Films and Feelings

    The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media.      But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth.  I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting.     Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs so...

    The first note I made for this film is that I knew a bunch of cowboys growing up. But I regretfully did not know any who were just so willing to burst into song.      I thought then that I knew what I was getting into with this movie. But I could not anticipate what this story would try to feed me.      The movie sees Amziah King, a good-natured beekeeper, smalltown musician, and all-around good dude, sorting through some business deals as he happens to reunite with his former foster-daughter, Kateri. Crossing paths again allows them to mutually rediscover what they gave to each other as two people who lifted each other up. But when King's entire stock is stolen at the worst possible moment, Kateri gets to step-up and defend what is theirs.      Amziah King is McConaughey at his most endearing. His ability to put the viewer at ease is the film's greatest trick. I've heard some buzz about this being his best performance ever. I'd...

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s 'Aladdin' in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with 'Inside Out 2' and 'Zootopia 2' topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely...