Films and Feelings

    Travis Knight's Wildwood has already generated above-normal discourse about the merits and application of animation as an artform. "Don't you realize that animation isn't just for KIDS, by Jove!?" (Don't you realize ... lots of us have been saying that for a while now?)  This connects to a much larger conversation about the stigma the artform has held, a conversation that has generally placed the onus on animation--and animators--to prove they can be as good as "real films" and "real filmmakers."     Animation as a form will need sustained support--from more than just the crowd who waited until now to decide that animated movies could be "good, actually." But Wildwood  itself offers other contributions that I imagine will carry the field much further.     Oregonian preteen Prue McKeel ignores her parents' instruction to not take her brother, Mac, outside. When a flock of crows descend and carry her brother off into the w...

    James Gunn promised early on that with his new DC Universe, not everything would be for everybody, but there would be something for everybody.      I have to assume he means he's eventually going to grant us the first proper superhero musical. (No, I still haven't seen "Joker 2.") But until such a time, James Watkins' new take on superheroes and horror with Clayface  is a valid offering just the same.     Rising actor, Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harris), is on top of the world, securing his first Oscar nomination, when he has a fatal night of passion with the girlfriend of a lord in the criminal underworld of Gotham. Matt is punished by having his lovely Hollywood face carved up irreparably. Matt's golden ticket to the front of the camera is ruined, and his reputation is smeared.      Driven to desperation, Matt seeks out a neuroscientist, Caitlyn Corr (Naomie Ackie), investing in an experimental form of therapy that could recover his...

Though I think of myself as putting my heart and soul into this blog, I generally like to keep my offline persona mysterious. This is why I use a pen name and why you’ll never see a picture of my face on this page. But I’ll pull behind the curtain just a little today and share that … I attended my high school reunion not too long ago.           I actually ended up attending this reunion twice simply because the first reunion, our “real reunion,” was planned at sort of the last minute and had rather sparse attendance. And so those of us who made it to that resolved to see if we couldn’t pull off something a little more robust, which we did some months later with much more success. And I honestly didn’t mind going twice over.          I never actively put any distance between myself and my old pals, but I also never really made any effort to hold onto them after graduating beyond liking their posts on...