Best Animated Feature Contenders: How to Train Your Dragon 3

by Tim

Only time will tell which five movies are going to receive nominations for the Best Animated Feature Oscar in January, but I can tell you this much with absolute certainty: there are going to be a lot of sequels in the mix. Each of the four biggest American animation studios released a single film in 2019, and each one of those was a franchise entry. Disney had the blockbuster hit Frozen II just a month ago, and their corporate cousin Pixar released the slightly smaller hit Toy Story 4 over the summer. Illumination Entertainment had a rare flop with The Secret Life of Pets 2. Before any of these, though, came my pick for the best major studio animated feature of the year, and a film we really haven't talked about very much at the Film Experience: DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, third and final film in a trilogy that started in 2010.

The film was greeted without much enthusiasm, whether from critics, fans of the series, or audiences more generally; this seems horribly unfair to me. While it is more than a little bit of a retread of 2014's How to Train Your Dragon 2 in its plot and especially in its generic, forgettable villain (and one should never think "unforgettable" when watching a character played by F. Murray Abraham, but here we are), the emotional stuff is all new...

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Podcast: A Beautiful Day, Knives Out, Waves, Atlantics

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R 

Index (61 minutes)

• 00:01 Happy belated Thanksgiving
• 02:01 Marielle Heller and Tom Hanks offer catharsis with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• 14:30 Knives Out and that yummy cast: Chris Evans, Toni Collette, etc...
• 21:30 Film Bitch Awards / Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers tangent
• 23:00 Exciting new voice: Senegal's Mati Diop and Atlantics
• 29:20 Waves divides people, including Nathaniel and Murtada, and we also discuss the rush to judgment on first screenings among pundits
• 38:00 Spirit Nominations - What did we make of them?
• 48:20 Best Cinematography - Roger Deakins for 1917... but who else? 
• 59:00 Can you believe it's December already? 

Related Reading
Murtada's interview with Mati Diop
Monica Castillo's Knives Out essay

 You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

A Beautiful Day for Podcasting

Tweetweek: 1917, Movie Real Estate, and 'The Bad Place'

by Nathaniel R

So we were at the first screening of 1917 yesterday at the DGA theater in NYC and as you may have noticed if you were online, the Oscar pundits and online film press collectively went berzerk for it, immediately declaring it was going to win everything, it was best this and that... even of the decade! 'Nobody's ever done this before' (uhhhhh. people have been doing continuous take movies since at least Hitchcock's Rope in the 1940s and probably before that and one of 'em just won Best Picture five years ago!)  For the record we enjoyed it and it is quite technically impressive... but deep breaths people. "Consider" your opinions before tweeting them out before the credits of the thing you just watched have even stopped rolling!

Much is made in 1917 about the futility of medals and yet my dumb ass still wants one for noticing each and every invisible cut in this “one-take” movie

— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) November 24, 2019

I'm not going to share the generically breathless super-hypey tweets (they all sound pretty much the same) but more 1917 reactions are after the jump, plus The Bad Place, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Dick Tracy, Cats, and Best Real Estate Envy movies. So read on for more curated tweets...

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13 days until Oscar nominations... Can Roger Deakins win with a 14th nod?

by Nathaniel R

the great Roger Deakins on set

Is 13 an unlucky number? Not particular with Oscar, no, but Roger Deakins is surely anxious to move beyond it. The 68 year old cinematographer is still hugely in demand and a regular Oscar competitor but he's currently sitting at 13 nominations and STILL has no statues to show for it. Will #14 prove lucky should he be nominated for Blade Runner 2049 this year (as is widely expected)? His nominated film list is just one beautiful astonishment after another: The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Reader, True Grit, Skyfall, Prisoners, Unbroken, Sicario. His filmography also includes films like Thunderheart, The Secret Garden, Barton Fink, and Sid & Nancy. Will he win on March 4th or will someone else steal his thunder yet again at the last moment...

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A "Blade Runner 2049" Teaser is Here!

Chris here. Denis Villeneive has scored his biggest box office hit with Arrival (it's inching close to $100M) but he could score an even bigger hit next year with Blade Runner 2049. The sequel is bound to spur steady curiosity and shrieks of sacrilege from the original's faithful over the next year, but Villeneuve should be the force that unites both factions. And to ease (or maybe exacerbate) those thoughts, we have our first look at the visuals with the just released teaser! We'll save the full YNMS for a more revealing trailer, but I have some thoughts...

• That's a lot of voiceover for a teensy trailer. Uh oh, did they not learn from the original's struggles?
• Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins, reunited and it feels so good.
• Ryan Gosling gives good coat. With all that mood and stoicism, this teaser plays like Only God Forgives but, you know, not terrible.
• We see you on that piano, Ryan. La La Land crossover fanfiction!
• With these mostly dusty hues, it's a relief to know that this might be a decades late sequel that doesn't borrow too much from its original, no?
• Deckard seems to have gone all McMansion while in hiding. Maybe Sean Young is lurking somewhere after all.

What do you think of this first look?