The Goods: Film Reviews
Roger Ebert claimed to review movies based on how well they achieved their goals rather than the goals themselves, and I’m here to apply that same philosophy. For Blue’s Big Musical Movie is pretty terrific at being an epic, thoughtful, mildly subversive triple-length episode of the hit toddler TV show.
About Time’s big gimmick is its time travel, yet it’s pretty horrible as a time travel movie-proper.
The Dancing Pig is a goofy little early film capturing a vaudeville-type stage dance — except one of the dancers is in an elaborate pig costume. I’m not enough of an early cinema history buff to declare this best costume ever filmed up to this point, but it’s gotta be up there — especially the cursed-looking teeth and tongue.
I ended up watching this movie twice in short succession to prep for a podcast recording. This turned out to be the right choice as it effectively doubled my appreciation for the film; every visual pattern, every subtle cue of dialogue, every delicate and luscious composition comes in sharper relief once you know exactly what to look for. And it does so without compromising the elliptical, sensuous storytelling texture of the film.
It’s amazing to me that such an early example of sync-sound cartoon did it so well. The character animation is so energetic, curves bending and colliding and creating larger-than-life entities at cartoonish proportions. And all of that visual energy perfectly matches the sounds so that there’s never any doubt in the viewer’s mind that the action we’re seeing triggers the exact sound we’re hearing.
The Emperor’s New Groove is one of those pieces of media that I’ve heard labelled “underrated” and “secretly great” so often that, well, it’s neither of those things. We as a culture (at least the millennials I know) collectively seem to remember this movie more fondly than just about any other Disney film.
Serie Noire is a bizarre French neo-noir of a man’s life flying off the rails when he connects with a teenaged prostitute.
We Can Be Heroes, the Robert Rodriguez return to family entertainment, is not quite good, but it is far more competent and watchable than I feared, especially given the car crash that was the Spy Kids reboot.
Calling The Adevntures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl “ugly” is a grave understatement.
There were certainly worse ideas in 2011 than rebooting the Spy Kids franchise. It’s a film concept that’s easy to refresh: recruit a new batch of charming kid actors, update the gadgets for the new era, weave in some family values, and spin up a kooky spy-fi premise.