As I stated in my original review, Mulan is a strong entry from Disney animation at a time when they were really blowing hot and cold. The story still has a lot of the formulaic problems that marked Disney films of the day, but it is at least executed very well, with good songs, […]
I’ve previously covered 2005’s King Kong and wrote a full review here, but I thought this time around I’d do a kind of contrast and compare, tale of the tape kind of thing alongside the 1998 version of Godzilla. So let’s see how they stand up to each other.
Approach
Godzilla took the more common road […]
I really like Dirty Work. Your ability to enjoy the film is directly linked to your tolerance level and enjoyment of Norm MacDonald’s comedy, as he pretty much shoehorns in every running gag he’s ever done (except, for some reason, the Germans). Just about everything else is here in abundance: “note to self”, […]
Okay, so I should have seen A Bug’s Life after Toy Story, since my intention had always been to watch the Pixar films in order. But, much like the Disney Animated Feature canon, that plan didn’t last long. Since I sort the film by series, I watched Toy Story 2 without even thinking […]
Viewed November 19, 2006
The Parent Trap is the remake of the 1961 Haylie Mills film of the same name. It introduced the world to the talented and not-yet-troubled Lindsay Lohan and helped usher in Disney’s recent live-action family comedy successes.
The setup follows the same basic outline at the original film: twin girls are separated […]
Viewed October 26, 2006
Okay, so a little background information here. Back in 1998, Pixar Animation Studios and rival-in-the-making Dreamworks Animation both debuted films about ants. Disney released Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, of course, but about a month earlier, Dreamworks released Antz.
Inevitably, with two films of such similarities going head-to-head, they end up being […]
Viewed October 18, 2006
Mulan is a film that was created in the middle of Disney’s “second dark age”, the period following the release of The Lion King, the film considered by most to be the pinnacle of the “second golden age”. And it must be said that it suffers from some of the lackluster […]
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 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 April 27, 2006
When discussing Celebrity, I described it as a “tone poem”. It certainly doesn’t stack up as a comedy or as a drama or even as a fully realized film. But as a tone poem it is remarkable. It is Woody Allen’s rambling, sometimes incoherent musings on the nature of […]
Viewed February 7, 2006
Okay, David Hasselhoff as Marvel Comics’ hard-bitten World War II veteran Nick Fury. There. The worst conceptual aspect of Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD is out in the open and it’s not as bad as you think. It’s not very good, but given Marvel’s track record circa 1998, there […]