Two Reel Cinema Club

I had an opportunity to rewatch Pixar’s Turning Red this week with my son in an actual cinema, and I’m happy to say it’s still utterly fantastic – even better on the big screen, where the film’s smorgasbord of detail shines.

The theme of the film is integration. 13 year old Meilin finds that the onset of puberty means she turns into a giant red panda whenever she gets emotional. She’s given the chance to banish the panda forever in a magical ceremony, but instead at the last minute chooses to keep the panda side of her nature and integrate it into her life. Know thyself, as the Oracle at Delphi advises us.

There are some distinct furry vibes here, if that’s your thing (c’mon, open your mind), and a great, honest take on teenage girls dealing with friendship and the advent of romantic feelings. (Well, the horn). It has anime nods and a Kaiju grandma and N-Sync-lite. And there is not one scene where you get the feeling that anyone said, ‘That will do.’ Instead the whole film feels like it was made by people who really believed in it and loved it and adored it and nurtured it. I loved it too, the first time I saw it and again this time.

I could take the chance here to talk about the value of specificity in screenwriting – one of the film’s many strengths is that it happens in a specific place, Toronto, and at a specific time, the summer of 2002. When you’re specific like that, authenticity can follow, and it’s authenticity that keeps the audience with the characters.

But instead I’m going to briefly discuss a controversy that arose when the film was originally released. The film got a poor review at the site CinemaBlend and was labelled ‘unrelatable’, and I have a couple of things to say about that.

First: wrong, wrong, wrong! Wrong! What? Seriously? I think the gist of the idea was that the film was about the life of a 13 year old Chinese Canadian girl, and because it was so specific, if you weren’t a 13 year old Chinese Canadian girl, you wouldn’t get it.

What? I mean, sorry, what?

This is an age old problem, of course. Oooh, yes. Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, bombed because not enough of the movie going public were academic archaeologists with whips, right? Stars Wars was a total disaster that disappeared without trace because it turned out that no-one in the audience, not one person, had ever been a farm boy on the planet of Tatooine.

Okay, so I admit it’s true that Turning Red will only appeal to a few limited groups of people. I’ve listed these groups below:
People who have been 13.
People who will be 13 in the next four or five years,
People who have or once had parents.
People who have ever worried about meeting the expectations of an older person they admire.
People who have had friends.
People who like music.
And finally, people who have bodies.

If you’re not in one of those groups, okay, sure, go and see something else. And good luck.

Secondly, and more seriously, this reminds me of one of the most heart-sinking notes you can ever get about a script. ‘It’s not relatable.’ ‘I showed it to my son and he thought it wasn’t relatable.’ That’s a real note I’ve received on a script I’ve written. And frankly, I think it’s stupid.

If you get the note ‘it’s unrelatable’ on your script, I think it means one of two things.

Either (a) the person giving you notes is incapable of empathy. If that’s the case, you have my permission to ask them if they really believe they should be working in the arts.

Or (b) they mean something else. Usually I think when people say a script is unrelatable, they mean it’s IMPLAUSIBLE. ‘I hit a road block in the story because I didn’t believe the teenagers would venture into the haunted house alone.’ ‘I didn’t believe the newspaper magnate would spend all that money trying to reclaim his childhood when his sled was right there.’ That’s fine. That’s an understandable note. If audiences don’t believe your characters, you have a problem. But it’s not ‘unrelatability’ that’s being described. The people in your script who do implausible things can still be people that we recognise and identify with. People empathise with R2D2, for goodness sake. Or a shell with shoes on. The issue is plausibility, not relatability. That word ‘unrelatable’ should be expunged from the dictionary.

We don’t go to the movies to look in a mirror. Or rather, yes, that’s EXACTLY why we go to the movies. But we know that the mirror contains multitudes. Just as we do.

At the popcorn counter this time we try to list our top three war films, only to find we’ve out manoeuvred each other and ended up with a pyrrhic victory: five good movies and one that’s so bad it earns a whole new rating.

I happened upon the trailer for Marcel the Shell With Shoes On a few weeks ago and was instantly mesmerized by its inventiveness. Fortunately the film came to our neighborhood cinema last week where I was able to see it on the big screen. The film is a triumph in both human, animal, and cinematic inventiveness. Marcel, voiced by Jenny Slate, is a snail living alone with his grandmother, Connie, voiced by Isabella Rossellini, in an Air B and B his family and friends were forced to evacuate. When filmmaker Dean moves in long term when recovering from a separation with his wife, he begins to document Marcel’s tiny world, the rich life that it contains, and the search for the community that was forced to abandon it. The stop motion animation blends perfectly with the live action footage, and documentary seamlessly washes into very imaginative fiction. This film is a labor of love more than a decade in the making resulting in one of the most innovative and creative things I’ve seen in a long time. I would recommend watching the feature first, then going back to see the short films where you can see the work in development. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is visually stunning, human, hilarious, emotional, and imaginative. Slater and Rossellini are brilliant. See it for yourself.

