Escape is a funky word these days. Up until just a month or so ago, we considered art to be our escape from our day-to-day lives. Sometimes it was an escape from a job we struggled with, an escape into something more creative and revitalizing. Sometimes it was an escape into a safer, kinder world where the good choices mattered. Sometimes it was even an escape into a world of frights and scary ideas because we wanted to feel something, anything in a safe way. We looked to art often to escape towards what we felt lacking. 

But that was a pre-pandemic world. It’s a different world now in which all of us are home, and not just home because we want to be but because we have to be. Everything joyful has a tinge of melancholy to it because it existed in pre-pandemic times. Political jokes have more bite because politics lately have had a rising death toll. Humor about doofuses is not nearly as funny when there are doofuses regularly in denial of our reality, only prolonging the situation. And even space adventures feel a bit sad because, well, we may feel like the virus is Earth’s way of breaking up with us. Even everyone’s favorite escapist art, the batshit crazy Netflix documentary Tiger King, leaves a weird taste in your mouth because these are the very kinds of people making decisions about our lives. 

So where’s the escape? And where, when you’re always home, is home? 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present: Strictly Ballroom. 

The more I think about it, the more I realize how perfect Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 debut film is for our times. Anyone who’s seen a Luhrmann film – be it Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby – knows his love for over-the-top flair and hyperkinetic style. You can definitely see the seeds of this in his maiden voyage. But there’s an extremely telling choice that Luhrmann makes: he gives us a home our main characters escape to. 

Home can be a literal place. But home can also be a feeling. A sense of security. At least once a week I think about Ladislao Loera’s story at an Austin Testify show in which he talked about finding home amidst chaos. He was dealing with the declining illness of his partner. The world frequently felt like it was spinning. But they both also loved dancing. And the most important thing he remembered about dancing is that no matter how many times you spin, you stay on track by locking eyes with your partner. When you look at them, directly and intently, the world stops spinning. You are home. 

Early on, we see that Scott (Paul Mercurio) is different. He’s a dancer determined to dance his own steps in a competition that rewards uniformity. His partner breaks up with him because what he does is not strictly ballroom. It’s his own kind of jazz. His own kind of escape. From there, his desire to do his own thing runs headlong into Fran (Tara Morice), a misfit of a dancer looking for a true partner. Scott tells her, “We’re telling a story. The rumba is the dance of love. Look at me like you’re in love.” But Fran doesn’t need to be told. She’s already there, deeply at home. 

Luhrmann makes a very telling choice in that everyone outside of Scott and Fran is filmed with a fleeting, near-claustrophobic camera. We’re shoved right in the oily, sweaty faces of the always-melting ruling class, the judges who insist things must be done a certain way. Luhrmann lights their faces from below, creating looks as ghastly as they are iconic. 

But when he focuses on Scott and Fran, the background literally fades to deep blacks and blues. Their faces are perfectly lit, in all their detail and uniqueness. We can truly breathe and have a chance to see who they are. And we can see how much they see in each other. We can see, in their gaze, the first boards being nailed up and the carpet laid out. We’re seeing a story built, step by unique, freely-chosen step. We’re seeing them build a home. 

By the end, Luhrmann finally gives the remaining cast a chance to be seen in a softer, more flattering light, at a distance that allows them to be human, when they submit to the fact there’s more to dancing than what’s strictly ballroom. There’s the partner, the gaze. There’s the steps and the flow. There’s the knowing there’s no one else you’d rather be moving with.

There’s home. 

Strictly Ballroom is currently streaming on Netflix.

My favorite part of Frozen II arrives about fifty minutes into the movie. It involves imaginary singing reindeer. It’s a bit catchy. And it means absolutely nothing. It’s a small part of this unfortunately misguided film and yet it’s the most telling piece of all. The best songs in the Frozen franchise tell us what the characters are feeling and flow powerfully with the story being told. But “Lost in the Woods’’ isn’t just a song for Kristoff. This might as well be a song from the filmmakers to the audience. 

It starts off innocently, with Kristoff singing “You had to go, and of course it’s always fine/ I probably could catch up with you tomorrow”. This may be the most accurate line in the whole movie. Because of course, Disney will never complain about the $1.5 billion it made at the box office with this sequel. And since it dropped it on Disney+, you, the fortunate subscriber, could pick it back up and watch it tomorrow or any other time. It suggests a casual relationship with its audience. So far, so sweet. 

