Jun 24
Cherish your friends and do not try to change them, no matter how much they embarrass you. That’s the message of this animated G-rated adventure about automobiles with eyeballs in their windshields and teeth in their grilles. Jets, boats and buses all share those anthropomorphic features in this sequel to “Cars” (2006). Unlike “Toy Story” and “Transformers,” there are no humans in this Pixar 3D tale. This time the main character is Mater, a buck-toothed hick-town tow truck (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) from Radiator Springs. On his first trip to Tokyo, he thinks wasabi is pistachio ice cream. That gaffe and other eye-rollers turn off celebrity race car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). The first film’s interstate race is upgraded here to an international one designed to hype a new “renewable” fuel. There is a corporate evildoer, a James Bond-like spy and uplift bits for “lemons” with low-esteem. Overdone action sequences unfold in London and on the Italian Riviera, but none match the kick-ass kinetics of the opener on an oil rig in the ocean. Writer-director John Lasseter and co-director Brad Lewis do not win a victory lap for this lesser model. The kids at the press screening did not squeal with delight. If your line at the concession stand is slow-moving, for the first twenty minutes you miss only overlong Pixar trailers and shorts. With Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson, Brent Musburger. 112m. (Bill Stamets)
May 11
RECOMMENDED
(Mia et le Migou, 2008) Jacques-Rémy Girerd’s “Mia and the Migou” has bright, spritely passages in its reported 500,000 hand-drawn frames, but the storytelling seems unsure whether its fabulizing is for kids or grownups. The search for and protection of a Tree of Life (see also: “Avatar,” “Charisma,” “Flipped,” “Tree of Life”) guarded by the monstrous Migoo (Wallace Shawn). The character work is distinctive and often gorgeous, the story a didactic drag about eco-responsibility and global warming. The magic of Hayao Miyazaki’s great embraces of the planet isn’t in evidence. Still, the handcrafted look appeals enough to recommend the film. Other American voice talent includes Matthew Modine, Whoopi Goldberg, John DiMaggio and James Woods; Modine is one of the producers of the English-language version. 90m. (Ray Pride)
“Mia and the Migou” opens Friday at Siskel. The U. S. trailer is embedded below.
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Apr 05
As part of its ongoing exploration of foreign film, the Logan Square International Film Series (http://tinyurl.com/squarelogan) is showing animated movies from around the world this month.
Peter Kaplan’s series proves that you don’t need big backers, big names or even a big screen to get a film festival off the ground. Started in January 2010 as a way for Kaplan to meet new people and see foreign films, the series is screened in his Logan Square apartment, either on his TV or using a projector. Next month, the series will be moving to Comfort Station on Milwaukee Avenue. Josh Samuels became a regular attendee and eventually the series’ curator after seeing a flyer at a Logan Square coffee shop. “I was like, wow, whoever is doing something like this out of their apartment is probably an interesting fellow, plus I like avant-garde film,” he says.
The animated films on offer this month include both feature-length and short works, and hail from Japan, the USA and France. Nina Paley’s Flash-animated “Sita Sings the Blues” weaves together episodes from the artist’s life and snippets from the Ramayana. The film garnered wide acclaim on its 2008 release, including a long rave by Roger Ebert on his blog. The Academy Award-nominated “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” director Sylvain Chomet’s first feature, is a wildly inventive homage to Jacques Tati and Jazz-age Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. Samuels compares the month’s last feature, “Paprika,” to a darkly Lynchian version of “Inception.” Each screening includes shorts selected by Samuels. (Benjamin Rossi)
The Logan Square International Film Series screens at 3421 West Medill every Sunday at 7pm.
