And now we come to a weird one: the first direct-to-video Disney sequel that was released to theaters. Which, the quick-witted (or, in fact, the merely literate) will note is a contradiction; but Return to Never Land was in fact aiming for the same distribution fate as all the other Disney sequels produced by the […]
Director Steve James has earned himself a reputation for making extrarodinarily wonderful documentaries, beginning with the legendary 1994 sports doc Hoop Dreams, followed by 2002’s Stevie and 2011’s The Interrupters, three movies that are customarily held by fans of the form to be among the greatest non-fiction films made in the modern era. And this […]
And now we go right over the edge. Initially, the Disney direct-to-video sequels were horrible, mercenary, awful things that despite being horrible and mercenary, made sense: they were all based on recent hit films (no accident that the first two of the things were follow-ups to Aladdin, the first animated feature to ever crack $200 […]
One of the things that gets thrown at the Disney sequels frequently, and admitted to even by those who’ve managed to find some way of defending them as a concept, is that they frequently serve as very little other than retreads of the original with a new batch of semi-marketable characters. What has surprised me, […]
A spoiler-free review of the film can be found here. And be warned: there are LOTS of spoilers in this essay. A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan Premiered 23 October, 2012 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE This doesn’t sound important, but […]
There’s old-fashioned, and then there’s old-fashioned, and then there’s Flight, a movie that looked around at the state of contemporary cinema and concluded, “You know what we don’t have enough of? Really earnest dipsomania melodramas”. Which is a statement that, I suspect, not a single one of us would actually have agreed with in advance. […]
We have arrived at a weird place in this voyage through Disney’s animated sequels: a film that isn’t a sequel, the original project that it’s not a sequel to wasn’t made by Walt Disney Feature animation, and the non-Disney non-sequel was not, itself, made entirely or even primarily by one of Disney’s own animation studios, […]
The regular readers in the crowd know that I ordinarily spend a disastrously large number of words reviewing films in the Disney animated features canon, of which the new Wreck-It Ralph is the 52nd; and I will perhaps do that some day for this movie, after I have a chance to live with it for […]
It’s awfully special to be an animation buff who gets to be aware that the film you’re watching right now is, no big deal, just one of the most technologically advanced cartoons ever made. And the staggering thing is that it’s happened twice in 2012: first with ParaNorman, which raised the bar on stop-motion animation […]
There is a very real possibility that out of the several thousand movies I’ve watched in my life, most of them in the twelve years since I was a wee film school freshman, Baz Luhrmann’s candy-colored, hyperactive post-modern musical Moulin Rouge! has had more of an impact on me than anything else. Partially this is […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Marc Forster Written by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade Premiered 29 October, 2008 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEZooming swooshy camera over the Mediterranean – cars! Speed! Cars! Speed! Swerve! Speed traffic cars! Zoom zoom vrrrrrrrm zoom! Is an Aston Martin car! Trucks! Crash swerve […]
1945 and the end of the eight years of World War II brought about many changes in manners sociological, cultural, and aesthetic; as will happen when civilization-defining conflicts end. We are going to concern ourselves at present with only one, a small one in the grand scheme: the sudden death of horror in American cinema. […]
