Disney Review: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia

Hello and welcome to the first post of my journey through all 56 Disney animated feature films! If you're interested in hearing more about what this project is, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

In case you were wondering, all three of these movies are rewatches for me. I won't be rewatching every movie, but I thought these three were important enough that I should do so. Plus, I hadn't seen Snow White or Pinocchio in a very long time, so I was due a refresher. In the future, movies I'm watching for the first time will be marked with an asterisk, but of course, that's not necessary this time around.

Anyway, here we go. These write-ups are long, far longer than I have any intention of making subsequent write-ups. But these first three movies are three of the most important movies in the Disney canon, so they deserve the extra words.

EDIT: You can now read the next entry in the series here.

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Okay, so movie #1. Longtime readers may remember that I've actually covered this movie before. For the most part, I stand by what I said there, with the caveat that this time around, I'm leaning more positive on the movie as a whole. Oh, to be sure: Snow White is the worst kind of idiot, infuriatingly naive about crucial life skills like don't take food from strangers, like geez, this is Being a Person Who Can Survive to the Age of Eighteen 101, and an insufferable, judgmental know-it-all about the most inconsequential things of all time, namely sweeping and washing one's hands before dinner. The more the movie focuses on Snow White, the more snore-worthy it becomes. In fact, the opening half hour of the movie—basically, before the dwarfs show up—is downright stuffy in that particular way that early sound pictures can tend to be, when filmmakers were still having trouble figuring out how to pace dialogue within a scene, and it's one of the few pieces of the film that betrays that it was made in the 1930s (the other being the trilling, airy singing).

However, once the dwarfs arrive, the movie perks up considerably. I had forgotten how much of a delight those boys are, not just for their slapstick and general amiability but also because they liven up the animation style to a tremendous degree. All the strictly human characters—Snow White, the Queen, the Huntsman, the Prince—are mostly drawn from live-action footage (some of it actually rotoscoped, a process by which animators draw directly onto live-action shots), giving vividly lifelike movements and proportions to these characters. It's beautiful and stately, but it's also part of what makes the beginning of the film so lethargic, as it renders the characters with this otherworldly, trapped-in-amber feel. Then come the dwarfs, drawn as caricatured and cartoony as you would expect of Disney models. They bound across the screen as if they're made of rubber, and their features are warm and expressive in ways that only cartoons can evoke, and all of the sudden, the movie is a great deal of fun.

The other thing that's skewing me more positive is that I had forgotten the degree to which I love the wicked queen. There's not a lot to the character, I'll grant, but as a force of pure and gloriously arch evil, she's unbeatable. The same animation style that makes Snow White airy and unapproachable makes the queen a terrifying, inky-black screen presence, and the ravenous vigor with which voice actor Lucille La Verne (a Tennessee native!) attacks the phrase "BURIED ALIIIIIVE" makes for one of the greatest line readings in the entire Disney oeuvre. I loved every minute of her role, so it's probably no surprise that the best part of the movie by far is the rain-soaked climax in which the dwarfs (the movie's heart) chase the cackling queen (the movie's murderous brain) up a craggy mountain. Some Disney villains go down like little wimps, but the queen's death (and the moments that precede it) is the biggest, baddest thing ever.

2. Pinocchio (1940)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was an expensive gamble that could have possibly ended Walt Disney if it hadn't been the smash hit it was (and it was a smash, the highest grossing movie of 1937 in America and, adjusted for inflation, still one of the highest grossing movies of all time). This means that when approaching their second feature film, the Disney team had a lot more money and financial security to work with (the budget, at over $2 million, was nearly double that of its predecessor). It shows. Pinocchio is, top-to-bottom, a better-looking movie than the already incredibly impressive Snow White; more than that, Pinocchio is (depending on how you feel about Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast) probably the most beautifully animated movie in the Disney canon, likely the most beautifully animated American movie ever, and a real contender for the most beautifully animated movie anywhere ever. There are, of course, the technical marvels for the time, like the sheer depth and sophistication of the multiplane fore/backgrounds and the way that the camera actually moves, swooping and panning and zooming to follow characters rather than just letting the characters prance around inside a static frame. And then there's the textural richness; Snow White's watercolor backgrounds worked well for the storybook feel of that story, but there's no topping the lushness of Pinocchio's use of real paint to create its environments, nor the way that the animators intentionally leave visible brushstrokes—not just on the static backgrounds but on the character cels themselves—to suggest hair or lighting or other textural effects. And be still my heart, let's not forget the most impressive showcase of animation bravura in Disney history, the escape from Monstro the Whale, as smoke and water (the best water animation in movie history?) and character animation pile up into what feels like a nightmarish Impressionist painting come to life.

Let's talk about nightmares, too, because Pinocchio is not fooling around. That Monstro, a colossal sea leviathan[1] that sounds like the revving engine of a war machine, isn't the scariest thing in the movie really says something about just how little Walt Disney cared about little kids wetting themselves. In fact, it's practically a relief to get Monstro after the barrage of Pleasure Island; as if it weren't already enough to have all those freaky carnival designs beckoning young boys to their doom (serviced by these bizarrely blank shadowy figures who look more like ghouls than humans), we're then treated to the motherload of scares in the form of Lampwick, Pinocchio's fast-talking, chain-smoking acquaintance, screaming for his mother as he transforms into a donkey. It's not just "scary for a kid's movie"; it's the most viscerally frightening moment of mainstream American cinema before the release of Psycho. Beyond just the scary scares, there's a lot of distressing stuff here—the movie makes something of a motif out of the trafficking of children, and the image of a child being thrown into a cage while crying for his parents is repeated frequently. There's also that shot of a lifeless Pinocchio face-down in a pool.

