I’m tempted to begin this review the way they used to introduce famous people on TV: “My guest tonight needs no introduction …” This line has received its share of ribbing, being an introduction that declares itself pointless, but in fairness, you always need an introduction. Even for people everybody already knows about. Like Cinderella….
Tag: movies
Movie Review: Arthur Christmas
Arthur’s heart was in the right place; it was his feet that usually weren’t. He wasn’t quite harmless – certainly not to the elves he routinely tripped over, whose home he once accidentally melted. But he meant well. Arthur Christmas is a story of Santa, his wife, his father, and his two sons. If you…
Review: Big Hero 6
If you really want to get the bad guy, it’s logical to conclude you need a hero. You might further conclude, especially if you’re fourteen, that you need a superhero. But to go from there to creating a superhero? For that, you need adolescent logic combined with genius-level skill. So enter, stage-right, Hiro Hamada, the…
Movie Review: Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one. And Peter Pan, eternally young in Never Land, has another sort of immortality in the real world. Everyone knows who Peter Pan is. Of all the re-tellings of Peter Pan over the years, Disney’s 1953 film may well be the most famous. A skilled artistry underlies the whole movie….
Review: Epic
One of the oldest dreams of humanity is that there is another world within ours – maybe smaller in size, but larger in most other things. And while we dream of that grand world, thrilling with fear and with wonder, we sometimes dream of finding our way in. To judge by all the stories, it’s…
CSFF Blog Tour: Cleansing Legends
These past few days, as the blog tour has been reviewing and debating Merlin’s Blade, I have been reminded of Walt Disney’s Sword in the Stone. I don’t know what that tells you about my frame of reference, but there you have it. Merlin’s Blade and Sword in the Stone are vastly dissimilar; any exhaustive…
The Mind’s Reel
There are movie lines that stay with you, that your mind keeps on playing whether you ask for it or not. And many of these lines stick without any inherent merit or apparent superiority. These are not the things that, while reading a script, leap up at you; no, they stay tamely on the page,…
Review: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Stooges come in all shapes and sizes. Some are culpably stupid, some are innocently stupid, some are actively corrupt. Some stooges know that they’re stooges, and some don’t know even that. Many are bought men, and a few are only duped. Jefferson Smith was another type of stooge – a tall, thin, Lincoln-quoting patriot, a…
Review: Arthur Christmas
Arthur’s heart was in the right place; it was his feet that usually weren’t. He wasn’t quite harmless – certainly not to the elves he routinely tripped over, whose home he once accidentally melted. But he meant well. Arthur Christmas is a story of Santa, his wife, his father, and his two sons. If you…
Review: The Fox and the Hound
The world has its natural enemies, creatures it pits against each other. Wolves and sheep. Farmer and locust. Hunter and deer. The fox and the hound. Disney’s The Fox and the Hound is called a story of friendship. It’s as much a story of enmity, and most of all a story of a confusion of…