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Peter Chattaway has just
posted some thoughts he’s previously shared elsewhere regarding the shape of Pixar’s body of work to date, and I’ve long thought it’s a brilliant theory.
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Yesterday
I wrote about the possible effects of the box-office success of
Alice in Wonderland on fairy-tale revisionism in family films to come. The flip side is the box-office disappointment of Disney’s
The Princess and the Frog, which hit DVD shelves yesterday.
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It’s a straw in the wind: As the recently restored 1939 classic
The Wizard of Oz comes out on Blu-ray today, Warner Bros is giving renewed attention to a pair of new Oz projects in early development, now likelier than ever to come to fruition. The reason:
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
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In my
last post on
Green Zone, I wrote that while I was reasonably pleased with my review, I was sure that “if I were a savvier political thinker it would be a better review.” Now, posting at
Arts & Faith, Peter Chattaway has thoughts that would never have occurred to me, darn it.
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Regular readers know that I usually steer clear of politically themed movies. I’m the same in real life; political discussions usually shut me down, simply because I feel I have nothing to say, and on the rare occasions that I do I often wind up regretting it.
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C |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
It’s tidy, comforting revisionism, like sending Rambo back into Vietnam so we can win this time. Instead of a morass in which the search for WMDs simply peters out, we get the closure of a smoking gun, a scapegoat whom Miller can buttonhole with righteous fury like Harrison Ford lacing into the president at the end of
Clear and Present Danger.
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Seaplanes combine Miyazaki’s twin gravity-defying loves of water and sky, flying and floating, as well as his affinity for vintage technology — and the movie’s haphazard, kitchen-sink style suggests that the director just wanted to kick back and have fun with this one. There are aerial dogfights, star-crossed romance, gorgeous scenery, a hat tip Fleischer-style vintage animation, a rip-roaring escape sequence set in Milan, a nightclub where enemies sit at adjacent tables like Rick’s in
Casablanca and the proprietress sings torch songs, and a showdown between the titular hero and an American antagonist that plays like the ultimate Humphrey Bogart / Errol Flynn smackdown that never was.
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Exactly 70 years ago today, on March 5, 1940, Josef Stalin and the entire Soviet Politburo signed an order to massacre tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war: officers, mostly reservists; doctors, academics, civil servants, clergymen of all faiths—the cream of the Polish intelligentsia.
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D |
*½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
The film is actually a joint evisceration not only of Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland, but also of “Jabberwocky,” with Alice recast as (so help me) a messianic warrior-hero destined to claim the fabled “Vorpal Sword,” don shining armor, and wage an epic battle on the fated “Frabjous Day” against the forces of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the dragon-like Jabberwocky.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
From the Leonardo-like engineering illustrations of the opening credit sequence to the hauntingly surreal final image on the edge of space, Hayao Miyazaki’s
Laputa, or
Castle in the Sky as it’s been dubbed for English-speaking audiences, displays the filmmaker’s visionary brilliance as a shaper of worlds as compellingly as any film he has made.
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“Read not the
Times, read the eternities,” Thoreau advised. The
2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films, just released days ahead of the Academy Awards, won’t make the headlines of the
Times — but if you prefer to scrutinize the eternities, you might want to skip the Oscars and check out the Arts & Faith Top 100.
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Marking this week’s DVD release of Hayao Miyazaki’s
Ponyo — as well as new special editions of three of Miyazaki’s most family-friendly films,
My Neighbor Totoro,
Kiki’s Delivery Service and
Castle in the Sky), I’ve posted a new article on “
The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki,” written for this month’s issue of
Catholic World Report.
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Miyazaki’s whole body of work (less one or two sub-par exceptions) offers unduplicated vistas of imaginative wonder and beauty, images of startling power, admirable and likable heroines and heroes, humanely conceived supporting characters, elusively engaging storytelling, wholesome moral themes, and unexpected sly humor. He is the sort of artist whose work doesn’t just entertain audiences, but wins enthusiasts. For those who haven’t yet discovered him, Miyazaki is a taste well worth acquiring.
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My friend Matt Page, who blogs
Bible Films Blog, has just written an interesting post on
color and color symbolism in Bible films.
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A recent story in
Variety connects the dots around various real-life and large- and small-screen stories and comes up with a disturbing picture: One way or another, 2009 was a high-profile year for adultery.
