tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53915994205184923792024-03-13T14:33:28.919-07:00Jesse's Casa de JesseNow with 13% less unwarranted hostility in the comments sections!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-70538167358753953682013-03-19T18:33:00.002-07:002013-03-19T18:33:42.255-07:00The Office Review: Episode 9.17, "The Farm"I'd really hate to be the breakout character on a sitcom. It sounds like a pretty miserable existence. The harder the writers push their breakout character, the less interesting that character becomes, as a particularly toxic sort of silliness inevitably seeps into the cracks where that interest once lied. I'd especially hate to be the breakout character of a sitcom who ends up getting his own spinoff. God, that would SUCK.<br />
<br />
But <i>The Office</i> is - or used to be and is trying, with varying degrees of success, to be again - less sitcommy, and I can actually almost imagine a pretty good Dwightcentric spinoff. (Obviously, this theoretical successful spinoff would've come into existence <i>before the ninth season</i>.) When the news first broke about <i>The Farm</i> - the actual failed Dwightcentric spinoff - I knew almost immediately that this was not that spinoff. But was I being overly negative? Would it really hurt to give Paul Lieberstein the benefit of the doubt for once? After all, he was good enough when he was just a writer; he simply seems to have been promoted past the thing he excelled at, like a Mike Scully. (Or a Michael Scott, if you'd prefer your <i>Office</i> reviews to only use metaphors about <i>Office</i> things.) Perhaps he'd have an easier time reigning things if he had a project he was at the helm of from the outset? (Y'know, just like Toby's Scranton Stranger investigation came to a quick and decisive and strangly conclusion once he actually took charge of that.)<br />
<br />
...yeah. Even though they made a modest effort to retrofit the pilot for <i>The Farm</i> back into <i>The Office</i> after the project was cancelled, let's not kid ourselves. This isn't really an <i>Office</i> review. This is a review of a different series altogether, one that never came to be.<br />
<br />
One that was thrown into a casket, and then shot, just to make absolutely sure that it's not accidentally buried alive.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Oh, yeah, beware of spoilers and stuff. And stuff.)</i></div><br />
<a name='more'></a>First things first, remember Aunt Shirley, who we literally just met in the previous episode and therefore have a deep, intense emotional connection to? Well, she's Dead Aunt Shirley now. This is used as an excuse to throw dirt on the majority of the main characters in this show. That's one way to start an episode, I guess? Always interesting to have a cold open where Dwight actually gets the best of Jim, but it's kind of an odd way to start an episode: setting up a funeral at which Dwight and<br />
Oscar are the only two familiar characters at a (sadly not all that romantic) funeral. (Sadly, we still don't get to see her "prehensile wing".)<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's a pretty transparent device to introduce us to the lesser Schrutes. There's his brother Jeb (Thomas Middleditch, of Professor Fartsparkles fame), who is also a farmer but - get this - he farms <i>pot</i>! In <i>California</i>! (And also, he speaks with a <i>lisp</i>! But only in <i>some scenes</i> so I'm not really sure what to make of it!) There's his sister Fannie (I hear it means something else in Britain), who is a <i>single mom</i> living in the <i>city</i>, complete with an <i>urbane, unmanly son</i>! And there's Cousin Zeke, who's....like Mose, but played by someone who would be willing to appear more than once or twice a season! It's definitely a more sitcommy setup than <i>The Office</i> itself started out with. They're characters we already feel like we already know everything about. We've been told their primary character quirks right upfront, without the room to grow that <i>The Farm</i>'s parent show wisely gave his characters. There would've been only one possible route of progression had this gone to series: Dwight's city-dwelling siblings heartwarmingly relearn the value of good old-fashioned rural livin'. Why would I want to stick around and watch this entire series, when I've already seen it in my mind?<br />
<br />
Because this was supposed to be a backdoor pilot (but now it's not, even though it TOTALLY STILL IS), nothing much really happens with the Schrutes even though we spend over two-thirds of the episode with them. There's the (not at all romantic, I must reiterate) funeral, a weirdly acted video will, and OF COURSE there's a scene where Dwight and the weird kid bond, thus making the weird kid less "weird" and therefore infinitely more valuable as a human being. (Sigh.) It makes sense, of course; they wanted us to get to know the characters they oh so misguidedly thought we'd be hanging out with for another 200 episodes too. Of Dwight's siblings, Fannie probably comes off the best. Partly because Majandra Delfino is kinda cute. (And also, where the Piantas live.) And partly because I like how she just happens to carry around a print-out of her poem, from the website, which makes that joke about ten times better than if it had actually been in a print publication. Zeke also feels like he makes sense here, representing the idea that there really is a place in this world where Dwight's not that weird after all. ("Dwight was obviously the cool one, and Mose was the visionary, which left me to be the comedian.") Jeb comes across as, by far, the least vital. I guess they thought having him grow pot was a joke in itself. (It's not.)<br />
<br />
We also get to meet Dwight's (Nazi?) Uncle Heinrich for, like, fifteen seconds. Why was he even here? (One of the deleted scenes that NBC released shows that he would've also gotten to accuse Dwight of being gay, had this episode not been edited all to hell. Sigh.) And there's some chick named Esther, who is young and blonde and "hot", albeit kinda trashy-looking as Amish go. Apparently she's memorable enough for Dwight to court her, with that now-cliché crow's beak business, but it comes outta fucking NOWHERE, because we only saw her for fifteen seconds earlier in the episode too! We know she likes riding around in the back of pickup trucks, and yarn - here's your new primary love interest for Dwight, folks! That's the problem with this episode in general, really. It's paced so, so terribly. If they really still insisted on showing the results of their failed experiment with <i>The Farm</i>, they really should've just SUCKED IT UP AND SHOWN US <i>THE FARM</i>. It's really hard to bond with these characters over the course of just twelve minutes of slow-paced rural comedy, and I know they wanted to downplay the fact that this WAS originally a backdoor pilot, but not only would anyone with half a brain be able to tell anyway, by cutting this story down to the point where you don't even know a damn thing about these people, they actually made it feel MORE confusing and unnecessary.<br />
<br />
Yeah, to make this feel more like a "real episode" of <i>The Office</i>, we also get a six-minute plot back at the office featuring the return of Todd Packer, a character so beloved that they only decided to let him return when they were desperate to fill six minutes of airtime with something of not very much substance. This plot was a pretty mixed bag. I thought Packer's attempts to apologize, with more insults, were pretty funny. And I guess the final reveal was amusing too, albeit pretty ludicrous. On the other hand, his character has never felt quite right with Michael Scott gone - he's so thoroughly detestable that he pretty much <i>needs</i> someone around to not hate him just to help it go down more smoothly. And, well, haven't we had more than enough "Kevin is stupid and dumb and will eat everything in sight regardless of the consequences" jokes for one series? Most importantly though, the pacing in this REALLY feels off, both because it's such a rushed plotline, and because it doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the episode, not even a little. Yet Another Revenge of Todd Packer completely breaks up the flow of <i>The Farm</i>, and <i>The Farm</i> completely breaks up the flow of Yet Another Revenge of Todd Packer, and they just taste weird together. (Well, I imagine Todd Packer tastes pretty weird the vast majority of the time regardless.)<br />
<br />
So, let's just ignore the kinda sorta almost successful side story and just focus on "The Farm", and <i>The Farm</i>. I've been going back and forth a lot in my head over what to rate this. There's <i>so much</i> wrong with it as an episode of television, on the one hand. It's awkwardly paced, with characters who are only intermittently interesting and don't have as much room to grow as you'd typically like mockumentary characters to have. Plus, if Esther is any indication, it looks like <i>The Farm</i> would've continued the unfortunate habit of Paul Lieberstein, Showrunner of introducing romantic subplots with women who get almost no characterization, or dialogue. (Remember Cathy? Remember Jessica? What does it tell you that I actually had to look up Andy's season-eight-girlfriend's name just to reference her?) At the same time, I can't help but feel a little sad that it didn't work out, because it feels like his heart really was in the right place - compared to the madness of Lieberstein's last season running <i>The Office</i>, this show looks like it would've actually been <i>more</i> down-to-earth, compared to my impressions when <i>The Farm</i> was first announced, and it just comes across as a genuinely good-natured, well-intentioned endeavor, even in its mediocrity. As such, I think I'll give it a little bit of a break and stick it right in the middle: "The Farm" gets a <b>5.0 out of 10!</b><br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and Down-Home Country Cookin':</b><br />
<ul><li>This week in Athlead: Whatever it is that this mysterious corporation does, we now know that employees can easily find more than enough time to accept trendy gift cupcakes! Spending time with their wives, though....eh, not so much. Life partners are neat and all, but they're certainly no cupcakes.</li>
<li>I always like it when the show acknowledges that its secondary characters' lives haven't really gone anywhere, either. Like Oscar realizing he's known Dwight for twelve years now. "<i>Twelve years.</i> Time is a son of a bitch."</li>
<li>It was nice to see Mose acknowledged in this episode, even if he disappeared after only one scene. "Will there be ghosts?" I'll have to remember that one the next time I'm invited to a funeral I'd rather not attend!</li>
<li>Similarly, Creed continues to hit his one or two bits of dialogue per episode out of the park. "I never forget a number. Names? In one ear and out the other. Places? Nope. Faces? That's rich. But numbers? I have a gift. I guess that's why I'm an accountant."</li>
<li>Of everyone who had a wacky story to tell about tripping balls on cupcakes, I probably liked Clark's the best. "I went Christmas caroling. In March. And I fertilized some bushes along the way. So, not my best night. But not my worst night."</li>
<li>For the first time in awhile, they released deleted scenes for this episode. I didn't really care for the one with Uncle Heinrich, like I said earlier, but I liked the other one, reintroducing us to Dwight the innkeeper. "I believe the duck was a Christian, if that's what you're asking."</li>
<li>So, can anyone tell me what's the deal with the almost-black-and-white-but-not-quite filter they used on the footage of Andy and Kevin doing weird shit in a druggy cupcake-induced stupor? Have they done this on the show before? Because it doesn't really feel familiar. Or right. Were the crew (of the, um, documentary) afraid we wouldn't realize this had taken place last night, even though Andy and Kevin had dialogue over the montage that pretty much explicitly spells out that this was last night? The hell?</li>
<li>For the record, though, I don't have a problem with the way they scored the last scene at the farm (of "The Farm" and <i>The Farm</i> fame) with "Sons and Daughters". It's a legitimate documentary technique, even if it fit better back in "The Dundies". Still, it almost makes me feel bad that this never became a series - I'm a sucker for optimistic "anything can happen now" moments, but they clearly....won't.</li>
<li>In three weeks: Promos for the documentary start airing, which might be interesting, maybe, depending on how the characters react. Also, Angela is apparently jealous of Esther, which probably won't be interesting. And Jim has a meeting with Ryan Howard, the baseball player, which could be fun, but only if the writers can actually be bothered to remember that they used to have a character named Ryan Howard on the show, too. At any rate, it'll have a more singular vision than "The Farm". I think. Here's hoping?</li>
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-22628481651125211652013-02-27T13:02:00.001-08:002013-02-27T13:02:47.769-08:00The Office Review: Episode 9.16, "Moving On"<div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Dwight brings Angela with him on a mission to clean his elderly Aunt Shirley."</i></div><br />
...that's how anyone reading this episode's description was greeted. "This is why you'll want to tune in to this episode", the guy who wrote the description seems to say, quite delusionally. "Dwight and Angela are washing an old person, guys!!" I generally assume it's a pretty thankless task, having to write these descriptions, but once or twice a season they get the thoroughly enviable task of having to compress a lot of weirdness down into one sentence, and that's when they can say to themselves, "This is what makes it all worth it." And though this isn't quite as viscerally exciting (and filthy sounding) as last season's "Darryl teaches Nellie how to eat a taco", it definitely gets points for oddness!<br />
<br />
The scary thing is that it ends up being one of the most important plots in an episode overstuffed with plots. Despite going up against Pam's job interview, and Andy's continued breakdown of his personal and professional likability, and Toby finally taking the Scranton Strangler case by the horns because apparently that's what people want, the extended storyline about aunt cleanin' manages to be just important. Is this the sort of thing we could've looked forward to <u>every week</u> if <i>The Farm</i> had been picked up as a series? Would we have eventually gotten an episode about Dwight teaching his wacky Nazi uncle to eat a taco too, for the universe is ultimately cyclical?<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Potential spoilers and whatnot after the cut!)</i></div><br />
<a name='more'></a>As usual with a vague title, there's the question of who, exactly, is moving on here. Is it Andy? Hell no it's not Andy! The episode description also claims that he's trying to move on from his relationship with Erin here, but he fails pretty miserable at that. Instead, he completes his devolution into a genuine villain by enacting an honest-to-goodness <i>evil scheme</i>. (Pete: "It IS awkward. This is a really uncomfortable situation that you've contrived.") And, well.....two episodes into his return, it's clear that he's just plain more entertaining now that we've abandoned any and all pretense that he is a person we are supposed to like, maybe, even a little bit. Granted, his character hasn't changed THAT much - after all, just last season, Andy's the guy who interrupted his girlfriend at her friend's bachelorette party to tell her he doesn't love her, not once, but twice! The only difference now is that we're not supposed to pretend he's a wonderful guy for stuff like this.<br />
<br />
I'm really baffled by the return of Gabe, and even more baffled by the fact that he's actually kind of funny here. Kind of funny enough that I'm glad we're seeing him again, and that's saying a lot considering the fact that I generally loathe those multiple seasons of the Andy/Erin/Gabe "love" "triangle". I was a little less sold on Pete's ex-girlfriend Alice, who kind of has a chimp face, albeit the sexiest chimp I've ever seen by a long shot. She's basically there to fill a stock role, that of the blandly bitchy girl who doesn't even try to remain professional in these situations, and she fulfills her role in the machinations of the story just fine. It's just that it's clearly less interesting than Gabe 2.0, which is kind of a sad prospect, really. Still, it's worth it for that shot of Andy Barnard, evil genius, taking delight in all the lives he ruined today. That's about as over-the-top as this show's cinematography can get without becoming ridiculous and distracting!<br />
<br />
So, if Andy's completely failing at moving on, then who else could it be? Is it Dwight and Angela, with the aunt-washin'? They come a bit closer, at least, and this plotline has a more mature, well-acted finale than it frankly deserves. Again, I'm baffled! For most of the hour, this is more <i>The Farm</i>-like Schrute family nonsense, of the sort they've been doing a LOT this season. (Paul Lieberstein's feelings must be spared, I guess, lest he wind up coming across as some sort of creepy sadsack!) When Dwight started describing his aunt, I rolled my eyes in anticipation of what was coming. And really, most of the plot was about as icky as I expected. And then Dwight gives his little "Casino Night"-lite speech, and it almost manages to put it all in context - Dwight <i>needs</i> someone like Angela to bring his weird, beety life some dignity. Against all reason, this moment actually worked for me. It's nice to see Angela Kinsey get to do some real acting again this season, and there's always something sweet about Dwight in what passes for an earnest moment for someone like him. "The eighty or ninety years I have left in this life, I want to spend with you."<br />
<br />
What about Toby? Is he finally moving on from this Scranton Strangler nonsense? He might actually be! After Nellie basically tells him to nut up or shut up, in more polite, British terms, he puts his neck on the line - The Proud Neck of Justice, isn't that the expression? - and discovers that, yeah, both he and all the conspiracy theorists in the audience have been wasting two seasons of their time. Is the sudden conclusion of this story with Toby in a neck brace funny? Yeah, it's funny enough. (Darryl was right - George Howard Skub IS a devil name.) Is it also a bit disappointing after having multiple behind-the-scenes interviews talk about how exciting it is that they're "solving" this mystery this season, not to mention two seasons of buildup? A little. Anyway, yeah, this is something that has happened now.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Pam realizes that she has "moved on", career-wise, after a job interview in Philly with Bob Odenkirk as Michael Scott. ("Moved on" in quotes because her current job is completely fabricated and mostly seems to involve tending to orders of PENS.) This is undoubtedly really, really gimmicky, and therefore really, really risky. If something like this doesn't work, why, it's nothing short of a mockery of the show's golden years! So it's a good thing that Odenkirk hits it out of the park - you can easily imagine a less attractive alternate universe where <i>he</i> played Michael Scott and had praise heaped upon him for years before he decided to abandon ship. Though, the really interesting thing about this guy, Mark, is the subtle ways in which he's different, and invariably creepier. Imagine, if you will, that season two became bleaker and more desperate, as opposed to lighter (both in tone, and in actual set lighting). Imagine, if you will, that Michael had a thing for knocking up receptionists. Perhaps it's all really aimless, a lot of Mark without much of anything to mold it, but it's fun anyway.<br />
