The Goods: Film Reviews
I recently read Ed Sikov’s Film Studies: An Introduction, and one early point he makes is that everything we see in cinema, even the most vérité and naturalistic scenario, is, to some extent, constructed. Everything seen and heard is placed in front of us for a specific reason.
To watch the first fifteen minutes of The Rescuers Down Under is to wonder if you’ve stumbled upon some lost Disney masterpiece: The animators, using their new “CAPS” technology that would define the look and feel of 1990s Disney animation, bring us soaring through the Australian outback. The nuanced color and lighting bring a simultaneous crispness and softness to the visuals that is the polar opposite of 1977’s The Rescuers, to which this is a sequel.
Few movies have endured with such a sterling — even ascendant — reputation as 12 Angry Men.
A largely-forgotten adaptation of a largely-forgotten YA tetralogy, City of Ember has nearly enough breathtaking production values to make up for its avalanche of cliches and crummy pacing.
Up is among the most uneven films from Pixar’s imperial phase, but still pretty close to a masterpiece.
The Rescuers is, visually, the moodiest piece ever released by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Almost the entire film takes place at night in dingy buildings and murky swamps. The flashes of color all feel like subdued flickers, with no individual moment capable of escaping the thick, gloomy mood. Even the character designs feel a bit faded and smudgy. It’s simply not very fun. This aesthetic the reason I hated this movie as a kid, though it’s grown on me as an adult as I have more of an appetite for less expressive, feel-good moods.
What a treacherous task to adapt a generation-defining novel: You risk alienating fans of the book if you deviate too much, boring neophytes if you bring too much slavish devotion to the source. And it becomes more perilous if you take on an epistolary or diaristic novel, a distinctly literary form that leans on subjectivity and unreliable narrators tough to capture in film.
I’d have less of an objection to the gnarly thematic weirdness of Saving Private Ryan if the film didn’t rub our face in it
I consider this grating little sketch to be a turning point in the history of western animation — even moreso than the actual Shrek movie.
Shrek is almost impossible to evaluate at face value. You can mark it lower for creating the lazy “celebrity voice cast + pop culture reference” formula of animated comedy; you can mark it higher for millennial nostalgia (this was the default movie substitute teachers turned on when I was in high school); you can mark it lower OR higher for its over-saturation in memes and pop culture.