The Sword in the Stone is the last Disney Animated Feature to be released during Walt’s lifetime. Although The Jungle Book would still have a strong influence from Disney, he did not see it to completion (no doubt adding to the causes of the four year interim between the films, the longest since […]
Jabberwocky was Terry Gilliams’s first solo outing as a director, following his collaboration with Terry Jones on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Filming from a script he co-wrote with Charles Alverson, Gilliam spins a rather personal tale around the “nonsense poem” by Lewis Carroll.
The story revolves around Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin), and apprentice…cooper […]
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service introduces George Lazenby in the role made famous by Sean Connery, James Bond. It would prove to be Lazenby’s only outing as the secret agent, but not because of a lack of quality. It’s true that Lazenby is a bit of a drag on the film (it was […]
Song of the South is a 1964 Walt Disney production that has never seen the light of day on home video in the United States due to issues of political correctness. Is the film broad and offensive in its treatment of black Americans? Not particularly. The problem seems to come down to […]
It doesn’t speak well of Destination Moon that when I sat down to write this review I couldn’t remember a single thing about the movie. Now, as you should know by now, I’m behind in writing these reviews so there’s a bit of a gap between the time I view them and the time […]
The Notorious Bettie Page tells the story of the rise to fame of the well-loved pinup girl. It follows her as she leaves her home and hooks up with a successful publisher of “educational” and “specialty” photographs, eventually becoming one of the most famous “non-famous” people in the country. (Bettie may not have […]
Casino Royale is the bastard step-child of the James Bond franchise. When Ian Fleming sold the rights to the first Bond novel, leading to its use on the TV show Climax! (where Barry Nelson was the first actor to portray the famous spy), he couldn’t have guessed that this would be one of the […]
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is the theatrically-released pilot for the similarly named television show starring Gil Gerard as Buck and Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering. As I mentioned in my review, Flash Gordon (made around the same time) tried to recreate the comic strip on the big screen. Buck, on […]
I’ve said about all I needed to say about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in my original review. There’s little to add, really.
But I would like to point out that like a lot of the films that have become personal favorites, there’s always something that I notice each time I watch it. This time, […]
The Beastmaster was one of the rare early-eighties attempts at bringing the sword & sorcery genre to the big screen. Unfortunately for its box office, it released the same year as the much higher-profile Conan the Barbarian. Beastmaster quickly faded from theaters. But it was one of the first films to really […]
Bambi is considered one of the greatest of all the Disney Animated Features and it does much to deserve that reputation.
First, is the film’s willingness to embrace the realities of nature. It doesn’t force too much humanity onto the characters, instead allowing their natural characteristics to emerge. While there are certainly anthropomorphic aspects […]
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, while not a faithful adaptation of the books on which it is based, captures the essence of those books and translates it to the big screen with flair.
It’s impossible to discuss Unfortunate Events without pointing out that, as mentioned, it doesn’t really follow the books. It takes […]
It’s hard to really get across how disappointed I was with Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There are among my favorite books of all time. (No, really.) Any production has a high bar to clear as far as I’m […]
Dr. No initiated the James Bond film series and, while not the first appearance of the character*, it established many of the standard features that would carry the series for over four decades. That being said, there is much about this production that makes it more in line with the most recent film, Casino […]
The Raven was one of producer/director Roger Corman’s highest budget films and is certainly among his most star-studded. After years of making cheap, but highly profitable, films, Corman was beginning to feel that he could step things up and get some real stars. One of the best fruits of his labors is this […]
Melody Time is the next-to-the-last of Disney’s “package” films (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad would end the era). It has a larger number of individual stories than most and, being music-based, it has more in common with Fantasia than the other package films.
First up is “Once Upon a Wintertime”, a short, unmemorable […]
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is the last of Disney’s classic “package” films. It, obviously, features two stories: Ichabod Crane’s from Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Mr. Toad’s from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The connection between the two is the stated desire to show one […]
The Great Mouse Detective is a highlight of the “dark days” of Disney Animation - those years between the death of Walt Disney and the renaissance brought about by the production of The Little Mermaid.
