If we must get these Disney remakes of their animated features done in unattractive, narratively slack live-action/CGI hybrids – and 2019 is making a particularly loud case that we must – I would say that you could honestly do a lot worse than picking up 1941’s Dumbo as a target. The original film is pure bedtime story, 64 minutes of simple story beats, not so much telling a story as […]

In 1941, the fate of the Disney Studios rested upon a single film, for the second time in four years. The one-two punch of Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of them costing astronomical sums and both of them crashing and burning at the box office, had left the company teetering right on the edge of bankruptcy. The last-ditch effort to get some money in the studio coffers was to make an […]

“Every movie’s a circus”, in the words of a song from the proudly mediocre Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Blvd. But we’re going to be a little bit more selective than that. At the request of Patreon supporter Carl Beasley, this episode focuses on on our top 5 circus movies: movies celebrating the wonderful entertainment form that has made such a rich pageant out of exploiting people with unusual bodies, […]

Thanks to Patreon supporter Harold Bleacher, we’re going to be prodding at some of our most sensitive emotional scar tissue in our next episode: by his request, we’re going to spend our next podcast talking about the top 5 most traumatizing films we’ve ever seen. Expect many dead parents of wide-eyed animal children, gore effects whose cheesiness through adult eyes can’t quite take the edge off of the shock they […]

Courtesy of Patreon subscriber Andrew Milne, our next episode explores what’s in a name, as we pick our top 5 movie titles of all time.  We also get the added pleasure of Andrew joining for the episode. It’s a fun one, tune in! Carrie’s Top 5: Casablanca Good Will Hunting Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Snakes on a Plane Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Tim’s Top 5: Your Vice is […]

Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to make a very important conclusion: he’s just not very good at visual storytelling. The new […]

Lady and the Tramp was the fifth, count ’em, fifth film released by the Walt Disney Company in 2019 that was more or less a redo of one of their classic animated features done up in some ungainly combination of live-action videography and CGI, following Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and it’s the one that was chosen to be part of the launch slate for […]

Pragmatically, Disney’s new version of Aladdin only had one bar it absolutely had to clear, and it clears it. While this is anywhere from the sixth to the eleventh entry in this unkillable cycle of live-action remake nostalgia jobs, depending on how you count them,* it’s only the second one based on one of the 1990s “Disney Renaissance” films that are in large part the reason anybody living in the […]

Happy May Day everyone! It feels a bit presumptuous to start looking at a new month of releases when I still have to catch up from April – I hear that there’s been an Avengers picture that made a bit of money. And just as soon as I have any sort of chance to clear five consecutive hours out of my schedule to catch up with it, I’ll be happy […]

There’s a large section of Disney enthusiasts who, like me, cannot stand these live action remakes. For almost ten years now, the Walt Disney Company has spent a lot of time and money to produce big budget retellings of the most popular movies in their animated canon. Because we live in the age of nostalgia, these movies have proven to be huge commercial successes, and Disney has doubled down on […]

We’re two months into one of the weakest years for box office in recent memory, though that’s about to change in a huge way. Quality-wise, though? I have my doubts, give or take a pair of genre films that look, respectively, gloriously trashy and just plain good. It’s a scrawny-looking sort of a month: only eight wide releases across five weekends, at least two of which are transparently just getting […]

If you’ve seen Stranger Things or the recently released zeitgeist-embracing adventure The Kid Who Would Be King, you know there’s no shortage of nostalgia for the decades in which most of the folks reading this grew up. The 1980s and ’90s are en vogue and ready to transport you back to your Topanga poster-covered walls of your bedroom. Or whomever you were into at the time. Maybe it was just […]