Frankenweenie (2012)

Posted on January 12, 2015 by badblokebob

Inspired by two of Burton’s early-’80s shorts (which are most commonly found on Nightmare Before Christmas DVDs), Frankenweenie takes the black-and-white stop-motion visual style from Vincent and the storyline from the live-action Frankenweenie, and expands them out into a feature-length offering.

The story is as simple as one you’d expect from a short: young Victor Frankenstein’s dog dies; for a school science project, he resurrects him. It works surprisingly well stretched to a feature running time, although it goes a little haywire at the climax (what’s the point of all the monsters, really?)

Even if the narrative is no great shakes, there’s plenty of fun to be had along the way. The dog, Sparky (ho ho), is very well observed; indeed, all of the animation is naturally top-notch. It retains an indefinable but desirable stop-motion-ness, something I felt Burton’s previous animation, Corpse Bride, lacked — it was so smooth that while watching I began to wonder if I’d misremembered and it was actually CGI. Frankenweenie is attractively shot on the whole, with gorgeous lighting and classy black-and-white designs. Although US funded, I believe it was actually created in the UK, so hurrah us.

There’s lots of fun references for classic horror aficionados… though, actually, they’re not that obscure: they’ll fly past inexperienced youngsters, but be identifiable to anyone who has a passing familiarity with Universal’s classic horror output. For the kiddies, there’s some good moral messages tossed in the mix, though the best — a brief subplot lambasting America’s attitude to science — should be heeded by all.

Some say it doesn’t have enough of an edge. Well, maybe; but I thought it was surprisingly dark in places. Not so considering it’s a Tim Burton film based on resurrecting the dead, but for a Disney-branded animation, yes. Those edgier bits are here and there rather than consistent, but still, I’m not sure what those critics were expecting from a PG-rated Disney animation. I guess there’s an argument that Burton should have pushed it further and aimed for an adult audience, but can you imagine an American studio agreeing to finance an animation primarily targeted at anyone who’s entered their teens? Because I can’t.

Even if you have to make some allowances for the kid-friendly necessity of Disney animation, I think Burton and co have taken an idea which showed little promise to sustain a full-length feature, and produced a film that’s beautifully made and a lot of fun.

John Carter (2012)

Posted on December 28, 2014 by badblokebob

A box office flop (it made a once-astonishing $284 million worldwide, but that was off a $250 million production budget and a ginormous bungled marketing campaign), John Carter has gained something of a following among those who did enjoy it or caught it later — see this post by ghostof82, for instance. I approached it hopefully, then, buoyed by such positive after-reaction — many a good film has been ignored by the general audience. Disappointingly, I didn’t find John Carter to be one of them.

Adapted from a classic, influential science-fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (that being A Princess of Mars, deemed too girly a title for a PG-13 SF/F blockbuster nowadays), the story sees American Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) transported to Mars, which he finds populated by human-esque aliens, the two factions of which are at war, and giant four-armed green-skinned aliens, who are trying to stay out of it. Of particular interest is the half-dressed princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), promised in marriage to villain Sab Than (Dominic West) in order to end the conflict. Cue simplistic politicking and CGI-driven action sequences.

There have been many reasons cited why John Carter flopped, a good many of them centred around the marketing campaign (reportedly director Andrew Stanton, given power by his directorial success at Pixar (Finding Nemo, WALL-E), demanded a level of control Disney felt forced to give, and his belief that Carter was as renowned a character as (say) Sherlock Holmes or James Bond led to a misaligned campaign, one which the professional marketing people who knew what they were doing weren’t allowed to salvage). Also, the sheer importance of Burroughs’ novel was actually a hindrance — not because it’s so famous (among Normal People, I don’t think it is), but because its influence means its imagery and concepts have already been plundered (Star Wars and its sequels being the most notable example). A sense of “seen it all before” is not a good thing ever, but doubly so for a movie that is, at least in part, based on spectacle.

