Quick take on The Wind Rises and other late season catch-ups

It's getting down to the wire for me to see all of this year's nominated feature films. Not my fault! I swear! It's these damn late/limited releases making it nearly impossible for me to see everything in time. Thankfully, new technologies such as iTunes and Netflix and the like have granted me access to all the years nominated documentaries and some of the foreign films too. However, for some titles I've had to get real creative (and rely on my high school French), while for others I've simply had to wait for them to finally see the light of day. I finally had the opportunity to see what all the fuss is about The Wind Rises, and if I'm lucky, I'll be able to catch Omar the day before the Oscars.

For now, here are some capsule reviews from late-breaking docs and miscellaneous films that I simply haven't had the time to write about:

The Wind Rises

The life and times of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horishoki – who designed the deadly Zeros that Japan would use in WWII – is brought to life by the gifted hands of master animator Hayao Miyazaki, which may (or may not) be his final feature film. Beyond its linear biopic format, Miyazaki's [non]swansong is an artful ode to the winds of artistic inspiration and a poignant reminder that even products of impassioned creative genius can be warped for sinister purposes. Though conspicuously lacking in the fanciful whimsy and fantastical world-building on which Miyazaki has built his auteur status (although he still plies his visual imagination to Jiro's vivid dream sequences), this is perhaps his most mature work to date, eschewing the childlike worldview of his previous films and adopting a more adult writing style. However, that doesn't change the fact that what we're watching is still a straightforward biopic about a man who may be interesting as a research curiosity, but is pretty flat as a screen character. Unlike other Miyazaki films I've treasured over the years, this one actually had me checking my watch at various points throughout. The picture is a thing of beauty yes (and a feast for the ears as Joe Hisaishi's score is one of the year's best), but it hasn't the story to match.

*** out of ****

My Award nominations: Animated Feature

Somebody didn't want to open until ONE week before the Oscars, so I had to hold off on this category. But now that I've seen all the contenders, precious few as they are, I can finally publish my picks for Best Animated Feature of 2013.

Connecting with the Movies of 2013

How does one begin to relate the white-knuckle space adventure of a thrill ride like Gravity to the soberly grounded realism of a docudrama like Captain Phillips? How is the intimate conversation piece Before Midnight at all similar to the sprawling historical tragedy 12 Years a Slave? What do any of these films have in common with each other – or any of the dozens of other applicable films released in the past 12 months – besides the fact that they are among the finest motion pictures of 2013? It's a question I find myself asking not only this year (which is being touted as one of the best for American cinema in a critic's age), but every year, as my mind mulls over the thematic patterns that connect the cream of the annual movie crop.

In 2009, 'escapism' was the pervasive theme connecting such disparate stories as Up in the Air, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, An Education, and Precious, among others; In 2011, 'nostalgia' and 'inspiration' connected many of the year's most celebrated titles, including The Artist, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, and many more; And for me, 2013's greatest films were connected by... well, 'connection'. Indeed, and as generic as it sounds, it's hard for me to recall a year in which so many memorable screen characters seem to triumph or fail as direct result of the connections they forge (or don't forge) between themselves and their fellow human beings.

My Award nominations: Documentary

As it is every year, I caught up with a lot of Documentaries after the Oscar nominations were announced, so these can also serve as capsule reviews for the ones I never had the time to write up properly.

Review - Short Term 12

(This one's up kinda late... sorry!)

“Look into my eyes, tell what it's like,

To live a life not knowing what a normal life's like.”

A sullen African-American teen, Marcus (Keith Stanfield), sits in a small bedroom rapping a cappella to an audience of his youth worker and his goldfish. When we look into his eyes, we can absolutely see that he never has, but has always longed to, know what a “normal” life's like. But for Marcus and the other underprivileged kids living at Short Term 12, the temporary foster care facility that gives this extraordinary little film its title, a normal life seems beyond their reach.

Written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Short Term 12 centres around Grace (Brie Larson), a young woman who works at the home for at-risk youths with her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). As Grace explains to a rookie staffer, their job is not to play therapist or parent, but simply to “create a safe environment”.

Review - American Hustle

American Hustle opens, as one might expect from a movie about scammers and con-artists, with a con job; But not a con job that has anything important to do with the plot. The con job in question is a man's toupée. Spending several meticulous minutes brushing on paste, applying the shabby tuft of a hairpiece, and then elaborately combing over his side hair so that every follicle is in precisely the right place, this man, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), is attempting to con the world at large into believing that he has no bald spot.

