Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” is a gorgeously crafted snooze-fest December 11, 2009
Posted by ronannarbor in Entertainment, Movies.Tags: Disney, kiddie movies, New Orleans, Princess and the Frog, Randy Newmann, Tiana
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As my last duty before heading off to Orlando for a week, I saw Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” in its first showing at the Showcase Cinemas this morning. It allowed me a short nap before heading off to Florida.
The first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes are absolute Disney at its best. If only the entire movie could maintain that tone. The hour in between those opening and closing bookends is a snooze-fest clearly aimed at 6 year old girls.
It’s great to have an African-American “Princess” in Tiana (I don’t think I give anything away here, since Disney has been touting this as their newest “Princess movie”)…and the voice cast is stellar. But the movie ends up emphasizing money rather than empathy with another human, and it dissolves into the typical “gotta marry a Prince and live happily ever after” fantasy that does no good for any children in this day and age no matter what their race.
Randy Newmann’s music is peppy at best, serviceable at worst, and there isn’t a memorable song in the bunch. The middle portion of the movie set in the bayou makes no sense even for Disney – an alligator that plays jazz with human counterparts on a riverboat…a “shadow man” that appears far too many times in the film and feels basically there to just “fill out the hour”; and long drawn out sequences where I literally found myself nodding off. I have NEVER in my life found myself nodding off at any film, let alone a Disney picture. But there is very little there to keep adults involved in the middle goings of the film. It’s a big-screen equivalent of Saturday morning television messages — although it all looks and sounds a lot better.
Once we get back to New Orleans for the final act, things take a turn for the much better, and Disney film-making at its best is at play. But at no point in this film did I ever feel anything “magical”. Instead, I found myself looking around the theatre wondering if any of these 4-year olds that were brought there by their parents and nannies this morning had any clue as to what was going on in this film.
Heigh Ho — it’s off to WDW I go.
Roland Emmerich’s “2012″ is insanely entertaining November 13, 2009
Posted by ronannarbor in Entertainment, Movies.Tags: 2012, Amanda Peet, CGI, disaster movie, end of the world, John Cusack, Movies, Roland Emmerich, science fiction
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If you’re not a fan of “Independence Day” or “The Day After Tomorrow” or “Armageddon” or “The Poseidon Adventure” by all means, bypass 2012 at all costs and you can stop reading now — but if you did like any (or all) of those movies, then run, do not walk, to your local theatre to see Roland Emmerich’s insanely entertaining end-of-the-world disaster film.
Let me say right off the bat that I love destruction and explosions and volcanoes and tidal waves in my movies, so right off the bat, I knew this was going to be great fun. And it is. It’s bigger, louder, visually eye-popping science fiction — with a big emphasis on the fiction. It’s 2012 and as predicted by the Mayan calendar thousands of years ago, the planets and sun are in perfect alignment – solar flares cause a heating of the earth’s core, and the fun begins when the earth’s plates start to shift around. The science is murky and not referred to a second time, but that’s all you need to set the story into motion. Presidential advisors sound alarms, noble acts are committed, ignoble ones are defeated, and for the lucky ones, half a million implied survive in arks. Yeah, you heard me right, arks.
But getting there is one rollercoaster ride of a grab-your-popcorn-check-your-brain-cheer-for-the-CGI-destruction experience. John Cusack tries to salvage family ties (he apparently was too distracted writing a fiction novel about the end of the world to pay attention to knock-out Amanda Peet and the kiddies). Woody Harrelson has the strangest cameo as a pirate radio host who predicts it all and narrates it as he watches Yellowstone erupt (this is of the Randy Quaid in Independence Day strange variety). Every character is a paper-cutout as far as backstory and interest. But who cares about the people here. It’s about the effects — and I do not say this lightly — the effects here don’t border on Art…they define CGI Art.
There are wonderful things here — and there are laughable things as well. Emmerich knows that the best way to approach the (bad) script is to make fun, and let the audience laugh along. And you do. There are times you laugh with the movie, and there are times that you laugh at the movie. And it’s all perfectly blended into one extraordinarily entertaining motion picture.
One scene about 3/4 of the way through this (almost three hour) movie finds our family and other stragglers having crash-landed in the mountains, watching helicopters carry a surprising load to their final destination: it’s both art and ludicrous at the same time. It made me smile for many minutes.
