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#Mychael Danna
maeganbobaegan · 6 months
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whatjaswatched · 2 months
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Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
I finished the book today.
It took me weeks to get through the first 6 chapters, and then less than 24 hours to finish the rest of the book.
I immediately followed the book with the film. I do not recommend doing this.
The film was fine. I’m not sure about the casting decisions. I’m not sure about the editing. I’m not sure about their subtle remix of the story. But the film was (objectively) stunning.
I think it’s just too hard to follow your own interpretation of a book so quickly with the film. I’ll have to remember not to do that again in future.
It can’t have been an easy story to translate into film, so, for me, 3/5.
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genevieveetguy · 2 years
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For the prey to live the predator must sometimes die.
Where the Crawdads Sing, Olivia Newman (2022)
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loveothislife · 1 year
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Academy Conversations: On the Basis of Sex (December 8, 2018)
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tabethawithane · 1 year
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no but why is surf’s up’s score top tier?
Mychael Danna did not have to go this hard for a mockumentary about surfing penguins.
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dweemeister · 1 year
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My Father’s Dragon (2022)
Kilkenny, Ireland-based Cartoon Saloon has now released its last two films in collaboration with companies more interested in maintaining their streaming services than granting a significant theatrical release. Wolfwalkers (2020), a production alongside Apple TV+, was an excellent addition to the studio’s Irish folklore triptych, and understandably few theaters showed it due to COVID-19 pandemic closures. Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon is a Netflix feature, and this is her first directorial effort since The Breadwinner (2017). With a similarly nominal theatrical release, My Father’s Dragon also represents another departure from all of Cartoon Saloon’s feature films thus far: it is specifically for a younger audience. I dislike the prevalent conflation of animated filmmaking as children’s entertainment (whether by those who write about films or filmmakers themselves), but this is an adaptation of Ruth Stiles Gannett’s book of the same name (itself a runner-up for the Newbery Medal, which honors American children’s literature).
My Father’s Dragon is visually striking, although it contains some of Cartoon Saloon’s most simplistic character design yet. But what makes this the studio’s most prosaic work yet are its tonal inconsistencies, noticeably modern sense of humor, and a conventional resolution to the central drama.
Elmer Elevator (Jacob Tremblay) and mother Dela (Golshifteh Farahani) move to a big city when their small-town candy store forecloses in difficult economic times. Money is short, and a distant Dela spends much of her time looking for stable work in order to help open a new store. Soon, Elmer encounters a talking cat (Whoopi Goldberg), who suggests that he might travel to faraway Wild Island to kidnap the lone dragon that lives there, and use the dragon for entertainment and exhibition purposes. With help from Soda the Whale (Judy Greer) and Saiwa the Gorilla (Ian McShane), Elmer travels to Wild Island and tracks down the dragon. The situation on Wild Island is more perilous than first impressions suggest, as Elmer befriends the young and immature dragon, Boris (Gaten Matarazzo) in order to address the situation.
All the animals on Wild Island are anything but nightmare-inducing, so younger viewers will probably be remarking how cute or cool the primates (Chris O’Dowd and Jackie Earle Haley), the rhino (Dianne Wiest), the crocodile (Alan Cumming), and the tigers (Leighton Meester and Spence Moore II) appear.
We do not see much of Dela after the opening minutes of the film, but her and Elmer’s character designs are a development from what viewers saw in The Breadwinner as opposed to Cartoon Saloon’s Irish folklore triptych. The oval faces and oftentimes half crescent/quasi-crescent eyes of the two human characters (and, strangely enough, Boris) in My Father’s Dragon are not quite enough to evoke responses that seem emotional enough for the moment. Acting teachers will say – and this is true for animated characters as well – that emotion typically precipitates an action (not the inverse of this). The degree of that action is up to the actor or, in this case, the animator. Too often, the human and the animal characters – in moments of distress, peril, and relief – are too still when expressing themselves. Frowns, tears, and anguished shouting convey only so much; through bodily movement and facial expressions do films, animated or otherwise, provoke an emotional response from a viewer. Twomey’s animators closely replicate Boris from how he appeared in Gannett’s book. But in that replication, they produce an inelastic character design that lends humor and a sense of fun, but largely incapable of handling pathos – which invariably harms the film’s closing act.
Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon lies somewhere between a picture book for the youngest children and a chapter book for students in the middle of primary school. At just over eighty pages, it is an abbreviated plot that sees Elmer encounter the dragon only in the final ten pages. The episodic nature of Gannett’s book makes the book difficult to adapt for screenwriter Meg LeFauve (2015’s Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur). LeFauve elects to understandably introduce Boris much earlier in the narrative and to introduce a catastrophic crisis to Wild Island that frames most of Elmer’s time there. Without spoiling much, such a calamity is nowhere to be found in Gannett’s original work, and one detects the influence of the interchangeable, humanity-threatening stakes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Was this sense of world-ending danger necessary? If one is targeting the audience that would also read My Father’s Dragon, the film’s climax is much too intense for them. Gannett’s book is defined by episodic, child-friendly peril from the animals (i.e., hungry carnivores that have peculiar quirks and can be reasoned with) and not existential stakes. Converting My Father’s Dragon away from an episodic narrative might be the primary narrative concern for most, but the counter to this is that LeFauve’s adapted screenplay dispenses with Gannett’s gentle wit that can delight those of any age.
