Grown Up Animation At Last?

The announcement that the full resources of Pixar will be set to work on an animated film about the Mexican Day of the Dead is enough to get any film lover’s expectations soaring. Obviously, there is no promise the film will be any more artistically daring than the spooky yet family-friendly likes of Henry Sellick’s Coraline. But for now it is reason enough to hope we will soon have an affirmative answer to the question animation lovers have asked for decades:

When will mainstream American cinema finally accept adult animation?

Read the full new episode of Burning Questions at The Film Experience.

Oscar Pages Begin

I've begun the project of creating pages to track the Oscar race as the year unfolds. Rather than go through the largely pointless - albeit fun - effort to try to predict the landscape of the race months in advance I will only be adding to the charts as the movies are released. This will give me more time to cover the under-the-radar contenders as they pop up over the year, rather than just predicting all year long that, yes, Daniel Day Lewis looks like a safe bet for Lincoln.

Obviously there has been very little buzz to speak of so far. A third of the way into the year and I have yet to spot even the darkest of dark horse contenders for Picture or Actor. There has been a little action in Actress and Costumes so I've started with those two. The category pages can be found in the sidebar and I will post updates whenever I add contenders to the race.

Check back over the rest of May as the rest of the pages go up.

Review: The Avengers

It is generally considered the height of nerdiness to debate which of two fictional characters would win in a fight. I have in the past heard heated argument over how much Kryptonite it would take for Batman to have a chance against Superman or whether the limits of Wolverine's healing abilities extended to, say, getting eaten by the Hulk. Utterly trivial, to be sure. But when the Marvel all-stars spend a good chunk of The Avengers' running time arranging and rearranging themselves into groups to beat the holy bejesus out of each other, such questions become increasingly pressing.

Can Captain America (super soldier) really hang in there against Thor (demigod)?  Can Iron Man (normal man in a super suit) withstand a punch from Hulk (hulk)? I will suspend my disbelief over the incredible awesomeness of the Iron Man suit up to a point, but Tony Stark is still a person in there with the traditional human skeleton, yes? How many concrete walls can Hulk launch him through before JARVIS pops open that suit to find a glowing blue circle sitting atop a pile of bloody pulp? Considering the amount of crap we all gave Lucas and Spielberg for having Indiana Jones survive a nuclear blast in a fridge, it seems fair to ask.

This may seem like nitpicking, but it actually plays into the overall verdict on The Avengers. One expects that any film that has churned up such momentous hype over the idea of superheroes from various franchises appearing together for the first time in one mega-movie would have some fun with the ways the characters interact. Alas, The Avengers expends most of its energy gathering the heroes only to throw them against a generic alien invasion just when they are getting interesting. Whedon's film easily qualifies as an above average Summer blockbuster. I don't imagine many people are going to leave the theater disappointed. It is only when it is viewed in comparison to the enormous potential of the project that it starts to come up short.

Click for Full Review

Running to the Airport

The are few things that strike more dread in the heart of the discerning moviegoer than the phrase "Romantic Comedy" and with good reason. The ratio of quality productions to flat out terrible ones is wildly out of balance. We are lucky to get one really fine rom-com a year whereas the dreck washes over the multiplexes of America of weekend, regular as the tide.

The list of problems with the genre could fill a book so for this episode of Burning Questions I am sticking to the surface, suggesting a few quick fixes, some rom-com pet peeves that would spell blessed relief if Hollywood would stop doing for good and all. Check it out.