The Goods: Film Reviews
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.
The Outsiders is Francis Ford Coppola’s epic greasers-vs-socs melodrama — his “teenage Gone With the Wind,” to quote the director’s commentary.
I’ve always had a hard time figuring out just where to place WALL·E in the Pixar pantheon for a couple reasons, the biggest of which is that WALL·E is a rare masterpiece that gets steadily worse across its runtime. The more the movie focuses on the fat humans and environmentalism parable, the more it feels like a run-of-the-mill good movie; and the less it feels like a generationally profound piece of cinema.
I have yet to see a Winnie the Pooh TV or direct-to-video special that is anything other than dire, though this one might be the least dire of the bunch. The problem, as with any of these cheap Pooh specials, is that the A.A. Milne brand of whimsy is so perilously difficult to nail. The Walt Disney Animation Studio Winnie the Pooh features (1977 and 2011) are either directly inspired by Milne or sufficiently well-drawn as a facsimile to correctly capture the spirit, but it’s not easy.
In much the same way that short stories allow for bizarre, unsustainable scenarios that would never sufficiently fill out a novel, so Pixar’s short films provide an outlet for not-quite-a-story-but-not-quite-not-a-story premises: An old man playing chess against himself? A living lost and found box? Personifications of day and night? Sure, it works for five minutes.
One thing that Luzzu gets indisputably correct: Water is beautiful. Alex Camilleri captures in his debut film, with the help of cinematographer Léo Lefèvre, about 37 shades of blue, some bubbly, some murky, some bright, etc. I just wish the film spent even more of its runtime at sea.
Here’s a summary of the first few minutes of Read it and Weep:
Totally plausible, right?
I find myself torn between basic appreciation of the filmmaking craft of King Richard and utter annoyance at its awards-bait laziness.
The first hour of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is one of the most entertaining blockbusters of 2000s. Gore Verbinski captures all of his budget on screen, with huge swashbuckling set pieces and chases and outstanding period production values. The action comes at a furious clip. You can almost taste the popcorn as you watch.
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.