Then it hits with “But is this what it feels like to be growing apart?/When did I become the one who’s always chasing your heart?” You may not realize this, but the first Frozen came out in 2013, a whole SEVEN YEARS AGO. That’s a long time. And especially when your biggest fans were young girls (and boys) who, in the interim, probably moved on to more mature things like Tik Tok and Snapchat filters or maybe even college, that’s quite the jump. What passed for enjoyable in 2013 may not ring as true in 2020, althought nostalgia is a powerful drug. Maybe Olaf isn’t as cute; maybe he’s just an annoying snowman who spits out random facts about farting turtles and water having memory. 

The most telling line, however, is this: “Up till now the next step was a question of how/I never thought it was a question of whether”. There’s no point in getting into what these lines mean to Kristoff because nothing the movie shows support it. But from a filmmaker perspective, they could very well be referring to something every creative project runs into: the moment of being lost in the woods. Sometimes we call it being ‘lost in the dark’. Sometimes we call it ‘the point of no return’. But it all feels the same. That dark, murky, icky moment where nothing seems to be working and where you look up, sweaty and confused, wondering just how the hell you got there. You see, maybe the Frozen II team spent years chasing a good story and how to put it together. But at some point along the way they had to ask, ‘Was this even a good idea to begin with?’ 

Trust the Brain Trust 

Anyone who’s worked on any creative project conveniently forgets the more arduous steps of the process whenever they’ve completed something. That’s how we keep making things, after all. There’s the excitement. Then the doubting. Then the complete WTF am I actually doing. A lot of people freeze up and stop there. But they forget that it’s a necessary part of the process. No matter what you do, you’re always going to hit that middle portion where you’re lost in the woods. The key thing is to not give up. To not act out of fear. But to ride it out. To push through. To listen to others and get a new perspective. To then look ahead and say, ‘Onward’. 

Pixar has had an unparalleled span of success since its first film in 1995 with Toy Story. But what made them so successful wasn’t the technology or the innovation or their beloved characters. It started further behind the scenes. It started with the Brain Trust. When it looked like Toy Story 2 was going to be a straight-to-DVD disaster, the Brain Trust pulled it from the brink. When director Andrew Stanton pitched his idea of Wall-E starting the first 1/3 of the movie with no dialogue, it was the Brain Trust the helped him work through his doubts. The Brain Trust, originally five storytelling experts within the company (John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft) blossomed to a team of 20 for Pete Docter’s masterpiece Inside Out. Ed Catmull, one of the Pixar co-founders, wrote in his book, Creativity, Inc.: 

“Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck,’”Catmull writes. “Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process–reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.”

I highlight that last part because it shows the biggest difference between Frozen II and Pixar’s latest, Onward. I couldn’t really tell you the through-line of Frozen II. There are things they do and places they go, but it has so little meaning. The real story it’s seemingly trying to tell is withheld from us until the very end. All the characters make bewildering decisions based on things we don’t know. Once full-dimensional characters like Elsa and Anna unfortunately become empty plot pawns. By the third or fourth time Anna and Elsa argued about whether to head different ways or not, I gave up on them. When Olaf dies (spoiler: he survives! because, of course!) a fairly random inconsequential death, disappearing into bits in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of Bing Bong’s actually devastating death in Inside Out (spoiler: he did not survive), that’s when I knew this film had no interest in taking chances. It didn’t seek out candid feedback to reconfigure what wasn’t working. It wanted everyone to be happy and everyone to look pretty and maybe even weirdly make a swing at colonialism and reparations without upsetting too many people – all in pursuit of a story that wasn’t actually one to begin with. It was just all plot with no meaning. 

Making an animated movie is really, really hard work. These things take forever to make. They go through tons of rewriting processes before they ever commit actual art to celluloid. It’s laborious and exhausting and many, many moving parts. I just wish, in the 7 years it took for this sequel to arrive that they bothered to really run this story by their own kind of Brain Trust before committing. They all live under the Mouse House! They could have helped each other out somehow. But I suspect Disney Animation acted the way we do when we suspect our idea isn’t quite there – we shield it from others and commit as hard as possible. There are some things to enjoy about this sequel – a weirdly fiery yet completely adorable salamander and some gorgeous visual imagery – but has no meaning embedded within it.

It’s rather telling that in 2019, Disney released two big-budget sequels to popular films with leading female characters in Frozen II and Rise of the Skywalker and completely, utterly stranded them. Both films end with our heroines staring into the sunset. It’s meant to be hopeful. But with ROTS, we see Rey – who’s spent the last three Star Wars looking for a family – left alone with a tiny robot while all her friends celebrate on another planet. And with Frozen II, we see Elsa riding her magical ice horse headlong into the sun towards a castle where she can be…alone? If the first Frozen was about the power of sisterhood, I guess Disney wanted to show sisterhood could still exist no matter how far apart you randomly choose to live. 

