Tag: Disney

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Spider-Man: Homecoming

In the flurry of desperate corporate maneuvering in the wake of the 2014 North Korean cyber attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for The Interview, the most significant move may be the return of the Spider-Man film franchise to Marvel control. Spider-Man is the crown jewel of the Marvel superhero stable, which is why the film rights were sold for big money back in 1985, way before the comic book company was mining its rich vein of intellectual property with Disney. Eventually, Sony ended up with the property, and, after the success of Brian Singer’s 2000 X-Men movie, the studio did three Spider-Man movies with director Sam Raimi starring Tobey Maguire as the webslinger. Raimi’s first two films are among the best blockbusters of the century, and, personally, I like the third one, even though that’s a minority opinion. Then the studio rebooted the franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield. While Garfield matured into a good actor, the two Spider-Man movies he starred in were clumsy and charmless.

Sony was reportedly planning on creating a Spider-Man series to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but after Kim Jong Il’s minions splashed the confidential contents of their servers all over the web, they needed to raise money in a hurry and preemptively surrendered to the Marvel juggernaut. It turned out to be the best decision Sony has made in a long time.

Spider-Man defines the Marvel approach to superheroes. He’s not a superhuman paragon of virtue like Superman. He’s young, flawed, often scared, and while his heart is always in the right place, his judgment is not always the best. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige cast Tom Holland as Peter Parker and fed him through the Marvel Cinematic Universe assembly line with relative newcomer Jon Watts at the helm. In a Hollywood that is exhibit A for bad decision-making processes, Marvel got everything right this time.

What’s most appealing about Holland’s Spider-Man is that we get to ride along while he discovers his powers. But this is not an origin story; we don’t have to see poor Uncle Ben die again. Tony Stark recruited Parker for Civil War, and created a high-tech Spidey suit, partially as payment and partially as initiation into the Avengers clan of super-beings. But Parker’s still in high school, so he’s just as invested in his Academic Decathalon team and the homecoming dance as he is in what he calls “my Tony Stark internship.” Spider-Man may be on the A-list in the real world, but in the Marvel universe, he’s C-list at best.

Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Wisely, the villain of Homecoming is also a C-lister trying to increase his Q rating. In a bit of genius casting that was, in retrospect, blindingly obvious, Michael Keaton, formerly known as Batman and Birdman, plays the villain Vulture. The character is a scrap metal dealer who used the broken bits of alien technology littered around New York after the Avengers saved the city from the Chitauri invasion to build himself a flying super suit. Keaton deftly straddles the line between the realistic and fantastic with a riveting performance. The confrontation between Keaton and Holland prior to the big finish is the best single scene in the entire Marvel movie canon. The world is not in peril in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it’s all the better for it. Instead of a city-destroying battle between the forces of good and evil, it’s just novice hero vs. novice villain. The human-sized stakes make it more exciting, and it’s considerably easier to follow the action with fewer moving parts. You don’t come out of the film feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head for the last half hour.

Another vital element done right is the strong supporting cast. Marisa Tomei represents a radical new version of Aunt May, which totally works. Jacob Batalon is excellent as Parker’s best friend Ned, and Disney teen star Zendaya is sharp as smartass classmate Michelle. Comedian Hannibal Buress is pitch perfect as Parker and Ned’s distracted gym coach. Unsurprisingly, Homecoming only falls down when it’s trying to connect with the bigger Marvel universe. Robert Downey Jr. is his usual snarky self as Tony Stark, but an extended subplot with Iron Man director Jon Favreau playing Stark’s henchman Happy Hogan periodically grinds the momentum to a halt. But that’s not enough to derail Spider-Man: Homecoming’s fun.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Beauty and the Beast

Disney’s 1991 production of Beauty and the Beast was a success by any measure. It was a huge box-office hit, earning 16 times its budget, a fact made even more remarkable because it was an animated musical with an original score. Those songs, including classics “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty and the Beast,” swept the musical categories at the Academy Awards. But one scene in particular stands out as historic. When Belle and the Beast waltz together for the first time, the camera swooped and soared through the beautiful, cavernous ballroom with a freedom never before seen in animation. The ballroom was modeled by a computer in 3D, using techniques and technology developed by Pixar, which at that time was a technology company started by Steve Jobs. The scene signaled a seismic shift in animation away from hand-drawn images to increasingly sophisticated computer renderings. Four years later, Pixar’s first feature, Toy Story, which was entirely 3D-rendered, closed the door on the classical era of animation.

In a way, Disney has come full circle with its “live-action” remake of Beauty and the Beast. I used the quotes because there is very little in this beast that hasn’t felt the touch of the cursor on a monitor in California. The CGI modeling techniques introduced in 1991 have become so sophisticated that they are virtually indistinguishable from “live-action” images. The production’s most astonishing accomplishment is Cogsworth, the fussy old head of the Beast’s household who has been transformed by the Enchantress into an ornate clock. Voiced by Ian McKellen, the incredibly detailed creation features layers upon layers of moving clockwork, and yet has enough expression and movement to do physical comedy with Lumière, the enchanted candelabrum voiced by Ewan McGregor.

Cogsworth is just one element in a rush of onscreen visual wonders, and it would be easy to miss his awesomeness. And that’s the biggest problem with this Beauty and the Beast — if I had to choose one word to describe the movie, it would be “cluttered.” The 1991 version often exploded into a riot of movement, especially in the centerpiece “Be Our Guest” dinner party sequence, but the minor abstractions introduced by traditional animation tempered the visual impact of those sequences. This time around, when the army of china comes whizzing at you, they’re fully rendered plates glinting in meticulously modeled candlelight. Beauty and the Beast is a frequently beautiful film, but it’s also sometimes hard to watch.

Fortunately, Emma Watson’s Belle is never hard to watch. Of the group of exceptional actors who came out of the Harry Potter franchise, Watson is the most talented. For the generation who grew up with her as “The Brightest Witch of Her Age,” she has come to represent millennial feminism. She’s the perfect choice for the live-action adaptation of the heroine who inspires the simple townspeople of her not-very-French village to sing “what a puzzle to us is Belle.” Seeing as she was about 18 months old when the original movie came out, she likely grew up watching the cartoon version of the bookish commoner who is ultimately wooed by the size of the Beast’s library. Her singing voice, while not the equal of Paige O’Hara’s work in the original, is more than adequate to the task. She commands the screen without ever really seeming to break a sweat.

Watson’s Beast is Dan Stevens, who gets considerably more screen time in this version of the story, which leans heavily on the Broadway adaptation. His shutter-rattling, no doubt enhanced baritone serves to flesh out the motion-captured character. Even better is Luke Evans as the anitheroically square-jawed Gaston. He is the very picture of toxic masculinity, ready to go full demagogue at the drop of a hat and lead the torch-waving visitors to go all Frankenstein on the Beast.

Much better than last year’s Jungle Book remake, Beauty and the Beast almost justifies the enormous expense poured into it. It reinforces the contention that Disney is the only contemporary studio that knows how to make a good movie. With her effortless brush-off of Gaston’s boorish advances, Watson’s Belle is coded as appropriately woke. But one wonders at the feminist subtext of a kidnapped woman who falls in love with her captor and changes the brute into a handsome prince by sheer force of her womanly charms. Amid all the ballyhoo and singing, its corporate perfection often feels flat. With all rough edges rounded off, this version of Beauty and the Beast is just another girl meets anthropomorphic water buffalo, girl loses man-buffalo, deus ex machina makes everything OK story.

Beauty and the Beast
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Moana

“If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you’re a Princess,” says Maui, demigod of land and sea voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, of Moana, the eponymous heroine of the new Disney animated extravaganza.

Moana, voiced by a high school freshman named Auli’i Cravalho, is not technically a princess, but rather the daughter of Chief Tui Waialiki (Star Wars veteran Temuera Morrison), leader of Motunui, a picturesque village on a lovingly rendered Polynesian island. But those are just details that have been temporarily glued to the ever-evolving ideal of the Disney Princess. Snow White, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, Pocahontas — the stars of Disney’s animated musicals are all gathered under the same corporate banner at princess.disney.com. They’re the bait that hooks the young girls into the Disney corporate synergy machine: See the movie, buy the merch, ride the ride. It’s easy to get cynical about all of it (and if you’re not feeling cynical yet, don’t worry, I’m cynical enough for both of us), but the truth is, Disney’s just really damn good at making these movies.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho are the voices behind the demigod Maui (left) and Moana, the eponymous teen “princess” of Disney’s new animated feature.

From before Homer told the story of Achilles setting out across the wine-dark sea, we’ve understood that kids need heroes. Stories of trials, bravery, and purpose help us fill in the blanks of who we want to be and, thus, who we become. In the past, Disney’s youngest female fans had Sleeping Beauty as a hero: a character whose best qualities are her utter passivity and attractiveness to men. Now, they have Moana, and it’s a big improvement as role models go. Instead of waiting for a man to come save her and drag her off into domesticity, Moana makes her own decisions. The only men in her life are her stalwart but overprotective father and the vain, tempestuous demigod. Moana is bereft of romance, and it’s all the better movie for it. Instead, it’s the story of a young woman trying to cajole the men around her into doing the right thing and then giving up and just doing it herself. But in stripping the patriarchy from the Princess, all that’s left for directors Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, and Chris Williams is a pretty straightforward Hero’s Journey, complete with an eccentric, elderly mentor (Gramma Tala, voiced by Rachel House); a descent into the underworld (for a musical number with a hostile giant crab); and a good, old fashioned leap of faith.

