Hello, Dolly! (1969) – DVD

August 14, 2003Posted in1960s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Romance

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Louis Armstrong
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the stage play by Michael Stewart and The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
directed by Gene Kelly

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Hunter S. Thompson once remarked that the Circus Circus casino would be “what the whole hep world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” The family audience, meanwhile, would be taking in something like Hello, Dolly!, a film so totalitarian in its crushing good cheer that anyone without a predisposition towards its phoney “togetherness” will find themselves beaten down in their seats. Equal parts Lawrence Welk and Albert Speer, it’s a grotesque epic pageant designed to show off all the money spent on production while being as condescendingly “cute” and innocuous as possible–a brew of wastefulness and sentimentality so strong that it’s hard to breathe in its aroma, let alone drink it to its dregs.

Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) – DVD

August 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)

July 25, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Stallone

Spy Kids 3: Game Over
½*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

Spykids3dby Walter Chaw Robert Rodriguez’s deeply unpleasant conclusion to his Spy Kids trilogy lacks the smarts and inventiveness of the first two films in the series, putting all of its eggs in a 3-D basket that is so certain to cause headache that bottles of aspirin should be passed out alongside the flimsy red/blue glasses. All the weaknesses of the previous Spy Kids entries, unbolstered in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (hereafter Spy Kids 3) by a sense of joy and innovation, are unforgivable in this film: the genuinely awful child actors, the cheesy special effects, and that certain air of imported moral superiority that seems a late-hour attempt to justify the emptiness of the exercise. Out of nowhere, the lessons of family and respect for disability find themselves grafted to this flimsiest of low-tech frameworks–special effects that are so amateurish and poorly implemented they don’t so much remind of Tron as replicate Tron bit-for-bit twenty-one years after the fact. The narrative of the film, such as it is, reveals itself to be a life-support system for hyperactive incompetence, and for a series of stupid cameos that are at least preferable to Sylvester Stallone as something called The Toymaker.

Brigham Young (1940) – DVD

July 23, 2003Posted in1940s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on a story by Louis Bromfield
directed by Henry Hathaway

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was hoping, prior to watching Brigham Young, that the film would be a twisted smash-up of subject matter and Hollywood convention. I was sure that the touchy matter of Mormon ritual would send the movie in all directions at once, trying to salvage a normal film but twisting itself through ever more bizarre hoops. But while it does indeed get the production team scrambling to deal with that pesky polygamy issue, Brigham Young is mostly just a dull problem-picture crossed with a boring western, with no real surprises to offer anyone who was born a little before yesterday.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

July 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, France, Theatrical, UK

**/****
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Patrick Gilmore & Tim Johnson

by Walter Chaw Making almost no impression at all, DreamWorks’ latest animated flick is a lot like their last animated flick, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: an endlessly-reproducible light romantic cartoon heavy on the derring-do and gender slapstick, and light on anything that could possibly be construed as memorable. The most noteworthy thing about the picture, in fact, is that it exposes the surprising quickness with which DreamWorks’ has become that which it most disdains: Disney redux–its sixth animated feature satisfying the maxim of joining what can’t be beaten and getting as entrenched and boring as Treasure Planet in the process. As soon as it’s declared that the quest of the film is for the “Book of Peace,” it’s already past time to let the eye-rolling commence.

Shanghai Knights (2003) – DVD

July 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Aidan Gillen, Fann Wong
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by David Dobkin

by Walter Chaw Crossing the Big Pond hasn’t exactly done wonders for the heroes of the halcyon days of Hong Kong cinema. Lured by the prestige and mythology of the Hollywood dream factory, folks like Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and so on have transformed the honesty of their craft into the same sort of boom crash opera we’ve been churning out on Yankee shores for decades now. Without a strong sense of how to film action, of the martial arts tradition in Chinese cinema, nor of the particular strengths of a particular artist, even as this genre has taken a dramatic upturn in popularity in the West, the folks most responsible for its sophistication have become sidekicks (Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies), B-list hunks (Yun Fat), villains (Li), failures (Lam, Hark), starfuckers (Woo), and, in the sad case of Jackie Chan, broad racial caricatures at the mercy of people like Brett Ratner, Kevin Donovan, and Tom Dey. Chan has made over 100 films over the course of forty years as an actor, director, writer, producer, and stuntman; the first thing that happens to him when he comes to the United States is that he’s placed in the company of idiots and neophytes. It feels like racism.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

June 27, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, Demi Moore
screenplay by John August and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by McG

