Garden Party (2017)

Nominated for Best Animated Short    It was hard to find a poster for this but that's okay.

A garden comes alive as frogs and toads enjoy a balmy afternoon to evening in the backyard and interior of a mansion.

That is honestly a terrible tagline, for all that it is accurate.  This movie is so adorably creepy but I am wary of revealing a lot of details because the best part of it is how it builds.  It's only seven minutes long but totally worth tracking down.  The animation is pure CGI and done in a realistic style.  None of the animals talk or have like The Wind in the Willows-type shenanigans but again, that does not do it enough justice.  You'd just have to see it.

I loved this way more than Dear Basketball, but I'm not a sports person.  As far as I'm concerned, this category is wide open.

Ultimate Avengers (2006)

  This is an animated adaptation of the Ultimates run of comics and bears no relation to the live-action Marvel Avengers.  If you're familiar with the cinematic universe, this is a bit of a shock in how much it deviates with the storyline, but I'm guessing that if you prefer the comics, you'd appreciate this more.

Captain Steve Rogers (Justin Gross) is lost in the ice following a decisive battle with Herr Kleiser (Jim Ward), a Chitauri alien masquerading as a Nazi official.  Sixty years later, his body is recovered by Colonel Nick Fury (Andre Ware) in the hopes of revitalizing Dr. Banner's (Michael Massee) super soldier program.  Cap wakes up, which is more than anyone could have hoped for, but is disoriented and not really in the mood to help out.  Fury is authorized to begin the Avengers Protocol over his objections and recruits Iron Man (Marc Worden), Hank Pym (Nolan North), Janet Van Dyn (Grey DeLisle), and Thor (David Boat) under the command of Captain America and Black Widow (Olivia d'Abo).  Their first team outing does not go as well as hoped and the Chitauri score a major victory.  Only some serious team building will allow these ego-driven individuals to put their differences aside and come together to save the world.

I never read any of the Avengers comics so for me this is vastly different.  Hank Pym is a total asshole (in the comics, he's revealed to be physically abusive toward his wife), Bruce Banner is much more unstable, and Thor is too busy fighting whalers to really help out.  I can't say I really enjoyed watching it because it still felt like a retread, or a retcon I wasn't prepared for, but it's not a bad animated movie.  It just didn't feel like my Avengers.  Which isn't really fair, since it did come out six years before the live-action one but that's the one I saw first and the series I've been invested in.  We're now 14? 15 movies deep into the cinematic universe so it's hard for me to accept the existence of this alternate version.  Some people will probably have the exact opposite experience.  And that's cool.  There's enough Marvel for everyone.

Black Panther (2018)

  And the Marvel movie onslaught for 2018 begins!

After the death of his father, Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns to his home country of Wakanda to be crowned king and rightfully assume the mantle of the Black Panther after defeating a rival claimant from the Jubari tribe, M'baku (Winston Duke).  But the crown is a heavier weight to bear than he was truly prepared for, especially with the psychotic Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) selling stolen vibranium around the world.  T'Challa and his ex, Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), travel to South Korea to stop one potential sale to American CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and take Klaue into custody, only to have him escape with the help of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan).  Killmonger has his own agenda to pursue, however, affecting not just the future of Wakanda but of the entire world.

Ostensibly, this is a superhero movie based on a comic book done by the same company that have produced literally over a dozen similar films.  In reality, this is so much more than just a superhero film.  This was Marvel's chance to substantially increase their diversity, to showcase some incredible black performers, musicians, writers, and director, and to prove (yet again) that audiences will pay to see representations of black people on film.  Nick Fury has been a mentor type, always in the background.  Luke Cage and Black Lightning are small screen.  For a lot of fans, this was the first major studio-backed black superhero since Wesley Snipes in Blade in 1998.  Literally 20 years.  An entire generation of people were born and can legally vote in the time it took to get another black superhero.

I had to sit there and think about that for a minute.  Mostly because I can't believe it's been 20 years since Blade came out.  Sweet Jesus, I am old.

