Guyalice's Year-End Film Picks

Since the Golden Globes were last Sunday and the Oscar nominations should be up in a few days, I thought I would share my own thoughts about what was the best of the years. Before reading, there are some movies I haven't seen yet that may change my mind, including: Winter's Bone (Film, Actress), The Illusionist (Animated), The Kids Are All Right (Actress), Blue Valentine (Actress) [*blush*], The Fighter (Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress)

But anyways, 2010 in review:

Film: The King's Speech
Runners-up: Toy Story 3, Inception, True Grit, Black Swan, The Social Network

Director: Christopher Nolan- Inception
Runner-up: Darren Arranofsky- Black Swan

Actor: Colin Firth- The King's Speech
Runner-up: None

Actress: Natalie Portman- Black Swan
Runner-up: Hailee Steinfeld- True Grit

Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush- The King's Speech
Runners-up: Andrew Garfield & Armie Hammer- The Social Network, Tom Hardy- Inception, Matt Damon- True Grit, Chris Evans- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Kevin Kline- The Extra Man

Supporting Actress: Rooney Mara- The Social Network
Runners-up: Helena Bonham-Carter- The King's Speech, Mila Kunis- Black Swan

Animated Film: Toy Story 3
Runner-up: How to Train Your Dragon

Best Documentary: Babies
Runner-up: Exit Through the Gift Shop [Note: This is a hoax, so it really shouldn't count]

Best Short: I'm Here
Runner-up: Day & Night

Sometimes, the greatest movie is the one in your mind...

Over the holiday break, I saw three movies in three days: The King's Speech, Black Swan, and True Grit. All were excellent and highly recommended, though The King's Speech is my pick of the year.

I went to True Grit with Mom, and one of the preceding trailers started with the Houston contacting Apollo 11 on the moon just before a period of radio silence. Cut off from earth, the astronauts explore and then come across... AN ALIEN SPACESHIP.

Me: (to Mom) Holy crap, is this going to be Neil Armstrong fighting aliens!?? That is the coolest thing I have ever heard of! It'll be Apollo 11 crew being all badass and how they saved earth but there was a government cover-up! And they can get the astronauts to star as themselves in bookends! This is going to be the most amazing movie ever!!

Trailer Titles: FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY

Me: (Crushing disappointment) Aw, piss!

Then a goddamned robot shows up.

Me: (to Mom) Aw, man, it's Transformers.

Trailer Titles: TRANSFORMERS

Me: >:(

Trailer Titles: THE DARK OF THE MOON

Me: I hate you, Michael Bay.

Best part of Waking Sleeping Beauty, or: Who's that mopey guy?

Waking Sleeping Beauty is a documentary about the "Disney Renaissance," where starting with The Little Mermaid, the animation studio had a great comeback in artistic, critical, and boxoffice responses. Well, being a documentary on animation, especially hitting with the nostalgic stuff from my childhood, this is basically a movie made specifically for me. It's very well made and while it stops in 1995 and doesn't explore the post-Lion King studio closings and all the flops and CGI misfires, it delves deeply into the tense rivalry between Michael Eisner, Roy E. Disney (Walt's nephew), and Jeffery Katzenberg (who would go on to co-found Dreamworks). Pretty surprising since it was produced by Disney and released by them.

It's also very revealing about lyricist Howard Ashman's contributions to the movies he worked on. It may just be the directors and interviewees fondness for him affecting their memories, but it really seems as though he was the key auteur behind Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast. The segment of the documentary focusing on his death from AIDS before the release of Beauty & the Beast is incredibly moving.

However, the greatest part of the film features archived video of somebody going around the studios and taping the animators goofing about (the guy behind the camera turns out to be John Lasseter). Then they come across this one guy all alone in his office working at his desk. He looks at the camera unamused, like he's spent the last two night in his office, hasn't had his coffee yet, and really wants the camera out of his face. Like that creepy, unsociable kid at college who's spent the last twelve hours on World of Warcraft and really just wants you to leave him alone.

It's Tim Burton.

P.S. If you watch the trailer in the link, you might think that Beauty & the Beast won Best Film at the Oscars. While it was nominated and won in several other categories, it lost... to The Silence of the Lambs.

Mwahahahaha.

