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cruztacean
Reviews
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Tiana was likable and real
I'm not giving this the highest rating, but I wanted to say I was very pleased with Tiana herself. Of all the Disney princesses, she is the one with whom I would most like to be friends, if she were a real person.
First of all, Anika Noni Rose is one TREMENDOUS singer! Her vocal performance on "Almost There," if nothing else, makes the film worth watching. Besides this, the work ethic instilled is a breath of fresh air. Tiana isn't a mere decoration of a princess such as Aurora or Snow White, isolated from society while waiting for her prince to come and rescue her, nor is she a helpless victim like Cinderella. She has her many adversities, but she keeps her attitude positive and works toward her own goal. Unlike others who only happen to have been born into favorable circumstances, this Disney character actually *earned* her right to be called "princess." Not by defying authority (Ariel) or running away (Jasmine) but by good old fashioned hard work.
Christians who are offended at the voodoo and the "Shadow Man" character are missing out on a few things: Naveen and Lawrence turned to the dark side for help, found themselves in serious trouble, and could only be rescued by guidance from a star called Evangeline, which means "bringer of good news." The word "evangelist" comes from the same root, and it cannot be coincidence that this name was chosen for the star. Wasn't Evangeline herself reminiscent of a cross? I think there is an excellent opportunity here to use the story to teach children about their Savior.
As for racism, I didn't see any, but I'll admit that not being of that race, I am not qualified to speak with authority, which is why I'm glossing over the question of racism. However, sexism is another issue- -and wonderfully, I see none except where it would be expected: the snide remarks from the real estate agents, when talking to a woman in the 1920's who is as independent and self-reliant as Tiana. If there is any racism there ("a woman of your station") then it would also be expected in that context. More importantly, though, did Tiana let it stop her from achieving her dreams? No. And neither should anyone else.
The film was criticized for killing off a character, but then so did The Lion King. Ray's funeral was touching, and his family's joy at seeing him now joined with Evangeline was absolutely heart-warming. Again a potential Christian application here: when we die, it isn't the end.
Another lesson, and an important one for young girls: Who got the prince? The one who wasn't looking for one, who was perfectly set to make her own dreams come true. Who got left out? The spoiled rich girl waiting passively for the prince.
If I have a criticism, it's that even for someone who once lived in Southern Louisiana myself, I found the Cajun accents a bit too thick sometimes to follow.
Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
Add me to the "I liked it" camp
I believe that those who are most vocally panning "Mrs. Winterbourne" are doing so because they simply don't like the genre of light-hearted romantic comedy. As a comedy, not a drama, and especially as a mistaken identity plot bordering on farce, it isn't *supposed* to resemble a true-to-life documentary, OK? I don't understand those who say Ricki Lake shouldn't have been cast in the female lead role. Why? Because she isn't some A-list skeletal blonde? She played Connie/Patricia admirably, and says that this is the role that made her the proudest to play. It was the first role, she said, where her weight didn't factor into the casting. Should she be sorry she's too "average looking" for some people's Hottiewood tastes? I don't think so. Who says ordinary women don't deserve love and romance too?
We'll get the obvious out of the way first. Of COURSE Shirley MacLaine shines as Grace Winterbourne. That lady could play a seashell and be absolutely spellbinding. Of COURSE Brendan Fraser has women swooning over his Hugh/Bill Winterbourne. That's what Brendan Fraser does. It's the smaller roles that make the movie wonderful: Loren Dean is altogether tops as Steven DeCunzo, the abusive womanizing lowlife who fathers Connie's baby and then abandons her to the streets, ultimately getting what he richly deserves. Convincing? Hey, I wanted to smack him myself. Nesbitt Blaisdell stole the scene as the homeless man who befriends a very pregnant Connie. "They pray at you," he warns her about a particular shelter, "but the food's good." Miguel Sandoval is truly enjoyable as Paco, the butler. The only small problem here is that Paco's homosexuality is a trait I gathered only from script, not from character development. In other words, I just never would have guessed Paco was gay without it being said outright. For all I know Sandoval himself could be homosexual (I have no idea) and my saying that he doesn't believably portray one could be hilarious in its irony, but it just doesn't seem that way to me. What do I want, a stereotype? Probably. Farces are usually full of them. Farce is all about exaggeration, and exaggeration relies heavily on stereotype.
My favorite scene in the movie has got to be the aftermath of the "Sunny Side of the Street" fiasco. Streetwise teenager tells catty blonde débutantes to "f--- off," leaving them flabbergasted with shock. That's funny enough, but then smooth, cultured, filthy rich family matriarch comes along behind her with, "You heard her. F--- off," which was one hundred percent hysterical.
There's the scene at the train station where Paco delivers the line, "You are as much a Winterbourne as I am," putting a lump in my throat.
I do have trouble with the wedding scene at the end. Connie stops the proceedings (and nearly stops the priest's pulse as well) by unexpectedly saying no. She, Patricia Winterbourne, does *not* take Bill Winterbourne to be her husband. "I, Constance Helen Doyle, do all that." And everything's back on again. My problem is that the marriage license would have read Patricia Winterbourne. They wouldn't have had time to correct it. Which, of course, would invalidate the ceremony, making Grandma Grace Winterbourne's closing line to baby Hughie--"They're married"--a false statement. Oh, no they're not. Also, I am forced to agree that Ricki Lake does NOT look like a character who just turned 18 years old. But hey, if I'm going to be consistent and say that farce isn't supposed to be completely believable, then we can suspend reality for those things too.
To summarize, so what if Mrs. Winterbourne is a chick flick? Chicks are half the world's population, guys. Get used to it.
The Loneliest Runner (1976)
Not Landon's best
From an autobiographical point of view, I suppose Mr. Landon wanted to be true to his own experience, but if he merely wanted to base fiction on something that happened to him, then it was less than spellbinding. The entire plot consisted of purely one-note drama all centered around the boy's bed wetting and the mother's humiliation of him for it. Subplots would have been helpful.
The mother made me sick, how she mentally, verbally, and psychologically tortured that boy. Anyone with half a brain knows that no sane kindergarten child, let alone a teenager, would wet the bed on purpose and subject himself to all that crap day after day.
The father made me even sicker, how he failed to stand up for his son, and how he lied to the doctor. "No, I didn't wet the bed when I was a child." In the end it turned out he had. Why didn't he tell the doctor the truth? Because he didn't want to be embarrassed? He'd rather let his son carry the full load of embarrassment himself? Especially knowing exactly what his son was going through, Dad should have been supportive. Furthermore, I kept waiting for that wimpazoid to grow some you-know-whats and tell his abusive wife off, but I waited the length of the entire movie for nothing more than, "Alice, will you shut up?" Shut up? Is that all? How about shut up, pack your bags, hit the road, and never come near this boy again unless you want to be arrested for child abuse?
The late, great, Michael Landon went on to write and direct much better work than this. Perhaps it's just because it was an early work that it falls so far short of his standard. Even Leonardo DaVinci had to start out scribbling.
Yours, Mine and Ours (1968)
Brady Bunch on steroids
This and Captains Courageous (Freddie Bartholomew's version) are easily my two favorite movies of all time. I've not even seen the 2005 remake, and given the reviews it got, I might not bother.
I do have some problems, mostly with character portrayal. These problems, however, are not the fault of the acting but of the writing and directing. To wit:
1.) Colleen North, aka Little Miss Histrionics. Hard for me to tell whether Jennifer Leak was overacting, or whether Colleen was supposed to be played as such a dramatic, hyper-emotional teenage girl always bordering on the hysterical.
2.) Susan Beardsley, the human garbage disposal. Holly O'Brien was merely pudgy, not actually fat, but it was enough to play on the stereotype. Everyone knows that if you have extra weight, it means you have no control over yourself. Eating is all you ever do. Thus Susan takes twice as much (or more) at the table, and then finishes what everyone else leaves behind. And her eyes light up like Christmas at the mention of food. Thank you, Hollywood, for such an accurate and sensitive portrayal of weight issues.
