Tag Archives: movie review

June 19, 2015 · 4:43 pm

Tomorrowland

I am compelled to review this movie precisely because it has been a box-office disappointment and has been criticized for not being the best work director Brad Bird is capable of. Other reviewers have said the set-up for the trip to the other dimension was wasted time and the plot is too slow…. they didn’t make enough use of the marvelous “other world” that they labored so intensively to create. I think the main reason people are disappointed in this movie, which I saw for the first time by my lonesome self at the metroplex in Lewisville, Texas, is that people have either forgotten how to watch intelligent movies, or they have simply never learned.

Movie character poster

The thing I loved most about this beautiful, inspirational movie, is its basic intelligence and the wonderful way Disney/Pixar’s Brad Bird weaves complex themes of past, present, and future together into a carefully patterned web of everything that’s right about good science fiction. Good science fiction tells you, through basic scientific understanding, what the possibilities are. It scares you with horrible possible futures that make all too much sense with things like climate change, nuclear warfare, and a society that embraces stupidity and entrenched habits that can lead us like lambs to the slaughter. It also shows you how technology and the willingness to risk it all on good ideas can possibly solve problems, even those problems that technology itself creates. This movie introduces us to complexly-layered characters. The male lead character is played by George Clooney, yet his bright-eyed, inventive, little-boy self is also a critical part of the whole mix. The female lead, Britt Robertson, is a dreamer who carries the theme with her based on the old Native American proverb that asks, “which wolf will win a battle between a dark wolf full of negativity and a white wolf full of positivity and light?” The answer, of course, is the wolf you feed. The character is relentlessly positive in the face of a horrific future that the film brings out which humanity probably deserves. And the catalyst character, the little-girl robot played by Raffey Cassidy, is a brilliant performance by an amazing young actress that brings to the front and center one of the most powerful of all science-fiction questions, “what does it actually mean to be human?”

I believe this movie brings out the best of Brad Bird’s skills as a story-teller. Like some of his most brilliant work in the past, like the cartoon movie Iron Giant or the Pixar movie The Incredibles, this movie pushes the magic nostalgia buttons from a fondly-remembered simpler time. I remember going to Walt Disney World in Orlando back in the 1970’s and being so enthralled by the two most must-see parts of the park, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. Tomorrowland was the culmination of my childhood astronaut dreams born of watching the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969 on our old black-and-white Motorola TV and all those other Gemini, and even Mercury missions that I followed with all-consuming interest. It’s that feeling of a better world waiting up ahead, in the future, just around the corner. The anticipation that something wonderful is going to happen… and then when it doesn’t happen, or, at least, doesn’t happen in the bright shiny way I was expecting… I can start over with the conviction that I can make it happen… that dreams really do come true.

Brad Bird’s body of directorial work is, in my humble opinion, the equal of some of the greatest cinematic artists of all time.

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Filed under humor, movie review, science fiction

Tagged as humor, movie review, positivity, science fiction

April 6, 2015 · 12:06 pm

The Mouse and His Child

https://youtu.be/p2XfzrRl3fs

Today’s animated cartoons are very sophisticated and technically superior to older fair like you might find on YouTube from… let’s say… 1977. As an artist and writer dedicated to didactic surrealism (yes, I know you probably have no earthly idea what those two words even mean, but that’s a review post for another day), I should probably look down my long critic’s nose at the story of A Mouse and His Child, from Sanrio Studios. I saw this bit of artwork in motion at the College-Town Theater in Ames, Iowa while attending Iowa State University. It is a dopey pre-Toy-Story story about a pair of wind-up toy mice who are designed to dance in circle and can do nothing more than that at the beginning of the movie. They are told at the outset that they can only do in life what they were designed to do… and nothing more. But then they spend the whole movie doing so very much more.

The artwork is very cartoony in ways that only an American who loves Japanese versions of American style can be. (Don’t try to tell me you didn’t recognize Sanrio as the “Hello Kitty” people.) It has classic animation voices in it. Peter Ustinov as the villain, Manny the Rat, Andy Devine as the frog… and more other classy actor-types than I can possibly remember.

The story is everything a cartoon movie should be. It is a quest to get rid of the wind-up key and be self-winding. It is a quest to choose your destiny for yourself… to make for yourself a family and have safety and love as all people should. There is also considerable danger. Young children will come away from this movie with many potential opportunities to develop nightmares from the images. It is also a quest to find a balance between the magic of the frog and the science of the Muskrat. In order to solve the mysteries of destiny, they have to look at a dog food label that has a picture of a dog grinning and holding a can of dog food with a label that shows a dog grinning and holding a… you get the idea, they have to see beyond the last visible dog. This movie makes sense in a way that poetry makes sense. You have opportunities presented to you make sense of it yourself. Like a good poem, you get out of it what you put into it. If you think about its meaning long enough, you will find something quite profound.

I have seen this movie now four times. I saw it in the theater in 1977. I saw it two years later on TV, on a Friday night. Then I re-discovered it on You-Tube this last February and I have watched it twice since. Every time I understand something new and wonderful from it. I have now made it my goal to find a copy of the Russel Hoban book and read that as well. You have to be a little crazy to like a movie the way I love this movie, but I have to tell you, I will be a little disappointed if nobody clicks on it to see if they like it too.

