I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to think I could write an obituary of Joe Grant, the veteran Disney artist who died on Friday: try Jim Hill Media or LaughingPlace for that. But I did want to write a little bit about what a symbolic moment this is, particularly coming so soon after the death of legendary animator Frank Thomas (the second-last of Disney’s so-called “Nine Old Men”) last September.
Yearly Archives: 2005
51 posts
You may have noticed how on current affairs shows, when they cut back to Ray Martin after a story, he often says: “We’ll be following that story and keep you posted on any further developments.” Which means that they’ll immediately forget about the poor victim whose case they were beating up, unless something else sensational happens, or the original story rates its socks off. Well, I’m not like that. So when I broke (okay, repeated) the news of the Bugs Bunny redesign, I followed up the further developments (here).
I wrote a while back about how much I was looking forward to the new movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so I thought it was worth commenting briefly on the ruckus over M.J. Simpson’s review of the film. For those that don’t lurk around the geeky corners of the internet, Simpson – a writer with a pretty impressive CV when it comes to writing about Adams – wrote a long, spoiler-filled review of the film (which you can find here). Previous to this, most of the reviews that had leaked out from preview screenings had been pretty positive: often they said a few things needed to be changed, but even that didn’t seem outrageous given that the whole point of these screenings was to fine-tune the film.
The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004)
Spanish Title: Mar Adentro
The posters and press ads for Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside are not terribly enlightening: the face of hunky Javier Bardem dominates the image, set against the featureless blue of the sea. There is no indication of the content of the film, which centres on the quest by Ramón Sampedro (Bardem), a quadraplegic, to end his own life. Yet there is a greater honesty at work here, for the film is not the worthy-but-gruelling experience that the material might have you expecting. The Sea Inside is a tender and often funny film that is always engrossing and ultimately deeply moving.
There’s a new TV spot for Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory up at The Movie Box. While not that exciting in itself, it’s an excuse to point you towards the full length trailer that has been around a while now, which is hosted from the same page. This is undoubtedly the weirdest piece of promotional material ever to be released by a major studio: it’s strange even by Tim Burton standards.
Bambi (David Hand, 1942)
Bambi was the last great Disney cartoon. It was the last in his amazing run of features between 1937 and 1942 (following Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo), and was in many ways the climax of that sequence. After Bambi the studio would never quite be the same again: a divisive strike, financial difficulties, and World War II would see Disney give up on true feature film production for the rest of the forties. For all their virtues, the features he would make later (starting with Cinderella in 1950) never reached the heights of these first five features. Bambi, with its cute baby animals and impeccable animation, is also probably the film that epitomises the common perception of Disney films.
Is this it? Is this the sign that in America at least, every single thing that can possibly be released on DVD is already out? I refer to the news that Rambo: The Animated Series is to be released on DVD. I had no idea that such a show ever existed, and it truly boggles the mind. But then, having been about nine or ten when Rambo: First Blood Part II was released, I do recall that the film series had a lot of appeal for small boys. (Who knows what it did to their fragile little minds – although it could do a lot to explain the current political environment). The picture on the front of volume 2, in which Rambo punches out an indeterminate ethnic stereotype, is particularly disturbing. (And have Bruce Lee’s estate signed off on the use of the title “Enter the Dragon?”)
Life’s small irritations: it always annoys me that the TV show M*A*S*H, starring Alan Alda, is so much better known and more widely seen than Robert Altman’s original 1970 film MASH (with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, and without asterisks in the title). Altman’s movie is a classic, really brutal and anarchic in a way that the TV show could never be. And who could really prefer Alan Alda to Sutherland, or Larry Linville to Robert Duvall, or Loretta Swit to Sally Kellerman, or William Christopher to Rene Auberjonois, or Wayne Rogers to Elliot Gould? There shouldn’t be any competition.
Lists that attempt to categorise the Top Ten, Top Fifty or Top One Hundred of a particular thing (Films, American Films, Horror Films, Action Scenes, Stars, etc) are a staple of arguments between internet nerds, but they also pop up in a wider context. The classic example is when magazines or media outlets run one as a stunt: they choose the Top Fifty of something-or-other, and then hope that news services will pick the story up, thus getting whatever outlet came up with the list some free publicity. At their best, these can be a lot of fun, and a few, such as the lists by the American Film Institutue, arguably serve some legitimate role in raising awareness of classic films. However, every so often you get a real doozy: when Turner Classic Movies in Britain surveyed their readers to come up with the best director, actor and actress that had never won an Oscar, they came up with Demi Moore as the most deserving actress. TCM, of course, still came out a winner – the poll was reported as if it was serious news worldwide.
The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004)
The Aviator sees one of the most celebrated of living filmmakers chronicle the life of one of the twentieth century’s most extravagant and flamboyant figures. Howard Hughes has been an obvious and tempting topic for ages: there has already been one film biography, the 1977 The Amazing Howard Hughes, with Tommy Lee Jones (which I haven’t seen), and Spielberg was kicking around Hughes as a subject with William Goldman and Warren Beatty back in the early 1990s. The Aviator is a somewhat old-fashioned, straightforward biopic, and it will never make a list of Scorsese’s greatest movies, but it’s a highly polished and engaging movie that for the most part overcomes some flaws in its screenplay.
Hughes’ astonishing life has so many facets that it provides almost too much for any one film, and The Aviator wisely narrows its focus to his relatively early years, starting with his epic production of the film Hell’s Angels in the late 1920s, and taking the story through to his test flight of the “Spruce Goose” in the late 1940s. His loopy-as-an-airshow later years (in which he became one of the world’s most determined recluses) aren’t covered, although they are heavily foreshadowed: the film takes him from gregarious playboy to an obsessive eccentric. It’s a story filled with big name characters (Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow), and Scorsese’s reputation has secured a deep cast to give the film that old-fashioned big epic feel. In addition to Leonardo Di Caprio as Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Hepburn, the film features Alec Baldwin, John C Reilly, Jude Law, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Kate Beckinsale, Edward Herrmann and Willem Dafoe in a range of often small parts.