Did you catch that there are four directors? I think that’s a record for a non-anthology movie. But that’s Disney under the direction of John Lasseter, who brought the fluid, iterative, team-based creative process with him from Pixar. There’s one official screenwriter (Jared Bush), but at least seven people get “story by” credits — and yet the film still steals beats from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mad Max: Fury Road. There are no missteps, but no big chances are taken, either.

The number of animators stretches well into the hundreds, and the evidence of that investment is up on the screen. Moana is one of the most gorgeous pictures Disney has ever produced. Nevermind the onslaught of stunning technical achievements, from Maui’s unruly locks of curls to the nonstop water effects that would have been impossible just a few years ago — Moana is a brilliantly designed animation. The human characters balance on the edge of the uncanny valley, and they are often interacting with backgrounds and objects that are as photorealistic as anything in a Marvel movie. The visuals are more inventive than the storytelling, and the most impressive moments come in the musical interludes. There’s one moment where Moana and Maui sing their way into an environment inspired by the impressionistic animation of Song of the Sea, and the contrast between the full rendered 3D CGI characters and the 2D backgrounds are like nothing I have ever seen before.

The songs, written by a team that included Hamilton scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda, are unfortunately not as memorable as the visuals. There’s no “Let It Go” or “Be Our Guest” here. With the exception of “Shiny,” sung by Flight of the Conchords Jemaine Clement as the aforementioned giant crab monster, the songs all kind of melt together into an unoffensive Disney goo that will one day seep through hidden speakers outside the Moana Outrigger Adventure ride at Disney World.

If you need me, I’ll be in the tiki bar.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Captain America: Civil War

Another May, another superhero movie. How far along are we on this wave of superhero movies? I date it from Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, although you could argue that it goes back to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The studios have refined the hit-making formula, crowding all other genres out of the blockbuster space. Only Star Wars brings in that kind of business, and, as great as The Force Awakens was, it clearly showed the marks of the Disney/Marvel method. As long as the returns remain good, the culture will be papered with comic book movies — and with Captain America: Civil War opening to $673 million on a $250 million budget, there’s no sign the returns are going to fall off any time soon.

Constraints breed creativity, and as formulaic as big-time superhero movies have become, Kevin Feige has a good process in place that both delivers the corporate goods and encourages filmmakers to do good work. Two of the Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movies have been exceptional, but the real heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s overarching narrative is the Captain America franchise since Chris Evans was introduced as Steve Rogers in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. Directed with a classical flair by Joe Johnston, The First Avenger established Captain America as a link to the country’s most heroic period: fighting the Nazis to save freedom. Steve Rogers has become a stand-in for America’s best version of ourselves. Whether it’s a super weapon in the hands of the Red Skull in his first film or an unaccountable surveillance state in Winter Soldier, how he reacts to the problems thrown at him is in accordance with the best angels of our civic religion.

Much of the credit for the success of the Captain America movies must be laid at the feet of Evans, who plays Steve Rogers as empathetic and fundamentally decent but with a strong sense of melancholy befitting a man out of time. The series has also been bolstered by strong direction, first from Johnston and then from Joe and Anthony Russo, who plunged the stalwart super patriot into a world of spy vs. spy intrigue in The Winter Soldier. The best superhero stories come when the heroes are confronted with challenges they are not well-equipped to face and a villain with enough vision to turn the heroes’ strengths into weaknesses. Captain America, the super soldier created to fight the Nazis, the ultimate external threat, found new depth when he had to tease out friend from foe inside the government he has sacrificed everything to serve.

There are two sides to every story — Chris Evans (above) as Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle as Iron Man and War Machine.

The Russos are back at the helm for Civil War and have once again tried to tie into the zeitgeist of a divided America. 2016 gives us two blockbusters about superheroes fighting each other. The first was Zac Snyder’s dismal Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Civil War is much better in every respect, largely living up to Winter Soldier.