A Step in the Right Direction

Whenever you’re lost in the woods or deep in the weeds or at a point of no return, there’s a word that works very well that we creatives all like to use: onward. So of course! There’s another movie that’s hit Disney+ today that has a pair of siblings who go on a quest. It’s called Onward. And just about everything Frozen II does bewilderingly wrong, Onward does passionately right. Frozen II has no clear conflicts, wants, or needs. Onward has two brothers with a clear desire to see their father again. Every single step of the journey is informed by that desire, and their wants give way to their needs – Ian’s desperate need to be recognized and liked for who he is, and Barley’s desperate need to be believed in despite how much of a screwup people think he is. There’s the conflict of time – they’re running out of it. There’s the conflict of believing in each other. And there’s even the conflict on which path to take that’s defined by Ian’s desire to keep things safe and predictable and Barley’s desire to veer off the beaten path and take the unexpected route. 

Several times throughout Frozen II, characters break into tears. They’re feeling so emotional! And yet not once did I ever feel a single thing. Because nothing made sense in this movie. Nothing was clear. Conflict was not established. I cannot feel any describable thing for a couple’s upcoming engagement if the biggest conflict in their poorly-informed relationship is bad timing. I cannot feel catharsis for Elsa or Anna if they’re not even acting like actual, feeling human beings.

But Onward? I felt a deep ache in my chest nearly the entire time. I understood how badly Ian and Barley wanted to see their father. I understood just how every breakdown and inconvenience threatened to deprive them of that one thing they wanted the most. And big, wet, warm tears slid down my face in the final minutes when everything beautifully revealed itself. The way Scanlon and his crew take the ending you think you’re gonna get and pull the rug out under you for something far richer is just a beaming testament to the power of well-crafted movies. Producer Emma Rogers mentioned how, even four years out from the film’s release, they had their ending figured out. They knew it all along. And it was simply a matter of rearranging the story to best support that ending. 

Bridging the Gap

But here’s the thing: there are few movies I can think of better suited to our new reality. Social distancing is a real thing. And part of that social distancing is that we can spend an awful lot of time thinking about the people we want to be spending more time with while forgetting the good fortune of those who are currently there alongside us. The way Onward turns into this realization, from the quiet, building desperation of the impossible to the satisfying, goddamn emotional beauty of the truth, well: it’s the first movie I’ve literally cried at in a good ten years or so. Literal, warm, streaking tears. I haven’t felt like this since 2015’s Inside Out, where you can just feel those story geniuses at Pixar having cracked the code of maximum emotional manipulation. But it’s never cheap; it’s always earned. They build their story from the core outwards, and nowhere is that more true than with Onward. At times, there’s a lot of noise around the core, things that don’t quite work and such. But the story of brothers Ian and Barley is going to sit with you for a while. 

It’s going to remind us in this time of separation and distancing just how close we truly are to the people we sometimes take for granted. It’s a lesson we all could use. And it’s right there, ready for us to view from the safety and comfort of our own home. 

When Spike Jonze’ Where the Wild Things Are came out in 2009, I often heard, “it’s not at all what I expected”. When I asked these people what indeed they did expect, they shrugged. They didn’t know. Just not that. Which is an odd thing to apply to an adaptation of a book that’s so short, less than 350 words comprising 10 sentences over 37 illustrated pages. Perhaps it speaks to how deeply engrained it sits in many of our childhoods. Perhaps we just really didn’t know what we wanted. 

I’m a big fan of understanding what a film is really going for. It’s okay to dislike something. Sometimes we prefer more explosions or better dialogue or more passionate acting. But there’s a difference between disliking something and critiquing it. Disliking something is a matter of pure personal preference. Critiquing it, when done respectfully, is looking at the goal of the filmmaking and seeing just how closely they came to succeeding.

So I read a few interviews from Jonze beforehand. I started to slowly, without realizing exactly what his movie would be like, understand what he was going for. He wanted to get inside the head of Max. He wanted the Wild Things to have that child logic of emotions, when they are big and scary and we’re unsure what to do with them. Knowing all this, I went to see it in a theater. And by the end, I was an emotional, near-tears mess. It felt like the biggest, warmest hug a movie theater could make, an embracing of the inner kid inside me. It remains to this day one of the most insightful and beautifully-conceived dramatizations of child psychology. In other words: if you want to understand children and their gorgeously violent inner lives better, watch this movie. 

Mister Rogers is perhaps just as giant a cultural artifact in our lives as Where the Wild Things Are, if not more so. They’ve both been around so long. They’ve touched so many people. So when I asked people if they’d seen ‘that Mister Rogers’ movie, I always got one of two responses: “not yet, but I want to” and “it was not what I expected at all; but it was really good”. 

