image courtesy of eyeforfilm.co.uk It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite movie. All most people remember about it is the “seeing the world without you in it” alternate reality, though that’s barely any of the film. The real power of the film is the trajectory of George Bailey’s life and how all the pieces lead to the inciting incidents that make Clarence’s arrival so important. As I stumble through Anne Hathaway’s filmography, this film feels like the start of a different care

image courtesy of avclub.com Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is an eleven-year-old Jewish kid growing up in Queens in 1980 who just wants to draw and be friends with Johnny (Johnny David), the Black kid in his class who gets treated way worse by their teacher for the exact same troublemaking. Paul’s grandpa Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) is the one person who actually believes in his art and tries to teach him to notice injustice instead of looking away from it, but after Paul and Johnny

image courtesy of variety.com When I discuss parenting with anyone, my line is typically that is both the greatest and worst thing you will ever do. Raising a child (or two in my case) is incredibly rewarding, especially when you see them learn and grow, taking lessons you've given them and becoming their own little people. But along with that pride and joy comes unending stress, anxiety, and panic that you will ruin your child, your child will become a terrible person (and i

image courtesy of gq-magazine.co.uk Making a good romantic comedy is incredibly difficult - way harder than people give the genre credit for. You need chemistry that actually sparks on screen, a plot that doesn't collapse the second you poke at it, jokes that land without undercutting the emotional stakes, and an ending that feels earned instead of just contractually obligated. Most attempts flame out on at least one of those fronts. Think about how many romcoms lean on a "bi

image courtesy of IMDb.com The best movie twists are not detrimental to the success of the film. But if a movie depends on one that completely dismantles the entire structure of the film, it better be a master stroke and not, say, the entire series is going on inside an autistic child’s head (props to any reader who understands the reference). I knew the twist going into this one, which didn’t help. But, man oh man. Spoilers ahead. Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) a fisherman

Image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com I love Ocean’s Eleven. Probably more than I should. Ocean’s Twelve didn’t do much for me, though I’ve only watched it once. And I still haven’t gotten around to Thirteen — I think I felt too burned by Twelve to bother. That’s a franchise with some steep diminishing returns, which is the mindset I brought into Ocean’s 8. The setup is classic Ocean’s, just recast: Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), fresh out of prison, links up with Lou and asse

Image courtesy of commonsensemedia.org I was in a coma for a couple weeks when I was twenty, after a car accident. My favorite musician did not visit me. But as far as I know, every friend who did visit fell in love during their hospital visits. All of them. Without fail. Because they bonded over shared pain and a mutual love of music. Not sure many PhDs came by, though. At least two that I know of - not in anthropology. Franny (Anne Hathaway) is doing fieldwork in Morocco wh

image courtesy of bbc.co.uk I watched the first few seasons of Downton Abbey before I lost interest. My wife and I are fans of The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’ “American Downton,” partly because it’s filmed in part in the Stockade section of Schenectady, New York, where I work. And while this film doesn’t dive into the upstairs-downstairs themes of that era of manners, it isn’t lost on this viewer how much Jane Austen’s novels have inspired those types of movies and shows. Ja

Image courtesy of mubi.com In 1999, NBC aired a television adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, starring a host of celebrities, like Whoopi Goldberg, Gene Wilder, Christopher Lloyd, and Tina Majorino, the girl who played Deb in Napoleon Dynamite. It won some Emmys and was heralded as a great technical achievement. In my memory, it was very cheesy and, despite using the best CGI available, it looked ridiculous. It couldn’t escape the “network TV movie” quality th

image courtesy of popcrush.com Anne Hathaway's story starts in 2001, when she went from a completely unknown teenager to the star of The Princess Diaries practically overnight since her big screen debut in 2001, she's been one of the biggest stars in all of Hollywood. She spent a few years doing the wholesome teen-star thing before deliberately blowing that image up - 2005's Brokeback Mountain marked her break from teen films, and then 2006 sealed the deal: The Devil Wears Pr