American Hustle, the latest from writer-director David O. Russell's career reinvention as a helmer of madcap character pieces, can itself be described like that toupée: A tangled, messy, unruly concealment of a script littered with bald spots, and yet we can't help but stare in enjoyment at the sight of it. That wig, however insubstantial, is a lot more fun to watch than a head of real hair.

Review - Her

Boy meets computer, boy loses computer in Spike Jonze's Her. But if you think this in any way resembles a typical love story, you'd be wrong... and right. Admittedly, how much you get out of this singular experiment in screen romance will hinge entirely on whether or not you can get past its bizarre premise. If not, you may find it to be unintentionally funny at best. But if you can bring yourself to buy it as more than a farfetched swing-and-a-miss, you may indeed discover a weirdly moving film whose subversive satire and thought-provoking themes border on the profound.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix following up his career-best work in The Master with yet another brilliant performance) can read people, but not connect with them. He works at a company that specializes in writing touching personal letters for people who lack the time or eloquence to do so themselves, and as gifted as Theodore is at anticipating the words that will move his clients, he is a lonely man – smarting from a painful breakup – who fears that he could never again be as moved as the readers of his ghost-written letters.

Review - August: Osage County

The Weston family takes dysfunction to a whole new level in John Wells' August: Osage County, based on Tracy Letts' Pulitzer and Tony winning stage production, and adapted for the screen by the playwright himself.

I use the term “adapted” very loosely, because August: Osage County demonstrates very little adaptation in its transition between mediums. The only significant alteration is a divisive new ending tacked on by notoriously editorial executive Harvey Weinstein, which doesn't exactly cast a vote of confidence in Letts' originally dour conclusion. But by most accounts from the Broadway crowd who were fortunate enough to see the play in its intended form, the two-act structure and abundance of spiny dialogue therein has been preserved for the film, virtually to the letter.

Review - Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks takes us behind the development of the Disneyfication of the Disneyfication of Mary Poppins (how meta!), the movie rights to which author P.L. Travers was notoriously resistant to sign over.

Emma Thompson plays Travers ('Mrs.' Travers, as she'll quickly tell you she prefers to be addressed), at the end of her rope and in need of money, urged by her agent to let Walt Disney Studios turn her beloved childrens book Mary Poppins into a feature film. She is loathe to let her precious creation become trivialized by the kid-friendly brand, but reluctantly agrees to travel to L.A. to work with Disney's writers and tunesmiths. Among her many insistences are that the film not be a musical, not star Dick Van Dyke, and contain no animation nor the color red. As history tells us, Disney reneged – or at least changed Travers' mind – on those stipulations.

Reviews - Philomena and The Wolf of Wall Street

Late December is often a time for family, but it's also a time for glutting on awards season movies, with multiple high-profile titles being released weekly. Naturally, families head out to the theatre on their precious days off in early winter, but finding the right flick for everyone can be a challenge.

To help you narrow things down (ever so slightly), here is a two-fisted review for a double feature I call the “Take-Your-Mom///DON'T-Take-Your-Mom Double Bill”. The comprising films: Philomena and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Now far be it for me to presume your mother's cinematic tastes, but if (like many people's moms) she's one of those Downton Abbey devotees who prefers lite drama of the genteel variety, or is simply convinced that British film and television is 'just better' than everything else, then it's hard to imagine her disliking Philomena.

Based on the 2009 non-fiction The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by journalist Martin Sixsmith (played in the film by Steve Coogan, who also co-produced and co-wrote the screenplay), it follows the travails of a darling old Irish woman (Judi Dench in the title role) as she and Sixsmith attempt to track down the long lost son that was taken from her fifty years ago. The jaded Sixsmith is only there to write a human interest story, a project which the former political correspondent considers quite beneath him. But as a surrogate mother-son relationship develops between the two, it isn't so unpredictable to see that Philomena has more to teach him than he realizes.

Review - Inside Llewyn Davis

If I had wings like Noah's dove,

I'd fly up the river to the one I love,

Oh fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well.

There's a timeless quality to folk music that allows it to resonate for generations because its poetry finds new life with every re-imagining. “Fare Thee Well” (quoted above and throughout this review) can be traced back to 1908 Texas, but has been interpreted and reinterpreted by artists ranging from Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan to Jeff Buckley, and now the Coen brothers in their brilliant new film Inside Llewyn Davis. It's just one of several traditional folk songs masterfully curated and re-purposed by the gifted ear of T-Bone Burnett to breathe truth and illumination into this transfixing character study of a sour musician (Oscar Isaac) trying vainly to get his career and life on track.

