When I last saw James Cameron’s massively successful, Oscar-dominating epic Titanic, it had been in theaters for just a few days, the hype was deafening, and I was a newly-minted 16-year-old boy, and thus I was duty-bound to hate it. Oh, and hate it I did – a hate that slowly drifted into sheer unadulterated […]
In the early 1990s, action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger found a project that he absolutely had to be a part of: a proposed remake of the 1991 French adventure-comedy La totale! in which a globe-trotting James Bondian super-spy fights terrorists while convincing his wife that he’s nothing but an everyday businessman. It was not like Schwarzenegger […]
There are a few directors who make dull, even insipid movies much too often for it to be a “surprise”, but I’m heartbroken every time it happens anyway. One of the kings of this tendency is Richard Linklater, who made the stunning dyad of romantic dramas Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, as well as the […]
The third sequel directed by James Cameron – but only the first sequel to a film he’d overseen originally – Terminator 2: Judgment Day holds a very special place in my heart; like a great many American males of my age, this was the first R-rated movie I ever saw, or at least the first […]
It would appear that the latest “masterpiece” phase of Clint Eastwood’s career has quieted down for the time being: after making a few knockouts in the middle of the decade, and in the process fully justifying those of us who’d been known to call him one of America’s great filmmakers since sometime in the ’90s […]
Having completed his meteoric rise to become one of Hollywood’s biggest popcorn-movie filmmakers in just a handful of years, so that only three films into his career his fourth film could be breezily advertised as “from the director of The Terminator and Aliens“, James Cameron set his sights on his most ambitious project yet, an […]
For any familiar story set in a very particular historical context, eventually some creative soul will hit on the idea of a contemporary update. It is thus probably inevitable that A Christmas Carol got moved into the modern day; this happened several times, in fact, considering both cinematic and television adaptations (I cannot say that […]
Following the ice-cold release of Home on the Range in the spring of 2004, Walt Disney Feature Animation set itself to the important task of becoming a clone of the far more financially successful DreamWorks Animation; 2005’s Chicken Little was a CGI feature with all the appeal of slamming your hand in a car door, […]
James Cameron’s rise to the top was swift: it was only his third film, and the second that anyone ever gave a damn about, that saw him win the coveted credit, “A James Cameron Film”. Of course, being the director of something as outstanding as The Terminator would do that for a fella’s reputation. Mind […]
Here’s a man who doesn’t, I think, get nearly the respect he deserves, even among Disney animation buffs: Will Finn. Maybe because his career took him all over the place, and Disneyphilia tends to reward the lifers, like Glen Keane, Mark Henn, or Andreas Deja; Finn started out as one of Don Bluth’s kids, doing […]
Brother Bear is the platonic ideal of a completely vanilla animated children’s movie: the one Disney film that, whenever I mention that I’ve been working my way through the whole animated canon, I can guarantee that whomever I’m talking to forgot that it exists. Even I keep forgetting that it exists: when working on scheduling […]
Now, here is a situation that I do not understand whatsoever: after completing Aladdin in 1992 and witnessing as it became the highest-grossing animated film ever produced at that, and still one of only two traditionally-animated features to break $200 million at the U.S. box office, directors Ron Clements and John Musker tried for the […]