That’s why it failed to connect with the general public, at any rate, but none are particularly good reasons to criticise the film for the more discerning viewer. Sadly, I think there are a good few others. The storytelling, for one, a confusing mess of alien names and words that are thrown around with reckless abandon. This may again by the fault of Stanton’s familiarity with the material, a lack of awareness that newcomers (aka the vast majority of the audience) wouldn’t have the foggiest what was going on. Such things are not necessarily a problem — look at the success of Game of Thrones or Avatar, both of which introduce silly names and/or thoroughly alien worlds. The difference there is the new information is either doled out slowly or doesn’t sound too far beyond what we already know — monikers like Joffrey or Tyrion are pretty close to real-life names, for instance. Everything in John Carter has a high fantasy name, however, and dozens of them are hurled at you virtually non-stop for the first half hour or more, making it almost impossible to keep up.

It doesn’t help that the film is structurally muddled at the offset. It begins on Mars, a voiceover detailing the conflict — an instant bombardment of names and concepts. I don’t mind things that challenge you to keep up, but it still feels a bit much. Then we jump to New York in the 1880s, where Carter is running away from someone in the streets. Then to his house, where his nephew has just turned up to be told he’s dead. You what? We just saw him in the telegraph office! And then we jump back to the 1860s, where he’s searching for gold and getting arrested (or something) by Bryan Cranston in a wig as some form of army officer. Then it gets a bit more straightforward. If being transported to Mars and meeting four-armed CG aliens who speak in subtitles is what you call “straightforward”, anyway.

This is mostly preamble, and it takes a long time to get through. I presume it’s faithful to the original story, because Cranston and co add virtually nothing to what goes on on Mars. That said, apparently Burroughs’ original book sticks to Carter exclusively, whereas the film keeps darting off to show us what’s going on elsewhere. I presume the idea was to give things a bit of momentum — while Carter’s being dragged around the Martian desert by his captors, we get to see the beginnings of the arranged marriage, etc. To me it just felt jumbled, and undermines Carter’s sense of confusion and discovery. We know far more of what’s going on than he does (if you can decipher it, anyway), leaving us waiting for our identification-figure to catch up.

It feels a bit facile to criticise the quality of CGI these days, but that doesn’t stop John Carter from being over-ambitious in this regard. In fact, it’s not really the sometimes-half-assed green screen or occasional plastic-ness that’s the problem, but the design: those four-armed aliens are just a little too cartoony. Perhaps it’s a hangover from Stanton’s Pixar days, perhaps something just went a little awry during the process, but their design doesn’t look quite ‘real’ enough; a little like someone’s taken a real-life creature and then lightly caricatured it. I think it’s the eyes, which are perhaps a little too big and round and ‘cute’, but there’s something else indefinable there, or not there. These aliens aren’t just set dressing but proper motion-captured characters, played by the likes of Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church and Polly Walker, so the lack of connection is regrettable.

The live-action cast don’t fare much better. You may remember Kitsch and Collins as co-stars of the poorly-received first Wolverine movie, where quite frankly they were two of the worst things in it (Kitsch was woefully miscast, for one). Doesn’t bode well for them being the leads, does it? Neither are as bad here, but neither quite click either. They’re surrounded by a gaggle of British thesps (West, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, James Purefoy) who feel like they’re slumming it in roles that are beneath them.

Some of John Carter’s fans have accused audiences and critics of ‘bandwagonism’ — that is, hearing/assuming it’s bad and so treating it as such. I can assure you, that’s not the case here: I was expecting, or perhaps hoping, to like it; to find a misunderstood old-style adventure full of entertainment value. It may be an old-style adventure, but that’s beside the point, because whatever it is, I just felt it wasn’t particularly well made: poorly constructed, weakly performed, lazily (and wrongly) assumptive of the audience’s familiarity with the material. Disappointing.

The UK TV premiere of John Carter is on BBC Two tonight at 6pm.

Frozen (2013)

Posted on December 24, 2014 by badblokebob

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. The 2010 thriller has been forgotten now, if it was ever that well known in the first place (it wasn’t, clearly), but when all the hype started to build around Disney’s super-hit, it was all I could think of. I wonder if, now that Disney’s version has made the transition to DVD, Blu-ray, on-demand and (from tomorrow) Sky Movies, anyone’s mistakenly sat down to the wrong version? I hope no one’s bunged it on and left their kids in front of it…

Anyway, Frozen — 2013 vintage — is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. I don’t know the original, but this version of the tale sees Nordic princess Elsa develop magical icy powers, nearly kill her younger sibling and best friend Anna, and be hidden away so as not to hurt anyone else. Years later, their parents have died and Elsa (now voiced by Idina Menzel) comes of age, so the royal world gathers for her coronation. It all goes wrong, she freezes the whole country, and treks off to create an ice palace. Anna (now Kristen Bell) goes after her, to save the kingdom and all that, teaming up with Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and his reindeer Sven (the latest in Disney’s long tradition of silent animal sidekicks). Oh, and there’s an incongruously-designed talking snowman, Olaf (Josh Gad).

You don’t need me to tell you that Frozen is a phenomenon, adored the world over. A woman in Japan even filed for divorce because her husband didn’t like it (I kid you not). 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 Tangled, and more. While they do have some points, they’re also being a tad harsh.

The much-discussed, and Oscar-nominated, songs Do You Want to Build a Snowman? and Let It Go are certainly overrated by the film’s fans. Neither compares to even the weakest numbers in films like The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, and while they’re not bad — the latter in particular is quite hummable and liable to get stuck in your head (including Mendel’s whiningly nasal delivery) — I wouldn’t say either belong among Disney’s real classic tunes. In fact, I enjoyed almost every other song in the film more. That’s partly expectation I guess (there was less pressure on the others), but I also think the remainder are just more entertaining. That said, there’s sadly no villain’s song. There’s not really room for one, but regular readers will know how much my preference tends to extend to those tunes. (It did originally have a villain’s song, but that changed when the storyline was re-written. It’s still in the final film, though: it’s Let It Go. No, really.)

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.)

Said characters deliver some funny bits, engage in some action sequences… Like the songs, everything’s fine without being exceptional. I don’t think this is a Disney film that lives in its moment, as it were. By which I mean that some of their weaker efforts rely on Good Bits to keep you entertained, and even those which are wholly marvellous still contain stand-out songs, jokes, or sequences. I’m not sure Frozen possesses many of those, but it does function well when regarded as a whole piece. That might mean you don’t head for the DVD chapter menu to jump to a favourite bit, but then this is a film, not a YouTube clip — “working as a whole” is a better goal to have achieved.

Musically, comedically, and in the quality of the animation, I’d put the whole experience on a par with other recent CGI Disney musicals, not any better — and considering Tangled is a few years old, the lack of improvement in the animation is perhaps disappointing. 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.

However, thematically it does excel. There’s a dearth of good moral messages for little girls in modern cinema — heck, cinema of all eras, really, because the older messages tend to be along the lines of “true love = happiness” — find a man and get married, that’ll do ya. Frozen forges forward, but without descending into the man-hating feminism that would make it a target for the kind of old-fashioned conservatives who’d prefer little girls only heard the old messages. Without meaning to ruin the ending, the princesses fall back on their own abilities to save the day, rather than relying on their One True Love to ride in and rescue them. Elsewhere, there’s strong stuff about accepting who you are even if others don’t; about not living in fear; about the perils of falling in love too quickly… None of it is as heavy-handed as it sounds when spelled out — like all the best moral messages, it’s going to seep in rather than be forced upon people. If Frozen is a film that appeals primarily to little girls, at least it’s doing something good with its power.

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.

Frozen is on Sky Movies Premiere from Christmas Day.

This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2014. Read more here.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

Posted on December 9, 2014 by badblokebob

Tom Hanks is Walt Disney and Emma Thompson is author P.L. Travers in “The Making of Mary Poppins: The Movie”. Disney has been desperate to turn Travers’ fictional nanny into a movie for years after he made a promise to his daughter; Travers has resisted, but now needs the money. She’s brought to LA to consult on the script, and proceeds to make life miserable for screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songsmiths Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman). At the same time, we see the story of a family in Australia from the eyes of a little girl Ginty (Annie Rose Buckley), as they struggle with the whims of her father (Colin Farrell), a bank manager who’s a little too fond of the bottle. Guess what the connection is!