July Re-cap: Super-short mini reviews

Books

• Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley- A book I started in college but quit 3/4 of the way through because I found it too similar to McKinley's other Beauty and the Beast adaptation, Beauty, only longer and boring. Now it's been enough time between reading both of them, and this go around I found this enrapturing, quite slow and meandering, but a wonderful, rich novel.
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman- Listened to an excellent full-cast audio at work. I never read the third book in the trilogy so I decided I should revisit the first two. First read this one when I was 12 and it was mind-blowing. It more than holds up.
• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynn Jones- The Arabian Nights-flavored sequel to Howl's Moving Castle is a delight, very funny and full of whimsy. More reason why Jones is becoming one of my favorite authors.
• White Cat by Holly Black- I normally don't care for Holly Black's YA novels, as her female heroines are normally too mopey and unidentifiable, and they tend to have this pissed-off tone about them. Maybe it's a fluke, or maybe because the protagonist for this one is a boy, but I did like this, and I like the Curse Workers world she's created much more than her hard-assed Faerie world.
• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson- Brilliant and often heart-wrenching story about a slave in a scientists commune in Revolution-Era Boston.
• Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern- Considering that it's based on Twitter feed, there's not much you can expect from this book, but it's actually a great memoir centering on Halpern's relationship with his ultra-crass father. It also becomes unexpectedly touching, as while his dad may be blunt, he does love the hell out of his family.

Movies

• Inception- Where's my spin-off with Arthur and Eames being ass-holes to each other??!!
• Hamlet- BBC/Royal Shakespeare Company production starring David Tennant, with Patrick Stewart as Claudius and the King's Ghost. As awesome as it sounds.
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox- Re-watched, still delightful. I love Wes Anderson's non sequiturs, though I'm sure most of the best random moments were ad-libbed.
• God of Cookery- <3 Stephen Chow. Best part: Roundhouse kicking that school girl in the face.
• That Hamilton Woman- The British Gone With the Wind with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Apparently Churchill considered it his favorite movie.
• Black Dynamite- "Your knowledge of scientific biological transmogrification is only outmatched by your zest for kung-fu treachery!"
• Dinner for Schmucks- Whatever you're expecting from it, you're gonna get it. Am I the only person in the world who things that the French film this is a remake of is over-rated and pretty mean-spirited?
• Starman-  The closest thing John Carpenter has ever done to a romance film? Of course, it's a romance involving Jeff Bridges as an alien.
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs- Was really not expecting to like this, but my first-impression of non-Pixar CG animated films tends to be wrong.
• Les Miserable (1998, Bille August, dir.)- Not very good, but I've been obsessed with Liam Neeson and Claire Danes lately.

Comics

• Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley- Awesome ending to one of my all-time favorite series. Surprisingly, it has a bit of an easier pace than it's manic predecessors, but it's still all the way boss. Can't wait for the movie.
• Fractured Fables, edited by Jim Valentino- not the best fairy tale-themed comic anthology out there, but the hits are pretty fantastic and the art's fantastic. Includes contributions from Jill Thompson (cute murderous sausages!), Terry Moore (disappointing and a little mean spirited), Bryan Talbot (a cool twist on Red Riding Hood).
• Secret Iditities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, edited by Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, & Jerry Ma- A really neat collection of comics that explores Asian Americans in comics and in historical and contemporary social constructs. My personal favorite is Gene Yang and Scottie Young's take on a Kato-like chauffeur who is the real muscles and brains behind a crime fighting duo.
• The Marvelous Land of Oz by Eric Shanower & Scottie Young- I'm not the biggest Oz fan, but I really dig Scottie Young's artwork. I'm also glad that this can expose more people to how messed up the gender-bending ending is!
• Pulse by Brian Michael Bendis, et al.- Got all three volumes on the cheap. Love, love Jessica Jones.
• Okimono Kimono by Mokona- Pretty random little book by one of the women who make up CLAMP. All about Mokona's love for kimono, with designs and tips on wearing them.

Television

• Avatar: The Last Airbender- Finished the entire series and, hoo boy, I can call myself a fan.
• True Blood- This show is out-trashing itself and I'M LOVING IT! (It's funny though that I'm looking forward to a Sam sub-plot while getting annoyed by Jason's storyline; normally it's the other way around.)
• Black Adder III- As wonderful as can be expected from a classic and much-loved BBC series, but I think most American audiences will be shocked to see Hugh Laurie as the ultra-foppish Prince Regent.
• Firefly- Why do I have a feeling that once I'm done with this show I'm going to be ultra-disappointed that they canceled it after only 14 episodes? I mean, I know that it happened over five years ago, but it doesn't mean that I can't still be glummed-out about it.

"You're waiting for a train; a train that will take you far away..."

Inception begins with Leonardo Di Caprio washing up on a beach. He wakes to see two fair-haired children playing in the sand. He is found by some armed men speaking Japanese. These men take him to a wizened old man who asks him if he's there to kill him. The guards display the only thing's Di Caprio was carrying: a gun and a toy top. The old man recognizes the top and starts to spin it... It is not until the very end that a first-time viewer will understand what this really means, an early example of all the complexities Inception holds.

There are so many things this movie gets right, I can only see it becoming one of the Great Movies, one that collectively sticks with us, becoming a part of our cultural make-up and that we always return to. It's a cerebral action movie that's brainy but not pretentious. One aspect of it that many seem to overlook is that it's premise is essentially a reverse heist-picture, where the group has to break in and leave something of great value. It's also a perfect example of using visuals to help enhance the story, not to over-compensate for a shoddy script. The characters are not completely fleshed out, but the actors are so compelling that their subtle character traits and flaws speak volumes. Di Caprio, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Cillian Murphy are as excellent as one can expect from them, but Joseph Gordan-Levitt, Tom Hardy, and Marion Cotillard are the ones whose performances you remember.

It's a complex storyline, and it's ambiguous (oh, that brilliant final scene!), but not in a purposefully frustrating way a la David Lynch. I'm really excited about all of the theories that are emerging around this film. Many of them are going to be crack-pot ideas, but I've already heard some pretty cool ones: it's all a dream, all of it, from the very beginning, and Mal was right all along; or that it's all a metaphor for film making, Christopher Nolan's 8 1/2.

That said, the film can be left as it is on the surface, and really whether it's an excellent summer blockbuster or an art film, it succeeds as both. Unless something else trumps this, I'm going to call it the quintessential movie of 2010.

Toy Story and the Wonder of Pathetic Fallacies

It's kind of sad yet kind of appropriate that as I get older the only films that I really anticipate the release of are animated. While we are getting too much Disney and Shrek derivative crap, we are also seeing a lot of highly innovative films being made that are taking chances with the medium. Youtube is giving a lot of exposure (although often in violation of copyright) to animated shorts, a form once restricted to film festivals. Miyazaki and Brad Bird are respected as auteurs. Now, Toy Story 3 is one of the best movies I've seen in years.

Pixar is truly bizarre--no studio should hit all the right notes all the time. When their "worst" films are the charming and enjoyable Cars and A Bug's Life, it's almost like waiting for the other shoe to drop--what if their next film is a disappointment? 

The very first Toy Story came out when I was only 10, and it struck with me as one of these works that molded my developing imagination and tastes. (Don't worry, I would eventually discover that Randy Newman sang the same song over and over.)

Contrary to what most kid franchises would do, the children's ages have not remained static, and Andy is moving out and leaving for college. What is he to do with his secretly-alive toys? Keep them close at hand? Put away his childish things and enter adulthood unburdened? Give them away and cherish the memories? Hmm... maybe this is why I hoard things.

One thing that I had trouble with initially while revisiting the world of Toy Story was trying to figure what the toys' relationship with Andy was supposed to be analogous to in real life. Was it meant to represent childhood friends who grow apart? Parents who most say goodbye to child? Children who must leave home? The faithful to their deity? Then I had to stop myself, realizing that I had to stop over-thinking it in this one instance. In the verisimilitude of this universe, the toys' love for their owner represents just that. It made sense to me as a child, and there's no reason why it shouldn't now.

Pixar is pretty brilliant at keeping the story on a level accessible to children without being saccharine or crass, while also being enjoyable for  adults without any audience pandering pop culture references. Also, in many ways they subscribe to the same school of thought as Maurice Sendak in that they aren't going to gloss over the tough parts of life, giving kids enough credit that they can handle it. That said, Toy Story 3 has plenty of kindertrauma nightmare fuel. There's the red-eyed, screaming cymbal monkey straight out of Stephen King, a baby doll reminiscent of Boo Radley, and Mr. Potato Head using a floppy tortilla as a body. Then there's the increasingly hellish trip to the dump. I am normally critical at how Pixar lines up a series of separate obstacles during their finale, each more dangerous than the last (Finding Nemo is the worst culprit of this). However, the dump scene was brilliantly orchestrated. It was chair-squirmingly intense, and when they reach the Mount Doom incinerator is beyond heart-wrenching. The way such love, compassion, fear, bravery, and acceptance is perfectly conveyed with these characters is beautiful, proving that sometimes the great performances don't have to come from a living thing. The whole sequence is already cemented as one of my favorite cinematic moments.

