![]() ![]() this spring, so it will take eggier Oscar egg heads than mine to determine whether it’s eligible for Best Foreign Film. The best foreign film I’ve seen this year, Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly from Iran, was actually made back in 2009 even though it finally was released in the U.S. If you care about the costume category, then Cinderella might surprise some folks. I thought that both Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart were mesmerizing in The Clouds of Sils Maria and should be part of the Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress conversation when we finally get around to having it. I thought Xavier Dolan’s gut-wrenching French-Canadian domestic drama Mommy was fantastic, but realistically, it doesn’t have a chance. I think the best it will get is a bunch of technical awards-though I’d love to see Charlize Theron get nominated for her performance as Imperator Furiosa. I know there are a lot of people that are praying for Mad Max: Fury Road to become an outside-of-the-box Best Picture nominee, but I don’t think that will happen. It’s so clever and touching and beautifully made that I think the film stands a very serious chance of being not only a shoe-in for Best Animated Film, but also Best Picture nomination like Up and Toy Story 3. Of the film’s that have already opened, the only probable Best Picture contender I’ve seen (and I’ve seen almost everything that’s been released) is Inside Out. ![]() And because no summer is complete without at least one below-the-radar French import, why not check out Thomas Lilti’s Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor? It’s a cold-eyed but compassionate portrait of a pair of first-year Parisian doctors making snap life-or-death decisions in the E.R. Clocking in at a svelte 84 minutes, it’s the kind of film that you don’t have to be a fan of westerns to enjoy. I’m also thinking about director John Maclean’s surreal New Zealand-shot anti-western, Slow West, starring Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Or Patrick Brice’s riotous adult sex comedy, The Overnight, starring Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling, and Jason Schwartzman, who’s quickly turning into the rare actor that you should really seek out in anything. I’m thinking particularly of movies like Rick Famuyiwa’s Sundance sensation, Dope, which channels the nostalgic joy of old-school hip-hop into a modern-day inner-city caper that has both smarts and a giddy “sometimes you gotta say WTF” Risky Business vibe. ![]() But I’d argue that when it comes to which film casts the longer shadow in terms of narrative influence, it’s Aladdin, hands down. The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were the blockbusters that revitalized Disney, it’s true. As wonderful and beautiful and seminal as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were, it was Robin Williams’ antic, pop-culture-riffing Genie who really invented that one-for-the-kids/one-for-the-adults joke formula that has become the contemporary blueprint of just about every animated film, whether it’s created by Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, you name it, ever since. So why did I say in my Inside Out review that the Second Golden Age began with Aladdin? Well, if you go back and read the context of what I wrote, the point I was trying to make is that the new Amy Poehler/Pixar flick is the heir to Aladdin in the sense that it is a children’s film that works on two levels: as a candy-colored kiddie entertainment and as a more sophisticated joke delivery system for the grown-ups in the audience. Disney was firing on all pistons at this point. (It lost to the decidedly kid-unfriendly The Silence of the Lambs). Next came 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, which not only cleaned up commercially, it was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar-the first animated film to ever be so honored. That quickly led to The Little Mermaid in 1989 (the studio had actually been developing the project as far back as the 1930s). In 1988, the studio collaborated with producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis to make the live-action hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit-one of my favorite movies which also became a huge box-office success, reigniting the public’s taste for ‘toons. Not only did they dust off the gems in their library and re-release them on home video for a new generation to discover and embrace, they also invested in creating new classics. ![]() In the early ‘80s, the top brass at Disney changed, bringing in Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who recognized the potential in the studio’s glorious past, broke out the defibrillator, and shocked new life into the flat-lining genre. ![]()
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