There’s fun to be had seeing the creation of a classic movie — I’m sure it’s not 100% the honest truth of how it went, but it is based on the tapes Travers insisted were made of the meetings, so it would seem the spirit is faithful. This isn’t a dry “making of” narrative, however, but a lively romp, as the two sides clash over jaunty tunes, characterisation, casting, and made-up words. Whitford brings understated gravitas to the man essentially tasked with giving Travers what she wants while also making a suitably Disney movie. Paul Giamatti turns up as Travers’ LA chauffeur, a role that starts out as bafflingly insignificant before gradually unfurling as one of the film’s most affecting elements.

Similarly, Hanks’ part seems to be little more than a cameo at first, but he steadily appears often enough to make it a supporting role. Reportedly he has perfectly captured many of Disney’s real traits and idiosyncrasies, and who are we to doubt the word of people who knew the man? His performance is not just a shallow, simple impersonation, but there’s not that much meat to Disney’s character arc either.

Instead, the film completely belongs to Emma Thompson. Travers is a complicated woman, a veneer of strictness masking deeper issues. Beneath the comedy of who will win in the battle over the film, there’s an affecting personal drama about the troubled upbringing that led to this human being, and how she’s still dealing with it so many decades later. Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith’s screenplay holds back from being too explicit with regards to Travers’ internal life, but it’s all vividly brought to the screen by Thompson.

In the Australian segments, Colin Farrell’s accent has to be heard to be believed — his regular voice is completely lost inside the character. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the storyline, though it is fundamentally predictable and the intrusions are sometimes unwelcome, interrupting the flow of the main ’60s narrative. Would that story function without them? Is there a better way to structure the telling? I don’t think the answer to either of those questions is “yes”, but I don’t think it’s a “no” either.

Some will find the story lacking in dirt, particularly when it comes to the portrayal of Disney. But it’s not whitewashed either, and do you really think the Disney Corporation would have allowed a movie to go ahead that depicts their founding father in a negative light? For that, I don’t think it’s as twee as it could have been — there’s definite conflict over what’s being done with Poppins, and, even with the film having turned out to be a solid-gold classic, we often find ourselves sympathising with Travers.

With plenty of humour and fun, a solid emotional heart, a first-rate performance from Thompson, and an array of excellent supporting turns too, Saving Mr. Banks is both a worthy tribute to a classic movie and an enjoyable one in its own right.

This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2014. Read more here.

October 2014 + Favourite Fairy Tale Films

Posted on November 1, 2014 by badblokebob

Lots to get through in this most decimal of months, so I’ll provide you with a nifty ten-point contents list…

October’s WDYMYHS entry (if there was one!)

Announcing this year’s #100!

All of this month’s viewing.

Analysis of the above, plus…

A note on my quite grand all-time review total.

A visual recap of this month’s archive re-posts.

A note on changes to some header images (more exciting than that sounds… maybe…)

A section I have titled “No longer loving film”…

What are your Favourite Fairy Tale Films?

And the “next time” bit. Bet no one ever clicks through to that. But this month there’s a poem. Oo-ooh.

All in all, it’s a thorough monthly round-up! So let’s get going…

What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?

This one’ll be quick: there’s no WDYMYHS film this month. First time I’ve slipped this year.

Why not? I simply didn’t fancy one. The pool has narrowed to just Oldboy, Rear Window, and Requiem for a Dream, and while I’m sure they’re all great films — and all ones I’ve been keen to see for yonks — an opportunity didn’t arise where they felt right. I could’ve forced one last night, but what’s the point in forcing it?

Two months remain to make it up. And maybe actually watch Raging Bull like I said I would, too.

In happier news:

And #100 is…

I’ve tried to make previous #100s notable, when possible: in 2007 it was the (then-)greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane; in 2010 it was the most recent Best Picture winner, The Hurt Locker; and last year it was the epically epic Lawrence of Arabia. (The other two, Swing Time and The A-Team, are both films I liked, but both were viewed more of necessity than strict “what would be a good #100?” choice.)

