sheer frustration, but will the young'ns who helped push Logorama to a win last year find real innovation to the ingratiating film's surface-deep regurgitation of the style of '50s educational films? Hopefully voters will embrace a film that doesn't feel as if was made in order to be excerpted by Michael Moore. Continue Reading »
Cinetrix responds to Dan Callahan. We would totally run an article titled "Rich Boy Cinema." Just sayin'.
David Cronenberg's Videodrome comes to Blu-ray today via the Criterion Collection. Carrie Rickey had some queasy things to say about it back in 1983 for the Village Voice.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
I'm going to just assume you've YouTubed at least one Disney song in your lifetime. Maybe you were singing with your kid, chasing nostalgia, or leading a libation-fueled rendition at some house party. You probably know the melody to "A Whole New World," and can sing the chorus of "Hakuna Matata." Disney has woven its inextricable thread into the collective pop-culture consciousness, so if you're a member of the past few generations, it's practically guaranteed you grew up with classic Disney films and their soundtracks.
Earlier this week, Disney Interactive Studios released Disney Sing It: Family Hits for Wii and PlayStation 3. It's the latest in the company's Sing It series, which has hitherto included music from such time-treasured, timeless classics as Hannah Montana and High School Musical. This time, Disney shifted the target audience from teenyboppers to a more universal crowd, with a varied song listing from decades of Disney movies.
Thirty songs from three Disney eras are honored: the classic period from the '30s to '60s, the "Renaissance" of the '90s, and contemporary releases, which include Pixar. Gameplay is less karaoke and more of a sing-along, as the original vocals play in the background as you sing the lyrics on screen. Assuming you stay in pitch and don't make Simba sound like a pubescent yodeler, you'll nab a high score. The game requires at least one microphone, which you can pick up with the game for an extra 10 bucks. Simply plug the mic into the Wii's USB slots and you're ready to unleash your inner Donna Summer. Continue Reading »
When New York Press critic Armond White panned the universally admired Toy Story 3, the disapproval he expressed and the backlash it inspired were so "predictable" that they were, well, predicted. Bumping TS3 from its briefly "100% Fresh" standing at the critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, White's piece (entitled "Bored Game") channeled a steady stream of pissed off Pixar loyalists to the Press website. "Registered just to say I think you are a massive twat and I feel really sorry for you," user woahreally weighed in. "Whoever ur boss is should be slapped for allowing you to publish this disaster of a review," opined the inventively pseudonymed usuckballs.
The comments-section calls for White to be fired are occasionally hilarious in their venom and vulgarity, all the more so for being so spectacularly self-defeating—could the Press have mounted a more successful campaign to increase their web traffic and user registrations? And there's the rub. White's detractors accuse of him being a "contrarian," someone who bucks the critical establishment and defies popular taste out of little more than cynical self-promotion and antisocial perversity. (This highly circulated chart of Armond's pans and praises has been offered as definitive "proof" that his opinions are reflexively reactionary.) But if this is true, any principled stand against White paradoxically rewards and enables him. "Don't feed the trolls," as the saying goes. Continue Reading »
I'll get to Toy Story 3 in a minute, but first I wanted to tell you about something else I've been thinking about today. We're designed to search for patterns, so I guess it's no surprise that you can't see a lot of movies without noticing trends. Sometimes it's something minor, like a stylistic trick you see repeated or an actor who keeps popping up. But when two movies open a window onto the same little slice of life, it can change the way you experience both. That happened to me the other day when I came across For Neda, an HBO documentary about Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was killed by a government gunman during the protests that followed Iran's last election. As it happens, I'd just seen Women Without Men, one of the characters of which was a fictional forebear of Neda: a strong-willed young Iranian woman who defied taboos and risked death half a century ago to protest an illegitimate regime. Women Without Men was a little too underdeveloped and For Neda a little too didactic for my taste, but as I watched one and thought of the other, they melded into a kind of double exposure. Like Astaire and Rogers, in that quote about how he gave her class and she gave him sex, each movie made me appreciate the other more: The art-house film gave the documentary historical perspective, and the doc made the fiction film feel more urgent. Continue Reading »
Because there wasn't enough violence in our last Links for the Day, Christina Aguilera recently called for a man who coughed during a promo interview for her upcoming album, Bionic, to be shot. Her new video premieres tomorrow!
Joshua Green over at The Atlantic posted a short but convincing case for Sarah Palin not running for president in 2012. There's also an even more convincing follow-up, in which he takes on colleague Andrew Sullivan.