Charliesangelsfullthrottleby Walter Chaw Even its subtitle an onanistic entendre, McG’s excrescent Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle takes self-awareness to the level of pornography in what boils down to one of the most queasily interesting trainwrecks in recent memory. It leaves the joyful goofiness of the first film in the dust of the “wanton slut” school of feminism, uncomfortable innuendo (incest just isn’t all that funny), and a parade of star cameos that would have derailed the film were it not already a mere series of references to other films. What the picture represents, in a very real way, is the death of cinema, swallowed whole by the same instinct that drives television: strobe cuts, shallow titillation, barely subsumed fetishism, gleeful stupidity… all fuelled entirely by a knowledge of medium. The picture doesn’t have any sort of meaning outside of the cinematic–it’s essentially a warm spasm of pop cultural goop, an extended succession of money shots with none of that distracting filler (plot, character, tension, purpose) that weighs down pictures exhibiting some measure of non-commercial ambition.

The Big Trail (1930) – DVD

June 24, 2003Posted in1930s, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, Western

**½/**** Image B Sound B
starring John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, El Brendel, Tully Marshall
screenplay by Hal G. Evarts
directed by Raoul Walsh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The Big Trail is the kind of movie that comes wrapped in a big piece of butcher’s paper with the word WESTERN stamped on it. It offers the barest structural skeleton of the genre, with pioneers fulfilling their Manifest Destiny over terrain both harsh and unforgiving, and it sticks with its forward march to Oregon with only minor narrative flourishes to distract from the standard-issue myth of America. Later westerns would meditate on the nature of both the lone-wolf cowboy hero and the value of the westward expansion, but this early John Wayne vehicle is quaintly naïve in its taking it all for granted, making for great film-historical fascination when the drama and the intrigue flag.

The Other Side of Heaven (2002) – DVD

June 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, DVD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Christopher Gorham, Anne Hathaway, Nathaniel Lees, Joseph Folau
written and directed by Mitch Davis

by Walter Chaw To call The Other Side of Heaven “appalling” would be to underestimate just how dangerous entertainments like it can be. The film positions itself as “based on a true story” and “based on a memoir” without understanding that the two are often mutually exclusive. Then, without apology, it proceeds to manufacture scenes for maximum manipulation, everything from the messianic to the mundane. An opening dance sequence set in a Cleaver American Fifties features more stunt people, professional dancers, and trampolines than Cirque du Soleil, its artificiality setting the tone for the rest of the film, while the scene’s conclusion (with the picture’s hero trapping the celebrants in a giant dance hall, dooming them to death should a fire break out) serves as a pretty succinct summary of the film’s feckless themes and carelessness.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [Widescreen Collection] – DVD

May 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Stuart Baird

by Walter Chaw For a film in a tired franchise trying to duplicate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (inarguably the best of the cinematic “Trek” line) down to an articulate arch-villain, heroic sacrifice, and mind-meld cheat, the irony of having the central conflict revolve around a defective clone is delicious and hilarious. Star Trek: Nemesis (hereafter Nemesis) is abominable pretension draped in the sheep’s frock of sci-fi pulp–pap of the first water invested in undergraduate doubling subtexts and ridiculous stabs at existentialism reminding of the discovery of the wizard of God in the fifth Trek flick.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) [Special Edition] + Atlantis: Milo’s Return (2003) – DVDs

May 20, 2003Posted in1950s, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A+
starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, Peter Lorre
screenplay by Earl Felton, based on the novel by Jules Verne
directed by Richard Fleischer

ATLANTIS: MILO’S RETURN
*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
screenplay by Thomas Hart & Henry Gilroy & Kevin Hopps & Tad Stones & Steve Englehart & Marty Isenberg
directed by Victor Cook, Toby Shelton, Tad Stones

“Climb aboard the Nautilus…and into a strange undersea world of spellbinding adventure! Kirk Douglas, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre star as shipwrecked survivors taken captive by the mysterious Captain Nemo, brilliantly portrayed by James Mason. Wavering between genius and madness, Nemo has launched a deadly crusade across the seven seas. But can the captive crew expose his evil plan before he destroys the world?” –DVD liner summary for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

by Bill Chambers The trained seal is impressive, but enough about Kirk Douglas. Disney’s epic live-action adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea proves three things over the course of its thick running time: that director Richard Fleischer (the man who brought us Fantastic Voyage, the film that inspired Innerspace) was a gifted special-effects marshall–20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still eye- popping/fooling 49 years after its release; that James Mason essayed the cinema’s definitive Bligh archetype; and that there’s always some asshole in a striped shirt in submarine movies. (Here it’s Douglas’s scurvy harpoonist Ned Land.) What’s surprising is how prosaic the film can be with so many assets in place, i.e., Mason, the Seussian interiors of the Nautilus, head-hunters, an enthralling killer squid, a seal with the charisma of Fred Astaire, and an especially vein-popping Douglas.

