Coco, CMBYN, and the Specificity of Feeling Seen at the Movies

by Jorge Molina

Award season means trying to watch as many movies as possible in the shortest amount of time to feel included in the zeitgeist (well, in our zeitgeist here, at least; movies from all across the board that, apart from wanting to be in the awards conversation, often have little in common.)

Recently I watched two movies that, at first glance, couldn’t be more different. On one hand there’s Coco, Pixar’s newest entry about a Mexican boy wandering into the Land of the Dead. And on the other, there’s Call Me by Your Name, the much-discussed festival favorite that follows the romance between a teenager and an older man in sun-drenched Italy. On the surface, these two films don’t share much yet they offered me a very similar cinematic experience.

Both made me feel seen (yes, in italics). They reflected parts of my identity that I rarely get to see reflected on screen. How did they do that? By being as specific as possible...

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Soundtracking: The Grammy Nominees

Chris here. Soundtracks are rarely awarded prizes as musical entities themselves, so I just had to take the opportunity to dive into this year's Grammy nominees. The Grammy's have an eligibility calendar that is off-kilter to the Oscars, so you will find overlap between last year and the current year. Like Oscar past, La La Land dominates, but I suspect won't be asweep here either. This is the music industry after all, and Grammy loves firmly established acts even more than Oscar - could this be the chance for Lin Manuel Miranda and Moana to finally get a prize, or even Pharrell Williams for Hidden Figures?

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Call Me With Kindness

by Jason Adams

Call Me By Your Name is turning out to be the sort of success none of us saw coming sixteen months ago when it was first announced that the director of I Am Love was tackling a little gay love story. It just broke the 2017 record for per theater average over the weekend, and its reviews have been unanimously stellar. It won Best Feature at the Gothams Monday night, it topped the Independent Spirit nominations, and it’s expected to stick around racking up such prizes all awards season long.

And yet there’s been one complaint that’s nagged at the movie from a determined bunch of folks (including the film’s own writer, legend James Ivory) since it first screened at Sundance in January – a supposed shyness about nudity and gay sex. Ivory told Variety it’s a “pity” there's no full-frontal nudity in the film, while The Guardian called the movie “coy” and Slate called it out for a “lack of explicit sex.” One shot in particular has rankled these folks the most – a seemingly old-fashioned pan out the window just as the characters finally approach their erotic consummation.

The film’s director Luca Guadagnino, who probably had to look up the word “coy” in the dictionary the first time it was lobbed at him for this, is nonplussed by the reaction – he told Vulture:

“It’s really something I don’t understand. It’s as if you said there are not enough shots of Shanghai. I don’t understand why there has to be Shanghai in this movie.”

I’m inclined to agree with him. Not only because I found the film sexy as hell, erotic in languorous, voyeuristic ways that movies don’t really approach anymore. Its sense of tactility, for sweat and fabric and skin, and its often-prurient stares – up the legs of swimming trunks, for example - are a welcome shock to the system that makes the forbidden seem commonplace, easy...

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Yes No Maybe So: "Avengers: Infinity War"

by Ben Miller

Oscar season is upon us and it’s easy to forget that studios also want to make billions upon billions of dollars next summer.  Marvel Studios have been teasing their fans for months with the news of the debut trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe teamup to end all teamups, Avengers: Infinity War.  Well, the hype has finally culminated to a climax as the trailer was debuted this morning.  Take a look after the jump and hit our obligatory Yes, No, Maybe So...

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I'm Your Biggest Fan! - Reeves, Gerwig, and Chance

By Salim Garami

What's good? Apologies because I don't have much to say or talk about this week, except remark on how I'm still in a pretty pleasant mood moving out of Thanksgiving weekend and into the holiday season.

And part of what prolonged my pleasant mood was to find an admittedly 2-year-old video of movie star Keanu Reeves on promotional tour promoting John Wick in Japan discussing his admiration for martial arts film legend Sonny Chiba (of The Street Fighter or Kill Bill fame), influencing his physical choreography and style. Lo and behold, Chiba was in the studio ready to meet with Keanu and the Matrix star is suddenly starstruck to meet him and begins waxing rhapsodic over Chiba's work. Seeing such a household star in the industry be taken aback by the presence of figure that certainly isn't as well-known internationally as Reeves brought a smile to my face...

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