Capsule reviews for the first day of winter

Up here in the icy GTA (which felt not unlike the glacial Arendelle of Frozen this past week) it's easy for me to forget that winter hasn't officially hit us until today. Perhaps that because I so closely associate winter with the Oscar season, which lasts much longer than a mere three months. For me, that means a glut of November/December prestige titles to catch up on; more than I can possibly write full reviews for. So here are some 1-2 sentence reactions to various films I've taken in so far. I may add more as I see them.

Review - The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Peter Jackson's overdrawn saga of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit continues in the ongoing trilogy's second episode, subtitled The Desolation of Smaug, which as it turns out, is not about bringing an end to air pollution in Middle Earth (I shudder imagine the size of Mt. Doom's carbon footprint). Smaug, of course, is the vain and ferocious dragon (voiced and mo-capped here by Benedict Cumberbatch) who has hoarded generations worth of stolen dwarf gold in the stony mountain keep of Erebor; the ancient kingdom which you'll recall young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and our intrepid band of heroes set out on an unexpected journey to recapture in last year's first installment.

The stakes heighten in this chapter, as Bilbo & Co., now well beyond the point of no return, draw ever closer to the villainous fire-breathing reptile, encountering all manner of other threats along the way. These include the usual orcs and wargs, but also a bearlike skin-changer, giant spiders (been there, done that), a menacing Necromancer, and suspicious wood elves among whom we meet Lord of the Rings mainstay Legolas. Shrewdly added to the proceedings after the first film was mildly criticized for its lopsided lack of female characters – Tolkien's fault, not the filmmakers' – is the elfin warrior Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), an original creation of Jackson and his writing team intended to shoot a much-needed strong woman's presence into the testosterone-heavy cast. Unfortunately, she is eventually relegated to being the fulcrum of a silly romantic subplot.

Review - All Is Lost

The 'old man and the sea' concept gets amped up to eleven in J.C. Chandor's arresting new survival drama All Is Lost, in which Robert Redford (referred to simply as “Our Man” by the closing credits) struggles to keep a sinking yacht afloat in the Indian Ocean.

Chandor's screenplay, which barely runs 31 pages due to its virtual absence of dialogue, is elegant in its simplicity; a refreshingly radical U-turn from the dense verbosity of his 2011 debut Margin Call. Our man wakes up from a nap on his 30' luxury yacht, the Virginia Jean, to discover water pouring in through a hole in the hull. He must rely on his resourcefulness and stoic determination (albeit one that's slowly ebbing away) as his situation constantly deteriorates from bad to worse to worse yet.

Review - Frozen

Casual moviegoers with kids to entertain for an hour or so can be forgiven for thinking that the latest animated effort from Walt Disney Studios is little more than a slapsticky romp about an impish snowman. That is, after all, the only clue they've been given by the TV ads and movie posters, but those only represent the tip of the proverbial ice berg. With Frozen, Disney actually makes as earnest an attempt as they have in the last 15 years to recapture the magic of their 1990s musical heyday, with a Broadway pedigree cast and not one, but two new Disney princesses front and centre.

The story, written by Shane Morris and co-directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, is based very loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although its vague Scandinavian setting seems to be all that was retained from Anderson's original 19^th century fable. This re-imagining tells of two princesses in the fictional land of Arendelle. Elsa, the eldest and therefore first in line to inherit the crown, was born with the magical ability to form ice and snow with the slightest gesture. Anna, the youngest, adores frolicking in the indoor winter wonderlands her sister can conjure, until a near-death accident convinces their parents that the girls should be separated and Elsa's powers kept under wraps.

Review - Nebraska

How do you define the essence of a man who's no longer here? No longer here in a mental sense, that is. Alexander Payne and veteran character actor Bruce Dern venture to do just that in Nebraska. As a character study about a somewhat tragic figure nearing the end of life's journey, it is rife with fascinating nuance, although not without expense to the story it tells on the surface.

Woody Grant (Dern) is a millionaire. Or so he believes. The letter he received in the mail clearly tells him that he's a “winner”, and failing to recognize the blatant scam, he sets out on foot from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim his million dollars in person. Surely, any reasonable kin would agree that the time has come to put Woody in a home, but his son David (Will Forte) has other thoughts. Much to the chagrin of his harried mother (June Squibb) and his older brother (Bob Odenkirk), David plays along with his dad's delusion, agreeing to drive the stubborn codger to Lincoln until Woody accepts the reality of his quest. Stopping over in Woody's hometown – the depressed community of Hawthorne – gives some old family and friends a chance to catch up, but word about his money luck starts to get out of hand.

