Asking the Wrong Questions

I think it was in one of last year's recent movie roundups that I noted that while everything in the world seemed to be terrible, at least the movies were good.  On the level of popcorn entertainment, if on no other, 2017 was a genuinely great year, delivering instant classics like Get Out , impeccable crowdpleasers like Wonder Woman , and slightly off-the-wall experiments like Spider-Man: Homecoming or Thor: Ragnarok .  Now here we are in 2018, everything in the world is, amazingly, even worse than it was last year, and as if to add insult to injury, the movies aren't even that good.  After the early highlight of Black Panther (which I'm increasingly coming to think of as an honorary 2017 movie), most of this year's blockbuster entertainment has run the gamut between fun-but-dumb ( Deadpool 2 ), inessential ( Solo ), and pretty lousy ( Infinity War ).  I don't even have high hopes for the rest of the year, whose "highlights" include Mission Impossible: ...

It may at first seem strange to say that Brave is a movie with a lot to prove.  After all, Pixar remains one of the few Hollywood studios whose name is a hallmark of quality, and it closed out the last decade with the one-two-three punch of Wall-E , Up , and Toy Story 3 , a trio of films so sublime and so perfectly formed that in their wake an aura of infallibility seemed to attach itself to the studio.  Even if that aura was tarnished by the misstep that was last year's Cars 2 --the first Pixar film to be critically ignored and shut out of the Best Animated Film Oscar category since its creation--there's no denying that, going by the numbers, Pixar is the most consistently excellent studio in Hollywood.  Of course, another way of putting it is that after Toy Story 3 , there was nowhere for Pixar to go but downhill, and there are signs of trouble besides Cars 2 's tepid reception--the fact that a studio that once prided itself on the originality of its stories will, by n...

After a promising start to the year, it's been a dispiriting spring and summer at the movie theaters, and there's not much coming up that I'm looking forward to (well, Inception , of course, and probably Scott Pilgrim too though I doubt it'll have an Israeli release), but here are some of the films I've watched recently. Julie & Julia (2009) - I can't be the only person who would have liked this film a lot better as a straight-up biopic of Julia Child starring Meryl Streep as Child and Stanley Tucci as her loving and supportive husband Paul.  The juxtaposition of Child's early career as a chef and cookbook author--her introduction to French cuisine when Paul, a diplomat, is assigned to the American embassy in Paris, her studies at a Parisian culinary institute, her meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she would write Mastering the Art of French Cooking --with the ballooning success of Julie Powell's blog and her struggles ...

Well, it's a shame about the rampant fat-phobia, but other than that Pixar's latest offering is an utter delight, and one which reaffirms my conviction that this is a company whose name ought to be synonymous not with dazzling computer animation but with the increasingly rare art of good storytelling. Someone should send a gift package of Pixar films, and most particularly Wall-E and The Incrdibles , to Russell T. Davies, as a demonstration that it is possible to tell a planet- or galaxy-spanning SFnal action-adventure story--for kids--which is chock-full of moving and meaningful character moments and also smartly and satisfyingly plotted and paced. For that matter, the rest of Hollywood should be in on that memo as well, as I can't think of a single recent blockbuster that demonstrates even a fraction of Pixar's commitment to story. Wall-E tells a very simple story--not for Pixar the for-its-own-sake convolutedness of the later Pirates of the Caribbean films--but...