To defeat Superman, you must put Lois Lane in danger. He’s too powerful to beat on his own, so you have to trick him into making mistakes. Similarly, the way you defeat Captain America is to put Bucky Barns (Sebastian Stan), aka the Winter Soldier, in danger. Bucky is Steve Rogers’ only link to the life he left behind in the 1940s, and Rogers feels partially responsible for Bucky getting the Soviet super soldier treatment that transformed him into a brainwashed assassin. When Civil War opens, Bucky’s been lying low since his escape at the end of The Winter Soldier. Captain America and his revamped crew of Avengers — Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) — are engaged in their usual business of keeping the world safe by chasing the fabulously named superterrorist Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). But, as usual when an “enhanced persons” donnybrook breaks out in an urban area, there are collateral casualties. In this case, a delegation of development workers from the reclusive African kingdom of Wakanda, the source of the world’s vibrainium, the material that Captain America’s shield is made from. The king of Wakanda, T’Chaka (John Kani) leads a movement to bring the Avengers under the formal control of the United Nations, and other countries, seeing the devastation wrought in the Avengers’ former battlegrounds, quickly come on board.

After Tony Stark is confronted by the mother of a young man killed during the final battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, he decides to back the UN resolution, known as the Sokovia Accords after the city that Ultron levitated into oblivion. But Steve Rogers disagrees. The Avengers were created to keep the world safe from superpowered bad guys, and Rogers is absolutely sure that he is the only person qualified to determine when and how those threats can be identified and neutralized. He and Stark are already on the outs when a truck bomb blows up the United Nations meeting on the Accords, and his old friend Bucky is tagged as the guy to blame. Rogers is torn between loyalties to his friend, to his government, and his own moral sense, and his path splits the Avengers into factions: the Iron Man-led, pro-accord forces, which include Black Widow, Vision, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and T’Challa, (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, the son of the slain Wakandan monarch who has vowed to kill Bucky. Standing with Captain America are Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch, Ant Man (Paul Rudd), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). To tip the odds in his favor, Stark tracks down Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who has only been Spider-Man for six months, and recruits him with an offer of a new spider suit.

The introduction of Spider-Man, the Marvel comic book empire’s greatest character creation, is just one demonstration of how superior the Marvel touch is to the DC regime. The Russos know we’ve seen Spider-Man’s origin story onscreen twice in this century, so when Stark asks Parker how he got his powers, he just mumbles “It’s complicated,” and leaves it at that. Holland’s version of Parker is closer to Toby Maguire’s goofy persona than the Andrew Garfield iteration, which is a big improvement.

Boseman’s Black Panther is a welcome addition to the MCU. He gives T’Challa a regal bearing that suggests he would fit in on Game of Thrones. The end of Civil War charts an interesting future for him, which we’ll get to see more of in his solo movie scheduled for 2018.

The centerpiece of Civil War is a great set piece inside the evacuated Leipzig airport where the two factions go at it for what feels like a good 15 minutes. Here the Russo’s major inspiration for the film comes into focus. The Empire Strikes Back brought moral complication into the Manichaean Star Wars universe, and Civil War attempts to do the same by making Rogers choose between competing goods at every turn. While defending Winter Soldier from Iron Man, Captain America says he’s doing it because Bucky is his friend. “I was your friend, too,” the wounded Stark says.

The shifting allegiances give the Russos a chance to bounce different pairs of characters off of each other, and it’s obvious this is where their interests really lie. Especially good together are Downey and Renner, who capture the raw anger of a longtime friendship betrayed.

Civil War is massively overstuffed with characters and fragmentary storylines intended to connect to the bigger universe but which bogs down the present story. Captain America: Civil War is a fun time at the movies, and among the best of its breed, but you can be excused if you feel superhero fatigue setting in.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Jungle Book

As my wife said when we were leaving The Jungle Book, “That was a lot better than I was expecting it to be.”

She’s right. Jon Favreau’s entry into Disney’s campaign of remaking its classic animation titles as CGI-heavy live action films is a solid little adventure story starring talking animals. Mowgli (Neel Sethi, in his feature debut) is one of only two real humans onscreen. His co-stars are a menagerie of CGI animals that constitutes the film’s biggest achievement.The computer-generated animation and backgrounds on display here are astonishing. The animators get all of the little things right, like the ripple of a wolf’s fur or the quiver of a porcupine’s quills, making this one of the visually best CGI-driven films since Avatar.

We meet Mowgli, the foundling raised by his wolf mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), as he’s trying to run with the pack. Try as he might, he can’t keep up, but alpha wolf Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) encourages him to keep trying. A drought brings all the animals of the jungle together in a water truce, where they promise not to eat each other while gathered around the last pond of drinkable water. It’s here that Shere Khan (Idris Elba) first sees Mowgli. Shere Khan carries scars inflicted by a human wielding the “red flower” of fire, and Mowgli becomes the focus of his grudge. The angry tiger threatens the wolf pack if they don’t turn over Mowgli, forcing the boy on a dangerous jungle sojourn with Bagheera (Ben Kinglsey), the black panther, as his guide. His ultimate goal is to make it to the human village, but Mowgli is unsure if he really wants to go, leaving him trapped between worlds.