Come this year, then, and what have I chosen for my sixth #100? After being scuppered for several days by not fancying anything too momentous, I threw the desire for meaning out the window and acquiesced to the other half’s request for me to “get that rude-sounding film off the Virgin box”, rendering 2014’s #100 as the debut feature of American Hustle’s David O. Russell, Spanking the Monkey. Here’s my drabble review.

(It’s an unfortunate coincidence that I’ve posted multiple drabble reviews in the past week. Full-length reviews do continue, and I’m sure there’ll be some soon.)

October’s films in full

#98 Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978), aka Se ying diu sau
#99 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
#100 Spanking the Monkey (1994)
#101 The Tourist (2010)
#102 Edge of Tomorrow (2014), aka Live. Die. Repeat.
#103 Dead Poets Society (1989)
#104 La Belle et la Bête (1946), aka Beauty and the Beast
#104a The 10th Kingdom (2000)
#105 Ten Little Indians (1965)
#106 Furious 6 (2013), aka Fast & Furious 6
#107 Cockneys vs Zombies (2012)
#108 Last Action Hero (1993)

Analysis

Ooooooone-huuuuuundred!

Ahem, ‘scuse me. But that’s undoubtedly the headline of this month’s viewing: as you may’ve noticed, I’ve reached #100, for the sixth time out of eight attempts. That’s a 75% success rate — not bad, really. This is the first time I’ve done it in October; a month behind my two earliest years (2007 and 2010 got there in September), ahead of last year’s November finish, and considerably less stressful than the down-to-the-wire December conclusions of 2008 and 2011 (both of which reached #100 on December 31st!)

This is also the fourth time I’ve passed the 100 films total. The next milestone is last year’s 110, which I’m closing in on (I’m already further ahead than I was at the end of November last year); after that, there’s 2010’s 122 and 2007’s 129 still to overtake. 2007 was my first year and remains unbettered, so it would be just shiny to finally achieve that. I’m 22 films away from that goal, which the averages for this year suggest is possible — a little too possible, actually, as 11-films-a-month is the precise average of the year to date. (Which, you’ll note, makes October a particularly average month.) Alas, history adds no reassurance: my average tally for previous November & December viewing is 17 films — and that’s boosted by strong numbers in 2008 and 2009, too: over the past four years, my Nov./Dec. average total is just 11. Still, 2014 hasn’t played ball when it comes to past averages, so we’ll see.

And, incidentally, though I ‘only’ watched 11 new films this month, I gave over five film-viewing slots to The 10th Kingdom — if I’d watched countable films instead, I’d be at 16, which would’ve made October my second-best month of 2014. But I didn’t, so it isn’t… but without a similar miniseries re-watch project lined up for the immediate future, November and December’s numbers might benefit.

It’s all to play for! Which is exciting for me, at least.

Moving on…

Niiiiine-huuuuundred

Also this month, I passed 900 feature film reviews. Sure sounds like a lot to me.

OK, firstly, I haven’t posted 900 reviews — my backlog’s still quite extensive — but I’ve surpassed 900 films that will be reviewed. I’m somewhere in the 850s right now, I think.

Secondly, it doesn’t mean I’ve reached #900. The tally includes all the extra reviews I’ve done down the years — the repeat viewings and the not-that-different director’s cuts and so on. The official #900 (as it were) would be this year’s #148. I’m doing well, but that’s not very likely at all. Next year, then.

And with that, there’s a chance for something even bigger: if I can make it suitably far past #100 this year and next year, one of 2015’s last films will be #1000!

(For those interested in a more precise number, I need to reach #124 both years for that to happen. Alternatively, if I do make it to a record-breaking #130 this year, then 2015’s #118 would be #1000. There are dozens of other plausible permutations besides those, of course.)

This month’s archive reviews

As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, my old stomping ground of FilmJournal is no more. For more on what that means check out the link, but for the purposes of my archive re-posts: they’re now more labour-intensive to complete, and I’m lazy, so there have been fewer. The project will still be finished, but it may take a bit longer than the speed I was churning through them before.

