TV/Movies Megathread

[MadImmortalMan]

At one point another villain's suit still had the label on. It was from C&A. He was a multi-millionaire banker.

Did they at least snip the vents open?

[Eddie Teach]

BTW, I dropped it after episode 1.

I have more time to waste on so-so tv shows. 

Heck, I'm still watching Agents of SHIELD.

[Ideologue]

Atonement (2007).  Is a seriously bitchin' long take worth an hour of Thomas Hardyesque super-boredom beforehand and a dumb twist ending afterward?  You make the call.

C+

Body Double (1984).  Brian De Palma shows the world exactly how to edit a great pop song into your movie: you don't edit it at all.  The world keeps turning as it had before.

B+

The Lion King (1994).  I liked this a lot more when I was a kid, and didn't realize 1)Simba was a shit, 2)the ideology of the royal lions is despicable, 3)Scar is the most likeable character, and 4)the climactic battle scene is undermined at every turn by goofy sight gags involving the comic relief characters, carrying on what may well be Disney's very worst tradition, the one that would just about ruin Hunchback and pose some serious issues to Mulan and Frozen.  At least in Beauty and the Beast it made a little bit of sense.

Sure, it's well-animated, but the songs aren't even that good and I'm tired of giving Disney animation an undeserved .5 bump.

C+

Amadeus (1984).  Did they really have dry ice in 1781?  I'm dubious.

B+

[jimmy olsen]

The Lion King (1994).  I liked this a lot more when I was a kid, and didn't realize 1)Simba was a shit, 2)the ideology of the royal lions is despicable, 3)Scar is the most likeable character, and 4)the climactic battle scene is undermined at every turn by goofy sight gags involving the comic relief characters, carrying on what may well be Disney's very worst tradition, the one that would just about ruin Hunchback and pose some serious issues to Mulan and Frozen.  At least in Beauty and the Beast it made a little bit of sense.

Sure, it's well-animated, but the songs aren't even that good and I'm tired of giving Disney animation an undeserved .5 bump.

C+

Are you fucking serious?

With some of the crap animated movies you've given As, and you give The Lion King a C+?

[garbon]

Get him, Tim!

Also, The Lion King musical is lovely.

[Ideologue]

Which crap animated movies have I given As?

My list of reviewed animated films to which I also gave As, so as I recall, is:

Little Mermaid (A+)
Fantasia (A+)
Transformers: The Movie (A+)
Aladdin (A+)
Tangled (A+) (originally an A, but I conceded this was too low for a film featuring such an achievement of lighting and spectacle)
Anastasia (A)
The Lego Movie (A) (potentially also too low)
(Secret of NIMH would also be an A, but I've never formally nor informally reviewed it; I think I gave Hercules a B+ due to its lack of top-shelf musicality, although I would give it an A now, despite my misgivings regarding its anachronistic humor and poor reading of Greek mythology.)

I'd have felt more comfortable giving The Lion King a safe B if Rifiki had not defeated a pack of hyenas using kung fu.  Or that the hyenas were essentially negated as a threat when Pumbaa just bum-rushed them.  That part's retarded.  Those scenes are staight-up Fs, and by being intercut with A+ material, they necessarily corrupt it.  Don't you agree?

Also, the sequences where zebras and other prey animals grovel to the lions that may one day murder them, and Mufasa's spurious justifications, makes me want to puke.  At least Bambi's equally baffling "Prince of the Forest" conceit was about a placid herbivore that wouldn't just as easily eat Thumper as play around on the ice with him.

[Syt]

Anastasia (A)

The fuck, what??

[Ideologue]

It's astonishingly pretty, I like the love story, and "In the Dark of the Night" is one of my favorite songs from a musical.  Rasputin and Bartok are, arguably, pretty stupid villains overall, but ultimately it's a riff on Jafar and Iago, so I can't be too angry.  I do not like its conception of the Russian Revolution as something that occurred due to black magic rather than the depredations of the class to which Anastasia belonged, but if you applied the same historical analysis to about any Disney movie whatsoever, it would suffer as well; we just don't because they usually don't set their horribly classist princess stories in the 20th century.

