Musical

The Jungle Book

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The Jungle Book was the last Disney animated film in which Walt Disney had any direct involvement. It’s probably not a coincidence that it also marked the end of the first real “Golden Age” of classical animated features from the House of the Mouse.

While the studio would continue to produce other cell-animated movies over the next twenty years, no one was ever going to confuse The Aristocats and The Rescuers for Pinocchio. It wouldn’t be until The Little Mermaid in 1989 that Disney would really reclaim its animated mojo.

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Help!

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With the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, they had the good sense not to saddle the lads with anything that closely resembled a plot. Their 1965 follow-up is similarly devoid of a storyline but saddled with the unnecessary appearance of having a plot. The alleged narrative ends up accomplishing nothing but diverting attention away from the music and scenes of the Beatles doing what they did best: being the Beatles. There are a few moments in which the four boys get the chance to cut loose and in those scenes, Help! does manage to come to life. Alas, there are not enough of those.

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Dreamgirls

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Dreamgirls took a long time to make the trip from Broadway to the screen, so long that when this film appeared I had all but forgotten that it had first been a play. Big and glossy, this movie is very successful at entertaining you, even if it does seem to play it a little safe at times. The biggest impact of this movie may just be serving notice of arrival of a potent new singing talent.

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1776

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If the rest of American history would have had such great musical numbers, I might have gotten better grades. Okay, this adaptation of the hit Broadway play wasn’t exactly letter-perfect history but it is remarkably faithful to the facts for, you know, a musical. It’s also extremely entertaining if you allow for its stage bound origins.

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De-Lovely

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The good news is that, even if De-Lovely’s narrative were completely missing in action, it would still be worth a viewing for its first-class productions of Cole Porter’s music, featuring performances by several contemporary artists like Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, and Natalie Cole. The even better news is that the story of De-Lovely, tracking the last fifty years of Cole Porter’s life, is also worth your attention.

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Lady and the Tramp

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Despite the silly, saccharine and inconsequential nature of its story, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp still stands as one of the great achievements in the history of the Mouse Factory’s animated features. Even if the movie had no story it all, that wouldn’t change the fact that it is one of the most gorgeously illustrated of the Disney animated films. There isn’t a frame of this film that I wouldn’t be happy to have framed and hanging on my wall. The animation of the canine characters fluidly blends realism and anthropomorphic fantasy. The filmmakers also make superb use of the movie’s 2.55:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio, a rarity among animated films of any kind.

The film is also unique in that it was also filmed simultaneously in the 4:3 Academy ratio. However, the “Full Screen” version on the new DVD is not this version, but a pan and scan of the CinemaScope film. That doesn’t matter, since here we watch only the widescreen version if we can, but it’s still sad that one of the original versions of this classic is not available.

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Rent

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Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire, seems like an odd choice to direct the film adaptation of an edgy, somewhat avante-garde musical like Rent. Unfortunately, the results tend to bear out the first impression created by this news. While the music and performances live up to the expectations formed by the Broadway play, Columbus’s direction fails to impress. His cinematography and staging tend toward the pedestrian, more appropriate to a beer commercial than a bohemian musical.

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The Blues Brothers

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Regardless of whether or not I like the movie, The Blues Brothers has something serious to answer for. This is probably the film that convinced movie producers that sketch characters from Saturday Night Live could be successfully translated into movies. Therefore “Joliet” Jake and Elwood have to shoulder part of the blame for travesties like A Night at the Roxbury and It’s Pat.

The problem is that the Blues Brothers weren’t sketch characters. They didn’t have a catch phrase and their only “schtick” was a genuine respect for the music that they covered. This gave screenwriters Dan Aykroyd and John Landis the freedom to craft an actual story around the characters. If the story is a little too slight to support two hours and thirteen minutes of running time, that doesn’t matter too much. Like their Blues Brothers appearances on SNL, this movie is mostly about the music.

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Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride

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The visual imagination of Tim Burton is probably unequalled among today’s filmmakers and when he brings it to bear on a project suited to his particular talents, the results are almost always unique and special. Corpse Bride, like Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, is an example of Burton playing on his home turf and swinging for the fences.

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The Muppet Movie

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In a lot of ways, the Muppets were the Looney Tunes of their generation, seemingly directed at small children but operating at a gleefully subversive level of sophistication that goes right over the kids’ heads and straight for the hearts of their parents. Their first feature length film plays like an extended big-screen version of their late-seventies television show. This is a good thing.

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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I dimly remember reading Roald Dahl‘s book as a child but, for the life of me, I can’t recall if I ever saw the 1971 adapatation with Gene Wilder. I almost rented it to watch a few weeks ago but the only copy I could get from Netflix was the original pan-and-scan “full” screen edition. I’m sorry, but if there is one thing that this writer does not abide, it’s the butchering of a film’s original image to fit the confines of a TV screen. Thus the Wilder version will go unreviewed here until I can track down a widescreen copy.

Tim Burton‘s other films based on other people’s material have been a mixed bag. Continue reading