Nonetheless, the last 31 days have seen 20 reviews re-appear:

24: Redemption	Bonnie and Clyde
Breakfast at Tiffany’s	Brief Encounter
The Condemned	Fight Club
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children	Grindhouse
I Am Legend	I Am Legend: Alternate Theatrical Version
Inglourious Basterds	Iron Eagle
The Kite Runner	Panic Room
Piglet’s Big Movie	Se7en
Speed Racer	Stand By Me
Traffic in Souls	Witchfinder General

Pretty Pictures, Mk.II

Back in August 2013, I finally added some header images to my “list of reviews” and “reviews by director” pages. This month, there’s been a little refresh and addition. “List of reviews” remains the same, but “reviews by director” has been updated to reflect my most-reviewed directors — mostly thanks to zombie movies

George A. Romero barged his way to near the top of the pile when I reviewed all six of his “of the Dead” films this time last year, while World War Z saw Marc Forster tip from the also-rans into the must-includes. There are 20 slots on that banner, and a fourteen-way tie for 18th place means I had to be selective. Quite by chance, I remained alphabetical: Hideaki Anno and James Cameron remain from the previous banner (Cameron due to significance, Anno because I’ll watch Evangelion 3.33 early next year when Manga UK are finally able to release it, which will only cement his place), while Danny Boyle is added. (Directors leaving the banner to make room are Richard Lester, George Lucas, and David Yates.)

Finally, I’ve finally added a header to the “coming soon” page. That’s a page that lists films I’ve already seen but will review in days to come — it’s looking ‘back to the future’, if you will. And that explains that.

No longer loving film

Also this month in the world of 100 Films, I finally cancelled my LOVEFiLM (or, as it’s now known, LOVEFiLM By Post) subscription. I liked it for the ability to rent pretty much anything released on disc (a far better selection than any streaming service offers, not to mention the comparative picture quality), but between all the stuff I’ve bought, the convenience of aforementioned streaming services (LOVEFiLM may have more choice overall, but only one or two discs in your possession at any one time), and recording stuff off TV too, I wasn’t getting through my rentals. Indeed, in some cases I’ve theoretically spent more on one rental than if I’d just bought a copy. Ugh. So I finally made the cancellation leap.

I’ve still got a Now TV films subscription for the time being, but as the price of that recently went up, I’m not sure for how much longer…

Favourite Fairy Tale Films

Once again I haven’t found the time to get stuck into a fully-written list of five, but having watching La Belle et la Bête and The 10th Kingdom in preparation for next weekend’s Fairy Tale Blogathon, I was thinking: what’s your favourite fairy tale movie?

Disney seem to have a near-monopoly on these, so undoubtedly some of their output would’ve made my list — Beauty and the Beast, definitely; The Little Mermaid and Aladdin are childhood favourites for me; and Cinderella is my pick of their older classics. Also from the Mouse House is Enchanted — inspired by fairy tales rather than technically adapted from them, but one of the best movies to play in that sandpit. Similarly, the Shrek series, and The 10th Kingdom too.

And if you want to get really out there, the BFI’s list of 10 great fairytale films allows in cinematic originals like My Neighbour Totoro and Pan’s Labyrinth. The former I could definitely go for in my final five, but I didn’t warm to the latter. Must re-watch that.

Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Next month on 100 Films in a Year…

Remember, remember, you films in November,
have good characters, dialogue, and plot.
I know of no movie
worth considering groovy
that does not have the lot.

(With my apologies.)

Up (2009)

Posted on September 22, 2014 by badblokebob

You know Up: it’s the Pixar movie where everyone talks about how amazing the first 10 minutes are, and never seems to have anything to say about the rest of the film.

Which sums it up pretty well, to be honest. “The rest of the film” may be where you’ll find the balloon-flying house and talking dogs that played so well on posters, trailers, and clips, but it’s the opening sequence that is artistically outstanding, emotionally affecting and, yes, the thing you’ll remember the film for. Without it, Up is a pretty standard adventure-y kids’ CG movie — good fun while it lasts, but nothing particularly special.

