Word: filmã
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Come Oscar time, nominations for The Incredibles, Disney and Pixar’s latest foray into the CGI world which they created, will likely be relegated to a single category: “Best Animated Feature.” More than the actors or the creative team, the film??s computer-generated content will be the draw for the vast majority of its young audience. No matter how photorealistic the images, how human the voices, for most viewers the movie will primarily be seen as pixels on the screen. But not for Brad Bird...
...it’s there all the same. Take his latest offbeat dramedy, Sideways—a perverse buddy movie in which two aging male friends (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) while away an hour or two competing for the title of most pathetically humiliated. By the film??s end, there is something of redemption for the pair, but there have been ample injuries along the way—and Church’s broken nose pales in comparison to the psychic wounds both suffer. Or consider Election, Payne’s 1999 film, the last third...
Payne brims with heartening examples: low-budget successes like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Lost in Translation, less conventional studio fare like Spiderman 2 (“just a great film??)—even the fact that he was able to make Sideways “with no movie stars” gives him hope...
...strangely more comic than dramatic. While most contemporary dramas (especially biopics) could easily be called tragicomic, with jokes sprinkled here and there to complexify our sympathies with key characters, this film is too funny, creating a dramatic space in which characters are impossible to judge. When the film??s most loathsome characters are simultainiously its most engaging characters, the viewer’s interpretation of the film is split between what the diegesis is attempting to explicitly say and the way these characters actually show on screen...
Takashi Shimizu, director of both the original Japanese release and the American remake, exhibits a deft hand in the film??s opening third, combining Ozu-like pacing and Hitchcockian suspense with images reminiscent of Thomas Struth’s Shinju-ku (Skyscrapers) series. Indeed, Shimizu’s Tokyo (like Struth’s Tokyo) is an infinitely complex urban cityscape where all the disparate, chaotic elements seem to coalesce in a single symbiotic moment...