Yeah, I have faith that if they decide to make more sequels, Pixar won't run the series into the ground. While I would get excited, this was a fantastic way to close the series. Like Andy, I've aged since the previous films, but the stories will stick with me.

Because Disney doesn't make movies for girls?

Hoo boy, this trailer is giving me a lot of conflicting emotions.


Who knows what the finished product is going to be like, but Disney's marketing team is trying to downplay this as a movie about a fairytale princess. I've noticed that over the last decade or so, their trend is that after they have a disappointment with a film, they don't try to learn from their mistakes but rather do something completely different. When Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range didn't do well at the boxoffice, while Pixar and Dreamworks were doing fantastic numbers, they didn't pin the problem on bad scripts or unappealing plots--it was because they were traditionally animated. So then they come out with Chicken Little and Bolt, two computer animated film that are very much in the "animals have wacky hi-jinks" mode of Dreamworks and Fox Animation.

So when The Princess and the Frog doesn't do so well, it's not because they alienated a lot of their potential audience with all the racially insensitive crap during its early development. No, it's because it's a traditionally animated film for girls! Let's make our next one computer animated and make it about a dude! Also, calling it "Rapunzel" or even "Rapunzel Untangled" is going to alienate all the boys who want to see it. Let's give it a stupid, confusing title like Tangled.

Despite my grumblings, I'm hesitantly excited, because this movie does look beautiful. I remember drooling over the early Rococo influenced concept art, and the animator's attempts to replicate classic traditional animation is probably going to make this the prettiest computer animated feature-length film ever made. Flynn, the thief who the trailer tells us is the main character, does have some funny lines and Zachary Levi's bravado is going to be great. Plus, Rapunzel looks adorable and that little chameleon buddy is too cute.

Don't disappoint me, Disney! I've put you on notice

Movie Review: Dungeon Siege

My friends chose a wammy of a bad movie for their Monday night get-together: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. I must admit I had never seen a film by Uwe Boll before, though his reputation as the worst director alive precedes him.

I know he has a dedicated cult of people who hate him, but I don't get them. I can understand following a bad director if they are sincere in their filmmaking yet blithely inept, like Ed Wood, or so extreme that they've got a kitsch-cool element to them, like Russ Meyer. But to dedicate yourself to someone, even in good fun, who is so half-assed in their filmmaking and so lacking in talent seems to be a wast of time to me.

Still the movie was an all-out assault on the brain and a bore to the senses. It's a Lord of the Rings rip-off that somehow makes room to steal from Gladiator, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Star Wars, Cirque du Solei, and recent wuxia films like The House of Flying Daggers. It has the strangest combination of actors probably ever assembled: Jason Statham, Burt Reynolds, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, Kristanna Loken (the Terminatrix), John Rhys-Davis, Claire Forlani, and Ray frickin' Liotta. It's humiliating. Not to mention Ork-things that stumble around like Putties and NINJA!

There are only two real highlights:

(1) Leelee Sobieski wears an awesome suit of armor, which is almost odd because the rest of the costumes look like they were put together by somebody's busy mom the night before the 3rd grad play. Now I am no Ren Fair nerd, and I have never lusted after anything that could hypothetically used while fighting, but I want that armor. Here's a picture of it, which I'm glad to find because you never get a clear view of it in the movie. Because that would have been competence in action.

(2) The Putty-Trolls are fighting. They have a catapult. They catapult rocks and things. Then they set things on fire and catapult them. Then they put their own men into the catapults. And set them on fire. And then catapult them. And when the on-fire Putty-Orks land, they start attacking people. While still on fire.

I cannot make these things up.

Bad movie! No buscuit!

Movie Review: Hairspray

Utterly satisfying, as charming as you would hope it would be. Haven't seen it on the stage, but ya damned skippy I saw the original movie. I really think that this new trend of remaking a movie on Broadway, then making the Broadway show into a movie is funny. Looking forword to seeing The Wedding Singer and Legally Blonde, even though the original ones are less than ten years old.

In some ways this is better than the 1988 original, as all the John Water's scuzziness has been smoothed over (even though it was PG, you can't escape the underlining Divine Madness in all of Water's films). This is certainly the best musical I've seen since Chicago, mostly because the director, Adam Shankman (who is a great director who's made some shit films: Bringing Down the House, Cheaper By the Dozen 2, and The Pacifier), is like Rob Marshall in that he understands how a musical should work on film. Shankman's a choreographer and has marvelous energy and timing.

