**/**** 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:
****/**** screenplay by John August and
Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson directed by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson
by
Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love
and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride
is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the
Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of
Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals
his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia,
his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound
horror, his Sleepy Hollow--in many ways, in fact,
Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent
(and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas)
feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him
best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of
creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his
work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so
stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human
hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor.
It's animation that gives the term its "soul"--there's something vital
about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its
story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so
much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so
perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his
way with actors.
**/****
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?
½*/**** Image
B Sound D
starring Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, Kathryn Walker, Colleen Camp
screenplay by David Ambrose & Allan Scott and Jeffrey Ellis
directed by Simon Wincer
by Walter ChawD.A.R.Y.L.
is nigh unwatchable mid-Eighties fantasy dreck--toss this one on the
scrap pile with Condorman and Krull.
Its main character, a "Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform"
acronymistically nicknamed Daryl (Barret Oliver), is lost in an opening
helicopter chase like the dog in John Carpenter's The Thing
before the film proceeds to rip-off every other '80s sci-fi flick that
preceded it (Starman, E.T., The
Last Starfighter, War Games, Firefox,
and on and on). Daryl is discovered by a kindly elderly couple (the
requisite Superman steal), placed in the foster
care of preternaturally sunny Mr. & Mrs. Richardson
(Michael McKean and Mary Beth Hurt), and then goes on to be really good
at Atari, baseball, and picking up bad habits from his chubby,
sewer-mouthed little pal Turtle (Danny Corkill). Then the MIBs come
a-knockin', natch.
**/**** 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.
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by John Logan, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
directed by Martin Scorsese
by Walter Chaw Channelling Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Robert Zemeckis to numbing effect, the once-vital Martin Scorsese follows his elderly Shutter Island with the honest-to-God borderline-demented Hugo, in which the titular French urchin helps Georges Méliès reclaim his cinematic legacy. It's a shrine to the birth of cinema, blah blah blah, the kind of thing someone as involved as Scorsese has been in film preservation was destined to make, I guess, at least at the exact moment that the ratio of working brain cells gave over the majority. It's heartbreaking to see someone as vital as Scorsese used to be end up in a place as sentimental and treacly as this, resorting to retelling the Pinocchio story with little Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as a clock-fixer (really) whose life's mission is to repair an automaton his dead dad (Jude Law) found in a museum attic--and who dreams one night that...wait for it...he himself is the hollow, broken automaton. I wish I didn't have to go on. Did I mention that it's in 3D? And that it's two-and-a-half hours long but feels like a slow seven or eight? Seriously, Shoah is a breezier watch.
DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Robert Zemeckis
THE FOURTH KIND
ZERO STARS/****
starring Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Corey Johnson, Elias Koteas
written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi
by Ian Pugh If Robert Zemeckis hasn't quite left the Uncanny Valley behind, at the very least, the heart missing from his latest effort--what seems like the trillionth retelling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and the billionth animated one--correlates directly to its absence of personality, rather than to an absence of humanity. A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but the character designs finally resemble something closer to artistic interpretation than to a failed attempt at replicating human beings exactly as they are, with Marley (Gary Oldman) and Scrooge (Jim Carrey), for example, rendered almost expressionistically to evoke rotten apples and hunched skeletons. From that standpoint, the actors' sudden bursts of acrobatic grace, no longer so incongruous, capture some of computer-animated cinema's wonder, the kind at which Zemeckis has grasped since The Polar Express--a true example of bringing the impossible to life. The only problem is that Zemeckis's own script isn't worth more than a shrug, and the film relies too much on its visuals to carry the extra weight.
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A starring Will Ferrell, James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Mary Steenburgen
screenplay by David Berenbaum
directed by Jon Favreau
by Walter Chaw Some of the preview spots for Jon Favreau's Elf are hysterical, leading me to think that the film's failure to be very funny has a lot to do with bad direction, editing, or maybe both. It's a lightweight, unapologetically warm-hearted picture that earns a lot of respect for avoiding scatological humour en route to honouring nearly every other ingredient of the The Jerk bumpkin-out-of-water formula. Like Steve Martin, Will Ferrell announces himself with this film (and Old School) as a smart comedian unusually committed to effect and the directions his performance might take him. Ferrell isn't a chaotic jester. His clowning compels because it has the quality of internal logic, enough so that it's somehow possible to accept his man-raised-by-elves creation at face value.
***/**** Image F (colorized)/B+ (b&w) Sound B Extras C
starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart
screenplay by George Seaton, based on the story by Valentine Davies
directed by George Seaton
by Alex Jackson George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street isn't my Christmas movie of choice. My most potent movie memory of Christmas is actually watching the Star Wars trilogy when it was broadcast on the USA network however many years ago. Accordingly, I make it a point of marking the holiday by watching some kind of Star Wars-like "deep reality" science-fiction or fantasy film, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Blade Runner. A couple years back, I watched The Passion of the Christ. But I digress. Of all the major Christmas movie cults--including those surrounding A Christmas Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, and 1951's A Christmas Carol--the Miracle on 34th Street cult is the one with which I'd most want to spend the holidays. The film manages to be irreverent without becoming sacrilegious and sentimental without becoming saccharine. It's a pretty silly film, but I guess you could say that it's serious about being silly. It values silliness for its restorative, therapeutic quality.
Recent Comments