I just loved this movie, and I can’t wait to go see it again. Seen in a surprisingly full movie theatre in Ann Arbor this afternoon (I thought I was the only person that didn’t work on Fridays), this is sure to be the fall blockbuster the movie studios have been waiting for. I can’t wait to see the grosses on this one come Monday morning…one caveat — as in many recent adventure action movies, there are several scenes of children in peril: not as intense as Jurassic Park, but enough to cause parents pause to think about their young-ones and their tolerance for this kind of mass-destruction and death and counterbalance it with their estimate of their own kids nightmare quotient before bringing them into the theatre. It’s typical PG-violence — bodies fall but don’t land — drownings, fire, crushing, crashing are mostly implied — bodies fly, they occasionally cling to things in the distance, but for the most part disappear. Again, it’s about the special effects, not the people.
Visual parallels can be drawn to Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow – complete with space-view shots of the world below. But it’s a formula that works — and here, it works bigger, faster, louder, and better. It’s the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. And I absolutely had a ball. There is nothing to think about here after you leave the movie theatre, except how amazing the special effects are. And that is exactly what I needed this afternoon. And that’s the view from Ann Arbor today…
UPDATE: Sunday 11-15-09 — The first weekend boxoffice take for 2012 was 65 Million Dollars over three days.
Holy Xanadu!! March 23, 2009
Posted by ronannarbor in Movies.Tags: 80's Hair, 80's nostalgia, ABC Family, Bad clothes, ELO, Netflix, Olivia Newton John, Tap Dance, Xanadu
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Recently saw the Broadway tour of Xanadu in Chicago — and it brought back this bizarre sweep of nostalgia for the original movie, which I hadn’t seen since 1980…So ABC Family comes to my rescue again this weekend with the movie version of Xanadu….and what a suprise…
First — let’s not get carried away — this is one of the WORST movie musicals ever made — and it has nothing to do with the sometimes excellent music and performances, and completely has to do with the terrible script.
But there is some brilliant in this terrible movie as well. First is Olivia Newton John in an amazing musical performance that includes tap dancing (she’s good!), roller-disco, and hip hop (okay, let’s call it what it was, there was no Hip Hop back then, it was all plain old DISCO)…but she is good….and I mean good. She matches other musical theatre singers/dancers for strong song and dance, and stage presence.
Then there is the wonderful art design — granted, it doesn’t get off to a good start with the purple-aura muses coming to life….but it gets better — the studio work looks great, and the sequence in which the Swing Band and the ELO Band slide together is sheer musical theatre brilliance.
The final sequence, as aweful as it is, features some terrific footwork and tap — when was the last time you saw Tap in a movie musical?…and these folks tap dance on roller skates!….
Give it a look — it’s aged well, and it’s a highly entertaining 90 minutes. It’s a great filler for your Netflix list — and if your old enough to remember, it’s a blast of 1980′s nostalgia that reminds you how terrible our clothes were, how awful our hair was, and the bizarre taste we had in colors. It’s all there, and it’s all more genuine than movies like Grease, because this movie wasn’t designed to be nostalgic — it was real-life living, breathing musical culture circa 1980. And it’s hilarious.
Now where is my shirt with the buttons that closed on a diagonal across my chest?….I know it’s in some closet somewhere…although this time, what goes around is NOT going to come back around…
What went wrong with MILK?… February 13, 2009
Posted by ronannarbor in Movies.Tags: Academy Awards, Best Picture, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Dev Patel, Focus Films, Frost/Nixon, Kate Winslet, Michigan Theatre, Milk, Oscar, Quality 16, Showcase Cinemas, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader
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With the Academy Awards fast approaching, this blog post takes a look at our Best Picture candidates…It was actually a strong year for movies, and except for the (bizarre) number of nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, pretty accurate, at least in reflecting quality, as far as I’m concerned…
First, let’s discuss SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE….my choice for Best Picture of 2008. This is far and away the first feel-bad-feel-good-can’t take your eyes off of it-unique-unBollywood slice of life picture ever made. Without giving away too much, lets just say the basic premise of rags to riches is turned on its head when our adorable lead actor (Skin’s Dev Patel) goes on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire not to win money, but to find his lost love. I adored this movie, despite it’s extremely violent first act. Everything was done right to catapult this film into the public limelight and it’s won every single major award for Best Picture this year. I don’t think I have liked a British film for frontrunner to get an Oscar since Chariots of Fire won in the 70′s. If you haven’t seen this film – for God’s sake, get off of the internet right now and go see it. It’s showing everywhere in Ann Arbor.
