Author: mfordfeeney

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

I was surprised to read that this picture wasn’t successful critically or commercially, since I’ve always loved it & held it in high regard.

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Alice in Wonderland:

Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories are of endless fascination to audiences worldwide and so it is no surprise that they have been so often adapted for the stage and screen. Walt Disney of course adapted seemingly every known story in existence, and this very nearly became the first Disney animated feature after he had produced some Alice shorts in the late 1920’s. It was actually to have been a blend of live-action and animation, but rival studio Paramount rushed an Alice picture to market and Disney shelved the project. (It would not be the last time that the movie sat on the shelf…)

The movie took a long time to make and was Disney’s most expensive production to date. Reportedly it’s kind of a mess and an unsuccessful attempt to mix the work of multiple directors over a difficult adaptation. This is news to me, since I love the movie.

Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland is my favorite version of the tale (yes, including the book). That doesn’t mean it’s the best, of course, just that it’s the one I grew up with and most closely associate with Lewis Carroll’s tale. In fact, it certainly isn’t the greatest version, as it’s more of an abridgement than an adaptation. I’m sure Carroll scholars detest Disney’s treatment of this most wonderful work, but honestly I’ve never had my hair blown back by his style of “literary nonsense” and all the hidden theological and political meanings in his writing.

So it isn’t an insightful understanding of the complexities of Carroll’s work. Guess we’ll just have to settle for it being a really fun kids movie. Maybe the picture only gets a corner of the nonsense, whimsy and absurdity of the source novel – that’s still a healthy dose for an animated movie in 1951.

At 75 minutes, it’s a short picture, typical of the time. It’s a pretty packed film for such a short runtime. Alice in Wonderland contains more songs than any other Disney picture, something you don’t really notice because many of them are very brief. The picture also includes a number of elements from the second Alice novel, Through the Looking-Glass, including one of the highlights of the picture, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”.

The film certainly was the product of many cooks, with three directors, ten directing animators, and thirteen screenwriters, not including the early draft by Aldous Huxley! Lots of stuff got left in draft form or cut, leading you to believe that the movie could have easily been twice as long. If it was a success, maybe they would have adapted the sequel.

Alas, the film fared uncharacteristically poorly for a classic Disney feature. It wasn’t a flop but if it made back its budget it could only be on paper when you consider the true costs of the lengthy development time. Unlike other Disney pictures which were re-released every 6 or 7 years, Alice wasn’t put out again by the company until 1974, although an abbreviated version of the film was shown on tv periodically. Unofficially the film was screened at universities in the late 1960’s for reasons that should be immediately apparent, causing the company to actually recall some of the existing prints from.

I love the picture – I’ve always loved it. Not all of the music works and Walt was right – Alice herself isn’t a very likeable character. But it’s the right amount of madcap fun for kids. The art direction is marvelous, making for a gorgeous film with wonderful voice acting. Possibly tame now, it’s pretty subversive for 1951, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t enjoy it.

Poster:

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Pass

The Representation Test Score: C (6 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://movies.disney.com/alice-in-wonderland-1951″ name=”Alice In Wonderland” description=”Join Alice as she chases the White Rabbit and journeys into a topsy-turvy world that gets “curiouser and curiouser” as her fantastical adventures unfold. Meet the Mad Hatter, March Hare, Tweedledee & Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts and more unforgettable characters, all set against a backdrop of awe-inspiring splendor.” director=”Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske” actor_1=”Kathryn Beaumont” ]

Main Cast	Kathryn Beaumont Alice (voice), Ed Wynn Mad Hatter (voice), Richard Haydn Caterpillar (voice), Sterling Holloway Cheshire Cat (voice)
Rating	G
Release Date	Thu 26 Jul 1951 UTC
Director	Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson
Genres	Animation, Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Musical
Plot	Alice stumbles into the world of Wonderland. Will she get home? Not if the Queen of Hearts has her way.
Poster
Runtime	75
Tagline	A world of wonders in One Great Picture
Writers	Lewis Carroll (as Lewis Carrol) (adaptation), Winston Hibler (story) …
Year	1951

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

A masterful thriller from a time when family entertainment didn’t need to be cute or dumbed down. 30 years on it still plays extremely well.

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Cloak & Dagger:

The 30^th anniversary reviews keep coming. I think I’m going to need some serious convincing that 1984 was not the single best year in history for movies. Despite not having a movie with the words Star Wars in the title, it was an amazing run of features.

