Posted on August 8, 2015 at 8:00 am
New on Netflix: Dinotrux! It’s based on the books by Chris Gall
Dinotrux are huge creatures are half dinosaur, half construction vehicle. Ty Rux is a Tyrannosaurus Trux, and his best friend Revvit is a razor-sharp Reptool. Together they fight to protect their community from the wrecker D-Structs. Episodes will be available on Netflix August 14, 2015.
Posted on August 7, 2015 at 3:26 pm
Dorothy McKim produced one of my favorite of the recent Disney short films, “Get a Horse,” which brought old-time Mickey Mouse into the era of 3D CGI with an eye-popping, with a hilariously intricate choreography that literally jumps out of the screen. She talked to me about the making of the film and the new Blu-Ray release, Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection
“Oh my golly, I love the shorts,” she told me. “I love the whole shorts program that we have here at Disney. We do them for a couple of reasons. We do it to test the director, to give a chance to the director pool, the director talent, and also to test the technology. And, it also allows a filmmaker to tell a short story in a very short amount of time. You got to get a lot of information in within 3-5 minutes, whether you do that through dialogue, through action, and also through the music. There’s such a diverse group of shorts, it just shows the kind of talent that we have here at the studio.” The old-fashioned images and animation in “Get a Horse” are all brand new footage. “Back in 2012, Disney wanted to bring back Mickey Mouse, like ‘Hey, let’s do some Mickey Mouse shorts.’ And it could be for for TV or it could be for the Disney Channel. We had about 30 people come forward with ideas. And what we did is that we culled that down to the top ten and we got those in front of John Lasseter. And what happened was that Lauren MacMullan, the director of “Get a Horse!” was pitching the idea. And we were in a room, and the pitch got to Lauren’s turn and she had one image that was up on the board and she had a black cloth in front of that and she said, ‘I have this idea for a Mickey short, but it’s a theatrical idea, it’s not an idea for TV.’ And she said, ‘I would love to take the hand-drawn characters, classic characters, keep them in black and white, and then they punch through a screen, and when they punch through the screen, they’re in color, and they’re in CG.” And she pulled down the black cloth, and it was an image of the classic characters in black and white, with Mickey’s foot punched through the screen, and his foot was CG and it was in yellow. And John Lasseter said, “I want to make that short.” It was the fastest pitch I have ever seen-—literally no more than ten minutes. It was that simple. And what we did was when we first started working on it, we thought it would be really great if we put it out into the world that we found this old footage and we wanted to build on it. And so we had that story going for us for a while, and then we started thinking, ‘Is this going to work against us?’ And I think it did a little bit with the Academy. It was all brand new footage. We had our own hand-drawn animators who worked on it, along with our CG. It was really great to watch both two groups come together on this short and it was the most fun thing I’ve ever worked on.”
It is not just the look of the characters that goes back to their original cartoons in the 1930’s. It is the way they move as well. “That’s called rubber horse animation,” McKim said. “We had Eric Goldberg, who was our head of animation, and he is just the best historian. He really brought that rubber horse animation that’s got their arms squashed and stretched. We did a lot of research. The lighting that we would use, what we did is we put the whole film through a rough patch, like going through and scratching it and making it look old. You know, back when they shot those shorts, they would do them in a little studio, and the reason why it looks like the lights are flickering was just that, their lights were flickering. We put a whole rough patch onto it and made it look like there were scratches on there and the lights were flickering. With the sound, we wanted that “Turkey in the Straw” that you hear in the beginning. We wanted the original one; we couldn’t get it because the people that made it, nobody is alive anymore, so we couldn’t find it. So we recreated it. Even with the sounds of an ocarina. Like little tiny whistles, right? We found an ocarina player and he came and put that in. So we really tried to make it authentic. As far as the sound effects, we actually used a lot of the original sound effects. We have an entire library that Jimmy McDonald built back in the day. They kept it, it’s with Walt Disney Imagineering, and we went over and actually used some of the instruments that Walt used. So it was all authentic.”
