Streaming Roulette, Sept: Whoever Slew Carey Mulligan's Oscar dreams?

If you're new to the site this is how we share new streaming offerings for the month. We select a handful or two of titles and just randomly hit a place on the scroll bar to see what the film looks like - no cheating.  Ready? Let's play...

I used to dress like this all the time when I was younger...

Wildlife (2018) on Netflix
We stand by our stanning of Carey Mulligan in this movie. She should'a been in 2018's Best Actress lineup. How many more great performances does she have to give before Oscar nom #2? 

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Tim's Toons: Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

Tim here. To the right kind of viewer (e.g. the kind writing this review), Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is THE animated event of 2015. Which does not, unfortunately, turn out to mean that it is THE best animated film of 2015, or even in the running for that title. But let us not accentuate the negative; it's still a special and enormously idiosyncratic little movie, and its failures are honorable.

The film is a long-simmering passion project for producer Salma Hayek, one of the many ardent fans to accrue to Gibran's 1923 English-language collection of essays (Gibran was Lebanese, as was Hayek's grandfather). When, exactly, she decided that the adaptation needed to be done in animation is anyone's guess, but it was exactly the right choice: the book consists primarily of a series of spiritual lessons in the form of prose poetry, with the ghost of a narrative connecting them. The film by necessity fleshes out that narrative considerably and literalizes it, but the meat of the film is still those essays: eight out of Gibran's original 26, each handed off to a different luminary in the world of international animation.

Those eight sequences are easily the best reason to see The Prophet.

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The Animated Feature contenders: Cheatin'

Tim here, with another look at one of the lower-profile submissions to the Academy in the Best Animated Feature category. This time around, we’ve got Cheatin’, the sixth feature-length animated movie from Bill Plympton (seven if we count an anthology made of his earlier shorts), one of most iconic names in independent American animation. I will not say that to see his work is to love his work – there’s too much aggressive grotesquerie in his character designs and morbid humor for that to be true – but I do think that it’s pretty hard to imagine anyone watching his beloved Oscar-nominated 2004 short Guard Dog and not walking out a committed fan.

In the meanwhile, we’re here to talk about Cheatin’, and what an absolutely wonderful film it is, too. It would be hard to defend it as Plympton’s best work: his sense of humor works so perfectly in the context of a short, where he can run in, land a few quick sucker punches, and run back out again. But “best” or not, it’s still a stunning work of unexpected emotional complexity and images scratched out in Plympton’s customary aesthetic, looking like delicately-shaded color pencil sketches of distorted, unyielding human forms.

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Your 2014 animated Oscar contenders

Readers, an apology. Here I am, the Film Experience's resident animation expert, and I'm late with news twice over. First, on Tuesday, the Academy annouced the full list of 20 contenders for Best Animated Feature. Nathaniel prepared a post discussing this development, but wasn't able to publish it before traveling to California. Here are his thoughts on the subject:

As expected we will have a full five-wide Best Animated Feature category this year. It only takes 16 contenders to trigger that and we have 20. This branch is definitely not the most predictable when it comes to nominees -- or even, sometimes winners (remember how competitive the Brave year was?) --  often opting for a few little seen critical and foreign darlings. The internet seems to be rooting for The Lego Movie which is by a significant margin the most popular animated film of the year in the US. What's interesting is that it's uniquely American appeal means that internationally the numbers are much different and How To Train Your Dragon 2 is, globally, the biggest cartoon of the year. It's also probably the frontrunner for Gold but you never know. It's not as undeniable as Toy Story 3 (a universally acclaimed capper to a hugely beloved trilogy that wasn't able to be honored with the competitive Oscar until then since the category hadn't existed).

Disney's Big Hero 6, opening this week, I can't personally see winning the category but it's a likely nominee and, what's more, the short before it called Feast, which tells the tale of a human's love life through his hungry puppy, is a strong contender for the short film Oscar. It was love at first sight for me and I'm not even a dog person.

THE ELIGIBLE 20 (plus 10 eligible animated shorts after the jump)...

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