Marcel

The movies are going through a phase in which franchised or generic material – or anything at all – is becoming ever more soullessly produced as “content”. And yet there is at the same time a reaction, a yearning for something real and organic in the movies, something with the handcrafted imperfection and waywardness that can’t be nurtured in the corporate environment. A kind of “real ale” movement. Superhero movies are beginning to pall and Pixar animations are starting to seem too programmatic.This wildly popular…

Image: Walt Disney Animation StudiosThe Disney+ live-action adaptation of Lilo and Stitch has found its little human star.Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard Nerd Out About Jurassic Park's Returning HeroesThe Hollywood Reporter, following a report in Knight Edge Media, writes that young Hawaiian actress Maia Kealoha has landed the role of Lilo Pelekai. The casting comes after an extensive open call as Disney searched for the remake’s leading role of a girl who adopts a fugitive alien after mistaking it for a dog. The…

Image: NetflixIt’s awards season, and for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the stop-motion movie got away with multiple awards spread across two events. On Saturday night, the Producers Guild of America and the animation-focused Annie Awards both had their respective ceremonies, and del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s acclaimed film came home with some nice, shiny awards.Last night, the PGAs awarded Pinocchio with the award for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures. It was the first award of the night, and…

At both the Baftas on Sunday night and the Oscars next month, there’s a strong chance that the award for best animated feature will go to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, an astonishing stop-motion animation that uses a beloved fairytale as a springboard for a deep dive into themes of death, fascism and Catholic guilt. Yet there’s another contender that has also been dazzling audiences with its ability to blend philosophical profundity with stop-motion whimsicality – a gently absurdist mockumentary about the inner life of…

Here is a genuine oddity: a weird little hothouse flower of a film that looks as if it might crumple at the slightest breath of wind – but is actually very resilient. It’s a quirky stop-motion animation, developed from a series of online short films, whose comedy frequency takes a little time to tune into. You have to wait a bit to hear its batsqueak, and before this happens there is a real and understandable danger that you will simply find it insufferably annoying. The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap…

Avatar: The Way of Water | New TrailerThe spectacle of James Cameron’s long-awaited sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time was, against all odds, worth the wait. The Way of Water improves upon the original Avatar on every level—not just in the spectacle, which was a given, but in the story, the characters, and the drama, too. The tale of the Sully family, forced to flee across Pandora and adapt to a new, wetter life, allows Cameron to explore a dazzling new world, while the fight with a Na’vi-fied Miles Quaritch…

Image: Toei AnimationOne Piece’s theatrical movies have generally been fine. Well, they used to be terrible until creator Eiichiro Oda started getting more hands-on with them, but generally they all ended in the same way—Monkey D. Luffy and his crewmates, and maybe a few more popular characters, teaming up to fight some new, ultra-powerful, non-canonical foe. But Red is different in almost every way, and for the better. It fills out Luffy’s backstory by introducing Uta, the daughter of One Piece’s most enigmatic…

The long revered French novelist, critic and essayist is still thought to be one of the most influential authors of all time a century after this death on 18 November 1922. While Proust does have more than one work of fiction to his name - in 1896 he published the short story collection Les Plaisirs et Les Jours (Pleasures and Days), for example, and between 1895 and 1899 he wrote the autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil – when people refer to Proust they tend to be talking about A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search…

In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.Anthony took up the challenge of entering…

After writing and producing the first two instalments of `Venom` franchise, filmmaker Kelly Marcel is all set to helm Marvel and Sony Pictures` Venom 3 starring Tom Hardy. According to Deadline, along with writing the screenplay, Marcel will produce; Hardy and Marcel will write the original story. Producing partners include Hutch Parker, Amy Pascal, Matt Tolmach, and Avi Arad. As per the reports of Variety, the only known plot details are that Hardy is reprising his role as Venom, the deadly protector, after the first…