Mar 16
(Ha Evangerion shin gekijôban, 2009) Hideaki Anno’s sequel to 2007′s “Evangelion 1:0,” and the second installment of four planned anime re-imaginings of the 1990s Japanese TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” places huge, destructive angels battling humanoid robots called Evangelions at the center of a saga about an apocalypse striking Japan. Yikes, the timing of the release. (Japanese exhibitors pulled Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which opens with the destruction and deaths after a tsunami, from release.) On one level, the furious pace of the story of teen-geek heroes and heroines battling to save their nation and the world is dazzling and visually kaleidoscopic, if confounding for a non-aficionado of the source material. In the context of the tragic events of the past week, it gains painful resonance. Then again, any Japanese viewer who knows the history of earthquakes, atom bombs and other forms of destruction loosed upon the islands of their country would have felt the same pull, even before tsunamis and nuclear plant meltdowns. If memory serves, “Evangelion: 2.0″ is more pungent and ever so slightly less daffy than its predecessor. 109m. (Ray Pride)
“Evangelion: 2.0 – You Can (Not) Advance” opens Friday at the Music Box.The trailer below offers a brisk slice of “Evangelion: 2.0″‘s style and pace.
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Mar 05
RECOMMENDED
Welcome to Dirt. Paydirt, I’d bet. Gore Verbinski’s first animated feature, “Rango,” promised to be strange-o after early teasers offered cryptic, semi-lysergic glimpses of the journey of a scrawny, tomatillo-headed chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp. But a spaghetti western that’s “Yojimbo” meets “Chinatown,” with splendid, not always slangy references to other movies and art? Highly unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable, and of a more toothsome sort of quirk than the last installments of the Verbinski-Depp “Pirates” trilogy. A lizard with no name is cast from comfortable terrarium life into the parched desert, and finds his way to a tiny town filled with tiny, parched animal citizenry in the desert. The city’s buildings, sometimes only glimpsed for a flash, are crafted from trash you’d find along the side of the highway: the post office a red-flagged US MAIL home delivery box; a frontier shitter fashioned from a Pepto-Bismol bottle. Depp’s awed-by-the-world vocalizations of Rango’s unstemmable interior monologue, externalized, are inspired throwaways, with lines like “I appreciate the puttanesca myself but I’m not sure a child would” referencing both the pasta source of the movie’s key genre as well as the adult gags that will sail over the heads of children, after the fashion of good, classic Warner Bros. cartoons. What do you do with lines like “I’m actually one of the few men with a maiden name” or “You missin’ yer mama’s mango?” Or “What’s a aquifer?” “Well, for aqua.” Laugh, or wait for the next one that will make you laugh. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb 16
RECOMMENDED
Pixar’s playful “Day & Night,” which was the opener for “Toy Story 3,” is one of the two best of this quintet, directed by Teddy Newton, a conceptual coup, a hand-drawn treat after the fashion of late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld that in its first iteration exploited 3-D to rich result. The teach-it-to-kids CGI “The Gruffalo,” about a nut-hunting mouse in the woods who faces a fox, an owl and a snake, repeats itself, but at least boasts narration by Helena Bonham Carter. From the U.S., Geefwee Boedoe’s “Let’s Pollute,” a salute to all-American waste keeping the economy strong, is a keen parody of stentorian educational films. (Boedoe designed the title sequence of “Monsters, Inc.”) “The Lost Thing,” an Australian short about a boy’s hope for a home for a weird creature he comes across on the beach while scavenging for bottle tops has a grown-up absurdity and sadness, largely from explaining neither beast nor boy. Perhaps best in its sculptural form and dimensional delight is “Carnet de Voyage,” a travel diary in scrapbook form that comes to life as a European who encounters the traditions of Madagascar’s Malagasy people. Bonus shorts include Bill Plympton’s “The Cow Who Wanted To Be A Hamburger.” 85m. (Ray Pride)
“The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2010 Animated” opens Friday at Landmark Century.