The most authentic sound in “Get a Horse” is Mickey’s voice, which was taken from recordings of the original actor who provided Mickey’s voice — Walt Disney himself. “It was really important for us to use Walt’s voice. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice. We had a screening for John Lasseter while we were making the work-in-progress, and Lauren and I were so excited. We pulled all of Walt’s dialogue from different shorts and we put it in into the short, and we’re so happy. And he’s like, ‘Oh wow, that’s so great! We’re going to use Walt, we’re not going to bring anyone else in, we’re going to use him.’ So we screened it, and John Lasseter, he’s brilliant, goes, ‘That was Walt except for the word red.’ And we kind of looked at it and we thought, ‘Shoot, we got caught.’ That one word, red, we couldn’t find anywhere in the library. We searched high and low. It took forever, about six months, to see if we could find the word red, and John found it. And we were like, ‘Oh man, you caught us,’ and he said, “’I could tell that wasn’t Walt,’ and we thought, ‘Man, he’s good.’ We really wanted to keep true to what our journey was. So we found a really great sound designer who worked with our editorial team, and they found three syllables that Walt said, an Rr, an Eh, and a Duh, to form the word red, and that’s three syllables from three different words that he used. They formed it and we put it together and they made it seamless. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice.”
McKim said that what Mickey and Disney had in common was “taking risks. He took risks. Walt, when he did his shorts and used Mickey. And Mickey took risks. Some of those old shorts, “Plane Crazy,” jumping out of a plane, you know, he wasn’t afraid. And I think that’s what we wanted to keep true to what Walt was doing with Mickey, and I felt like we really accomplished that in ‘Get a Horse!’”
Posted on August 7, 2015 at 8:00 am
Posted on August 6, 2015 at 5:48 pm
“Aren’t you allowed to have two dreams?”
The person asking the question is Ricki (as she is now known), played by Meryl Streep. She has just accused her ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline), of not supporting her dream of playing rock music. And he has responded, “I thought we were your dream.” Years ago, Ricki was a suburban housewife named Linda, with a husband and three young children. She left them to be a rocker, and now fronts a cover band called Ricki and the Flash, performing at night for a small group of loyal fans at a bar in Tarzana, California. During the day, she is a cashier for a warehouse store. Neither job pays well; she is about to declare bankruptcy.
But first she has to go home. Her daughter Julie (Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer) is having a breakdown because her husband is in love with someone else. Pete’s wife is away, caring for her ailing father. So Pete calls Ricki and asks her to come home and help him take care of Julie. She arrives, with her guitar and dressed in 70’s rocker drag, at his gracious gated community and enters Pete’s grand and elegant home, where everything seems effortlessly comfortable. And where Ricki, with her stringy braids and kohl-rimmed eyes and tattoo is very out of place.
Screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) gives Ricki some unexpected characteristics and of course Streep brings her to life. Linda/Ricki loves to perform and loves the look and shock-the-bourgeois attitude of a rock musician, even at her other job. But she is not the stereotype anarchist/liberal. The tattoo on her back is a proudly waving American flag and she calls out “Support the troops!” from the stage. We learn a little bit more about where that comes from in one of the movie’s highlights, when Pete’s second wife, played with depth, heart, and resolve by Broadway star Audra McDonald, returns home and the two women have a conversation about what is best for Julie. It is couched in the kind of “we don’t have to like each other but we need to get along” terms of two very different women who share the experience of having been married to the same man and, in their own ways, mothering his children.
Streep clearly loves being back with her “Sophie’s Choice” co-star, and she and Kline create a palpable sense of history with each other in some touching moments, especially when they join forces to confront Julie’s ex. And it is a joy to see Steep and Gummer together. Their trust and connection is so solid that it gives them both the freedom to make their relationship complicated and painful, wanting so much from one another, and still wanting to give to one another, too.
Rick Springfield (yes, that Rick Springfield) is excellent as lead guitar of The Flash and sometime boyfriend for Ricki.
The film is awkwardly constructed, and the ending, while sweet, is abrupt and unrealistic. It makes sense for the storyline that Ricki is not a great singer or musician, with a dozen cover songs on the soundtrack, director Jonathan Demme’s commitment to using the live performances without any studio sweetening is questionable. But the musical performances are joyous, tender-hearted and true. And it explores essential questions: How do we love the people who cannot love us back the way we want them to? What do you do when your dreams do not fit together? What will you give up for someone you love?
