Viewed August 28, 2006
High School High wants too much out of itself. On the one hand, it wants to be a wacky, Airplane-like comedy. (This is not surprising, given the screenplay is by David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Scary Movie 3 & 4), Pat Proft (The Naked Gun, Police Academy, Hot Shots) […]
Viewed August 27, 2006
Another in the BBC’s line of “ShakespeaRe: told”, The Taming of the Shrew is much more successful than the last one I watched, Macbeth. I think this is partly because Shrew is a comedy and so therefore lends itself more naturally to adaptation than a drama that was based on historic […]
Viewed August 26, 2006
Continuing my viewing of the classic Donald Duck Disney cartoons, we come to Modern Inventions, which is a bit too formulaic for my tastes. First of all, it is just a series of wacky interactions between Donald and several “inventions” that inevitably lead to Donald being abused in some way. […]
Viewed August 25, 2006
Okay, so I finally picked up Volume One of “The Chronological Donald”, the special edition 2-disc set that Disney released featuring Donald Duck’s first 36 cartoons (that don’t feature Mickey Mouse). Now, I’ve not seen most of these, so I’m making my way through them slowly, a few at a time. […]
Viewed August 24, 2006
A Dairy Tale: The Three Little Pigs is a short that is included on the Home on the Range DVD and features the characters from that film. The style is much more simplistic than the original film, not much more detailed than typical Flash cartoons found on the web. It […]
Viewed August 23, 2006
As subtle as a sledgehammer to the head, as nuanced as a 500 lb. naked man streaking through the Louvre, Touch of Evil does little to deserve the reputation it has gained over the years.
Now, I have nothing but respect for Orson Welles. I think he is one of the greatest […]
Viewed August 22, 2006
CQ is a love letter to 1960s European cinema by Roman Coppola (son of Francis Ford Coppola). It takes place in 1969 France and tells the story of Paul, a young filmmaker who has come there to make “important” films. His major work is a document of his life, where […]
Viewed August 21, 2006
Kull the Conqueror is actually an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror. But when filmmakers approached Arnold Schwarzenegger about reprising his starmaking role, he declined. So, rather than cast someone else as Conan (seen as untenable at the time), they changed the part to Howard original barbarian hero, […]
Viewed August 20, 2006
The Brothers Grimm has a lot in common with director Terry Gilliam’s 1988 masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (my personal favorite of his films). They both deal, in different ways, with the power of myth. While Munchausen is more directly about the power of belief, this one deals with […]
Viewed August 19, 2006
H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau has been adapted to film three times, Island of Lost Souls being the earliest. Now, I’ve only seen the most recent, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (with Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer and David Thewlis) and I can tell you, this 1933 version is […]
Viewed August 18, 2006
Home On The Range at one point looked to be the last traditional animated film fom Walt Disney Feature Animation. Then CEO Michael Eisner, stung by the relative failure of the last few Disney animated features, declared that, starting with 2005’s Chicken Little, all Disney animated features would be computer generated. […]
Viewed August 17, 2006
Freeze-In is a training movie shot by Sears to help introduce their salesmen to a new sales campaign for the Coldspot Time Bank, a new freezer that Sears introduced in 1968. Apparently, sales had been dropping off, so Sears decided to try and give them a jump start with this new […]
Viewed August 16, 2006
A Is For Atom is a cute little cartoon that explains the nature of nuclear energy and its uses in a post World War II society.
The explanatory sequences are really well done and make the nature of nuclear fission understandable for all. Perhaps understandably, they aren’t too detailed on the negative […]
Viewed August 15, 2006
Now, I’m not a big fan of the X-Men films. But, then again, I’ve never been a big fan of the X-Men. I’ve never been able to buy the central conceit that mutants can be compared to other oppressed groups (take your pick). The problem with the comparison for […]
Viewed August 14, 2006
As you may know, Toy Story 2 began its life as an intended straight-to-video release, until Disney got a look at what Pixar was cooking up and upgraded the production to a theatrical release. But eventually Disney did produce a straight-to-video movie featuring the characters of Toy Story. […]
Viewed August 13, 2006
BBC America is currently showing a series of films under the banner “ShakespeaRE: told”, where classic Shakespeare stories are reworked into modern settings. This week, I watched Macbeth, and it couldn’t have been more wrong-headed if they tried.
First of all, they set the film in a restaurant. Joe Macbeth is […]
Viewed August 12, 2006
Robots is Blue Sky Studios’ follow-up to their 2002 breakthrough film Ice Age. It doesn’t quite live up to the earlier film, but is entertaining, certainly looks good and will please younger audiences.
