It is another dazzling film from Pixar with Up.  I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard during an animated film but this one tugs at the heartstrings like no other.  It is all good things – breathtaking animation, vibrant characters, risky storytelling on occasion.  It is funny, joyous, sublime.  Like other Pixar films, it makes you look differently at the world when you leave the theater.  It will make you think twice before you resist the urge to honk at a slow moving or slow driving senior.   Maybe that doesn’t really matter to you now, but it will someday.  What is becoming more and more obvious is that Pixar is the studio turning out the best films, animated or not.   And they almost always take you to a place where you think, “did they really just do that?”  Still, it’s a running theme that their films are made by and written about male characters almost exclusively.   Does that matter?  Political correctness shouldn’t be the primary motivator when it comes to art.  On the other hand, maybe it is something worth talking about.

James Rocchi wrote that their female characters aren’t strong, and lamented their continual choice of male writers, male directors and thus, male characters.   In an article that declares The Incredibles and Up his two favorites, which is probably the hardest pill to swallow in his whole piece, nonetheless, Rocchi writes:

…Why can’t you guys seem to write strong female characters? With the notable exception of The Incredibles‘ Mrs. Incredible (who was voiced by Holly Hunter) and Violet (Sarah Vowell), your female characters are ether dead, irrelevant, under-written or absent. And all your directors are male, too. Both those things are going to change with your upcoming The Bear and the Bow — about a young woman in a fairy-tale take on Scotland, directed by Brenda Chapman — but you’ve got to do more than that – up the bench strength for women on both sides of the camera, with more opportunities for characters and more opportunities for female writers and directors.

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Here are the rest of the categories for tomorrow night’s MTV Awards. Anyone who missed voting for the first set of nominees can find them here.

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Best Female Performances, Breakthrough and Comedic Performances, after the cut.

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There has got to be some kind of major financial potential lost when Nicole Kidman drops out of a project.  You’d think that she would be replaced with someone of equal star power.  Funnily enough, Woody Allen decided not to match fame for fame and chose instead Lucy Punch to replace Kidman.  Variety says that “sources” say “Punch will play a high-priced call girl similar to Ashley Dupre, who was at the center of the scandal that brought down New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.”

Kidman had other committments with The Rabbit Hole.

It’s Pixar’s world; we just wish we could live in it. With this summer’s Up mission accomplished, and before we can say, “Next!” the new teaser for Toy Story 3 appears. We assume this preview will be seen preceding screenings of Up, but Alex Billington at First Showing has a copy for us to borrow beforehand.

This teaser squeezes more cuteness out of 43 seconds than many movies manage in 2 hours. Directed by Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo). Written by Oscar winner Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine).

As Pablo noted overnight, “UP! just got 98% approval on RT !!! That’s higher than any other Pixar film.”

Up has 18 perfect scores of 100 on Metacritic, for a year’s-best average of 90. Last year, WALL-E had 20 100’s and The Dark Knight had 16 perfect scores. (Interestingly, if not tiresomely, Stephanie Zacharek gave all three of these critic’s darlings their lowest scores on the board, nearly single-handedly chipping the top off their overall averages. 50 for TDK, 70 for WALL-E, and now another 50 for Up.)

Until I’ve seen a movie, I only skim the first paragraph or two of a reveiw and skip to the end — that way most of the plot and other details keep fresh until their unwrapped in the theater. That’s why you don’t see spoilers in my excerpts. There are too many great appraisals for me to pull quotes on this busy Friday morning, so I’ll take the easy way out and suggest you click to Metacritic and do your own cherry-picking. Sifting through the reviews today, two observations stood out for me though. The first, from Peter Travers at Rolling Stone is the stretchiest comparison I’ve seen among the Up boosters:

Up may be the first animated kiddie crowd-pleaser to feature dentures and an hommage to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, as old man and boy drag a house and the burden of dreams through the jungle.