Anyway, yes.  Huge expectations for this film.  And it is worth it.  If you are a Marvel fan, this is another stellar entry in the canon.  If you are African American, I can't begin to imagine what this is for you.  Yes, there is a mid-credits sequence and a post-credits sequence that sets up Avengers:  Infinity War.  No, girl-who-sat-next-to-me-in-the-theater, that is not Jesus in the post-credits sequence.  That is **SPOILERS** Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, and it is huge that he is just hanging out meditating and shit in Wakanda.  Huge.  **END SPOILERS**  If this movie is any indication, 2018 is going to be an amazing year for film.

Strong Island (2017)

Nominated for Best Documentary   Okay, now we're back on track (kind of).

This Netflix original documentary follows Yance Ford as he attempts to make sense of his brother's death.  In the early 90s, unarmed African American William Ford, Jr. was shot by Caucasian Mark Reilly following a verbal altercation at the body shop Reilly worked at.  The case never went to trial. The grand jury of 23 white members determined that the incident was self-defense and not a homicide.  Yance Ford's family were never satisfied with this verdict and over the course of the film the toll it exacts is tremendous.

I found myself sympathizing with the Ford family but also strangely cold about the film.  Part of that is because it feels extremely claustrophobic.  It is shot almost entirely in close-up interviews either of Yance Ford himself or family members and witnesses.  While Ford is possessed of a deeply expressive pair of eyes, the cumulative effect is lost in the repetition.  This is clearly a passion project and one that is certainly very topical, but for me it was a little too personal.  I can't help but compare it to The 13th, a nominee from last year that also dealt with institutionalized racism, but on a macro scale.  By looking at the mechanisms of power designed to keep African Americans an oppressed minority, 13th was able to make a sweeping indictment of the prison-industrial complex and the U.S. Justice system.  Strong Island, however, is solely focused on one family dealing with the grief of losing a son.  It comes off as less about looking for change and more about assigning blame.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

  This is also not nominated for an Oscar this year, but it was in 2009.  It didn't win and I don't know why a) because I am too lazy to look up who actually did win and b) because this movie is one of the most entertaining documentaries I have ever seen.

Werner Herzog takes a small crew to McMurdo Air Force Station in Antarctica to interview the people that spend the majority of their time in the most inhospitable place on the planet.  The people are all interesting in their own rights, but Herzog's narration is what makes this film.  He is wry bordering on kinda bitchy, warm, engaging, and extremely funny.  If you've only (God forbid) known him as the villain from Jack Reacher, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

The other draw is obviously the scenery.  Instead of just focusing on penguins, Herzog takes his cameras into active volcanos and under the frozen seas to bring some spectacular views of the south pole.  Amazing.

Nanook of the North (1922)

  This is not nominated for this year's Oscars.  It's actually from my film class, which is Cinema of Exploration.  We've watched a couple of other things, but only bits in class so this is the first one I've watched all the way through.

This proto-documentary follows Nanook, an Inuit man from the polar circle, as he goes through several recreations of traditional indigenous activities, like building an igloo, trading hunted skins, and killing a seal and a walrus.  The filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, spent a couple of years trying to put together enough footage of "natural" life before saying Fuck It, and just scripting nearly the whole damn thing.  Still, it's pretty pioneering in that camera equipment in 1922 wasn't exactly the most user friendly or convenient, and it does show the arctic circle in the days before global warming.  You can watch the whole thing on Wikipedia or YouTube.  As a warning, it is super racist and they actually show real animals being killed.  My advice is to watch the film for the nature bits and fast forward past the trading post scene and the hunting scenes.

This film is a great example of accepting our past, warts and all.  This indigenous family was exploited for the entertainment of white people and that is inexcusable but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have value.  It's part of our collective human history and facing it is the only way we'll learn to be better.

Random TV

I've actually been saving this post for a while, just in case I got behind with my movies so I'd still have something to post.  I've been doing homework damn near all day and still have more to do so this might not be as in-depth as I'd like it to be but I won't have it said that I didn't try.  So here's some TV I've watched fairly recently.

I have only watched a couple of discs of Animaniacs season 3 because I decided to try and get to the Oscar nominees that I had bought but not yet seen, so this is on hiatus.  It's Animaniacs, though, so it's not like there's some overarching plot.  And I'm going to really enjoy some colorful brain candy and fun songs after I get through this month.

