in slate annual movie clubAs we head into 2022, film critic Dana Stevens emails fellow critics like Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loaiza, and David Sims about a year of cinema. read the first entry here.
club kids,
I’ve always been a last-minute traveler looking to extend my return ticket by a day. There is one museum and cafe I would love to try with local friends before catching my flight back home. That’s how this year’s movie club ends, and Mikata plays the role of a local friend.Couldn’t bilge and I threw the hash whale Just for a little reward? (For the suicidal loner withdraw, I could riff on how Brendan Fraser’s doomed Charlie keeps doorbell-ringing visitor traffic impressively brisk. . saturday night liveland sharks do not stop by the phone. )
This week we all touched on one common truth from different angles. The way new films are published, discovered and discussed has changed abruptly and irrevocably in a very short period of time. Getting together for a round table like this is much more fun and meaningful. On my way out of the theater, on my way down the escalator to the lobby, on my way to the parking lot and train, I was picking movies piecemeal. This year, I watched movies as often as I did when I wasn’t home, but before I realized I was in front of someone else I wanted to watch and take the time to chew on the movies. I remember sitting there for weeks, if not months. .
Maybe that’s why my only memory of this year’s movies is the one I saw with my best friend side by side at the cinema. It’s the same movie that Mrs. Alice loved so much. Seashell Marcel wearing shoes, Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate’s ingenious stop-motion animation about an intelligent 1-inch-tall Chotchike that lives in a hidden corner of a human-sized house. Marcel, a character that Slate and Fleischer Camp created together as her marital joke in 2010, has since become a viral YouTube sensation for her. As longtime Jenny Slate fans with vague memories of the original Marcel video, my friend and I were intrigued, albeit dubious, by the creator’s idea. Full feature. We were sure we saw not only what was likely to be one of our favorite movies of the year (it was only June), but an unexpected and profound meditation on loneliness. , divorce, dementia, exile, grief.
Marcel the Shell It has the courage of its convictions: with the naive candor of its protagonists, it trusts its viewers to accept the world’s rules.Pink doll shoes can make his dream of being a guest come true 60 minutes. Full of wonderful passages of visual whimsy, Marcel the Shell It’s not just about being lucky or looking cute. It feels like a film born out of a spirit of playfulness and freedom that’s hard to maintain (although the logistics of pairing lightly digitized stop-motion miniature animation with live actors must have been a real bitch. is not). Either way, that was the spirit that the movie got through to my friends and me.
Even after our post-show conversation, we continued texting about the film for the next few days, strangely inspired by the struggles of the fictional anthropomorphic Shell, and never thought we’d be so involved in the end. Marcel, in a way, left us with a desire to be better people. We want to be more lively and attentive as critics, more risk-takers as writers, and more kind and open to the world around us as family and friends. I hope I’m not being too naive and sincere in closing by declaring That’s when it comes to movies, and (to quote the best New Year’s Eve movie of all time) otherwise, I hope we can all start the new year off right. wise.
Skiing on a man’s toenail,
Dana
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