Shine a Light (2008) + Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

Shine a Light (2008) + Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Disney, Documentary, Music

SHINE A LIGHT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Martin Scorsese

HANNAH MONTANA/MILEY CYRUS: BEST OF BOTH WORLDS CONCERT TOUR
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Film critic and snarkmeister extraordinaire Glenn Kenny recently blogged, “When Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light hit theaters in April, it gave movie critics, myself included, a chance…to weigh in on just what they thought of [the Rolling Stones]. It sure was fun, kinda, but rather missed a point, which is that having an opinion on The Stones these days is like having an opinion about Mount Rushmore. No one really gives a shit.” While I’m inclined to agree, does that not make a concert from “The Stones these days” tantamount to a sightseeing tour of Mt. Rushmore? What, then, does Shine a Light leave us to talk about? Sadly, not a lot.

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2008, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Directors: Tim Burton, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical

The Nightmare Before Christmas
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A
BD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by Caroline Thompson, based on a poem by Tim Burton (adaptation by Michael McDowell)
directed by Henry Selick

by Vincent Suarez You know the feeling: too many movies, too little time. You walk down the corridor of your local multiplex, relishing the titles on the marquees and posters, and you know that many will unfortunately have to be seen on home video. If you’re lucky, you’ll make wise choices, but, occasionally, your home viewing includes that film you regret not seeing theatrically. For me, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (hereafter Nightmare) is one of those films. Having grown weary of Burton’s quirkiness after the disappointing Batman Returns, I passed up Nightmare in favour of movies I now cannot recall; what a shame. Fortunately, Touchstone’s optical disc presentations of this magnificent film (the previous LaserDiscs and last year’s DVD release) provide more than a glimpse of what was surely a wonderful theatrical experience.

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] – DVDs

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Thriller

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Josh Hutcherson, Annasophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Zooey Deschanel
screenplay by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson, based on the book by Katherine Paterson
directed by Gabor Csupo

THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING
½*/**** N/A
starring Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy
screenplay by John Hodge, based on the book by Susan Cooper
directed by David L. Cunningham

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn
screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and John Sayles, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw In the genre of wide-eyed, hyperactive ‘tween bullshit, there seems a common thread of missing parents or siblings with all the attendant Oedipal complexities upon which to coat-hanger every genus of just-pubescent, Uncle Joe Campbell shenanigans. (Oh, I get it, it’s a metaphor for strange hair, jerking off, and embarrassing hard-ons–no wonder I identify with these things again as I get older.) More underground than overt adolescent emo rock-star/rapist fantasies like vampirism, the flicks of this type that work–such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, or the third and fifth Harry Potters, or The Passion of the Christ–incorporate the uncertainty and body horror of growing up with hero/martyr fantasies and, ultimately, the melancholy of childhood’s end. The result of a job well done is a piece of enduring, often befuddling, resonance, owing in part to the canny hijacking of some existing folklore or mythology (including comic books) and the gratifying recognition that at the end of all that hormonal devastation is the justification of manhood. Psychosexual psychodrama at least, the new crop of boy-into-man-boy flicks, in the wake of the astounding success of that certain boy wizard (and, shit, probably Shrek‘s, too), takes a new interest in fantasy as a means to specific ontological ends. For this unabashed fan of Matthew Robbins’s idyllic, laden Dragonslayer, it’s not entirely bad news.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)

Posted in2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Poland, Slovenia, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Andrew Adamson & Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the novel by C.S. Lewis
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw Let’s face it: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (hereafter Narnia 2) is by most objective measures a complete mess. It doesn’t do a particularly good job of shading in its backstory (you really need to have read the book or seen the first film very recently) and its narrative proper is truncated and spastic. The characters don’t demonstrate enough awe when they’re confronted with a minotaur for the first time, nor do they register the appropriate shock upon characters from their storybooks suddenly appearing in their midst. Though there’s a real problem with special-effects films that spend too much time gawping at their own illusions, it’s not much better when pictures like this give its characters good reason to be surprised and they’re not. It begins in the middle and ends with an exit tune so embarrassing that it threatens to completely deflate the goodwill the picture has, against all odds, built to that point–but damn it if it isn’t quite good for all that. Narnia 2 reminds of Stardust in that sense: it works because it works, because the connective tissue that’s there in the ephemera is made of sinew and spider silk–strong, fibrous, and sticky even when the actual plotting does the film no favours. Its themes are universal, even though C.S. Lewis is unabashedly Christian; what’s laudable about the first instalment and now this sequel is the obvious pains taken to present themes of resurrection, redemption, and faith as archetype rather than dogma. Attaching something so specific as an idea of Satan, for instance, to a brief, remarkably affecting reappearance of The White Witch (Tilda Swinton) is a reach and missing the point besides. Narnia 2 is about believing in something so simple as a greater power–about humility and resisting temptation and the easy path. Yoda had something to say to my generation from atop a log in Dagobah, and it’s possible to see Narnia 2 as Luke’s invitation to meet his darker self in the roots of a gnarled old tree.

The Rookie (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

The Rookie (2002) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

***/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Dennis Quaid, Rachel Griffiths, Jay Hernandez, Brian Cox
screenplay by Mike Rich
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Based, at least in part, on the book The Oldest Rookie: Big League Dreams from a Small Town Guy by Jim Morris and Joel Engel, Disney’s The Rookie is a semi-fictionalized account of the unlikely rise of small-town high-school science teacher and baseball coach Jim Morris from respectable obscurity to big-league relief pitcher. Morris (Dennis Quaid) inspires his team of bad news bears (Big Lake, Texas Owls) to overachieve by promising to try out for the majors if they get on a winning streak and make it to state tournament.

The Game Plan (2007) – Blu-ray + DVD

The Game Plan (2007) – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sports

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kyra Sedgwick, Morris Chestnut, Roselyn Sanchez
screenplay by Nichole Millard & Kathryn Price
directed by Andy Fickman

by Bill Chambers Maudlin trash, The Game Plan makes The Pacifier–one of the prototypes for this slop–look like No Country for Old Men. Again we have a beefcake bachelor (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) in a macho profession (football) learning to stop worrying and love the Devil’s spawn. The Rock plays star quarterback Joe “The King” Kingman, whose cushy, Elvis-accessorized lifestyle is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a little girl claiming to be his long-lost daughter. Named Peyton (not after Peyton Manning or Walter Payton, as a leatherhead would hope, but Nobel Prize-winning M.D. Peyton Rous–an early herald of her precocious pretentiousness), she invites herself to stay for a month while her mother ostensibly does philanthropic work in Africa. In the meantime, Mother or some facsimile is fed the lie that Peyton is away at ballet camp (in January?! The film opens on New Year’s Eve), and Joe becomes a pawn in maintaining this illusion by striking a Faustian bargain with Mater Suspiriorium, er, Monique Vasquez (Roselyn Sanchez), the compulsory love interest and gatekeeper of the local prestigious dance academy. (The Game Plan takes place in a Boston so generic it may as well be Metropolis.) Ingratiating herself with Joe’s clownish team-mates (no “Playmakers”-style conflicts for these guys), if not his pragmatic–and flatulent!–agent (Kyra Sedgwick, of all people), Peyton ultimately, predictably, succeeds in her kamikaze campaign to be crowned “the best thing that ever happened” to Joe.

Underdog (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

Underdog (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2008, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Patrick Warburton
screenplay by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams
directed by Frederik Du Chau

by Bill Chambers Whereas the gigantic Underdog balloon that hovers over New York City during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is at least conceptually interesting (American commerce’s idea of a Stalin statue), Underdog, Disney’s charmless live-action resurrection of the beloved super-mutt, has no subtext, just a bunch of mercenary actors and technicians who can barely disguise their contempt for the film’s screenplay, which lazily embellishes the extraordinary-pet genre with scatology while weaving a maddeningly derelict patchwork of recycled tropes like the grieving widower/orphan, the unattainable hottie, and the disgraced cop. It’s fair to say I hate Underdog, but I hate it because it doesn’t even have the will to finish what it starts. Only two things about it are kind of fascinating, and only then from a largely extratextual standpoint. The first is that in taking the title character out of the cartoon realm, the digitally-manipulated slapstick pratfalls and clumsy landings look grotesquely painful for the beagle(s) playing Underdog. They should’ve gone the Scooby-Doo route and fashioned a 3-D likeness of the 2-D prototype, since the sight of man’s best friend hurtling through panes of glass really has no intrinsic comic value.

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Christmas, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Tim Allen, Martin Short, Elizabeth Mitchell, Judge Reinhold
screenplay by Ed Decter & John J. Strauss
directed by Michael Lembeck

by Bill Chambers Much like a TV show that’s been on the air too long, the Santa Clause films have accrued an unwieldy supporting cast (including those old harbingers of cancellation: grandparents and babies) and begun hitting the reset button on characters thought to be at or near the end of their arcs. Here, workaholic Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) is reminded via the frustrations of his second wife that he might not be husband material–which, all things considered, isn’t a bad direction for the series to take, if only because we rarely see remarriage grappled with in any context on the silver screen. Still, as the house style has evolved such that it can no longer accommodate even the quasi-realist, Oh, God! Book II trappings of the original, we get that reductive trope about a family man who takes pride in his work being a man who’s asking for karmic retribution. Never mind that he’s fucking Santa Claus and the needs of the many would appear to outweigh the needs of the few in this case. I suppose it’s progress or innovation that Mrs. Claus (Elizabeth Mitchell, whose role as one of the child catchers in Running Scared retroactively renders her a subversive presence in these films) is expecting and in her third trimester at that, thus upping the asshole quotient when Santa allows his attention to drift towards other impending deliveries for five-nanosecond stretches–but at the risk of applying logic where it isn’t wanted, why would Santa impregnate his wife nine months before Christmastime? It’s counterintuitive at best. And if it was an accident, surely there’s an ‘Abortion Clause’ he could’ve invoked. Maybe they’re saving that for a future instalment.

Meet the Robinsons (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Meet the Robinsons (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Musical, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Michelle Spitz, Stephen J. Anderson, Jon Bernstein, Nathan Greno, Don Hall, Joe Mateo, Aurian Redson, based on the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce
directed by Stephen J. Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You can’t really get angry at a movie like Meet the Robinsons. Unlike most of the painfully credulous product that rolls off the Disney assembly line, it isn’t interested in killing you with its dubious moral or bullying you into some dreadfully conformist position. But if it isn’t ridiculously invested in all of the things that make kidpix horrible, those elements remain present and accounted for–just held at bay long enough to stop you from lobbing a brick through your monitor. Even the film’s attempts at ironic wit come off as forced, as though the filmmakers could think of no other way to leaven the schmaltz. (This despite lacking the sensibility needed to pull it off.) The best you can say about Meet the Robinsons is that it appears to have been made with good intentions–but we all know about the road that’s paved with those.

Ratatouille (2007)

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2007, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

****/****
written and directed by Brad Bird 

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s latest film Ratatouille is the auteur’s affirmation that it’s possible, no matter the station, to find genius among the rabble. It’s charmingly egalitarian, this idea that any class or creed can produce the next Einstein or Baryshnikov, and it seems a direct response to the critics of his The Incredibles, who would say that that superhero film’s mantra of “if everyone is super, no one is” is an embodiment of intolerance and classism. Ratatouille‘s answer is a lot like the one offered by Bird’s feature debut, The Iron Giant: that not only is it possible to overcome one’s basic programming, but also that choice supersedes predestination and, moreover, that a basic morality governs the actions of all things. A lot to put on the doorstep of a film about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who wishes he could be a chef in the kitchen of idol Gasteau (Brad Garrett)–but Bird, in the course of just three films (and stints with “The Simpsons” and “The Critic”), has forged a pretty formidable ideology based on, of all alien things, the sociology of common sense. Some people are more gifted than others, some people are assholes, and most people are idiots; just as an understanding of race and gender comes with the acceptance of basic differences, so, too, does understanding within a culture only come through a similar acceptance that some people are super and others are simply background.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

Pirates2by Walter Chaw I've liked almost everything Gore Verbinski's done up to this point–he's treated genre pictures with a degree of sobriety that's refreshing when snarky post-modernism seems the golden mean. But Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (hereafter Pirates 2, though "Pirates Reloaded" is perhaps the more appropriate paraphrase) carries with it the taint of desperation that comes with impossibly raised expectations and a burgeoning "known" director who–for lack of a better idea–devotes himself to the notion that magnification is the same thing as inspiration. A giant budget and a franchise tag is an effective snuff to that alchemical combination of energy and brilliance that has thus far typified Verbinski's output, and Pirates 2 is exhibit one of just how boring an unimaginably expensive a blockbuster can be when it jettisons character and story in favour of gimmick and state-of-the-art-for-now special effects. The first of two consecutively-shot sequels, the movie has the added difficulty of being entrusted (like Episode II, The Two Towers, and The Matrix Reloaded) with the exposition third of the tripartite narrative arc. Pirates 2 is a middle without a beginning or end that tries to compensate for that deficiency by throwing money at the problem. Yo ho-hum.

Dumbo (1941) [60th Anniversary] – DVD + Dumbo [Big Top Edition] – DVD

Posted in1940s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Musical

***/****
60TH ANNIVERSARY DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B
BTE DVD – Image B+ Sound B Extras B
screenplay by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, based on the book by Helen Aberson & Harold Perl
directed by Ben Sharpsteen

Dumbocapby Bill Chambers With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, Walt Disney had established two story prototypes between which he would all but vacillate over the next couple of decades. In 1937's Snow White, the eponymous heroine trusts that Prince Charming will one day steal her away from life's ills; in 1940's Pinocchio, a misfit innocent is navigated by his surrogate conscience (Jiminy Cricket) through an unkind world back to the parental figure he left behind. Disney didn't really return to the Prince Charming myth until the Fifties, when he began a run that includes Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Peter Pan (a movie about a swashbuckler's repeated rescue of the damsel in distress who fancies him)–Pinocchio's template just seemed to have more resonance during the war years.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Howlsmovingcastlecap

by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

Chicken Little (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
screenplay by Ron Anderson, Steve Bencich and Ron J.Friedman
directed by Mark Dindal

by Walter Chaw Frantic, frenetic, anxious, obnoxious: the ideal audience for Chicken Little should be in bed by seven, and Disney’s umpteenth cry of “sure-fire comeback project” looks, appropriately, like another convulsive episode of corporate crying-wolf. Chicken Little, for instance, makes pop culture references that don’t mean anything in the context of a film whose sole purpose appears to be instructing your children to be fearful and hyper. They’re just there to give parents, alternately stunned and bored, a little rootless pleasure in the middle of epileptic flash; what’s left isn’t clever (or kinetic) enough for us to ignore its essential emptiness. What Chicken Little is more than anything else is exhausting. You could by rights hope that it’s is a send-up of the Fifties cycle of Martian invasion pictures (it name-checks War of the Worlds for no good reason) as The Incredibles was a send-up of Golden Age superhero comics, but even a cursory comparison between the two films shows that Disney’s desperation to make Pixar’s looming secession a non-issue is as limp and impotent as the Nevada State Boxing Commission.

Bambi II (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

Bambi 2: The Great Prince of the Forest
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Alicia Kirk
directed by Brian Pimental

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It would be faintly disingenuous to cry bloody murder over a straight-to-video Bambi sequel: given Uncle Walt’s own propensity for denaturing children’s classics (and milking the new “classics” for cash), it’s only fitting that the cream of his own canon would be whored out for what the market will bear. Still, Bambi is no ordinary Disney movie, but one whose awesome craft is matched only by its singular horror of the adult world. It’s ludicrous, then, to pick up the story after the deer-kid has learned to talk and show him that being a grown-up isn’t so bad. Not only does it generally contradict the original, but it also blows off the primal fear and sadness that make Bambi as potent as it is.

Eight Below (2006)

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Antarctica, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs
screenplay by David DeGilio
directed by Frank Marshall

by Walter Chaw There are situations and statements, questions and propositions, that are so stupid by their nature that they actually approach Zen. And then there’s Frank Marshall’s arctic dogs-and-dude melodrama Eight Below, which plays for all the world like not only the world’s most unwelcome sequel (to Snow Dogs), but also a companion piece to March of the Penguins. It is, in simplest terms, a pandering blight–a straight line (nay, flatline) from unsurprising set-up to unsurprising resolution, every bit the equivalent of a line of footprints in the snow between two known points. Opening with one of film history’s most wooden leading men, Paul Walker, and “nice Jewish boy” comic relief Jason Biggs sitting in a hundred-degree steam room before running out into a 30-below autumn day in Antarctica, Eight Below immediately teaches us that human beings heated to a toasty 110 degrees do not steam when exposed to sub-zero temperatures and, more, that if you should ever visit the South Pole, your breath will never, ever show. It’s full of fun facts like that, but it saves its most fascinating revelations for the intricacies of canine interactions, including their complex gift-giving behaviours, advanced speech, abstract philosophical concepts, and eerie ability to go for at least fifteen days at a time without food or water. It even wrests an explanation from the universal loam as to what Walker was put on this earth for: to be upstaged by eight dogs, someone named Moon Bloodgood, Jason Biggs, and miles of white. It goes without saying that those scenes Walker plays against Bruce Greenwood have the queasy, guilty fascination of a baby seal getting mauled by a polar bear.

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

Kronk’s New Groove (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Philippines, Romance

*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ (DD)/A- (DTS) Extras C
screenplay by Tom Rogers
directed by Saul Andrew Blinkoff & Elliot M. Bour

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You know you’re watching a family film when: a) father issues dominate the plot; b) it talks down to the parents in the guise of speaking on their level; and c) the whole thing is larded with pseudo-in-jokes intended to make everybody feel smart. So it is with Kronk’s New Groove, a straight-to-disc sequel (to an original unseen by yours truly) that posits the Emperor Kuzco’s one-time adversary Kronk (voice of Patrick Warburton) in a race against time to impress his “Papi” with the classic wife/kids/house-on-hill bellwethers of success. Alas, it’s an indifferently-concocted affair, with the minor character pushing more charismatic presences to the side and leaving nothing to distract from some feeble jokes, obvious plotting, and a total refusal to bring something new to the table.

Valiant (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, War

½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras D
screenplay by Jordan Katz, George Webster, George Melrod
directed by Gary Chapman

Valiantcapby Walter Chaw The animation is flat, the screenplay is insipid, the pacing is mortally off, and the voice acting is the mixed bag you generally get when you hire movie stars instead of professional voice talent (this is already the second animated film Ewan McGregor's tackled this year–third if you count Lucas's folly) to breathe life into your pixellated creations. But other than that, Valiant's fantastic. Its setting (WWII, circa D-Day) isn't as imaginative as that of Robots (this year's other glaring animated failure), and its CGI housefly sidekicks don't talk, as they did in Racing Stripes (this year's other glaring made-for-kids animal-related failure), but if you can overlook its obvious and subtle and inescapable deficiencies, well, what you have here is a blockbuster simply waiting to have its destiny fulfilled by the same group that flocked to the inexplicably popular Shrek films. Valiant's central marketing point is that it's from the same producer, John H. Williams, as the Shrek franchise, which, while technically true, ignores the movie's ten other producers.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw I'm offended by the marketing for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter Narnia 1)–not the trailers (which are pedestrian) or the print ads, per se, but the campaign to pre-screen reels to churches and church groups, including Colorado's wildly divisive rightwing activist organization Focus on the Family. It's not something I'm terribly surprised to see from Walden Media–but it's something that strikes me as peculiar coming from the gay-friendly Walt Disney Pictures, a studio currently "suffering" a boycott from Focus on the Family that aims, in part, to force Disney to explain their "Jekyll and Hyde" products and policies. Of the two hypocrisies, fiduciary vs. ideological, I guess I'd favour one over the other, not being in the business of weighing sins, as it were.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Adventure, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.