Wolf boy — Neel Sethi as Mowgli.

The voice casts are all quite good, led by America’s spirit animal Bill Murray as jovial slacker bear Baloo, and including Scarlett Johansson as the hypnotic python Kaa and the recently departed Garry Shandling as Ikki the porcupine. Favreau and company devise a series of cleanly executed set pieces to put Mowgli in peril as he navigates through the dangerous jungle.

Favreau’s Jungle Book is visually lush and innovative, but you know what else was visually lush? The 1967 animated adaptation of The Jungle Book, which was the last film Walt Disney worked on before his death in 1967. That version sanded some of the rough edges off of Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist source material and imbibed the characters with some of the best songs in the Disney canon. Orangutan King Louie, played in 1967 by Louis Prima, flirted with racial caricature, but his version of “I Wanna Be Like You” is a heavy-bopping freight train of a song. Favreau turns the colonialist overtones way down by casting Christopher Walken as King Louie and referencing Brando’s performance in Apocalypse Now. Walken delivers a fine take on the song, but not fine enough to erase the memory of the original. Along with “Bear Necessities,” it’s one of only two songs to make it into this version, and that’s the problem in a nutshell. Disney wants to make some kind of slightly gritty reboot of The Jungle Book that will appeal to the hypothetical kids today, but also channel the spirit of the original, but in trying to thread the needle, Favreau takes a middle path that fully satisfies on neither level. The Jungle Book is not quite as inessential as last year’s Cinderella, but ultimately it still fails to justify its own existence.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Zootopia

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the first thing throngs of visitors encountered was Main Street, U.S.A., Walt Disney’s sanitized, safe, and, ultimately, utopian vision of America as a small, Midwestern town where everyone was happy — everyone who mattered, anyway.

Disney’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the years, and its vaunted animation division that produced timeless masterpieces such as Fantasia, Pinocchio, and The Jungle Book fell into disrepair. In the early 1990s, a young animator named John Lasseter championed computer animation as the House of Mouse’s way back to the forefront and was canned for his troubles. Fortunately for everyone, he attracted the attention of Pixar, the animation production house Steve Jobs cobbled together from the remnants of George Lucas’ computer graphics division, and went on to define the zeitgeist, starting with Toy Story, until Disney finally threw in the towel and bought its rival outright 10 years ago.

Lasseter is now the head of the animation division he was once run out of, and so, with Star Wars and Marvel properties defining the pop-culture landscape and acting as an ATM for the company, it’s his job to articulate Walt’s utopian message for the uncertain 21st century. Disney did not release budget numbers for Zootopia, but Variety estimates there’s upwards of $100 million invested in this ambitious spectacle. The talent in the director’s chair(s) is about as impressive as it gets in the animation world. Byron Howard’s been with the studio since Mulan, more recently helming Tangled. Rich Moore was the director for some of The Simpsons’ greatest episodes, including “Lisa’s Substitute,” “Marge vs. the Monorail,” and “Cape Feare.” The vision of ideal America they conjure in Zootopia is tolerant, kind, rational, but not perfect — and all the stronger for it.

We get the backstory for the human-free world of Zootopia from its hero, a rabbit named Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), one of 275 brother and sisters growing up on a carrot farm in the Bunny Borough. The animals abandoned nature red in tooth and claw and built a multispecies civilization based on mutual respect and not eating each other. The sprawling capitol is Zootopia, a city with excellent public transportation where “anyone can be anything.” But, like America, Zootopia doesn’t always live up to its highest ideals, and Judy’s ambition to be a police officer is unlikely, since the force is dominated by African megafauna. But Judy perseveres and makes history with the help of Mayor Leodore Lionheart’s (J.K. Simmons) diversity program. But, as with many ambitious trailblazers, she runs up against institutional roadblocks, here with the face of a water buffalo named Bogo (Idris Elba), who assigns her to meter-maid duty. But when she’s confronted by the frantic wife of a missing otter (Octavia Spencer), she gets 48 hours to solve the mystery, which may be related to a wave of AWOL animals across the city. Along the way, Judy must confront not only prejudice against her as a she tries to break into the formerly bunny-less world of animal law enforcement, but also her own prejudices against others, such as Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a con artist fox, whom bunnies — including Judy’s own parents — still regard with suspicion as their most-feared former natural enemy.

Zootopia‘s most ingenious move is mining the 1982 Walter Hill film 48 Hrs. for its main character dynamic — only in this case, Nick Nolte is a bunny, and Eddie Murphy is a fox. When the unlikely pair’s investigation inadvertently inflames the city’s long-dormant predator/prey tensions, the parallels to to the human world couldn’t be more clear to the adults in the audience.