<br />
Less fun is her dinner with Jim that night. Yeah, on one hand, it's as well acted as always, and on a technical level it's crafted quite nicely as well. And it was strangely refreshing to see flashes of their old cutesiness together, considering how genuinely sickening it had become by just last season. Okay, and yeah, the way Pam's mood crumbled when she spoke up about moving to Philly was a pretty good punch to the gut, as was intended. It's a really nice scene, on an objective level. But. Haven't they already had this same exact fight? Are you really gonna end the episode with the same setup to the same fight we've seen them starting to have several times before now? Doesn't drama usually hinge on gradually expanding a situation, not hammering the same exact moments week after week?<br />
<br />
Like many of its characters, <i>The Office</i> itself seems to be having trouble moving on as well. There's a definite sense of hesitance when it comes to finding its endgame. Somehow Jim and Pam's final season story arc seems less sure of itself than ever, and the reveal that this documentary will, in fact, be a thing that airs in the show's universe was handled about as awkwardly as possible. (There's a reason real documentaries often have a narrator instead!) "Moving On" is a curious episode in that there's a lot of stuff going on, and you'd think that would make it a prime treatment for an hour-long episode, but somehow the pacing never quite congeals. It feels less like an hour-long story, and more like a lot of interesting storylines that just happen to fill an hour for some reason. Like they only just started to realize how few episodes they have left to finish everything up. Awkwardness aside though, "Moving On" is still a nicely solid final season episode with a lot to like, so I'm gonna give it <b>7.5 somethingorothers out of 10!</b><br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and, Y'know, Stuff:</b><br />
<ul><li>Andy has officially managed to attract more open hostility from the office than even Michael ever managed. Even from Pam! "Where are you going?", he asks. "Not on a three month boat trip!"</li>
<li>Andy was on fire in the terrible nicknames department tonight, especially when it comes to Clark. Clarker Posey, Clarkwork Orange, Zero Clark Thirty.</li>
<li>Andy's making the most of the bachelor life. "Last night I ordered a pizza by myself and I ate it over the sink like a rat." (Clark: "There you go, good for you!")</li>
<li>Mark fails to sell the receptionist position: "The last three girls here all got pregnant. Don't be afraid, it's a different chair."</li>
<li>Gabe still wears Erin's old button-downs around his condo, and he doesn't have the lung capacity necessary to blow a whistle. And Cousin Mose apparently rapes scarecrows. Lots of dysfunction afoot tonight...</li>
<li>"Gabe, can you stop talking? Because every word out of your mouth is like the squawk of an ugly of an ugly pelican!"</li>
<li>A lot of fans seem to be convinced that Jim's character has been radically changed this season, but I feel like he convincingly comes across as himself trying to deal with a new and exciting but stressful situation. He still manages to be perfectly charming. "And this is just consolation champagne. It's from the part of France that IMMEDIATELY gave up to the Nazis."</li>
<li>Probably my favorite thing about Pete and Clark, as "New Jim" and "Dwight, Jr.", is the fact that they actually do seem to be non-antagonistic friends. It's cute! And in this episode Clark put his hand on Pete's shoulder so I am now compelled, by the laws of fandom, to imagine them doin' it, and I don't really mind that.</li>
<li>Coming up next week: Punxsutawney Phyllis, alas, did not see her own shadow, which means we have to deal with six more weeks of no new <i>Office</i>.</li>
<li>By the way, my apologies for being so very late on this. Anxiety and insomnia are the best of friends, and they enjoy teaming up to be unrelentingly assholish towards Jesse, who seemingly has no choice sometimes but to put things off until they decide to go back on vacation.</li>
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-67937440026568232322013-02-12T12:50:00.000-08:002013-02-12T12:50:11.148-08:00The Office Review: Episode 9.15, "Couples Discount"I'd like to wish you a belated Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Valentine's Day used to be predictably painful for me, but then I got a girlfriend (hi Tails!), so now I can be one of the relationshippy bourgeoisie, cruelly mocking the downtrodden proletariat of the single. Ah, yes - such a wonderful and thoroughly heartwarming holiday. And I couldn't be more thrilled that they moved it ahead a week this year, to February 7!<br />
<br />
....okay, yeah, it's a little weird to have a V-Day episode a week early when NBC will actually be airing an episode on the 14th anyway. As confusing holiday-related scheduling goes it's really minor, to be fair. Zombie <i>Community</i> will evidently be airing its Halloween episode next week, surely the result of some sort of deeply subversive, meta, and/or postmodern commentary on the very concept of sitcom holiday episodes and NOT the result of being screwed over by the network, repeatedly. I guess I shouldn't complain about this too much. Yet, I will. If they're going to be airing an episode of <i>The Office</i> next week anyway, then why didn't they plan around that a bit better when they made their decision to pair up "Couples Discount" and "Vandalism"? Of course, I'm surely incapable of understanding the deep complexities it takes to schedule programming. Maybe they thought it would just be awkward to air a Valentine's episode of something on the same night as a Halloween episode of something else?<br />
<br />
Yeah. Because "Couples Discount" would've totally been the awkward part of that equation. <i>Totally.</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Possible spoilers and such below the cut!)</i></div><br />
<a name='more'></a>Despite the title, this episode isn't really about couples discounts past the first act. (Theoretically, you could say that it's a discount in the <i>number</i> of couples, but even that's not true; Erin/Andy is over, but replaced by Erin/Pete so...yeah.) And, honestly, I'm glad this didn't last past the first act, because <i>The Office</i> is not a show that needs to be spending extended periods of time inside the Particularly Stereotypical Bitchy Asian Nail Salon. What the fuck was that? There's only one thing I liked about this outing, and that's Darryl's eloquent, impassioned defense of his fake gay relationship with Oscar that only exists to get a one-day 20% discount. And even that was in response to a Particularly Stereotypical Bitchy Nail Salon Asian. I can't say I'm <i>offended</i>, but I'm definitely disappointed by the sense of "otherness" they're presented with. (At least Ping was polite!)<br />
<br />
Why'd they name this episode after a one-act diversion? Why, surely to avoid spoiling Andy's return here, even though they already ruined that by originally announcing this episode under the title of "Andy's Return", of course! Yes, Andy's back from three months of boatin', because Ed Helms is back from three months of hangin' over. Apparently Ed pissed someone off by putting his film career ahead of the last season of <i>The Office</i>, because he's finally complete his long slide down into genuine goofy-haired villain territory. (He and Meredith should throw a silly wig party together!) Some people might think it's weird, but they should be used to it by now: Andy gets a new characterization once or maybe even twice a season. It's a fact of life. There's nothing to be done about it, other than making excuses. I've noticed a bit of a pattern with Andy, at least, in that he's sweet and earnest when he's down and out, but devolves back into douchedom once he's climbed back up. Having managed to hide out on a yacht for three months without losing pay and, in fact, even getting a bonus, things are pretty great for him now, which naturally means he's plunged to the terrifying depths of <i>super-douchedom</i>.<br />
<br />
Note, however, that his super-douchedom isn't really a negative towards this episode. Y'see, Andy spent the previous season and a half being a warmed over Michael Scott clone, inept and oblivious but sweet and well-meaning beneath it all, and it didn't work for him. Here, he is finally something we haven't really seen in this series: inept and oblivious and not all that fond of his employees. He's a swaggering asshole, putting them down for doing more work than he did, and the seething rage he incites is deliciously tense to watch unfold. Dwight excels at this, because of course he's always been a master of contempt; his anger at having the white pages sale retroactively blown was great, and I highly doubt that's the last we've seen of this story thread. Also, how can you <i>not</i> love his Andy impression, guys? And while it was maybe a bit sitcommy to have everyone team up to give Andy a wildly inaccurate summation of the last three months, I don't care. I'm too taken by the delightful prospect of a respectable paper company selling balloons to fault them for that!<br />
<br />
Even Erin is rightfully fed up with his antics, and early on she declares her intention to break up with him, though Pete has his doubts. This is about where fear started to set in for me. Was this the return of the interminable sorts of romantic Erin plots from inferior seasons past, a return that would destroy so much of my lingering goodwill towards the introduction of Pete? At least for this week, I feel my fears were unfounded, as she gets the courage to speak up within a day, and the plot actually moves forward. One of the downfalls of introducing this plotline in an already stuffed final season is that we haven't gotten to know Pete all that well, but he still seems sweet enough. Here his willingness to let Erin make her own decisions (BTW, I'm really confused by the lighting in that parking lot scene) forms an effective contrast to Andy's seriously unromantic and notions of romance, which he explains in a wonderfully creepy speech. Surprisingly dark, even. It's the first time in <i>years</i> that Ellie Kemper and Ed Helms have been convincing in a scene together, which is sad seeing as how they were last season's primary romantic leads. Sigh.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Brian is a probably not <i>totally</i> useless enigma! This week, at his "thanks for not letting Warehouse Guy murder me" luncheon with Jim and Pam, he starts showing flashes of, y'know, character traits. Pretty dark character traits. I can't help but suspect that he knew Alyssa (who, as an unseen character, is a probably totally useless enigma) would be, ahem, unable to attend, even when he first scheduled it. I can't help but notice, after years of watching Michael fake-crying, just how unconvincing his sorrow is here, and I'm assuming for now that it's intentional. I certainly noticed how he talked to Pam like Jim wasn't even there. And it seemed pretty blatant to me (and many others) that he's deliberately trying to introduce doubt between them, spilling secrets and all but coming out right and saying he thinks they're almost over. Seriously, dude's a total freakin' sketchball. (Maybe my transient hooker jokes last week weren't so inaccurate after all!)<br />
<br />
Even with Brain's more blatant sketchballin', though, the luncheon wasn't all that interesting. It's Jim and Pam fumbling around afterward, attempting to understand just what exactly they should do about their situation, that sold it in retrospect. I know some people say it's out of character for Jim to try slinking back to Philly early just to avoid confrontation, but I thought it was consistent enough with, say, the way he handled things with Karen in season three. Actually, as they discuss their, um, meal in the parking lot (less oddly lit by this point), it seemed to me that he was more frustrated with himself than anything. Once again, Jenna Fischer steals the show; underneath Pam's meekness, she's by far the most courageous between them. This is where it really starts to feel like a shame that this Valentine's Day episode didn't actually get to air as a Valentine's Day episode, because sometimes the most romantic things aren't all that romantic at all. The most romantic line in the entire episode? "I think that you should stay and I think we should fight." And it works.<br />
<br />
Yeah, this is one of those episodes where I'm seriously torn, because it really doesn't put its best foot forward. In addition to Particularly Stereotypical Asian Nail Salon, the first act also treats us to Kevin fondly reminiscing about three months of drinking the "chunky lemon milk" Andy left in the fridge, because dignity is for the weak I guess. But on the other hand, there's so much here that's actually likable, too, even if the Jim/Pam story this week feels dropped into this episode from a far more serious alternate universe. It's certainly not an all-time high, and not even a season high, but it does feel like things are getting back on track after last Thursday's disappointing pair of episodes, so I'll give this a thoroughly respectable <b>7.0 out of 10</b>.<br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and Other Things I Failed Miserably at Incorporating Into the Review Proper:</b><br />
<ul><li>"I really like Andy these days. He's pretend and he does exactly as I tell him to. All that will change when Real Andy comes back tomorrow. Unless he comes back as Pretend Dwight. In which case we're in for an epic, confusing showdown."</li>
<li>I still can't adequately express just how funny the idea of balloon salesmanship is to me. Why? I don't even know! "Who knew the balloon game would be so lucrative?" (David Wallace doesn't even bat an eye; his heart's not really in this anymore.)</li>
<li>Even in the middle of breaking up, Erin always tries to find a bright side. "You retweeted me a lot, to be fair."</li>
<li>The really sad part is that there are actually quite a few people out there who have an Andylike view of relationshippin'. "I know you may not be feeling love for me right now, but if you fake it I won't be able to tell the difference! So I'll feel good, and then eventually, maybe.....you'll actually start to love me again."</li>
<li>Wasn't Jan working in a hospital, for some reason, in season seven? What happened to that? At any rate, it looks like Jan's gonna be leaving the series in the same way she entered it: over speakerphone, bitching out the regional manager.</li>
<li>Pete asks a good question, you know. Why <i>does</i> no one stop Meredith when she goes off on tangents like that? You've gotta stop her <i>before</i> she gets to "Flesh Hoover"!</li>
<li>Six seasons after "Back From Vacation", the writers still clearly see the humor value inherent in watching outwardly depressed guys sadly noodling around with Caribbean instrumentation. Granted, this episode didn't have me feelin' as hot hot hot as that one...</li>
<li>I was just kidding last week, but now that they've been "foot buddies", maybe there IS a chance that Kevin and Angela will get together. It seemed kinda funny when it was just a joke, but now that it's an actual thing they might be doing, I'm feeling a bit....frightened, would be the best way to put it. (If you think she rolls her eyes at his grossness a lot <i>now</i>...)</li>
<li>Next week's episode apparently involves - SPOILER - Pete getting fired. (But I can't imagine Andy's three month secret vacation going unpunished, either.) Last week's episodes involved Brian get fired. Lots of firing in this cluster of episodes, but not specifically in <i>this</i> episode, which is, um....the one Greg Daniels originally announced someone would get fired in in the first place. Weird!</li>
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-41564845671739384952013-02-06T07:38:00.002-08:002013-02-06T07:40:15.375-08:00The Office Reviews: 9.13 and 9.14, "Junior Salesman" and "Vandalism"Be honest, NBC. You chose to burn both of these episodes on the same night because they're both big disappointments, right?<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, thanks. That's all I needed to know. alright. Buh-bye.<br />
<br />
No, but I'll try my hardest to be sympathetic. I'm aware that wrestling the show into series finale-worthy submission requires grappling with an awkward assortment of plot points of various degrees of seriousness; there's the down-to-earth Jim/Pam-type stuff from the early seasons, and then there's the overt broadness from later seasons. Naturally, finding a balance between the two that isn't alienating either way is more difficult than it might sound at first. Could I do it? No, I admit that I would be hopelessly inept in such an endeavor. The problem is that this writing crew has already been able to prove that it's NOT earlier in the season, which makes it all the more depressing when they do fail. C'mon, guys! You were on the right track, in theory!<br />
<br />
But, no. It's time to throw silly things like tonal consistency out the window, and careen drunkenly between various things they technically have to get done this season but don't really care all that much about. That's just as good, right?<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>(I should probably take this opportunity to throw in a spoiler warning for the stuff after the cut!)</i></div><br />
<a name='more'></a>First up to the plate was "Junior Salesman", which tackles the challenge of dueling tones by not even attempting to tackle the challenge of dueling tones. Perhaps that's unfair; I know there was originally a B-plot about Pete trying to help Erin find her birth parents, which at least sounds like it had the potential to be sweet, even if they clearly didn't succeed. (After all, it WAS a plot they felt they were able to cut without losing anything important!) Instead, the tone of the episode is given over almost entirely to rampant broadness, with only one plot to speak of.....one plot all about Dwight and his Dwightfriends being typically Dwighty. Oy.<br />
<br />