So, for most of the fall and early winter, MILK looked like a shoo-in to win Best Picture. So what went wrong? First, this is a fine film and beautifully acted throughout. It’s filled with continuity and historical inaccuracies, and the Castro has never really looked the way it is pictured in studio sets in the film, but overall the film is a very well filmed and finely acted showpiece. And therein lies the problem. The Academy already awarded a Best Documentary Oscar to The Times of Harvey Milk, and MILK is very much a live-action remake of that documentary. Second, Focus Features absolutely botched the release of this film, Instead of going wide right after the Prop 8 debacle in California, when the country was heated-up about similar issues, Focus chose to roll the film out in small art houses in selected markets. “Going wide” at the end of January involved the addition of only a few thousand more theatres, and it never went the cineplex route. In Ann Arbor, it has shown only at the huge vaudeville house Michigan Theatre and has never opened at the cineplexes. Meanwhile Slumdog is going strong on almost 4000 screens nationwide. You do the math. Fine picture, but it’s not going anywhere anymore for best picture.
Miramax’s dark horse this year is THE READER. I saw this in San Francisco, because frankly, it had such limited release in Michigan it was too much of an effort to find it in the local theaters. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie from a literate, well-told, well-acted point of view. And that was about it. I’m not sure how this snuck into the Best Picture category, and it’s not going to win. But I’m glad it did, so that more people will see what might otherwise have quickly disappeared into the literate-movie ether…I really liked Kate Winslet here. You can see the ending coming from a mile away, but it the film is still deeply moving and has impact long after seeing it. But it’s minor impact. Seeing the film made me want to read the novel, because it felt like a lot of story was missing. Guess what, it’s not!!
Sheen and Langella both deserve Oscar’s for their performances in FROST/NIXON…but in reality, have probably gotten all of the true accolades they are going to get while performing these exact same roles in the stage version of the movie. The same can be said of the film as a whole. Note to Ron Howard: I really missed the multiple-angle live television shots of the penultimate scene’s “big reveal” that so beautifully captured both Frost as well as Nixon’s faces at the same time on stage. I loved the film, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t stand a chance against Slumdog (or for that matter, Milk).
Which brings us to a movie I despised:
I am completely at a loss as to how THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON got so many Oscar nominations. It’s not going home with any of them, with the possible exception of Best Makeup. But even there, The Reader’s makeup for Kate Winslet is actually similar and has more nuance. While I enjoyed the technical marvel of this film’s CGI work, I basically lose all interest when you invent something like the “living backwards” McGuffin and expect an audience to care after three hours. The film did contain my favorite cinema image of 2008: the final tableau of the clock (still running backwards) in storage while the waters of Hurricane Katrina sweep into the room. Brilliant. That, and editing at least an hour out of this brutally long movie would have made it more accessible. I detested this film, and wouldn’t be surprised if it won nothing.
BIGGEST OMISSIONS?
Sticking with Best Picture, I’m not convinced that THE DARK KNIGHT shouldn’t have been nominated instead of CURIOUS CASE. It took a formulaic Batman movie, and superimposed a fine moral story along the lines of Silence of the Lambs. And I am not sure that DOUBT shouldn’t have taken the place of THE READER. Reader’s tale of holocaust remorse is touching but dated, and Doubt’s storyline of possible child abuse is historically dated but emotionally relevant as if ripped right out of today’s headlines (which it was — the play was written at the height of the US priest-abuse hysteria a few years back).
Good luck to all of the films.
Here in Ann Arbor, you can see the nominees at:
MICHIGAN THEATRE: Milk
STATE THEATRE: Slumdog Millionaire
GOODRICH QUALITY 16: Frost/Nixon; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire
SHOWCASE CINEMAS: Slumdog Millionaire; Benjamin Button
And that’s the view from Ann Arbor…