3.) Would Helen, a nurse, actually question her own judgment and ask hubby if he thinks her son has a temperature? I don't think he would have doubted himself and asked her opinion about Navy shipbuilding. That's his area of expertise. Nursing is hers. Or was she trying to score points by playing the helpless damsel in distress waiting for her knight in shining armor?
4.) The fight between Helen and Sister Mary Alice over Beardsley vs. North wouldn't have happened. At the first sign of conflict, any teacher in any school would have referred the matter to the principal rather than keep arguing with the parent.
These complaints are trivial, though, compared to the things I love about the film. I have listed everything I didn't like about the movie, but I cannot list everything I did like, because it would involve literally everything else. Nothing in this world is perfect, so "Yours, Mine, and Ours" probably comes as close as possible. I loved seeing Lucille Ball as a real woman, a person with some semblance of intelligence, as opposed to that incompetent mockery of a housewife that Ricky Ricardo even felt entitled to spank sometimes for misbehaving. I loved Helen's gentle but effective dig at the judge who praised her by criticizing his own wife. The children are adorable. Much positive press has been given to Eric Shea as Philip North Beardsley (and rightfully so) but it was Michelle Tobin's Veronica who really stole my heart. As for the older children, in contrast to Colleen's drama queen act, I was much more drawn to the responsible, level-headed Rosemary as played by Nancy Roth.
The scenes at the bar and at the Japanese restaurant were outright hysterical, and that Chinese doll Helen and Frank were admiring in the store window...oh, the looks on their faces when the proprietor said the f-word (fertility)!
9/10.
Multiplicity (1996)
The sexism spoiled it for me
There are three stars for the concept, which I would have greatly enjoyed except for the following sexist elements, making it obvious to me that the story was written by some pretty unenlightened men:
1: The general plot more than suggesting that it takes four men working in overdrive to please one woman--and they still don't quite manage to do it.
2: A wife stereotypically resorting to tears to get her way, leaving a baffled husband wondering what the thunder she wants. When #4 informs #1 that Laura had been crying, #1 acted surprised, and I wondered why. This was her typical modus operandi; what was the big shock?
3: A wife needing her husband's permission to go back to work, and then not doing it because he doesn't enthusiastically jump up and down loving the idea. (She cried, of course.)
4: A stumbling explanation of why she is expected to be more maternal and nurturing than she apparently is, culminating in a blurted out, "That's why you have breasts." Translation: anatomy dictates role in life.
Actually, Laura irked me more than Doug did. If there's one thing worse than a chauvinistic man, it's a wimpy woman who gives credence to the chauvinism.
If it weren't for these things, I would have ranked Multiplicity much higher. I was terribly disappointed after having such high hopes based on the concept. I did, however, enjoy the deal with cloning #4 from #2 and getting someone who is described as "special." #3's explanation about making a copy of a copy, and having it not be as sharp as the original, is probably the best part of the movie.
The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986)
Ugh.
I am giving four stars for the acting and cinematography, which were excellent.
What bites is the degree to which the movie strayed from the book. Now, I realize that some of this would be inevitable. But the screenwriters took it too far, as if they didn't get the spirit of the books. They essentially made it an altogether different story with the same names. The movie lost me after the first scenes depicting the earthquake and the cave lion attack, which were done well. After that, I didn't recognize it. I'm talking about major differences in both plot and character.
Plot: The movie says Ayla is "the first of the Others that the Clan had seen." What about the man with the broken arm, whom Iza's grandmother had treated for his injuries? It is The Mammoth Hunters, the third book in the series, that finally reveals just who the man was, but the story is told in CotCB.
Plot: Ayla is not pregnant at the time of her exile. She does not give birth in solitude. As a matter of fact, she doesn't even reach full adulthood until long after she is caught using the weapon, the crime for which she is exiled (death cursed) in the first place.
Plot: The movie suggests that no one would provide for Durc simply because Ayla had no mate, and her adopted father could not himself hunt. In fact, the baby was half Cro-Magnon. The Neanderthals had never seen a mixture before and didn't understand the combination of features. They saw Durc as hideously deformed, even more so than Creb. It was for that reason that the men of the Clan had wanted to leave him to die, not just because he would be a welfare child.
