Tag: US

Categories
Animation Art Features Movies

Kubo
and the Two Strings

Director – Travis Knight – 2016 – US – Cert. PG – 101m

*****

The following review originally appeared in Funimation UK; republished to coincide with the LAIKA: Frame x Frame exhibition which shows at BFI Southbank from Monday, 12th August to Tuesday 1st October 2024 (free to visit, but booking essential – click here) accompanied by a stop-frame animation season including all five LAIKA feature films and much, much more

A Hollywood film inspired by the Far East.

Western cinema in general and animation in particular has long held an interest in all things Oriental. Every so often, a film made in the West pays homage to one aspect or another of Eastern culture. The animated fantasy Kubo and the Two Strings is the latest entry in this curious Western sub-genre. It’s a dark fairytale about the quest of a boy named Kubo for his late father’s long-lost suit of armour to protect himself from the evil spirits of his grandfather and two aunts.

The company behind the production are US stop-frame outfit Laika who previously made Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. All three like Kubo are dark visions far removed from the upbeat fare that constitutes much contemporary Hollywood animation.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Coraline (3D)

Director – Henry Selick – 2009 – US – Cert. PG – 100m

UK release date 08/05/2009

Originally reviewed for Third Way in 2009; republished to coincide with not only the 15th anniversary cinema reissue of the film on Thursday, 15th August 2024, but also the LAIKA: Frame x Frame exhibition which shows at BFI Southbank from Monday, 12th August to Tuesday 1st October 2024 (free to visit, but booking essential – click here) accompanied by a stop-frame animation season including all five LAIKA feature films and much, much more

Selick has successfully positioned himself as Hollywood’s stop-frame puppet animation film-maker (as distinct from plasticine animation film-makers Nick Park and Aardman). His The Nightmare Before Christmas suggested leanings towards horror and the macabre; Coraline goes further in the sense that one’s immediate reaction after viewing was to question whether this was a film suitable for children (on reflection this may be a grown-up reaction and kids may in fact love the film, in much the same way that as a child I enjoyed hiding behind the sofa during the scary bits of Dr. Who.) The source material is an acclaimed children’s book by Neil Gaiman. Anyway, you have been warned.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Exhibitions Movies

LAIKA
FRAME x FRAME

Pic: Toby Lewis Thomas, courtesy LAIKA and BFI

*****

Exhibition shows at BFI Southbank from Monday, 12th August to Tuesday 1st October 2024 (free to visit, but booking essential – click here) accompanied by the Stop Motion animation season including all five LAIKA feature films and much, much more

In the best part of two decades, US-based Laika Studios – named after the first dog in space – has carved itself a niche as arguably the foremost producer of stop-motion animation puppet films. That’s distinctly different from the other leading company in the stop-motion field, UK-based Aardman Animations, who specialise in plasticine animation. The difference is that plasticine is a malleable substance that can be reworked and remodelled one frame at a time, whereas although puppets can be moved a frame at a time, they can’t be remodelled.

Laika have consistently (and deservedly, in this writer’s opinion) picked up Oscar nominations for each of their five features, a remarkable achievement that speaks of the high quality of their work. Their five features (with a sixth forthcoming) are:

  • Coraline (2009): A young girl is lured into a darker, parallel world.
  • Paranorman (2012): A boy who can speak with the dead, ostracised by his local community, must save his town from dark forces by righting centuries-old wrongs.
… Read the rest
Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Hollywoodgate

Director – Ibrahim Nash’at – 2023 – US, Germany – Cert. 12a – 89m

****

A Western documentary shot with the approval of the Taliban showing the eponymous air base in which the Americans abandoned large stocks of military hardware – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

An extraordinary exercise in both journalism and historical, socio-political filmmaking. A few days after the US military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, fearless, former journalist Nash’at entered the country as, to all intents and purposes, a one-man film crew. At first, it was a fruitless exercise, but then he somehow managed to get in with a soldier about to be deployed on a big airport.

Negotiating with Afghanistan’s airforce to be allowed to shoot documentary footage, Nash’at secured himself permission to follow and shoot not just the lieutenant, M.J. Mukhtar, but also the new head of the airforce, Mawlawi Mansour, with the proviso that anything Nash’at was told not to film, he was not to film and anytime he was ordered to stop filming, he had to stop filming. Refusal to do either would have meant big trouble. He played along, shooting whatever he could without breaking the air force head’s trust, knowing that the Taliban would have no control whatsoever over the footage when he left the country to edit what he’d shot.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ozi
Voice of the Forest

Director – Tim Harper – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 87m

**

An orangutan girl becomes a social media influencer to stop corporate exploitation of palm oil after her forest habitat is burned in a forest fire – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

The fate of orangutans in countries such as Borneo is dire in the sense that, to facilitate the extraction of palm oil, rainforests are being cleared and burned (in some cases leading to forest fires removing further areas of rainforest). The problem is that the rainforest is the habitat of the orangutan, and they are being left with their natural home severely depleted. It’s a disaster for this species and needs addressing urgently.

Enter this film, which laudably seeks to place that idea in front of family audiences.