Thus, Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon can be a clamorous work that shows none of the patience – for its characters and viewers – of any of Cartoon Saloon’s previous work. Despite some impressive backgrounds (the most polished ever seen in the studio’s work) and wonderful color palette, no amount of visual mastery can cover up a screenplay that is trying too much to draw out laughs from Boris’ emotional immaturity. This writing tactic – in which modern screenwriters attempt to placate supposedly gratification-hungry viewers with one garrulous punchline-spewing character – is something I associate with the major American animation studios.
Another characteristic of My Father’s Dragon that seems more characteristic to its mainstream American peers is the presence of an all-star voice cast that does little to no modification of their typical vocal inflections while recording for the film. It is distracting to hear Whoopi Goldberg, Dianne Wiest, Rita Moreno (as the Elevators’ landlord), and Matarazzo (who essentially plays a character not too far removed from his character of Dustin in Stranger Things) acquit themselves in this manner. Too little thought has gone into how can they best voice their characters, given their characters’ appearances and the situations of the moment. Are these developments – the hyperactive and comedy-seeking writing, merely adequate voice acting, and declarations about courage and the Power of Friendship – indicative of Netflix’s influence over Cartoon Saloon’s approach to this adaptation of My Father’s Dragon? Or is it a sign of things to come for the Irish studio?
Whatever the case, this is a disappointing fifth effort from Cartoon Saloon over the last thirteen years. Given the standards of their previous work, the studio deserves mercy from further barbs from yours truly. The missteps seen in My Father’s Dragon pale in comparison to some of the work that the likes of Disney, DreamWorks, and especially Illumination have offered in recent years, The tenor of Cartoon Saloon’s upcoming work appears, at least for the new future, to be similar to that seen in My Father’s Dragon. Up next for the studio is a feature film treatment for their children’s television series Puffin Rock (on Netflix in the U.S.) and Louise Bagnall’s directorial feature debut in Julián (adapted from the picture book Julián is a Mermaid by Jessica Love; Bagnall previously directed the Academy Award-nominated short film Late Afternoon for Cartoon Saloon).
As for Nora Twomey – one of the co-founders of Cartoon Saloon alongside Tomm Moore and Paul Young – she remains a figure in animated cinema to keep an eye out for. The co-director for The Secret of Kells (2009) and sole director on The Breadwinner has shown her ability to guide projects along with emotionally and thematically nuanced narratives and stunning visual splendor. And though My Father’s Dragon represents the first miscue on the former element, Cartoon Saloon’s animation remains a visual balm in an industry that, at least among those that financially dominate animated filmmaking, is as far away from hand-drawn work as it ever has been.
My rating: 6.5/10
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL). Half-points are always rounded down.
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
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bkenber · 2 years
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'Where The Crawdads Sing' Doesn't Dig Deep Enough into the Marsh
‘Where The Crawdads Sing’ Doesn’t Dig Deep Enough into the Marsh
After watching “Where the Crawdads Sing,” I immediately went out and purchased a copy of Delia Owens’ novel upon which it is based. Judging from the opening narration in which the main character of Catherine “Kya” Clark tells the audience how “marsh is not swamp” but instead is “a space of light where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky,” this cinematic adaptation looked to defy…
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innervoiceart · 2 years
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"The opening music of The Ice Storm is what I find most captivating about the film. It creates a unique atmosphere and sets the tone for the entire movie. The music is solemn, haunting, contemplative, and otherworldly, which is in contrast to the setting of the film. Typically, a chilly drama about a New England WASP family would include music with piano, cello, and harp. However, Mychael Danna's score is different. He has used woodwinds and percussion, including the Indonesian Gamelan and Native American flute instruments. The first few notes of the haunting flute are unforgettable, and it is one of the film's most memorable elements."
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ancestorsalive · 5 months
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Loch Etive | A Celtic Tale | Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna
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minionfan1024 · 6 months
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Happy 65th Birthday to Mychael Danna!
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differenthead · 8 months
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Volume 260
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0:00:00 — "Many Miles" (Edit) by Mars Lasar (1992)
0:01:10 — "Pastorale" by Erik Wøllo (1988)
0:05:18 — "Voices III" by Jan Pulsford (1986)
0:06:10 — "Hot Air" (Edit) by Mkwaju Ensemble (1981)
0:07:03 — DJ
0:13:41 — "The Forgotten Legend" by Warren Bennett (1989)
0:24:50 — "The Cornfield" by Brian Bennett (1982)
0:28:38 — "Memory Image" by Claude Larson (1986)
0:31:52 — "And Evening Falls" by Tim Story (1991)
0:33:58 — "Night Sky" by Richard Grassby-Lewis (1995)
0:35:17 — "Deep Blue Sea" by Sven Torstenson (1984)
0:38:06 — "To the Land Beneath the Waves" (Edit) by Mychael Danna & Tim Clément (1986)
0:46:11 — "Aquamarine" (Edit) by Robert Slap (1989)
0:52:36 — "Excerpt from Sacred Space Music Vol. II" (Edit) by Constance Demby (1984)
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ardasssha · 11 months
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Egoyan x Danna - my newfound love. Each on their own - great, but the two of them together - truly and madly soul twisting, cathartic and heartbreaking in a good way. Exotica is a dark labyrinth of interconnected human tragedies. Its plot is heightened by the mysticality and dark sensuality sounds of the same level mainly tooped with Indian lush ambiency, flute and hurdy-gurdy instruments. Find out for yourself..
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genevieveetguy · 7 months
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. Do you want me to date him, or "date" him?
No Hard Feelings, Gene Stupnitsky (2023)
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pablolf · 1 year
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Pi's Lullaby
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misslubaluft · 1 year
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One More Colour (Sam Dent Band Version)
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