CODA (2021) - The Big Winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2021

Siân Heder’s CODA, an American remake of the French La Famille Bélier (2014) manages to exceed the mainly comedic approach of the original and tackles the story from a more grounded and authentic angle. Whereas the original didn’t make an effort to actually cast deaf actors in the respective roles, Siân Heder did for CODA. Emilia Jones’ Ruby is the only hearing member of her deaf family who makes ends meet with fishing. She helps out each morning before school and faces social isolation in school due to her family's disabilities. When she finally jumps over her own shadow and joins the choir to act on her lifelong passion for singing, she is encouraged by her teacher Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez), who insists on rolling the R’s in his name, to aim higher than keeping up the family fishing business and to consider going to music school.

View fullsize

Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi

CODA is the type of film you can recommend to pretty much anyone without risking that they won’t enjoy their time with it. It’s a crowd-pleasing movie with several great emotional pay-offs for multiple characters and overall it is just a great time to watch. However, apart from deaf performers in deaf roles, the movie isn’t anything groundbreaking or spectacular. At the end of the day, it is a very familiar story of a young adolescent who doesn’t believe in themselves (enough) until a third party, mostly some kind of mentor figure, comes in and teaches them to harness their true potential. It even packs the ‘don’t be held back by people around you in your small town’ trope into the mix and if I’m being totally honest, I don’t mind the storytelling clichés that CODA uses. Because the film shines especially in smaller moments of situational comedy and emotional payoffs between Ruby and her parents. 

View fullsize

Amy Forsyth as Gertie, Daniel Durant as Leo Rossi, Marlee Matlin as Jackie Rossi, and Troy Kotsur as Frank Rossi (from left)

Although there are a number of knit-picks I have with the film, the overall story hinders me to not enjoy this heartfelt story to the fullest. Certain dramatic tensions feel rather forced and easily avoidable mostly through communication, but I guess ultimately that is one of the issues tackled in the narrative itself so I cannot fault it too much for that.

Siân Heder’s second feature won big at Sundance taking home the award for Directing, Ensemble Cast, and both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize for best Drama Feature. 

CODA was a worthy tick-off for the Sundance Film Festival and broke records by its $25Mio. acquisition by Apple for their streaming service AppleTV+, surpassing last year’s Palm Springs that was bought by Hulu for $17Mio & 69 Cents and can be expected to be released in the next few months on Apple’s streaming service.

View fullsize

Eugenio Derbez as Bernardo Villalobos

CODA sets Ruby on a familiar journey of self-discovery and combines a Coming-of-Age story with authentic and respectful portrayals of a mostly deaf family. With a healthy dose of humor, drama, and music CODA will have something for everyone.

3.5/5

The Aristocats - 52 Years in 52 Weeks

The Aristocats (1970)

Welcome back to 52 Years in 52 Weeks. Each week in 2021 we’ll watch a film I’ve never seen before starting in 1969 moving one year forward every week.

This week, I watched The Aristocats from 1970. Wolfgang Reitherman directed this feline family adventure from Disney. Reitherman is also (at least partly) behind other Disney classics like 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, and 1970’s The Rescuers, which I believed to be connected to The Aristocats because the mice looked similar in my mind. But I guess that just makes me the racist equivalent for rodents. But I’ll leave the racial stereotyping to the experts over at Disney. More on that later. Reitherman co-directed these films but he’s arguably best known for 1973s Robin Hood and 1967’s The Jungle Book. All the films mentioned are available for streaming on Disney+. What the service might lack in original new programming it inarguably makes up with its rather impressive backlog

Phil Harris, who voices Baloo and Little John in Jungle Book and Robin Hood respectively, does the voice for the most memorable character from the Aristocats. O’Malley. It’s impressive how creepy yet still charming Harris manages to be as the stray cat that helps The Duchess and her three kittens on her way back to their wealthy home.

The plot is fairly simple. When Adelaide Bonfamille leaves all her liquidities to her cats, her butler decides to get rid of them in an effort to inherit his employer's money that he believes to deserve. Funnily enough, Edgar is too dense to realize that he would still get all the money as cats...can’t...spend...money. I know. Mind. blown. But that rather simple world-view runs through the entire plot of The Aristocats. Intense over the top action chase scenes and the occasional song is all we get from the movie. It never tries to be more than a simple - ignore the partly intended terrible pun - cat and mouse game. 

I personally found most jokes to be more miss than hit. For example, the geese characters feel particularly random and unnecessary. Maybe it’s because I just can’t stand the upper-class way of talking from the 40s-70s. Particularly the Duchess is a great example of that. I just can’t stand the way she talks. Perhaps that’s just a ‘me thing’ but I find it distracting. In the context of the story, it makes sense to have an upper-class cat speak in an upper-class manner. It’s just so annoying. But honestly, Thomas O’Malley’s constant ‘baby’ is equally irritating and predatory, to be frank. 

The Aristocats is a movie that’s supposed to be light-hearted. With Thomas O’Malley strolling along the riverside taking the family on an adventure. I just don’t connect as well with movies that I feel like don’t have a purpose or reason to exist. This might be cynical but I dislike cookie-cutter versions of stories that are way too familiar without adding much to anything. You could argue that the purpose of a movie like this is simply to entertain and I’d have to agree. Lots of studio films exist purely for that reason and don’t need any themes on top of that. But I wasn’t even entertained by anything happening in the plot. As you’d expect from a family film, its conclusion is predictable and the moments in between, at least to me, are not charming or memorable enough to leave a good impression. 

And what’s worse than a truly bad movie? A mediocre, boring one. And that’s what The Aristocats is. 

Also giving a cat with Asian features chopsticks to play the piano is at most unexpected but not really funny. In the overall context, that scene simply serves as a colorful, musical pitstop halfway through the movie before they ultimately assimilate to the aristocratic lifestyle at the mercy of an old, white woman.

Maybe I’m reading into this too much but there is that disclaimer at the start of the film that Disney puts in front of some of their older releases deemed controversial. 

Ultimately The Aristocats is a rather weak entry in the long list of animated Disney classics. But at least it’s better than all of the recent ‘live-action’ remakes, but from the recent trend of Disney redoing literally their entire 90s golden age of films, it’s only a matter of time until they’ll produce the inevitable remake for this one.

Next week we’ll watch Spielberg’s feature-length debut Duel.