Review: Weathering with You

By Tim

Makoto Shinkai, the Japanese animation director whose new film Weathering with You opens this weekend in the US, has honed in on a few particular aesthetic preoccupations with laserlike intensity over the years. One of these is rain and the way that each droplet catches and reflects the diffuse light of a cloudy day; one is the brilliance of sunbeams piercing their way into shady areas, with fuzzy, dusty edges blurring the difference between light and dark; one is the way that riding in trains forces a lateral flatness onto the perception of the rider, transforming landscapes into planes of action moving across each other. He also favors stories about the extreme emotional states of teenagers, starting with but not limited to youthful romantic passion, and these stories tend to end in lopsided sentimentality expressed with as much unsatisfying contrivance as a decent filmmaker would dare throw into an otherwise satisfying screenplay.

Weathering with You, comes with a scenario that has been created with the apparent goal of specifically enabling him to chase every one of those things as far as a person possibly could. It's about a near-future Tokyo where it's always raining, and a teen girl who has the ability to create localized pockets of rainless sunshine...

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New Oscar Trivia courtesy of the fresh Oscar nominations

Here are some fresh statistics to ponder given the new round of Oscar nominations. If you can think of more records broken or equalled let us know in the comments so we can add them. Refresh your screens for updates!

ALL TIME RECORDS...

• Thelma Schoonmaker, received her 8th nomination for editing The Irishman. That's an all time record but she has to share it since Michael Kahn (who, like Thelma, is three time winner in the category: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan) has also received 8 nominations in his career, most recently with Lincoln (2012) when he broke their previous tie for "most nominated".
• Little Women (2019) is now the most nominated adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's book ever filmed...

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Best Animated Feature Contenders: "Ne Zha"

by Tim

Thus far in this round-up of 2019's animated features, we've been focusing on Oscar hopefuls and the more artsy side of animation. This week's subject, Ne Zha, is neither of those things, but in its own way, this is still as significant as any other film we've looked at. This is a blockbuster of the first order: the second-highest-grossing Chinese film in history (and the second-highest-grossing film made in a language other than English), with the highest single-territory gross for any animated film ever made. And even though stories about the Chinese box office always have to come with an asterisk attached (those numbers are often cooked a bit, especially when records are in play), that is by any means enough of a big deal that it's more than a little frustrating that essentially nobody in the United States has heard about any of this.

Ne Zha is a film the Chinese animation industry has been working towards for a long time. Along with the rest of Chinese cinema, animation has spent most of the last decade looking to beat Hollywood at its own game, providing the kind of opulent spectacle that for a long time was the exclusive domain of big-budget American filmmaking...

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Year in Review: Mainstream Box Office (feat. Lupita, Queen Elsa, and lots of Superheroes)

Our Year in Review party is getting off to a bit of a slow start (we launched with 50 biggest documentary hits) but we hope to speed up now and what better festive topic during the holiday moviegoing season than an audience participation one? Herewith six "top ten-to-twenty" box office hit lists regarding various subgenres of the mainstream and what we can learn from them... at least in terms of moviegoers today.

We're starting with female-led pictures because this should not be regarded as a minority or special interest topic given that half of the world's population is female! Little Women was a major late-breaking success in this arena but it wasn't the only success from 2019. Let's look at that chart first.

🔺= the movie is still in over 100 theaters. Figures are as of February 23rd

1. TOP GROSSING (LIVE-ACTION) FILMS WITH A FEMALE LEAD
(Excluding films where a male lead is just as prominent as his female co-star)

Captain Marvel

01 Captain Marvel $426.8 (Disney/Marvel, March 8th) starring Brie Larson
02 Us $175 (Universal, March 22nd) starring Lupita Nyong'o
03 Maleficent Mistress of Evil $113.9 (Disney, Oct 18th) starring Angelina Jolie
04 Little Women $107.1 (Columbia, Dec 25th) starring Saoirse Ronan
05 Hustlers $104.9 (STX, Sept 13th) starring Constance Wu & Jennifer Lopez...

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Best Animated Feature Contenders: How to Train Your Dragon 3

by Tim

Only time will tell which five movies are going to receive nominations for the Best Animated Feature Oscar in January, but I can tell you this much with absolute certainty: there are going to be a lot of sequels in the mix. Each of the four biggest American animation studios released a single film in 2019, and each one of those was a franchise entry. Disney had the blockbuster hit Frozen II just a month ago, and their corporate cousin Pixar released the slightly smaller hit Toy Story 4 over the summer. Illumination Entertainment had a rare flop with The Secret Life of Pets 2. Before any of these, though, came my pick for the best major studio animated feature of the year, and a film we really haven't talked about very much at the Film Experience: DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, third and final film in a trilogy that started in 2010.

The film was greeted without much enthusiasm, whether from critics, fans of the series, or audiences more generally; this seems horribly unfair to me. While it is more than a little bit of a retread of 2014's How to Train Your Dragon 2 in its plot and especially in its generic, forgettable villain (and one should never think "unforgettable" when watching a character played by F. Murray Abraham, but here we are), the emotional stuff is all new...

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