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Tagged as animated cartoon, cartoon lover, humor, magic vs Science, movie review, surrealism, The Mouse and His Child

March 7, 2015 · 2:28 pm

The Magic Boy (1959)

When I was a boy in the magical, wonderful days of black-and-white photos and Howdy Doody on TV, the 1960’s, the Belmond movie theater did free Christmas movies for kids. Every weekend when I was nine we went to the show and took the neighbor kids, packed ourselves five-to-a-seat along with every other kid in Wright County, Iowa, and watched wonderful movies. We saw westerns with Jimmy Stewart and Alan Ladd. We saw Tarzan find the Elephant’s Graveyard in a movie starring Mike Henry. And best of all, we found a movie playing there as part of a triple-feature free-movie day, all in Japanese animation (known today as anime) called The Magic Boy. I fell in love. No, not with a neighbor girl or girl cousin that I was either sitting on or holding on my lap, but with the magic that is Japanese animation. Now, I won’t lie and say this was before I became slavishly devoted to the animated cartoon show Astroboy that played most weekday afternoons at three, and for several years at five o’clock in the morning. I was already immersed in that as well, but it was all on the black-and-white Motorola TV. It was the color, the motion, the cuteness of the characters, and the Japanese-ness of the basic story that I fell in love with.

It was the story of Sasuke, a young boy living in feudal Japan with his sister and several cutesy, highly-personified critters. One day, a marauding eagle comes and snatches up the little Bambi deer-thing and takes him to a lake. The fawn is dropped into the lake as a necessary sacrifice to the eagle’s evil mistress. Sasuke and his pets come to the rescue, leaping into the lake and saving the drowning deer. A huge evil salamander, actually the witch in her accursed form, nabs one of the rescuers, one of Sasuke’s pets, and eats it to gain the power to re-constitute herself in witch form as the evil Yakusha.

Sasuke then goes on a quest. He must learn magical powers from a wizard and grow into a competent sorcerer so that he can defeat the witch and avenge his lost pet. It was a quest that closely mirrored my own. (The year after I saw this wonderful movie, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy, a trauma it took me a lifetime to overcome. My quest was to become a wizard and find magic power to restore myself and protect others. My quest led to becoming a story-teller, a teacher, and an artist… as well as being a wizard. I chose colored pencils as my wands of power.)

This movie changed my drawing style and my life goals for good. And I had never been able to see that old movie again or find it on video despite years of searching because I could not remember what it was called. Today I found it. It is posted online with it’s German title, but the dialogue all in Spanish. I will watch it anyway. But I will only post the snippet I found in English here.

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Filed under anime, autobiography, movie review

Tagged as anime, autobiography, becoming a wizard, Magic Boy, movie review

February 14, 2015 · 5:27 pm

Allegro Non Troppo

Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain from Disney’s Fantasia

The old faun

In musical terms, Allegro Non Troppo means fast tempo, but not too fast. So, I recently discovered that Allegro Non Troppo is one of many rare and obscure old movies which I am passionate about that can be found in its entirety on YouTube. I will include the YouTube link at the end of this post, and I sincerely recommend that if you have never seen this movie, you watch the whole thing at least once. No matter how many cringes or winces or blushes it causes, this is a movie of many bizarre parts that you really need to take in as a whole. It ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, the atrociously ugly to the lyrically beautiful, from the brilliant classical score being played by a mistreated band of old ladies with orchestral instruments to a gorilla running amok, from Debussy to Ravel, from an artist released from his cage to single-handedly draw the animation, to a satire rich with baudy humor making fun of no less a work of animation than Prisney’s… I mean Disney’s Fantasia. The dark elements are there. The light-hearted, lilting comedy is there. The fairy tale delicacy and technicolor dreaming is all there.

And why should this be important to me? Especially now that I am retired from a long and fruitful teaching career? Well, I have history with this movie. I saw it first in college. I was an English major, but I took every film as literature class I could fit into my silly schedule. As an undergrad, I was determined to be a cartoonist for a career. I took classes seriously and aced most of them, but I was at college to intellectually play around. I didn’t take the prescribed courses to be an English teacher. That had to wait for the more responsible me to come along in grad school for that. I saw both Fantasia and Allegro Non Troppo during one of the play-time years. Much as the old satyr in Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, I was enamored with sensory experience. I took my first girlfriend to see Disney’s Fantasia, and she later turned down the opportunity to see Allegro Non Troppo with me. Good sense on her part, but the beginning of the end of our relationship. Just as Fantasia has the part in it where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring describes evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the end of the dinosaurs, Allegro Non Troppo uses Ravel’s Bolero to describe the evolution of life on a weird planet from germs in a discarded Coke bottle to the inevitable coming of the malevolent monkey who is ultimately us. And, of course, the satire would not be complete without some off-set for Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. As near as I can figure it out, the apprentice, played by Mickey Mouse, becomes the snake from the Garden of Eden in Allegro Non Troppo. When the snake is unable to get Adam and Eve to eat the apple, he makes the mistake of eating the apple himself. He learns the hard way that, no matter how clever, even diabolically clever, you think you are, you are not really in control of anything in life. Every would-be wizard in the world has to understand that he is powerless without hard experience. And what a boring world full of naked people this would be if there were never any apprentices in it foolish enough to actually become wizards. Of course, I haven’t really talked about the most heart-twisting part of Allegro Non Troppo… the sad cat wandering the ruins of his former home, or the most laugh-aloud part with the super-tidy little lady-bee trying to eat a blossom, but being interrupted by a couple of picnickers.

