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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Box Office: Animation of 2017

by Nathaniel R

This long holiday weekend saw the releases of three major Oscar contenders. Call Me By Your Name had a sensational per screen average (101,000 per screen). Darkest Hour also showed its prosthetic Churchill face for a good opening ($44,000 per screen). And then there was Pixar's Coco, which easily trounced Justice League to take the #1 spot. Critics are raving and, more importantly, Latino critics are raving, too, as you can see at Remezcla and here at The Film Experience.

So let's do the box office report differently this weekend and look at this year's Animated Features...

ANIMATED FEATURES AT THE BOX OFFICE IN 2017 GROSSES AS OF NOV 26th
1. Despicable Me 3  $264.3	6. Captain Underpants $73.9
2. Lego Batman Movie $175.7	7.🔺 Coco $71.1 REVIEW
3. The Boss Baby $175 REVIEW	8. Lego NinjaGo Movie $59
4. Cars 3  $152.9	9. Smurfs: Lost Village $45 REVIEW
5. The Emoji Movie $86 REVIEW	10. Nutjob 2 Nutty by Nature $28.3

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Jorge Gives Thanks

by Jorge Molina

2017. What a year it's been, huh? Not only does the world seem to be changing / falling apart at every level, in general, it also has not been a particularly easy year for me on a personal level. I don't want to get too personal (that's for the actress that wins an Oscar for playing me to do in her monologue), but it involved lots of delayed visa paperwork, a forced exile to my hometown in Mexico, and a three-to four week delay in movie release dates.

But, throughout it all, I could always count on entertainment to pick me up and get me going. It was (as it always has been) my medicine, my way to fight back, and my chosen method of escapism. So this year, I am thankful for these little pieces of pop culture that made it all better:

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Sneak Peek Review: Pixar's “Coco”

Jorge Molina reporting from Mexico where Coco has already opened...

The main thing that unifies all Pixar movies (and a big part of what makes them so successful) is how deeply they are rooted in specificity. A movie set in the world of toys, in the world of bugs, in the world of monsters, of superheroes, of cars.

But in all their movies until now, this very specificity has been universal. We’ve all had to let go of toys, and feared monsters, and wanted to become superheroes. With Coco, Pixar dives into their first film that is truly specific, based around a world, a culture and a folklore that only exists for one particular group of people.

A group of people that I happen to be part of...

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1944: The Three Caballeros

by Tim Brayton

We're celebrating the cinema 1944 right now at the Film Experience, and as the resident animation lover, how could I pass up the chance to take a look at that year's most wonderfully bizarre cartoon? I'm referring to Disney's The Three Caballeros, the studio's second feature-length contribution to the United States government's Good Neighbor policy during World War II. That program involved goodwill tours and films tailor-made for Latin American audiences, and in Disney's case, a combination of both: a research trip to South America with Walt Disney and several of his most important artists result in the creation of 1942's Saludos Amigos, in which international icons Donald Duck and Goofy had fun visiting Brazil and Argentina, respectively, and learning all about the locals.

Saludos Amigos is a charming, slight movie (at 42 minutes, it severely tests the definition of the term "feature film"), and exactly what you'd anticipate from the description "the U.S. government paid Disney to make a film about how great people in South America are, in the fumbling, patronizing manner of 1940s Hollywood".

Its quasi-sequel is not that at all... 

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