From the ridiculous (Barbarella) to the sublime. Zelig is, to put it simply, the best mockumentary ever made. To me, anyway. And I’ve already mentioned how much I love This is Spinal Tap, so you know that’s a bold statement. But it deserves no lesser phrase. Year before Forrest Gump […]
I’m not going to lie to you. The main thing that drew me to Barbarella as a youth was the copious amounts of nudity. I mean, I had never seen a film that had so much casual nudity in it. There are women who are just naked for no particular reason from […]
Now, I’ve been a big fan of Bob Hope since the days of my youth, when the local independant station used to show his movies every saturday or Sunday morning. (This is also the cause of my love for Godzilla and Blondie movies.) But ever since then, my favorite has been Son of […]
Until Cars, Monsters, Inc. was my favorite Pixar film. Oh, I made a lot of noise about Toy Story 2, but deep down, I always knew that it was Mike and Sully that I’d rather watch.
The thing is that Monsters, Inc. gets almost everything right. The cast is perfect, the story is engaging, […]
I love Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. It does something that I always admire in a film: it builds its own take on reality and blindly holds onto it no matter what. The world of Anchorman is a specific take on the 1970s: male chauvanist, environmentally unfriendly, yet harmlessly naive (despite the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Toy Story 2 is one of those rare occasions when the sequel outdoes the original. While Toy Story is a wonderful film, but its biggest draw is the (then) unique style of animation used. By Toy Story 2, it would take more than CGI visuals to grab an audience. It does this […]
Ah, Toy Story. Although they had done several shorts and dozens of memorable TV commercials (Listerine bottles swinging on vines and dancing gummi Life Savers ring a bell?), it was with this, the first computer animated feature film, that Pixar Animation Studios made its name and reputation. Prior to Toy Story, precious few […]
Bananas is Woody Allen’s second full film (after the re-dubbing of 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and 1969’s Take the Money and Run) and it’s the first to make major use of Allen’s “loser” character, the guy who has everything go wrong, but still gets the girl in the end somehow. Of course, being […]
Heaven Can Wait has always been one of my favorite films and it’s the one that made me an unabashed fan of the great Charles Grodin.
But there’s so much more to this film than just that. Heaven Can Wait (for those of you who don’t know) is a re-make of a popular (and excellent, […]
The Cheap Detective followed hard on the heels of writer Neil Simon’s previous mystery parody, 1976’s Murder by Death. While Murder by Death had an impressive cast (David Niven, Alec Guiness, Maggie Smith, Peter Sellers, etc.) playing parodies of a wide variety of mystery characters, I think it was clear that the standout was […]
I was in the mood for something easy to watch, so I next chose This is Spinal Tap , since I’ve seen it so many times that I don’t need to focus in too hard on it anymore. Tap is an all-time classic, with phrases like “goes to eleven” becoming commonplace in popular culture. […]
Next up, was The Emperor’s New Groove, which I reviewed fully last year. It had been my intent to watch the Disney Feature Animation canon in chronological order, but this one came on TV and I couldn’t help but watch it. Since getting into the whole “Emperor’s” universe, I’ve learned a lot about […]
You know, I held off watching another film way too long out of some weird sense of not wanting to watch something “unworthy”. But as time has gone on, I’m settling in to watching what I would’ve watched anyway.
First of all, I’ve been on a huge “Hitchhiker’s” kick since last year, when my sister […]
Viewed December 31, 2006
When I started this project, part of the goal was to watch movies I had always intended to see, but had somehow missed. I kicked off the proceeding with what I called “the great unwatched”: Unbreakable. The other movie that qualified for that title is one of my mother’s favorite […]
Viewed December 30, 2006
Well, one last time, I sat down to watch some shorts, since I had waited so long to watch my movie of the day. This time, I watched the shorts available as extras on my DVD of Dumbo, both titles that would seem to have influenced the film about the elephant […]
Viewed December 27, 2006
Three Ages is an ambitious comedy from Buster Keaton, where he strives to show how love has changed (but mostly stayed the same) throughout the ages. He does this by illustrating three cases of love: a caveman, a Roman citizen and a modern day man (well, modern for 1923, anyway).
All three […]
Viewed December 23, 2006
Waiting… is a comedy about the staff at a mass market restaurant (”Shenaniganz”) that follows the events of a new worker’s first day.
Essentially, Waiting… is like an old Bill Murray vehicle (think Meatballs or Stripes) with the Murray part filled by his modern-day counterpart Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds plays Monty, an “old […]
Viewed December 21, 2006
GE recently debuted their “Imagination Theater“, a web site devoted to short films (and clips about GE products). The films are a mix of live action office-based films and animated shorts that are more abstract.
The Crossing shows the value of “thinking outside the box”, as they say. Its shows four […]
Viewed December 19, 2006
Pokémon Heroes is the 2003 entry in the annual Pokémon film series (and the last to be released theatrically in the US). Like the TV series, it follows the adventures of Pokémon trainers Ash Ketchum, Misty and Brock as they learn about the world of Pokémon. This time, they come […]
Viewed December 18, 2006
Herbie Fully Loaded picks up the story of the Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own last seen on the big screen in 1980’s Herbie Goes Bananas. (There was also a 1997 TV remake/sequel of the original film, The Love Bug, that is not necessarily in continuity.)