It is an adaptation of the Paul Galdone novel Basil of Baker Street and tells the story of Basil, a mouse […]
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is the last of Disney’s “package” films (if you don’t count Fantasia 2000, which I don’t). But, unlike the package films of the 1940s, which consisted of individual stories that were often later split up as shorts, the segments in Winnie the Pooh were pre-existing shorts, created […]
The suits over at Disney must have been feeling pretty good about themselves when they released Aladdin. They had just come off the enormously successful Beauty and the Beast (the only animated film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture) and seemed to be on a roll. With much of the […]
Meet the Robinsons is the second film in what was meant to be Walt Disney Feature Animation’s new direction: CGI. After the monumental failure of Treasure Planet and the less than thrilling performance of Home on the Range, Disney was no longer going to produce traditionally animated films, instead they would produce “CGI” films, […]
The Little Mermaid is another film that I could go on about for days if given the opportunity. The main thing that sets it apart from the Disney animated films that preceded it was the focus on music. This is not surprising, as lyricist Howard Ashman also served as a producer on the […]
If Snow White is the film that made Disney studios, Dumbo is the one that saved them. You see, after the success of Snow White, Walt Disney set his sights a bit higher than just making entertainment. He made Fantasia. It was an enormously expensive undertaking that proved financially disastrous. Now, […]
“The one that started it all and still the fairest of them all!” read the ad copy for the DVD release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And, frankly, it’s hard to argue with that statement. Sure, there have been a lot of technical and artistic advances since 1937, but Walt Disney […]
In the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation, there has only ever been one film to get a true sequel (that is, a narrative film followed by another narrative film). The Rescuers was a surprisingly successful, quirky, little adventure film. Years later, straight-to-video sequels would be the order of the day, but the […]
Showing how important he had already become, Jiminy Cricket returns to act as presenter (and sings a great new song, “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow”) for the two stories in Disney’s 1947 “package” release Fun and Fancy Free. Jiminy is wandering about again (as he was at the beginning of Pinocchio) and comes upon a […]
The Hound of the Baskervilles is perhaps the oddest Sherlock Holmes film that is actually based on a work by Arthur Conan Doyle. It starts with the fact that Holmes is played by Peter Cook and Dr. Watson by Dudley Moore. Now, they were both fine actors when they tried and could have […]
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is my favorite film by director Terry Gilliam. In it, I feel that his growth as a filmmaker since his work on Monty Python and the Holy Grail finally came to fruition. After essentially making three films with the same focus and worldview (Jabberwocky, Time Bandits and Brazil), […]
Treasure Planet should have been a big, fat success story for Walt Disney. It’s based on one of the best adventure stories of all time, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, it has incredible visuals and it features a strong voice cast. But, in the end, it was all for naught as the film […]
Given how much I love The Nightmare Before Christmas and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I really expected to enjoy James and the Giant Peach a lot more than I did. The problem with Roald Dahl (author of the original book) is that he had a very dark view of life and it’s […]
I’ve never been a big fan of Disney’s Peter Pan. I don’t know what it is about the film, but I always viewed it with detachment. My recent viewing has done little to change this impression. Maybe it’s the story itself that leaves me a bit cold, I don’t know. Still, […]
The Lemon Drop Kid is, for the most part, a typical Bob Hope comedy of the era. What gives it a bit of a zing is the fact that it is based on the works of Damon Runyon (like Guys and Dolls and Little Miss Marker). So we have Bob making his way […]
The films that Ed Wood is best known for are undoubtedly those on which he collaborated with his freind Bela Lugosi: Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and, most famously, Plan 9 from Outer Space. In 1994, director Tim Burton filmed a fictionalized version of the making of these films in Ed Wood.
Glen […]
I hadn’t seen Cinderella, Disney’s 12th Animated Feature, in several years, but was inspired to watch it because of the impending release of Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, which was getting strong reviews. I’ve still yet to see Cinderella III (I’ll apend my thoughts here when I do), but after watching the original […]
The Princess Bride is one of those rare cases where I had read a not-terribly-popular book before seeing the movie. Of course, I was suckered into reading it by the exciting copy on the back. (At that time, I was reading *a lot* and it took something extra for a book by an […]
Much like Star Wars, it’s hard to remember how radical Jurassic Park was when it came out. Sure, there had been CGI effects before, dating all the way back to 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes. But the scale (hah!) of what Industrial Light and Magic did with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park changed the […]
Logan’s Run is the last of the great, pre-Star Wars sci-fi epics. The vast, clean sets and the (frankly) unrealistic look of the technology was the hallmark of 1960’s sci-fi (2001: A Space Oddysey notwithstanding) and I’ve always loved it. It’s very much the style that influenced the “Austin Powers” movies. But […]
Viewed December 28, 2006
The Road Home begins with a young man named Changyu (Hao Zheng) learning of the recent death of his father. When he returns to his village, he finds that his mother wishes to have his father’s body carried home by the men of the village (an old custom), despite the difficulties […]
Viewed December 25, 2006
This version of The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe was made for the BBC in the late 1980s as part of a series dramatizing C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. The series was then edited into three TV movies, beginning with this one.
I suppose there’s no point in trying not […]
Viewed December 24, 2006
The sleeper hit of late 2004, The Polar Express was the latest example of director Robert Zemeckis’ fascination with computer imagry (following the toon/human work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the history-melding in Forrest Gump). Here, he usues motion capture technology to record the movements of his actors (mostly Tom […]
Viewed December 11, 2006
The Year Without a Santa Claus is a remake of the classic 1974 Rankin-Bass production that details the events when Santa decides to give up the gift-giving, feeling he’s unappreciated by the world. Now, the smartest thing the producers of this movie did was not release it to theaters as they […]
Viewed December 9, 2006
Having established the characters in the first film, Shrek 2 gives a sense of how extendable they are, that is, how much the characters can stand up to continued adventures. Now, I had been told that Shrek 2 was better than Shrek, despite its review being more negative. I certainly […]
Viewed November 30, 2006
Like many, the first notice I gave Gumnaam was when I saw it’s opening dance number included in the film Ghost World. But far from the wacky 60’s romp that the number seems to indicate, Gumnaam turns out to be a somewhat altered re-telling of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (uncredited, […]
Viewed November 27, 2006
The African Queen is an unquestioned Hollywood classic. The pairing of Humphrey Bogart as riverboat captain Charlie Allnut and Katherine Hepburn as missionary Rose Sayer trying to make their way down river to attack a German boat during WWI is as famous for its own merits as it is for the […]
Viewed November 25, 2006
The Cheetah Girls 2 is the second Disney Channel Original Movie in a series based on books by Deborah Gregory that chronicle the trials and tribulations of a girl singing group in-the-making. Having faced difficulties finding their common voice in the first film, in CG2, they travel to Barcelona, Spain to […]
Viewed November 24, 2006
Oliver & Company is the 27th “Disney Animated Classic” and found Disney at a crossroads. Since the death of Walt, they had released fewer animated features and of arguably decreasing quality. When Michael Eisner took over Disney in 1984, one of the goals set out for his new management team […]
Viewed November 21, 2006
Election is one of those “dark comedies” that are so popular with film critics (less so with audiences). The fact that it takes a decidedly negative view of just about everyone explains why critics thought highly of this film. But unlike other dark school comedies (like Heathers, for instance), virtually […]
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 November 12, 2006
Boy, I didn’t care for The Iron Giant. I thought I would, given that it was directed by Brad Bird, who would later direct The Incredibles. But whereas The Incredibles is an intelligent look at what defines individuality in the world, The Iron Giant (which shares some of the same […]
Viewed October 27, 2006
House of Frankenstein sees the Universal Monster series crawling towards its end. Only House of Dracula reamains and it’s not looking too promising.
Well, HOF has one thing going for it, the return of Boris Karloff to the series. Unfortunately, he’s not playing either the Frankenstein Monster, nor his other major […]
Viewed October 22, 2006
Son of Dracula picks up the story of Dracula several years after the events of Dracula’s Daughter. Unlike that earlier film, however, it does little to try and maintain continuity. There is, for instance, no mention of the aforementioned Countess Marya Zaleska. In fact, things are left ambiguous as […]
Viewed October 16, 2006
The Ghost of Frankenstein is the first of the Universal monster movies that I’ve seen that really disappointed me. A few good scenes and another quality performance as Ygor by Bela Lugosi make it worthwhile, but it’s just not on the level of the other films.
The story picks up several years […]
Viewed October 14, 2006
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is really much more a Wolf Man movie than it is a Frankenstein film. In fact, it seems to ignore the continuity that was established in the “Frankenstein” series, acting as if the monster had not been seen since the end of the original 1931 film.
Lon […]
Viewed October 8, 2006
Anyone who thinks Bela Lugosi was a one-hit wonder just needs to see Son of Frankenstein. Not only does it sport a ripping good story and beautiful sets, it features one of Lugosi’s greatest characters (and one that people seem to seldom remember he created): Ygor. But he’s no […]
Viewed October 6, 2006
The Little Matchgirl is a straightforward adaptation of the sad story by Han Christian Anderson that tells of a poor girl, unable to sell her matches, who uses them to transport her to a better place.
This short is included on the new “Special Edition” DVD of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and it […]
Viewed October 4, 2006
Dracula’s Daughter is the surprisingly good follow-up to the classic 1931 film Dracula.
The story picks up almost immediately after the destruction of Count Dracula at the end of the first film. (Although John and Mina Harker have disappeared). Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is found with the […]
Viewed September 28, 2006
Bambi II is a film I honestly never thought they would make. I mean, it’s one thing to trot out The Lion King 2 or The Little Mermaid II or even Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. But a sequel to Bambi? Well, I prepared myself for the worst and […]
Viewed September 6, 2006
I treid. I swear I tried to go a week without watching an animated film, but I just couldn’t do it. I needed a relatively short film to watch (it ws late and I was tired) and there was a DVD of Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers just sitting […]
Viewed September 4, 2006
Cards on the Table is a recent TV Movie featuring David Suchet as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Now, I’ve read plenty of Christie (and seen a lot of Suchet’s Poirot on his show and other TV movies), but I’m not familiar with Cards on the Table. A bit of digging […]
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 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 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 […]