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EMOTIONAL VAMPIRES, BUT IN A GOOD WAY
Aug. 15th, 2015 11:21 amI haven’t managed to get to the cinemas much this year for a variety of reasons. But I did make it at least twice since the last time I posted something in this category.
Inside Out
Odds are you’ll be sick of hearing about this film before the year is out, but for once the hype is justified – at least to me.
By now you know the premise – five anthropomorphic emotions run the control room inside the head of 11-year-old Riley, with Joy the primary leader. When Riley’s family moves to San Francisco, Sadness starts taking over. After Joy and Sadness – along with Riley’s core memories – are accidentally dumped into her long-term memory, they must find their way back to HQ through Riley’s mind before she experiences an emotional breakdown and loses her personality.
This is easily the most inventive and creative film Pixar has done in years, and the most layered and complex film they’ve done it their entire history. Directors Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen do a great job of distilling complex psychological concepts and distilling them into a simplified but clever story and a weird but recognizable metaphoric landscape. And sure, it’s a little heavy on the emo – the main characters are emotions, after all – but it’s never really forced or overdone, and it works thanks to a great voiceover cast that really sells the characters.
After six years of slipping into franchise retreads and pedestrian princess films (i.e. Brave – good film, but didn’t raise the bar the way I’ve come to expect Pixar films to do), it’s good to see Pixar back on form and proving it's possible to make smart, creative films and still be successful.
What We Do In The Shadows
Mockumentary from Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement (based on a short film they did in 2006) that’s basically The Real World with vampires, only it’s a comedy.
Rooted in the premise that a New Zealand film crew was granted access to the super-secret Unholy Masquerade, the film focuses on four vampire roommates who are somewhat out of touch with the modern world. That changes after they turn would-be victim Nick into a vampire, after which Nick gets them up to speed on things like The Internet while they teach him (not entirely successfully) about being a vampire. There are arguments over dishes, attempts to get invited into nightclubs, batfights and encounters with responsible werewolves.
I confess I’m not a big fan of mockumentaries, if only because it’s an overdone format. But this is rather well done. The improvised humor doesn’t always work for me, but there are a lot of genuinely funny scenes. And they have a lot of fun with the standard vampire tropes (lack of reflection, turning into bats, requiring to be invited into a building, etc) without really mocking the genre as a whole. In fact, it’s one of the better vampire films to come out in awhile.
FUN FACT: Here in HK, they actually went to the trouble of hiring local voiceover actors to do a dubbed Cantonese version.
Behold.
This is unusual – they typically only do that for animated films. Evidently they thought this would be a big enough film in HK that they thought it was worth the expense of dubbing.
Bite me,
This is dF
Inside Out
Odds are you’ll be sick of hearing about this film before the year is out, but for once the hype is justified – at least to me.
By now you know the premise – five anthropomorphic emotions run the control room inside the head of 11-year-old Riley, with Joy the primary leader. When Riley’s family moves to San Francisco, Sadness starts taking over. After Joy and Sadness – along with Riley’s core memories – are accidentally dumped into her long-term memory, they must find their way back to HQ through Riley’s mind before she experiences an emotional breakdown and loses her personality.
This is easily the most inventive and creative film Pixar has done in years, and the most layered and complex film they’ve done it their entire history. Directors Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen do a great job of distilling complex psychological concepts and distilling them into a simplified but clever story and a weird but recognizable metaphoric landscape. And sure, it’s a little heavy on the emo – the main characters are emotions, after all – but it’s never really forced or overdone, and it works thanks to a great voiceover cast that really sells the characters.
After six years of slipping into franchise retreads and pedestrian princess films (i.e. Brave – good film, but didn’t raise the bar the way I’ve come to expect Pixar films to do), it’s good to see Pixar back on form and proving it's possible to make smart, creative films and still be successful.
What We Do In The Shadows
Mockumentary from Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement (based on a short film they did in 2006) that’s basically The Real World with vampires, only it’s a comedy.
Rooted in the premise that a New Zealand film crew was granted access to the super-secret Unholy Masquerade, the film focuses on four vampire roommates who are somewhat out of touch with the modern world. That changes after they turn would-be victim Nick into a vampire, after which Nick gets them up to speed on things like The Internet while they teach him (not entirely successfully) about being a vampire. There are arguments over dishes, attempts to get invited into nightclubs, batfights and encounters with responsible werewolves.
I confess I’m not a big fan of mockumentaries, if only because it’s an overdone format. But this is rather well done. The improvised humor doesn’t always work for me, but there are a lot of genuinely funny scenes. And they have a lot of fun with the standard vampire tropes (lack of reflection, turning into bats, requiring to be invited into a building, etc) without really mocking the genre as a whole. In fact, it’s one of the better vampire films to come out in awhile.
FUN FACT: Here in HK, they actually went to the trouble of hiring local voiceover actors to do a dubbed Cantonese version.
Behold.
This is unusual – they typically only do that for animated films. Evidently they thought this would be a big enough film in HK that they thought it was worth the expense of dubbing.
Bite me,
This is dF
