Screening Room: ‘Anomalisa’

Anomalisa_posterA bleak, Up in the Air-like story about a depressed businessman’s wanderings through an anonymous American heartland, the stop-motion animated film Anomalisa is the newest boundary-blurrer from Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It’ll be the one that anti-Pixar Grinches in the Academy will be voting for in the animation category against the Inside Out majority.

Anomalisa opens in limited release this week and wider in January. My review is at PopMatters:

In today’s America, you must have money for your disaffection to be interesting. At least this is the case in Charlie Kaufman’s downbeat stop-motion animation film, Anomalisa. Like some slim and semi-acclaimed allegorical novel recently translated into English, it’s a story about a man alone in a strange city having dreamlike encounters while wrestling with his inner demons. Along the way, he meets a variety of people lower down the socioeconomic ladder than him, and treats them terribly…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘The Spectacular Now’

Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller cuddle up in 'The Spectacular Now'.
Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller cuddle up in ‘The Spectacular Now’.

spectacular_now-posterThe new teen romantic melodrama from the writers of 500 Days of Summer and the director of Smashed opened yesterday and it’s definitely worth checking out … particularly if the words “teen romantic melodrama” didn’t immediately turn you off.

My review is at PopMatters; here’s part:

The Spectacular Now eases sublimely into the love story, from Aimee and Sutter’s meet-drunk through the expected senior-year trials. As he did in Smashed, director James Ponsoldt pays attention to the details of everyday ebbing and flowing, to the ways that moments of light comedy can help to ease us—viewers and characters—through crises. He teases warm, naturalistic performances from Woodley and Teller, both of whom have the bright eyes and quick give-and-take of born wits, but not that angular and underfed look of so many young actors. Their faces, their contemplations as well as their delights and disappointments, are set off by smart cinematography that is somehow both lush and nonshowy…

Here’s the trailer: