Animated Feature Contender: The Wind Rises

Tim Brayton will be looking at the key contenders for Oscar's Animated Feature race. He previously reviewed Ernest & Celestine, Frozen, and Letter to Momo. This week: The Wind Rises.

It’s easy enough to expect great, career-capping things of the final film of any important director even when it was largely an accident of timing that it worked out that. And when the director in question has openly announced his retirement with his film still fresh in theaters, that makes it that much more tempting to view it as some kind of Overt Statement. In the case of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, it’s a bit hard to say what an Overt Statement might actually consist of, but we can get this out of the way and then relax: there’s nothing about this that feels like a grand farewell to an artform. Far from being a summing-up, it’s probably the least characteristic film of the director’s canon, except in one respect: it makes the fascination with flight and objects in motion, a concern in every single movie he’s made (if only in a very small way), the central driving force of its plot.

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Animated Feature Contender: A Letter to Momo

Tim, our resident animation guy, sounds off on the eligible films vying for Animated Feature

Between now and the announcement of the Academy Award nominees on January 16, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature award: specifically, the smaller, more easily-overlooked films from non-U.S. animation studios. For it strikes me that they are the more deeply in need of love and attention than the more visible mainstream American productions likely to dominate the race. Also, I don't imagine that anyone is desperate to have a conversation about Free Birds.

Our first subject is the oldest on the submission list: A Letter from Momo from Japan, which premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, only making its stateside bow this year.

[Does it deserve the comparisons to A Spirited Away? Find out after the jump]

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Oscar Contenders Stack the Decks at Asia Pacific Screen Awards

Glenn here. Rarely discussed by Oscar commentators for reasons unknown to me are the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Held annually on the Gold Coast in Australia, these awards recognise, well, cinema from Asian and Pacific regions. This year's batch of contenders are from a typically diverse group of nations with several high profile Oscar contenders in the mix. Amongst this year's roster of nominees are the foreign language submissions from Palestine (Omar), Iran (The Past), Saudi Arabia (Wadjda), China (Back in 1942), Hong Kong (The Grandmaster), Singapore (Ilo Ilo), New Zealand (White Lies), South Korea (Juvenile Offender) and Kazakhstan (The Old Man) as well as films amongst the long lists for animation (The Wind Rises) and documentary (The Art of Killing). Just imagine if Japan had chosen Like Father Like Son and India had chosen The Lunchbox!

Some history and this year's nominees after the jump.

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Golden Horse Countdown

Here's Maggie Cheung's commercial (filmed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien) for the Golden Horse awards to be held on November 23rd in Taipei. I have it on good authority that she's saying...

 50 years Golden Horse, happy birthday

I wish I could speak Mandarin and Cantonese.
I also wish I could create sparkler-like effects by waving my arms around. 

Chinese speaking readers should also check out these promos. See, to celebrate their big 5-0 the Golden Horse Awards are interviewing past winners about their classic performances/films. And for those who missed the announcement the Best Picture nominees this year at the Golden Horse Awards are the following features:

Tony Leung, Maggie's #1 screen partner, in The GrandmasterDRUG WAR (Johnny To)
THE GRANDMASTER (Wong Kar Wai) Hong Kong's Oscar Submission, Dan's review which is likely the frontrunner given the huge amount of nominations (11) and the Maggie Cheung-adjacent legends involved
ILO ILO (Anthony Chen) Singapore's Oscar Submission Chen was not nominated for director, replaced by Mong-Hong Chung who directed Taiwan's Oscar submission Soul, but he's up for "New Director" instead
A TOUCH OF SIN (Jia Zhang-Ke) Glenn & Jose's review
STRAY DOGS (Tsai Ming Liang) Venice winner

What's the last Asian film you saw and are you rooting for any of the Asian entries to win a Best Foreign Film nomination in the Oscar race this year (a lot more on that category coming up soon)

NYFF: Nobody's Daughter Haewon

TFE's coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sep 27-Oct 14) is picking up pace. Here is Jose discussing Nobody's Daughter Haewon.

Hong Sang-soo seems intent in preserving the cinematic style the French specialized in during the early 1960’s. His movies often combine two of the topics most favored by New Wave filmmakers: the blurry line between fantasy and reality and the movies. In Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, the director delivers one of his most enjoyable films to date in telling the story of Haewon (Jeung Eun-chae), a bubbly young woman trying to succeed as an actress while having a tormentous affair with her married professor (Lee Sunkyun).

Hong captures his heroine in an assortment of intimate moments, mostly involving her hopelessly romantic takes on life. When she meets a visiting scholar who confesses he’s looking for a wife just like her, she immediately announces to her friends that she might be getting married soon and she assumes a guy is “the one”, because she ran into him more than once on the same day.

Even if the film never tries to dig deep into the characters, the director leaves enough clues for us to try and decipher why this woman turned out the way she is. One of the very first scenes shows her mother coldly say goodbye to her before moving to Canada, among her final pieces of advice is the suggestion that Haewon try to become Miss Korea since she can’t act. Through moments of quirk and “is it a dream?” confusion, we are led to believe that this woman is simply trying to stay away from real life as possible, she’s also developing a slight drinking problem which makes for some of the film’s funniest moments.

With endless mentions of pretending, setting up faux chance meetings, inner jokes that turn into insults, endless moments where a secret truth becomes public and an unexplainable Jane Birkin cameo that also references Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, resembles a farce written by Moliere himself, if he too had been obsessed with the children of Marx and Coca Cola.  

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon plays during the festival on 09/29 and 09/30. Go see it and come back here to help us figure out what Birkin was doing in the movie.