Blueprints: "Coco"

Feliz Día de los Muertos! To celebrate, Jorge looks at how the script for Disney’s “Coco” mixes two languages the same way the movie interconnects cultures.

I’ve written a couple of pieces in this site before about Coco. It was an extremely intimate and touching experience to be able to see my native culture represented to accurately and lovingly. It is a movie that perfectly captures the spirit of Mexicanism, of our fragile and ever-present relationship with death, family, and tradition. 

I saw the movie twice in theaters: once in its original English, and once in its Spanish dub. While I consider the dub to be a better version (but that perhaps has to do with the way I’ve always experienced animated films), the English one made me consider a new aspect of the film: the way it handled Spanish. It’s a movie explicitly set in a different country; one where a different language is spoken (unlike say, Brave). How can the script incorporate this essential cultural element without making it seem unauthentic? It turns out, they do it muy bien.

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TIFF Quickies with Gael García Bernal, Paprika Steen and more...

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

Herewith very quick notes on five new films from world cinema, some with stars you'll recognize, that deserve lengthier word counts. That said, we're a week behind with TIFF reviews so we have to crank them out somehow -- better short-takes than no takes at all! 

Museo
The ever prolific Gael García Bernal continues to be a gift to world cinema. He has a small role in The Kindergarten Teacher (which... more on later) but fully carries Museo, a restless gem from Mexico. The movie begins with a formative father and son memory and memorable newsreel footage of an ancient statue being hauled across Mexico as a prized museum acquisition. Years later in 1985, the son Juan Nunez (García Bernal), or "Shorty," as his often derisive family calls him, remains obsessed with the story and robs the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City of 140 more mobile pre-Hispanic pieces...

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Showbiz History: The Girl From Missouri, The Princess from Genovia

10 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history...

1904 Dolores del Rio born in Mexico. By 1925 she's a star in silent films, Hollywood's first Mexican movie star, but her time in Hollywood is short. She reinvents herself back home in Mexico becoming a huge movie star all over again and ushering in Mexican cinema's Golden Era. 

1926 Gordon Scott, future Tarzan beefcake born in Portland. He stars in one of the most interesting Tarzan films, Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959) which also features Sean Connery!

1934 The Girl from Missouri opens in movie theaters, a vehicle for Jean Harlow who was actually from Missouri...

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Mamma Mia! And Me: How the Musical Changed My Life a Decade Ago

by Jorge Molina

Today Mamma Mia! turns a decade old. The film opened exactly ten years ago, on July 18th, 2008. And this weekend, what is perhaps the most unexpected sequel in the franchise factory that Hollywood has become will open.  

I could write a piece about some sort of legacy, or about what a monstrous hit it was when it opened (becoming the highest grossing live action musical ever, and the highest grossing movie in history in the U.K. at the time). I could attempt an oral history on why I firmly believe this was the most fun any group of actors has ever had on set, or an objective reexamination on why this silly and often senseless movie works so effortlessly.

But I want to get a little more personal. Because ten years ago, that movie changed the way I looked at myself and my life...

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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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