Don't get me wrong here; I know I complain about Dwight a lot, but I don't hate Dwight the character. His staunch authoritarianism and general out-of-touchness have always worked great. It's the more cartoonishly weird traits he's picked up over the years that I have definite misgivings about. (<i>Cat turd collector!</i>) The majority of Dwight's friends exemplify this difference between being an odd human being and just being odd pretty damn well. Let's take Random Eric Wareheim Cameo's X-Men School? Really? This is a joke which exists within the <i>Office</i> universe now? (Meanwhile, though, I can at least always endorse an appearance from Cousin Mose, with his stiff-armed run and natural fear of paper products.)<br />
<br />
Yes, of course I'm aware that the whole point of the storyline is Dwight coming to realize that he has outgrown his friends, respecting and perhaps even liking the non-weirdos he works with. There's way too much broadness counterbalancing it in this episode, but this itself isn't a bad story hook. Indeed, his (non-romantic) relationship with Clark continues to be one of the more interesting character dynamics this season, right up there with Dwight and Pam's weird friendship. (Dwight makes for some of the most interesting interactions with anyone, really, except for post-season three Angela of course.) Certainly more interesting than the Jim/Pam situation tonight, wherein he apparently thinks he can resolve the rift in their relationship by pulling a few strings to get her a somewhat less obnoxious deskmate; only time will tell, I suppose, if the writers realize how wrongheaded this is or not.<br />
<br />
Actually, the Dwight/Pam/Clark desk clump is a potentially intriguing idea; despite the overly broad trek there, their first scene as a newly formed clump was so adorable that I really wanted to bump the grade up for that alone. Seriously, how awesome was Dwight's "Absolutely I do"? What a fantastic comeback coming at us, from practically out of nowhere! And then, during Jim's little speech, the pan to Brian. Really? This is how they're gonna do this? I don't mind the basic idea of Brian the Creepy Stalker Boom Guy or even Brian the Well-Intentioned Boom-Wielding Pseudo-Jim. I wouldn't even mind Brian the Cat Turd Collector. I do, however, very much mind Brian the Boom Guy With No Discernible Characteristics Besides The Expected Pam-Yearning. We know nothing about this man yet, so he <i>definitely</i> hasn't earned his final-shot-of-the-episode pathos yet. You gotta <i>earn it</i>, man!<br />
<br />
Onto the second episode: "Vandalism" continues down the road of non-antagonistic Pam/Dwight interaction. ("If there's anything I hate worse than art, it's crime.") This is always potentially entertaining, I thought, but then I actually watched the episode, and realized they were less interested in exploring that relationship than in having a bunch of grown adults saying the word "butt", repeatedly (save for Nellie and her rogue "bottom"). Now, I hate to be <i>that guy</i>, but I do not for a minute believe that the more gruff and violent warehouse workers would settle for anything less than "ass" coming out of their filthy potty mouths. Then again, I don't for a minute believe that a gruff, violent warehouse worker would opt to paint cartoon buttocks instead of, say, a penis, like real vandals do. Even Dwight and Pam know that! Basically, this butt-heavy story made me yearn for the days of season two, where "Drug Testing" committed to drown us in (uses of the word) "urine", and somehow it felt <i>natural</i>.<br />
<br />
Once again, Brian interferes for Pam's sake, this time by showing off some mad boom mic beatin' skillz that he has, presumably, practiced on transient hookers in the past. Once again, Brian gets in trouble with his superiors for interfering, because they would apparently rather watch Jenna Fischer get beaten to a bloody pulp. (Just like a transient hooker!) And once again, we feel no sympathy for him, because we know nothing about him. Jim's pining for Pam back in the day was genuinely emotional because he was an actual character, with actual character development. We got to know him, and understand him, a courtesy we frankly have too little time to really experience with Brian, not that they're even trying here. Yearning and mic-violence alone do not a compelling character make, dudes. If this really is your big, final arc, you'd better get your shit together, and fast.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Jim's back in Philly, having apparently no contact with his wife anymore, because who can be bothered - they're starring in different plots tonight! He's already busy with his other marital spat with Darryl! Jim's messy, but Darryl's clean; hilarity ensues! <i>*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*</i><br />
<br />
Consequently, the most significant storyline tonight is actually the accountants' trip to Angela's spawn's birthday. Yeah, because it involves (State) Senator Robert Lipton, it's pretty heavy-handed stuff. He makes his race-based votemongering as blatantly obvious as possible, then throws in the blackest servant he could find on such short notice, just to make sure we wouldn't mistake it for subtle or anything. Hey, <i>The Office</i>: you air alongside <i>Parks & Rec</i> each week. You don't have to do political. They've got that covered. The sole bright spot of this story, the sole thing making it feel significant, is Kevin finishing off the night with a simplistic, choppy, but definitely blunt-in-a-very-Kevin-way takedown when no one else would speak up: "Thank you for the food. And also, you suck. You are, like, a terrible person. These guys care about you, and you're just using them! Again, the food was very good." The extra half a point is for you, my friend!<br />
<br />
Junior Salesman: <b>5.5/10</b><br />
Vandalism: <b>4.5/10</b><br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and Assorted Sundries:</b><br />
<ul><li>This week, in Unravelling the Mystery of How Athlead Works: They will be attending the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is actually an unusually specific detail for one that still doesn't explain anything. (Also, if you were wondering, yes, it still involves investors, investin'.)</li>
<li>At least it was a good week for cold opens. I actually liked the one in "Junior Salesman" both for the unconventional camera angle, and for Meredith being Meredith: "Hey, boom guy. When are you gonna boom <i>me</i>?" (It's the closest he comes to being involved in an actual joke, too!) Meanwhile, "Vandalism" gets points for allowing adorable sneaky-sneak Erin to introduce the best new character of the season: "Darryl, meat Bearyl!"</li>
<li>Clark totally deserved his promotion, you guys. "I've been working here for twelve weeks. That's a whole season of <i>Homeland</i>!"</li>
<li>Can you believe the shit Dwight has to put up with? "It's like, really, Jim, you don't understand the difference between a slaughterhouse and a rendering plant? Uhhhh, remind me not to lend <i>you</i> any dead cows or horses!"</li>
<li>How would you respond if Jim suddenly asked <i>you</i> to breathe in his face? Weirded out, maybe a little turned on? Yeah, that's about what I thought.</li>
<li>Dwight gets the only two uses of "butt" that actually work this week: "Also, sign them. My fetish is <i>signed</i> drawings of butts." "Frank draws a butt on your mural, I'm drawing your mural on Frank's truck's butt. Eye for an eye, Mamacita!"</li>
<li>Brian Baumgartner mentioned in a recent interview that if things went the way he thinks they're going to go for Kevin, he'll be "very pleased". Here, he actually earns a smile from Angela. Will they be doing the nasty by the end of the season? Can you even fathom how that would work? It's not quite a Skitty/Wailord situation, but it's the closest <i>The Office</i> could feasibly muster. (Unless they brought back the super fat guy from Stamford, I guess. I know how much everyone has been clamoring for THAT.)</li>
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-87286701814546757232013-02-04T02:57:00.000-08:002013-02-04T02:57:10.219-08:00InsomniaI've suffered from recurring bouts of insomnia all my life; the most recent was just over a week ago. Despite dealing with it for as far back as I can remember, I've never really gotten used to it. It's always just about the worst thing ever. As the sleep deprivation builds and builds, it starts feeling a lot like a particularly dark and surreal nightmare, one I obviously can't wake from, even as I desperately wish I could. When it gets particularly bad, it feels like an actual physical presence looming over me, isolating me from everything I hold dear in the world, confining me to my bed and yet ensuring that I'm too unnerved to sleep, such that it may stretch out the delicious torment of its prey for yet another day.<br />
<br />
In this handy visual aid, the part of Insomnia is played by an otherworldly, bloodthirsty giant purple octopus who likes trapping poor, defenseless skunky foxes in some sort of malevolent (but oddly Yoshi's Islandy) alternate dimension.<br />
<br />
....it made sense when I was heavily sleep deprived, you see.<br />
<br />
Why even share it? I guess I just like what a mindless and irrational portrayal of my emotional state at that point in time was. When something in my life beats me down, the shit I create gets CONFUSING, and I think it's kind of interesting to analyze in retrospect. For me, anyway. And I'm one-quarter of my readership, so what I say is interesting goes!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi99iuYAYjrf-9HGAx5dHefW1fWDopXnBr2LGBFhD9UyFvLg_7w5OE8z1mK51ddEy0FtIqHZRNSwomEw7veU5SNGIYjd_niClZflFnzUfQpgcCFEpKBn7kHcelvPJsm4CN-3LWG4iBgoS0/s1600/insomnia.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi99iuYAYjrf-9HGAx5dHefW1fWDopXnBr2LGBFhD9UyFvLg_7w5OE8z1mK51ddEy0FtIqHZRNSwomEw7veU5SNGIYjd_niClZflFnzUfQpgcCFEpKBn7kHcelvPJsm4CN-3LWG4iBgoS0/s320/insomnia.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-40537074553967674892013-01-30T05:01:00.000-08:002013-01-30T05:01:38.268-08:00The Office Review: Episode 9.12, "Customer Loyalty"What exactly constitutes an "explosive mind-bender", anyway? No, really. I know it's 2013, and by this point in time any and all strong adjectives have been weakened to the point of triviality. So, when Greg Daniels says that an upcoming episode contains an "explosive mind-bender" about the nature of the documentary, what he obviously means is, "This is a good episode that does something a little bit unexpected." And thus, a surprising chunk of fans across the internet proceeded to seal their cruel fate of crushing disappointment, by taking this phrase literally, and expecting "Customer Loyalty" to actually bend their minds, with explosives.<br />
<br />
"Steve Carell is coming back", a few of them convinced themselves, "because Michael Scott is secretly the one behind the whole documentary!" Never mind the fact that it's already been confirmed by countless sources that, no, Steve Carell isn't coming back, at all. "Or surely the documentarians have some sort of DARK CONNECTION to Jim's/Pam's DARK PAST and also they're RELATED." Because, clearly, the way for the writers to preserve everyone's fond memories of the past eight seasons - okay, nobody has fond memories of season eight, but you know what I mean - is to recast everything in a creepy, possibly rapisty light. Long story short, fans are weird, and when they're given even the slightest reason to start with the theorizing, it's enough to make a sane man want to put a bullet through his head.<br />
<br />
So, you really have to feel bad for "Customer Loyalty". Its biggest flaw isn't even its own fault. Here it is, being a perfectly lovely episode of television, efficiently plodding away at its day job in construction, helping to build the foundation of a solid final story arc, and gently minding its own business at the end of the day after the whistle blows....and then the producers run their mouths, and the insane fans pour out of the woodwork, yelling and screaming and projectile vomiting about how "Customer Loyalty" was not nearly as explosive or mind-bending as the twist ending they had thought of themselves, involving evil twins and secret passages and, hey, remember this one character who was in, like, one scene in season two, yeah, HIM, maybe he's involved too.<br />
<br />
Jesus Christ, people. Sometimes I'm so, so glad that I just don't think big.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>But, let's be obnoxious, and try putting off talking about the elephant in the room for as long as possible. Because there was other stuff going on here, right? How about Dwight and Darryl, huh? Aren't <i>they</i> a wacky pairing? Yeah, that was probably the weakest part of the episode, but it's not too bad. It makes perfect sense that what Dwight really values here is loyalty, customer or otherwise. ("If there were somewhere else that valued my loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most.") I totally understand where he's coming from. His little world is unraveling, after all. Everything progresses along pretty entertainingly, in fact, until Dwight sets up a "fun" paper delivery, involving "fun" things, like Christmas lights, milkshake assaults, and "fun." (At first I rolled my eyes because that's not at all a plausibly Dwighty music choice, but then I comforted myself with the thought that it's probably the result of a desperate Google search to find out just what, exactly, constitutes "fun". That's just pathetic enough to amuse me!) Ultimately, the plot doesn't even really get resolved; Dwight just gets left behind, and fired-in-the-hole, and apparently that's the end of their debate on this subject? Yeah, the final stretch of this is just lame. Didn't put any fire in my hole, at all. :(<br />
<br />
Fortunately, it has some actual merit before that point. Namely, Dwight's attempt to guilt-trip him with a conference room presentation about, yes, customer loyalty. Who among us can't sympathize with the silent plight of Not-So-Disgruntled Customer Dude, forced to sit through this nonsense against his will? I'm always thrilled when the show still manages to make a play for awkwardness, and actually succeed. Even still, the Dwight/Darryl plot is only really responsible for kickstarting this little fiasco; the focus quickly shifts away from them to Erin and Pete, and non-customer types of loyalty. Frankly, I'm genuinely surprised that I didn't roll my eyes at this change in focus, too. Paul Lieberstein's tenure as showrunner featured the discussion of characters' private lives in such contrived and, frankly, occasionally disgusting ways - I'm Angela-scowling at you, "Angry Andy" - that I'd almost forgotten the way the show used to do this, reined in and deliciously uncomfortable. Like this. Granted, it's not exactly subtle here, but it's still believable and I still thought it worked pretty well. And surely Dwight and Darryl deserve credit for at least kicking it off? :)<br />
<br />
Even the Erin/Pete saga in general isn't bothering me as much as I thought it would. It's not perfect, and it still doesn't feel like it's carrying much weight even in this episode, but....what can I say? They're actually cute together, and they actually have chemistry! Can't have romance without that, and I'd know, because they tried that with her for, like, four seasons. And their little story tonight also involves Nellie, who <i>also</i> used to be absolutely insufferable last season, and who <i>also</i> has suddenly emerged as being confusingly likable in season nine. Oh, Greg Daniels, you crafty wizard, showing off your Rod of Redemption! Sure, all Nellie really does here is rather clumsily meddle in [insert clever couple name for Erin and Pete]'s personal lives, but for some reason it's not nearly as annoying as you'd think. Perhaps it's because it's so obviously coming from a simple, destructive desire to remain liked. Indeed, after being humiliated and temporarily split up, Erin and Pete end the episode in more or less the same place they started it; it's <i>Nellie</i> who enters new territory, realizing that there are more noble uses for her Staff of Meddlin' than trying to maintain a tiny sliver of favor with unpredictable, undependable Andy.<br />
<br />
Oh, and also, there's her "relationship" with Toby. If an episode like "Dwight Christmas" had popped up last season, you just know that would've been a quick one-off, never brought up again so we could stay focused on, I dunno, conference room discussions on sexual inadequacy or whatever. (Seriously, screw you, "Angry Andy".) But here, it's allowed to linger a bit longer, and it's delightfully cringetastic. We've seen the version of Lusty Toby who's too hopelessly ineffectual to even ask anyone out in the past, but I think this is the first time we've seen him (thinking he's) in an actual relationship, and it's every bit as creepy as you'd hope. It gets such a small amount of screentime, but it's the funniest part of the episode. "Lady, you never stop surprising me," he says, pulling her hair back, stroking her neck, and presumably just channeling the gross sexy bits of his many unpublished cheap Chad Flenderson novels. If anyone has ever been wondering why he just can't get a little happiness once in awhile.......now you have your answer. This is why he shouldn't. Ew. :)<br />
<br />
But, okay, enough sidestepping the important stuff. The real meat of this episode is, of course, the rather serious Jim and Pam story. Everything starts out innocently enough, as they anticipate Cece's ballet recital. (Really, this is something that people make their two-year-olds do now? Are you serious? Sigh...) Jim looks forward to seeing her show off their patented Cece Spin-and-Kiss, which he demonstrates for us; the only thing missing to make it even more authentic and adorable is an adult Jim-sized ladybug costume. And Pam looks forward to....well, time with her husband, I guess, since he'll actually be coming in from Philly for this. Or will he? Any sane person would get an idea of where this is going from the outset, seeing as how Athlead is a very businessy business that involves all sorts of vague but time-consuming businessthings. Tellingly, Jim only tells his coworkers that he has "that thing in Scranton" later, which more or less cements our suspicions about the upcoming trainwreck. And, as Jim and Pam later trade lighthearted banter about rectangles and the pointing thereof, the only real question seems to be of who will end up lashing out first. It's a very familiar plot, yes, but that's an area where the show used to thrive: finding said plot's original basis in reality, and firmly, painfully playing that moment straight, even as silliness ensues all around it.<br />
<br />
Even still, I was not at all braced for The Fight. Of course I was prepared for <i>a</i> fight; I've seen sitcoms before. Partly as a result of growing up with an ostensible parental figure with an unbridled enthusiasm for awful sitcommery, I've seen <i>puh-lenty</i> of actors pretending to have petty arguments. I'm pretty sure every single episode of <i>According To Jim</i> revolved around some form of argument, as though marrying a fat lazy slob isn't as glamorous as one might've thought. And, well, aside from the obvious fact that marital discord played for laughs on such a regular basis is kinda gross, why don't 99% of sitcom fights have even a smidgen of resonance, of any sort? Because they're always situations that could've been resolved if someone had just cleared things up days ago before they had completely dug their own grave, or hell, if someone had just sidestepped doing the Obvious Wrong Thing in the first place. I guess some people might find it relatable, remembering arguments where they were "obviously" right, but no, it's not actually that black-and-white, you arrogant fools. But then, here comes <i>The Office</i>, reminding us on behalf of comedies everywhere just what an emotionally zero-sum game the argument truly is.<br />