For all the talk in this movie about being a "good boy," it's not really a story about morality; it's about how unbelievably cruel the world is, how it rewards trust with betrayal, innocence with brutality, and, in the face of all that, how vital it is to care for those who love you. When Pinocchio saves Geppetto at the movie's climax, it's a moment of pure and true love in defiance of every self-serving impulse he's been offered for the movie's previous 80 minutes. To say that this is a more sophisticated message than Snow White's goes without saying, but I'll go further: this movie earns its message of familial love and self-sacrifice more than most movies that profess these themes. So in case you couldn't tell, Pinocchio is one of the all-time greats. I love this movie. I could watch it forever.

3. Fantasia (1940)

And then Disney released freaking Fantasia just a few months later. This is the hottest of hot streaks. The only other instance I can think of involving an animation studio releasing two great movies in such rapid succession is Studio Ghibli releasing My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies on the same day (though truth be told, I think Pinocchio and Fantasia is the superior pair—don't hurt me, Ghibli stans).

In a way, this movie is the culmination of this era of Disney. Both Snow White and Pinocchio took these European stories and created vaguely European fantasy neverwheres rendered with classically high-brow sensibilities and populated by contemporary-styled cartoons; Fantasia pushes this high-brow/cartoon dichotomy to its logical endpoint by having the highest of European brows, orchestral music of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, rendered through a combination of folk-tale and cartoon imagery. Most iconically, of course, is Mickey Mouse corralling broomsticks to the tune of Paul Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice, and the rest of the sequences fall somewhere along the spectrum of the dark fantasy of Night on Bald Mountain (Chernabog, wassup) to the dancing hippos of Dance of the Hours. It's the abstraction of the Disney formula established in its very limited way by the studio's first two features, and that abstraction is notable. Disney is a studio that, in certain respects, is experimental—right now in 2018, we're nearly three decades into a long-form experiment involving the extent to which identity theory, reader response, and corporate synergy can intersect—but it's rarely formally experimental in the way that Fantasia is when it uses its own animation to mix and match the component pieces of what can be called a Disney Feature.

To that point, this is the purest expression we ever got of Walt Disney, Visionary. Walt was flawed in severe ways (not the least of which were his racism [of which we can see in the original cut of the now-edited Pastoral Symphony sequence] and affinity for unbridled capitalism), but there's also the very real fact that his ambition both to bring feature-length animation to the masses and to do it through such sophisticated and high-class-adjacent methods as he did in Snow White and Pinocchio permanently changed the fabric of American cinema forever. And Fantasia was his attempt to do so again, to reinvent the American middle brow's relationship with classical music and animation. And there are some astonishingly bold aesthetic choices here that the Disney team utilizes to these ends, from the opening Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence's use of abstract, nonrepresentational animation to even the inclusion of Rite of Spring at all, a piece which not even three decades prior was inciting riots. Imagine Disney in 2018 releasing a movie featuring the music of John Cage and the animation of Don Hertzfeldt, and you've got the rough modern equivalent of how out-there this project was.

Viewed another way, Fantasia is also the end of this era for Disney. In its original release, it netted a huge loss financially, and this loss casts a long shadow on Disney history. It (along with cost-cutting measures during WWII) effectively killed the lush, layered, painterly style of these first three features; the following movies Disney released before WWII—Dumbo and Bambi—are no slouches of animation, but the style has changed; the focus is more on character design and bright colors, and little of the Impressionism of Pinocchio nor the baroque colors of Fantasia survives. And definitely gone is the experimental urge at play here. There's an argument that Bambi uses up the last of this spirit, but even then, it's a muted spirit. For the most part, following Fantasia, Disney movies plant their feet more and more firmly into the territory of "children's entertainment," and while that's not an inherently bad thing (Disney has done a lot of great work making movies exclusively for children), it is disappointing to see the diversity of the storytelling and animation of these early features constrict into the more limited palette of the Disney movies to follow. Worse, it sets the tone for American animation in general, relegating it unfortunately to the realm of entertainment only aimed at children and making it more difficult for any animated feature not family-oriented to survive.

This is getting bleaker than I meant it to be. Long story short, Fantasia is great and one-of-a-kind. I love it almost as much as Pinocchio.

See y'all next time!


1] Thanks to my wife for suggesting this word during our viewing.

Mini-Reviews for May 21 - 27, 2018

Don't worry; I'll be starting that Disney retrospective soon. You can expect the first post sometime this week.

Movies

Wonder Woman (2017)
Wonder Woman is, as its thesis on humanity itself says, flawed. This is most notable in its depiction of World War I as a war with "good guys" and "bad guys," a claim the movie tries to undercut later on with discussions about the genocide of indigenous peoples and speeches about how the war is "all of our faults," but there's a lot of clumsiness in that walking back—it says all humans have the capacity for evil and violence and that war is a divine conspiracy for the suicide of the species (good theme, esp. for WWI), but it only actually depicts evil done by the Germans, and by golly, when it comes to film, especially one as visually driven as this, actions speak way louder than words. But what speaks even louder than its mismatched history and uneasy imperialism is Wonder Woman herself, cast and played perfectly by Gal Gadot and, prior to this year's Black Panther, given the most precise and uncluttered character arc any superhero has had since Star Lord in the original Guardians of the Galaxy; after the Jenga-stacked accumulation of the Marvel movies, this sort of clarity is a drink of cool water. And then there's director Patty Jenkins, who does tremendous work turning the Zack Snyder aesthetic into something genuinely iconic and exciting. The Marvel movies have a better grasp of how to create a successfully entertaining movie, but I find the DC project of playing up the otherworldliness and deity of their superheroes to be a much more thematically interesting approach to this material, and it has the potential to pay off richly. As much as the movie has some issues with the execution of its latter half (complaints that it devolves into yet another CG superhero climax are warranted), it's also one of the great blockbuster moments of last year to see this god-like woman look down on humanity and determine that, despite their capacity for evil, human beings are worthy of love and protection. This dialogue about humanity by people who are, by the movie's logic, definitely not human makes this movie's larger themes work on a mythological, even philosophical level, one where the Marvel movies, for all their structural integrity, usually crumble. Wonder Woman's thesis is hard-won and honest humanism in a narrative that acknowledges both the absurdity and necessity of humanism. As much as we can nitpick the specifics of the movie, that's powerful. Grade: B+