Fully Loaded […]
Viewed December 17, 2006
No Time for Nuts is a 3D animated short included on the DVD release of Ice Age: The Meltdown which, like Gone Nutty before it, stars the “sabre-tooth squirrel” Scrat. This one involves Scrat coming across a time machine and travelling all through time in chase of his constantly-on-the-move one remaining […]
Viewed December 15, 2006
Village of Daughters is one of what seems like an infinite number of farces that British studios like Ealing were cranking out in the 1960s. It revolves around a salesman, Herbert Harris (Eric Sykes) who travels to Sicily and finds himself caught up in a scheme by the local priest, Don […]
Viewed December 14, 2006
Okay, so we talked about how Bela Lugosi was willing to make cheap, quickie movies back in 1939. But where did he hit bottom, film-wise? Was it with Ed Wood and his posthumous appearance in Plan 9 From Outer Space? Nope. It was with the justifiably reviled Bela […]
Viewed December 13, 2006
Perhaps Thanksgiving Day would have been a better day for seeing Let’s Talk Turkey, as it is basically a comedic guide to carving a Turkey. I’m told that it a fairly standard comedy short from producer/narrator Pete Smith, who worked on around 200 films from 1931 to 1955.
This mini-epic begins with […]
Viewed December 12, 2006
The Road to El Dorado is another one of those films I have no excuse for not having seen. After all, I’ve owned the soundtrack since it came out, since the songs are performed by Elton John with lyrics by Tim Rice (of whom I’m a big fan). In fact, […]
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 10, 2006
The Santa Clause 2 improves on the original film by sticking more closely to a festive mood, but gets somewhat muddled with too many plotlines.
The main focus of the film is Santa Claus (aka Scott Calvin, played by Tim Allen) and his search for a wife, as required by contract (the “Mrs. […]
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 December 8, 2006
Good luck finding information on The Wild Goose. If my job hadn’t required me to give tech support to a recent event where the film was shown, I don’t know how I would have ever learned about it and that’s a shame. Writer/Director Bruce Cronin made several low budget films […]
Viewed December 6, 2006
With time winding down and only five shorts left in The Chronological Donald, Volume One, I decided to go ahead and watch the rest and close out my look at the early phases of Donald’s career.
Early to Bed is a simple, formulaic short featuring Donald trying to get to bed early so […]
Viewed December 5, 2006
My Wife’s Relations is classic short-form Buster Keaton. Buster gets hauled into court by a woman who thinks he broke a courthouse window. Thinking they are an engaged couple (and speaking no English), the judge marries them. While the woman’s family is aghast at the shrimp their sister has […]
Viewed December 4, 2006
Think Bela Lugosi lowered himself by appearing in Ed Wood movies? Maybe so, but if The Gorilla is any indication, he was already willing to hire himself out to anybody back in 1939. To understand the circumstances, you should know that the stars of The Gorilla, the Ritz Brothers, were […]
Viewed December 1, 2006
Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmas is an anthology film that tells three Christmas-themed stories in Disney style.
The first is a story featuring Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. It has some similarities to the classic film Groundhog Day as the nephews wish that every day was Christmas and […]
Viewed November 26, 2006
Fatty’s Spooning Day aka Mabel, Fatty and the Law is a relatively early entry from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that displays all his typical character traits. He womanizes. He gets in trouble with the law. Just about the only thing he doesn’t do is the acrobatics that he was […]
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 23, 2006
Tina and Frank is a short film made by Oakland filmmaker Erin Gleeson. It follows a young woman named Tina who has befriended an older divorced man named Frank. They have bonded over the odd habit of punching people in the face and much of their time is spent setting […]
Viewed November 22, 2006
Timber finds Donald attempting to steal food from Pierre (a re-named Pete). He gets caught and Pierre puts him to work lumberjacking. From there the wackiness ensues as Donald causes more trouble than gets work done. There’s a lot of to and fro between Donald and Pierre until Donald […]
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 20, 2006
One way to judge the quality of a film is to judge the quality of its remakes. For The Shop Around the Corner, its progeny couldn’t be of higher quality. Its story of two disparate people who fall in love through the mail was first remade in 1949 as In […]
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 16, 2006
The Paperhanger’s Helper aka Stick Around is interesting because it is exactly the kind of comedy that Laurel and Hardy would be making history with just a few years later, and yet it doesn’t work here. This is because while Oliver Hardy is present, his sidekick (in a role that would […]
Viewed November 10, 2006
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie takes the exitable ocean dweller and brings him to the big screen for the first (and, to date, only) time. While much of SpongeBob’s comedy translates well to a larger canvas, there are aspects that just don’t come up to snuff.
The plot is no more or less […]
Viewed November 9, 2006
One Week is a classic Buster Keaton short that finds him and his new bride (Sybil Seely) given a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. When Buster’s rival changes the numbers on some of the boxes, Buster’s efforts prove to be more comical than effective.
