Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

May 27, 2017Posted in2017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Theatrical

Pirates5

*/****
starring Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg

by Walter Chaw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (hereafter Pirates 5) is stultifyingly boring, which is interesting because lots of stuff happens in it, constantly. It's guilty of a kind of antic, Brownian motion that suggests all of the repugnance inspired by a bivouac of army ants and none of the creepy sense of underlying order. It's like watching stirred tea: brown and insensible. Just like. Consider the first major set-piece, in which our jolly Roger, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, starting to look like those leather bags you find at Himalayan shops), conspires with his truncated crew to steal a giant iron safe and ends up stealing the entire bank. The entire bank, savvy? Compare it against the brilliance of the train sequence in 2013's The Lone Ranger to appreciate exactly how underestimated that film was, and exactly how estimated this one is. There's a team of horses, a little person, a building being dragged through an island town, shit flying everywhere, and Capt. Jack doing Buster Keaton if Buster Keaton weren't an artist and were, instead, an aging actor most of the audience is beginning to suspect is playing himself now. Later, there's a cameo by Paul McCartney and, you know, same, same. The posture is rock 'n' roll when really it's one of those "Top of the Charts" cover compilations gamely put together by the house band. It sucks. If it makes you feel cheated, well, you were.

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

March 21, 2017Posted in2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

Beautybeastliveactiondisney

*/****
starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Stephen Chbosky and Bill Condon, based on the screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Three cheers for Disney’s dedication to diversity. I saw a production of “A Christmas Carol” last year with a fully integrated cast. It made no sense, but hooray for diversity at any cost, even at the expense of sense–even at the risk of self-parody. Even when it doesn’t move the ball, necessarily. I’m not talking about making Gaston’s fawning sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad) overtly gay instead of merely coding him as such, I’m talking about making every other person a person of colour for the express purpose of being on the right side of some imaginary, constantly-moving but unforgiving line in history. Sometimes, it’s a good thing; sometimes it feels desperate; and sometimes, it’s just premature. When it’s good, it looks like Disney’s Rogue One, where the diversity spoke to oppressed cultures revolting against a fascist, white-nationalist regime. When it’s not good, it looks clueless. We’re not a post-racial society; presenting us as such, burdened as it is by the damning weight of good intentions, comes with the danger of excreting another Cloud Atlas fantasy–the type of movie the white people in Get Out would make: tone-deaf and offensive at worst. Or, as with this live-action Beauty and the Beast, just sort of silly and twee.

Moana (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 13, 2017Posted in2016, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Moana1

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Pinocchio (1940) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 2017Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, FFC Must-Own

Pinoke1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
story adaptation Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia
supervising directors Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske

by Bill Chambers Bambi was supposed to be Walt Disney’s second feature film, but the phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs1 had thrown his fledgling empire into such chaos–most of it created by Walt’s manic spending and multitasking–that it got swapped out for Pinocchio, ostensibly the easier to animate as well as the more commercial of the two. It’s not that Disney was playing it safe, it’s that he thought he could bank some time and audience good will for experimentation in the years ahead. But before Pinocchio even opened, Disney was apologizing for falling into a sophomore slump, and the film wound up being a box-office disappointment, grossing less than Bambi eventually would.2 It’s interesting to try to watch Pinocchio from a contemporary perspective and determine what’s lacking (the crude sentimentality of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for starters), having grown up with it as a brand classic. Is it possible this idiosyncratic motion picture–more of a dry run for Fantasia than Walt maybe realized or intended–was ahead of its time, and time caught up? It’s possible, though Pinocchio undoubtedly benefited from Disney’s practice of cyclically reissuing their animated features: people started to appreciate that it had in abundance what modern Disney movies lacked, chiefly, personality, inspiration, and ambition.

The BFG (2016) + Pete’s Dragon (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 8, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Spielberg

Thebfg1

Roald Dahl’s The BFG
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement
screenplay by Melissa Mathison, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Steven Spielberg

PETE’S DRAGON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Robert Redford
screenplay by David Lowery & Toby Halbrooks
directed by David Lowery

by Bill Chambers An inverse E.T. written by that film’s screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, The BFG is in some ways archetypal Spielberg. It’s another child-led picture to follow E.T., Empire of the Sun, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and The Adventures of Tintin, featuring more of Spielberg’s weird hallmark of colourful food and drink (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Hook, Jurassic Park). But Spielberg just isn’t that guy anymore, even if he always will be in the public imagination (it happens to actors…and it happens to directors, too), and The BFG has the same ‘you can’t go home again’ quality that plagued Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It would be inexplicable within the recent arc of his career if not for the precedent of Tintin, which gave him an appetite for impossible camera moves that can really only be sated when the sets are virtual, as they are for much of The BFG. I can’t help thinking of Spielberg’s story about how the alien-abduction sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn’t working until he went back and added shots of the screws on a vent cover turning by themselves; he thrives in that margin of error, like when he let a sick Harrison Ford shoot the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark and stumbled upon one of the most iconic moments in cinema. The amount of previsualizing necessary to make something like The BFG shrinks that margin considerably, and all foresight and no hindsight make Steve a dull boy.

Moana (2016)

November 21, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Musical, Theatrical

Moana

**½/****
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 15, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

Findingdory1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

Telluride ’16: Short Films

September 20, 2016Posted in2016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Mystery, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2016, Thriller

Tell16shorts

by Walter Chaw

Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with…no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It’s possible to do this meaningfully; it’s also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That’s what’s happened here. Dirt isn’t promising, but it is brief.

The Jungle Book (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

September 4, 2016Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical, Scarlett Johansson

Junglebook161

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Neel Sethi
screenplay by Justin Marks
directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features–especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain–which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief–wanted to see a “real” purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a “real” prince, or a “real” wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the “real” Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. “Ghoulish curiosity” is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp’s recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we’ve seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I’m dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney’s animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin’ April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

Finding Dory (2016)

June 20, 2016Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

Findingdory

**/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

Zootopia (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 13, 2016Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family

Zootopia1

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

Zootopia (2016)

March 5, 2016Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

Zootopia

***/****
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 23, 2016Posted in2015, 2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Family, Pixar, Road Movie

Gooddino1

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 10, 2016Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

Snowwhite1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
story adaptation Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Richard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith
supervising director David Hand

by Bill Chambers Walt Disney was shooting for the moon with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not just his first but the first animated feature. He of the Silly Symphony wanted it to have prestige, fostering an obsessive-compulsive streak within the studio that is curiously reflected in the film’s epic preoccupation with orderliness, cleanliness, and labour. It has the air of manifesto when one considers that of the eight songs on the soundtrack, two, “Whistle While You Work” and “Heigh-ho,” are about the satisfaction of work1 while a third, “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum,” is a set of bathing instructions subtitled “The Dwarfs’ Washing Song.” In her unrelenting fastidiousness, Snow White reeks of self-portraiture (armchair Freuds might speculate on Snow White’s other qualities, such as her being so perfect as to drive the competition mad, as they apply to Disney, already an Ozymandian figure armed with multiple Academy awards by the time of production), and it’s because of this that her predilection for housework doesn’t feel like the typical chauvinism abundant in the Disney canon. When she scolds two squirrels for sweeping dirt under the carpet, it’s difficult not to hear it as an ethos.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 2015Posted in2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

Revenant

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Tomorrowland (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 15, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Tomorrowlandbd1

***/**** Image A+ (ultra) Sound A+ Extras C+
starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy
screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a mess and it knows it. It’s unruly, barely contained, just this side of completely falling apart. There are many and distracting continuity errors, and though it makes a joke of it, it’s clear immediately that the movie doesn’t know how to start, much less end. It has an engaging, irrepressible heroine it strands at the moment she should be doing something (“Am I supposed to be…doing something?” she actually asks), and it has a visit to a memorabilia/collectibles store run by unusual proprietors that is packed to the girders with Brad Bird ephemera of the Iron Giant and Incredibles variety. Tomorrowland has hanging about it, in other words, all the elements of disaster: winky meta references, lack of narrative cohesion, desperation-born mistakes, bad screenwriter/Nick-Riviera-bad script doctor Damon Lindelof as Bird’s co-author…and yet it’s good somehow. Credit Bird, who knows his way around spatial relationships, and credit a simple, plaintive idea that the world can be better if we believe that it can be better. If the sign of a great filmmaker is his ability to make a bad actor seem good, Bird is a frickin’ genius for making something Lindelof worked on not an utter catastrophe. It’s big and simple and corny in a Lone Ranger, Captain America, Silver Age Superman kind of way–the kind of big and simple and corny I can get behind.

Aladdin (1992) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 12, 2015Posted in1990s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

Aladdin1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

Portions of this review, including the first four paragraphs, were originally published on October 5, 2004.

by Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989’s The Little Mermaid and especially 1991’s nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument’s sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992’s Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt’s twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling–as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps–mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It’s a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio’s Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney’s renaissance because of it.

Tomorrowland (2015)

May 20, 2015Posted in2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Tomorrowland

***/****
starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy
screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a mess and it knows it. It’s unruly, barely contained, just this side of completely falling apart. There are many and distracting continuity errors, and though it makes a joke of it, it’s clear immediately that the movie doesn’t know how to start, much less end. It has an engaging, irrepressible heroine it strands at the moment she should be doing something (“Am I supposed to be…doing something?” she actually asks), and it has a visit to a memorabilia/collectibles store run by unusual proprietors that is packed to the girders with Brad Bird ephemera of the Iron Giant and Incredibles variety. Tomorrowland has hanging about it, in other words, all the elements of disaster: winky meta references, lack of narrative cohesion, desperation-born mistakes, bad screenwriter/Nick-Riviera-bad script doctor Damon Lindelof as Bird’s co-author…and yet it’s good somehow. Credit Bird, who knows his way around spatial relationships, and credit a simple, plaintive idea that the world can be better if we believe that it can be better. If the sign of a great filmmaker is his ability to make a bad actor seem good, Bird is a frickin’ genius for making something Lindelof worked on not an utter catastrophe. It’s big and simple and corny in a Lone Ranger, Captain America, Silver Age Superman kind of way–the kind of big and simple and corny I can get behind.

Cinderella (2015)

March 14, 2015Posted in2015, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

Cinderella15

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Lily James, Richard Madden, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Chris Weitz
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Notable in however these things are notable for not being an Ever After revisionist Cinderella but rather a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Disney animated version, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella would be interesting to look at next to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if only to see how Helena Bonham Carter morphs from immortal beloved to Fairy Godmother. (Answer? Awkwardly.) It’s not a bad conversation to have, actually, in a film that finds a great deal of depth in Cate Blanchett’s Barbara Stanwyck take on Lady Tremaine, the evil stepmother. In a nicely-played scene, she stops just short of confessing that the reason she resents Cinderella (Lily James) is because, for women, society abhors the aged and venerates the youthful. It’s not deep (and maybe it’s not meant to be), but it does add a little bitter undertaste to its “happily ever after.”

101 Dalmatians (1961) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 17, 2015Posted in1960s, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family

101dal1

One Hundred and One Dalmatians
***½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
story by Bill Peet, based on the book The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton S. Luske, Clyde Geronimi

by Bill Chambers 1959’s Sleeping Beauty and 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (hereafter 101 Dalmatians) make for an illuminating double-bill; the latter could even be construed as a Godardian rejoinder to the former. An anti-auteur of these movies, Walt Disney determined their outcome by divesting resources from their development–including his own expertise–and pouring them into his personal Taj Mahal, Disneyland. This deprived the expensive Sleeping Beauty of the talent that may have been able to crack its deceptively simple fairytale formula and transcend the limitations of a graphical style inspired by medieval tapestries. When the film barely broke even, Disney decided his next animated feature would adapt a property with some grounding in contemporary prose and cost a lot less, leading to the shuttering of the ink-and-paint department and a vigorous embrace of Xerography, whereby the animators’ pencil drawings were photocopied directly onto acetate rather than delicately retraced and refined by hand.