And this, from TV Guide’s Perry Seibert, gives a terrific distillation of the formula Pixar uses to consistently spin a creative philosophy in pure gold:

Pixar doesn’t really make family films in the way we’ve come to use that term — a dismissive shorthand for something blandly inoffensive. No, Pixar lets smart, quirky artists indulge their creativity, and the results are often the kind of universally appreciated movies that helped make Hollywood a dream factory in the first place. Up fits proudly into that tradition.

Using the Firefox “Find” tool to look for keywords on a page, I searched for ‘3-D’ in several reviews. More than one critic says Up would lose nothing in 2-D, and in fact it’s subtle color palette might be dimmed with the dark shades we have to don to view 3-D. I’m curious to hear more first-hand reactions to the 3-D aspect, to help me make up my mind which way to see it. (yeah, as if I’m not already planning on seeing it both ways.) Share you thoughts about that?

IndieWire has polled a group of critics and bloggers and published scores for the top films and filmmakers at Cannes. Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet placed first in every category except, not surprisingly, Worst Film.

FILM
1) “A Prophet” – 14 pts (6 mentions)
2) “Antichrist” – 11 pts (5 mentions)
3) “Police, Adjective” – 10 pts (5 mentions); The White Ribbon – 10 (5 mentions)

DIRECTOR
1) Jacques Audiard, “A Prophet” – 15 pts (6 mentions)
2) Gaspar Noe, “Enter the Void” – 14 pts (5 mentions)
3) Lars von Trier, “Antichrist” – 12 pts (5 mentions)

SCREENPLAY
1) “A Prophet” – 11 pts (7 mentions)
2) “Up” – 8 pts (3 mentions); “The White Ribbon” – 8 pts (3 mentions)

ACTING PERFORMANCE
1) Tahar Rahim, “A Prophet” – 16 pts (6 mentions)
2) Giovanna Mezzogiorno, “Vincere” – 10 pts (4 mentions)
3) Ronnie Bronstein, “Go Get Some Rosemary” – 8 pts (6 mentions); Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds” – 8 pts (4 mentions)

WORST FILM
1) “Kinatay” – 12 pts (5 mentions)
2) “Antichrist” – 8 pts (4 mentions)
3) “Map of the Sounds of Tokyo” – 7 pts (4 mentions)
4) “Tetro” – 7 (3 mentions)

Those participating in the poll are named after the cut.

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Brad Brevett at Rope of Silicon has found a promo for Bad Lieutenent that he suspects might have been made to drum up interest in Cannes. Not strictly a remake — since Herzog claims never to have seen the original — it gets my attention because of the director and then loses it just as quickly because of the star. I know I’m in the minority, but the only two Nicholas Cage movies I’d ever watch again are Raising Arizona and Adaptation (and as proof, I watch them every year or two).

I’m a devoted fan of Werner Herzog, so I’m curious to see what he does with a black comedy. But, for me, there’s not much evidence that the director of Aguirre the Wrath of God had anything to do with this. From these scenes, it looks closer to Bad Santa than Bad Lieutenant.

If this aggravating age-verification thing gives anyone problems, maybe I can embed a youtube version after the cut.

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Maybe you’ve heard about families cutting back this summer. Forgoing vacations for staycations — finding ways to escape on the cheap without leaving home. Instead of sampling exotic flavors at a trendy new restaurants, go grocery shopping and buy off brands to confuse your taste buds. Instead of roughing it in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, go back to basics by neglecting to pay your utility bills for a month or two! In that spirit, yeah, it’s too bad we couldn’t go to Cannes. But lookie here, kids, the MTV Movie Awards are Sunday night!

I know, I know. If this is beneath your dignity, just skip it and go watch the clips from The White Ribbon again. The MTV Movie Awards don’t front. They know they’re silly and superficial. The fans get a warm feeling from showing their appreciation, and the stars get a tingle from their shameless self-promotion. There’s a certain purity to the lack of pretension.

Vote here and find 4 more categories after the cut. We’ll cover the acting nominees tomorrow. Write in votes are welcome, and even better if you share them in the comments. Try to have fun.

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Waitress: Well, there’s shrek, sausage, panda and shrek. That’s not got much shrek in it.

Dreamworks has announced its slate of animation through 2012, and it reminds me of Monty Python’s classic spam bit. Except Shrek substituted for spam would taste even more canned and flavorless.

Comingsoon.net has the list:

• How to Train Your Dragon , a troubled teen adopts a… dragon.
• Shrek Forever After, the fourth installment of the Shrek series.
• Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom
• Puss in Boots, his origin story, before he met Shrek.
• Madagascar 3 the menagerie goes to Europe in a traveling circus.
• The Guardians unites Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost and the Sandman to fight evil-doers.

There’s this though: Oobermind (formerly Master Mind) with Robert Downey Jr. voicing “a supervillain who finds life a little dull after vanquishing good-guy rival Metro Man.” Tina Fey voices another character. Sounds promising, but can’t Dreamworks trust kids to pronounce Übermind?

Looking way ahead, to November 2012, just in time for the festive Mayan End of Days celebrations:

Katzenberg has staked out a third date that fall, Nov. 12, for an original feature, to be chosen from a trio of projects currently in development. The first option, caveman comedy The Croods, from directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco, was once intended to be an Aardman collaboration. Another, Truckers, is derived from Terry Pratchett’s The Bromeliad Trilogy with Simon Beaufoy adapting a story of miniature creatures stuck living in a department store. Damaschke also cited a third option, tentatively titled Super Secret Ghost Project, that asks what ghosts think about humans.

Those actually all sound not half bad. Though maybe just because they’re so vague and far away.

A tale of good and evil battling for souls that’s made with Gilliam’s fantastic and fantastical visual imagination, “Imaginarium” is the director’s best, most entertaining film in years. — Kenneth Turan, LATimes

Although many critics at Cannes deemed Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassusm a noble bur faulty effort, a swing and a miss, I’m not hearing the swoosh of an airball at all from this brief clip with Lily Cole and Christopher Plummer. It takes a lot to make me give up on a Terry Gilliam film — if indeed I ever do. Thanks to Noah R. for reminding me to post this tease and the one after the cut, along with a minute-long look at Heath Ledger in his final role.

Conventional wisdom is coming together to agree on what works best in the Imaginarium: Casting Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as three different incarnations of Ledger’s character, to fill the unbearable void he left behind, works better than anybody has any right to expect:

…the structure of “Imaginarium” and the nature of what was left to shoot when the actor died made the use of those substitute actors so seamless that, Gilliam said, “the postproduction sound guy assumed it had been written that way.”

It’s no wonder, then, that Gilliam feels that he “didn’t make this film. Forces from above and below made it. It made itself. I don’t panic anymore. It’s got its own relentless momentum. It just needed some human sacrifice…”

More of Turan’s LATimes piece after the cut, where you’ll find the other two clips as well.

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…a terrifying thriller in which two crew members wake up on an abandoned spacecraft with no idea who they are, how long they’ve been asleep, or what their mission is. The two soon discover they’re actually not alone — and the reality of their situation is more horrifying than they could have imagined.

Love the whispered bugged-out urgency and ratchet-wrench editing in this preview of Christian Alvart’s Pandorum. It reminds me of the isolated desperation in the perpetual panic attack of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Coming to us from Movieweb via First Showing, it’s the closest thing to a perfect terror trailer I’ve seen all year. I’m expecting Drag Me to Hell to have my nerves in knots this weekend, but I’d really rather be put through the wringer of dread in a movie devoid of jokiness or camp.

Starring Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid, Antje Traue, Cung Le, Norman Reedus and Cam Gigandet, Pandorum is due in theaters September 4th.

