Category: Review

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Review Legacy

The Rescuers (1977)

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.

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Review Legacy

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

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.

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Review

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

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

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Review Legacy Revision Candidate

Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party (2001)

I consider this grating little sketch to be a turning point in the history of western animation — even moreso than the actual Shrek movie.

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Review Legacy

Shrek (2001)

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.

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Podcast Rating Review

The Outsiders (1983)

The Outsiders is Francis Ford Coppola’s epic greasers-vs-socs melodrama — his “teenage Gone With the Wind,” to quote the director’s commentary.

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Review Legacy Revision Candidate

WALL·E (2008)

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.

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Review Legacy Revision Candidate

Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine for You (1999)

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.

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Review Legacy Revision Candidate

Lava (2014)

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.

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Legacy Revision Candidate Review

Luzzu (2021)

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.

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