Don’t get too excited, though, because having set out to raise consciousness, it attempts to do so with a script that’s overly simplistic and laughable. It starts off well enough, with carefree, small orangutan girl Ozi (voice: Amandla Stenberg) leaping from branch to branch, pulling old orangutan’s tails to knock them off their branches and being rescued from falling into the expectantly gaping jaws of a hungry crocodile by her watchful dad (voice: Djimon Hounsou).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Borderlands

Director – Eli Roth – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 102m

*

A ragtag collective of misfits must outwit their pursuers on a hostile planet– videogame adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th

Intergalactic bounty hunter Lilith (an orange-haired Cate Blanchett) is hired by the universe’s most powerful industrialist Atlas (Edgar

Ramírez) to find his missing teenage daughter Tiny Tina, last seen on Lilith’s home planet Pandora, famed for an ancient civilisation of the Eridians and their much sought after vault which can only be opened by a member of that race. The planet is a renowned hell-hole, and while Lilith knows her way around there, she has no intention of going back.

Atlas, however, makes her an offer she can’t refuse, so it is that Lilith finds her way to Pandora where she is soon united with Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) who turns out to have a love of using children’s cuddly toys as explosive missiles. Tina is accompanied by a soldier on the lam (Kevin Hart) and a sympathetic if none-too-bright muscleman (Florian Munteanu). Her entourage soon expands to include an irritating motormouth robot (voice: Jack Black) programmed by an unknown client to protect Tina and a cynical scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

DÌDI (弟弟,
translates as
‘little brother’)

Director – Sean Wang – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A young, Taiwanese-American teenager must deal with issues of ethnicity, family and love in 2008, when social media has become a significant element of growing up – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

2008. California. Summer. 13-year-old Taiwanese-American Chris (Izaac Wang), who prefers to go by the nickname Wang Wang, is rebelling. Mandarin is spoken at home by Nai Nai (‘grandma’; Chang Li Hua) and mum (Joan Chen), but that doesn’t stop mega-sweary English language shouting contests at the supper table between Wang Wang and elder sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who is due to attend UCSD later in the year. When she’s out, Wang Wang hangs out in her room and posts as her on her Facebook (about which, amazingly, she never comes back to him). In the bathroom, he pees into her moisturising cream (leading to her threatening to period him in the mouth if he ever does it again).

Outside the house, he hangs out with his peers Farhad Mahmood (Raul DIal) and Jimmy Kim aka SOUP (Aaron Chang). Egged on by them in the manner of pubescents everywhere, he attempts to hang out with Madi (Mahaela Park), the girl he fancies.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Mountain Queen:
The Summits
of Lhakpa Sherpa

Director – Lucy Walker – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 103m

***1/2

A Sherpa woman climbs Everest ten times and escapes an abusive marriage to one of her fellow climbers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 26th and on Netflix from Wednesday, July 31st

Amazing what you can learn from documentary movies. From this one, I learned that all of Nepal’s Sherpa people have the same surname: Sherpa. One of them, a woman named Lhakpa Sherpa, had always wanted to climb Mount Everest. A series of meetings led her to the Nepalese Prime Minister, who, impressed with her determination, put her in charge of a year 2000 expedition to conquer the summit. Unfortunately, she was not the greatest of leaders, preferring to go on ahead at her own pace. Many of her fellow climbers gave up or returned to camp, but she kept going and became the first woman to both make it to the Summit and return alive.

Bitten by the Everest-scaling bug, she went back on her own the following year and did it again. This time, she went with a Romanian climber named Gheorghe Dijmărescu, who she had met the previous year. A romance ensued, and she went back with him to Connecticut and had a child by him before the couple married in 2002.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Twisters

Director – Lee Isaac Chung – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 117m

Film ***1/2

Special Effects (the twisters themselves) *****

A young woman attempts to compensate for failed “twister taming” which caused the tragic deaths of three of her friends, by further pursuing tornadoes – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 17th

In the very first moments, Kate (Daisy Edgar Jones from Where the Crawdads Sing, Olivia Newman, 2022) stands in a field of tall grass. It’s an image that could almost have come out of director Chung’s previous film, the intensely personal Oscar-winner Minari (2020). Almost, but not quite: apart from one briefly seen-child, this is not a film populated with Korean-Americans. It doesn’t attempt any kind of ethnic statement, but then, why should it? People either come to this because they saw Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996) and want a rerun or, if they’re younger, because they want the same thing that pulled audiences into the first film: mayhem caused by the awe-inspiring, unstoppable force of nature that is a tornado, aka a twister.

The title implies there are more than one, and there are indeed, but then, there were in the first film too.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Twister

Director – Jan de Bont – 1996 – US – Cert. PG – 108m

Film **

Special Effects (the twisters themselves) *****

1996 review for long defunct website London Calling Internet

A twister, as lovers of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) will know, is a tornado that snatches up objects in its path into the air and then dumps them down again. The one that snatched Dorothy into the air was a cheap special effect in a wonderful film. The current movie, on the other hand, is the other way round: basically, it’s a rotten movie with awe-inspiring special effects. The cast here is not so much the workmanlike group of American actors playing uninspired characters as the incredible series of tornadoes which appear one after another, each seemingly darker and by inference more evil than its predecessor.

This may also be one of those rare movies that requires a big (cinema) screen, with all the resolution that a projected celluloid image can give these tornadoes, to really work its magic.

Approaching Twister with the usual criteria, it fails abysmally. The feeble plot, such as it is, concerns Bill Paxton and ex-wife Helen Hunt coming together, leaving the former’s wife-to-be Jami Gertz out in the cold.… Read the rest