Wonder Wheel (2017)
It's an immense frustration to me that the most aesthetically engaging Woody Allen movie in a very long time (I would argue since Shadows and Fog, though there are a few other pit stops since that I'd contentedly settle upon) has the weakest Allen screenplay since Whatever Works, along with at least one bad performance (Justin Timberlake) and at least one iffy one (Kate Winslet). Such is the experience of watching a modern Woody Allen film, where there are frequently very good things among the frequently very bad things. The aesthetic I'll credit to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who uses the carnival lighting of the film's intentionally artificial—even music-box-like—Coney Island setting to make everything on screen positively glow with constantly shifting colors (to say nothing of the multiple long takes, all staged perfectly). The screenplay and the performances I've got to credit to Allen, though, since all their hoary tropes (a woman having an affair, you say? My oh my) and structural problems and stiltedness are as much of Allen mainstays as swing jazz. Also, I don't always find biological readings of movies to be compelling or helpful, but come on, there's no way that Allen isn't baiting us here with his story of a guy who is in a relationship with both a woman and her step-daughter. All that said, the movie looks soooo good that I'm tipping this over to a very slight net positive. Grade: C+

Middle of Nowhere (2012)
Unlike a lot of rising acclaimed directors, Ava DuVernay isn't much of a visual stylist, and her writing is, in its grand gestures, never a highlight either. Where her movies excel is at the micro level, the way a small edit creates tension between scenes, the way body language accumulates over a scene to build to great moments of intimacy and humanity. With this skill set, she can get amazing performances out of her actors, and here, Emayatzy Corinealdi and David Oyelowo shine. Also, Corinealdi's character rides the bus a lot and falls in love with a bus driver, so you know this has my number. Grade: B

Birth (2004)
Nicole Kidman's dazzling performance is the mirror image of Mia Farrow's in Rosemary's Baby, each raw and empathetic responses to a trauma that the world around them denies them the catharsis of processing. In Birth, Kidman's character has lost her husband suddenly, and ten years later, a ten-year-old boy comes and tells her that he is her husband, reborn; nobody (including possibly the film's audience) believes the boy but Kidman, who must relive their relationship's life and death through this boy—as depictions of grief and love and the unearthly madness of those emotions go, Birth's is both alien and breathtakingly human. If Kidman evokes Rosemary's Baby, then the film's otherworldly tone is Picnic at Hanging Rock, as we (along with Kidman's character) slip from drama to dream without ever releasing the tether of conscious reality. It's all rather stunning and makes me want to revisit my (lukewarm) feelings on director Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, which mines a lot of that same otherworldliness. Plus, if we aren't talking about Alexandre Desplat's score as one of the best of this century, then what are we even doing? Grade: A

8 Mile (2002)
There are two things that work in 8 Mile: 1. the on-location footage of urban/suburban Detroit, and 2. the lengthy rap battle that closes the film. And both of these things do more than work—they practically save the movie. The setting, full of its crumbling homes and cavernous, abandoned urban architecture, evokes a version of Detroit (and I emphasize "version," since I'm sure Detroit—as is the case with my home town of Memphis—doesn't always appreciate its public perception as Exhibit A in The Death of the Mid-Century American City) as something of a poetic squalor that absolutely makes the movie's action more interesting as it clambers over the brick and asphalt of this landscape. And the rap battle, the movie's climax and the only time we see Eminem do much rapping, hums with more live-wire energy than the rest of the movie combined. The rest of the movie, well... it's a pileup of underdog cliches, problematic archetypes (esp. the female characters), and boring drama—to say nothing of the uncomfortable racial component of having Eminem, a white dude, crashing into hip-hop against black antagonists. This is, to an extent, the story of Marshall Mathers himself, so I won't begrudge the movie too much for cribbing the autobiographical details. But given how popular and financially successful Eminem proved (and already had proven) to be relative to even some of the most successful black rappers, there's still something iffy about this guy's main opposition being black rappers. I don't quite know how to do this story without that dynamic, but I'm also not sure we needed much of this movie outside of silent shots of Detroit and that rap battle at the end, so. Grade: B-

Ghost World (2001)
This scratches the same itch as Juno and the better parts of Superbad for me, wherein we watch funny teens on the brink of adulthood using snark to mask the terror and loneliness of coming to grips with the parallel facts that 1. They are about to enter the adult world, and 2. The adult world sucks. Thora Birch, as Enid, plays perfectly that late-teen feeling of being being perpetually irritated by everything (a feeling I relate to deeply), as well as that similarly late-teen vulnerability in recognizing that identity—especially that identity you've cultivated as a high schooler—is both excitingly and scarily fluid (another feeling I relate to deeply). Hers is one of two wonderful performances this movie absolutely wouldn't work without, the other being Steve Buscemi's Seymour, a character that can be argued is just a nice version of a gross archetype (the older dude who falls for a teen, the older dude who thinks the modern world is terrible, the older dude who feels resentful that the women around him are shallow—take your pick; Juno drives this character type right into its dark subtext, to that movie's benefit, I think), but Buscemi's take on the guy is so perfectly pitched toward sadness and self-loathing that it works without him feeling like a sugarcoated MRA or something. Other parts of this movie feel either ill-considered (the weirdly broad convenience store hijinks) or underdeveloped (Scarlett Johansson's Rebecca—Johansson is totally not pulling her weight here, which is disappointing). But together, Birch and Buscemi make this movie a poignant exploration of friendship and loneliness that I fell in love with. Grade: A-

Television

Atlanta, Season 2: Robbin' Season (2018)
Although I enjoyed Atlanta's first season, I wasn't quite as enthusiastic as some of the show's more vocal supporters. Well, count me among the show's more vocal supporters now. Season 2 (or Robbin' Season, as it subtitles itself) is likely the best television we're going to get in 2018. Largely eschewing Season One's surrealism (though we do get a reference to the invisible car) for a more situational strangeness that's rooted in the Theatre of the Absurd, Robbin' Season proves to be a much more flexible and profound beast than it's older counterpart, wrenching hilarity out of terrifying existential labyrinths and horror out of piercing mundanity. In "Barbershop," Alfred (i.e. Paper Boi) is stuck in an episode-long haircut limbo as his barber drags him along for his shaggy-dog to-do list, and it's the funniest TV episode of 2018 to date; in "FUBU," a flashback to Earn's teens is one of the most painful and accurate depictions of high school I've ever seen on TV, and it's the most painful TV episode of 2018 to date; and in "Teddy Perkins," an episode best-approached with as little knowledge of it as possible, Atlanta looks the racism and abuse in show business and even evil itself squarely in the eye, and it's the best TV episode of 2018, period. Watching Robbin' Season recalls the excitement I felt watching Lost's fourth season or Mad Men's fifth, where I had no clue what to expect from week to week except the unfiltered pleasure of a show drunk on its own creativity and sure enough in its hand to pull off every idea it has masterfully. TV like this doesn't come around often, folks. Grade: A

Bob's Burgers, Season 8 (2017-18)
I mean, what can you say about Bob's Burgers anymore? It isn't really a show that innovates on itself, aside from the fun season premiere, "Brunchsquatch," which is animated in the style of some of the series's fan art. In general, though, it's a chronically unambitious show, content to tell small stories of the same variety it's always told, imbued with the same warmth for outsiders and weirdos as it's always had. Nowadays, we tend to value television that's dynamic, television that changes—Breaking Bad is beloved for, among other things, its relentless evolution of its own premise. But let's not forget that for the majority of TV's existence, formula and stasis have been the medium's default, and when a show has as much mastery of its formula as Bob's Burgers does, the dividends can be wonderful. Grade: B+

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 5 (2017-18)
I continue to be gently entertained—rather than completely smitten—by this show, and it's increasingly reliant on the occasional Very Special Episode to address the various societal implications of the series, which I find kind of irritating. But the show's cast is still one of the best in the business, and on a week-to-week basis, it works as basic workplace sitcom comfort food well enough. Plus, the finale ends on a corker of a cliffhanger, which makes me glad that NBC rescued it from cancellation (sad face that the same can't be said of fellow Fox casualty, Last Man on Earth). Grade: B




Books

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
I read this not just because I've wanted to for years (which is true—and truth be told, I tried and failed to read it in high school) but also because I loved Isabel Allende's very García-Márquez-inspired The House of the Spirits so much that I wanted to follow-up. I dunno if this loses me literary cred or whatever, but I preferred House of the Spirits more—it's more emotionally accessible than García Márquez's distanced, often alien fable of Colombian history. Macondo, García Márquez's Colombia in miniature, is a town viewed under a microscope, not lived in, by his readers, and maybe I'm only feeling this way because I'm not Colombian, but also, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that we're not supposed to feel for these characters in the same way that we are Allende's. That's not to say this novel isn't also capable of fantastic heights, because it is, taken as a whole, great and at times tremendously powerful, often because of García Márquez's elevated, distancing approach. On the cover of my edition, there's a pull quote from William Kennedy of the New York Times that I've often rolled my eyes at, in which Kennedy compares the novel to the book of Genesis, but now, having read the novel, that's exactly the right comparison. The experience of the novel is very much like reading those early books of the Bible, where the supernatural piles on top of family genealogy which piles on top of history. We're left with a book that feels very much like it was written from the perspective of heaven looking down at Earth, and when the novel's apocalyptic ending—down to its soul-rending final sentence—splays across the last page, it lands like the fist of God itself. Grade: A-

Music

Janelle Monáe - Dirty Computer (2018)
Monáe pulls something of a St. Vincent by making this, her newest album, significantly more pop-centric and lyrically straightforward than her previous outings. There's a part of me that's disappointed in that, as one of the chief things I've loved in the past was her Bowie-like playing around with sci-fi personas and her record-crate-dive approach to genre. On Dirty Computer, the songs are most definitely about Janelle herself, and the music (while somewhat rooted in music history via its Prince inspirations [Prince himself was something of a mentor for Monáe before his passing]) sticks mostly to modern production and contemporary genres. Some of this works extremely well. Monáe gets to rap quite a bit, which is an enormous treat after her all-too-brief bars on her previous two albums, and several of the most modern-sounding tracks on the album—"Pynk," which sounds a lot like Charli XCX's work with PC Music, "Django Jane," which is basically a trap song, and "I Like That," which could have fit comfortably on Lemonade—are among the album's best. But then you've got songs like "Screwed" and "Crazy, Classic, Life," which focus on shout-along choruses, sloganeering, and Katy-Perry-sounding pop production in a way that sounds pretty thin to me. Monáe is clearly feeling liberated and happy at having shrugged off her android persona and come out as pansexual, and I think it's wonderful that she feels that way. The album's thematic through-line re: racial and sexual identity is a strong one, and I wouldn't want her to closet herself again in the interest of bringing back the weirdo sci-fi personas and stuff. But at the same time... I can't help but feel that her music was stronger (or at least more consistent) when it was committed more to being weird. I'd love to see her find a way to rediscover that part of her music without losing the personal touch and openness of the best songs here. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for May 14 - 20, 2018

Sorry for the late post! It's been a tremendously busy week.