And, if you haven’t seen that opening, to tell you about it would spoil it for you. If you haven’t already heard, try not to find out, because I think knowing where it’s going undermines its impact a bit — though it’s so well-done that it does remain effective nonetheless.

As for the rest of the movie, there’s some amusing situations and dialogue, and the usual unconstrained-camera antics so beloved of CG movies during action sequences. The talking dogs are solidly observed, although for me the concept didn’t pay off as well as the clips promised — the best bits were shown off in advance. The special features reveal the extent the animators went to when researching real-world locations to influence the film’s strange, alien landscape; sadly, the fact the bizarre rock formations are actually a real thing somewhere in the world is more interesting than how they’re used in the film.

A bit like WALL-E, Pixar start off with something courageously original, but then lets it slide into standard US animated fare. It makes for a must-see, but only thanks to a relatively small portion of the whole; and all round it’s a good film, but not a great one

Up was viewed as part of my What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…? 2014 project, which you can read more about here.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by badblokebob

Disney attempted to replicate the success of Mary Poppins with this, another musical adaptation of a fantastical British novel set in Britain with British people in it — including some kids who, based on their accents, must be from the same part of London as Dick Van Dyke’s Bert. A childhood staple for others, it somehow passed me by ’til now.

Set during World War Two, it follows a gaggle of evacuated siblings who are placed with Angela Lansbury’s white witch. Or, rather, white-witch-in-training — via a correspondence course, which has stopped just before the end. So off they pop to find the course’s director, after which hijinks ensue, culminating in a stealth invasion of Britain that can only be thwarted with magic.

Tonally, it’s every inch Mary Poppins 2, helped no doubt by having the same director, screenwriters and songwriters. There’s the bemused-but-game kids, the quirky magic-performing woman, a male adult to round out the gender-coverage; the story is a series of loosely-connected vignettes, many of them featuring songs, 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.

As a whole, it’s good fun, though lacks the je ne sais quoi that has made Mary Poppins so beloved across the generations. Not being quite as good as one of the all-time-great children’s movies is hardly something to be sniffed at, however, rendering Bedknobs and Broomsticks a perhaps-underrated success.

Chicken Little (2005)

Posted on April 13, 2014 by badblokebob

The director of Disney’s woeful The Emperor’s New Groove re-tells the well-known centuries-old folk take about a chicken who became a middle school baseball champ before foiling an alien invasion.

This was Disney’s first foray into computer animation in their main movie canon, in the wake of Home on the Range’s failure and Pixar and DreamWork’s CG success. It merely proves the fault was not with their traditional animation, but with their storytellers.

Occasional bright spots of humour are the only relief in this cheap-looking childish ‘adventure’, only notable as the “first film released in Real D’s digital 3D format”.

The UK network TV premiere of Chicken Little is on Channel 5 at 3:25pm.

It featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2014, which can be read in full here.

In the interests of completing my ever-growing backlog, I decided to post ‘drabble reviews’ of some films. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a drabble is a complete piece of writing exactly 100 words long.

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by badblokebob

From 1984 to 1994, a perfect storm of people and circumstances changed the face of animation forever.

So declares the title card at the start of this documentary, which covers how in just a few years Disney went from nearly shutting down its animation division to a period of immense critical acclaim and box office success, including the first animated movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

On the surface, it’s not a secret story. A significant part of the film is made up of contemporary news and documentary footage that clearly shows this was being covered at the time, and you can see more of the same just by looking into box office numbers and critical assessment. It’s also, to an extent, ‘race memory’ — we ‘all’ know of the Disney classics from earlier years, how this tailed off through the likes of The Black Cauldron, and then the renewed burst of creativity that began with The Little Mermaid and flowed through the likes of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, until (more or less) the end of the ’90s (before it all went wrong again, but that’s another story).

However, Waking Sleeping Beauty is told from the inside: director Don Hahn started out as an assistant director at Disney animation in the ’80s, graduating to producer by the time of Beauty and the Beast. With him he brings behind-the-scenes home movies and access to a stunning array of interviewees. Almost everyone who was anyone at Disney during that time is interviewed, either through archive footage or new audio commentary. It was a tough time, and while Hahn’s portrait is probably not quite warts-and-all, it comes damn close; for example, we get to see some of the caricatures the animators drew in disgust at their new boss, Jeffrey Katzenberg.