<br />
No, really, it's pretty much impossible to make any sort of complaint about the fight. Well, aside from the fact that it still manages to feel like such a sucker punch, but that's kind of the point. The performances on this show are always nice, but it's been so long since I've seen John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer actually <i>act</i> like this. And they both make valid points; there's not a typical sitcom straw spouse (okay, a straw husband nine times out of ten) in sight. Did Jim really need to lash out as hard as he did? No, but Pam didn't need to be so dismissive of his work stress, either. Doesn't her home stress count for anything, though? Just what constitutes an "agreement", anyway? Pam's reaction, in particular, is heartbreaking. Having one's excitement deflated like that is almost more painful than never being excited about anything at all. When exasperated fatigue meets excitable optimism, you've got a surefire recipe for disappointment. It's not the first time they've had to make sacrifices for each other - their entire relationship was pretty much founded on Jim sacrificing a better job for her, and then later there was that Lieberstein-era thing about Pam quitting art school far less convincingly - but it's the first time they've really resented each other for it. And it's acted so well that it hurts.<br />
<br />
But then, there's the big love-it-or-hate-it reveal: With Pam crying openly, weak and vulnerable, Brian the Supposedly Hunky Documentary Boom Mic Dude steps in to console her, asking his Unseen and Presumably Less Hunky Cohorts to shut off the cameras to spare her further embarrassment, I guess. And this is where the fan reactions fork violently. Is that really an "explosive mind-bender" in and of itself, like Old Man Greggy Daniels said? No, not really, we don't even know the guy yet. Will it be after we get to know him? Well, that really depends on whether the things we may or may not learn about him end up having any retroactive relevance to this little moment! He rubs her leg comfortingly, but that could mean all sorts of things, so even that neither mind-bendy or explosive as of yet. I can easily understand how the people who took his proclamation at its hyperbolic face value were disappointed. But, is this reveal at least "something a little bit unexpected"? That much it is. After years of the documentary aspect of the series being marginalized to the point of just feeling like a weird, disconnected stylistic element, they've been playing it up more and more this season, growing to the point that it's finally time to shatter that fourth wall altogether. As we don't yet know what to make of it, it's big, but in a really small way. An <i>Office</i> way. It really was an interesting little bit, as long as you didn't ruin it for yourself ahead of time.<br />
<br />
On the whole, this episode reads very much like a turning point. By the end of the half hour, exactly half of the season remains, and it seems almost as though it's trying to draw a line in the sand. "The first half of the season", it seems to say, "was just bridging the gap between the prior several seasons of virtual nothingness, and the final six hours of genuine somethingness." Whether that'll turn out to be the case or not, at this moment in time, it feels very much like the case. Erin finally has a non-psychopath in her life, so Andy will finally have to put up or shut up. Dwight, presumably, has finally conceded himself to the fact that the world will move on and he can't do much of anything about it. In the background, Angela seems to be teetering on the edge of a major breakdown (and Angela Kinsey confirms as much in a recent interview). And, in those final moments with Jim and Pam, the creaking gears of Greg Daniels' Magical Drama Machine clang and bang their way back to life, reanimated by his Rod of Redemption, signaling the potential for one final blaze of glory....if you'll just chill out and avoid doing it in with specific expectations at first. C'mon, guys, seriously. I did it with this episode, and it lead me to believe it was worth an <b>8.5 out of 10</b>. It can work for you, too!<br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and Discarded Folderol:</b><br />
<ul><li>This week in juicy Athlead details: It involves "investors", which is a very businessy businessword indeed. Y'know, for business.</li>
<li>All this yammering on and I didn't even mention the cold open! We're inching a bit towards the less plausible end of the Jim Prank Spectrum, but it was cute! Plus, I like the symbolic value of this intricate piece of Young Jim emerging now, when he feels like almost a completely different person. "I expected more from Young Halpert", he says; if Young Halpert were watching this very episode, he could very well express the same sentiment about Stuffy Current Halpert. (By the way, awesome job nailing the look of the second season flashback, with the lighting and the hair and everything!)</li>
<li>Clark's only in one scene this week, but it's a good one, as we learn that the computers in the annex are still stuck with Windows 95 and dot matrix printers. Weirdly enough, just a couple days before this episode, I randomly brought up dot matrix printers as a hilariously old-fashioned piece of technology during a late-night conversation with my girlfriend. I guess, for some reason, last week was just <i>the</i> week for randomly remembering that they're a thing that existed.</li>
<li>The best part of having Toby meddlin' in Nellie's meddlin'? Paul Lieberstein himself is forced to vocalize, on national television, precisely why the Erin/Andy plot he pushed for <i>four years</i> is unraveling. Intentional, or do I just like imagining that comedy writers are far crueler than they really are?</li>
<li>Dwight clearly learned everything he knows about commanding the conference room from Michael. "Customer loyalty. What is it? Can you hold it in your hand? Can you nudge it with your finger? Can you dump it on a woman?" (Kevin: "It's when you get a free sandwich after you've already eaten ten sandwiches.")</li>
<li>Pam, on her chances of getting the Irish Cultural Center mural: "Let's be realistic, there are a ton of great artists in Scranton with way more experience. I mean, who are they gonna go with? Some nobody like me, or a big name like Tracy Fleeb?" (Look at me, being all high and mighty about my sophisticated sense of humor, only to turn right around and laugh at a silly name!)</li>
<li>Phyllis weighs in on the Andy/Pete debate: "Well, Andy's cute, but he's too vanilla. Whereas Pete, he's just one sick dude. I mean, you <i>know</i> this guy likes to get weird."</li>
<li><b>This week's review brought to you by Windows 95! Join the wave of the future! Microsoft Antivirus for Windows doesn't much care for it, but you might!</b><br />
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-34580023832531691552013-01-23T15:18:00.000-08:002013-01-23T15:18:38.000-08:00The Office Review: Episode 9.11, "Suit Warehouse"A couple years ago, I wrote a brief series of <a href="http://jesstehskox.blogspot.com/2011/03/family-guy-review-hand-that-rocks.html"><i>Family Guy</i> reviews</a>, where I mostly complained about the show being the show that it is in the first place. I reviewed them not out of any affection for the show - for I have very little - or any real desire to think about it - for I have very none. Rather, they're just the side effect of having to live with a gross urophile who would watch pretty much nothing else, and needing to talk through that. Since then, I've been thinking - why not give brief weekly episodic coverage to something I actually <i>do</i> like, or at least care about, even if it's maybe a little embarrassing?<br />
<br />
And so, that is how we have arrived at this: a series of reviews chronicling the final efforts of <i>The Office</i> to convince people that it is, indeed, still a thing that exists even without Steve Carell. (A series of reviews I hope to be more timely from now on.) This ninth and final season thus far has, to be sure, not even come close to match anything from the heights of seasons 2-4, yet with Greg Daniels back at the helm there are just enough flashes of what the show had that, well, I find myself clinging to the hope that somehow it'll all come flooding back in time for the finale. There's actually character development again! Stories! Stuff like that! Simple things that fell by the wayside during Paul Lieberstein's years as showrunner, where a bunch of things happened in arbitrary sequence, and then unhappened as necessary, and so on. (Pretty much the only thing he could commit to was, well, the thing that Steve Carell leaving already forced him to!) So, of course, the question remains: Will anything that has happened so far this season actually matter, or will it all crap out in a most spectacular way?<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>(I suppose I should mention that Jesse reviews typically contain spoilers, so....spoiler alert, for anyone who cares.)</i></div><br />
<a name='more'></a>There's also always the possibility that it will crap out spectacularly while still somehow actually mattering, like Darryl's interview at Jim's magical "sports marketing" firm. The interview gives the writers an opportunity to indulge in the ol' cringe humor, which was cute, but it doesn't pack nearly the same punch that these scenes used to. Not only is it pretty short - it's hard to get <i>too</i> uncomfortable in under a minute - but it's so blatantly mechanical, too. Not at all natural. Was the original version of this scene longer before it got chopped down? It's a weird case, though, where the scene itself didn't work for me, but the wider character arc it's in service of still did. I like Darryl's continuing struggle against his discomfort with the white-collar world - in an era of the show characterized by silly, over-the-top developments, this remains a surprisingly down-to-earth problem. If anything, it's one that they've been underplaying. Here, it's dealt with in a frustratingly perfunctory manner courtesy of writer Dan Greaney, by having Darryl come right out and say he doesn't belong there. "I'm just a warehouse manager", he says, only for everyone else on the Athlead Board of People Sitting Around a Table in a Vaguely Businesslike Way to come right out and say that they also used to hold an improbable variety of mundane jobs, too, so it's totally okay and we can drop this angle entirely! <i>Subtlety!</i><br />
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Oh, but then Darryl unwittingly kills a bunch of fish, and that gives him something else to panic about for the duration of the next act break. It's good for a laugh I guess, but it's kind of a contrived problem that comes out of nowhere instead of stemming from his central character conflict. As Pam aptly notes: "<i>They're</i> the ones who put a fish tank next to a basketball hoop."<br />
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Honestly, though, I'm sure the main point of the trip to Philadelphia was to see Pam continue to not speak up about how she's not alright with this at all. Some weeks, her feelings are coming from an understandable place; other weeks, the writers make her sound like your typical shrew of a sitcom housewife who can't stand their husbands having even the slightest hint of a life of their own. Fortunately, this week is the former. It's finally sinking in that Jim's full-time in Philly will mean, y'know, <i>actually moving there</i>, which is an understandable thing to be apprehensive about. An understandable thing that, once again, Dan Greaney makes sure is overly obvious, this time by having Asian Receptionist Guy come right out and say, "We can't wait until you move here", which I guess he thinks is something that people say to people they've just met.<br />
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It's better when Jenna Fischer is allowed to get the point across in the usual actorly way, by, um, acting. The best emotional moments of the episode come when the writing stops being overly obvious and lets her shaken silence do the speaking. She's actually going to be missing these people after all. Isn't that how it always is? I'm sure everybody has bemoaned their sad, pathetic routine, only to feel genuinely distressed when even that starts fading away. There's something to be said for familiarity. At any rate, this continues to be the first time in, oh, let's say four seasons that I've been legitimately interested in what happens with Jim and Pam. A rift seems inevitable, and this being the final season with the reset button potentially finally off the table, <i>anything</i> could happen. (But probably won't.)<br />
<br />
In the Far Less Relevant Stuff Department, Dwight and Clark try to sell to a father-son business. (Stone & Son Suit Warehouse - so <i>that's</i> where the title comes from!) Dwight, now with 10+ years of experience as a salesman, apparently still doesn't know any better way to do so than by dragging someone along and pretending to be a father-son team as well. An incredibly unsettling father-son team. It's sad, really - don't think about it too much. Your tolerance for this plotline will depend very much upon your tolerance for Dwight, because it's essentially The Wacky Adventures of Dwight and Dwight, which is surely more fun for the writers than anyone else. To be fair, there actually are a few laughs here, but then Dwight (the actual Dwight, not Clark, who is essentially also Dwight) starts talking in grotesque detail about cat turd collection, and....no matter what else they brought to the table, would <i>you</i> buy paper from someone who did that? I can safely say I wouldn't!<br />
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Waaaaaaay back in season three, the episode "Traveling Salesmen" made a thoroughly compelling argument for how Dwight could plausibly harness his Dwightness to sell paper, by finding a logical overlap between "creepy persistence" and "dedicated service". Six seasons later, it seems his skills have regressed immeasurably. He's just creepy, period, and his final maneuver to turn things around just rings false. After purchasing a suit from Stone & Son, he comes to the winking conclusion that "I guess it <i>does</i> make sense to buy from a father-son business", as though this alone somehow undoes the cat turd collection stuff. Again. <i>Cat turd collection</i>.<br />
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Meanwhile, without any of the main characters present to reign in their insanity, the rest of the office resorts to shameless product placement for the Nespresso PIXIE. Product placement that amounts to everyone drinking so much espresso - sorry, <i>Nes</i>presso - that they become unhinged hyperactive crazy people, which I'm sure is precisely how the fine folks at Nestlé hoped to have their product showcased. It's all very silly, of course, probably even sillier than the Suit Warehouse plot. Some of it works, like Stanley's joy at actually being awake to see 2 p.m. ("I usually take a siesta about now.") But then there's the giant, cartoony sweat stains, and everyone spontaneously decides to tear up the carpet - no, not like THAT - and it's basically a lot of silliness that wouldn't fly if there was actually anyone in charge. Season two's "Office Olympics" also had a plot that depended on the manager being out, yes, but that was also about generally responsible people blowing off a little steam....not going completely insane and destroying property without repercussions of any sort!<br />
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There's a bright side to the insanity at the office, though: Erin's anxiety over handling a shipment of pens on Pam's behalf. It's weird - people keep singling this out as though it's the most ridiculous part of the episode, as though she's literally Too Dumb To Live. (As one commenter somewhere put it, this makes her look "more mentally handicapped than Kevin", perhaps forgetting <i>literally everything Kevin has done over the last four seasons</i>.) Really, though, it's grounded in relatively down-to-earth real-world anxieties. I, too, get worked up when asked to handle a new task I don't feel has been adequately explained. Is it exaggerated a little? Sure, but Ellie Kemper does a great job of keeping it grounded, and her caffiene-addled talking head ("I don't want to be a busybody, but I don't want to be a lazybones. Busybody, lazybones, busybody, lazybones...") gives it even more legitimate context. After all, she'd hate to betray anyone's trust. <i>About the pens</i>. Though, maybe I'm unfairly biased toward this little plotline - after all, Ellie Kemper <i>is</i> ridiculously adorable. Hell, the ridiculousness of the rest of the office tearing up the building is almost worth it when Pam returns, sees the damage, and Erin tries to explain what happened: "You left me in charge of the pens, Pam. That's what happened. <i>The pens happened!</i>"<br />
<br />
Wow. I ended up rambling on for longer than I'd expected. Maybe I should think about closing this up now. Well, what can I say? This was uneven, to be sure. I enjoyed bits and pieces of the trip to Philly, and as an anxious lazybones I found the pen stuff relatable, but I wish they hadn't been dulled so much by the sheer amount of time we spent in the Suit Warehouse. I get it, the writers like writing for Dwight because wackiness is easy, but that doesn't mean that doubling up so you don't have to write for anyone else works. On the whole, I guess I'd rate this about a <b>6.0 out of 10</b>.<br />
<br />
<b>Trivial Observations and Miscellaneous Miscellany:</b><br />
<ul><li>Eleven episodes into this season, and I'm <i>still</i> not at all sure just what, exactly, Athlead does. This week, we learned that "sports marketing" involves both "timelines" and "mandates", which are both appropriately businessish terms that appropriately businessish people might talk about in an appropriately businessish manner, and I guess that's as close as they're gonna come to clearing this up. <i>Business!</i></li>
<li>I hate to seem like an obnoxious teenage girl, but as far as Erin is concerned, I guess I'd have to say I'm in the Team Pete camp. Andy's kind of a major douche, and though I like Ed Helms well enough, you almost wish he could just stay out there, having a big film career, for the entire rest of the season....but I guess the fact that we have an upcoming episode actually named "Andy's Return" puts a damper on that hope. Oh well.</li>