Goodwin, a Memphian whose voice-acting experience began with Robot Chicken, gives vibrant life to Judy, Zootopia‘s breakout star who is destined to enter the pantheon of Disney characters next to Bambi and Dumbo. From her on down, characterization is Zootopia‘s biggest strength. All of the bit players are good, including the legendary Maurice LaMarche doing his Marlon Brando imitation as Mr. Big, the shrew godfather of Tundratown, Tommy Chong as a nudist yak, and Raymond Persi, who gives a show-stopping performance as a sloth in charge of the DMV. The animation is the equal of any recent Pixar feature, with a wealth of jokes delivered through simple attention to detail.

Zootopia‘s message of tolerance and respect comes at a perfect time for the human world wracked by renewed racial divisions drummed up by marauding demagogues. Disney always strove to base his vision of America on the better angels of our nature, and with Zootopia, the company he founded has succeeded.

Zootopia
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cinderella

It was strange to watch Disney’s new, live-action Cinderella so soon after seeing Into the Woods. In Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tale musical mashup, Cinderella, who was played in last year’s film adaption by the extraordinarily talented Anna Kendrick, is a flighty, witty presence who toys with the Prince because she can’t seem to make up her mind about much of anything. But the new Disney Cinderella played by Downton Abbey‘s Lily James is none of those things, which is why Sondheim’s take on the character is labeled “revisionist.” For better or worse, this Cinderella is as familiar and unthreatening as Disney’s branding department needs her to be.

The director Disney chose to revamp the intellectual property Walt appropriated from the cultural commons of fairy tale land is Kenneth Branagh. A prolific Irish stage actor who was hailed as the second coming of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Branagh is no stranger to screen adaptations, having began his film career in 1989 the same way Oliver did in 1944, with a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Henry V. And while he has done yeoman’s work adopting the Bard over the years (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet), lately, he’s found success adopting Marvel heroes (Thor) and Tom Clancy novels (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).

Even working within the Disney corporate environment, Branagh’s hand is evident in Cinderella. He approaches this adaptation in the same classy way he approaches Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: It’s not the Grimm version of the tale he’s adopting, like Sondheim did in Into the Woods. Nor is it the 17th-century French version of the tale Cendrillon, which introduced the Fairy Godmother and the glass slippers. Branagh’s bailiwick is to adopt Disney’s 1950 animated musical Cinderella into a live-action, non-musical version.

I’m still pondering why anyone thought this would be a good idea. Cinderella is extremely important to Disney. It’s widely credited as being the film that saved the studio, reversing Walt’s sliding fortunes after a decade of war and bad luck had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. After all, Disneyland’s centerpiece is Cinderella’s Castle. It’s built right into their corporate logo. And no one has been more successful with musicals in the 21st century than Disney, as hordes of parents who can’t get “Let It Go” from Frozen out of their heads will be the first to tell you. So why strip out the music from the corporate flagship, dooming it from the very beginning to be a tinny echo of the original?

Branagh does his best, as he always does, and over all, the production benefits from his taste and style. Cinderella reads Pepys to her melancholy father (Ben Chaplin) after her mother (Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame) dies. The diction is much higher than with most movies aimed primarily at preteen girls, with narrator and Fairy God Mother Helena Bonham Carter opining about how “economies were taken” when Cinderella’s father dies offscreen, leaving her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, who steals every scene she’s in) and stepsisters Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) without any means of support. James’ Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) actually have good chemistry, and they appropriately share some of the film’s best scenes together, such as when Branagh has them circle each other on horseback when they first meet in the forest, and when they steal away during the ball so he can show her his “secret garden.” Visually, the director takes frequent inspiration from the animated version, from the color coding of the wicked stepsisters to the way Cinderella’s pumpkin coach dissolves when the Fairy Godmother’s spell wears off.

Branagh’s swooping camera and sumptuous CGI palaces look good enough, but they can’t replace the classic, hand-drawn animation of the old-school Cinderella. And even without the songs, this version is almost 50 minutes longer than the classic. Most of the extra running time comes in the beginning, when Branagh spends time exploring more of the family’s backstory, although he wisely gives Blanchett’s Wicked Stepmother as much screen time as possible. Cinderella‘s not a bad movie, per se, it’s just turgid, overly long, and desperate for a reason to exist beyond the boffo box office numbers it put up last weekend. But we all know that, for the House of Mouse, $132 million is reason enough.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Big Hero 6

Based on a Marvel comic by the same name, Big Hero 6 is a fun, occasionally brilliant, never boring computer-animated film from Disney. It’s a distinctly 21st-century creation, where kids’ skills in creating and controlling technology can give them superpowers and allow them to create the kinds of friends they want and need. At times, it’s like a candy-coated Blade Runner, substituting the clean, bright lights of San Fransokyo for the grim wasteland of Los Angeles 2019. Like Ridley Scott’s seminal vision, it is concerned with the blurring line between humanity and machine, but unlike author Philip K. Dick, it says that we can not only control our creations, but we will eventually put our trust in them and be rewarded.

