WHERE'S THE BEEF?

Having become an extremely late convert to the church of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I cannot pretend to have approached the thoughtlessly-titled Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 with a sense of dread or anticipation; except in that, being a fan of clever animation, I am always hopeful that new animated features will be could, and deeply suspicious they will not be (it is my suspicion that is rewarded, far more often than my hope).Still,...

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OCTOBER 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

After a year that has been, film for film and month by month, the most tepid in my living memory, we're finally hitting the good stuff: not that I am typically fond of the sort of movies that tend to get released in Oscar season, because it is a matter of record that the stuff I just love and the stuff that AMPAS just loves are not, for the most part, the same stuff. This year, though, some of the films that were probably never meant to be Oscarbaity in the first place are getting crazy awards buzz, and the season's two biggest auteur pictures...

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THAT'S A SHINY MEAT-A-BALL

Lord knows, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the 2009 film that is more or less the reason that Sony Pictures Animation has any sort of brand name cachet at all, is not looking to break ground. It has a hapless male protagonist with a wacky animal sidekick, a ditzy girl supporting character, a doe-eyed moral about being true to your dreams no matter what anybody else says, far too many jokes where the punchline is "secondary character does an overwrought...

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)

The question I would ask, for a start, is whether Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is chiefly a Harry Potter movie, or chiefly an Alfonso Cuarón movie. This is, of course, dumb as fuck: there are people who have seen and worshiped and idolised Prisoner of Azkaban who probably haven't even heard the titles of the director's other six features, and would possibly drop dead of mortification if they ever accidentally stumbled upon the sex-soaked...

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THE MISSING

Prisoners is the sort of movie that becomes more baffling the further I get from it, which feels like the exact opposite of what should be the case. Basically, we have here a movie in which damn near every stylistic choice from the director, the crew heads, and the actors suggests an achingly serious consideration of humanity's violent impulses, with several scenes in particular appropriating imagery that is surely a deliberate evocation of the Abu...

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TIM AT TFE: THE MOUSE THAT ROARED

This week's essay: in celebration of its 75th anniversary, a review of the Mickey Mouse short Brave Little Tail...

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (2001)

It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and made A Little Princess, a kids' movie based on a well-liked work of children's literature. He then made Great Expectations, a film for adults adapted, very...

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DANCE, DANCE, OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST

They say that good things come to those who wait, and I am happy to report that after months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that's so bad it's good, in the form of 3-D sports/dance hybrid Battle of the Year, something of a b-boying themed remake of the 1989 taekwondo tournament movie Best of the Best, which I'm 100% sure is a cultural touchstone all of you immediately recognise. Short version: a team training hard as possible,...

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49th CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: PREVIEW

The Chicago International Film Festival has a schedule, and it's starting up in barely more than two weeks. Which makes this the deliciously chaotic time to figure out what hell it's worth seeing.For starters, there are a good number of big, important releases, certainly more than last year: August: Osage County, Inside Llewyn Davis, The Immigrant, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 12 Years a Slave, Philomena, Kill Your Darlings, and Blue Is the Warmest Color will all be getting gala presentations. Speaking privately, these have never been my favorite...

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WHAT'S HAPPENING SOON

October is just about upon us, and it brings with it the kick-off of Super Crazy Year-End Time here at Antagony & Ecstasy. So the time has come for a couple of announcements.First, the Chicago International Film Festival announced its schedule last week, and I've spent some time living with it since then; my full thoughts will be coming later today, if you just can't possibly bear to wait for my preview of an event most of you will be in absolutely...

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1998)

At the time it was happening, the brief but showy run of modern-day literary adaptations of the late '90s (bracketed approximately by Clueless in 1995 and O in 2001) was immensely annoying, at least to me; too much enthusiastic cribbing from the flash-and-dazzle teen culture of the day, far too many shrill attempts to find modern analogues to pre-industrial concepts in ways that are meant to be clever and virtually never are. But a certain creeping...

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RAISE YOUR VOICE

Generally speaking, In a World... is so gosh-almighty damn adorable that it's way too easy to lose track of how weirdly dense its script is. Herein, we have a movie that wants to be an affectionately wacky inside-baseball comedy about one of the most marginal acting fields in the film industry; that wants to be a loud and proud feminist statement about using talent, passion, and cunning to chip away at male privilege so vigorously entrenched that...

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CHILDREN IN NEED

American independent filmmaking is as capable of producing uninspired, derivative hackwork as any other production model, and frequently has in the past few years. But sometimes, things just click, and we're lucky enough to get one of those truly interesting and meaningful stories about normal human lives in all their intoxicating smallness that make people speak warmly about the democratisation of filmmaking techniques. Short Term 12 is that kind...

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TIM AT TFE: WHITHER PIXAR?

This week's essay plaintive whine: what is going on at Pixar Animation Studios, and w...

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: A LITTLE PRINCESS (1995)

A Little Princess is, I guess, significant in that it ushered hot new Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón into Hollywood filmmaking out of nowhere, in 1995 (Sólo con tu pareja, his only previous feature, had screened at Toronto and made a splash, but never received U.S. distribution until 2006). But to me it is far more significant in that it was the first time that Emmanuel Lubezki lost a Best Cinematography Oscar, and it's one of only two times that's...

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