This short is a prime example of […]
Viewed November 7, 2006
Mater and the Ghostlight is a cute little short that is included on the Cars DVD and features a new adventure for Mater, Lightning McQueen and the gang from Radiator Springs. It’s not Pixar’s best DVD exclusive short (that would remain, IMHO, Mike’s New Car), but it’s still a good one.
The key […]
Viewed November 6, 2006
Donald’s Vacation is a rather uninspired entry in the Donald Duck canon. There’s lots of Donald mucking about in nature, but there is little focus. I got the sense that the guys at Disney just had a bunch of gags lying around and structured this short in order to use […]
Viewed November 5, 2006
One of the biggest hurdles that most Disney straight-to-video sequels have to clear is maintaining the tone of the original film. Some fail spectacularly (The Lion King 2), while others are surprisingly strong (Alladin and the King of Thieves, Bambi II). Of course, some ignore the original tone completely and […]
Viewed November 4, 2006
Okay, this is another one of those circumstances where I really should like a film, but somehow it just doesn’t connect with me. I expected to like Kung Fu Hustle, since it plays into a lot of things I enjoy, yet it somehow missed the mark.
For one thing, it’s not nearly […]
Viewed November 2, 2006
Right off the bat, I thought it was funny that Disney put the song “Whistle While You Work” into Billposters. It’s obvious that even back then, Walt was interested in synergy and keeping the memory of Snow White alive in people’s minds. Unfortunately, except for that amusing inclusion, Billposters is […]
Viewed November 1, 2006
Well, the day after Halloween must the time to start watching Christmas movies. At least that’s what the Disney Channel seems to have thought when they decided to air The Santa Clause on that day.
The basic premise of The Santa Clause is that a divorced father, Scott Calvin (Tim Allen), […]
Viewed October 30, 2006
As the month of October drew to a close, I tried to squeeze in as many horror and horror-based films as possible. One of the films I meant to get to was Elvira’s Haunted Hills. I’ve always been a fan of Elvira (real name, Cassandra Peterson), having watched her show […]
Viewed October 29, 2006
The Paleface is a pretty standard entry from Buster Keaton during his pre-feature days. It’s a funny little short about a white man who is taken for a god by a tribe on American Indians on the verge of losing their land to an oil baron.
There are plenty of Buster’s trademark […]
Viewed October 23, 2006
Donald really starts to hit his stride here, as the animators have obviously begun to really define what works for him and what doesn’t.
Officer Duck is a nifty crime caper short that has Donald disguising himself as a baby to infiltrate the lair of a wanted criminal, Tiny Tom (essentially the eternal […]
Viewed October 12, 2006
Sea Scouts finally fulfills the promise that the “nephews” series had in it all along. Huey, Dewey and Louie have shed most of their “little brat” attitudes and are much more like they were portrayed in the comics. Here, they are truly trying to be helpful to Donald, but their […]
Viewed October 10, 2006
Scary Movie 4 is even more all over the board than the previous entries in the series both in the quality and the sources of its jokes.
The first odd thing about Scary Movie 4 is the filmmakers’ apparent insistance to maintain continuity with the previous film. The first twenty minutes of […]
Viewed October 5, 2006
Clockwise is an attempt to take John Cleese’s immensely engaging screen persona and translate it to the big screen in a starring role post-Monty Python. Unforunately, the main character is neither as irritating as his classic Basil Fawlty, nor is he as appealing as the later Archie Leach from A Fish […]
Viewed October 2, 2006
Man, was that a disappointment. I didn’t really expect Casper to be a great film, and I had certainly heard some of the complaints, but I never expected it to miss the mark so completely.
I suppose that if the film were called anything else, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. […]
Viewed September 29, 2006
Okay, so maybe my Disney obsession is getting out of control. I mean, I know there’s more of the faux Bob & Doug McKenzie in Brother Bear 2, but did I need to see it so soon? Well, probably not. But it wasn’t bad and the addition of two […]
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 27, 2006
The only reason I saw Miss Grant Takes Richmond is because Turner Classic Movies decided to air it during a William Holden marathon. The fact that TCM had never aired it before should give you some indication of how obscure this movie is. Starring Holden before Sunset Blvd. (1950) and […]
Viewed September 26, 2006
I’m beginning to understand why I came to like Donald so much. If these cartoons are any indication, he was much put upon. In The Hockey Champ, Huey Dewey and Louie (they’re becoming omnipresent, aren’t they?) once again torment Donald and get the best of him because of his temper. […]
Viewed September 25, 2006
The Reluctant Astronaut is another Don Knotts vehicle that features Knotts as the hapless, but loveable, loser who finds himself in over his head. This time, he’s Roy, the timid son of an ex-army man. His father wants him to do great things, so signs Roy up for the space […]
Viewed September 23, 2006
I really wanted to like writer/director Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. When he’s on his game, there are few actors better than Sean Penn and everything seemed to point to a solid performance here as fictional guitar great Emmet Ray. But it’s not from Penn that the great performance comes.
It […]
Viewed September 22, 2006