Movies

Zombeavers (2014)
About what you'd expect from the title, with the added wrinkle of being slightly socially conscious by having a half-baked metaphor based on the "beaver=vagina" thing, which... *sigh*. I was hoping for a doofy, so-bad-it's-good kind of thing (and that's clearly what the movie is going for). But there's just something about its vaguely conscious pretensions and how thoroughly the movie reveals that it doesn't understand its own subtext (there's an extended scene whose point is literally that a character is making a big deal about another character being topless, and this seems less about body image/modesty culture commentary and more about "hey look, titties"—why yes, the movie is written and directed by a bunch of dudes, why do you ask?) that's deeply irritating, and ultimately, I found it all to be craven and lazy rather than fun. No abundance of hilariously bad beaver puppetry and over-the-top gore can remedy it. Grade: C-

Pariah (2011)
After loving Mudbound, I thought I'd go back to Dee Rees's 2011 breakthrough. The cinematography is very nice in that hazy, neon, handheld way that's been American indie's bread and butter for the past decade or so (though perhaps that decade of neon-bathed digital has softened the impact of this movie's look), and the story, while drawing on a familiar trope (the coming out story), succeeds by transporting tropes into an environment I've never seen them play out in, urban African-American culture. Some of this feels a little too on-the-nose, and it feels like the movie is spread just a tad bit thin by focusing on as many characters as it does, a feeling Mudbound miraculously avoided. But in general, it's a well-observed and engaging piece of cinema that fits in nicely with the sensitive, naturalist (as opposed to twee) indies of recent years. Grade: B

Cruel Intentions (1999)
It's basically the opposite of a screwball comedy, wherein instead of talking around sex in humorous ways, these guys just dive head-first into it by frankly talking about orgasms and oral sex and stuff [*Pete Rose sliding into home image*], only with that same glibness that makes screwball feel so fleet. The movie is attuned to and making fun of social nuances/manners in a way that feels at home with its 18th-century source material, and it's also dealing in this almost-parodic teen melodrama mode that fits in well with the late-'90s spate of teen movies and TV, the combination of the two making for some interesting moods in the film. So I like all that. But at the same time, I also don't think the movie really works as a whole, and I'm going to call it a failure of both directing and acting. Sarah Michelle Gellar is really the only one in this cast who understand the viciously tongue-in-cheek, arch tone that this material necessitates, and she gets all the best moments, too; the rest of the cast seems to have wandered in from something like Dawson's Creek and are various shades of listless and tone-deaf (though I guess Selma Blair deserves something for her strange, grating performance). And this is all staged in really contradictory and dull ways by the director, who I'm not going to say has misunderstood the material so much as he seems to lack the craft necessary to make the material pop; this is some shockingly generic filmmaking for a story that involves a wager staked on lowkey incest, and ten points from Gryffindor for those terrible music cues ("Bittersweet Symphony," what are you doing?). There's also the whole late-'90s sexual ethic that seems to buy into the myth that someone can be harassed (and basically raped, to be honest) into enjoying sex, which like... yikes. There's enough smart/high-camp stuff going on here that it didn't really ruin my time with it, but I don't blame anyone for checking out because of that. Either way, it's a complicated, compromised movie that easily could have been way better. But also, it's not like we've gotten a better version of this specific type of movie since, though I welcome modern filmmakers to try. Grade: B-

My Neighbors the Yamadas (ホーホケキョとなりの山田くん) (1999)
The two things that make My Neighbors the Yamadas so distinctive within Studio Ghibli's catalog—the sketchy, hyper-cartoonish aesthetic and the almost entirely vignette-based structure of its plot—also make it something of a drag at times. There are times when the art style works extremely well, especially when it blends the line between objective and subjective reality (a character flies into the air, the world itself melts away into a fantasy), and there are just as many times when the plot's vignettes create these heartbreaking little ellipses and slice-of-life pinpricks. But almost as often, the movie is directionless and inconsequential, and I strongly felt the 100-minute runtime. It's an interesting experiment that I'm glad exists, but I probably won't be returning to this any time soon. Grade: B-

Metropolis (1927)
Surprising absolutely nobody, one of the most popular and enduring movies of all time is great. Fritz Lang's vision of the future by way of the Weimar Republic is awe-inspiring and transporting and exactly the sort of thing I watch movies for. I can nitpick: the movie never quite bests its jaw-dropping opening hour (honestly, the 2.5-hour length of the "Complete" cut I watched was about fifteen minutes north of ideal), and I guess I wanted the movie to be just a tad more agitprop-ish and a tad less "we need a messiah to make the capitalists and the labor get along"—viva the robot revolution, is what I'm saying, or maybe that's just the Janelle Monáe fan inside me. But fixating on these bits would be unrepresentative of just how successful this movie was at achieving in me the greatest ambition of all popcorn cinema: I was enthralled. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for May 7 - 13, 2018

1.5 weeks until summer 1.5 weeks until summer 1.5 weeks until summer 1.5 weeks until summer

Also, since I know my mom reads this blog, Happy Mother's Day! Love you, Mom! Please don't hate me for not liking The Greatest Showman!