Maybe I’m diving too deep into a kid’s movie right off the bat, but Kids These Days (™) are far more tuned into these ideas than most adults, and stories like Big Hero 6 will be the battleground upon which the future is fought or surrendered to.

Big Hero 6

Referencing Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the hero of Big Hero 6 is named Hiro (Ryan Potter), a 13-year-old budding cyberneticist whom we meet hustling back-alley robot fights with his deceptively cute fighting unit. Concerned about his brother’s flirtation with the underworld, Tadashi (Daniel Henney) takes him to the university where he is studying, and Hiro falls in love with the idea of school after seeing the gadgets dreamed up by Shaggy-like Fred (T.J. Miller), cyclist Go Go (Jamie Chung), neurotic Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), and chemist Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez). So Hiro enters a tech contest to win a scholarship to the school. His creation, a swarm of nanobots that he can control with his brainwaves, wins the attention of Professor Callaghan (James Cromwell) and entrepreneur Alistair Krei (Alan Tudyk). But his triumph is short lived, because there is a mysterious fire and explosion at the school, which kills Tadashi and destroys his nanobot creation. He has one ally: an inflatable medical robot named Baymax (Scott Adsit) that turns out to be infinitely useful as Hiro assembles his superteam to investigate the link between his brother’s death and a mysterious super villain who has eerily familiar nanobot servants.

Big Hero 6 is an origin story for a superhero team, but Baymax is the breakout star of the show.

This is not a Pixar film, but it bears the clear stamp of producer John Lasseter, who directed Toy Story. It is proceeded by an excellent short called Feast, the story of a relationship as told from the point of view of an adorable dog that looks more like the now-classic Pixar shorts than a Disney cartoon. Let’s hope the cross-pollination between the two studios continues to produce good fruit like Big Hero 6.

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Summer Movie Journal #5

Full Metal Jacket (1987; dir. Stanley Kubrick)—Kubrick is a cable television hypnotist; stop to watch a scene or two, and the next time you check your watch, two hours of your life have vanished. Part of this comes from Kubrick’s distinctive mixture of precision imagery and ambiguous human agents; his shifty films, which often concern the breakdown of orderly systems, always feel like you can eventually figure them out if you could just see them one…more…time. Like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket is a horror film, but it’s more matter-of-fact about the world’s terrible things than its predecessor. Its main subject is the way people like Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and Vincent D’onofrio’s Private Pyle are ground up in the human being lawnmower that is the U.S. military-industrial complex, embodied in the film by R. Lee Ermey’s mad-god drill instructor. Ermey’s florid, obscene litanies of abuse, which he delivers nonstop at maximum volume, coexists uneasily with Kubrick’s tightly composed images of military harmony, including a shot of Marines climbing ropes in the twilight as beautiful as anything in a Miyazaki film. For most viewers, Jacket’s merciless first forty-five minutes overshadow the film’s second half, which takes place in Vietnam and includes a little thing called the Tet Offensive. But it shouldn’t: one look at Animal Mother’s 1000-yard stare ought to keep you locked in. And in the age of CGI, Kubrick’s meticulous craftsmanship stands tall. Just think; they had to set those building on fire during the battle scenes every single day. Grade: A+


Hot Fuzz (2007: dir. Edgar Wright)— Edgar Wright is another filmmaker who stops me in my tracks whenever I’m idly channel-surfing. Hot Fuzz, about a London supercop (Simon Pegg) who thinks something fishy is going on in the small English village where he’s been reassigned, is the only action-comedy anyone needs to see, a triumph of verbal and visual wit more immediately accessible than anything Wright, Pegg and co-star Nick Frost have done so far. But for genre connoisseurs interested in a bit of fun, this pastiche offers endless treasures. Its network of cross-references and allusions are bewildering, edifying, inspirational: the Lethal Weapon theme music, the Silent Rage lookalike who can only say “Yarp”, the Straw Dogs shotgun violence played off as a joke, the casting of The Wicker Man’s Edward Woodward as the town’s security head, all the songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the A-Team like way in which the bad guys aren’t killed. To say nothing of Timothy Dalton as the guiltiest-looking, most shamelessly wicked murder suspect in film history. Grade: A+

