Movie Reviews

• Title: The Square
• IMDb: link

I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly what to make of The Square. It’s hard to create a satire poking fun at pretentiousness when your film is at least as pretentious as as the subject of your mockery. Swedish writer/director Ruben Östlund‘s film certainly provides its share of moments satirizing modern art, middling celebrities, what wealthy donors of the arts really care about, and marketers. However, the film is over-brimming with subplots involving a threatening letter, a mugging, an angry child, a crazy one-night stand (Elisabeth Moss), and a marketing plan so ridiculous it’s impossible to take it seriously.

Claes Bang stars as the curator and public face of a museum in Stockholm about to unveil their newest addition (which gives the film its name). The wistful, if hopelessly naive, piece of art is a square in which the artist believes that whoever enters leaves all negativity behind and will receive whatever help they need from those that pass by. As concepts go it’s no more or less ridiculous than an artist (Terry Notary) jumping around like an ape and nearly sexually-violating a young woman during a dinner for wealthy donors.

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• Title: Coco
• IMDb: link

Pixar’s nineteenth feature isn’t one of the studio’s best, but it does display plenty of heart. We open to extended narration setting up the life and family of young Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) whose family’s hatred of music makes the first-half of the movie seem like Footloose with dead people. More than anything in the world Miguel wants to be a musician which, through a somewhat convoluted series of events, sends him into the netherworld on Día de Muertos when the spirits can leave the Land of the Dead and visit their living relatives (only if their families have remembered to place their picture in the family ofrenda, or altar).

Once Miguel is loose in the Land of the Dead, with only a single day to find his way back home, the film picks up. After meeting relatives whose blessing he needs to return to the land of the living, but who will provide it only if the boy promises to give up his music, Miguel goes in search of his long lost great-great grandfather who he believes to be one of the greatest musicians of all time (Benjamin Bratt). Relying on the help of a dog and a skeleton named Hector (Gael García Bernal), Miguel begins his quest.

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