Viewed June 27, 2006
I put Superman Returns at a big disadvantage before I saw it. I watched Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman right before going to the theater. Now, normally I wouldn’t place that kind of pressure on a film. I didn’t watch any of the 90s ‘Batman’ movies before seeing Batman […]
Viewed June 26, 2006
The Punisher is the second attempt to bring the hard-edged Marvel Comics character to life. The previous version of The Punisher from 1989 starred Dolph Lundgren in the title role and was a decent, if not exactly original, effort. This new version had a much larger budget and, after the […]
Viewed June 25, 2006
My Name Is Modesty is the second attempt to bring Modesty Blaise to the big screen following 1996’s Modesty Blaise. The earlier film takes a very stylist look at the character, sending up the spy films of the day and really going towards a “camp” feel (must to the annoyance of […]
Viewed June 24, 2006
Kid Speed is another entry featuring Oliver Hardy from his days languishing as a character actor, bouncing from film to film, usually in the role of the heavy. This one revolves around two racecar drivers, The Speed Kid (Larry Semon) and Dangerous Dan McGraw (Hardy). Not only do they compete […]
Viewed June 23, 2006
Boy was I ready to dislike the remake of Mighty Joe Young. My every instinct told me that it couldn’t live up to the original. And it doesn’t. But it comes an awful lot closer than I expected and is a decent film in its own right.
The biggest problem […]
Viewed June 22, 2006
King Kong Lives is the little-known follow-up to producer Dino De Laurentiis’ infamous 1976 re-make of King Kong.
In a touch of realism, it picks up the story ten years after the previous film (re-capped with the actual conclusion of the previous film; Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges and all). Kong […]
Viewed June 21, 2006
King Kong Escapes from Toho Studios follows their highly successful King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). To a degree, it follows the basic plot of the original King Kong. Ship comes to island, finds giant ape, ape falls for girl, ape is brought to mainland, etc. The big difference, of […]
Viewed June 20, 2006
It’s always difficult to make a sequel to a beloved film. It’s even harder when a significant period of time has passed. Witness The Two Jakes to see it done well and Slap Shot 2 to see it done poorly. The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch falls […]
Viewed June 19, 2006
Okay, I pretty much watched Blackball (or “National Lampoon’s Blackball”, as the DVD states) because Vince Vaughn was in it. While I wasn’t that impressed with the last vaughn film that I saw, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), he’s usually rock solid. I fully expected this to be little […]
Viewed June 18, 2006
Bruce Almighty is an extremely well-balanced comedy starring Jim Carrey and Jennifer Aniston. It concerns Bruce (Carrey), a TV reporter who feels life has treated him unfairly. After a particularly disastrous day, he has a meeting with God (Morgan Freeman), who endows him with all the powers of the Almighty, […]
Viewed June 17, 2006
In the years following his initial entry into films and prior to his successful teaming with Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel often lent his talents to films for others, either as a bit player or, as in Yes, Yes, Nanette, a director. Laurel co-directs with Clarence Hennecke and is most likely responsible […]
Viewed June 16, 2006
Morons from Outer Space is a rather ambitious undertaking from the British film industry at a time when it was in a bit of a decline. It is, obviously, a sci-fi comedy and the writers, Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, come up with some decent bits of humor and the […]
Viewed June 15, 2006
It’s hard to say what I made of The Sports Pages. Ostensibly, it is an anthology of sports-related stories. (If the intro by James Brown is any indication, they meant to make more.) The two stories presented here couldn’t be more different in their content and their attitude.
The first […]
Viewed June 14, 2006
Phil Collins: Face Value is one of the series of “Classic Albums” documentaries, designed to explore the creation of music albums that have stood the test of time. This one, naturally, covers Collins’ debut solo album from 1981.
It goes into quite a bit of depth concerning the artistic decisions made with […]
Viewed June 13, 2006
Bunny is a short film from Blue Sky Animation (Ice Age) about an elderly rabbit and her battle with a moth that treads a line somewhere between whimsy and gravitas. It can be found on the Ice Age 2-disc DVD.
Visually, Bunny works quite well, with the animations of the moth particularly […]
Viewed June 12, 2006
Right off the bat, I’ll point out the similarities between The Brave Little Toaster and several of the Pixar films, since it is that connection that led me to watch it. BLT presents a world where inanimate objects come to life when their owners aren’t around. A small group of […]
Viewed June 11, 2006
In the ever-increasing field of CGI animated films, only Ice Age (2001) from 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios comes close to achieving the quality of the Disney / Pixar pairing. Gone Nutty is Blue Sky’s original DVD short about the crazy little “sabre-tooth squirrel” Scrat from Ice Age and […]
Viewed June 10, 2006
Lucky Dog, filmed in 1919 but released in 1921, marked the first on-screen pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It couldn’t be more different that the comedies they would become famous for, but it still is good for a few laughs.
The set-up is dead simple: Laurel is a penniless traveler […]
Viewed June 9, 2006
Cars is Pixar’s return to pure family-friendly fare after the more grown-up focus of 2004’s The Incredibles. And for me at least, it was a happy return. While I enjoyed The Incredibles (I’ve watched it three times over the course of my recent Pixar-a-thon), I’ve always preferred the all-ages films.
