Coco (4/5 Stars)

I wouldn’t know the first thing as to what “Coco”, Pixar’s latest venture, gets right and wrong about the beliefs around Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that centers around veneration of ancestors. All I can say is that, portrayed by Coco, it makes for an ingenious engine for plot. The conceit of “Coco”, and for Dia de los Mueros perhaps, is that upon death, people enter into a new life in a parallel dead realm (there is probably a better word for it than that). In the dead realm, life goes on as usual, except instead of class divisions based on wealth or rank, there are class divisions based on how well one is remembered in the Earth realm. Remembrance in the Earth realm can be both physical as well as mental. A dead person can be remembered by having their photograph placed on a family shrine or can simply exist within the mind of a family member. But if the photograph is not placed on the shrine or the last family member who remembers the dead soul dies or forgets, than the dead soul dies a second death in the alternate realm.

Miguel, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, is a young boy with an interesting family history. His great great grandfather, a musician, became estranged by the family. His great great grandmother swore off music and forbid any of her descendants to remember the great great grandfather. As Miguel’s family celebrates this year’s Dia de los Muertos, the only family member to still remember the great great grandfather is Abuelita, Miguel’s great grandmother, who is very close to dying herself. Thus there is a ticking time clock here, for Miguel to figure out what needs to figure out, to essentially save the second life of his great great grandfather. I have to admit, this is a plot I have not seen before.

The idea that the memory of ancestors keeps them literally alive, albeit in a different place, should be inviting to everyone. The fact that this movie is also very specific about a particular culture presents to the audience something Pixar does extremely well. It is an original story with emotional underpinning that is instantly identifiable. “Coco” is not as funny as other Pixar movies, but it makes up for it by being especially touching. Who, of course, who would not melt a little to see a long lost relative come back to life? And the way Pixar tugs this particular heartstring, through the use of musical elements and cues that weave themselves through the story, is very effective.

All that is lefts is to admit, once again, that Pixar has made a visually striking movie. The Pixar style may seems at times to be a bit foreign to this culture. When I think of movie dominated by bones, I am reminded more of the stop-motion animated style of Tim Burton, but it is not too distracting. I don’t know what details of Dia de los Muertos is got right or wrong, but even there had not been such a culture and this movie was made up whole-cloth, it would have succeeded in making it interesting, important, and vibrant.

Pixar has a tradition of dual directors per film. “Coco” was directed by the Pixar veteran Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 2, Monster’s Inc., Finding Nemo, and Toy Story 3) and a Pixar new-comer Adrian Molina, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Aldrich. I expect it is to Molina’s credit that this story has the level of detail it commands and to Unkrich, the usual Pixar flair and competence.

Rosewater (4/5 Stars)

The hook of this story was all so irresistible. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the many award winning fake news show on Comedy Central, sent a correspondent named Jason Jones to Iran on the even of the 2009 Iranian elections. While there he interviewed a British-Iranian journalist named Maziar Bahari who tried to convince Jason, comedically dressed as a spy, that Iranians were not evil and that Americans and Iranians had plenty in common. I remember seeing that segment in 2009. And then shit went down in Iran. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, rigged the elections and the following street protests went viral. Several months later we find out that Maziar Bahari was jailed without due process after the elections. He was accused of being a spy and provoking civil disorder through the Western media. What was some of the evidence against him? Well, the Daily Show segment that showed him talking to Jason Jones dressed up as a spy. Maziar wrote a book about it titled, “Then They Came for Me.” Jon Stewart offered to help to make it a movie, tried to get other people to do it, and then after finding that people in Hollywood were busy, decided to just write and direct it himself. After almost thirty years in the business, this is Stewart’s directorial debut.

But of course Jon Stewart has enough sense to know this story is not about The Daily Show. That may be the hook and Jason Jones does show up to play himself for about a minute, but this is a story about Maziar Bahari and Iran. The Daily Show’s importance to this story is not exaggerated. It may even be diminished by Stewart’s ever-humble view of his show’s popularity and influence. He is as ever the opposite of the arrogant self-important culture warrior of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a very interesting movie; avant-garde is almost a perfect word for it. I hesitate to use that word because you probably are going to start thinking of black and white French movies, but let me explain. It has a very simple photographic style. The palette of the movie is not unlike a Paul Greengrass movie (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Bourne Ultimatum) so it has a true documentary style feel to its movement and an almost non-existent directorial style. The acting also is simple and direct. Lastly the production value does not add anything more than what you would see in real life. But at the same time it makes rather extraordinary choices in digital effects. For instance, during the 2009 election demonstrations, the movie employs digital twitter art to show that the streets are alive with social media. At another time as Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) walks down the street, the storefront windows start showing memories from his past concurrently with an explanatory voiceover. These are odd show-offy effects movements that have been seemingly dropped out of the sky in what is otherwise a very non show-offy movie. The same goes for the editing style of the movie, which freely employs flashbacks and jump cuts. I’m not saying it did not work because I don’t think they were too disruptive to the tone but they were at least a little. Then again, at other times the avant-garde choices really do work. For instance, in solitary confinement Maziar has several imaginary talks with his father and sister who were also imprisoned for political activism in their time. So John just goes ahead and puts real actors in the jail cell with Maziar and has them talk like they are really there. At another point he decides to play Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” in the jail cell like it is really there. That was sublime. All of this is the effect of having a person who doesn’t really know how to make movies (but really knows how to communicate with an audience in the medium) be at the helm for the first time. The decisions make sense but they also feel like they were dropped from space. This is an odd little movie.

