From My Collection: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T Movie Review

Way back in the mid-1950s Theodore Geisel wrote a screenplay. If you don’t know who Geisel is, you probably know him by his pseudonym Dr. Seuss. Yes, that Dr. Seuss. The one who wrote about fifty children’s rhyming books between 1937 and 1990, all of which take place in fantastic worlds populated by bizarre creatures from the mind of a genius. His screenplay, for which he also conceived the story, is The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

It is a scarcely remembered movie, with barely even a cult following, that I first came upon as a freshman in college, where the Film Society made it the first in a Halloween double feature with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I loved it that first time I saw it and again the next year again (when I became president of the Film Society I could no longer justify the $250 rental fee with only about $20 in ticket sales). But I returned to it again recently with my son, who is well-versed in many of Seuss’s books.

Purple Rain Movie Review

The sudden death of the enigmatic celebrity, the electrifying performer, the virtuoso musician Prince made me jump immediately to a movie I’d never seen before. Purple Rain was Prince’s first movie. He starred in it and of course wrote all the music that his character, The Kid (a somewhat autobiographical version of himself), performs. He won an Oscar for Best Original Musical – the last time that Oscar category was even awarded. Purple Rain has never a bright reputation. It’s no work of cinematic gold and is only remembered today because it stars Prince and his music. By most accounts, it is the best of Prince’s four films so I can only imagine just how bad Under the Cherry Moon must be.

Classic Movie Review: Lady and the Tramp

One of the Disney animated classics that I fondly remember from childhood is Lady and the Tramp. It ws re-released to theaters when I was a kid (before widespread home video releases and before Disney put them out on VHS). It felt more monumental to me then than it does now. At only 76 minutes, it is briskly paced and spare. There’s really not much story to tell and the big romance between Lady (voiced by Barbara Luddy) and the street mutt Tramp (Larry Roberts) is developed in one brief sequence when Lady is lost away from home and Tramp saves her from some unsavory dogs and takes her on a date to an Italian restaurant for the iconic spaghetti-eating scene, which is now one of the most indelibly romantic moments in cinema history.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Aladdin

It had been a very long time since I’d last seen Disney’s Aladdin. I was inspired to take another look at it because of the tragically too soon death of Robin Williams a few months ago. I’m not sure there’s any other Disney animated film that leans so heavily on the voice talent of one particular actor the way Aladdin does. That’s not to say it has nothing else going for it, but Williams’ voice work as the genie is so memorable, it’s hard not to think of the film as a Robin Williams vehicle rather than one in  long and proud tradition of animated feature films.

Everyone Says I Love You Movie Review

Woody Allen’s career has been a lengthy string of annual hits or misses. Part of what makes him so compelling a filmmaker is how he dives right in and commits himself even to the ones that aren’t so great, just to keep himself working and putting out new material every year. His movies have a way of changing over time – for me at least – so that The Purple Rose of Cairo seemed a lesser effort, a whimsical throwaway, when I was twenty, but when I revisited it at about thirty-one, there was greatness I had missed. Sometimes it goes the other way, as with Everyone Says I Love You, which I liked a lot more seventeen years ago than I did the other day.

Short Cut Movie Review: Frozen

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Disney’s Frozen is a loose (very loose) adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale The Snow Queen. As an example of classic Disney animation, it succeeds wonderfully. This is gorgeously rendered computer animation. The palette is beautiful icy blues blended with crystalline whites with lots of shine and sparkle. The story, by Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, and Shane Morris is at least more contemporary in theme than Disney’s princess movies have typically been, by which I mean this isn’t strictly about a young woman desperate to meet a man to marry. Buck and Lee directed the film.

Elsa is the young woman with the often uncontrollable power to turn the world around her to ice. She’s spent the majority of her youth and first years of adulthood locked away from the world. Her sister Anna has no memory of what she can do. Both women want the best for each other and their primary goals are, in the case of Elsa, to avoid hurting her sister, and for Anna, to have a normal life with access to and a relationship with Elsa.

Unable to resist the temptation to include adorable non-human characters, there is a snowman come to life named Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad), who has the best musical number in the movie in which he sings about his desire to experience summer and warm sunshine. There’s also an interesting colony of little trolls with the film’s second best number. Unfortunately, the rest of the songs are close to dreadful. They capture little of the classical style Disney used to do best. The music by Robert Lopez sounds like contemporary pop rock: the same spiritless, over-produced music for mass consumption that we get from any of the TV talent contest shows. Kristen Anderson-Lopez’s lyrics often don’t help, performing the function that too many modern musicals utilize which is to have dialogue and narration sung rather than spoken. Songs in musicals should express ideas and emotions rather than actions and instructions. Incidentally, the singing by Kristen Bell as Anna and Idina Menzel as Elsa veers into ear-splitting awfulness. When Menzel strikes the high notes in her big song, I literally cringed and winced at the piercing shriek. But this is what passes for good singing today – the tightly strained and forced cries that would never pass muster outside popular opinion. It would have been much better movie without the songs.

Les Miserables Movie Review

I saw Les Miserables on Broadway as part of a class trip in sixth grade. There are three observations I’d like to make after seeing Tom Hooper’s new film adaptation, with a screenplay by William Nicholson, of the stage musical. The first is that I’m surprised a public school took eleven-year olds to a play that features prostitution, suicide as a means of atoning for lack of mercy, and the innuendo-laced number “Master of the House.” The second is that the show must have made quite an impression on me because, although I only saw it that once, I have several vivid memories of the staging of certain scenes. The final observation, and the most noteworthy, is that it is a damn fine musical. It’s got some riveting numbers, many of them as emotionally moving as anything in the history of great musicals. Yes, it occasionally suffers from one of my biggest pet peeves about some musicals: lyrics that narrate action. But as in the great tradition of opera, Les Miserables is a sung-through show with hardly any spoken dialogue. When it’s on point, however, as in the songs that focus on the expression of deep emotion, it is thrilling and moving.

Chico & Rita Movie Review

Chico & Rita is a lovely little tribute to an era in American culture during which a new American genre was born and to a country and its people who helped foment that genre. The genre I speak of is jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the country is Cuba, which lent a great many musicians to the New York music scene, bringing with them their conga drummers and smooth Latin beats to help transmute a the burgeoning new form.

Rio Movie Review

Several studios have tried to horn in on Disney’s virtual monopoly on feature animation, usually by trying to do things that Disney does not do. DreamWorks has created more grown-up oriented fare in the Shrek series and the little remembered Antz while Blue Sky Studios, best known for its Ice Age series, has tried to build its reputation around lovable animal characters. With Rio they’ve tried to branch out a little bit by including several prominent human characters in the story and by giving the film a rollicking musical score by John Powell (who also provided the wonderful score for How to Train Your Dragon) and some big musical numbers featuring singing characters and animated dance sequences.

The Muppets Movie Review

It’s been 15 years since the last time the Muppets graced cinema screens. I haven’t seen The Muppets in a movie since they took Manhattan 25 years ago. Someone in Hollywood apparently thought it was worth a shot to bring them back. Really they took a chance on Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, who came up with a story and pitched it successfully to Disney studio executives. Lo and behold, The Muppets, directed by James Bobin, has turned out to be one of the most successful Muppet movies.

Because it’s been so long since they went away the story has to awkwardly cater to their old fans while introducing them anew to the next generation. I don’t know if this is a franchise Disney can maintain because the one thing that remains certain after seeing this film is that the Muppets are analog characters in a digital age.

Moulin Rouge! Movie Review: Ten Years Later, It Still Does It

“Love Is Like Oxygen.” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.” Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong.” “All You Need Is Love.” At least that’s what pop music tells us as well as Christian, the young penniless Bohemian writer looking for truth, beauty, freedom and love in turn of the twentieth century Paris in Baz Luhrmann’s kinetic marvel Moulin Rouge! It’s ten years ago this month I first saw this movie on DVD and shortly thereafter I sought it out in the one Manhattan theater that was still showing it. It simply astounded me even though I fully expected to be repelled by it. I’m not a fan of musicals in general, but it quickly became, along with West Side Story, one of only two examples of the genre I truly adore and landed on my list of favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century.

Tangled Movie Review: Hardly a Disney Classic

Say what you want about Disney, and I could say plenty, but their classic animated films provide wonderful entertainment based on centuries-old classic tales. Even if they instill backward, “some day my prince will come” attitudes, they touch something in children that draws them into the stories. Throw in some great musical numbers and audiences walk out humming songs that will eventually be counted among the great movie songs of all time.

Their latest animated musical, Tangled, eschews the hand drawn look popularized during Disney’s heyday in favor of computer animation. It’s rather surprising that it took more than 80 years and 50 animated feature films for Disney to get around to the Grimm Brothers’ story of Rapunzel. It’s one of the classic princess stories along with Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, all of which were canonized by the Mouse House more than 50 years ago. Of course this isn’t the studio’s first computer animated feature, but it is the first done in the narrative style (complete with musical numbers) of their most memorable films.