Cars […]
Viewed June 9, 2006
Ahh, what the heck. If I can’t watch an extra movie now and then, what’s the point? So…One Man Band.
This short, released theatrically alongside Cars, is (as far as I’m concerned) a return to form for Pixar. The last two shorts, Boundin’ and Jack-Jack Attack, I found to be […]
Viewed June 8, 2006
Having exhausted my supply of unwatched Pixar material, I decided to turn to their ex-stablemates, Industrial Light & Magic and watch a short film they made called Work In Progress.
It’s kind of a fantasy realization of the nature of ILM. There are three characters, Lux (a tall, thin scientist who comes […]
Viewed June 7, 2006
I’m not going to kid you. Making Nemo is not a full-fledged documentary on the scale of Empire of Dreams or RKO Production 601. But it is a fairly in-depth look at the production of Finding Nemo (2003), with lots of behind-the-scenes footage and insight into the creative process behind […]
Viewed June 6, 2006
Red’s Dream is another early Pixar short, this one concerning the aspirations of an unbought red unicycle.
Frankly, this one lacks the polish that features so prominantly in other Pixar shorts, even the early ones. The clown that is central to the dream sequence is rather odd looking and just doesn’t appeal […]
Viewed June 5, 2006
As I continue my quest to watch all the Pixar work I had not yet seen, I finally watched the proto-Pixar film The Adventures of André and Wally B. It was made by the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project on a computer that Cray let them borrow in hopes that Lucasfilm would […]
Viewed June 4, 2006
Boundin’ is a lightweight cartoon as Pixar shorts go. Created by veteran animator Bud Luckey, it tells the story of a sheep who is very proud of his wool, only to have it shorn off to his humiliation. A fortuitous encounter with a legendary jackalope helps him come to terms […]
Viewed June 3, 2006
With the release of Pixar Animation Studio’s new film Cars mere days away, I decided (in addition to re-watching all my favorite Pixar stuff) to try and track down all the Pixar material that I had not yet seen and watch it before going to the new film. Turned out there […]
Viewed June 2, 2006
The Characters of Star Wars is a documentary on, well, the characters of the Star Wars trilogy. (Wasn’t that obvious?) I’ve seen many of these kinds of featurettes and documentaries over the years (my favorites: From Star Wars to Jedi (1985) and When Star Wars Ruled The World (2005)). […]
Viewed June 1, 2006
Lady Luck is a classic example of the “big idea” romantic comedy. In this one a gambler named Larry Scott (Robert Young), falls in love with a woman who comes from a long line of gamblers. Mary Audrey (Barbara Hale) is dead set against gambling and doesn’t allow it in […]
So I’ve decided that going forward, I’m going to use the Award Ceremonies to give a kind of “State of the Project” talk. I don’t want to clutter up the blog with lots of posts that aren’t actual reviews, but ocassionally there’s things I’d like to say, so here’s where I’ll say them.
First of […]
Viewed May 31, 2006
Your Name Here is, like Overs and Outs, a chance for the corporate filmmakers to let their hair down. This one is much more direct: a parody of every corporate history film.
The film starts out with a bold pronouncement from Calvin Productions: they have created the perfect corporate film. It […]
Viewed May 30, 2006
The Butcher, The Baker and the Ice Cream Maker is quite odd, even for a corporate film. It espouses the virtues of boxed ice cream. That’s right, it’s all about how great it is to have your ice cream available in boxes. Obviously, it was aimed at store owners, […]
Viewed May 29, 2006
Peg-Leg Pedro starts out as a straightforward cutesy cartoon. A couple of adorable little kids out sailing are attacked by a pirate. With the help of their friend Nicky Nome, they defeat the pirates and find the treasure. But how can they get all that treasure home, you ask, […]
Viewed May 28, 2006
Shoot or Be Shot is another in a long line of films about filmmaking. Specifically, a film about low budget cheezy filmmaking. I only really got this film because it features William Shatner and, really, he’s the only reason to watch it.
The set-up is all too common: young filmmaker gets […]
Viewed May 27, 2006
In a bit of a change, I decided to watch a film from a star of the silent era that I am not terribly familiar with. I decided to watch Bromo and Juliet, a vehicle for Hal Roach Studio stalwart Charlie Chase. Chase was a relatively big star at the […]
Viewed May 26, 2006
G.I. Joe: Ninja Battles is little more than a promotional film for the G.I. Joe line and the commercial DVD release G.I. Joe: Valor vs. Venom (2004). It’s “animation” is limited to mildly animated still drawings and occasional clips either lifted from Valor vs. Venom or done during that production. […]
Viewed May 25, 2006
In the 1920s and 30s, when Hollywood wanted a version of a film for overseas, they would usually just shoot all the dialogue scenes multiple times in each language required. For the 1931 film Dracula, Universal tried a different tack. Director Tod Browning would direct the main picture during the […]
Viewed May 24, 2006
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is everything I expected it to be: a decent enough action flick with little in the way of originality. Basically, T3 tells a very similar story to T2: two robots sent to the past; one to kill, one to protect. Throughout the course of […]