Nikky Blonsky is adorable- a star is born. Amanda Bynes is cute, too, which's nice because I've always wanted to like her, but she's always been in terrible tweenage pictures. Everyone's memorable, actually. Michelle Pfeiffer hasn't been as sexy since she was Catwoman, but it's a shame that now she's found her middle-age nitch by playing villains. Christopher Walken's sweetly deadpan. The bell of the ball, Travolta, is actually not a spectacular as he should have been. Good, but they would have had better movie if they'd just asked Harvey Fierstein to do it.

Side-note: For those who hadn't heard, GLAAD complained about the casting of Travolta because Scientology aparently believes that homosexuality is something that can be cured by joining Scientology and eating lots of vitamins. I don't think that this is fair, because Travolta has made no negative comments about gays, and it's not right to condemn a man just because of his (nutjob) beliefs.

Movie Review: Stardust

Saw this last weekend, and I have to say that this has been the best movie I've seen this summer. One of those sheer delights that you don't want to end.

However, now that I'm starting to read the book, I'm afraid that I might end up being disgusted with how they changed things. I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, but Stardust never appealed to me until now. Just by flipping through and reading passages and looking at Charles Vess' illustrations, I can tell a lot has been changed, most notably that the world beyond the wall is in fact Fairie. In the movie, it's just an original fantasy world, so much of the old ballad elements are lost. This said, I'm still optomistic that I will like both book and movie as individual works in their own rights, especially since they are so different. I already find the movie's ending more satisfying than the book's (I peaked).

The film is sweetly romantic, well-paced, and visually exciting. With the special effects, I was initially not empressed with moments like the pet-sized elephants at the fair, but the sky ship, the dead princes, and Yvaine's starshine were enchanting. Most rememberable were probably the performances. Charlie Cox was your standard charming but bumbling Gaiman hero, and you fall in love with him, even at his stupid moments. I haven't liked Claire Danes so much since Little Women, but she was excellent as Yvaine, just the right proportions of ethereal and spunky. I'm a little torn over that Michelle Pfeiffer is mostly playing villainesses now, but I cannot deny that she plays them well. I'm glad I had forgotten that Peter O'Toole and Ricky Gervais were in it, because it was fun to be surprised by them. Robert De Niro hasn't been in a movie like this since Brazil, and he obviously had a lot of fun with it. He steals whatever scene he's in without being too overpowering.

Telling from the trailers, which included Beowulf, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and The Golden Compass, fantasy is the most bankable in-thing to do in the post-Lord of the Rings industry. Maybe with movies like Stardust it'll be a fantasy-film Renaissance, like it was in the 80's. Imagine this decade creating movies more in line with the Neverending Story and Legend!

Stardust worked, but it was more aimed at adults, but some movies, like the dreaded upcoming Dark is Rising, seem to be pandarizing to tweens, ripping out its literary elements and simplifying its mythology. However, The Golden Compass looks very promising, and the Narnia movie appears to be respectable to its source.

Movie Review: Live Free or Die Hard

Heh, I like Bruce Willis. He can star in absolute crap and still make it somehow watchable. However, the fourth Die Hard flick is great, especially if you're looking for some big, noisy, dumb fun. I can't think of any other film series where the first two sequels suck, while number four is good. It's funny how increasingly bad ass John McClane becomes as the movies go by. In the first one, he blows up a chair as his opening act. In this one he blows up a HELICOPTER WITH A FRICKIN' CAR! It must be a hair thing, because whenever Bruce Willis is bald, he's indistructable (see: Unbreakable).

However, in this one McClane was more grizzly, hardened, and wisened, rather than his original wise-ass. There were a few moments, but mostly he was all brood and tough-talk. This might be because he's towing around Justin Long to play the voice of sarcasm. I hope Justin Long becomes huge after this movie, because I can just see people getting excited when they discover the "I'm a Mac" guy makes movies (actually he's been in a lot of stuff). He's hot geekage.

I was expecting to be annoyed by the introduction of McClane's grown up daughter, but then I realized that this is probably how she would have realistically grown up to be- white trash and a little tarty. The villain was boring, especially when you remember that he's following up Alan Rickman and Jeremy Iron. They should have cast someone like Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, or the like so they create a creepy British guy triumverant.

Kevin Smith is a mug.

The storyline was pretty freaky, apparently based on an article speculating this tech-based national disaster. But who cares... EXPLOSIONS!!!