But the thing is, this movie is a timely subject for me. Not only did I, just yesterday, rediscover it, but it still has the same meaning for me now as it did when I first saw it. Then I was an aspiring young artist who loved this movie because it approached ideas non-consecutively, just as I approached my learning years… rambling here and there, finding first a bitter-sweet something, and then a sad beauty behind everything in life. And it is where I am again now, in a poor-health enforced retirement… divorced from teacher’s schedules and time itself. Able to do as I please, and aspiring once again to commit great acts of art.

Sentimental Movies

Wow! Such a movie! It is a movie about the movies. A historical fiction about movie history. It tells a bittersweet fable of the 1950’s, when the Un-American Activities Committee was conducting its witch-hunts in Hollywood. And it’s about a postwar town that is still suffering from heavy losses among their young men. And about a case of amnesia and mistaken identity. It is hard to explain, so go watch the dang movie!

I borrowed this image of the movie’s movie theater from a blogger, prasenjitchaudhuri.wordpress.com, whose review will probably make more sense than mine does. But that theater marquee is the one icon from the movie that I first fell in love with.

As I said, this is a movie about the movies and a love of the movies. It weaves in through the story of 50’s communist witch hunts a tale about a somewhat spineless young man who bumps his head, loses his memory, and is adopted by a whole town as a missing war hero come back from the dead. It hits every Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart cliche in the books. Just like It’s a Wonderful Life it makes me laugh so hard I have a wheezing fit, followed a couple of scenes later by something that makes me want to cry so hard that I will drown out all the weeping females in the audience with half-stifled basso sobs. Any movie that I walk out of embarrassed that my face is tear-streaked, is a movie that made me feel so profoundly good about life and love and laughter, that I want to see it again and again. There are so many movie-references in the film that I need to watch it two or three times just for that. For gosh sakes, the idol head from Raiders of the Lost Ark makes a cameo appearance in the movie within the movie, Sand Pirates of the Sahara.

So, basically, I watched this movie for the first time on DVD at home in bed, still recovering from scary new heart condition #2, and had a chance to laugh and cry and enjoy this movie without any fear of being laughed at for how I responded to it. And, so what did I do about it? Why naturally, I got on WordPress and exposed my secret shame to you. That makes about as much sense as everybody in that little town grabbing an amnesiac out of the river and making him into their beloved son. What a great movie! Wow!

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Tagged as goofiness, humor, movie review, movies that make me laugh and cry, movies within movies

March 1, 2014 · 11:38 pm

Thanks for the Memories, Mr. Disney

This post is going to sound an awful lot like stuff and nonsense, because that is what it primarily is, but it had to be said anyway. Last night my family took me to see the movie Saving Mr. Banks, a deeply moving biographical story of P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, and how she had to be convinced to surrender her beloved character to the movie industry which she so thoroughly detested and distrusted. It is also about one of my most important literary heroes, Walt Disney, and how he eventually convinced the very eccentric and complicated authoress to allow him to make her beloved character into a memorable movie icon.

“We create our stories to rewrite our own past,” says Disney, trying to tell Mrs. Travers how he understood the way that her Mary Poppins character completed and powerfully regenerated the tragedy of her own father’s dissolution and death. This is the singular wisdom of Disney. He took works of literature that I loved and changed them, making them musical, making them happy, and making them into the cartoonish versions of themselves that so many of us have come to cherish from our childhoods. He transforms history, and he transforms memory, and by doing so, he transforms truth.

Okay, and as silly as those insights are, here’s a sillier one. In H.P. Lovecraft’s dreamlands, on the shores of the Cerenarian Sea, north of the Mountains of Madness, there roam three clowns. They are known as the Boz, the Diz, and the Bard, nicknames for Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, and William Shakespeare. These three clowns, like the three fates of myth, measure and cut the strings of who we are, where we are going, and how we will get there. They come to Midgard, the Middle Earth to help us know wisdom and folly, the wisdom of fools.

Why have I told you these silly, silly things? Do I expect you to believe them? Do I even expect you to read all the way to paragraph four? Ah, sadly, no… but I am thinking and recording these thoughts because I believe they are important somehow. I may yet use them as the basis of a book of my own. I enjoy a good story because it helps me to do precisely as Mr. Disney has said, I can rewrite my own goofy, silly, pointless past.

Tag Archives: movie review

Tomorrowland

The Mouse and His Child

The Magic Boy (1959)

Allegro Non Troppo

Sentimental Movies

Thanks for the Memories, Mr. Disney

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