I am 80% done (literally, I have watched eight out of 10 episodes) with season 4 of Game of Thrones.  This is also a casualty of pushing everything in my Netflix queue back to make room for Oscar nominees.  I would go into detail about what I have enjoyed from this season but since I haven't finished it, I can't.  This show has proven to me time and time again that I really can't count on a character making it until I see the finale.  So I'm going to keep my trap shut and not jinx them.

Christy talked me into watching season 1 of The Magicians.  She bought the show on a whim and really enjoyed it so she sent it to me.  I had previously tried reading the books by Lev Grossman and couldn't stand them so I was mildly optimistic about the show.  Does that sound counterintuitive?  You know how you read a book and love it, then they do a show or movie and it sucks because you loved the thing and then they changed the thing?  Yeah, so if I hated the book and they change it for a show or movie, odds seems pretty good that my opinion of it can only improve.  The exception that proves the rule is the Fifty Shades series.  Nothing could have saved them.  It was a shit book and a shit movie that spawned shit franchises.  Anyway, The Magicians is okay.  I found the main two characters of Quentin (Jason Ralph) and Alice (Olivia Taylor-Dudley) to be deadly boring and the supporting cast barely interesting enough to make it worth watching those two.  The concepts is basically what if The Chronicles of Narnia was real but fucked up and the only people who could prevent a magical apocalypse were students from an American Hogwarts.  If you read that sentence and got a warm, tingly feeling in your nether regions, knock yourself out.  It's on Netflix.

Speaking of Netflix streaming, I also watched season 4 of Glee.  Remember Glee?  I don't remember why I originally stopped watching it.  I think I was moving and had to turn off my cable or got broke and had to turn off my cable and then just didn't care enough about it to catch back up.  Watching season four gave me such a rush of nostalgia, though.  I barely remembered the characters and didn't really care about their struggles but I seriously missed that feeling of hope and Pollyanna spirit in my TV watching.  This is the first season after the main cast has "graduated" high school.  Half of them move to New York City and the other half end up back in Lima, Ohio for one reason or another to rejoin their former club as mentors.  If you need a pick-me-up, this is the show to watch.  Every possible social issue is covered and nothing is so great it can't be surmounted with the power of song covers in 45 minutes.

The most recent thing I've watched to completion is season two of The Tudors.  It's actually fucking me up a little because I'm taking a class on early modern England, right around the time of Queen Elizabeth I, so seeing her dad run around establishing a church and hacking folks' heads off right and left is a little surreal.  I have already had to stop myself from bringing up the show in class since it has less than nothing to do with the discussion.  Anyway, season two is the rise and fall of the Boleyn family and Henry VIII's (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) continuing problems with the Pope (Peter O'Toole) and the other Catholic heads of Europe.

So that's what I've been watching.  I'm continually stretched thin and growing thinner as I try to apply equal amounts of energy to work, the five classes I am currently taking, the barest hint of a social life so my friends don't think I've died, Oscar season, and my two blogs.  I'm doing the best I can and I hope it will calm down soon.  Thanks for sticking with me this long.

Get Out (2017)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay
  So I now understand the confusion at the Golden Globes this year.  This is definitely not a comedy.  It has funny moments, but it is assuredly a horror film.  Anyone who tells you they thought it was hilarious is someone not to be trusted.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), an up-and-coming photographer, agrees to go with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener).  He expects it to be somewhat awkward, but is not prepared for the sheer wrongness of everything.  By the time Chris realizes he is in real danger, it is too late.

A sense of real menace pervades the entirety of this film.  That is incredibly hard to sustain but Jordan Peele handles it masterfully.  It's worth pointing out that William Peter Blatty was also a comedy writer before turning in the screenplay for one of the greatest horror films ever made (and a personal favorite), The Exorcist.  I would hold Get Out right up there with it and The Stepford Wives, which I think would make for an interesting double feature in suburban horror.  It deserves every single Oscar it's nominated for and probably another one for Best Original Score, because the music is creepy as fuck.  I'm actually really mad I didn't get to see this last year so I could put it in my Top Ten list, because it would definitely have made it.

Part of me wants to unpack everything that makes the film terrifying but a larger part just wants all of you to see it and then we can have a discussion.  Comment or @ me on Twitter (@LucyBlogsStuff) and we'll talk.

Dear Basketball (2017)

Nominated for Best Animated Short    It's really hard to find any of the short films so I was very excited to see this, even if it is about basketball.

