2015 #195
Bill Condon | 130 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 12 / PG-13
Bill Condon | 130 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 12 / PG-13
Oscar-winning adaptation of the stage musical that doesn’t tell the story of the Supremes in fictionalised form, no sir.
Jamie Foxx is the ambitious car salesman who transforms a trio of black soul singers into a crossover hit by replacing chunky lead Jennifer Hudson with sexy Beyoncé Knowles. Personal issues dog the girls’ career, as Foxx becomes megalomaniacal, leaving early successes like R&B star Eddie Murphy in his wake.
Despite oddities, like diegetic performances being replaced part way by characters breaking into song, and questions over the story’s adherence to fact, the film is a compelling (if heightened) character drama.
For most of the ’90s and ’00s, Disney churned out direct-to-video sequels to many of their most beloved animated classics. They have a reputation for being unremittingly awful, hence why Pixar’s John Lasseter put a stop to their production after he became Disney’s Chief Creative Officer in 2006. Despite that reputation, however, there are those who say one or two are actually quite good. One of those (and the only one I’ve previously seen) is 
are to be found with the forty thieves… I expect you can guess where that’s going. Fortunately the film gets there pretty quickly, then transitions into a story about the possible redemption (or not) of Cassim alongside the quest for the Hand of Midas, capable of turning whatever it touches into gold (natch).
Score: 
In this ‘sequel’ to Inside Out, Riley is going to hang out with a friend… who turns out to be a boy, which sends her mum and dad — and their anthropomorphised emotions — into paroxysms of worry. Is this the 12-year-old’s first date?
The short that accompanied Inside Out in cinemas is essentially a music video for a folksy ballad about a pair of volcanoes who are in ‘lava’ (read: love) with each other.
Disney’s ’80s/’90s renaissance more-or-less came to an end with this adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s jungle hero.
David Tennant replaces Martin Freeman as the teacher of a primary school class who enter themselves in a Christmas singing competition in this part-improvised sequel to the 
You’d be forgiven for thinking MGM want people to forget this movie even exists: it was dumped on US DVD back in 2000, it’s never had a UK disc release, and a long-rumoured special edition has never emerged. That’s a shame, because there’s a good-quality musical tucked away here.
a bit fatalistic for a bright little musical about two people falling in love on a show boat? No, it’s just an indication of where things are going — into darkness, as modern parlance would have it, because from here on out everything goes to pot. To detail the ins and outs would be to spoil the narrative, but much of the film is more tragedy than cheesy Hollywood musical.
Perhaps it isn’t a film to ease back with on a Sunday afternoon, but not every old film or musical needs to be. If you can get past the opening, Show Boat offers a tough, emotional, perhaps even challenging, view of the world that marks it out as a film deserving of some rediscovery. Can we have that special edition now, please?
Frozen is a grim single-location thriller about three college kids trapped on a ski-lift overnight, battling hypothermia and worse over a hundred-foot drop. Or at least it was until last year, when Disney went and released its all-consuming mega-musical. 
Unlike the best Disneys, however, I think its appeal resides firmly with little girls — you don’t actually have to go very far on the internet to find people baffled by its success. Plenty of people think the music is bland, the characters underdeveloped, the moral and emotional arcs not fully thought-through, the visual style a rip-off from 
The lack of villain’s song is attributable to the fact that, for nearly the entire film, there are no nasty characters. A villain emerges right at the end to give us a climax, but for once that works — a genuine twist! It’s almost a shame it has to resort to that, but how else do you end a Hollywood movie other than a big dramatic confrontation? Plus, aforementioned snowman Olaf confounded my expectations, pulling off the quite remarkable feat of not being the most irritating CGI character since Jar Jar Binks. (I don’t know who is the most irritating CGI character since Jar Jar Binks, but Olaf is alright.)
It’s not bad — it’s adequately cartoony — and actually the ice and snow effects are very, very good. It’s the character animation that I felt let it down, especially some of the more minor roles — there were points where their style and movement looked little better than you’d find in a video game cut scene.
Frozen is by no means a bad Disney movie, and it does have a lot of favourable aspects. Whether the internet’s right and it’s not as good as Tangled, I wouldn’t care to say (I enjoyed Tangled, but at this point have largely forgotten it); conversely, the sometimes-rabid fan base are perhaps being a little over-enthusiastic. There’s nothing wrong with a kids’ movie being beloved by kids, though; and with all the dreadful things the media churns out for little girls to obsess over and centre their life values around, this is undoubtedly one of the most positive.
Disney attempted to replicate the success of 
and one that’s mostly animated with our live-action heroes integrated; plus a climax where the good guys defeat one of the world’s great evils, with Poppins’ bankers here switched for the almost-as-bad Nazis. The magical special effects in that final sequence won an Oscar — and well deserved it was too. They look great, definitely holding up today, and it’s actually hard to be sure how they were all achieved.
27 years after its West End debut, the long-running smash-hit musical finally makes the leap to the big screen. Such a beloved work paired with a recently Oscar-winning director and an all-star cast was pretty much a dead cert for big-name awards nominations, and so it was to be; but critical reaction was more mixed: I’ve seen people who love the film unreservedly, and others who despise it with a passion.
Despite its running time, Les Mis is quite brisk for much of that plot (which, sorry if you’ve never seen it, I have described a fair old chunk of). There’s no interval in the film, but on stage it doesn’t come until well into the Paris section of the tale. Such a break must help the pacing, because while I remember enjoying it all on stage (where, I might add, it’s even longer), on screen I felt the middle portion began to drag. So yes, an epic running time for an epic, but it actually moves quickly through the parts that make it an epic before slowing for a bit of a forced romance and that kind of palaver.
Much talk around Les Mis focused on the performances, with three in particular attracting discussion. As honourable wronged-man Valjean, Jackman is the star of the show, and brings his musical theatre background to bear on a clearly-sung but emotive performance. He was unlucky to be in the same awards year as Daniel Day-Lewis’ all-conquering turn in 
The rest of the cast is an assortment from the can-sing (Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried) to the comedic-so-it-doesn’t-matter (Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter). The best voice of the lot belongs to Samantha Barks as Eponine. No surprise, really, as she was poached from the West End… where she’d found herself via one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s BBC talent shows, so I imagine he feels thoroughly vindicated now (as if he didn’t before).
Hooper does an above-average job on the whole, but the lack of awards nods shouldn’t be so surprising.
100Films.co.uk 