A Summer’s Tale (1996; dir. Eric Rohmer)—Although Eric Rohmer’s funny, lovely romance about the romantic adventures of a young man and three women had its long-overdue U.S. theatrical premiere earlier this year, it isn’t coming to Memphis; looks like Kansas City (where it’s currently playing) is as close as it’s going to get. This is a shame, because this is perfect mid-August fare, a chatty couple of hours that records, with grace and equanimity, all the dumb games people play when they’re too young and uncertain to deal with love, sex and commitment. I don’t tend to look to Robert Louis Stevenson for advice about today’s youth, but he’s spot-on about the central dilemma of the clueless dude at the film’s center: “He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His experience is incomplete… He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit.” Out of such hesitations and feints are authentic feelings and many painful memories born. Grade: A


Post Tenebras Lux (2012; dir. Carlos Reygadas)—There’s too little to hold onto in Reygadas’ emotional autobiography, for which he won the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Its internal logic remains opaque, and its few potent-looking individual vignettes fail to compensate for its many dead spots. I liked the two visits by the devil (I think) and the scene where the guy rips his own head off, but the rest of the imagery and emotions were either hidden or buried. I feel sorta dopey disliking this movie, though. It’s easy to tee off on typical Hollywood product because village-idiot brainlessness is often what it’s selling. It’s tougher to take down something “challenging” or difficult or unconventional. Because these works may require more time and effort for viewers to unpack it mysteries and challenges, you feel like a chump and a simpleton when you finally give up and say, “I don’t get it.” But I don’t get it. Grade: B-


“Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin (1992; dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker)—I didn’t discover Robin Williams’ soul while watching The Fisher King or Good Will Hunting; I discovered it in a Disney cartoon. The connection between creativity and solitude—and the way in which Williams’ manic flights of free-associative fancy frequently exhausted other people whenever he escaped from the prison of his own head—is the subtext of Williams’ Genie’s mantra: “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space.” Nevertheless, Williams’ magical wish-granter is his greatest role, in part because it best embodies the radical notion of the comedian as world-builder. Wonder, joy and generosity in the movies are all too rare, but these things are all present in this gloriously surreal, genially self-indulgent two and a half minute musical number, which still delights me after dozens of viewings. (Favorite moment: the way the Genie leers, “Well, lookie here!” after conjuring up a tiny harem for his new master.) Before bursting into song, the Genie declares “I don’t think you quite realize what you’ve got here”; that purely expository line will assume new shades of meaning and gravity as we continue to grapple with Williams’ huge (and often frustrating) artistic legacy. Grade (musical number only): A+

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: Earth to Echo

Earth to Echo might be a Disney movie, but it’s a cool little adventure showing influences from 1980s sci-fi to more recent fare like J.J. Abram’s Super 8.

The movie revolves around best friends Tuck, Munch, and Alex. Tuck, the protagonist played by Brian ‘Astro’ Bradley, is increasingly dismayed at their neighborhood being torn apart after a construction company comes in to build a highway, so he decides to start filming their lives. We see their world through the handheld eyes of Tuck’s many recording devices.

The boys, outcasts at their school, find solace in each other. Alex, played by Teo Halm, is an adopted child of two loving parents who are expecting a baby of their own; he’s brooding just enough to be short of a cliché, but trust issues still come through. Munch (Reese Hartwig) brings the apprehension to the group and the squeaky-clean attitude that prevents him from ever lying.

Two days before everyone in the neighborhood is to evacuate, hopelessness sets in.

“We’re just kids. What can we do?” ponders Tuck.

Soon enough, something weird happens. Their smartphones start what they call “barfing” — weird designs pop up on the screens, making the phones unusable. The boys become convinced that there’s a bigger picture, and everything, including the construction company, is connected.

With some encouragement from Tuck, who’s clinging to anything to make the most of their dwindling time together, they set out to find the source of the dysfunction. Along the way, they pick up Emma (Ella Wahlestedt), a popular girl at school who is tired of the cookie-cutter life she’s lived so far. What they find is truly out of this world: an alien that’s stranded, and it’s up to them to help the little guy.

The CGI is on-point, adding to the film but not totally overtaking it. The alien is reminiscent of Pixar’s Wall-E, rounded and communicating nonverbally and with beeps.

Earth to Echo, aimed at tweens, has a message of empowerment. Here, the kids, armed with cameras and a sense of adventure, figure out what’s going on in their community. It works. The jokes land just right even for the adults in the audience, though some might have a hard time keeping up with the handheld cameras, which sometimes were just fast-moving enough to feel lost.

Earth to Echo is a good film for those parents with older children, particularly ones that might feel helpless with issues in their community. They can see how, despite their age, they can make a difference too.

Earth to Echo

Now Playing

Multiple Locations