As best I can tell, Waking Sleeping Beauty is only available in the UK through certain streaming services (I watched it on Now TV, which it has now departed; I believe it may have been on Netflix, but again isn’t right now), which is a shame. The US DVD is reportedly packed with nearly an hour-and-a-half of additional interviews and the like, which makes it an enticing prospect.

As Disney’s ‘animated classics’ continue to be successful (with Wreck-It Ralph and Christmas-just-passed’s Frozen the most recent entries) and the focus of their business, from merchandise sales to attractions at their ever-popular theme parks, it’s easy to forget that the animation legacy nearly died — several times. Waking Sleeping Beauty does an excellent job of showing us how close they sailed to disaster, and how the dedication and creativity of individuals who believed in that legacy stopped the ship from sinking.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Posted on December 24, 2013 by badblokebob

Disney’s 51st and/or 52nd animated classic (depends who you listen to) is, essentially, Toy Story with video games. Arcade games, to be precise. Turns out that all the characters from said entertainments hang out in the plug bar that powers them all, though behind-the-scenes they’re not necessarily like their characters — most of the villains are pretty nice guys, who have Bad-Anon (Bad Guys Anonymous) meetings to share their woes. But as the game he stars in reaches its 30th anniversary, Wreck-It Ralph has had enough of being an outsider, and when the other characters in his game imply he’ll be included if he can win a medal — which he can’t, because he’s a bad guy — he sets out into other games to try to get one.

Cue fun antics as our hero careens through various other games, right? Wrong. He goes to… two. OK, we see glimpses of a few more, and the Bad-Anon meeting takes place in Pac Man, but essentially he pops into one game to get said medal and introduce an apocalyptic MacGuffin, and then another for the rest of the plot. That latter game is Sugar Rush, a candy-themed cart racer. I’m pretty sure the production team must’ve spent the entire production eating candy for “research”, because the gaudy world and much of the film’s pace has all the idleness and restraint of a kid on a sugar high — i.e. none.

Unfortunately, despite the rarely-filmed milieu of video games, it’s all a bit predictable — like I said, it basically does with video game characters what Toy Story did with toys, both in terms of the story and its themes of acceptance. At least one wearing subplot had me involuntarily exclaim “oh get on with it!” out loud (and I was watching by myself). The pace rarely lets up, and at 101 minutes that becomes tiring. When it does give you a break, you kinda wish it would get a wriggle on, because it’s obvious where things are going and it’s wasting time getting there. Of course, most mainstream films (especially kids’ movies) are going to follow broadly the same arcs — however bad it gets we know the hero will win, etc — but the trick is to make you enjoy the journey, not long to arrive at the destination. I spent most of the third act almost drumming my fingers as I waited for it to get to the latter.

For fans of retro — and indeed current — computer games, there’s plenty of cameos and references to be excited about, both in terms of familiar faces (various characters from Sonic, Mario and Street Fighter, for instance, amongst many others) and clear riffs on other franchises and genres. I’m not really a gamer though, so while I recognised many of them (from the days when I did engage in such pursuits) there wasn’t exactly a thrill in it. I think that pleasure of recognition, and some almost in-joke-level bits, can lead certain viewers to enjoy the film more than it otherwise merits. That’s nice for them, but does nothing for the rest of us.

Wreck-It Ralph isn’t actually a bad film. There’s a fair bit of inventiveness with the concept, and the makers have worked hard to establish a world with rules (though your mileage may vary on how successfully they’ve done that), but it descends into a breathless, sugar-fuelled, reheated runabout. I imagine young kids will adore its colourfulness and its energy, and won’t be bothered by the over-familiar plotting and life lessons; but, beyond nostalgia for arcade gamers, I don’t believe it has huge amounts to offer a grown-up viewer.

Wreck-It Ralph debuts on Sky Movies Premiere at 1:45pm and 7:15pm today, and is already available on demand through Sky Movies and Now TV.

This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2013. Read more here.

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