Jan 12
RECOMMENDED
Sylvain Chomet’s debut animated feature, “The Triplets of Belleville” (2003) is one of the great eyefuls of recent animation, an inundation into an eccentric, overstuffed and very specific world. His first feature since then, “The Illusionist,” based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, is a bit more subtle and dry as the story follows a tall Hulot figure, “Tatischeff,” across mid-century Europe as the days of music hall die off. Tatischeff winds up in a dusty Glasgow (where Chomet himself works as well), which offers such modest asides as kilted Scots cutting a rug to a pub’s jukebox, until he meets a young girl, Alice, who believes in his potential as a magician. Near silent and nostalgic in a dusty and pleasant fashion, Chomet is a master of finding expressiveness in faces both human and rabbit, man and girl, and they’re well worth gazing into. Chomet’s framing echoes both the proscenium of music hall and the middle distance framing of Tati’s own great films. A combination of hand-drawn and computer work set “The Illusionist” apart from the 3-D cruise ship-luxury-liner-scaled productions of DreamWorks, but its genuine satisfactions are on a much gentler scale, as in Tati’s own impeccably scaled and timed comedy. Is this aficionado of hand-drawn animation making a portrait of his own place in the world of film in that of an “illusionist” at the death of his trade? Yes, and more. Chomet scored the film as well as adapting and directing. 82m. (Ray Pride)
“The Illusionist” opens Friday at the Music Box.
Jan 05
RECOMMENDED
Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger’s “My Dog Tulip” unreels fourteen years in the life of man and dog. Man has the murmuring voice of Christopher Plummer; dog has an owner who finds “touching that she should find the world so strange and wonderful.” The minimal, stylized watercolor and pen-and-ink animation is melancholy in a way that suits bittersweet reminiscence. (The film was hand-drawn on a computer.) Based on J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of sharing a dog’s life of food and shit and sex and affection, the words are wise and playful and Plummer’s sometimes plummy delivery wonderful, and I know at least one dog-lover who will surely heave with sobs upon seeing “My Dog Tulip.” The gorgeous animation will sate others’ appetites. With the voices of Isabella Rossellini as a veterinarian who knows the central source of Tulip’s ills, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Gerety, Brian Murray, Paul Hecht, Euan Morton. 83m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)
“My Dog Tulip” opens Friday at Siskel.
Dec 17
RECOMMENDED
That fake look of a lot of 3D fits the cyberterrain of the totalitarian realm in this sequel to “TRON.” The exceptional computer graphics do not eclipse the quantum up-bump seen in the 2D original from 1982, although its visual adventurism is upheld here, coded with traces of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. Except for framing scenes shot in overcast British Columbia, “TRON: Legacy” is set in an endless nightscape as dark as “Dark City” and “Blade Runner.” All that’s insubstantial melts into something or nothing with 3D seamlessness. Check out the sparkly detritus marking every death. Read the rest of this entry »
Cherish your friends and do not try to change them, no matter how much they embarrass you. That’s the message of this animated G-rated adventure about automobiles with eyeballs in their windshields and teeth in their grilles. Jets, boats and buses all share those anthropomorphic features in this sequel to “Cars” (2006). Unlike “Toy Story” and “Transformers,” there are no humans in this Pixar 3D tale. This time the main character is Mater, a buck-toothed hick-town tow truck (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) from Radiator Springs. On his first trip to Tokyo, he thinks wasabi is pistachio ice cream. That gaffe and other eye-rollers turn off celebrity race car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). The first film’s interstate race is upgraded here to an international one designed to hype a new “renewable” fuel. There is a corporate evildoer, a James Bond-like spy and uplift bits for “lemons” with low-esteem. Overdone action sequences unfold in London and on the Italian Riviera, but none match the kick-ass kinetics of the opener on an oil rig in the ocean. Writer-director John Lasseter and co-director Brad Lewis do not win a victory lap for this lesser model. The kids at the press screening did not squeal with delight. If your line at the concession stand is slow-moving, for the first twenty minutes you miss only overlong Pixar trailers and shorts. With Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson, Brent Musburger. 112m. (Bill Stamets)