<li>For as much as I complained about Dwight's Dwightness tonight, I still liked his complete and utter failure at faking a phone call with Jim in the cold open. "Well, thank you, Jim! Yes, I <i>am</i> better than you. Thanks for acknowledging that. Okay, buh-bye, love you."</li>
<li>Likewise, for all my complaining about Clark's Dwightness, I still think he was a worthwhile addition to the cast, when he's allowed to be his own kind of creep. "Women reach their sexual peak at whatever age Jan was last week. I mean, it was like making love with a wild animal. But not like a cougar, like you might think. It was....like a swarm of bees. Bees that just find something wrong with every hotel room."</li>
<li>Oh, Darryl: "If this company's going down, I wanna go down on it. <i>With</i> it. I wanna go down with it..."</li>
<li>By the way, I cannot possibly adequately express just how much I hate trying to write with ballpoint pens. Dunder-Mifflin really IS a shitty place to work!</li>
<li>Next week's episode - well, tomorrow's, to be more accurate - is when Greg Daniels claims they're gonna start unraveling the mystery of who's behind the documentary, and it sounds like there's a lot of other shit going down. It's pretty much the episode that will determine whether season nine will ultimately sink or swim! IT'S ALL RIDING ON THIS! No pressure, though.</li>
<li><b>This week's review brought to you by the Nespresso PIXIE! Convenience that's up to thrice as expensive per serving as the competition, because extortion is easy - it's coffee that's hard! Now available in exciting and revolutionary new colors, like <i>brown</i>!</b> <i>(But seriously, see how long it takes you to get sick of <a href="http://www.nespresso.com/pixie/?l=en_US">the sad little 30-second music loop on its website</a>. Oooh ooh oh oohohoh oh, indeed!)</i></li>
</ul>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-58540754747227388292013-01-07T00:05:00.002-08:002013-01-07T00:05:58.296-08:00New (and Old) Year's Resolutions!Oh, hey, it's 2013 already. Actually, it has been for several days now, but I'm slow. Also, I'm sick, which makes my slowness even slower. Curse you, common cold!!<br />
<br />
Anyway, like several years before it, 2012 turned out to be more of an unmitigated disaster than I had hoped (and <a href="http://jesstehskox.blogspot.com/2012/01/okay-maybe-this-will-be-year-where.html">blogged</a>) for. Granted, it wasn't as disastrous as, ahem, years far in the past I had to spend with a certain urophilic someone who shan't be named. I guess things are slowly getting better nonetheless, and I think that's an important realization. And I just know things are gonna keep getting even betterer, because it's a new year, with renewed potential for big change. We finally elected a black man president, after all!<br />
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So, what do I hope to achieve in 2013? I'm glad I asked! As usual, I've made a quick list of the four things I feel are the most important for me to focus on this year, on a personal level.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><ul><li><b>Becoming the social people person I seem to really need to be.</b> This is something I resolve to do every year, and it's something I always make a little progress. Why not keep going? I actually made several friends last year - love you, Andrew, Jamie, Matt, Steffie, Scott, Sam, and Emily! - though, alas, I'm still pretty awkward in person nonetheless. Still, progress is progress, and as a social anxiety sufferer, I'm always proud of every little step I manage to take out of my shell. Y'know what bothers me more than anything? People who try to "helpfully" suggest the easy way to cope with social situations that might make me nervous, like the person at my support group who cheerfully informed me that applying for disability would be "better" than trying to have a career in the real world, or......y'know, whatever. What the fuck, people??? That would be giving up, and Jesse doesn't give up. Now, he thinks about it for a long time, he <i>seriously</i> thinks about it, but no, in the end, he just doesn't. Why give up? I'm better off in this department than I have been in a long time, so I'm unreasonably confident that I'll be able to keep it up in 2013, too.</li>
<li><b>Hobbies!</b> For some reason, I've always been remarkably bad at actually allowing myself to enjoy....myself. Being creative, whether writing or drawing or whatever, is one of my favorite things in the world, and yet I still rarely allow myself to do it, because there's always something "more important" I feel I should be doing. And <i>of course</i> there's something more important to be doing <i>sometimes</i>, but certainly not <i>always</i>. Compulsively rearranging my closet in order from the thing I'd most like to wear at the moment on the left to the thing I'd least like to wear at the moment on the right is probably something that I could stand to put off a little more. After all, everyone needs a hobby. Right? I really need to get around to working on Infinite Mankey Theorem with Taylor, and there's a few stories I've been itching to write, and the Wacom tablet has been nagging me to spend a little more intimate quality time with her. In short, in 2013, I resolve to be prolific enough that you'll all be completely sick of me eventually. You're welcome.</li>
<li><b>Something related to weight loss, because people are required by law to resolve to lose weight, every single year.</b> After all, defying the law is not at all a Jesselike thing to do.</li>
<li><b>Taylor, finally.</b> This is the big one, about a hundred thousand million times more important than all the rest. I love Taylor with all my heart; the hardest part was having to keep myself from saying it for the longest time. After all, she WAS in a "relationship", though truth be told that just amounted to a lot of gross emotional messiness. Emotional messiness I was more than happy to help tidy up. Just like she helped me tidy up a lot of emotional messiness in my own life. With our mutual emotional janitorial tendencies, I guess it's no real surprise that we've ended up here. I'd do <i>anything</i> for Taylor, and in 2013, I resolve to make doing "anything" considerably easier for all parties involved, by finally starting our life together, and nothing will ever be able to tear us apart again. Truth be told, we've been madly in love for five years now - here's to about a hundred thousand million more!</li>
</ul><div><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(...and even more regular prostate massage. Let's say daily, that sounds about right.)</span></div><br />
So, here's to 2013! I hope you all have big plans for this year, too. The world was nice enough to not end in 2012, after all, so I think you owe it to the world to make the most of the not-deadness you've so kindly been given!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-48466676693656023112012-12-15T05:29:00.001-08:002012-12-18T12:30:56.109-08:00D52 Week 52 (FROM THE NEAR FUTURE): Wreck-It Ralph!<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>(WARNING: Spoilers for a newish film you very much may not have seen ahead!)</i></div>
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I'm not <i>actively</i> participating in this anymore, y'know, but I figure, if I just happen to watch one of the remaining movies, I might as well still say something, right? It's always nice to still have the option of subjecting others to my opinions.<br />
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As a writer (in theory) myself, I'm all too aware that virtually any story that anyone anywhere could think of has, with almost 100% certainty, already been told countless times in the past. Because, well, humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. It's kind of our thing. Other animals got all sorts of practical, yet fascinating and awesome, physical abilities; humans, instead, got the ability to make shit up, and against all reason, we've done pretty well for ourselves with that. Anyway, objectively speaking, nothing is original, ever. And yet, things still <i>feel</i> original to us. Why is that, when they clearly aren't? It's a simple question of conviction. Do the people behind a story honestly believe in it, or are they simply running down a checklist, making sure it has all the essential components that make it recognizable as a story? Despite the frequently gorgeous animation, the often catchy songs, and their admirably patriotic support of the all-American "non-A-listers whose voices you might nonetheless hopefully recognize" industry, the Disney Renaissance all too often felt like the latter, as I've liked pointing out a lot. And then DreamWorks achieved box office prowess, and Disney shifted to marking off essential film components on a wackier checklist for much of the 2000s. By comparison, <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i> feels like a revelation. It's got just as many storytelling cliches as the far less impressive Disney films that came before it, but it engages them with a renewed sense of self-confidence. They're not just half-heartedly checking them off; they're all here for a reason, and that alone makes this probably the best thing Disney has done in at least a decade and a half.<br />
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(Perhaps it helps that video games themselves are positively overflowing with obvious cliches. One could argue, then, that if anything they <i>enhance</i> the atmosphere here.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Well, of course, when it comes to making a movie like this, it only stands to reason that you'd want someone like Rich Moore directing. After all, he's directed for both <i>The Simpsons</i> and <i>Futurama</i>, which at their best have a refreshing way of approaching the well-worn world of storytelling cliches with the right mixture of cynicism and sentimentality; a mixture that can reveal the shameless, mechanical manipulation these techniques indulge in while still acknowledging that, yes, they still work for a reason, and no, we're not completely heartless. (He also directed a couple episodes of <i>Drawn Together</i>, which....certainly was a thing that also existed, wasn't it?) I mean, let's face it - Ralph's emotional arc is pretty much the classic Disney Princess routine. He has a good, steady gig, but he longs for more in the world, before somehow managing to save the day, and ultimately realizing that he can have both. It's all very familiar, and yet it feels more relevant than it has in a LONG time, because Ralph's situation really IS sympathetically crappy. He's not an unappreciative pampered princess, after all. He sleeps on bricks! He SHOULD be unhappy! (And that anniversary party might be the most awkward, cringey thing Disney's ever done, in a good way.) It's all formula, but Moore and company still remember to fill in the blanks, instead of making the formula be an end unto itself. As for the cynicism, well...for one, the sudden revelation that Vanellope actually IS a Disney Princess, followed by all but outright saying, "Actually, no, y'know what? That's a really lousy aspiration for a little girl to have!" Combined with <i>Brave</i>, 2012 seems to be a pretty big year for Disney-distributed films directing big fuck-yous at this princessical nonsense they've perpetrated in the past; fuck-yous that will, of course, be quickly forgotten because little girls will be terrible, forever.<br />
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Or maybe I'm just reading too much into things here. But, reading too much into simple things is what critics are supposed to do, so why stop now? Even the voice cast itself seems oddly appropriate for a film that's essentially about fighting back against typecasting. After all, we have Jane Lynch, for one, yet again playing an abrasive obvious lesbian who, for some reason, actually isn't. An obvious lesbian, I mean; she's still plenty abraisive. And Jack McBrayer's career pretty much consists of playing Jack McBrayer in different contexts, some decidedly more unsettling than others; here, he gets to play the perfectly settling Jack McBrayer With A Magic Hammer. All kidding aside, though, I like them, and they fit their roles well. The most remarkable thing is that Sarah Silverman, who I really don't like so very much to be perfectly honest, manages to fit her role well too, in a likable way. Likeable! How does that work? I just do not know, but she is, child-friendly pottymouthisms aside. As for John C. Reilly, he might be the only one playing a main character who's actually had a diverse career. Like...a puzzlingly diverse career. I'm sure a lot of actors would kill to have a career like that, where he can go off and do whatever weird shit he wants, and still manage to repeatedly find work in mainstream, "respectable" films. Anyway, he's good too, even if he doesn't exactly sound all that bulky. Well. A little.<br />
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Yes, despite having a cast without all that much voice-acting depth, and despite possessing a story that sounds like it could be silly and superficial and decidedly un-depthy, there's a surprising amount of actual, honest-to-goodness depth here. After messes like <i>Meet the Robinsons</i>, which I caught part of on the Disney Channel some time ago and was immediately aware that it was just plain too wacky to have the emotional depth it was pretending it did, it's nice to see something that can be funny <i>without</i> sacrificing emotion. Once again, Rich Moore's past experience comes into play in a big way. For instance, it's interesting to see how Ralph's villainy isn't just an informed trait. Yes, I suppose villain protagonists in 3D animated family films are the furthest thing from "new", as that obnoxious trailer for <i>Despicable Me 2</i> might remind one, if one can actually remember that there were also non-Minion characters in that, too. But it's hard to remember one who's been (intentionally) allowed to come across as genuinely threatening as he does when he smashes up Vanellope's kart. Good intentions or no, you can't tell me that's not a curiously intense sequence! Even more curious is the realization in that moment that Sarah Silverman - SARAH SILVERMAN! - is making you feel something emotionally. Indeed, it's the sort of thought I found myself having throughout the entire movie. This is all just so, so silly, so why is it making me a little teary-eyed? No doubt part of that is just Jesse being an overemotional fool in general, but still. This is a well done story nonetheless.<br />
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Probably my biggest concern about this film before it was released was that it could easily turn out to be desperate and pandering and more than just a little bit sad. It was a bit hard to tell when the first promotional materials were coming out whether it would actually embrace its whimsical subject matter, or whether it would just be another shallow, half-baked 3D Disney flick pathetically flailing its arms as it pleads for relevance. "Video games, guys! RETRO video games! Isn't that nifty? Why won't you love meeeee?" So, color me surprised when it wasn't that at all. (Surprised, because I am a terrible, irredeemable pessimist!) Like the typical Pixar films of yesteryear used to do, <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i> manages to fully embrace its quirky "unseen world" setting, with results much nicer than it should theoretically have the right to be.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXWkvK68QH-9C57f6Xk3K65t-aqww5qAlh95sLNaU9GHq8YvXFg2YSX2AIpS340uRS6b3tW8gHXW0VaN0QU0GQUiWwnV9_fKLuhfYc3tpex0KKbnpKyIHrtNqiILGhA4lBDD6iSH3fEdk/s1600/Wreck-It+Ralph.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXWkvK68QH-9C57f6Xk3K65t-aqww5qAlh95sLNaU9GHq8YvXFg2YSX2AIpS340uRS6b3tW8gHXW0VaN0QU0GQUiWwnV9_fKLuhfYc3tpex0KKbnpKyIHrtNqiILGhA4lBDD6iSH3fEdk/s400/Wreck-It+Ralph.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>If you die in the laundromat, you die FOR REAL!</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b>Trivial Observations and Whatnots:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>To be perfectly fair, it's possible I'm being a bit too overly positive; after all, Matt, Steffie, and I shared some all-natural cartoon enhancement in the parking lot beforehand. Still, for the time being, I fully stand by this review.</li>
<li>As much as I adore the completely ridiculous names they gave the <i>Sugar Rush</i> racers - they're some of my favorite gags in the whole movie - I have to admit, I just don't know what the deal is with "Rancis". I need your help, because I can't for the life of me figure out what the fuck's going on with that one.</li>
<li>Sonic sure pops up in the background disproportionately often, doesn't he? Is this part of the <i>Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed</i> cross-promotion nonsense? If so, it failed miserably!</li>
<li>Speaking of which, what's a console character like Sonic doing hanging around in an arcade? <i>SegaSonic the Hedgehog</i>? Okay, sure, why the fuck not.</li>
<li>Just so we're clear, "Shut Up and Drive" is a song about a lady looking for a gentleman to take over and drive her car (read: lady bits, probably) for her, so it's....pretty much the exact opposite of what Vanellope is doing in that scene, which is to say, driving her car (read: CAR), for herself. (Conversely, I admit that I actually liked the Owl City song.)</li>
<li>If <i>Sugar Rush</i> was a real game, by the way, I'd totally play the shit out of it. I'm not afraid to admit it. I dig that track design!</li>
<li>No reason to keep the much-disliked Terrible Disney Sequel thing going, on account of both the dislikability, and also, the fact that there IS apparently a sequel in the works already. A THEATRICAL sequel. No way this can go wrong!</li>
<li>I'd be terribly remiss if I didn't also mention <i>Paperman</i>, which is really sweet and just delightful in general. Love at first sight, it must be said, is a far more palatable plot device in short-form animation than it is when expected to carry a ninety-minute feature!</li>
<li>Once again, the little kids in the theater were more excited about the trailer for <i>Despicable Me 2</i> (which seemingly didn't realize it might also be shown in 2D) than the main feature. These children are our future, and we're all doomed: such is your motivational closing thought for the day. :)</li>
</ul>
JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-91854178444753411562012-11-23T18:46:00.003-08:002012-11-23T18:46:51.349-08:00Nothing Exciting Ever Happens.Hi, blog! I'm sorry I've been neglectfully neglecting you. That's just awful of me, and I'm sorry. How can I ever make it up to you?<br />
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<i>You can't. I'm really, really pissed off and I'm never, ever gonna forgive you. I think we should see other blogpeople.</i><br />
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I....I know, I was being selfish, but this isn't me, honest! I can do better, really I can! P-please....just give me one more chance....<br />