USAToday has 5 shots on location with Denzel Washington and The Book of Eli.

“You occasionally ask yourself why you’re shooting a movie in these conditions,” says Allen Hughes, who co-directs the thriller The Book of Eli, due Jan. 15, with his twin brother, Albert. “When the wind is really blowing, it looks like the earth is meeting the sky. It looks like the end of the world.”

Which is fitting: Eli is about that very subject. Denzel Washington stars as a loner trekking across a post-apocalyptic America with a mysterious book that could be the key to man’s salvation. Washington, who shed 55 pounds for the role, recalls storms so rough that crews had to don goggles just to see what they were filming. “There’s a reason there’s nothing growing out here,” he says. “It’s land no one wants.”

Two more shots of Denzel and Gary Oldman after the cut.

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Another high point in this year of science-fiction peaks? One unfair complaint about the genre is that it’s often cold and too emotionless. In space, no one can hear you sigh. Maybe that’s why sci-fi grounded in familiar surroundings usually has the best shot at awards potential. ET, Close Encounters, Gattaca. Even as far back as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, science fiction does better on the awards circuit if the characters have their feet planted on planet Earth.

In spite of everyday realities like the daring space shuttle repair of the Hubble telescope last week, Oscar still seems to think astronauts and off-word adventure are the dramatic equivalent of comic book superheroes. They need to get over it. Some of the freshest and most thought-provoking movies ever made are those that show us a near-future or alternate reality. Hard to tell from this trailer for Mr. Nobody has the gravitas to give it a sense of prestige — but it’s got elements the Academy likes to see in science fiction and fantasy films: Depictions of separation, loss and reunion. Yearning for security conflicting with an urge for adventure. And a kid, to help audiences get in touch with their inner childhood wonderment.

Check out the official website here. Thanks to FirstShowing.net for featuring the trailer. Any synopsis reveals too much, so I won’t publish one here. I’d recommend letting this movie come at you out of the blue. Mr. Nobody is written and directed by Belgian Jaco van Dormael, and stars Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Rhys Ifans and Diane Kruger. It won’t open in Belgium until October, and hasn’t found international yet, so there’s a good chance we won’t see it here this year at all.

Warning: Non-movie news. Anyone sensitive to such topics are advised to shield their eyes and skip to another story.

Reach out and tamper with someone. Remember a few years ago when AT&T allowed the National Security Agency to set up a secret room inside an AT&T control center, so that all our e-mail, web surfing and phone traffic could be monitored and “analyzed”?

Always happy to lend a helping hand to the overlords in the form of illegal wiretapping, AT&T is now branching out to experiment with voter fraud. It’s only American Idol voter fraud. For now.

AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of “American Idol,” might have influenced the outcome of this year’s competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week. (NYTimes)

I’m posting this as a follow-up because it was mentioned in the comments by Arkansas insiders that Kris Allen’s “victory” over Adam Lambert might be a result of homestate support as much as homophobic backlash. But it’s harder to measure that factor accurately when the people paying for American Idol advertising are enabling vote boosters for one contestant and not the other.
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Hate to post two items in a row with question marks in the headline, but that’s all we have to work with on a slow news day. ScreenRant cobbles together fresh rumors for a story they’ve been following since January. A few months ago, McQueen’s widow said she’d like to see Daniel Craig portray the King of Cool. That sounded like brilliant casting but, alas, it looks like the producers have their own ideas.

According to The Examiner, Pitt is, “about to sign on,” to play McQueen, but nothing is said of the reason why he was chosen. There is speculation that it’s because of Pitt’s resemblance to McQueen (he’s not exact, but who is?), as well as him sharing love with McQueen for, “beautiful women, fast cars and motorcycles.”

I’m surprised Daniel Craig doesn’t share the same love for “beautiful women, fast cars and motorcycles.” but I guess that’s why I don’t have a job at The Examiner.