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Too long neglected,
Decent Films Mail returns today with two new columns,
Mailbag #16 and
Mailbag #17. (For the benefit of RSS subscribers, at this writing it looks like the RSS feed hasn’t yet picked up on them. This looks like a glitch; I’ll look into it.)
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Clint Eastwood,
Avatar,
Hotel Rwanda,
Children of Men, Hayao Miyzaki, Lenten viewing,
The Last Temptation of Christ,
Dogma, Harry Potter and more.
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“Zorro: The Complete Seasons 1 & 2”,
Up in the Air,
Adam, Dan Brown,
Terminator movies and more.
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A few weeks ago the
National Catholic Register ran my
2009 year-end piece with my lists of “top ten” and runner-up films. (An
expanded version of the article appeared at Decent Films.) This week, I’d like to catch up with a few other lists from Christian sources worth noting.
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My
Lenten viewing suggestions prompted a reader to ask: “Would you consider supplementing an English-only list? I love the idea of a Lenten movie night, but I have several children under reading age, and my husband just dislikes reading his movies. LOL. I will have to carve out time on my own during the week to watch the intriguing foreign films you have included.”
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If so, check out the
Emeth Society, billed as “A Book and Film Society Promoting Catholic Culture in the Diocese of Phoenix.” And if you
don’t live near Phoenix, check out their website anyway, and ask yourself, “How can I get something like this going in
my diocese?”
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Many Catholics observe Lent with a discipline of withdrawal, in whole or in part, from mass communications media: movies, television, Internet, radio, music, newspapers. This is an admirable discipline … I find it helpful to make a practice of spiritual viewing during Lent, just as many make a practice of spiritual reading. For those inclined to consider this practice, here are six film suggestions for the six weeks of Lent.
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This weekend, the release of
The Wolfman made me think of highlighting my
2003 essay on horror and the macabre, originally written for the re-release of Ridley Scott’s
Alien. At first I thought I would take the occasion to make a few cosmetic changes, but as I began pulling threads here and there, I kept thinking of ways to improve the piece, until I wound up doing quite a bit more work expanding the piece than I originally intended. (The story of my life…)
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Horror represents a field many Christians approach with trepidation, and rightly so. The horror shelves of bookstores and video stores are very largely a wasteland of mindless, tasteless trash; indeed, there may be no other genre as disproportionately overrun with junk. Yet the grotesque, the macabre, and the frightful have an abiding place in human imagination and culture — a place that Christian sensibility has historically not seen fit to reject or condemn, at least entirely.
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B- |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Harry Potter meets
Clash of the Titans in
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the first installment of Rick Riordan’s fantasy pentalogy, directed by Chris Columbus (
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). The target audience for
Percy Jackson & The Olympians has never seen
Clash of the Titans, of course (I mean the original
Clash of the Titans, of course, not the coming remake). That they have seen Harry Potter goes without saying.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults*
The Wolfman retells the classic werewolf story, but has little to add besides volume and gore. Jump moments pile up to the point that you stop jumping and merely feel annoyed at the obvious, heavy-handed manipulation. Alone in the dark in his ancestral home, Lawrence Talbot seems to hear a creepy whisper, but it turns out he’s just remembering something from his youth. Then a minute later it happens again. Later on there’s a gotcha dream, with a menacing figure rising from the shadows and leaping at Lawrence in his bed — but then he wakes up. Or so it seems, but then it happens again — but it’s a dream again. It’s like a haunted house where they never stop jumping out and saying “Boo!”
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“Spectacular Spider-Man” is perhaps the most exciting entertainment for family audiences to come from the small screen in a very long time. I’ve been watching it on DVD with my kids, and with this week’s release of Vols 6 and 7 nearly completing the show’s two-season run to date, it’s apparent that the show just keeps getting better and better.
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Last week I blogged about my upcoming Catholic Answers Live appearance — but I wrote the wrong day. It’s
Thursday, 2/11, not Friday, 2/12, from 7pm–8pm EST / 4pm–5pm PST. Sorry for the confusion!
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Adults
Toward the end, the two storylines almost converge as Julie’s blog comes to Julia’s attention — and Julia’s reported response leaves Powell in tears. How that twist strikes you make depend in part on which storyline you have felt closer to, on whose movie it is for you. Either way, there’s something for everyone, and if there’s a couple of brief bedroom scenes, for once they involve happily married couples.
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