There was a Gary Cooper film named Cloak & Dagger in 1946, but the 1984 Henry Thomas/Dabney Coleman movie isn’t actually a remake of that picture, but rather a remake of the film noir The Window (1949). (The Window was itself based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich called “The Boy Who Cried Murder”. The concept of a witness to a murder who needs to be silenced sure appears in a lot of movies…)

If you saw the movie in theaters during the first few weeks of its run beginning July 13, 1984, you saw it as a double feature with The Last Starfighter. I don’t remember if that’s how I saw it, but I vividly remember seeing the picture in the theater and running home to augment my Dungeons & Dragons games with Jack Flack and a spy game. I don’t think it had occurred to me before this that you could have role-playing adventures that didn’t involve swords and monsters. I remember looking through the role-playing supplements at the local bookstore and in TSR ads for any spy modules. I know they had a game called Top Secret, though I never played it.

Cloak & Dagger came out at that great time when not only was it ok to be into D&D and video games – it was actually cool. Along with pictures like WarGames, Tron & The Last Starfighter, it was a golden age…

In the movie, Davey Osbourne (Thomas) is an 11-year old fan of video games and stories, always wishing real life could be as exciting as the adventures of his RPG hero, Jack Flack (Coleman). Jack doesn’t just star in the Cloak & Dagger RPG and Atari video game of the same name, he is Davey’s imaginary friend who follows our young hero around as the boy tries to inject some excitement in his life. Davey’s real life is mundane and unsatisfying – his mother has recently died and his father Hal (also Coleman) is loving but dull, trying to raise an introverted son while his job as a military air traffic controller requires him to be often absent. Davey spends much of his time at the local gameshop (The Gamekeeper, a real store – in California, not the film’s location of San Antonio) with his younger neighbor Kim (Christina Nigra) playing C&D (I forgot that’s how the kids referred to it in the movie – love it).

Everything changes, however, when gameshop owner and dungeon master Morris (William Forsythe) sends the kids on an errand downtown and Davey alone witnesses a murder. A dying man in a lab coat gives Davey a Cloak & Dagger videogame cartridge with instructions to bring it to the FBI and give them a code number. MacGuffin successfully passed, the mysterious man dies, thrusting Davey into a real-life Cloak & Dagger adventure as the killers try to silence him and retrieve the cartridge.

Just writing out the synopsis makes me want to go watch the movie again. It’s just so good! A near perfect adventure for kids, the film is surprisingly serious as a thriller. While perfect for a young audience, it works for just about anyone as screenwriter Tom Holland and director Richard Franklin crafted a taut tale that doesn’t flinch from violence and real peril for the main characters. This is the only film either made that is even remotely family-friendly as they were known for pictures like Psycho II.

The kids are in serious danger for much of the film and are exposed to very adult situations. That no one believes them makes it all the more compelling. This combination of an allegory about growing up and the tone perfect understanding of what it must be like to be a kid in this situation makes the movie not just entertaining for a young audience, but also I think an important step in graduating to more complex material. I’d argue that it is as effective as many of the famous novels in depicting a time in a young persons life when things begin to get scarily adult and would be good in teaching kids to come to terms with this transition.

Due to the video game crash of the mid-1980’s, there never was an actual Atari 5200 Cloak & Dagger video game cartridge produced. The game did appear in arcades (Atari repurposed a game in development, Agent X, as a movie tie-in) which is better than The Last Starfighter achieved. Despite the inability to play the game at home on your Atari, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who re-enacted Jack Flack adventures with pencil & paper or running around the neighborhood pretending to be a spy.

Cloak & Dagger was one of my all-time favorite movies as a kid, and I’m amazed just how well it still works today as I revisit it. It was spellbinding to my daughter, watching it for the first time, and while I hope they never try to remake it (although I’m certain they will), I think that studying and trying to duplicate the spirit of this movie would be invaluable to modern filmmakers.

Poster:

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Fail

The Representation Test Score: C (6 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” name=”Cloak & Dagger” description=”A young boy, with a penchant for spy thrillers and video games, finds himself in the middle of real espionage when he’s relentlessly pursued by spies after he comes into possession of a video game cartridge containing top-secret government info.” director=”Richard Franklin” actor_1=”Henry Thomas” actor_2=”Dabney Coleman”]

Main Cast	Henry Thomas Davey Osborne, Dabney Coleman Jack Flack/Hal Osborne, Michael Murphy Rice, Christina Nigra Kim Gardener
Rating	PG
Release Date	Fri 10 Aug 1984 UTC
Director	Richard Franklin
Genres	Action, Family, Adventure, Crime, Thriller, Mystery
Plot	11-year-old Davey, whose mother is dead and whose father doesn’t spend nearly enough time with him….
Poster
Runtime	101
Tagline	Davey’s hero was imaginary . . . but the enemy agents were real!
Writers	Tom Holland (screen story), Tom Holland (screenplay)
Year	1984

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

These 2 things may seem mutually exclusive but they’re not: 1) Green Lantern isn’t as bad as they say. 2) What’s wrong with it? Everything.

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Green Lantern:

I have never read a Green Lantern comic. He sometimes would show up in other DC Comics I read, but even then it was pretty rare. So my review is limited to the merits of the movie as a standalone and not on any adaptation criteria. So if you are a fan of the comic series or character, I will probably annoy you with the following statement: Green Lantern is not an interesting character. Maybe that’s just in this movie – it probably is. But most of the problems with the Green Lantern film don’t strike me as poor filmmaking…

I wanted to like this movie – I really did. And I don’t hate it. But it just really doesn’t work very well.

The problems start almost immediately – there’s something about a narrated introduction that fills me with dread. It means that you instantly are going to be told things that you are expected to remember – that isn’t a problem. No, the problem is that my silly meter is very often set off by a whole bunch of exposition filled with silly names and suspect logic. Sometimes this isn’t a deal-killer. Off the top of my head I can think of three great films with silly opening narration (written or spoken): Highlander, Terminator & Blade Runner. Sometimes you just have a bunch of info that you have to get across or the movie will be confusing. But the roll-out of Green Lantern had me rolling my eyes before the titles:

The immortals or Guardians on the planet Oa have harnessed the emerald energy of willpower. (The power of this story is based on a color?) They divided the universe into 3,600 sectors and sent out a bunch of green rings which would choose worthy peacekeepers, so naturally these oddly-numbered recruits would be known as the Green Lantern Corps. (Wait a minute, I thought the ring was the magic item? Now it’s a lantern? Did they send lanterns out to everyone, too? Why aren’t they called the Green Ring Corps?)

I know this sounds like a really nit-picky point, but I think this is part of the trouble I have with the character. There’s just too much going on. There’s a ring, but it needs to get charged by a lantern, which needs to get charged by a planet, which was created by weird looking aliens that are immortal, which is another way of saying they are stuck looking like that forever. It all takes place in space. And there are three thousand and six hundred of them. Oh, and the power doesn’t come from the lantern or the ring or the planet, it comes from willpower. Which is green. Not yellow, because that’s fear. Fear is more powerful but it corrupts. I don’t know what red does…

Parallax is the main villain. He is gross – really gross. All yellow and brown with an enormous forehead. In fact, there are a lot of ugly characters in this movie. And not just the villains. I consider this a bit of a deal-killer. Again, maybe I’m being petty and maybe long-time readers were thrilled to see Sinestro as pink with a widow’s peak and David Niven mustache. Or the fish-guy or Hector Hammond (also mustachioed…hmm…). But I think I speak for most of us when I say that watching the hero fight a nauseating brownish-yellow cloud and a sweaty guy with greasy hair and a bulbous forehead is entirely joyless.

I think we were all a little confused and wary when it was announced that the suit would be entirely digital. I’m going to say that again – the main character’s costume is CG. How could you possibly manage a budget when the costume has to be created for every frame that the title character appears in? They certainly didn’t skimp anywhere else, because the effects are top-shelf. Like the rest of the movie, they look weird and have questionable design, but they are unquestionably well done.

The action, too, is well done if not riveting. The actors themselves are fine. I don’t really even have a problem with Reynolds in the title role; he plays it too goofy, but again, I think that’s the filmmaker’s choice. And I’m not going to criticize anyone who had a hard time taking this seriously.

There’s a sameness to Green Lantern that is ultimately the most damning thing about it. The comic-book action is good but can leave you bored because of any number of reasons: story, design, characters. DC obviously swung for the fences with this one but really was undone because of the fundamental shakiness of the character. It may work very well on paper and I’ve even seen a fairly enjoyable animated movie, but for live action it’s just a little out there. That said, I think that the character would probably work much better in a Justice League movie. I’m just not sure that he’s strong enough to support his own franchise.

Poster:

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Fail

The Representation Test Score: D (3 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

 

[schema type=”movie” name=”Green Lantern” description=”A test pilot is granted an alien ring that bestows him with otherworldly powers that inducts him into an intergalactic police force.” director=”Martin Campbell” actor_1=”Ryan Reynolds” actor_2=”Blake Lively” actor_3=”Peter Sarsgaard” actor_4=”Mark Strong” ]

Main Cast	Ryan Reynolds Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Blake Lively Carol Ferris, Peter Sarsgaard Hector Hammond, Mark Strong Sinestro
Rating	PG-13
Release Date	Fri 17 Jun 2011 UTC
Director	Martin Campbell
Genres	Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Plot	A test pilot is granted an alien ring that bestows him with otherworldly powers that inducts him into an intergalactic police force.
Poster
Runtime	114
Tagline	One of us… becomes one of them.
Writers	Greg Berlanti (screenplay) &, Michael Green (screenplay) …
Year	2011