Saints Be Praised. Sam Jackson is Nick Fury!

In a bizarre example of art imitating life imitating art, Samuel L. Jackson, the only man that anyone would ever want to play Nick Fury from Marvel Comics, is indeed playing Nick Fury in the Iron Man movie.

If you weren't already intreiged with the miscasting that somehow works of Robert Downey Jr. (instead of Scotchity-Scotch-Scotch, will it be Cokity-Coke-Coke?), this is enough to make me see it. The badassness will positively ooze off the screen.

Oh, and for the record, Jackson has so far played a Jedi, a Tarantino hitman, a supervillain, Shaft, and now a superhero. Squee!

Movie Review: Marie Antoinette

Finally got around to seeing this, as I've been intrigued with it since seeing the teaser trailer with its delightfully inappropriate 80s music. The teaser caused a bit of a stir when it was first released, stirring history buffs into a tizzy. I think it was a smart move to make, because it helps one be prepared to the strangeness of the anachronist soundtrack, which I think will help keep the film innovative for years to come. The film is a rare example of a postmodern biopic, with the out-of-place music and the unexpected casting of Rip Torn, Jason Schwartzman, Molly Shannon, and others that are suprisingly effective.

I adored the film, but I do have to admit that the real stand-out is production design and the costumes. Everyone must have spent an ungodly amount of time pouring over paintings of the time. Its so appealing to look at, it even made a socialist feminist like me somehow desire laying around in beautiful gowns, gossiping, while eating bon bons and playing with little dogs.

As it is a movie, I'm only going to assume that historical accuracy was thrown out the window, but as a film everything works and the result is charming. Kirsten Dunst is a good queen, and I might be saying that because I've fallen out of love with her over the years. But she is best when she is playing spoiled and shallow types, just as she was when she was younger and playing Amy in Little Women and Claudia in Interview with the Vampire. So you might say that Marie Antoinette is the role Dunst was born to play. The film is sympathetic to the film, but not necessarily taking an appologist's stance: it's rather counter-legend, as she would certainly never have said, "Let them eat cake," but she would have been generous enough to settle for smaller oak trees to line her Versailles estate. She may have been incredibly irresponsible, but to an extent she was the scapegoat of the sins of all the nobility. Sophia Coppola portrays her as the ultimate poor little rich girl.

I love Sophia Coppola, especially her earlier films, The Virgin Suicides and its semi-companion short, Lick the Star, both about lonely girls struggling with the cruelty of childhood and their blossoming sexualities. I had hoped that Marie Antoinette would be more in the tone of these ones, but its more like her famous Lost in Translation. I do adore her directing style, somehow appearing Zen-meets-Roccoco. Delightful.

Let's hope that her next project is even more daring and ambitious.

Movie Review: Paprika

Paprika is the newest release by Satoshi Kon, the master behind the acclaimed Japanese animated films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers. I had the privilege of seeing on the big screen at Raleigh's wonderful Galaxy Cinema, and it's breathlessly beautiful trip. The film is about technology that allows researchers to enter patients' dreams, but when the technology is stolen, the dream world begins to invade the "real world." Paprika is the vivacious and sexy alter-ego/avatar of the project's serious and formal Dr. Chiba, but she seems to be quite independent of her counterpart.

So, let's play the irritating "it's like" game: It's kinda like Ghost in the Shell, mixed with a more interesting Waking Life and a much better The Cell. Paprika can hop into any canvas and out through another or travel through live television feeds and out onto the street, and giant dolls attack office buildings. The ground ripples violently before the dreamer is pulled back into the waking world, and a doll ceremony parades through forrests and busy streets. It really captures the bizarre, delerious moments that makes sense only in your dreamscapes. And, oh, the colors...

It's one of those cases where I am so envious of the filmmakers because they were able to conceive and create such original images. You cannot learn how to have such a productive imagination, as well as how to shape your imagination into something presentable on screen. The Japanese are truly ahead in the animation medium, using it to its full potential. It's no longer just "Pokemon and porn," but movies where the stories are actually enhanced by producing them as animation.

The film was a bit confusing, particularly since it's not real clear what the detective's role is, even though he's so prominent (it turns out he's an incidental character who becomes a hapless hero). But it was not just some visuals-are-the-saving-grace picture, it's interesting once you catch up with what's going on, and there's a really sweet, suprising love story that surfaces at the end. I didn't think it was as good as Tokyo Godfathers or Millennium Actress, but I think I may appreciate it more when I rewatch it on video.