When we think ‘that Mister Rogers’ movie, we’re likely imagining a biopic. A pretty standard linear story of the life of Fred Rogers and his inseparable creation. But if there’s anything I love more than a good movie, it’s a movie that takes a wild, risky swing. Fortunately and delightfully, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is both. 

The first hint that it would be something different and unexpected came when the 2019 Oscar nominations came out and Tom Hanks’ Mister Rogers was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and not in the bigger Best Actor category. Many people, who clearly had not seen the movie, were shocked. How dare they! How dare they game the odds for even a saint like Tom! But those who had seen it assured the rest of us it was no mistake. This was not the movie they thought it was. It was something far richer. And indeed it is. 

The genius of A Beautiful Day’s framing device is the way it introduces our real main character, journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). Mister Rogers begins his show by introducing him as one of his friends that we’ll learn about, and if it’s not clear to you why this happens, it will slowly hit you as the movie rolls on: adults are really just bodies controlled by the inner child. We may have thought all along that Mister Rogers was a kid’s television program. But it’s clear his lessons are just as applicable to adults. And it’s clear he has just as much an interest in any one person, regardless of their age. Without outright saying it, director Marielle Heller’s genius film (with a risk-taking script from Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster), gently acknowledges just how much we still need a Mister Rogers in our lives to remind us that we’re human, we’re doing our best, and we are still going to feel these gorgeously violent emotions and learn how to deal with them. 

The older I get, the more I realize the things that hit me the hardest are rarely about the actual circumstances at hand. It’s a raw nerve that’s been touched, a deep elemental nerve that can also be considered a strong feeling I had as a child. Maybe it’s anger that came from feeling left out or alone. Maybe it’s embarrassment at not knowing what’s going on and being put on the spot. Maybe it’s feeling heard, but not understood. It could be a lot of things. But by and large all these things that bring out the biggest emotions in us come from deeply-embedded experiences we had as a child. Sometimes we fool ourselves into progress.  We feel wiser. We read a lot of books, do a lot of journaling. We think, I am now an adult, dammit! And then something completely unexpected hits us in just the right, vulnerable raw-nerve part, and the facade shatters to the floor. We’re still just a kid in a grown body.

One of the best things A Beautiful Day does is the one I hoped it would do the most: demystify and humanize Mister Rogers. You would think people want him to be idolized, a living day saint. Because that’s what we need. Someone – like Jesus or Baby Yoda – far more perfect than we could ever hope to be. Something to inspire us. But when Vogel asks Rogers’ wife what it’s like to live with a modern-day saint, she’s quick to politely express how much her husband doesn’t like that framing. Being considered a saint, she says, is not only untrue but it makes someone feel unattainable. Being like Mister Rogers is perfectly attainable. He still has a temper. He just has developed, over a long lifetime, ways to deal with it. 

By the end, after we’ve seen a beautiful arc with Vogel’s character, a deeply hurt inner child finally getting what he needs so forgiveness can pave the way, we’re left back with Mister Rogers. He tapes his show, wraps up his final take, and checks it on the monitor. He likes what he sees. Everyone breaks for the day and goes home. But he, the imperfect inspiration, remains behind. He walks across a darkening set and sits at a piano. He begins playing melodically before pounding out all the low keys at the same time, an exercise he previously told Vogel he does as a way to deal with the bigger, more difficult emotions. It’s a beautiful reminder that even after everything we have seen, including great joy and gratitude from Mister Rogers himself at Vogel’s journey and the new friend he’s made in him, he still is human. He still is grappling with the waves of emotions we all have inside of us. And he still, once again, is going to do his best to deal with it in a way that doesn’t hurt himself or others. He’s attainable. He’s the inspiration we need the most. 

Racing is an unforgiving sport. When all the rules and regulations are in place to make it as competitive an endeavor as possible, every mistake is magnified. Overheated brakes? You’ll lose control. An underpowered engine? You’ll be gasping to keep up. Making this even more difficult is the limited amount of space in a vehicle meant to be as sleek and aerodynamic as possible without actually lifting off into the skies. 

It’s creating a space shuttle meant to remain on Earth. 

At the start of the Ford v Ferrari, a team of Ford marketers are baffled at how to lift their flagging sales. When Lee Ioacca (Jon Bernthal) suggests sexing up their dusty brand by throwing Ford into the Le Mans 24, the most punishing and unforgiving race on the planet, the goal is set: to compete with the otherworldly Italians at Ferrari. The man they task to lead the way, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), knows how impossible their mission is. Luckily, he knows just the driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), to help him bridge the gap. 

That’s the historical layout of the story. But what makes Ford v Ferrari work so well is how hard the filmmakers work to make their own cinematic Ford GTO, swapping out and exchanging parts for the sleekest earthbound spaceship possible. Ford v Ferrari existed as a script for nearly 10 years, with director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Walk the Line, Logan) checking in from time to time. It needed one last push, one last exchanging of and honing of pieces to get it ready for the green light. So Mangold ditched the ensemble feel of the film and focused on the relationship between Shelby and Miles. They sacrificed some historical accuracy for the betterment of the emotional truth of the story: that true friendship is the only race we can always win. It makes this vessel of filmmaking lighter, tighter, and powerfully grounded. 

Mangold completely understands that the laws of gravity work just as well in storytelling: that every force will be met by an equal, opposing force. So the friendship doesn’t start smoothly, something the film circles back to in increasingly thoughtful ways. Shelby and Miles are two very different people who really need each other. Miles is the only driver Shelby can win with; Shelby’s the only one who will fight for Miles when corporate Ford fights his lack of PR skills. Before they finally get on the same page, they have a pretty hilarious public fight, with groceries flying and awkward fists landing. It’s Batman fighting Jason Bourne, a necessary scuffle to make sure they both know they’re gonna stick with each other to the end. 

There are other exotic parts that make up this finely tuned vehicle including a wife (Caitriona Balfe) as demanding of partnership and honesty as she is a true companion, a magnificently villainous Tracey Letts as Henry Ford II (aka The Deuce), and enough throttling, ferocious car camerawork to make the Fast and Furious series a little jealous. In the end, it all comes back to Miles and Shelby, to Batman and Bourne. Their friendship is forged in the fires of passion, an earthbound rocket chasing the amber sunset long after the checkered flag. 

While watching Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire last week, I couldn’t help but think of another lady: 2017’s Lady Bird. There, writer/director Greta Gerwig painted an indelible portrait of a high-school senior often at odds with her hometown and what she perceived to be as a limited, boxed-in future. As part of a deep lunge of an attempt to get accepted to an East Coast school she definitely can’t afford, she shows the head nun at her private school her admissions essay. 

“It is clear that you love Sacramento,” the nun says. (She’s spent most of the movie complaining about it) 

“I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird says. 

And then the nun offers a line I still, three years later, think about at least once a week: “Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?”

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to get back into drawing and improving my skills as a writer who draws. I recognized everything Marianne was doing – the contouring, the mixture of colors, the way she held her instruments. But what stood out to me the most is the most simple and important of all: attention. The way she leans and sneaks in looks at her subject in Héloïse, running behind a rock to sketch out her hands or struggling to remember the shape of her ears. 

It is astonishing how much our brain can misremember. If I told you “draw a car” you’d likely draw something with two wheels, a door, some kind of window. It wouldn’t really look like a car, though. I’d look like what you think a car looks like. The lack of attention breaks the reality. Now say you were – and this is exactly something I did, to astonishing results – to look at a picture of a car, or even better, look at a car from side profile in a parking lot. Really look at it and notice where the curves go. Where the door creases begin and end. Just how much space is between the tire and the frame of the car. They seem like minor details, but each of these minor details you can notice and approximate will have a substantial impact on your next drawing. You’ll get ever closer to the real thing.

It’s no mistake that Marianne’s love for Héloïse increases the more she pays attention. She cannot separate her attention to her subject from her love for her subject. They become one and the same. And the most hurtful thing that could be said to her comes when Heloise tells her she doesn’t even see herself, or worse, Marianne in the portrait. It’s chasing reality, but not the truth. And really, how painful is it to her from someone you are crushing on that you think you know them, but you really don’t? 

At one point, as they talk about when they may or may not have fallen in love with each other, they each list off the different things they do when they’re feeling different ways. We expect this from Marianne, after all. She is the artist. It’s literally her job to pay attention, to make this secret portrait without Héloïse knowing. But what we don’t expect is Heloise to be as incisive and perceptive about Marianne. She’s been paying attention, even as she’s been an avoidant subject to paint. It’s an exhilarating turn. 

The last shot in the film is one for the ages. The camera does not move. We just see Héloïse’s face for what seems like an eternity. It’s our portrait, a gift from the filmmaker, to allow us to see just how much we’ve been paying attention to Heloise and the connection she’s found herself in. And if we continue to pay attention, we’ll see it’s not just sadness that comes over her; it’s everything. Every laugh, every tear, every dash towards the sea. All the highs and lows and waves in-between. All we want in life is to be painted a portrait by someone who truly understands us, even if they are gazing agonizingly, appreciatively, from afar.