Movies

The Greatest Showman (2017)
Look, I know there's a stuffy theater critic character in this movie whose whole purpose is to point out that it doesn't matter if a critic hates a show if the audience likes it, and I know I'm walking right into that very, very obvious trap the movie has set for me, but boyohboy, I did not like The Greatest Showman. I'll grant that Hugh Jackman is well-cast in the lead (if the intersection between The Greatest Showman and The Prestige tells us anything, it's that Jackman definitely needs to 1) be cast more as a huckster magician, and 2) be in more musicals—his enthusiasm is contagious). I liked the "The Other Side" song and the shot glass choreography. And some of the costumes are fun in a "what if Moulin Rouge but colorful community theater" kind of way. But man, that's freaking it for positives. The sets—both the physical ones and the obvious, ugly CG—look atrocious. The screenplay is a total disaster, lacking any sort of dramatic tension either within its thinly constructed scenes or between them (it wouldn't be a stretch to simply edit this movie into a series of aesthetically connected music videos), and its one-dimensional characters simply act without real exposition as to why they would, flipping from one personality to another with only the barest explanation on the rare instances when a character "develops." And the music—oh Lord, the music. On the one hand, you've got the choreography, which is at times admirably maximalist but whose maximalism is shredded to bits by overzealous modern editing that, I suspect, is covering for a ton of on-set blunders (I'll eat my hat if "we'll fix it in post" wasn't uttered at least twice during the filming of this movie). On the other hand are the songs themselves, boring pieces of the blandest of pop trends rendered actively irritating by heinous overproduction. So you're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place there. I could go on sputtering with critical vexation for paragraphs more, but I'll just leave you with this: the movie has a point when it says that it doesn't matter if one person dislikes a show if it makes others happy. So that's why I'm asking you to join me in hating The Greatest Showman—all of you, come with me, and we can rule the galaxy, away from empty, craftless piffle like this. It doesn't matter if one person hates The Greatest Showman, sure, but what if many people hate it? *twists mustache, cackles* Grade: D+

The Work (2017)
One of the formative experiences of my adolescence is moving to Tennessee and joining the local middle school football team, whose members took it upon themselves to look at my scrawny, lonely, slightly irritating, new-kid self and psychologically and physically harass me for the duration of the season. The experience was agonizing, of course, but for all that agony, my overwhelming feeling at the time was this relentless urge to toughen up—they picked on me because I wasn't good enough, big enough, stoic enough, sexual enough, man enough, so the obvious solution was to be better, bigger, more stoic, more sexual, manlier—to never cry or express a sincere emotion outside of raw aggression and stiff-lipped, distant camaraderie. I tried; it was the most miserable year of my life. If there's one thing The Work—a documentary chronicling a four-day group-therapy retreat for men in Folsom Prison—shows as these men tremble and rage and scream in pure anguish as they heave a lifetime of repressed feelings onto the prison floor, it's that traditional masculinity is a torturous cage. Traditional masculinity literally kills. I'm not a resident of Folsom (in case you were in any doubt) or even one of the individuals from the outside world who volunteered to come on this retreat, too, but the feeling of solidarity I felt with these men was intense. The film isn't perfect. I question some of the editing, and it feels a little off to have the movie culminate in the emotional breakthrough of a white guy from the outside. But then again, here I am blathering on, so. Grade: A-

It Might Get Loud (2009)
Seeing the room where Led Zeppelin recorded their version of "When the Levee Breaks" is interesting; so is seeing The Edge make the pedal effect for the "Elevation" riff and Jack White doing his "the 1940s aren't over until I say they're over" bit. Hearing these guys just geek out about guitars and how they became guitar players to begin with is legitimately engaging. But I dunno; I guess I could just do without all the gobsmacked hero worship and overt rockism, too—especially when it's coming from white dudes who only mention black artists like twice. And unfortunately, that part is about half the movie. Grade: C+

My Left Foot (1989)
It's a little bit prestige-y for my tastes, but there's no denying the power of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as a man with cerebral palsy nor the admirably even-keeled, unsentimental way that the movie approaches its subject. There's probably a better movie to made with these component parts—ideally one that doesn't involve such biopic cliches as the "I'm old and successful now, but first I gotta remember my past" framing—but the one we got has good stuff to offer. Grade: B

River's Edge (1986)
As far as these "kids sure are murderous these days, huh?" movies go, River's Edge at least has the decency to incorporate an inter-generational critique into its youth-in-revolt despair. As uncomfortable as I am with the way the camera lingers over the (obligatory) nude female corpse here, there are some smart things being said about the way that misogyny is a cultural virus transmitted from one generation to the next and how the generational cycle of violence makes this only more acute. Also, props to Keanu Reeves for crafting his Bill & Ted performance far enough in advance to give it a test run in this movie. Grade: B



Television

Superstore, Season 3 (2017-18)
People seem to be sleeping on this show, but don't, people! Superstore is the best workplace sitcom since Parks & Recreation, and it's majorly come into its own in its third season. Virtually everything works here: the ongoing plots, the individual episode structure, the cast—I'm not a huge fan of the Jonah/Amy will-they-won't-they thing, but even that came together rather nicely in the final few episodes of the season, a mini-arc that ranks among the show's best. It's the little things that make the series work, though: boob cheese, secret tunnels, the constant Target idolization, those wordless shots of anonymous customers doing strange things in the store. There's nothing groundbreaking here except the idea that the 22-episode network sitcom is still a format with some juice. But that's an idea I like quite a bit. Grade: A-

The Last Man on Earth, Season 4 (2017-18)
As always, The Last Man on Earth is wildly inconsistent, and Season 4 is the worst case of that yet, with large stretches of the season stretching onward without form or a clear forward momentum. And yet, as always, there are nuggets of gold that keep me coming back: Fred Armisen's cannibal subplot, the lovingly cutthroat relationship between Tandy and his brother, everything Kristen Schaal. The Last Man on Earth continues to be completely its own thing, this bizarre mix of sitcom, melodrama, domestic farce, and sci-fi apocalypse, and with this show's unsurprising (yet, with the season/series finale's cliffhanger, unfortunate) cancellation, it looks like I'm going to have to get used to not having that weekly bit of weird in my life. Grade: B-


Books

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (2014)
There is a ton to like about I'll Give You the Sun. In particular, its bifurcated narrative—split between two twins, one twin (Noah, a teen artistic prodigy struggling with his sexuality) narrating one sequence of events while the second (Jude, still artistic but struggling to find her identity in relation to her brother and parents) narrates a series of events two years later—allows for Nelson to juggle points of view and style engagingly; both narrators' voices are distinctive and vibrant, framing the story in their own artistic terms (Noah, for example, frequently interjects a description of the painting he would make of a given moment, while Jude oftentimes uses the language of sculpture), and it works really well. Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that this structural gambit has a huge liability as well. The truth is that there's just not a lot of interesting stuff going on in the Jude-narrated "two years later" sequence, whereas almost everything interesting for both characters happens in the Noah-narrated sections, leaving the Jude sections dealing with an entirely tedious (and somewhat icky) plot that involves Jude's infatuation with the most stereotypical "bad boy" you can imagine (British, biker, smokes, wears leather, tortured past—you name it) and Noah's section with all the interesting character work. Add to that the pileup of coincidences and easy resolutions at the story's end, and I was left with a sour taste after the magic of the novel's first half. But oh well. That first half was legitimately great. Grade: B-

Music

Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
After going down the road of overproduction and blatant pop aspiration (to great effect in Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love, to significantly lesser effect in Human Touch and Lucky Town), Bruce swung back as far in the opposite direction as he could. The result is The Ghost of Tom Joad, a collection so underproduced and quiet (seriously, be prepared to turn the volume way up if you want to have a hope of hearing some of Springsteen's mumbles) that it's a liability in the same way that the contemporary, mainstream production of the previous two albums were. The Boss is definitely going for a Nebraska thing here, but unlike Nebraska, Tom Joad's songs are lost in the minimalism rather than chiseled cleanly by it, just as gated reverb and the like swallowed Human Touch's nuances. Thankfully, Tom Joad's lyrics are excellent (unlike Human Touch—sorry, but it's true); in fact, there's a decent argument to be made (one that I won't make but that I'll be sympathetic to) that Tom Joad is Springsteen's best-written album. Springsteen has always been a storyteller, but his focus here on people so distinctly unlike him—Latin-American immigrants get a big spotlight here—produces some of his most affecting and wonderful(ly heartbreaking) stories. As a result, it's an album that hugely rewards close listening and study, more so than most Springsteen records. I'm just skeptical that that close listening needs to be as close as it is. Grade: B

Mini-Reviews for April 30 - May 6, 2018

Reviews, get 'em while they're hot.

Movies

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

I could go on and on about the narrative problems of a movie that—to name one particularly nagging instance—involves a stone that only allows one to rewind time when the plot requires it, but I imagine the internet has already hashed out those nitpicks. Instead, let's talk about the action scenes in this movie. Throughout most of the movie's 149-minute runtime (!!!!![!!!!!!{!!!!!!!}]), I was concentrating very hard on why the action in this movie felt so unsatisfying, and I think I've arrived at it. In this movie, we have:

1. A dude who can manipulate time and space

2. a reformed Russian spy

3. a mind-reading lady with insect antennae

4. a tech genius with an army of nano gadgets

5. a sentient A.I.

6. a sentient tree

7. a witch who can hypnotize people and move things with her mind

8. a teenager who shoots spider web out of his wrists

9. an ex-U.S. Air Force guy who flies around on a jet pack

10. a purple, Malthusian space god who, midway through the film, acquires an object that allows him to literally alter reality

11. and like a bazillion other folks, all with different abilities and backstories.

And yet in the action scenes, these powers manifest themselves (with very few exceptions) in one of two ways: punch or zap. Remember the ending of Doctor Strange, when he beats the bad guy by putting him in a time loop? That was pretty neat. But in Infinity War, there are no time loops; Doctor Strange just shoots orange mystical energy from his fists. In Infinity War's action scenes, there are only collision and explosion. Where are the exciting and creative stagings of fight sequences? Lost in a sea of generic punches and zaps. And it's really dull, y'all. I'm being overly harsh to prove a point: it's not the premise of this movie I'm against—it's that, at several key points, the movie's execution veers unnecessarily into this unimaginative territory that is disappointing for a movie about magic space rocks and muscular, green supercreatures. You'll notice by the grade that I'm not completely against this movie—I'm even skewing positive. I like a lot of what's here: Thanos is the next in the recent wave of really interesting MCU villains; the ending is genuinely surprising (even if it feels suspiciously like a Whedon-esque thing of having tragedy be more shocking than meaningful); the plot is propulsive; the character interactions are fun ("I am Groot"; "I am Steve Rogers"). I'm just saying that for a movie that's supposed to be the culmination of the MCU thus far, it feels oddly like a flattening of its possibilities. Grade: B-

The Commuter (2018)

I was really enjoying this B-grade mystery set on a train, because it's set on a train and it's a mystery—solid pedigree there. But then about 2/3 of the way through it ceases to be a mystery and becomes more of an action movie, and right around that time, the train derails. A fitting metaphor, maybe, but I was really just distressed that we didn't get to see the end of the line, which was what I was looking forward to. Grade: B-

Tully (2018)

