Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

Valley Cinemas is holding over one film – The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 and adding a new feature, this week the kids-oriented The Good Dinosaur.

With its 16 animated feature Pixar has returned to a familiar well, the story of a friendship between man and animal, or at least boy and dinosaur, who, with bravery and self-esteem issues finds himself washed away on a river and must – guess what? – struggle to get back home. The Good Dinosaur is one of those reassuring, platitude-filled family stories disguised as a cartoon in which a central character must “face his fears.” In this case it is Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), who is both counseled and teased by his siblings and parents. His boy savior in the woods is Spot (Jack Bright), a feral child with more on the ball. The subtle name reversal of pet and adult is part of the alternative universe created in which the dinosaurs didn’t die out and instead became domestic farmers of chickens and crops. Thus, as in certain unscientific religious paintings, dinos and man romp together. The landscape animation is the best part of the film, which seems to be set in Montana, or a close facsimile. Other voices include Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin, Sam Elliott, and TV’s John Ratzenberger.

Meanwhile the Glasgow City-County Library (408 3rd Ave S, 406, 228-2731) is offering a documentary about Inuit energy usage, Joel Heath’s People of a Feather, from 2013. The director spent seven winters in the Belcher Islands in Hudson’s Bay to capture images of man and animals coping with cold nature, relying most of all on the elder duck feather, apparently the covering that provides the best warmth in the world. But the Inuits' biggest foe isn’t the weather, but a huge hydroelectric dam in New York that disrupts ice flows and ocean currents. Heath eschews talking heads and reports in favor of simply showing the changes of the earth over time. As the film’s promotional info relates, People of a Feather is inspired by “Inuit ingenuity and the technology of a simple feather, the film is a call to action to implement energy solutions that work with nature.”

Among the new DVDs coming to The Worx are American Ultra, No Escape, Sean the Sheep, and Ricki and the Flash.

Though not much viewed or well-received when it was released a few months ago, American Ultra is a fun spy film, one of those tales like The Long Kiss Goodnight or the Bourne movies about an ordinary person who doesn’t realize that he or she is a spy-trained killing machine. In this case it’s the usually disagreeable Jesse Eisenberg, partnered up again with Kristin Stewart, and the stoner pair are believable as a stoner and his g.f. inexplicably being hunted down by CIA assassins.

No Escape is another one of those fib-titled movies, like the out-of-control train film Unstoppable. Well, guess what? Happy-family-hunte-by-rebels Owen Wilson and Lake Bell do escape, along with a few other stars. Oh, and they stopped that train, too.