As is often the case in the earlier half of Disney Studio's existence, the quest for artistic excellence without any consideration of cost often came back to bite them hard later. This happened early on where the artistically superb Pinocchio and Fantasia proved to be such financial flops as to ultimately cripple the studio for a good decade. History …
Continue reading Disney Silver Age #6: One Hundred And One Dalmatians
At some point in every Star Wars fan's life they end up asking these series of questions: How did Han Solo and Chewbacca meet up for the first time? Why is he called Han Solo anyway? How did Han win the Millennium Falcon from Lando? Why did Han go on the Kessel Run, and why …
Continue reading Solo: A Star Wars Story (Big Screen Review)
Sleeping Beauty came during a time of tumultuous change for the Walt Disney company. Walt himself was quickly being pulled away in multiple directions by the company's forays into live-action films, documentaries, the TV-division, and a little project called Disneyland. In addition the animation division itself was starting to get serious competition from new upstarts like …
Continuing my never-ending quest of diving through all my Criterion movies, this month I decided to tackle a bunch of my screwball comedies. Of course given the enormous magnitude of my collection, I was only able to get through maybe half of my Criterion screwball comedies at best. To be fair, as the high number …
Continue reading Adventures in Criterion Vol. 2: Screwball Comedies
Much like E.T. the alien himself waddling unbeknownst past Mary, the matriarch of a suburban home, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial similarly seems to be a movie that seems to maintain a very low profile in my day-to-day psyche. And yet every time I see this movie again I am reminded that like its titular alien it is a …
Continue reading Hall of Fame #3: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Lady and the Tramp was a first for Disney for several reasons. After a series of fantastical stories it represented Disney's first domestic picture based not on a fairy tale but in a more realistic human setting (with Bambi of course being a realistic movie set in the wilderness). It was also Disney's first feature film not …
A lot has seemingly happened since the last time we checked in with Netflix. Most importantly they recently got into an epic battle with Cannes over the film festival's decision to disqualify any film from being in competition that did not have a planned theatrical distribution. This resulted in Netflix pulling all of its movies from …
With Avengers: Infinity War boasting close to two-dozen superheroes and a slew of other non-super characters it is safe to say that it is an ensemble cast movie (and one of the more ambitious ones to boot). The ensemble cast movie, with so many moving pieces to put together, is a notoriously hard type of movie for …
I was three-quarters of the way through watching the classic Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire musical Swing Time and just about ready to declare it one of the best things I had ever seen. Up to that point it had been a breezy and sweet musical filled with splendiferous dance numbers and a touch of old-school Hollywood class. …
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