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<i>*sigh* Okay, fine. Go ahead.</i><br />
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...what? Really? I just.....I didn't expect you to give in so easily.<br />
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<i>Yeah, well, I don't have much self-esteem.</i><br />
<br />
Cool. Okay, where to start?<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Oh, yeah! I painted my room! It's a really cool tree frog green now, I love it.<br />
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<i>That sounds like an awfully loud colour for an entire room, if you ask me.</i><br />
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Well, I didn't.<br />
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<i>Just sayin'. I'm a classy, elegant green. Just look how frickin' classy and elegant I am! I can't imagine this much of a really bright green all in one place.</i><br />
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It's more tolerable if you're high, I guess. It's my room, and I like it, and that's all that matters! The only frustrating part was that weird faux wood panelling that trailers from the 1970s have, with the pointless gaps between each fake "board". Really hard to get enough paint down in those, without having to waste tons of time on painstaking detail work. What was wrong with people in the 1970s??<br />
<br />
<i>It was probably more tolerable when they were high.</i><br />
<br />
Fair enough. What else? Oh, yeah, I bought a 3DS awhile ago! It's fun. <i>Paper Mario: Sticker Star</i> is pretty cool.<br />
<br />
<i>This counts as an exciting life event to you?</i><br />
<br />
I still live in Montana for the time being, so yes.<br />
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<i>Anything else?</i><br />
<br />
Well....it's kind of not really up and running yet, but Taylor and I are working on <a href="http://infinitemankeytheorem.blogspot.com/">a theoretically humorous review-type blog together</a>. I should probably mention that sometime.<br />
<br />
<i>So you HAVE been seeing other blogpeople! How dare you??</i><br />
<br />
Er.....um......well, I......<br />
<br />
<i>You neglect me for MONTHS at a time, and then you come back with nothing useful to say?? And THEN you expect me not to be offended that you're working on stuff with some other floozy?? That is IT. I'm DONE WITH YOU. *angrily storms out and slams the door*</i><br />
<br />
B-but...blog....<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Things are changing, really they are. I swear, they finally are. Really! I'll....I'll prove it to you, blog, and I'll earn you back yet. Just you wait....JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-63440292530795015032012-10-23T22:03:00.000-07:002012-10-23T22:03:47.542-07:00D52 Week 40: The Emperor's New Groove!There's no shortage of divisive films in the Disney canon - at least three of which involve offensive Asian stereotype cats - but <i>The Emperor's New Groove</i> has to be the most curiously divisive. It divides the realm of People Who Watch Disney Films into two categories, with almost stunningly clean-cut precision. Those who watch Disney films because they're just general animation fans tend to like it, because it's something different; but those who watch Disney films out of the belief that they're inherently <u>superior</u> to other animated films tend to look down on it, because it's SILLY, like something produced by one of those OTHER studios, harrumph. Granted, yes, this is a very silly movie, and even in its most theoretically tense moments, it chooses instead to lovingly embrace Teh Wacky. But still, people. Go harrumph yourselves.<br />
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Where does Jesse fall? Well, frankly, I'm in the former category. I've never thought there was anything admirably consistent about Disney, quality-wise - aside from the Pixar films they merely distribute, at least. Sometimes, their in-house productions are good. Sometimes they're not. Oftentimes they're forgettable. They're consistent where it gets tiresome to be consistent, like using the same fucking story in roughly 80% of their movies; and they're inconsistent everywhere else. What makes Disney so special? Damned if I know! I'm certainly not a big enough fan to enjoy watching a different Disney film EVERY SINGLE WEEK. (I'm certainly also not a big enough fan to think it's an even remotely romantic idea to spend a honeymoon at a Disney-themed amusement park. You're welcome, Tails.)<br />
<br />
Indeed, when I expressed my interest in the D52 thingamajig, I thought it would mostly be a recurring sort of discussion topic at most, until it unwittingly morphed into THIS, which is not a consistently consistent source of fun. Anyway, at least I was less frustrated with this particular week. Because, you see, I fall into the former category.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Part of the reason <i>The Emperor's New Groove</i> works is that it comes hot on the heels of an extended streak of hypocritically self-serious films. Films like <i>Mulan</i> and <i>The Lion King</i>, who were under the horribly mistaken impression that they could still be unfalteringly deep and meaningful, while still playing up the flatulence, for "laughs". (<i>The Lion King</i> isn't bad, but....it wasn't the least bit better off for the inclusion of Timon and Pumbaa, either.) Disney had gone from producing genuinely artistic films (<i>Beauty and the Beast</i> is still the high-water mark), to merely thinking that everything they produced was an "artistic" film. Indeed, Roger Allers seemingly wanted to take this film in a similar direction, back when it was still known as <i>Kingdom of the Sun</i>, and starred Owen Wilson (who of course is the DEPUTY-MAYOR OF ARTISTICNESS). Now, don't get me wrong, I like some of Allers' other work; I just maintain that it was high time for Disney to get off their high llama and, if they insisted on having silliness, at least accept it on its own terms. <i>The Emperor's New Groove</i> is a very silly film, and it only very rarely has pretensions that it's anything but, and somehow that's a huge relief.<br />
<br />
I guess the casting of David Spade in the lead role is also a potentially divisive move. Because....well, America's never had much fondness for the scrappy little fella outside the context of being the sort of small, skinny guy that plausibly might hang around with Chris Farley, have they? He's not exactly a dynamic or, well, pleasant presence. But, honestly, doesn't that make him perfect for this role? David Spade is nothing if not the sort of weak, ineffectual, kinda effeminate-but-not-in-a-hot-way guy you'd imagine thinks he's hot shit when, alas, he is precisely that thing, but in the literal sense. And he still likes hanging around fat guys, as you can see. They're just, erm, a little less excitable now. Probably less erratic, though.<br />
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I've heard people - erm, <i>person</i> - question why Yzma is framed as the film's villain, when Kuzco starts out just as heartless. "How do we know she wouldn't have changed, too, if she'd had a Pacha of her own?", asks That Person. What, does Kronk count for nothing? I mean, I know Patrick Warburton is an evil black magician whose ability to be in so many pop cultural places at once can make them start to blend together and nullify each other after awhile - ALL ACCORDING TO HIS PLAN, MUAHAHAHA - but still, he's playing a perfectly nice guy here. If anything, it's her fault, for not taking an interest in his Spinach Puffs of Moral Wholesomeness. I don't view it as a problem, because this is a light film, and saying she's the villain because she's the one who doesn't repent is enough justification for such a light film. So very light. Like a well-made spinach puff! :)<br />
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The few biggest problems this film <u>does</u> have are those fleeting moments it still has to pretend this emotional arc would be enough to carry a serious film all on its own. To justify it still being a theatrical release from Disney, I guess. Yes, those quiet moments where Kuzco and Pacha realise they're each not so bad and, awwwwww, fwiendship....they're perfectly sweet and all, but in this specific case, they actually seem to undermine the pure silliness that otherwise makes this a relatively unique Disney film. You can look to just about ANYTHING they've done as a studio if you want unearned sentiment! But these moments are so short that, honestly, how can I even complain? It's still plenty silly. <i>The Emperor's New Groove</i> is a "minor" entry in the Disney canon, but it's still good fun - good enough fun that it's probably their BEST minor film, if that makes any sense.<br />
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One last time: I'm the former type of fan. When I initially injected myself into this project, I thought it was going to be a recurring discussion topic, not a formal weekly review thing. I stuck with this for as long as I could anyway; but, alas, there's only so much Disney that Taylor and I can possibly take over such a short period of time. They're often not even interesting enough to nitpick at length anymore, sadly. And so, one of the few recent Disney films that I actually enjoyed seems like a reasonable enough place to anticlimactically drop out of this for now, does it not? After all, bigger things ARE on the horizon...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWkQ2OxLu50A5KCxtjnednWxk-OjgCAE4H-jUAwQeK2tOSrSdyJ6ltxJqHl3H1pTvmyNmmUHPGFaK1ipvmrrMwY2THpGUegNbYXoT5h_o6-0O4tBijcEuuOwbY_B9K5cvNRTqiMnx_Pp0/s1600/The+Emperor's+New+Groove.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWkQ2OxLu50A5KCxtjnednWxk-OjgCAE4H-jUAwQeK2tOSrSdyJ6ltxJqHl3H1pTvmyNmmUHPGFaK1ipvmrrMwY2THpGUegNbYXoT5h_o6-0O4tBijcEuuOwbY_B9K5cvNRTqiMnx_Pp0/s400/The+Emperor's+New+Groove.png" width="400" /></a></div>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-29001022636419408112012-10-03T13:42:00.000-07:002012-10-03T13:42:00.982-07:00D52 Week 39: Dinosaur!Congratulations are in order for Gurgi and, um....other, even less memorable characters. <i>The Black Cauldron</i> is no longer my least-favourite D52 film!<br />
<br />
We have a most puzzling paradox, really: <i>Dinosaur</i> would've been considerably less boring had it, well, allowed itself to be "boring"! It's absolutely absurd that they went through all the trouble of making these realistic, detailed dinosaur models, then completely ruining that by giving them goofy cartoon voices - to the degree that Della Reese's voice is goofy, anyhow. Um. Well, it's goofy relative to the visuals, anyway. If Della Reese really was a dinosaur, nobody would take her seriously, and <i>Touched by an Anchisaurus</i> would've been cancelled after just one season, instead of <i>*consults Wikipedia*</i> holy shit <i>Touched by an Angel</i> was on the air as recently as 2003? I like the stories about angels, unicorns, and elves, now I like those stories as much as anybody else, but....seriously, that's kind of sad, isn't it? When you consider all the amazing series out there whose lives were cut tragically short because networks don't get those young people and their internets, and then <b>TOUCHED BY A FUCKING ANGEL</b> gets <b>NINE SEASONS</b>??? Screw you, CBS, and your freakishly old audience!<br />
<br />
Consisting of dinosaurs, you could say.<br />
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<br />
Which brings me back to the movie I'm ostensibly supposed to be writing about. <i>*takes a deep breath*</i><br />
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<a name='more'></a>Y'know, for as terrible as <i>The Black Cauldron</i> was, at least it still felt somewhat like a Disney movie, in the sense that it was animated in a Disneyesque style, and there was a stupid romance, and a comic relief sidekick you wanted to shoot in the face with some sort of period-appropriate projectile weapon. But <i>Dinosaur</i> feels....nothing like that - so you probably wouldn't be surprised to know that, for the longest time, it actually wasn't part of the proper Disney canon. Actually, <i>Dinosaur</i> doesn't really feel like much of anything. Hell, I can imagine hearing more realistic and compelling dinosaur stories (dinostories?) from hyperactive li'l kids playing with their dinosaur action figures. (Especially if they've voiced by Wallace Shawn.) Hell, little kids would probably come up with less wonky names than Aladar and Yar and Plio and Bruton and Kron and Ralph Zondag!<br />
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Of course, one of the fundamental problems that comes with making a film about dinosaurs is that everyone knows what a pathetic, failed enterprise dinosaurdom turned out to be! What with all the extinction and all, y'know. In order to overcome something like that, you need characters with actual personalities that you can actually connect with. Like <i>The Land Before Time</i>! The original, I mean. Though the sequels have characters you can connect with too, to the extent that one connects with a person one really wants to shoot in the face with a period-appropriate projectile weapon, I guess. Hell, that exaggeratedly dry educational kids' show that Robin-Williams-in-drag ends up replacing in <i>Mrs. Doubtfire</i> has more personality than this movie! You get the point. It's impossible to care about these guys on a personal level. And we all know what happened to the dinosaurs. It's not like Aladar and Company (a film whose theme song would, naturally, underline the fact that Aladar has no savoir-faire whatsoever) are gonna save the terrible lizards in the long-term or anything, so their story isn't interesting on an epic scale, either. It's not even interesting on a mildly-fun-to-watch-while-high scale, despite containing a meteor shower and everything! Basically, this dinosaur-themed movie ironically fails as far as any sort of scales are concerned.<br />
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But let's pretend for a second that the dinosaurs WEREN'T completely doomed in the near future anyway and this trek actually mattered. Is it just me, or is there a bizarre, borderline creationist undertone to this film's vilification of Kron? I mean, there's no doubt that he'd benefit from some anger management courses, and he needs to open his mind, maaaaan, and you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and so on. (Though I never understood why I'd want to catch flies in the first place. I usually go out of my way to avoid them. But, that's just Jesse.) But, as far as this film is concerned, his biggest sin seems to be believing in the survival of the fittest, as though he were some sort of ICKY WILD ANIMAL or something. Fuck you, Darwin! And, honestly, shouldn't these dinosaurs consider themselves lucky that they're in his herd on their way to Literally The Only Place On Earth With Green Things Apparently in the first place? I generally assume that real dinosaurs weren't quite so egalitarian when it came to hangin' 'round with other species. Sure, in the end, he ends up being humiliated because his path is blocked by rubble, but it's not like he had any way of knowing that, to be perfectly fair. Dinosaurs didn't have 511, guys. Or any other sort of telephone-based anything. They didn't even have tin-cans-and-string! They didn't even have tin cans OR string! Given the circumstances, are we to believe that the nobler thing to do would've been to let the ENTIRE herd starve for the sake of a few dinosaurs who would've died along with them anyway?<br />
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Oh, and what of the carnivores? It's pretty standard for dinosaur-themed media to treat the meat-eating dinosaurs as the biggest assholes in the universe, because their consumption of meat was somehow more vicious than tigers or lions or dolphins, who are all just majestic and wonderful and perhaps even cute, according to hypocrites. But it seems particularly egregious in this, a film that prides itself on being relatively realistic, visually anyway, to paint them as inherently villainous simply because their digestive systems work differently from those of our herbivorous protagonists, especially combined with the very un-naturalistic morals about Kron's leadership. "Dinosaurs are awesome", this film seems to say, "except for all that nasty-ass dinosaur shit they insist on doing." Though, I suppose we can't expect scientifically sound ideas from a film that contains a lemur who dubs himself the "Love Monkey". Even if we accept the possibility that the lemurs had, indeed, evolved during the time of the dinosaurs - which, by the way, would place this movie pretty much right at the time the dinosaurs went extinct, so nothing Aladar does matters - there sure as fuck weren't fill-blown monkeys yet. Nice job knowing what animals would exist in the future, Zini! "Natural history is fascinating", this film seems to say, "except for all those FACTS and TIMETABLES. Fuck that shit."<br />
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(Oh, by the way, don't get me started on the Love Monkey as an actual character. Very rarely do I encounter film characters I want to stab with a period-appropriate piercing weapon nearly as much as I do him.)<br />
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This film's not even visually pleasing to make up for its stupid characters and its stupid story and its stupid stupidity that's stupidly stupid. Y'know what was cool about the co-mingling of live-action and animation in <i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit?</i> and even <i>Mary Poppins</i> and stuff like that? They had no intention of fooling anyone into thinking the cartoons were live-action people, and vice versa! They create a decidedly incongruous visual effect when they're stuck together, and that's great, because the whole point was to say, "Look how odd and magical it is for these very different beings to interact with each other!" Whereas in <i>Dinosaur</i>, the filmmakers have the audacity to pass off these awful CGI beasts as an actual, organic part of these real backgrounds, and so they lack even a sliver of that same charm. Instead, I found myself keenly aware of the way they just didn't quite fit in, and the way their gross CGI skin doesn't seem to fit quite right on their skeletons, and it all adds up to be scary beyond all reason. If <i>The Land Before Time</i> is about dinosaurs' epic journey to the Great Valley, <i>Dinosaur</i> is about their equally epic journey to the Uncanny Valley, basically.<br />
<br />
