*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
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 Mononokeand
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.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE
PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+ starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges screenplay
by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B- starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María
Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell
by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of
disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How
to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How
to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The
Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it
as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era
Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the
entertainment industry at its game of media-manipulation is to play by
the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least;
and when he loses the girl to some asshole "in the know," the audience
can rest assured that they'll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg
ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in
New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY
FAIR clone only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really
plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown,
though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach
strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about
the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond
your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.
ZERO STARS/**** starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire directed by Sam Raimi
by Walter Chaw Based on L. Frank Baum's little-known Pussyhound
of Oz, Sam Raimi's career nadir Oz the Great and Powerful
(hereafter O-Gap) answers the question of who you would ask to anchor
your $300M+ tentpole extravaganza: yes, James Franco, who's now claimed the
mantle of the worst actor in the United States from the quiescent Paul Walker. Franco is an avatar of the picture's bad decisions, from the Zach Braff-voiced CGI monkey sidekick to the sassy CGI Hummel
figurine to the tragic miscasting of Mila Kunis as Theodora, a.k.a. the Wicked
Witch of the West. Yes indeedy, fans of the MGM original, of Baum's wondrous
series of books, and of the shit-show "Wicked" will all hate it
equally--almost as much as neophytes to the whole damned mess who will come for what
Raimi's proudly proclaimed "the ultimate Disney movie" and leave with a mouthful of exactly as promised. It's blindingly obnoxious,
tasteless in a meaningless way, and occasionally makes reference to Army
of Darkness just because, I suspect, Raimi's last-resort defensive posture
is to fall back on what he knows. But it's not nearly enough to save him here.
The argument with weight is that the more expensive a movie becomes, the less
likely it's going to be good; the first clue that Raimi is creatively bankrupt
is that while his buddy Bruce Campbell appears in this film, Campbell isn't the star.
**/****
ImageA-
Sound B-
Extras C screenplay by Joe
Ansolabehere, Paul Germain, Bob Hilgenberg, Rob Muir directed by Bradley Raymond
by
Jefferson
Robbins There's this thing in children's fiction I call
the Curious
George Effect. A character transgresses, and in the context of that
character's world it's a big hairy deal, potentially life-threatening.
But the repercussions are so nifty-neato that the initial sin is
shrugged off, perhaps never mentioned again, perhaps not explicitly
identified as an error in the first place. The consequences for the
guilty character are as follows: anxiety, cool adventure, reset to
status quo.
**/**** Image
B+ Sound
A Extras
B+ directed
by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson
click any image to enlarge
by
Bill Chambers Since the 1950s, mainstream audiences have
grown up
knowing Walt Disney's Peter Pan as the definitive
adaptation of J.M.
Barrie's play and its subsequent novelization (Peter and Wendy),
and
that's a mixed blessing. For every thing the Disney does well, like the
swashbuckling, it does
something
horribly wrong, like compounding Barrie's 19th-century
notions with
retrograde
values all the movie's own. For instance, the English Barrie may have
regarded
Native Americans as exotic creatures by locating them in Never Land, but
it's
Disney who immortalized them in literal red skin, then gave them a song
celebrating
their mono-syllabic cretinism:
**/****
Image A+
Sound A
Extras C+ screenplay
by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps directed
by Tim Burton
click
any image to enlarge
by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the
early-Eighties, Tim Burton was
part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out
artwork for
films like The Fox and the Hound and The
Black Cauldron. But
drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R.
Crumb,
and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving
him a
chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the
Disney
umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent,
a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and
the
live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses
mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter
scandalized Disney (too "scary," plus dead dogs and black-and-white
have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans
were
shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio
in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a
feature-length remake of Frankenweenie,
stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still
with an
undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B- starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Mia
Wasikowska
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Tim Burton
by Walter Chaw A diary of missed
opportunities but not the disaster it could have been, Tim Burton's Alice
in Wonderland reminds a great deal of Walter Murch's Return
to Oz in that both are closer in spirit to the respective
dark of their inspirations while still falling tantalizingly shy of the
beguiling murk of their headwaters. (In terms of adaptations, No
Country for Old Men holds the gold standard for cinema that
understands its source well enough to use it in its own sentence.)
It'll be compared of course to the Disney animated classic that mistook
Lewis Carroll's misanthropy-soaked surrealism for whimsy--a comparison
Burton tries to sidestep by incorporating more elements (the
Bandersnatch, the Jabberwocky, the Jub-Jub Bird, snickersnack) from the
largely-ignored second book, Alice Through the Looking Glass,
but one that'll hound a film featuring plucked-out eyeballs and a
castle moat traversed by skipping across severed heads.
THE FOX AND THE HOUND
***½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras C uncredited screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel P. Mannix directed by Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich
THE LITTLE MERMAID
*½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements
by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. With The Fox and the Hound
and The Little Mermaid bookending an especially
turbulent decade for a studio mortally locked in a struggle to
reconcile its animation pedigree with its crass commercial instincts,
the former has come to be regarded in the Disney mythology as the Good
Friday to the latter's Easter Sunday. It's therefore fitting that the
two films they most emulate are 1942's Bambi and
1950's Cinderella, respectively, as the Forties
marked the last time the Mouse House was on the brink of foreclosure. (The
Fox and the Hound goes so far as to recycle cels from Bambi.)
Much like The Little Mermaid represented a somewhat
cynical reboot of the fairytale default, so, too, was Cinderella
a glorified salvage operation following the
money-/audience-hemorrhaging pro bono work Uncle Walt did on behalf of
FDR's Good Neighbor policy. Alas, the Good Friday and Easter Sunday
analogy applies to not just Disney's phoenix-like resurrection but also
the tonal and moral disparity between the two pictures: one is the sad
truth; the other is wishful thinking.
***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens
directed by Joe Johnston
by Walter Chaw Joe Johnston's rousing Art Deco audition for Captain America, The Rocketeer is, twenty years on, as crisp and clean as laundry-line linen. It has a beautiful hero, his beautiful girl, and Alan Arkin as the crotchety old Q/Whistler/Lucius Fox to guarantee that no matter what our hero does to his gadgets, there'll always be more and better ones to take their place. The villain is modelled on Errol Flynn and works for the Nazis, and you don't have to squint very hard to figure out that a good portion of the picture's stickiness and cult accretion has to do with the idea that its 1938 setting allows for a measure of movie-history geekery. A sequence on a film set as bad guy Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, chewing scenery like a champ) shoots a period swashbuckler is subversive not only for the way that it reflects the vehicle in which it finds itself, but also for suggesting that the Golden Age of Hollywood was, as we suspected all along, rife with miscreants and foreign agents. It allows for a greater connection to our working-class heroes, as well as the comparison the movie makes now again of The Rocketeer to Chuck Yeager. And at its best, it allows The Rocketeer to feel exactly like the best kind of aw-shucks patriotism: spic-and-span and "you got a stick of Beeman's?" and based on a love of our ideals instead of a hatred of an Other.
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+ directed by Clyde Geronomi & Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske
click any image to enlarge
by Bill Chambers Despite its streamlining of the
particulars, Walt Disney's feature-length Cinderella ultimately takes fewer liberties with the source material (chiefly,
Charles Perrault's "Cinderella, or The Glass Slipper") than almost
any of his other animated fairytales. Consequently, there remains the problem
of a heroine who'd still be sweeping the floors were it not for her Fairy
Godmother, the deus ex machina to end deus ex machinas. The
Cinderella myth, as Perrault interpreted it, is at best anachronistic--we learn
that beauty is a virtue but that grace is a gift...whatever that means. Disney's contemporization turns it into a karma
fable of sorts, with martyrdom paying off like a jackpot and the comeuppance of
Cinderella's tormentors the real happily-ever-after of the piece. Cinderella's a less-than-ideal role model for the millions exposed to the movie in childhood, really, because she accepts victimhood until external forces intervene on her behalf.
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