Kobe Bryant narrates and produces this six-minute elegy to the sport that made him famous.  I am not a sports person, so I've never watched him play or been interested in anything about him so this was actually the first time I've ever heard his voice.  The animation is intended to look like rough pencil sketches, which is charming, interspersed with more fully-realized drawing, like the poster.  Some of the depictions of him as a child reminded me of Disney characters, so I looked up the animator, Glen Keane, and found that he worked on major animation for the studio, including Tangled, Tarzan, Pocahontas, and Beauty and the Beast.  So he's kind of a big deal.

Obviously, this isn't a person I'm familiar with and this is the first film I've seen from this category so I can't speak to its chances.  It seems heartfelt and lovely to look at.

Race to Witch Mountain (2009)

  This will most likely be the last Christy pick for a while.  I'm woefully far behind on her selections and with this last semester and the Oscars, I just don't have time to get to them.  Don't worry, I'm sure they'll be back this summer, after I graduate.  Until then, just enjoy this post from her August pick.

Jack Bruno (Dwayne Johnson) is a cab driver in Las Vegas.  He used to be a wheelman for some bad people who are still after him.  After one such encounter, Jack hits the streets to start his day, then realizes he has two kids in the back seat.  Sara (AnnaSophia Robb) seems nice but has this annoying habit of calling him by his full name.  Seth (Alexander Ludwig) is a little more reserved.  Jack is not in the mood to deal with two runaways, especially after the kids offer him a large wad of cash to take them to an abandoned shack in the desert.  He follows them inside, only to discover that things are much weirder than he expected.  The children are aliens being chased by an unstoppable killing machine from their planet and by a shadowy group of government agents led by a sociopath named Burke (Ciaran Hinds) from ours.  Jack is in way over his head and reaches out to a chance meeting with a fare from earlier in the day, Dr. Alex Friedman (Carla Gugino), an astrophysicist speaking at the UFO convention.

This is supposed to be a remake/reboot/reimagining of Escape to Witch Mountain, one of my favorite non-animated Disney movies as a kid.  Comparisons were unavoidable but I tried to not let my existing nostalgia get in the way of watching this movie.  So I'm going to tell you my thoughts about it as its own entity, then go in to the side-by-side.

This is much more of a straightforward action film than I was expecting.  The star is definitely Dwayne Johnson and he handles it with the same kind of easy self-assurance as all of his other roles.  That has the potential to be quite boring, depending on how many movies of his you've seen and how often.  Fortunately, I tend to space out my Rock exposure so it was within acceptable tolerances.  There is no real room for backstory or character development.  The obligatory romance is shoehorned in but not overdone simply because every move is in service of propelling the plot forward at breakneck speed.

Okay, here's the comparison.  The whole point of Escape to Witch Mountain was the mystery about the kids, who were named Tony and Tia.  Race to Witch Mountain just flat out tells you from the opening menu that they are aliens.  Sara has the same kind of powers as Tia (telepathy/telekineses) only cranked up to 11.  Tony struggled with his but Seth is obviously superpowered.  There was also no concept of a Terminator-type super soldier sent by their own alien government to kill them.  Obviously, the biggest difference is having Dwayne Johnson instead of Eddie Albert.  He's clearly trying to go for the "crochety old man saddled unwillingly with two weird kids that he slowly comes to care for" type, but he seems much more like a hired bodyguard than a bystander chosen by chance.  Also, the pacing doesn't really allow for Johnson's character, much less the audience, to get invested in these two kids like Escape to Witch Mountain does.  Part of that is because Race to Witch Mountain swaps the villain from a creepy millionaire posing as the kids' uncle to a shadowy government agent who wants to dissect them for science.  I agree in the reasoning.  The creepy millionaire bit seems bizarre and totally dated whereas the idea that there are portions of the government whose job it is to cover up alien incursions like this are accepted as within the realm of fictional plausibility.  But it forces the film into such an accelerated pace that nothing feels like it has consequences.

Final judgment:  these are two totally separate films.  I think it's possible to like one or the other, or both, or neither, equally and without reservation.  One is a mid-70s Disney adventure film about an old man and two precocious orphans and the other is a late-00s Disney action film about The Rock as a Las Vegas cab driver helping two extraterrestrials get home.