Where the wild things are
Too long didn't read: Travis Knight's Wildwood in a nutshell is easily the best animated of the year-- of several years-- one of the best stop-motions ever, one of the most beautiful autumnal films ever made. Better than Lord of the Rings, easy.
Bigger
(WARNING: plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail!)
Digger for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is arguably his most expensive production yet ($125 million officially); for Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise it's September.
The film has been described as 'obnoxious,' 'self-indulgent,' 'pretentious,' and-- possibly most hurtful-- 'delusional;' it's also been called 'brave.'
Dying is easy; comedy, hard.
Of course I was going to check this out-- Zach Cregger's Weapons was one of the more interesting horrors of last year, Barbarians one of the more interesting horrors before that.
Does it deliver? Save you the suspense: yes, but how it delivers is I submit the question to ask.
Armando 'Bing' Lao is 2026's National Artist for Film
This September 2026 Armando 'Bing' Lao (1948 - 2024) was posthumously granted the title of National Artist of the Philippines, generally considered the highest honor the state can give one of its citizens.
Coming toon
I saw Dave Green's Coyote vs Acme and-- surprise surprise-- liked it.
Didn't sound promising. The premise itself is looney tunes-- that Wile E. Coyote would finally come to his senses and attempt that most American of undertakings, file a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation; that the case would blow up into a congressional hearing commanding nationwide attention; and that this whole silly drama would be material enough to fill a hundred minute feature.
Not to mention the real-world decision of Warner Discovery to treat the picture as a 30 million dollar tax writeoff; the struggle to find an alternative distributor; the last-minute rescue by Ketchup Entertainment, which bought the movie for fifty million.
The big online fuss surrounding its unlikely commercial release; the basically low boxoffice returns which, most unlikely of all, barely fazes the fans-- no one is blaming Ketchup, and a handful of articles have called the release a 'win' despite the modest numbers.
David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street is a bowl of Spielberg movie parts (ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park to name an obvious few) torn into bitesized pieces and tossed together, with a dash of Robert Zemeckis for plot dressing. Less obvious are bits of tone and detail from classic science fiction author Clifford D Simak, who liked to set one fantastic premise after another in a smalltown setting ("The Big Front Yard," Way Station).
Spielberg and Zemeckis are quick handy labels to slap on this concoction but I submit Simak is key-- not just to this picture but to much of what Spielberg (and Mitchell here) is doing. You get a patiently built-up portrait of suburban (in Simak's case rural) life, you're introduced to characters and their dynamic within the family, who in turn form relationships with the community at large. Then something happens and we're shown the characters' increasingly panicked reaction to events, the story's eventual resolution ideally a natural outgrowth of what the characters have learned along the way.
