Ten years ago I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a lovely enough city but at the time boasted only a handful of cineplexes with all of them playing very-much the same thing. I had only just discovered Netflix DVDs (remember those) owing to the fact that I had only recently come out …
There is nothing greater for a cinephile like me to watch a movie for the first time and falling in love with it. This is especially true when you see said movie in a theatre with all the hype surrounding its release and you can't help but get swept up in it. The first viewing …
Continue reading 10 Year Anniversary: Does it Hold Up? (2008 Edition)
A dirty little secret in Disney movies is that while they have created many great heroes, both male and female, for kids to look up to and emulate it is almost always the villains who are the most interesting characters in whatever movie they end up in. Villains are the characters animators dream about getting …
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 …
Homebody Movies 