For this project, I dove headlong into non-English animated films, finding some hidden gems and catching up to some blindspots. Here are the films how I would rank them, with links to my reviews. I'd love to hear about others I haven't seen or your thoughts on any of these films. Coming up next in The Tens: The Hathaway Path-a-way, looking at ten selections from Oscar winner Anne Hathaway's filmography. 10. Bubble Bath (1980) Too crass for me; when subversive has no message,

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com/ MacGuffin, per Wikipedia: an object, device, or event necessary to the plot and to the characters’ motivations, yet insignificant or irrelevant in itself. Is the bag of cash here one of those? It kicks the story into motion and everyone wants it, but somewhere along the way it stops mattering. People are simply greedy, and nobody cares who gets hurt or whether there’s any real payoff at the end. In an unnamed industrial city, a low-lev

image courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com This movie rules. It’s a Czechoslovakian film, but the language the characters speak is just gibberish. And it’s amazing. If Rankin and Bass spent an evening guzzling whiskey and taking downers, it might just result in this. The handmade animation is so meticulously done, like an entire world carved into an elaborate cuckoo clock that moves with a rigid perfection. The characters have no names; they don’t say any actual words. But the w

image courtesy of ifccenter.com Satoshi Kon has an unfortunately short filmography - he died of pancreatic cancer at 46. I haven’t seen his TV work or Tokyo Godfathers, but Perfect Blue is a masterpiece. If you want a more in-depth discussion of his work, check out the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David for their series on him. But the work I have seen tells a story of how much more he could’ve done. This film premiered the first year of the Best Animated Feature Osca

image courtesy of mubi.com Conceptually, social media is supposed to be "good" for people. The idea of a utopian society where anyone can be whoever they want without fear of ridicule or persecution, because everyone is supposedly starting from the same level ground. Obviously, that isn't the case, and never has been. I'm an elder millennial, so early social media platforms like AOL Instant Messenger, early Facebook, and MySpace were essentially built for me and my generation

Image courtesy of mubi.com Animator Ralph Bakshi spent the 70s and 80s as animation’s id to Disney’s fledgling superego, hitting theaters during the studio’s weakest creative stretch with raw, adult work Disney wouldn’t touch. Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated animated feature, kicked things off with raunchy countercultural satire, followed by the gritty urban grotesques of Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. He then pivoted to rotoscoped fantasy with Wizards and The Lord of the Rings

Image courtesy of gkids.com First - and I should’ve said this at the beginning of this series - subs over dubs. If you can watch an animated film in its native language, do it. My youngest son watches a lot of anime, but mostly the Westernized stuff you see on Netflix, like Naruto or whatever else. I don’t watch any anime tv shows and haven’t seen a lot of anime movies. I’ve seen most of the big ones - Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, all the Miyazakis if that counts.

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid. So, of course, I watched it all the time. This was when MTV still played mostly music videos, and some of my favorites were the animated ones - music videos that took the song’s central theme and developed an entire story that, at its heart, wasn’t exactly a narrative interpretation of the lyrics, but spring-boarded into something creative and weird. One of the most memorable of these was the song

image courtesy of mubi.com You ever go to a children’s pageant? Fewer events are entered with lower expectations. You just hope it’s cute or quick or, at the very least, nobody starts crying in the middle of it. Every so often, something crazy will happen - some kid has the voice of an angel, some little girl goes viral with an incredible dance number, or, more likely, the show just stays together. This film feels like one of those latter shows. This film came out in 1926. Th

image courtesy of nytimes.com I recently caught up with HBO’s 2020 miniseries The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of the same name (which I have read). I also just began reading It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Needless to say, I was already primed for a “tyranny can happen anywhere” movie. Enter Marjane Satrapi, her graphic novel (the source material for this film), and co-writer/director Vincent Paronnaud. Persepolis follows “Marji” from childhoo