Review - Dallas Buyers Club

The year is 1985, and Texan electrician Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) sits frozen on a hospital bed, paralyzed for a moment in stubborn disbelief at the life-changing news he's just received: He's not going to live to see 1986. He's not even going to live to see the end of the month, as the calendar on the wall of his trailer reminds him with a sting. He's contracted HIV, and at a time when the virus is so misunderstood and under-researched that odds of surviving the next 30 days are slim.

Forced to confront his own misconceptions about the disease and the prejudices of his so-called “friends”, Ron remarkably manages to turn his darkest hour into the most meaningful seven years of his life, as he uses his considerable wiles to acquire all manner of unapproved but effective treatments to keep himself – along with hundreds of other AIDS patients – alive to fight another day. He founds the Dallas Buyers Club, also the title of this terrific new film that chronicles his true story, so that sufferers can circumvent the FDA's corrupt regulations and receive symptom-relieving drugs directly from Ron's makeshift office/motel room.

Review - 12 Years a Slave

Two men labor on sweltering a Louisiana afternoon, planing wood and hammering nails into an small unfinished building. To their own eyes, they are equal; sharing conversation and stories of their lives. But equal they are not; one a free white man working for wage, the other a black man in bondage, working simply because it is what he was sold to do. “Your story is amazing,” the free man says to the slave. “And in no good way.” That really is the most essential way to describe the incredible true story of Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped from his home and family to be sold into slavery. Based on Northrup's 1853 memoir, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave stares unblinking into arguably the darkest chapter of the United States' history, making a case for itself as the definitive American horror story.

In 1814, still 59 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives as an upstanding citizen in Saratoga, NY – an atypically progressive community for its time. A gifted violinist by trade and a decent man by nature, he is free and proud to walk the streets with his family, wearing his finest clothes, frequenting the finest shops, sheltered from common bigotry by his respected status. But this dream existence proves to be just that: a dream – one from which he awakens in shackles, alone and confused in a cold, dark cell. Daring to insist to his captors that he is free man and justice shall be done, he is flogged, menaced, and stripped of his identity along with his bloodied shirt. He is Solomon Northrup no more. He is a “Georgia runaway” by the name of Platt, or so he must pretend if he wishes to survive his waking nightmare.

Review - Captain Phillips

For freight liner captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), the day starts with a mundane drive to the airport with his wife, casually discussing the challenges their children will face in the modern workforce. “It's tough out there these days,” he ruefully acknowledges. “... 50 guys competing for the same job.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in impoverished Somalia, 50 men are competing for a job as well; hoping to be selected to a pirate crew just to stay fed and pay off their warlord oppressors for another week.

The disparity between these two worlds – one of affluence and one with no opportunity at all – is made sharply visible when men from each clash violently on the high seas in Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips. Based on harrowing true events that unfolded off the horn of Africa in 2009, Greengrass depicts in straight-faced detail how a band of four Somali pirates armed with automatic weapons pursued and boarded the Maersk Alabama and held its captain hostage in a confined lifeboat until the military intervened.

Review - Gravity

220 miles above the earth and with little chance of coming back down. That's not only the basic premise, but also the way one feels after having just watched Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's long gestating follow-up to 2006's Children of Men. After literal years of hype and ecstatic festival buzz, the question for me was whether Cuaron's magnum opus could possibly meet my out-of-this-world expectations. The answer is a resounding YES. Gravity is a triumph; A groundbreaking invention of pure cinema that captivates from its awe-inspiring start to its potent final images.

The opening title card ominously warns that life in space is impossible, before cutting to the still serenity of Earth, glowing blue against the infinite blackness. A white dot creeps into view, slowly growing in the frame until we can recognize it as the space shuttle Explorer. Veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney doing his best George Clooney impersonation) and rookie Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are making repairs to the Hubble telescope. Matt makes jokes and regales mission control with amusing anecdotes while he putters around on his mobile thruster pack. Ryan is nervously tethered to her work, trying hard to keep her breakfast down on this routine mission. But of course, nothing about space travel is routine. With little warning, a field of satellite debris tears through the shuttle and leaves the space walkers stranded. From here, Gravity takes off on a dazzling roller coaster ride that rarely lets up, as Ryan must learn to defeat her traumas (past and present) and muster up the courage to make it back home.