Opening this week:
Zootopia—The title refers to a city that looks like a theme
park, with frozen tundra, desert, rainforest and other ecosystems all
conveniently connected by highway exits. The inhabitants, you see, are
animals—anthropomorphic, bipedal, civilized mammals of every sort, from
pachyderms to rodents, living side by side.
It’s not Utopia,
however. Inter-species tensions continue, especially between predator and prey
species, and there are glass ceilings in certain professions. Our heroine Judy
Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), for instance, is a bunny who has
internalized the high-minded idea that “Anyone can be anything,” and she wants
to grow up to be a police officer, normally a job for the likes of tigers and
rhinos and cape buffalo.
Through determination and resourcefulness, Judy realizes her
dream, but as with many pioneers, she gets stuck with traffic duty. Before
long, however, she’s caught up in a mystery involving missing predators, and
develops a tense alliance with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wily vulpine con
artist.
The buddy-picture plot that ensues is surprisingly dark and
noir-ish at times, and in some ways Zootopia
is one of the least sentimental Disney movies I can remember. It’s fraught with
unmistakable racial and class subtext, and although it has the struggling
underdog protagonist standard to animated features, it honestly grapples with
the complex and painful realities behind the believe-in-yourself platitudes of
the genre. Thus, the movie’s ultimately positive conclusions feel hard-won, and
all the more uplifting.
Zootopia is
delightful, but I did have a complaint: the freakin’ 3-D. At least at the
screening I saw, it dimmed and washed out the images, and added not one effect
that I thought was worth the eyestrain. See it in old-fashioned 2-D.
In case anybody still cares, a few notes on the Oscars:
It was gratifying for me to see the number one movie on my
Top Ten list, Tom McCarthy’s low-key powerhouse
Spotlight, win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. It was even
more gratifying to see the great, 87-year-old Ennio Morricone, who had
never won an Oscar for Best Original Score (he won an honorary Oscar in 2007),
take the statue for his superb music for
The
Hateful Eight. It makes up, sort of, for Morricone not even being nominated
for his greatest score, for 1970’s
Two
Mules for Sister Sara.
But most of the satisfactions of this year’s surprisingly
enjoyable Oscar show had little to do with the nominees, and more to do with
the host. Interest in the Oscars was high this year, less because of any
particular suspense as to who would win, and more because of what the great Chris
Rock would say and do. While the telecast was glacially paced and overlong as
usual, Rock, who had not too memorably hosted the show in 2005, brilliantly
managed his tricky duties this year.
What made it a tricky gig was, of course, the controversy
over the lack of racial diversity among this year’s nominees. Some
African-American industry notables had boycotted the show, and Rock himself had
been urged to decline the job.
His approach was marvelously disarming. From the very first
line of his monologue, he attacked the subject straightforwardly,
good-naturedly and in all directions—his jokes were at the expense of the
Academy, the boycotters, and himself, and they ranged from daringly tasteless
to thoughtful. A high percentage of them were genuinely funny, and all of them
put the controversy into perspective, without disrespect to the validity of the
boycott’s grievance.
Perhaps most amusingly, however, was that Rock wouldn’t let
it go. I expected he’d try to dispense with the subject with a few jokes at the
beginning of his monologue and then move on to a business-as-usual Oscars, but
bit after bit kept coming back to it. The show was so single-mindedly devoted
to the controversy that, ironically, it probably brought attention to racial
inequities in Hollywood
in a way that no number of minority nominations could have, deserved though
they might be. And it seems pretty unlikely that this would have been the case
if Rock hadn’t hosted.
A couple of disappointments: Names eyebrow-raising-ly
omitted from the “In Memoriam” segment included Abe Vigoda, Geoffrey Lewis,
George Gaynes, Tony Burton and Pat Harrington, Jr. Also, while the brilliant
Mark Rylance entirely deserved to win Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies,
I still found it slightly disappointing—I wanted to see Stallone win for Creed. But I suppose it’s in the spirit
of the original Rocky, where even
though he didn’t win, Rocky triumphed just because he got to the Main Event.