Parents should know that this movie includes tense and unhappy family confrontations, discussion of a suicide attempt, strong language, drinking, marijuana, and sexual references and situations.
Family discussion: Can you have two dreams? How does Pete feel about Ricki? How can you tell? Why does Ricki hurt Greg?
If you like this, try: “The Rocker” and “Juno” and see Streep and Kline together in “Sophie’s Choice”
Posted on August 6, 2015 at 5:20 pm
B+| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for language including some sexual references |
| Profanity: | Very strong and crude language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking and smoking |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Reference to suicide |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | August 7, 2015 |
| Date Released to DVD: | November 9, 2015 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B0153C71X8 |
Form illuminates content in this imperfect but compelling film based on the real-life audiotapes of a four day interview of author David Foster Wallace in the final days of his book tour for Infinite Jest
The subject of the interview is David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), whose writing was densely and intricately layered. The journalist doing the interview is David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), also a recently published novelist, though his book attracted no attention.
Lipsky persuades his editor at Rolling Stone that Wallace, whose book is a critical and commercial hit, would be a good subject for the magazine. And Wallace, now in the final days of his book tour, agrees to let Lipsky come along. Their wide-ranging (in geography and subject matter) conversation over four days reflects a constantly shifting set of expectations, assumptions, and goals for a construct so essentially artificial it hardly makes sense to call it a relationship. And yet, Lipsky literally moves into Wallace’s man cave of a home and for that time there is a simulation of some kind of friendship between them, at times even a sense that they could be friends, which they both seem to find unsettling and appealing. Wallace’s writing had a fractured, self-referential quality, filled with asides and meta-commentary. So it makes sense that the film has some of those qualities as well. If there were such a thing as cinematic footnotes, they’d be here. Instead, the context itself provides the footnotes. Wallace, whose great subject was American consumer culture, ends up in Minnesota’s Mall of America, eating in the food court as the indoor roller coaster zooms by.
Janet Malcolm famously described a journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” We see some evidence of that in “The End of the Tour” but there are several other layers as well. The two men are about the same age, both writers, one lauded as one of the great novelists of his generation, one who released a book that got no attention at all. So Lipsky wants more from Wallace than a story. He is looking for guidance, validation, understanding. He acknowledges that he wants what Wallace has. At the same time he wants to understand why Wallace does not seem to want it. The two men are both relentless, even obsessive, self-observers. As Lipsky is recognizing the gulf between the kind of superficial details that make up a celebrity profile and what it means to actually know someone, he tries to find some kind of foothold. He wants to prove himself to his editor (in real life, the article was never published). And he wants to prove to himself that he is somehow in the same species as Wallace. There is a Mozart/Salieri element here as Lipsky’s greatest talent may be his ability to appreciate Wallace’s genius.
The commitment to verisimilitude is claustrophobic at times because almost all of the dialogue is taken directly from the tapes. An opening scene where Lipsky first hears of Wallace’s suicide and digs out the tapes adds nothing to the story. And yet again this is a case of form following content, as the near-obsessive, even fetishishtic, constricted particularity of the conversation is the kind of thing one of Wallace’s characters might do. The most telling moment in the film is when Wallace admits that he does not mind being profiled in Rolling Stone. He just does not want the profile to make it appear that he wants to be profiled in Rolling Stone. That is exactly the kind of fractured, Schroedinger-ian attraction/repulsion Wallace felt to the themes of his work: the gulf between presentation and reality, between observing and being, between attention and distraction. As Lipsky knew, it is a privilege to be a part of that conversation, even as we must be aware that it is the kind of entertainment — even at this ambitious level — Wallace would both want and not want to see.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, sexual references, drinking, and smoking.
Family discussion: Why did Wallace agree to the interview? Why did he get angry with Lipsky?
If you like this, try: the books by David Foster Wallace and “My Dinner with Andre” and listen to the excellent interview with David Lipsky on the podcast, “The Moment“
