REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.

There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio, turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.

The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?

But miracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador of Uh-Earth. Elio will do anything to certify his place here. And so, when it becomes clear that the only thing he can do is stop the war-mongering alien lord, Grigon, from launching an attack, he goes up to bat. This he does hoping to stop an intergalactic war: he wasn't counting on finding his first real friend.

The alien world is a fluid, vibrant, crystalline paradise. The filmmaking itself pays some delightful homage to the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Alien, but the designs of the actual extraterrestrials derive from no obvious earthly source. There's a bit of sea-slug, a bit of toothy caterpillar, a bit of artisan walnut sculpture, etc. these all seem to have sprung directly from the minds of this movie and this team. This gives the audience the chance to imagine that they really are the first to discover this corner of the universe.

It's sometimes said that good voice acting does not draw attention to the talent behind the mic: I don't know if that's always true. I'll tip a hat at the young newcomers, Yonas Kibreab and Remy Edgerly, but I was also absolutely beside myself recognizing such talent as Jameela Jamil, Brad Garret, and Brendan Hunt. There's something really nice about realizing that even established artists will absolutely not take for granted the opportunity to be visually reincarnated as a Pixar space-fuzzy.

Still, I'll give the golden medal to Zoe Saldaña as Olga, Elio's aunt. Her character is disadvantaged by not being as colorful as Elio's alien cohorts, but Saldaña brings such delicacy and personality to the position that she wrestles the spotlight from more visually stimulating puppets--no small feat for a character who herself has a hard time articulating emotions. This is "Wizard of Oz" where Auntie Em stands toe-to-toe with the lion and the scarecrow.

If there's one note to be made ... the film's opening is admittedly a little overstuffed. The movie puts us through a few drills before flinging us to the far reaches of the galaxy, and you start to wonder if this is how the whole movie is going to be.

Good news: it isn't. A little less than halfway through, you can recognize the rhythm the movie sets during that cold opening, and the film spends the rest of the time building variations and progressions on the theme carved out early on. Once the instruments are all set, the orchestra really comes together.

Movies like Elio these days are a bitter-sweet pill. When a movie like this overcomes the odds (this project saw a massive creative overhaul during production--watch the first teaser from 2023 and then watch the more recent trailer from this spring) and sticks the landing, its ultimate fate is still only to be shunted to second-tier priority next to projects that already come with their hooks pre-sunk into the cultural consciousness.

And it is clear by now that this sort of clout always derives from the franchise, not artist or even the studio. (Imagine supplying such master works as Monsters Inc. or Ratatouille and that still not being enough to earn the trust of theater patrons ...)

I must confess I haven't actually seen the new How to Train Your Dragon remake yet. People tell me it's better than I think it will be, whatever that's worth. I'm genuinely not in a position to tell at this time. But it's the equation as a whole that poses the problem.

"Not as bad as we thought" will always carry a lot further for a movie like the "Dragon" remake than it ever will for a movie like Elio. Critics need to be twice as aggressive to sway a fraction of viewers to see untested material like this.

And what critic is going to be crazy enough to sign their name to a cartoon?

It's easy for a fellow like me to gripe about the state of the union, as many in the film world have. But even I can forget that the film world has also always been full of surprises, and it has always turned on the most peculiar of points. Anyway, the story of Elio is the story of one kid being so convinced that he is so idiosyncratic and alone that he imagines he has to be extracted from his space to find someone who wants him, only to realize that his network of love literally stretches across the stars.

In that spirit, maybe we can keep our eyes open too.

--The Professor

Comments

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century With the development of the inter...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone. But the movie has a system error t...

My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues. My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend. I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought. Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to ...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog