Review: The Secret Life of Pets 2

by Ben Miller (who has small children)

What do we want from a film when it is obviously not for us? If I'm watching an indie about a life experience that's in no way relatable to my own, I can still admire the artistry and the humanity. If I’m watching a film about talking pets specifically aimed at children, I can enjoy it... but what am I supposed to get out of it? Films like The Incredibles, WALL-E or Wreck-It Ralph are “for” kids, but non-children can enjoy them on a number of levels beyond the bright colors, fart jokes or action sequences.  Those films dug deep into issues about family, loneliness and friendship and had an overarching theme to bring everything together in a coherent way.

The Secret Life of Pets 2 is not one of those films and doesn't try to be...

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Red Carpet: Creative Arts Emmys

Purse first. Purse first. Jose here. First things first: congrats to RuPaul on his first Emmy! The iconic entertainer won on his first nomination as Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program for RuPaul's Drag Race. It only took him 8 seasons, but that's another story, Emmy as we all know is a notoriously slow learner who only starts liking things once they've stopped being cool, or once the uncool things they love have ended and they have no other choice but to reward cool things, which is why over the weekend Amy Poehler and Steve Buscemi also became Emmy winners <3

Keeping up with their tradition of loving the same things, the Creative Arts Emmys (which this year were awarded over two nights after hitting a record 82 categories!) also perpetuated the same red carpet trends, as the stars showed up in gowns that were either beaded or Grammy-esque, or both. Unlike the Oscars which continue being the epitome of glamour, or the Golden Globes which are its more playful cousin, the Emmys are usually about restraint and stars often show up in the same designers they did the previous year. This becomes even duller in the Creative Arts ceremony which isn't televised, which is my way of saying that coming up with looks worthy of discussion was quite the feat...

See the notable looks after the jump. 

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Lake Bell Returns To Her Director's Chair To Ask What's The Point?

After securing the 2013 Sundance Film Festival’s Screenwriting award, a slot on the National Board of Review’s top ten list of indie films, and the vocal support of critical heavy hitters like A.O. Scott, Lake Bell’s pitch-perfectly precise comedy In A World… announced itself as one of the more confident debut features in recent memory, let alone from an actor-turned- director/writer. If you haven’t seen this film about voiceover artists in Los Angeles, it expertly defines the multidimensional barriers to success that women face any time they wish to advance upward – and it’s the movie where Tig Notaro met her wife.

This week Bell announced her follow-up feature What’s the Point?, continuing her series of personal, sharp social commentaries with titles that end in grammatical whodunits. According to Deadline, What’s the Point? poses the additional question of whether marriage should be a seven-year contract with negotiable renewals – which, if you’ve listened to her episode of WTF, you know she has no shortage of smart answers when it comes to the topic of married life. Bell will again attack the issue from three angles - as director, writer, and star - and Ed Helms will anchor the other half of the onscreen couple.

While we patiently wait for the film, here are a few suggestions to pass the time:

• Make sure to check out her wise deadpan playing dumb on Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. In this series and others, Bell’s witty ability to crack open nuts without ever showing her hand often recalls some of Madeline Kahn’s most blistering, hysterical work.
• Watch every episode of Children’s Hospital and then re-watch In A World… and then count up all the actors who appear in both.
• Support other TV actors-turned-directors with your ticket dollars. This year we’ll see Clea DuVall’s debut The Intervention – which won Melanie Lynskey an acting award at this year’s Sundance – as well as Jason Bateman’s follow-up to Bad Words, The Family Fang starring Bateman, Nicole Kidman, and Christopher Walken. And right now you can see her Wet Hot sorta-love interest Michael Showalter’s full-on Sally Field crushfest, Hello My Name Is Doris (Nathaniel’s review).

Have you caught up yet with In A World… and does the promise of another Lake Bell joint sound like your thing?

Team FYC: In a World... for Best Original Screenplay

In this series Team Experience sounds off (individually) on their favorite fringe Oscar contenders. Here's Tim Brayton asking you to consider "In a World..." The Spirit Awards did, nominating it in this very category...

What’s a talented comic actress with no good parts coming her way supposed to do, anyway? If you answered, “write herself a damn starring role, already”, then you’re on the same page as Lake Bell, the immensely likable and talented star of the TV series Childrens Hospital, making her feature debut as writer, producer, and director with In a World… Though for all her hypens, it’s as screenwriter that Bell most impresses with this project, a hugely ambitious affair all around despite how utterly low-key and normal it all feels.

There are three things happening here all at once, and the script pays equal attention to all of them. First, In a World… is a conventionally satisfying romantic comedy, with the added benefit of having interesting people who act like human adults and have interests and personalities far beyond “if I’m not in a relationship THIS EXACT MINUTE, I will die, and also I am a failure as a woman". Second, it’s one of the best peeks inside the movie industry we’ve gotten in a lot of years, attending with focus and what feels like a great deal of authenticity to the world of trailer voice-over artists, paying tribute to their skills and lightly mocking them for the puffed-up egos common to all actors. Thirdly, and most impressively given the things mainstream cinema likes to talk about in 2013, it’s a cutting investigation into how gender is experienced both in culture generally and in traditionally male-dominated industries. Not just because of the expected “arrg, girls can’t narrate trailers!” plotline, but in how it anticipates and subverts the way we expect to see these people behaving, given the film’s generic requirement, and in Bell’s pet-observation about “sexy babies”, and how women are encouraged by the media and society to diminish themselves and their autonomy.

Heavy-duty stuff, treated with a light, wry tone that gets all of its ideas across without ever forgetting that first and above all, this is a comedy, and it needs to be both funny and fun. There’s no doubt that In a World… is both of those things, and insightful and truthful along with; it looks and acts like a lightweight confection, but it has more ideas packed into its tidy frame than the most wordy and self-important prestige pictures would know what to do with.

previous FYCs  Costume Design Lawrence Anyways | Sound Mixing in World War Z  | Cameron Diaz in The Counsellor | Spectacular Now for Best Picture | MakeUp for Warm Bodies 

LFF: Black Rock

Craig here with a look at another film showing at the London Film Festival: Kate Aselton's survival thriller Black Rock.

It’s certainly a bad day at Black Rock for Kate Bosworth and her two BFFs. Director/co-star Kate Aselton and Lake Bell both cherish Bosworth’s friendship  but they have their own shaky history festering between them like an open sore. The three women go for a ‘last hurrah’ camping trip to the titular retreat with treasure hunts and restorative bonding in mind. That’s until they chance upon a trio of ex-soldiers, not long back from Helmand Province, on a suspicious shooting trip.

More often than not island settings immediately instil narrative suspense. Indeed, once the women shore up on a deserted beach the potential for drama reveals itself in fraught chatter and mention of either lack of provisions, isolating distance from observable humanity (in the form of, uh-oh, NO MOBILE PHONE RECEPTION), or, as here, all of the above.

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