So, is it any surprise that this is now my least favourite D52 film? <i>The Black Cauldron</i>, like it or not - I didn't - is at least memorable. (Almost against my will, "munchings and crunchings" has weaselled its way into my snack-related vocabulary.) It's such a misguided spectacle that it naturally instils strong emotion in anyone watching it, as evidenced by <a href="http://jesstehskox.blogspot.com/2012/06/d52-week-25-black-cauldron.html">my write-up for it</a>, which was VERY emotional, in the sense that saying "fuck" a lot constitutes emotion. But <i>Dinosaur</i>? It's an even WORSE sort of film - the sort of film that is so thoroughly boring and so utterly bland in spite of all its stupidity, that you really can't feel much of anything towards it. You can deconstruct everything that's wrong with it - I tried my hardest here - but at the end of the day, am I going to remember this at the end of the year? Of course I'm not! This isn't worth remembering! Let's all just agree to forget this ever happened, okay? Okay. Thanks.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitVURFroUXXIYtWe67uvk5KoLb3X2HwfHNhHfxJMl9kIqg-6cAb0yuLpa40pvTgz3xpxjW_N5LWHQjeHHCYfHyAD1dNZvGrdexb9lmdvJ2tu9DYXf4BxlyqRcJBEJ1pvSs-N7uPaN69wU/s1600/Dinosaur.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Fun Fact: Brown is literally THE most realistic colour in existence!" border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitVURFroUXXIYtWe67uvk5KoLb3X2HwfHNhHfxJMl9kIqg-6cAb0yuLpa40pvTgz3xpxjW_N5LWHQjeHHCYfHyAD1dNZvGrdexb9lmdvJ2tu9DYXf4BxlyqRcJBEJ1pvSs-N7uPaN69wU/s400/Dinosaur.png" title="" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLE AND WORTHLESS AND UTTERLY UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT THAT DESERVES TO BE WIPED OUT BY A METEOR SHOWER</b>: Completely abandoning the seriousness and the artistic integrity of the original, <i>Dinosaur II: Aladar's Incredible Musical Friendventure!</i> is instead a lighthearted journey where our hero and his wacky friends embark on a journey with no stakes whatsoever and meet more friends and together they sing about the power of friendship and the awesomeness of hugging and the sweetness of sweetness, and honestly, this might be the one case where that would be BETTER than the original!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-73606892337265997322012-09-28T22:33:00.002-07:002012-09-29T12:03:15.386-07:00D52 Week 38: Fantasia 2000!Hard to believe it's only been eight months since <a href="http://jesstehskox.blogspot.com/2012/01/d52-week-3-fantasia.html">I took a look at the original <i>Fantasia</i></a> (my first full-fledged D52 review, from an apparently happier time in my life!), and yet, here we are. Fastest fifty-nine years EVER! Of course, it wasn't the first time a sequel had been proposed: in the 80's, your friend and mine Wolfgang Reitherman proposed something called <i>Musicana</i>, "an ambitious concept mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art and more, following the old Fantasia format". And then this was ditched, because Recyclerman was physically unable to do anything potentially interesting by that point in that career. Why, the mere THOUGHT of doing that eventually killed him, so it was shelved. But then, in 1990, Roy Disney entered the fray, feeling the need to prove that he is every bit as much a Disney as his Uncle Waltie; and so, following in his footsteps, he produced a <i>Fantasia</i> film that ended up heralding the end of a period of critical acclaim and commercial successes for the studio. Just as <i>Fantasia</i> begets <i>Dumbo</i> and <i>Melody Time</i>, <i>Fantasia 2000</i> begets <i>Treasure Planet</i> and <i>Home on the Range</i>. Thanks a lot, dudes.<br />
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Still, that shouldn't affect one's opinion on the quality of the Fantasiae themselves. After all, we should be fair, and impartial, right? So, come join me in being an impartial fairy, as I take a segment-by-segment look through Disney's first package-style film in quite some time! (It's easier to not be dreading a package film when I know that it won't be succeeded by, like, six more.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (Allegro con brio)</u></b></div>Remember how <i>Fantasia 1941</i>* opened with an obnoxiously long bit of abstract claptrap that surely would disappoint any of Those Kids Today who ended up watching it? Of course, it wasn't made with Those Kids Today in mind. This was in the past, where Those Kids Yesterday ran amok, so there's at least that excuse. But <i>Fantasia 2000</i> was made much closer to the reign of Those Kids Today. And....well, yes, surely neither of these films were meant for kids in the first place. But it's Disney, and surely some of them will end up seeing this anyway, and my point is that this does a TERRIBLE job of hooking them. It didn't do much to hook me, either. My points from "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" still stand. On a technical level, this wild abstract animation is impressive, but there's no rhyme or reason to it, and it's kind of sad to think that much money was poured into something that is about as impactful as the visualization thingamajiggy on your media player of choice.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Pines of Rome</u></b></div>I have to wonder, as did Taylor: What in this composition, exactly, made the animators think, "Why, humpback whales soaring through the atmosphere, OBVIOUSLY"? And even worse still, they're awkward CGI whales, with a disconcerting mixture of ultra-realistic (for 1999) texturing right alongside big cute hand-drawn (?) cartoon eyes. These whales creep me the fuck out, frankly! And yet, it's hard to completely disregard the artistry of this segment; the inside of the iceberg and, later, the world above the clouds are absolutely GORGEOUS. But do pretty backgrounds alone make a successful segment? Not really. There's just not much else to this. Meh.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Rhapsody in Blue</u></b></div>I've mentioned it before, but it's certainly worth repeating: It's interesting what a very small percentage of Disney films are actually set in Disney's home country! And this has the odd effect, of course, of making those settings like this one, in New York City, seem strangely exotic by comparison. Okay, on one hand, using "Rhapsody in Blue" to specifically epitomize New York is hardly a stretch; that's just what everyone seems to do, period, regardless of the fact that Gershwin thought it represented America at large. A more curmudgeonly fellow could accuse this of being an unusually straightforward and even unimaginative combination of music and imagery in the realm of Fantasia. And yet....it seems impossible to dislike this! It's a sweet, even touching slice of life - or, more accurately, several different slices of life comprising, let's say, a life party sampler of sorts - with loose, retro-stylized animation providing a much-welcome break from the increasingly sterile visual homogenization that had developed as the Renaissance went on. This is different, it's charming as fuck, and it's the highlight of this film, at least in Jesse's loosely caricatured eyes.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major (Allegro)</u></b></div>As far as I can tell, this only exists to serve as a counterpoint to the far more successful stylized visuals in the previous segment. Y'see, while that worked fantastically, this proves that things aren't automatically awesome just because they're stylized. I dunno, perhaps I'm being short-sighted here, but I just couldn't find any reason to appreciate the awkward, stilted animation, which seems entirely too emotionless for an ostensible love story anyhow. It's not even the best Hans Christian Andersen adaptation with a disproportionately happy ending they've done! And it's just so very sad to see the Walt Disney Corporation still spewing the same hateful anti-rat propaganda they were spewing 44 years prior in <i>Lady and the Tramp</i>. I guess, even in 1999, everyone working there was still a 1950s housewife.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>The Carnival of the Animals (Finale)</u></b></div>How in-depth can you even analyse a segment this short, really? Supposedly, this was inspired by the dancin' ostriches from <i>Fantasia</i>'s excellent "Dance of the Hours" sequence, and it is WAY out of that league, sadly. On its own merits, though, it's a cute enough diversion for two minutes, no more, no less. "Who wrote this", indeed!<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>The Sorcerer's Apprentice</u></b></div>It's actually really weird seeing this next to all the more polished, more modern digital animation next to this. It's easy to see the benefits of both techniques. The modern animation is clean and crisp and it's able to do fantastic things, but there's something oddly captivating about all the charming little imperfections at work here, too. The fact that the mighty waves are so obviously paint, Mickey's ears in a bizarre fight to the death with his wizard hat, the fact that Yen Sid is just plain an oddly drawn motherfucker....it all combines to let you know what a massive, ambitious undertaking this was for the time. How can you not appreciate that? This is a good, quality piece, just like it was 59 years prior. Yes, it's still unnerving seeing Mickey go axe crazy, but eh, whatcha gonna do? For the sake of commenting on something new: Penn and Teller are a lot more fun when they're being very talented fake magicians, and not overly aggressive atheist libertarians, aren't they?<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Pomp and Circumstance (Marches 1, 2, 3, and 4)</u></b></div>Poor, poor Donald Duck. He's never had a proper chance at big-screen stardom in a properly budgeted Disney flick. Sure, he got to partake in all that drug-induced Latinsanity, and <i>Fun and Fancy Free</i> gave him the opportunity to starve so badly that he truly thought it was an awesome idea to make a sandwich out of plates, which I'm sure he appreciated immensely. But now....I guess this is his answer to "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"? Of all the things you could theoretically adapt with Donald Duck, um, the one Bible story that even Christians generally seem to regard as far-fetched nonsense wouldn't have even made my list of possibilities. It's not as good as Mickey's own segment - Mickey has all the luck, to the point that he even gets to see Daisy naked in the intro - but it's cute and well-done and appropriately sweet nonetheless. (It's probably for the best that Daisy never learns about Donald's hallucinogenic love affairs with sexxy Latin American women during his young-and-stupid days.)<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>The Firebird (1919 Suite)</u></b></div>Supposedly this was created with the intent of being "emotionally equivalent" to the "Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria" sequence from <i>Fantasia</i>, which seems like a surefire (HAHAHA) recipe for failure, right? After all, it's very hard to replicate history like that! But, honestly? I think I might like this better. I mean, sure, Chernie's an above average Cartoon Satan, but what else does he have going for him? He looks impressively devilish. That's it. This feels like it had a lot more substance to it. Just look at that ruined landscape! It's one of the most strikingly bleak things in the entirety of the Disney canon! And, well, the thing about Chernabog is....for as ostensibly evil as he be, he sure didn't do much. But the Firebird's impact is pretty evident. And while the procession of personality-free monks that served as the counterpoint to Boggy, they were entirely disconnected from his evil, evil hijinks. But Birdie's relationship with this sprite chick is pretty clear: Nature is pretty, and though it destroys itself sometimes, it's just as capable of repairing itself. (As long as Man isn't the one destroying it, of course. Stop keeping nature down, Man.)<br />
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Overall, a lot of the praises and criticisms I could heap onto <i>Fantasia 2000</i> are much the same as the original <i>Fantasia</i>. It's a package film, so it's a mixed bag. Some of the segments are uninspired, and some are just plain too up their own ass with their abstract pretentiousness for their own good. But then, when there's a segment where everything clicks, it's genuinely powerful and majestic and, well, you actually understand for a second what Walt probably had in mind. If I had to choose between the two, <i>Fantasia 2000</i> probably has a higher entertainment ratio....and it helps that the Cavalcade of Random Celebrities, by and large, have more personality than Deems Taylor. But then, what doesn't?<br />
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<b>THOROUGHLY UNLIKEABLE AND UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL OF LAST WEEK, CUZ I'M SLOW</b>: The music industry is dead!!! if you believe the doom-and-gloomery of music industry people who are now only sort of fabulously wealthy, as opposed to fabulously wealthy. No, Those Kids Today just don't care for music anymore - just listen to your local Top 40 radio station. They're far more interested in, like, I dunno, fashion or some shit. Such is the angle of <i>Pantasia</i>, a stunning and classy set of cartoon shorts, each exploring the intricacies of a different sort of leg-covering. Suggested tagline: "It's a trouser trove of cartoon magic!"<br />
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*It gets an extra, arbitrary year because <i>Fantasia 2000</i> was first premiered in 1999 and, of course, I have to keep things consistent!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-37318134067785874752012-09-23T04:03:00.001-07:002012-09-23T04:03:55.998-07:00D52 Week 37: Tarzan!And thus, the period somewhat arbitrarily known as the Disney Renaissance comes to an end, forever. With this most momentous of occasions, one very important question comes to mind: What is it about nature-based settings that predominately feature animal characters that brought out this weird urge in Disney to hire famous pop singer-songwriters, to contribute awkward quasi-ethnic songs? There's something very 1990s about slow pop ballads set to tribal chanting and percussion, isn't there?<br />
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Yes, <i>Tarzan</i> is, in many ways, a good note for this era to go out on. It's really pretty! There are some genuinely interesting characters! The action scenes are nicely done! The biggest problem with the film can be summed up quite simply: Phil Collins. The again, the biggest problem with most things Phil Collins is involved with can be summed up in the same way. A Disney film doesn't have to be a musical to succeed, but if it's going to lean heavily on its soundtrack - and they often do - then those songs should be, y'know, organic and entertaining at best, unobtrusive at worst. Phil Collins manages none of these things. (Of the many petty things Trey Parker and Matt Stone have pettily been pissed off about over the years, losing to Phil Collins might be one of the most reasonably petty of them all.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Also not particularly helpful: Rosie O'Donnell. I legitimately wasn't sure throughout almost all of this whether Terk was a dude or a chick. Does that make me insensitive? Maybe. Maybe it does. But I don't particularly care. Pondering this was the main distraction I had from how much of an asshole the character comes across as, just based on the voice she gives her (that's right, right?) alone. Then again, it would hardly be a Disney Renaissance film without obnoxious and grating and thoroughly unwelcome comic relief, now would it? The frustrating thing in this case, though, is that there's non-obnoxious comic relief in this film, too. Jane is fun! Her fascination with the wild world of the jungle, to a borderline insane degree, is pretty funny - not in a loud-and-wacky-for-loud-and-wacky's-sake way, but in the way that actually derives from her characterization. What a concept! "He has no sense of personal space", she declares with abject glee, surely offending some feminists somewhere, but who cares, she's just so HAPPY!<br />
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The biggest surprise of the movie, though, was how genuinely likeable and even sympathetic Tarzan himself is. Now, granted, I've never read the book and I've never even seen any of the other adaptations of it, but I'd always gotten the impression from pop culture that he was, y'know, just kind of a simple-minded asshole. But, at the very least, Disney sidesteps that potential issue entirely. He's a complex fellow - certainly moreso than at least some of the human people raised by other human people in this story - driven, primarily, by his charming sense of curiosity. He's hardly the ape-man savage that lesser pop culture references like to think of the character as, such that the one time he actually breaks out the Stereotypical Tarzan Yell Thing, it comes across less as something that feels like a thing this particular character would do, and more like something they <i>had</i> to do, to remind you he's technically still Tarzan. He doesn't do much else that's stereotypically Tarzanesque, really. Oh, wait, I guess he beats a big jungle cat at hand-to-hand combat, too. That's something, right? I mean, I certainly couldn't do that. I can barely beat small housecats at hand-to-hand combat, on account of the blindingly painful sharpness of their hands! But I digress.<br />
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I admit: This movie made me cry, indirectly. There's something that Jesse identifies with pretty deeply in the scene where Li'l Tarzan stares into the water and violently mopes about how he doesn't look like everyone else so fuck the world. It's a cliché, but dammit, it's an identifiable cliché! That pretty much was my life in the past. It's only recently that I've learned to be okay with Real Jesse, and that's even still a work in progress. Yes, I even felt that way when I was Li'l Tarzan's age. I wish I'd just splashed myself with mud and organic matter during my not-even-close-to-mid-life crisis, instead of attempting radical weight loss self-surgery that, THANK GOD, didn't get very far....but, eh, what are you gonna do now. The point is, Tarzan's confusion over where he belongs is a genuinely effective plot device, and serves to make his foolhardy behaviour seem more justifiable, at least, than that of the average Disney Princess. And of course he's a Disney Princess! Look at that hair!<br />
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A cliché I'm less fond of here is the Terrible and Distant Father Who Finally Warms Up To His Son On His Deathbed, or TDFWFWUTHSOHN. Not only is it a cheap way to wring emotion, but there's something really cold about it from a storytelling standpoint, isn't there? It's as if to say the only way the story can end satisfyingly for our heroes is to senselessly bump this guy off, and he was an asshole and so everyone can go back to their lives almost immediately, without mourning, in spite of what he said. But then why make him try to go out in a "dignified" way, if everyone's gonna forget it anyway? Sometimes, people are just assholes. They're born assholes, and they'll die assholes. (Like Jim.) It makes especially little sense in this context. "Tarzan, I know you deliberately disobeyed me for, like, the millionth time, even though as we've just seen I was totally right, and that's why I'm lying here, dying of invisible blood loss from this invisible gunshot wound....so I think you're positively nifty now. Bye!" If you recall, <i>Pocahontas</i> was also pretty cold about this trope, with Pocahontas not batting an eye at the death of Cocoapuff, because she was never particularly cuckoo for him at all. (Something else this film has in common with that one: Two different languages that are both rendered as English, confusingly, except when those two different languages are being spoken in the same scene. It's a good thing that Tarzan, too, was pretty adept at Listening With His Heart.)<br />