This Jason-Reitman-directed, Diablo-Cody-written feature is something like the intersection of that pair's last two collaborations—the quippiness and domestic observations of Juno bumping up against the existential despair and psychological turmoil of Young Adult. Tully is a much darker film than advertised, though that's not really clear until the film's final, heartbreaking act. But when it gets there—oof. It's a movie at once about the toll of motherhood and about the malaise of becoming older and more boring in the interest of protecting your children, and if it doesn't all quite work (the movie is far too cagey about its actual endgame, for one), enough of it does that the end product is pretty affecting. Grade: B+

Arabian Nights (As Mil e uma Noites) (2015)

Whereas Miguel Gomes's previous film, Tabu (one of this decade's finest films, no less), seemed positively drunk with the way that cinema allows for a hermetically sealed, controllable version of reality, Arabian Nights swings hard in the opposite direction, replacing the pure-cinema flourishes of Tabu for an aggressively realist one—an impulse that's delightfully incongruous with the film's fantasy trappings (the title isn't a juke—it is, after all, a reinterpretation of The Arabian Nights). It's as much documentary as it is fantasy film, and more than either of those, this is a fiercely political film. Each story in these "Arabian Nights" is set in and critiques the world of Portugal's policies of economic austerity, and the film's grounding in a documentary (or at least documentary-like) format forces us to reckon with the reality of economic austerity's ugly consequences within the fantasy sequences. It's the opposite of fantasy escapism, and while I will cop to being bored for LARGE sections of this movie (and I will also cop to my being mostly ignorant of Portuguese politics, which may have influenced the boringness), I can't deny the power of its premise nor the scorched earth of its satire. Grade: B

Henry Gamble's Birthday Party (2015)

It's a movie that's honestly and critically engaging with the Evangelical Christian moral paradigm, which is something I very much appreciate. There are also some nicely lyrical moment involving underwater cinematography, which I also appreciate. But there's no getting around the way that the stilted writing and acting create line deliveries in that unnatural, modular way that often comes out of the low-budget indie realm (or even... *gulp* the faith-based film industry, whose aesthetic this movie echoes either unfortunately accidentally or slyly purposefully, I can't decide)—something writer/director Stephen Cone thankfully worked through much better in his follow-up, Princess Cyd. And as much as I do love the extremely self-conscious Evangelicalism on display, I can't help but feel that the film's plot may have been just a tad too eager to cram in every single buzz-worthy Christian-world critique out there—in this one 80-min movie, we get body image, sexuality, alcohol, trauma, infidelity, repression, suicide, pornography, and more, and it feels a little overstuffed. Still, I'd rather a movie try and not quite succeed at this kind of urgent Evangelical scrutiny than not have tried at all. Grade: C+

300 (2006)

[Michael Bluth looking into a paper bag labeled "Dead Dove"]—"I don't know what I expected." Grade: D

Television

A.P. Bio, Season 1 (2018)

You've seen this before: dude loses his job and becomes a teacher, only he's a bad teacher and doesn't really teach and instead manipulates his students for his own gains. I liked it better when it was called School of Rock, because at least that had Jack Black doing his intense guitar-playing thing. In A.P. Bio, we have Glenn Howerton and a bunch of supporting cast that the show never really figures out how to use and no guitar. I'll give the show this: its commitment to avoiding sentiment is nice, and the cast of kids playing the students is excellent. But as far as plots go, as far as genuine laughs go, this is pretty thin. Grade: C+

Music

Preoccupations - New Material (2018)

The band's... uh... new material doesn't have anything nearly as good as "Death" (is this band ever going to top that??) or even "Degraded" from their last album. But Preoccupations is admirably staying the course as the 2010s post-punk torchbearers, and New Material, despite lacking some of the highs of previous efforts, is not some slack effort. More so than on Viet Cong or Preoccupations, texture is at the front of the band's mind here, and there are some delicious, thick slices of production on this album involving synths and percussion. It's good stuff. Grade: B+

An Announcement: I'm Blogging Through the Disney Animation Feature Films This Summer

Hey, there.

So thanks to the twenty of you who voted in the summer project poll that I had open for the past month, it's decided: I'm going to do a blog series on the Walt Disney Animation Studios feature films this summer! THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.

I specify "Walt Disney Animation Studios" because as I'm sure you all are well aware, there is a metric ton of animated movies associated with the Walt Disney Company. I won't be touching the direct-to-home-video stuff (which normally come from different heads of the Disney hydra), Pixar, TV movies, or anything else that didn't 1) get a theatrical release and 2) come specifically from Walt Disney Animation Studios. Sorry, fans of Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. Maybe next time.

Wikipedia says that there are 56 Disney Animation feature films, starting with 1938's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and ending with 2016's Moana. But you guys don't need me to lecture you on one of the most culturally visible and lucrative movie studios of all time. Part of the fun of this series is that I imagine a lot of you have a lot more knowledge on these movies than I do (or at least a lot of memories to draw on). I'm excited to see everyone's commentary.

I've seen a great deal of the 56 canonical features, but there's a decently sized subset that I haven't seen (comin' for you, Saludos Amigos) and an even greater subset that I've only seen once as a child and have just vague, undefined memories of (it's been a while, The Fox and the Hound)—I'll definitely be watching/rewatching all of these. That said, there are also quite a few of these movies that have practically carved their name into my brain due to childhood inundation. I'll try to rewatch some of these, but realistically, I'm not sure how many I'll get to. The never-seen and barely seen ones are getting priority this summer.

The way I'm envisioning it right now, this project will essentially be formatted the same as my AFI 100 Movies project from several years ago—that is, 1-3 movies reviewed in capsule each post, with the movies I'm watching for the first time marked with asterisks.

Anyway, I have about 2.5 weeks of school left, and once that's done, I plan on jumping in head-first. So await post #1 in a few weeks.

Looking forward to this, guys! See you at Snow White!

Update: You can read the first entry here.