Character: Broud has been raping Ayla repeatedly. Like modern rapists, he is actually getting his jollies from making Ayla do something she hates. Finally, during the last rape, she is so happy about being pregnant that she doesn't care anymore and doesn't react. To put it as delicately as possible, this completely deflates Broud, and he can't continue. So far so good. But then one of the women who are watching immediately takes a dig at Broud's wife Oga, using a stick in her hand to illustrate her point, and the women giggle. Mrs. Auel had made it clear in her book that 1.) The Neanderthals were not able to smile or laugh, and 2.) The women are genetically programmed to be so submissive and fearful of the men, that they would never have laughed about a man's shortcomings even if they could.
Character: Brun also is seen smiling, something that he should not have been able to do.
Character: Blond, blue-eyed Ayla is seen as terribly ugly by the Clan, because she is so drastically different. Her height and her propensity for hunting make her, though she seems the ideal of feminine beauty to us, appear to the Clan as something of a butch. So why would Brug, the blue-eyed Clan (which is doubtful) have ignored Uba, a young woman from the highest line of medicine women, in favor of so-called ugly and unladylike Ayla? The movie suggests that had Brug not been killed in the bear ceremony, he would have possibly pursued a mating. I have trouble adapting to that. Which leads me to--
Plot: There is no Brug in the Clan of the Cave Bear book. It was Gorn who was killed in the bear ceremony. Brug doesn't come along until Plains of Passage. He is also known as Brugar, and then he is a different person entirely.
Plot: The hallucination Ayla experiences after she follows the mog-urs into the cave is nowhere near the book. Also, the movie shows Ayla being summoned to the cave, drawn by Creb/Mog-ur's voice calling to her by name. Actually, for her to be there was deadly taboo. The movie did not make this clear.
Plot AND Character: After making Broud leader, Brun would not have had the power to then fire him. And Broud's falling to the ground in abject humility after Brun's chastisement of him would not have happened.
The playing-with-the-echo scene, I understand, is simply a method by which they showed the passage of time as Ayla grew to be a woman. Seemed a little cheesy to me, though. I had wondered why in the heck she would be standing there repeatedly calling out her own name. It took me a few viewings to realize that she was, in fact, playing with an echo.
Kudos to the actors, to the makeup artists, to the people in charge of scenery, etc. Not-so-kudos to the screenwriters. I think they blew it.
Look Who's Talking Now (1993)
Well, *I* liked it. May contain some spoilers.
Call me lame, but I am a sucker for these talking-animal movies that it seems to be the fashion to hate. It is also pretty much a given that we have to hate sequels, just for being sequels. I'm going against the grain here, but that's me.
The movie is downright cute. If people want to equate "cute" with "sappy," making it a bad thing, I respond that some movies are supposed to be an escape from reality.
This said, I don't like everything about it. I never liked John Travolta's James in the first place. He (the character, I mean) is a hypermacho creep who gives men in general a bad name. His character causes Lysette Anthony's Samantha to lose ground not for her acting, but for something that is not her fault: the writing that fails to answer the question, "So what does she see in him anyway?" Kirstie Alley's Mollie can be annoying too, with her overemotional dramatizing of everything, although the deliberately campy dream sequences redeem things just a touch. If we're going to be melodramatic, at least let's do it on purpose, right? Thank goodness for the children and the dogs to carry the movie. They are the reason for six of the seven stars I've given it. Olympia Dukakis as the now fair-minded, formerly buttinsky grandma, accounts for the seventh.
The interplay between the snobby purebred and the streetwise mutt is hysterically funny. "Doggy snacks" to the trainers, who were able to get the dogs to behave on cue with the perfect gestures and facial expressions. More doggy snacks to Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton, the canine voices. David Gallagher and Tabitha Lupien are stellar as Mikey and Julie, and deliver performances as well as or better than anyone can expect at their ages.
As for the writing, it isn't all bad. "I never liked this haircut," says Daphne the spoiled poodle. "My butt is freezing!"