An entire series of movies focused on side characters from the Winnie the Pooh universe sounds an awful lot like the Walt Disney Company mindlessly squeezing money out of anything it can manage to. And it only sounds that way because it is exactly that. Even so Piglet’s Big Movie, the second of these Pooh […]
Areas don’t get a whole lot greyer than the ones explored in The Gatekeepers, lately a nominee for the Best Documentary Oscar (it lost, and to a weaker film; but we had best not stay up nights for frustration at all the movies losing Oscars to weaker films). It is a film from Israel, broadly […]
Customarily, it is the done thing to refer to 1940’s Rebecca as the only Alfred Hitchcock movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, because even among those who are able to airily deride the whole eight decades and change of the Academy’s existence as a whole lot of trivial nonsense, Hitch’s failure to […]
Thank God, I finally get to stop using cumbersome sentence constructions involving the phrase “Walt Disney Television Animation”, because unless I am terribly mistaken, The Jungle Book 2 was the first production made by the newly rechristened DisneyToon Studios, a rebranding of the Burbank, Sydney, and Tokyo animation facilities meant, I imagine, to lay a […]
A Good Day to Die Hard isn’t as good as the original, 25-year-old Die Hard, because no shit it isn’t. Definitionally, most action movies aren’t as good as the best action movie ever made. So there’s absolutely no reason to go there in the first place. But if we say instead, something like, A Good […]
We’re not so far past Valentine’s Day that I can’t share with you what I think to be one of the great, specifically American love stories ever put to film, a sex-soaked film noir from either 1949 or 1950, depending on your source. Customarily known nowadays as Gun Crazy, it went through most of its […]
Identity Thief is “Bad Girls” by M.I.A. By coincidence or not, this same song is the last music cue in the trailer for upcoming Melissa McCarthy vehicle The Heat. I mention this because the idea that McCarthy has stumbled into a theme song for herself is quite a bit more interesting than anything else I […]
It’s fair to say that I had a good number of expectations going into 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure; that it would be kind of good was not among them. For which I do not think it’s fair to blame me, because what about any of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels to its classic animated movies, […]
The unfortunately loaded baggage that Side Effects carries with it, something it does not deserve but has to deal with anyway, is the question, “if this actually ends up being Steven Soderbergh’s last theatrically-released feature film, does it make a suitable cap to his career?” Like any pointless rhetorical question, the answer is both “yes” […]
In this film-by-film wallow in the depths of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels and spinoffs of their more respectable theatrical animated features, I had initially been compelled to skip right over 1999’s Hercules: Zero to Hero. Happily – for an extremely specific sense of the word “happy” – reader Todd Draper had my back, and has been […]
One of the important rules, if we are to play fair and maintain our intellectual integrity when dealing with a new movie, is that you should always spot a movie its concept. By which I mean, if you walk into a movie already having issues with the basic idea behind it, that’s just not really […]
It doesn’t speak well of this series that I took off two months after only two entries, but going forward, there shouldn’t be any gaps for a while. Please enjoy my continued soul-bearing. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a 1948 vehicle for Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, enjoys a prominence in the private mythology […]