But what ultimately makes the movie worth seeing is the humor and empathy it employs towards its subject, several months of solitary imprisonment and interrogation that borders on torture. You would not think it by looking at it but the title of the movie is a joke. It refers to the cologne that Maziar’s interrogator always wore. Apparently this middle-aged somewhat portly balding tough guy thought he should smell like a rose all the time. Little details like this fill the movie. The start itself owes a bit to Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ That is, Maziar (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) is woken from his sleep by several men including Rosewater (played by Kim Bodnia) and is taken off to prison with no warning or explanation. There is no due process of law. He gets no phone call or lawyer. They make it clear that they will not let him go unless he confesses that he acted in concert with foreign spies. Now here is where Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari make it interesting. Where a normal movie would treat the character of the interrogator as a one dimensional zeolot of Iranian ideology, this movie treats Rosewater as simply a bureaucrat who is just doing his job. In one scene we see him call his wife to let her know when he is getting home. In another he hopes for a promotion if he gets Maziar to confess. In another great scene, Rosewater’s boss comes into the room to show him how to interrogate this particular type of prisoner. Maziar, an educated professional, is a bit above Rosewater’s pay grade. He usually beats up uneducated poor people. Here Rosewater is directed to get a confession by using his head and not his fists. Maziar needs to get on TV and admit his guilty without any obvious signs of torture. Rosewater is not really up to the task and it is kind of sad actually. Especially in a couple funny scenes where Maziar takes advantage of Rosewater’s obviously repressed sexuality. This is a great performance by Kim Bodnia and I hope he is gets an Oscar nomination out of it.

At the same time though, the character of Maziar is taken out of the culture war as well. In one great scene he has a discussion with his father who was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah in the 1950s because he was a devout communist. His father does not want his son to admit guilt and to stay strong. Maziar retorts that he has a wife that is pregnant with his child. Would he deprive them of a husband and father for an ideology? Wasn’t his father’s imprisonment and torture based on the Soviet system of imprisonment and torture? What loyalty does Maziar have to any ideology when almost all of them are headed by total assholes that imprison and torture people? This is a sentiment I’m sure bares influence from Jon Stewart whose show on Comedy Central is guided by the strong insight that although the national dialogue may be controlled by the yelling and shouting of unnecessarily provocative pundits and ideologues, the vast majority of people are preoccupied with their own lives and shit, are willing to cooperate and compromise with those they have differences with to make daily life easier, and share a general hope that the idiots in charge don’t fuck up their lives too much. And Maziar probably agrees with that too. Hey that’s another thing we may have in common with Iranians. 

Babel 11/29/06

I liked this movie and I feel incredibly artsy fartsy saying that. I'm quite sure that if it hadn't been for the fact that I've already seen hundreds of movies, I probably wouldn't have understood this one at all. Having said that I almost didn't understand this movie. It was spoken in six different languages and the subtitles were in Italian. I must have missed half the words and weirdly I think that might have added to my enjoyment of the movie. I just assumed the dialogue was perfect and whatever was happening on the screen was completely motivated. 

Let's see, this movie had three stories. All only distantly connected, the Japanese story hardly connected at all to the other two. We had the Mexican-American story. The American-Morroccan story, and the Japanese story. Six languages, Spanish, English, Morrocan, French, Japanese, Japanese Sign Language. The coolest thing about this movie is that it respects our interest in different cultures. We get great cultural views from a Japanese dance club to a great Mexican wedding. If you can be interested in being a 'fly on the wall' as different kinds of people go about their lives then this movie is for you. If you're expecting something like Crash, which was what this movie was compared to, then you're in for some dissapointment. The storylines run parralel but never intersect. I wanted them to, but then again I liked each of the stories enough that I really didn't care in the end. I finally got why the movie was called Babel half way through. Language barriers.

The only two main actors I recognized were Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Both very good performances. Brad Pitt's characther reminds me alot of George Clooney's charachter in last year's Syriana. They both have beards and find themselves in a Muslim country among other things. He might get a nomination. I don't know. They gave the Oscar to Clooney didn't they.