I forgot Land Before Time.  That would totally get an A or A+.  I'm still waiting on a BD release of that; not to mention the release of the excised material that made the movie about herbivorous dinosaurs almost starving to death in the midst of being stalked by apex predators too violent.

[The Brain]

Amadeus (1984).
B+

Fuck you, moran.

[MadImmortalMan]

Here's one for Beeb.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068235/

Special appearance by Trevor Bannister from AYBS.

[Josquius]

Anastasia (A)

The fuck, what??

And Hercules.
Isn't that generally regarded as one of the worst Disney films out there?

[Savonarola]

Parisian Love (1925)

Before "The Plastic Age" Clara Bow made some awful films (and after the invention of sound as well, but that's another story), Parisian Love might be among the worst from that part of her career.  Clara is an Apache (a French gangster, not a Native American).  She and her boyfriend try to burgle a scientist's residence; the boyfriend gets caught and the scientist recognizes him as a former student.  So the scientist takes care of him and introduces him to proper society.  As boyfriend leaves the country to pitch a burglar alarm to the British, Clara embarks on a fantastic revenge scheme.  She pretends to be a girl raised in the convent, and somehow the scientist falls in love with her.  They dance the tango and he proposes.  At their wedding she reveals that she's an Apache and only married him for revenge.  Then her boyfriend returns and Clara rushes into his arms.  Fortunately another Apache shoots Clara and the story is brought to some sort of closure.

It's dull and doesn't make sense.  Clara gives it her all, but there's no chemistry at all with the boyfriend.  It would have been more believable if Clara had actually fallen in love with the scientist; they made a better couple.  The scientist and boyfriend would have made a more convincing couple too; but 1925 was not ready for bromances.

[Ideologue]

Yes, but what of Wings?  Does it live up to the reputation of the show that bore its name?

[Ideologue]

Anastasia (A)

The fuck, what??

And Hercules.
Isn't that generally regarded as one of the worst Disney films out there?

No.  Chicken Little is.

Hercules is, it's true, considered one of the worst of the Renaissance--though I'd reckon that Pocahontas has a lesser reputation, and Hunchback's combination of problematic elements with extremely good ones has left it in the dustbin of history.  Still, its directors Ron Clements and John Musker, if not operating at the height of their powers (Mermaid, Aladdin), still exceeding by a fair margin their evidently far less talented colleagues.  Clements and Musker are the only Disney directors of the era who didn't seem so keen on self-sabotage and managed to both balance comic and dramatic tones and avoid introducing troubling conceptual elements--compare Mermaid to Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin to The Lion King.  If any principal player stumbles, it's Alan Menken--whose best work was and remains in the shadow of the late Howard Ashman.  However, it's not for lack of trying: his experiment with the gospel Muses just doesn't work that well, and along with Mulan, Hercules did usher in the long hibernation of the Disney musical form.

The animation and design are each sublime, James Woods is at his Woodsiest, both very amusing and still believably evil, the Titans are cool, Megara is still one of my favorite Disney female leads, and I like Michael Bolton's main theme.  It's probably Disney Animation's best film till 2010, though I really do need to sit down and watch Clements and Musker's bizarre passion project, Treasure Planet (which does contend for "worst" Renaissance feature, although some would argue the Renaissance had already ended with Tarzan or Fantasia 2000, both of which have serious weaknesses).  Clements and Musker had certainly lost it by the time of The Princess and the Frog, which is not horrible, just a bit of a bore.  The duo's back at work at Disney now, though, and they'll return with a Polynesian-themed CG-animated ( ) film in 2016 or 2017, however.  I'm looking forward to it.  If it's even close to as good as Hercules, it'll still beat the pants off of Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph.

[Savonarola]

Yes, but what of Wings?  Does it live up to the reputation of the show that bore its name?

I don't know if anything could live up to that standard...



The story is very much tied to the time and place it was made (America about a decade after the First World War.)  The camerawork is amazing, especially in the airplane scenes.  I don't know of anything like that in the early sound era; even the Hugh's extravaganza, "Hell's Angels," seems far behind "Wings."