Xena: Warrior Princess – Season One (1995-1996) – DVD

May 17, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Television

Image C- Sound B- Extras A-
“Sins of the Past,” “Chariots of War,” “Dreamworker,” “Cradle of Hope,” “The Path Not Taken,” “The Reckoning,” “The Titans,” “Prometheus,” “Death in Chains,” “Hooves and Harlots,” “The Black Wolf,” “Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,” “Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards,” “A Fistful of Dinars,” “Warrior… Princess,” “Mortal Beloved,” “The Royal Couple of Thieves,” “The Prodigal,” “Altared States,” “Ties That Bind,” “The Greater Good,” “Callisto,” “Death Mask,” “Is There a Doctor in the House?”

by Walter Chaw With a show title that appears to mean “Alien: Warrior Princess,” what’s not to like about Sam Raimi’s and Rob Tapert’s foray into the realm of cheesecake camp cinema? The distaff queer version of “Highlander: The Series”, it occurs fairly early on that while there will be many aborted love affairs, the only consistent sexual tension will be between Xena (Lucy Lawless) and her talkative, Willow-esque geek sidekick Gabrielle (Reneé O’Connor). Tackling the series from the pink triangle is tempting, but fairly self-defeating: A scene in the second episode where a wounded Xena commands that a farmer stick his poker into the fire pretty much defeats a snarky approach to the material. That bridge has already been crossed–not to say that I’m above crossing it again.

Treasure Planet (2002) – DVD

May 1, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Ron Clements & John Musker and Rob Edwards, based on the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

by Walter Chaw Beginning as a clever updating of Robert Louis Stevenson’s kiddie adventure classic Treasure Island, by its end, Disney’s Treasure Planet washes out as another bombastic familial reconciliation fable that marks the flat trajectory of most Disney “boy” animations. Released just a few months removed from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in North America, Treasure Planet‘s narrative and character shortfalls are all the more glaring for their studied lack of depth and the picture’s general overreliance on excess, broad comic relief, and all of the stale portfolio of hackneyed Disneyisms. Treasure Planet even comes complete with that most irritating of cutesy crutches: an anthropomorphic globular whatzit created with what appears to be more of a concern for ease of holiday season polymer mass-reproduction than narrative foundation. The existence of one slapstick comic-relief gag not enough, enter Martin Short as homosexual robot B.E.N.–an animated caricature of Short’s Ed Grimley character whose appearance mid-film is as handy a signal as any that Treasure Planet, for all serious intents and aesthetic purposes, is over.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002) – DVD

April 18, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

The Wild Thornberrys
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Kate Boutilier
directed by Jeff McGrath and Cathy Malkasian

by Walter Chaw Preaching its message of courage, family, and self-confidence with grace and a bare minimum of soapbox grandstanding and mawkish sentimentality, The Wild Thornberrys Movie is a picture of warmth and imagination. Its globe-trotting wildlife-show family, the titular Thornberrys, have as their most conspicuous member gawky Eliza (voiced by Lacey Chabert), a freckled, bespectacled, orthodontically challenged little girl who earns the power to communicate with animals through an act of kindness. The locating of a traditionally unattractive young female as the superhero at the centre of an adventure serial (the picture is based on a Nickelodeon series) is so rare an idea in American animation that its appearance here makes for one of the more bracing, genuinely exciting creations of the modern popular culture. Its mainstay status in Chinese martial arts and Japanese anime films remains a gulf that U.S. culture, in its occasional simple-mindedness, remains far from bridging.

Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (1995) – DVD

March 30, 2003Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Family

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bruce Davison, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Bradford, Tom Bower
written and directed by Phillip Borsos

by Walter Chaw Though shot with a nice eye for vistas, Phillip Borsos’s ponderously titled Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (hereafter Yellow Dog) is decidedly modest in scope. It’s a wilderness fantasy/adventure involving a boy and his dog that follows along so closely to the set-up/pay-off structure that the build-up to the inevitable marooning is almost sadistic in its inevitability. Think of every moment dad teaches his boy to build a fire as the children’s-movie equivalent of a green foot soldier in a war flick showing a picture of his sweetheart to his buddy right before a big action scene.

