Coco (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017)

Coco (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017)

Cast: voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Edward James Olmos, Luis Valdez, Cheech Marin. Screenplay: Lee Unkrich, Jason Katz, Matthew Aldrich, Adrian Molina. Cinematography: Matt Aspbury, Danielle Feinberg. Production design: Harley Jessup. Film editing: Steve Bloom, Lee Unkrich. Music: Michael Giacchino.

When Coco was being made, there was no thought that the film's vibrant evocation of Mexican culture might be seen as a nose-thumbing directed at a xenophobic POTUS. If anything, the concern ran the other way, especially after a bone-headed attempt by Disney Pixar to trademark the phrase "Día de los Muertos" was met with outrage and charges that it was "cultural appropriation and exploitation at its worst." The Disney people backed off, explaining that they were only hoping to protect what was then one of the working titles of the film. Today, after three years of talk about building walls and fighting off invasions, Coco can probably be seen as a vehicle for understanding rather than co-opting another culture. Or what is better, it can be enjoyed for vivid color, imaginative design, and engaging characterization, and for its crowd-pleasing accomplishment of what Pixar and Disney have always done best: blend jokes and scares and music in a wholly satisfying way.

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Gael García Bernal in Y Tu Mamá También

Luisa Cortés: Maribel Verdú
Julio Zapata: Gael García Bernal
Tenoch Iturbide: Diego Luna
Narrator: Daniel Giménez Cacho
Silvia Allende de Iturbide: Diana Bracho
Diego "Saba" Madero: Andrés Almeida
Ana Morelos: Ana López Mercado
Manuel Huerta: Nathan Grinberg
Maria Eugenia Calles de Huerta: Verónica Langer
Cecilia Huerta: Maria Aura
Alejandro "Jano" Montes de Oca: Juan Carlos Remolina
Chuy: Silverio Palacios

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenplay: Carlos Cuarón, Alfonso Cuarón
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Marc Bedia, Miguel Ángel Álvarez
Film editing: Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También is kept aloft for so long by wit and energy, and by the skills of its actors, director, and cinematographer, that it's a disappointment to consider the way it deflates a little at the end. It is, on the whole, a brilliant transfiguration of several well-worn genres: the teen sex comedy, the road movie, the coming-of-age fable. Cuarón has credited Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (1966) as a major inspiration, but I think it owes as much to François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), not least in Daniel Giménez Cacho's superbly ironic voiceover narrator, who provides a larger context for the actions of the three main characters. It's the narrator, for instance, who tells us that the traffic jam that holds up our middle-class teenagers was caused by the death of a working man who tried to cross the freeway because otherwise he would have had to walk a mile and a half out of his way to use the only crossing bridge. Or that Chuy, the fisherman who befriends the trio when they finally reach the secluded beach, will lose his livelihood to developers and commercial fisheries and wind up as a janitor in an Acapulco hotel. Somehow, Cuarón manages to avoid heavy-handedness with these comments, injecting the necessary amount of serious social commentary into a story about two horny Mexico City teenagers and the older woman who goes in search of a beach called "Heaven's Mouth" with them. Even in the story, the subtext of social class in contemporary Mexico keeps peeking through: There's a slight tension between the upper-middle-class Tenoch, whose father is a government official, and the lower-middle-class Julio that's suggestive of Tenoch's sense of privilege. Similarly, Luisa, who was trained as a dental technician, confesses to a sense of inferiority to her husband, Jano, Tenoch's cousin, and his better-educated friends. The screenplay by Cuarón and his brother, Carlos, deserved the Oscar nomination it received for these attempts to provide a deep backstory for the characters. Even so, the film owes much to the obvious rapport between Luna and García Bernal, and to the steady centering influence of Verdú, all of whom participated in rehearsals that were often improvisatory embroidering on the Cuaróns's screenplay. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who would go on to receive three consecutive Oscars for much showier work on Cuarón's Gravity (2013) and on Alejandro Iñárritu's Birdman (2104) and The Revenant (2015), here maintains a strictly documentary style of camerawork, though often with the subtle use of long takes and wide-angle lenses. As I said, I think the film deflates a bit at the end with the revelation of Luisa's death: It seems an unnecessary attempt to moralize, to provide a motive -- knowing that she has terminal cancer -- for her running away and having sex with the boys, turning it into only a final fling. Would we think less of Luisa if she were simply asserting her right to be as pleasure-driven as her philandering husband? Were the Cuaróns attempting to obviate slut-shaming by giving Luisa cancer? I hope not, because the film shows such intelligence and sensitivity otherwise.

Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004)

In the middle of Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education, two men go into a theater that's holding a film noir festival. When they come out later, one says, "I kept having the feeling those films were about us." Indeed, if Almodóvar's movie is inspired by anything, it's film noir, but filtered through the Technicolor movies made by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s. The score by Alberto Iglesias often echoes the melancholy longing of Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958). The intricate plot for Bad Education begins when a young man (Gael García Bernal) comes to the offices of film director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) and identifies himself as Goded's old school friend Ignacio Rodriguez. He doesn't call himself Ignacio anymore, he says. Instead, he goes by his stage name, Ángel Andrade, and he's hoping that Goded will cast him in his next film. Goded is more than surprised to see his old schoolmate -- in fact, he tells his assistant and current lover, Martín (Juan Fernández), Ignacio was his first love -- but he's currently experiencing a creative block and isn't hiring anyone now. So the actor leaves Goded a manuscript of a story he has written. Part of it, he says, is about their school days, and the rest is fiction based on what he thinks might have happened when they grew up. Goded reads the manuscript and is so impressed by the story it tells that he is determined to film it. And so begins an intricate film about memory, imagination, deception, betrayal, obsession, and revenge that centers on a pedophile priest's molestation of his young students. Bad Education was originally given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for "explicit sexual content," but I suspect it was mostly because the sexual content involves two men. The rating was eventually reduced to R. The performance by García Bernal is spectacular: He manages several identities while retaining the core essential to all of them. Like most Almodóvar films, Bad Education is alive with bright primary colors -- the cinematography is by José Luis Alcaine, the art direction by Antxón Gómez, and the set decoration by Pilar Revuelta, with costumes designed by Paco Delgado and Jean-Paul Gaultier -- but the brightness only serves to heighten the shadows.