There are lots of advantages to putting God in your film. No-one knows what they look like, so casting can be as crazy as you like, and (so far) they never sue over the unlicensed use of their image. We try to remember as many examples of God on screen as we can while we queue at the popcorn counter. Inevitably we will have missed a few – but that’ll all be sorted out by Judgement Day, won’t it?

My daughter has correctly identified Moana as possibly Disney’s greatest film. (Possibly anyone’s greatest film, in fact. Come on, fight me.) So we were looking forward to seeing The Sea Beast, Chris William’s new Netflix backed animated picture. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in the same territory.

Well, it’s in exactly the same territory, of course – the water.  If you don’t watch the whole movie, everyone should at least see the first fifteen minutes, which features maybe the greatest sea battle ever filmed, full of wonderfully detailed and nuanced animation and clear, spectacular action.

The script, on the other hand, is where nuance went to die. Here is a film that demonstrates that writing children is hard. Orphan stowaway Maisie Brumble is sweet, but she has a lot of terribly on the nose dialogue.

In her scene with her protector Jacob, she tells him, ‘All you have is me and all I have is you. And that don’t sound so bad. What do you say? Shall we give it a go?’ ‘You mean like a family?’ he asks. ‘Sure,’ she tells him.

It’s a nice sentiment… but if you’ve watched the film you’ll know that this emotional landscape has just been far better expressed and explored using the body language of the two characters in the previous fifteen seconds. We can read everything we need to know about the feelings of the people in this scene from the way they hold their shoulders and move their eyes.

Adding all this talky-talky-talking simply diffuses the power of the moment. This film is full of wonderful character animation, facilitated by software that allows incredible, painstaking detail. Early in the movie the way that Captain Crow carefully turns his shot glass on his tabletop tells us more about him than two pages of dialogue. So could we please retain the confidence to tell more of the story that way?

Ancient gods meet the Marvel Cinematic Universe in this episode, as Thor: Love and Thunder clashes with 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts. Join us for epic tales of the Quest for the Three S’s: swords, sandals and semi-naked men.  But it turns out there’s more than just escapism on screen, as the two films also tell a parallel story about how ideas of empowerment and responsibility have changed over the last sixty years…

After sneaking a musical instrument into the popcorn counter, we prove once and for all that neither of us is Bob Dylan, but we have seen some kick ass concert movies. Which ones stand out and is the live music feature film due a comeback?

We watched Sofia Coppola’s feature Marie Antoinette (2006) this weekend. Goodness knows what inspired the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola to make a film about how hard it is being the offspring of a great emperor.

The costumes are doing the heavy lifting here, supported by some great hair and the easy charisma of Kirsten Dunst. The eclectic soundtrack certainly catches your attention, but also underlines that incongruous music programming isn’t as easy as Stanley Kubrick makes it look. (I bet Sofia Coppola met Kubrick when she was a girl, didn’t she? According to John Baxter’s biography he approached Francis Ford Coppola about funding A Clockwork Orange.)

But if there’s one big problem the film suffers from I’d call it The Suspended Plot Point.

If you play guitar or piano you’ll know the power of the suspended chord. That sus4 that hangs in the air begging to be resolved. The chord naturally makes you will it to move on, begging to turn into a triad. It’s a well used, simple musical trick. But if you play the same chord in the same song for fifty five minutes, even if the drums and the bass are still hammering along, people might be inclined to press skip.

For more or less the whole middle hour of Marie Antoinette, the story teeters on the issue of when and whether her husband Louis-Auguste will consummate their marriage and seed her with an heir to the throne of France. They aren’t doing it, and they continue not doing it for a long, long time. We get the same urgent encouragement from Marie Antoinette’s counsel, the same plaintive letters from her mother, the same pained expressions from the Countess of Noailles again and again and again, and still, nothing happens. The whole film rides on this plot point for a very long time, and while such a device doesn’t have to bring the whole film to a stop, here it does. Character development, sub plots, they all just feel like they go into a holding pattern while we repeat the gags and enjoy looking at shoes. Eventually Louis-Auguste gets a quick sex-ed lesson and things get going again, but that feels like it leaves half an hour of the film to get the rest of the story done.

Sometimes characters can feel like they’re stuck. It’s a part of life. But that doesn’t have to mean the audience needs to do the same.

We’re All Shook Up this episode by the frenetic gyrations of Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic Elvis, another example of style trumping substance. But it’s hardly the first Hollywood film about white people making money out of black music – that might be The Jazz Singer, famously the first talkie (except it isn’t…) from 1927. Has cinema or the world changed as much as we hope in the last 95 years?