Review - Kubo and the Two Strings

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not a return to full reviews for me, I'm afraid. Just an exercise to shake some of the rust off. It'll be back to capsules for awards season movies.

In a bustling village square, in some unnamed era of pre-Imperial Japan, a boy wearing an eye-patch and a baggy samurai robe drops a pile of paper on the ground and strums a power chord on his shamisen. As though by instinct, the crowd turns, silences, and gathers 'round with barely-contained excitement.
“If you must blink, do it now,” instructs Kubo (for that is his name), literally commanding the attention of his audience.

As he plucks the strings and taps harmonic on his instrument, his paper springs to life, folding itself into intricate figurines that run, jump, fly and do pantomimed battle with each other, acting out the drama as Kubo narrates a tale of adventure and heroism for the delighted onlookers.

We are (shrewdly) given no explanation of this sorcery, and honestly, we're too bedazzled to care. Just like the throng of villagers rapt by Kubo's paper players, when we sit down to a Laika feature we are being treated to the most elaborate puppet show ever imaginable. Or at least until Laika – the stop-motion animation studio behind this thrilling illusion – imagines a way to make it more yet elaborate for their next trick.

Oscar Telecast Retrospective Part 2: Mad Max's Golden Hour

With Rock laying waste to the elephant in the room through that biting monologue, it was time to get on with the show...

The Huntsman sisters, beautiful bad-asses Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron, flirt with writers everywhere while introducing Best Original Screenplay, which went to Spotlight's Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer (not “John”, Charlize!).

The victory was not only richly deserved, but also immediately exposed the Thank-You Ticker for the disastrous experiment that it was, as Singer began his speech by repeating “We've gotta thank...” four times over with numerous names in between.

Review - Mad Max: Fury Road

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Max is just living in it. Well, existing in it.
By his own admission, survival is the one instinct that he – the last sane man in a world gone crazy – has been reduced to as he wanders through the post-
apocalyptic Wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth in a film series that hasn't revved its engines since 1985.

The real madman is producer-writer-director George Miller. Mad for deciding to pull his long dormant road warrior out of retirement 30 years beyond Thunderdome; Mad for conceiving the sort of world that heretofore could only have existed in a truck-driving anarchist's worst acid trips; And finally, mad for pulling it off with the sheer mind-shredding gusto that filmmakers half his age (he recently turned 70) consistently struggle to inject into modern action movies.

Best not to stand up after seeing this one. It'll melt your bones from the inside.

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 3: Music

I guess I'm just lucky to fall into the minority of people who actually enjoy song and dance, because there was a lot of it for me to enjoy on Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. Things got off to an unusual but memorable start with Seth MacFarlane's tongue-in-cheek but controversial “Boobs” song (which speaks more to Hollywood sexism than Seth MacFarlane sexism in my opinion), followed by the odd but inspired pairings of Channing Tatum and Charlize Theron, or Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to join MacFarlane for some vintage swing and soft shoe. Seriously, when will we ever see that specific collection of actors performing together like that? He concludes with a brief, repurposed rendition of "Be Our Guest", always an old favourite:

What a boob!

Tatum and Charlize doing Fred and Ginger. Love the way they look tonight.

I have high hopes of seeing JGL tap into his inner song-and-dance man more often.

Seth's not a bad shoe shuffler himself.

Review - A Snow White double feature

A pair of Costume Design nominees which bowed earlier in the year forced me to go back and play a bit of catch-up.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the most superfluous Snow White recreation of them all? Trick question. Turns out it's both of them. With fairy tale revisionism dominating studio slates recently – either because audiences are really clamouring for it or because it's cheaper than paying licensing fees for anything written in the last hundred years – 2012 ended up yielding not one, but two new takes on the girl with skin as white as snow and hair as black as night. Occupying opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman make a peculiar, if not a high quality, double feature.

Mirror Mirror is the incarnation that tries to preserve the lightheartedness we often associate with fairy tales. Lily Collins plays the raven-haired beauty who joins up with a septet of pint-sized bandits after her vampish diva of a step mother (Julia Roberts) had ordered her be taken to the woods and slain. From thence on, they both compete for the love of a dashing but comically inept prince (Armie Hammer).

My Awards nominations: Actress

Not as packed as last year's stellar slate, but I still had some tough decisions to make Here are the five Leading Actresses who made the cut:

VIOLA DAVIS in The Help:

Davis' subdued expressiveness communicates a great deal of fear and sadness, but also a gradual self-realization and growing estem which gives the character her arc. Her exposition of backstory carefully seeps through even when it's not yet there on the page.

ROONEY MARA in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

Mara is gripping and magnetic as the misanthropic investigator who can dish it out as bad as she gets it, if not worse. The performance is mannered, distinctive, and ballsy. Mara embraces Salander's emotional maladjustment with alarming confidence, which is what makes her so fun to watch!

ELIZABETH OLSEN in Martha Marcy May Marlene:

Olsen is superbly ambiguous, every facial tick revealing unspoken anguish and uncertainty. Her internalization of an indoctrinated mind at war with itself informs her external struggle to reassimilate with her family and society, which feels painfully authentic as a result.

TILDA SWINTON in We Need to Talk About Kevin:

Swinton is becoming the anti-Meryl-Streep in that she's giving awards worthy performances every year that never seem to get awards attention. That'll hopefully change with this quietly controlled turn. She owns every moment with her subtle command of understated but deep-running emotion.

CHARLIZE THERON in Young Adult:

Theron's thorny, darkly comedic portrayal of an alcoholic, emotionally juvenille trash novelist teems with precise, bitchy mannerisms. She paints a caustic collage of depression, anxiety, and severe psychological immaturity; a woman (rather, girl?) drowning in her own bitterness.

Just missed: Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs, Stephanie Sigman in Miss Bala,
Meryl Streep in The Irion Lady, Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn