Christmas in Connecticut (1992) + Jingle All the Way (1996) – DVDs

November 8, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, DVD, Family, Romance, Schwarzenegger, ZERO STARS

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound C+
starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Roundtree, Tony Curtis
screenplay by Janet Brownell, based on the screenplay by Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini and story by Aileen Hamilton
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger

JINGLE ALL THE WAY
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson
screenplay by Randy Kornfield
directed by Brian Levant

by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let’s say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine “fatuous.” Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who’s led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of “fatuous” all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams’s national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It’s hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn’t it?

Alfie (2004)

November 5, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Jude Law, Marisa Tomei, Omar Epps, Nia Long
screenplay by Elaine Pope & Charles Shyer, based on the play and screenplay by Bill Naughton
directed by Charles Shyer

Alfie2004by Walter Chaw I haven’t liked any of the six films that Charles Shyer directed before his remake of Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, so I guess there’s something to the auteur theory after all. Minus one fab performance from the suddenly omnipresent Jude Law, Shyer’s Alfie is a toothless affair–not surprising given modern cinema’s propensity for turning out lifeless twaddle, but somewhat dismaying given that the film’s source material is one of the most scabrous flicks in the annals of misogyny captured on celluloid. Contrasting the 1966 and 2004 versions of Alfie would be like an essay on how the movies have lost their edge over the course of the past four decades: we’ve moved from the medium cool of Sixties films, with their yearning to break free from the oppression of the Fifties, to the stagnant pond of the now, with its films too scared to offend the priggish States, filthy as they are with the descendants of pilgrims and Puritans. Come to think of it, a comparison between the two pictures also functions as an examination of the general difference between Europe and America–or an overview of religiosity in all its florid and degenerative influences on art.

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) – DVD

November 2, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, DVD, Family, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour
screenplay by Fredric M. Frank, Barré Lyndon and Theodore St. John
directed by Cecil B. DeMille

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth is pretty close to being the Biggest Crock on Film. A lame assortment of soapy intrigues, bloated set-pieces, and garish colours, it's calculated to alienate the highbrows and haunt Guy Debord's nightmares. Some allege that it's the worst film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, a hard claim to challenge no matter how unquantifiable the distinction. But while The Greatest Show on Earth is aimed squarely at those loathsome people who speak of films as "rollercoaster thrill-rides," there's no denying that it was made with a zesty vulgarity and executed with loving care. It's professional in both senses of the word: too much of a static thing to have artistic merit, yet big fun to watch as a well-engineered Rube Goldberg vehicle captained by Jack Smith across a field of giant marshmallows.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994) – DVD

November 1, 2004Posted in1990s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Western

***/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS)
starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Angie Dickinson, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the novel by Tom Robbins
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover From its disastrous premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (which prompted a hasty re-edit) to the unanimous critical drubbing it received a short while later, few films have had harder luck than Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The reviews were at best vague, alluding to some thing in the theatre that defied description as much as it discouraged it, while those brave souls not scared off by the word-of-mouth–even fans of Tom Robbins's 1973 source novel, people who could at least be said to have known what they were in for–came away hostile and perplexed. But anything that inspires this kind of uncomprehending panic is a special sort of film–that's right, I'm one of those lonely few who actually liked Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And analyzing its successful failure is hugely instructive, specifically in showing how certain social forces, then as now, unfairly shape what is considered aesthetic treason.

The Rose Tattoo (1955) – DVD

October 26, 2004Posted in1950s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Daniel Mann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Anna Magnani is the kind of actress people describe using all the wrong superlatives. Everybody talks about her “big” presence, about how she’s a “powerhouse” and a “force of nature,” as though she were the Italian Shelley Winters. This kind of blather hardly approximates the scope of Magnani’s talent. She’s big all right, but she’s more than the pyrotechnic scenery-chewer that “big” normally designates: she’s that rare combination of big and nuanced, a crushing blend of uninhibited physicality and the willingness to take every line, word, and punctuation mark personally. Technically, even a luminary like her has her work cut out for her in something like The Rose Tattoo, what with its middling Louisiana Peyton Place scenario by Tennessee Williams, the dry, emotionless direction of Daniel Mann, and a supporting cast of Hollywood phoneys conspiring to waste her talent. But Magnani never betrays the thought that her part might be less than worth her time, and in so doing, she makes it worth her time. Ours, too, more often than not.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

October 22, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, France, Romance, UK, War

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

Headyoungveraby Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates–perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that–and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed–at least never for them.

DIFF ’04: Kontroll

October 21, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Hungary, Romance, Thriller
Control****/****starring Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badárscreenplay by Jim Adler & Nimród Antaldirected by Nimród Antal by Walter Chaw A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit…

A Home at the End of the World (2004) – DVD

October 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Romance

*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras D
starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Wright Penn, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Michael Cunningham, based on his novel
directed by Michael Mayer

by Walter Chaw Glib, facile, essentially misguided, and exhibiting a kind of misunderstanding about film craft that sends exactly the opposite of the intended message in every scene, Michael Mayer's directorial debut A Home at the End of the World is a trial from start to finish. It makes appalling soundtrack choices first in establishing period, then in demolishing mood, and finally in screwing up the chronology enough so that the viewer is left completely unmoored. If you're using a jovial Seventies soundtrack to place your film in the Seventies, it's a really bad idea to start using a classic Motown soundtrack when your picture actually moves forward in time. (Not even mentioning what a perverse boner it is to accompany the discovery of a dead father with "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.") Add to that a screenplay by The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham that displays the same kind of top-heavy, more or less off-base pretension and disdain for such outmoded values as loyalty and generosity, and what you have is a recipe for a very particular kind of disaster.

DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty

October 16, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK
**/****starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everettscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"directed by Richard Eyre by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who…

DIFF ’04: À Tout de Suite

October 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Thriller
**/****starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordierwritten and directed by Benoît Jacquot by Walter Chaw Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a…

Shall We Dance (2004)

October 15, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the screenplay by Masayuki Suo
directed by Peter Chelsom

Shallwedance2004by Walter Chaw Shall We Dance sits on the screen like an unwelcome dinner guest, or a corpulent toad. It's a remake of a mediocre-but-popular Japanese film that jettisons the question mark after "Dance" on its title screen, the inflectionless phrase squatting there as this movie's moniker a curiously apt description of the dismal marionette's-waltz to follow. The only thing more inscrutable than Jennifer Lopez's self-effacing slide into the territory of Melanie Griffith's mumbling kewpie doll career is the filmmakers' concept of Richard Gere as a comic actor capable of carrying off long takes and haughty deliveries. After all, it's hard enough to believe that the glowering, pinched vision of J.Lo staring fixedly out a dance-studio picture window at Chicago's hurtling elevated train would serve as an invitation instead of a dire warning. The romance of the El has gone decidedly downhill since Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay, and Tangerine Dream took a ride in Risky Business.

DIFF ’04: Kinsey

October 14, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance
***/****starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaardwritten and directed by Bill Condon by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde…

Raising Helen (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

October 12, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable–films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.

Aladdin (1992) [Platinum Edition] – DVD

October 5, 2004Posted in1990s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance

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

Aladdincapby 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.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] – DVDs

September 20, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, France, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn–I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and–how do I say it delicately?–Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Wimbledon (2004)

September 17, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, France, Romance, Sports, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Paul Bettany, Kyle Hyde, Robert Lindsay
screenplay by Adam Brooks and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw If you go see Wimbledon, the umpteenth edition of Tired Romantic Comedy Theater, it's only because you have a checklist in your head and aren't content with a film that doesn't satisfy every contrivance. There's the meet-cute, the unlikely match, the handsome rival, the gay best friend, the falling-in-love montage, the plot conflict (spouse, parents), the break-up montage, the public apology, the triumphant reunion. Director Richard Loncraine's tepid foray into Richard Curtis territory is rife with the kind of familiar hallmarks that lull throngs of lonesome Mia Farrows to the warm embrace of The Purple Rose of Cairo–a brief respite from the used paperback bookstores that rely on a steady trade of romance novels the way that independent movie stores rely on porn. In fact, there's not that much of a difference between Wimbledon and porn: plot is predictable and secondary to the performers, who provide whatever interest there might be in the enterprise. Everything else is plug and play, so to speak.

TIFF ’04: p.s.

September 13, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
P.S.**½/****starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Hardenscreenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulmandirected by Dylan Kidd by Bill Chambers Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands…

Foreign Correspondent (1940) – DVD

September 7, 2004Posted in1940s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, DVD, Romance, Thriller, War

Foreigncorrespondent

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders
screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dialogue by James Hilton, Robert Benchley
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor–the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little-girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction–compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.

TIFF ’04: 5×2 – Five Times Two

September 6, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, TIFF
Cinq fois deux**/****starring Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi, Stéphane Freiss, Géraldine Pailhas, Françoise Fabianscreenplay by François Ozon & Emmanuèle Bernheimdirected by François Ozon by Bill Chambers Racking up an unorthodox number of short films before tackling his first feature, 1998's lead balloon Sitcom, the prolific François Ozon returns to his roots in a way with 5x2 - Five Times Two (5x2 - Cinq fois deux), a collection of five vignettes that charts an ill-fated marriage--backwards. As the picture opens, Marion (archetypal Ozon blonde Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) are being read the terms of their divorce agreement; as the picture closes, the…

The Three Musketeers (2004) – DVD

August 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Romance

Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and David Mickey Evans
directed by Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I must confess to something like a fetish for the joint screen ventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, animation's answer to The Ritz Brothers. Their 1937 short Lonesome Ghosts is one of the essential building blocks in my love of cinema: I used to own a silent 8mm cartridge of it that could be viewed by handcranking a to-the-eye projector, and I unwittingly taught myself persistence of vision through bored frame-by-frame dissections of Mickey tiptoeing across the floor and Donald losing his cool. And as far as Mickey Mouse is concerned, he has Donald and Goofy in tow in his best colour outings–with a handful of exceptions (such as 1941's guardedly wistful The Nifty Nineties, or the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence from Fantasia) that cast Mickey as an emblem of virtue rather than as a virtuous individual (thus seizing on the iconic resonance of the character's design), Mickey's solo shorts circa the war years are far too polite for their own good. Mercurial Donald and accident-prone Goofy add a much-needed pinch of salt.