Pixar has unveiled a fake TV commercial, purportedly from 1983, promoting a new character from Toy Story 3, Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear. Another toy you never had as a child, if you were lucky, Baby Laugh A-Lot:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
By the grace of five extra Best Picture nominations, Pixar finally managed to land itself a slot in the main drag. By a horrible stroke of irony, we are now forced to treat this category like we would any niche Grammy category, predicting an almost ignobly easy win for the nominee contending in the Oscar equivalent of the "general fields," even though this is maybe the broadest, most impressive set of nominations in the category's nine-year, Treasure Planet/Shark Tale/Bolt littered history. (The 2005 slate may still win on overall balance, but it had to limit the scope down to only three nominations to do so.) Granted, we are as fine with an Up triumph as anyone. The movie's sanguine warmth and eye-popping visual clarity would make it an easy win even if it had still suffered an embarrassing snub in the training wheels-festooned Best Picture lineup. Continue Reading »
First off, I want to encourage everyone in New York City to take advantage of an opportunity that I will sorely miss: an in-person appearance (alternative link to event) by Yuriy Norshteyn. This legendary 68-year old Russian animator rarely comes to the US; he may very well be traveling to raise funds for his first feature film The Overcoat, which he has been working on for nearly 30 years. In any case, please go in my place, as I will be on a flight to Berlin as he makes his appearance at the SVA Theater:
Monday, February 15: School of Visual Arts Theater (333 W. 23rd Street, between 8th/9th Ave.) This event is billed only as a Q&A so be aware that there may not be a screening. No price is indicated so I'm also assuming it's free.
To be honest, I am a recent convert to Norstein, like, as of this week. He has been touted on this site before, as one of the 100 Most Important Directors of Animated Shorts, as voted on by my colleagues at IMDb. Still, when Tale of Tales appeared for the first time on the TSPDT 1000 upon its most recent update, I had never heard of the film, despite it being voted the greatest animated film of all time at polls conducted by two animation film festivals.
So I won't pretend to be an expert on this film when I've been acquainted with its filmmaker for all of a week, and when there is already a book length study by animation scholar Claire Kitson available, which I will seek out. I will only say that I've seen this half-hour masterpiece four times in four days, and it feels like it's stayed with me for four years. It's as if Norshteyn sat with these images all his life, drawing them with such lucidity and palpable depth of feeling, that they make even the untold hours of ingenuity and laborious craft behind Pixar films feel relatively disposable. It summons a concept of the fermented image: a vision that has stayed with a person for as long as they've been breathing, and perhaps beyond that, like the wolf that lurks throughout the film, a folkloric figure as old as Russian blood.
To read the rest of the entry at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
Sometimes, I don't know how I feel about Steven Spielberg.
Not because of his movies, understand; I have my favorites, my occasional dislikes, the same as everybody else. No, it's something else.
There's an old story, that while working on Jaws, Spielberg and George Lucas were screwing around with the animatronic shark after-hours, putting their heads in its mouth and such, and managed to break the thing. They took off into the night, laughing but nervous for breaking something so expensive. I always conflate that story in my mind with Bill Gates, on the verge of changing computing for the whole world forever, getting behind the wheel of a bulldozer, racing it, and slamming into a parked car. Continue Reading »
The House Next Door's Pixar Week runs from Oct. 4 to Oct. 11. If you'd like to contribute a piece, please e-mail Todd VanDerWerff at todd@vanderwerff.us
Look after the jump for a full list of posts.
Sunday, Oct. 11
Michael Peterson writes about how you never quite know what's going to make up your legacy and Pixar's connections to a video game company in A Matter of Trust: Pixar and Its Step-sibling.
Saturday, Oct. 10
Tom Elrod examines how Pixar's love of traditional family dynamics creates films that favor a traditional, social conservatism in Focus on the Family: Pixar's Small-c Conservatism.
Friday, Oct. 9
Jack Patrick Rodgers looks at how John Lasseter's films both long for a bygone American age and celebrate the current one in Love and Loss in John Lasseter's America.
Ryland Walker Knight re-examines Brad Bird's compositions and ability to create a sense of taste purely through visual portraits in Ratatouille's Sense of Taste, of Place.
D.W. Gardner examines just why some of Pixar's films seem to advocate living your life within a narrowly defined set of boundaries and why some seem to advocate pushing past them in Pushing at Boundaries: The Two-Faced Ideology of Pixar.
Colin Low takes a look at the two Pixar films he considers undisputed successes and laments the studio's output since the latter of those two films came out in Pixar's Peaks: Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles.
Tuesday, Oct. 6:
Stephen Russell-Gebbett compares the films of Pixar to the films of Studio Ghibli and finds them wanting in imagination and well-developed characters in Just a Toy: Pixar's Failure of Imagination.
Monday, Oct. 5:
Odienator ventures down to his local multiplex to watch the two Toy Story movies in 3-D with the people in his neighborhood and reflect on the films themselves in Watching Movies: You've Got a Friend in 3-D.
Sheila O'Malley thinks back on two men in her life - one young and one old - and how her life and their lives are connected through Pixar's films A Bug's Life and Up in "Talk About the Movie": A Bug's Life and Up.
Sunday, Oct. 4:
Pixar Week editor Todd VanDerWerff discusses the history of the studio, the thematic concerns of its filmmakers and some of the things Pixar week will entail in The Studio as Author: An Introduction to Pixar Week.
I'm going to just assume you've YouTubed at least one Disney song in your lifetime. Maybe you were singing with your kid, chasing nostalgia, or leading a libation-fueled rendition at some house party. You probably know the melody to "A Whole New World," and can sing the chorus of "Hakuna Matata." Disney has woven its inextricable thread into the collective pop-culture consciousness, so if you're a member of the past few generations, it's practically guaranteed you grew up with classic Disney films and their soundtracks. 
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