Robots is a bit more of a formulaic movie than either Ice Age or Ice Age: The Meltdown. […]
Viewed August 11, 2006
Back in 1992, when Quentin Tarantino was the poster boy for “new cinema” with his groundbreaking film Resevoir Dogs, I was more impressed by Robert Rodriguez’ film El Mariachi. There’s no question that Resevoir Dogs is more professional (especially the acting talent) and slicker. But El Mariachi showed that Rodriguez […]
Viewed August 10, 2006
War Babies is one of a series of short comedy films made by Educational Pictures in the early 30s. The idea behind the series was to parody popular films with small children (about aged 3 - 5) in the roles instead of adults. They are most notable today for being […]
Viewed August 9, 2006
Shattered Glass tells the true story of Stephen Glass, an up-and-coming young journalist at The New Republic who was found in 1998 to have fabricated facts, quotes and even people in many (if not most) of his articles.
Glass is played by Hayden Christensen (best known as Anakin Skywalker in Episodes II & […]
Viewed August 8, 2006
So, I found another proto-Pixar film, thanks to the guys over at Luxo. This one is called Pencil Test and was done by Apple back in 1988 to show the graphic prowess of the MacIntosh II. John Lasseter (or as we know him here, “The Savior of Animation”) served as […]
Viewed August 7, 2006
Date Movie is another in the long line of over-the-top comedies that have become popular recently with the Scary Movie franchise, but can trace their heritage back to the original Airplane. Like those films, the plot of Date Movie is razor thin, but the jokes fly fast and furious. Unfortunately, […]
Viewed August 6, 2006
The number of things that go wrong with V for Vendetta are almost too many to count. It is wrong-headed from the get-go. Now, to be fair, I was never a fan of the original comic book on which this film is based. It seemed to me to be […]
Viewed August 5, 2006
Alice’s Wonderland is the first in a series of ‘Alice’ films that Walt Disney made in his early days and that marked his first major success (he would make over fifty during the series’ five year run). What made the ‘Alice’ films so unique for their day was the way that […]
Viewed August 4, 2006
The problem with The Dukes of Hazzard is that it totally fails to capture what made the original TV Show such a success. It is this basic failure that permeats the film and is at the core of everything that goes wrong throughout.
First, the casting is a disaster, despite some ingenious […]
Viewed August 3, 2006
Nanny McPhee is an impressive entry in the family film genre. The basic premise is not all that original: horrible children finding difficulty dealing with life after the loss of their mother being set straight by a caring (if unorthodox) nanny. There are certainly shades of Mary Poppins in here, […]
Viewed August 2, 2006
Thru The Mirror is an odd short starring Mickey Mouse that takes some of its inspiration from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. It can be found on the “Masterpiece” edition DVD of Alice In Wonderland and in many ways is more successful than the main film.*
It starts […]
Viewed August 1, 2006
Ice Age: The Meltdown has confirmed something that I felt for a while: that production company Blue Sky is the only studio that really gives Pixar a run for their money quality-wise. I’ve still not seen Robots, but Ice Age was the first non-Pixar CGI animated film I ever bought as […]
Well, I sure called it on Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, didn’t I? I said it was unlikely to make $300 Million and it went and broke just about every box office record there is. Even more impressive, it’s actually doing quite well on overall ticket sales, putting it into the […]
Viewed July 31, 2006
Cohabitation is a Hong Kong film that revolves around the love lives of two friends. The story is pretty standard soap opera-type stuff. The trobules of the two couples aren’t really that original or interesting. There aren’t even any twists to the stories, just the typical variations on the […]
Viewed July 30, 2006
Eurotrip is another in a long string of “wacky” teen comedies that have been foisted on us since the arrival of American Pie. As these things go, it’s not that bad, but it ultimately fails to really stand out from the pack or stand on its own.
Okay, so a young guy […]
Viewed July 29, 2006
Pony Express Days tells the tale of the brief lifespan of the Pony Express. George Reeves plays Bill Cody and much of the focus of the short is on his desire to ride for the Express. Things come to a head when secession talk in California leads to a desperate […]
Viewed July 28, 2006
Well, I’ve already watched the original Love Affair and its first remake, An Affair to Remember. Unable (so far) to track down a copy of the Warren Beatty / Annette Bening version of Love Affair, I’ve moved ahead to the most recent take on the story, the Bollywood film Mann, which […]