The Core (2003)

March 28, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disaster Movie, France, Germany, Italy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Cooper Layne and John Rogers
directed by Jon Amiel

by Walter Chaw Jon Amiel’s poorly-timed disaster throwback The Core is a by-the-numbers affair that features the sort of special effects mayhem that folks will reference when terrorists blow-up the Acropolis–perhaps explaining in part why this bombastic summer film is being rushed into release in the late-winter doldrums: better to get it in movieplexes before it has to be delayed for a few months. But with unfortunate mentions of the Al Jazeera news agency and a botched shuttle landing that is exceedingly uncomfortable given its proximity to NASA’s recent tragedy, it could just be that The Core is a bad idea for any time, and releasing it when no one is likely to see it is just a cut-your-losses sort of thing. The Core is probably betting that people are more fatigued by the Riefenstahl-ian “embedded” live coverage of our troops in action than by their over-familiarity with this kind of Armageddon/Deep Impact/Poseidon Adventure falderal, when the truth is that it’s possible to be tired of both.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002) [2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

March 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, UK

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
written and directed by Paul Vischer and Mike Nawrocki

by Walter Chaw Sort of Monty Python-lite with a Christian message, the VeggieTales direct-to-video series of didactic sketches is, I’m told, the top-selling home video series in history, speaking at once to the creepy rise of grotesquely hypocritical religiosity in the United States and the fact that VeggieTales, judging by its first feature-length film Jonah, is extremely clever and entertaining. Packed with visual gags and semi-subtle references (a “Moby Blaster” video game in a seafood reference recalls Melville’s fondness for the Jonah tale), Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie is a bouncy Christian animated musical with a handful of compulsively catchy tunes and some crisp computer-imaging work. It occurred to me a few times during the course of the picture that as far as Christian entertainment goes, this is the first product that didn’t disqualify the term as an oxymoron.

Bushwhacked (1995) – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery

*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Daniel Stern, Jon Polito, Brad Sullivan, Ann Dowd
screenplay by John Jordan & Danny Byers and Tom Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg
directed by Greg Beeman

by Walter Chaw The Yang to the distaff Yin of Troop Beverly Hills, Bushwhacked, Greg Beeman’s endlessly irritating slapstick take on High Sierra, finds the bird-faced actor Daniel Stern doing his best to milk the hysterical simpleton shtick of his hapless Home Alone villain. Nicknaming Stern’s character “Spider” for no real reason but to, eight years after its release and just now finding its way to DVD, connect it in a disturbing way to David Cronenberg’s thirteenth film by way of arrested Freudian developmental phases and fixations on body function, Bushwhacked, as it happens, is also about as funny as Spider–not a particularly shining endorsement of something that’s ostensibly a comedy.

Das Boot: The Director’s Cut (1981/1997) [Superbit] – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1980s, 1990s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, DVD, Thriller, War, West Germany

***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bengsch
screenplay by Wolfgang Petersen, based on the novel by Lothar G. Buchheim
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

by Walter Chaw The curious mental state of German submariners in the waning days of the Second World War is reflected in the general malaise of the United States in the weeks following September Eleventh and the hours preceding our unpopular pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Caught in the maddening doldrums between one act of unimaginable violence and its inevitable aftershocks, America’s implacable disquiet is one part anticipation of the inevitable, multiple parts cynicism, and, for a large portion of the population, a dollop of distinct lack of faith in the motives and competency of our leadership. A closer examination of the similarities pithy but perhaps unfruitful, sufficed to say that revisiting Wolfgang Petersen’s masterpiece Das Boot (in its Director’s Cut form) at this suspended moment in time is not only rewarding as great cinema can be, but also current and amazingly poignant.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) [VISTA Series] – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted inAdventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Mystery, Spielberg

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer
screenplay by Peter S. Seaman & Jeffrey Price, based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary K. Wolf
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers Who Framed Roger Rabbit opens with an animated short (“Somethin’s Cookin'”) starring Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) and Baby Herman (Lou Hirsch) in which Roger, sitting for the lady of the house, is thwarted in his attempts to keep his young charge from climbing the refrigerator. You’d hardly know it, but we’re seeing these characters for the first time–and the ineffable period authenticity of “Somethin’s Cookin’,” a cartoon commissioned specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, betrays the scrupulous eye of director Robert Zemeckis almost immediately. Animated by the legendary Richard Williams, “Somethin’s Cookin'” is fashioned in Tex Avery’s mix of elegance and elasticity; later, when Bugs Bunny makes an appearance in the movie proper, he still has the slopey head of yore. (Warner actually insisted on the modern versions of Looney Tunes appearing in the film, so Zemeckis had dummy footage mocked up to get their approval that he had no intention of using in the finished product.) The prologue ends prematurely when Roger sees bluebirds instead of stars–in the picture, cartoons are shot on soundstages: Roger Rabbit exists for real, as do Mickey Mouse, Bugs, et. al, and they hail from a Hollywood subdivision called Toontown. They are invincible, but they are also actors who bring their personal lives to work, so sometimes they just can’t generate stars on command.