Seen a ton of movies lately, but both
Big Hero 6 and Ernest and Celestine really stood out as excellent films. Both were smart, cute, touching, well-written, and endearing as all get out. Both are suitable for kids, of course, but they were also the best films I saw even among the more ballyhooed adult ones.
People are probably familiar with
Big Hero 6 (4.5/5) so I won't spend too much time on it. It would suffice to say that Baymax is probably one of the coolest side characters in a kids' movie in a long time.
Ernest and Celestine (4.5/5) is the animated story of an unlikely -- and yes, against all odds and forbidden -- friendship that develops between an underground mouse and her above-ground bear. It's charming, incredibly constructed in its coloring and art, a little twee, but so, so sweet and endearing. You want to hug the movie. Suitable probably for young children even though I do not have kids. Just an eminently worthy film, and one that deserved its Oscar nomination from last year.
Seen a bunch of documentaries, too.
Fuzz (3.5/5) was an interesting doc about guitar pedals and the men who make them. It's quite an interesting watch if you want to geek out about music and the engineers behind the sounds being made by many musicians today. Some of the personalities are actually pretty damn cool. Great line from the movie. "What's the most important [economic indicator] with these pedals? Resale. Musicians are losers. Anything they buy, you have to think how much dope they can get out of it when they sell it back."
Also saw
Time Is Illmatic (4/5), a documentary about Nas
. It's an interesting look at the making of Illmatic. I've personally never gotten the hagiographic love for this album (I actually like Nas's mid-aughts output better, believe it or not) but this documentary is fascinating. Some revealing stuff about Nas's longing to get out of the Queensbridge housing projects, the death of his best friend and musical/business partner when Nas was a teenager, and the lives of the people Nas left behind when he broke it big. There are several poignant and telling scenes in the movie, all of which seem to involve his brother, Jabari, who steals the show with his stories and general demeanor, even though he looks worse for the wear (oh, those yellowing eyes). Functioning within the documentary as a counterpoint, he tells a darker and possibly more interesting story than one that simply concerns one man's rise to the top of the entertainment industry.
Oh, and after a quick Google search for the correct spelling of his name, I found this.
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/qa-nass-brother-jungle-on-life-in-queensbridge-and-the-new-doc-time-is-illmatic/
eta* Ernest and Celestine, Fuzz, and Time is Illmatic are all on Amazon Prime if you've got it.
After that it was off to the races. My wife was grabbing my arm so tight she nearly broke it.