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Though <i>Tarzan</i> is certainly no <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> or <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>, and it's not even <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, it's still a surprisingly decent film, in spite of its many faults. Appropriately enough, it winds up being pretty emblematic of the Disney Renaissance experience as a whole, too. People seemingly like to remember that period being filled with great films like the ones I mentioned, but the reality is that Disney during this period was, on the whole, no more infallible than Disney during other periods - they just spent a shitload more cash in the hopes that people wouldn't realise that not every film was a slam dunk, or a home run, or a whatever-they-call-it-when-you-score-big-in-curling. <i>Tarzan</i> contains a few likeable characters and an effective emotional hook, like the best films of the period. But it also contains the obnoxious comic relief voiced by a divisive comedian, the almost callous lack of concern for the characters not involved in its romantic plotline, and the unmemorable non-Ashman-or-Menken musical numbers that became mockably common in Disney's oeuvre during that particular decade. Even during their most critically successful period, Disney still couldn't resist the same kind of pathetic pandering to dumb kids that they're reviled for engaging in today - the only thing that has changed is what dumb kids want in the first place.<br />
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<b>TERRIBLE AND AWFUL AND WORTHLESS DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL THAT DESERVES TO BE SHOT SO IT CAN FINALLY REALISE ITS TERRIBLE AWFUL WORTHLESS AND ATTEMPT TO ATONE FOR IT ON ITS DEATHBED</b>: When Tarzan discovers that his many years of jungle livin' have blessed him with the ability to transmogrify into literally any jungle critter he could possibly desire, he does the only logical thing - he moves to America where he uses these skills to help the police solve crimes, in <i>Tarzan III*: Tarzanimal!</i>! His first case, though, is tougher than expected, though, as he squares off with a powerful Eastern European ambassador abusing his diplomatic immunity status to run a sinister art smuggling scheme, or something. It's always shit like ambassadors and art smuggling in shows like that, isn't it? Anyway, the ambassador's voiced by Coolio!<br />
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*or would it be <i>Tarzan IV</i>? Does <i>Tarzan & Jane</i> count for the sake of numbered sequelry?JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-61167827889205227532012-09-14T19:45:00.001-07:002012-09-14T19:45:11.546-07:00D52 Week 36: Mulan!Y'know, the Disney Renaissance experience seems to be really hampered when you watch all of these movies back-to-back (as are a lot of cumulative Disney experiences, apparently). How wonderful it must've been to be moviegoers in the 90s - I wasn't allowed to see movies at that time, period, so I wasn't one - and have a new gorgeously drawn Disney film almost every year! Why, that's almost just long enough to forget enough about the previous one to feel like the new one's, well, new! Whereas, when you watch them all back-to-back, it's a little wearying. That barely concealed sadistic side of us all seizes on the repetition to come gradually more to the forefront, practically begging to see even ONE movie that doesn't end in unearned happy lovey-dovey romancings. For all the intriguing new directions they go in on a visual level, and all the surprisingly well-cast characters that pop up, it still always seems to boil down to the same rusty old story mechanisms, creaking away, until the end of time itself. Is this literally the only type of plot they could dream up at this time? Seriously, dudes??<br />
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And so, we come to <i>Mulan</i>, a film where our heroine mentions on precisely one occasion that she thinks her commander is hot, and he can't bring himself to murder her for being a woman. Clearly, They Should Totally Be Together, forever!!! ♥<br />
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<a name='more'></a>But, let's try to focus on what might differentiate Mulan's story from those of previous Disney Princesses. (Yeah, apparently she's marketed as part of THAT nonsense, even though she wasn't born a princess, and Shang's merely a high-ranking military dude. Perhaps a bunch of royalness just rubbed off on her when she unwelcomely hugged Emperor Pat Morita?) Like, um....well, I guess her parents don't yell very much, now do they? They're still too ignorant to understand why she's "different", but they're ignorantly supportive, at least. And....I suppose her foolishly foolish act of fool's rebellion that only a foolish fool would foolishly conceive of, foolishly, was not done so much for selfishly selfish reasons, as it was done to help her family, selfishly. It's interesting to note that her foolhardy adventure requires a lot more preparation than previous characters in similar situations, too; consequently, by the end of it, it doesn't seem so dumb after all. Let's take Ariel for a counterpoint - even though it ultimately ended Happily Ever After, I never got any impression that she was anything other than, well, kind of a naïve idiot. But Mulan's pretty bright. And that's probably a positive change!<br />
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And yet, this movie might be less likeable than <i>The Little Mermaid</i>. I could blame this on all sorts of things - weird pacing, uncomfortable bouts of sexism that seem to defy the feminist message, Eddie Murphy - but it comes down to the fact that <i>Mulan</i> is WAAAAAAAAY out of <i>TLM</i>'s league on a musical level. Jerry Goldsmith's score sounds adequately Chinese-as-recognizable-by-a-Western-audience, but when we start getting into the actual songs, well....Matthew Wilder and David Zippel are no Ashman and Menken. (Hence the different names.) Their work here gives the bizarre sensation that they're just going down a checklist of "essential" elements of Disney songs, crossing off the items one by one as they're assembled into soulless, inorganic music golems. (Google Chrome spellcheck insists that, by "golems", I clearly meant "Togolese".) Melodically, they're nice enough, but the rhymes, for instance, have a consistent air of perfunctoriness. There's always something disconcerting about listening to a song that practically seems to be telling you, subtextually, "Here's your fucking rhyme, now get off my back already." ("I'll Make a Man Out of You" seems to especially suffer from such phoned-in rhymes, sidetracking what would've otherwise been a great song.)<br />
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To give credit where I suppose it's due, though, Christina Aguilera's poppy cover of "Reflection" in the credits is probably one of the less egregiously awful poppy Disney singles to play over the credits in recent memory. Maybe there actually IS some sort of person in there, beneath all the Aguilerity.<br />
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But let's talk about Mulan's gross relationship with Shang. It's probably one of the most confusing and unromantic romances in recent Disney memory! Okay, so, it's kind of cute when he has this weird, subtle, inexplicable attraction to her when she's still "Ping". That's probably as close as we'll ever get to even vaguely implied hardcore gay action in the Disney canon, so I'll just take what I can get! Anyway, after "Ping" is revealed as a lady, it's harder to understand why she still likes the guy. Because he didn't murder her? Why, if <i>I</i> fell madly in love with everyone who didn't murder me, well, I'd have pretty much no time left to do other things that make me miserable! Because he's very slightly less sexist than the others? But he still looks down on her and almost lets Emperor Pat Morita die as a result! And then, though we're asked to see it as a sweet moment that cements their totally-in-love-and-together-forever-ness....forever, I can't really see Shang's visit to Mulan and Mama Fa and Papa Fa at the end of the movie as anything other than him fulfilling a simple duty because Emperor Pat Morita told him to. (Papa Fa's, incidentally, is the world's foremost Chinese pizza chain, as I'm sure you're already aware.)<br />
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But this is just indicative of a more common problem that Disney never seems capable of grasping. When you insist on having, say, a strong woman as your main character, someone whose strength and independence and general sense of self comes from her being, essentially, a modern character plopped into a past time period, and she spends the entire film standing up to the oppressive societal norms of her era, it comes across as nothing short of character assassination to then have her forgive all of that at the drop of a hat. Their films seem to do this a lot, to varying degrees, presenting strong and brave and wonderful women who stand up for what they believe in - which is good! - and then "rewarding" them by allowing them to realise their place in society and throw all of that away by marrying an asshole who doesn't even have to atone for his assholishness beforehand - which is bad! They do it a lot, but it seems especially egregious here!<br />
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Rounding out the film are some typically bizarre casting choices for comic relief characters. Eddie Murphy and Harvey Fierstein are totally Chinese, y'all! (The choice of Fierstein makes more sense when he joins his army buddies in crossdressing for the finale, I suppose.) Mushu, in particular, is polarizing - he's essentially Eddie Murphy, and if you enjoy seeing Eddie Murphy Eddie Murphyin' it all up in here, then you're bound to love the little fella. But it's fundamentally hard to tell the difference between him and a certain other wacky talking animal critter he's known for, at least vocally. (Confusing the matter even further, if I recall correctly, they ended up having Donkey fuck a dragon, resulting in biologically baffling crossbreeds!) I didn't much care for his Murphyisms here, though I suppose it didn't help that they mostly come as a weird tonal shock right after rather serious things happening to Mulan. Really? They couldn't smooth out the transition a little better? But, to give some credit in an attempt to seem reasonable, Mushu's character design and long, floppy expressiveness was pretty much spot-on. There's just something about the way Eddie Murphy talks that makes it seem like he SHOULD be flailing around and bouncing off the walls, isn't there?<br />
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Yeah, if you couldn't tell, I wasn't really wild about <i>Mulan</i>, but I have to wonder if that's solely because of the faults of the film itself, or if it's two months of burnout when it comes to the Disney Renaissance formula. (Or maybe I just didn't smoke enough wild dagga beforehand.) Whatever the case, at the very least, this was probably more racially sensitive than <i>Pocahontas</i>? That's something, right? Maybe?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Teenage girls are literally the WORST.</i></td></tr>
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<b>TERRIBLY TERRIBLE AND AWFULLY AWFUL AND WORTHLESSLY WORTHLESS DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: Being a respected army general, Shang is sent off to Paris to command his country's army in the French-Chinese War; out of sheer loneliness, his foolish fool of a wife follows him without his permission. Thus, the stage is set for <i>Mulan III: Mulan Rouge!</i>. In Paris, she befriends Pierre du Croissant (Hal Sparks), a hack writer who had been struggling for years, but her loveliness finally inspires him to write a wildly successful cabaret revue, using popular Radio Disney songs from centuries in the future! Naturally, Mulan relishes in her newfound vicarious fame, oblivious to the fact that Pierre has fallen in love with her. It's only too late that she realises the truth - by this time, she has also caught the eye of the King of France, Duke Jacques Baguetteman (Diedrich Bader), and she gets stuck in the middle of an ugly fight between the two. Finally deciding she's had enough, she consults the famous French wizard, Tuberculo (Rondell Sheridan), for assistance in breaking her contract as Pierre's muse; alas, he is more interested in simply locking her up so he can gradually absorb her life energy and become stronger than ever. When Shang hears of this, he's furious at her; nonetheless, he teams up with Pierre and King Duke Jacques in a climactic final battle to take down Tuberculo, and Tuberculo's sis (Olivia Holt), once and for all! In the end, Mulan learns the important lesson that, as a married woman, she can no longer be ambitious without her husband's permission, for it is dishonourable; and the two reconcile over a romantic candlelit frog platter atop the Eiffel Tower. (Meanwhile, in an unrelated subplot, Mushu has wacky adventures about town with Yao in drag, as is his wont.)JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-77913585387408454702012-09-05T23:48:00.002-07:002012-09-05T23:48:53.443-07:00D52 Week 35: Hercules!I can't help but wonder if I would've enjoyed this movie more had I not been overexposed to James Woods' episodes of <i>Family Guy</i> while living in one of the few states even worse than Montana!<br />
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After the grimness of <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>, I suppose it's only logical to have some palette-cleansing silliness. (And when you think of silly stories, the first thing that comes to mind is Greek mythology, right???) As such, like <i>Aladdin</i> a few years back, we get an ostensibly serious figure who ends up being voiced by a Particularly Unlikely Celebrity whose fast-talking mannerisms surely take forever for whichever fool(s) ended up being responsible for animating them. Of course, regardless of how James Woodsed out I might be for one lifetime, Robin Williams as the Genie makes his Hades seem reigned-in and relatively tame by comparison, in that he actually has, y'know, an actual concrete characterization and stuff. (Not that I'm implying that Ed Sullivan impressions <i>don't</i> count as characterization in and of themselves, but-- oh, actually, I TOTALLY AM.) And, yeah, again, there's kind of a romance somewhere in there, with a lady who's forced to get close to the Big Bad against her will - which is also more tolerable than some of the previous examples of this. Despite trying a couple of interesting things, <i>Hercules</i> is pretty much one of the more formulaic entries from the Renaissance era, but at least it's formulaic in a competent way, I guess!<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Though, by all means, he's a perfectly pleasant fellow who'd be perfectly pleasant to hang out with (horrific strength-related accidents aside), Hercules is one of the most personality-free Disney protagonists we've seen in some time. As a teenager, he's endearingly awkward, I suppose. How can anyone with godlike strength be that gawky and skinny, anyway? Anyway, they ditch that endearingness pretty quickly, and he spends most of the running time being a genial and heroic but relatively bland celebrity. I mean, again, this movie's pretty clear that it just wants to be silly after the seriousness of last week, so why can't he get in on the act, too? Aside from slaying the CGI Hydra That Sticks Out Like a Sore Thumb and out-car-salesmanning Hades, he doesn't even engage in much in the way of epic adventurin'. It's a story that's ostensibly about Hercules, but that acts almost like it would rather not be. It's like making a biopic that completely ignores the important thing that its subject was famous for in the first place! And how does being willing to sacrifice oneself for someone you love <i>more</i> honourable than risking your life day in and day out to save strangers? For that matter, for the thousandth time, how is falling deeply, madly, passionately in love with a woman you had precisely one mostly-nice-but-awkward-at-the-end date with, and nothing else?<br />
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Strangely, though, Meg actually IS likeable. Disney women are a crapshoot, so I have to savour it when they produce a really good one. (Not that there was anything WRONG with Esmerelda, per se, but her primary character quirk was simply that every guy everywhere wanted to bone her, hard...) The interesting thing about her is that she's played as, essentially, a throwback to 1940s screwball comediennes, and in the process she manages to come across as decidedly <i>more modern</i> than that then-recent brand of Disney women who just get what they want by bitching and bitching and infinitely more bitching. In fact, I'd go as far as to say I wish this movie was about HER. Hercules is little more than Some Random Adopted Kid; she's got a far more interesting backstory. A far more interesting backstory that Hades recounts to us precisely once, and then it's promptly forgotten. What the hell, guys? The fact that she's so willing to give in to spending the rest of her life with "Wonderboy", after having her heart rather cruelly torn out and stomped on and humiliated in the stocks in the town square of her being, by the very guy that she SOLD HER FUCKING SOUL TO HADES TO SAVE IN THE FIRST PLACE....well, it's needless torpedoing of her interesting character just to serve the Standard Disney Renaissance Plot Generator Formula, and that's not cool. Yeah, I guess it's a prerequisite here given the myth they're adapting in the first place, but that doesn't make it seem any less silly; if I were in her situation, having gone through what she'd gone through, frankly, I'd need more than just a catchy tune performed by African-Greek statue ladies. (This is, for the record, the second consecutive Disney film where beings carved from stone counsel a main character on their love life through song.)<br />
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As for Hades, well....you'd think the Lord of the Underworld would be a little better at making shady deals, wouldn't you? The idea that Hercules can get out of his Taking a Day Off From Heroism Contract simply because Meg got hurt by some other freak accident is just....stupid. Nice going, Hades! Really, though, Hades' comical villain stupidity lends this film an oddly Saturday morning cartoon sort of vibe. Well, a really high-budget one, anyway. And that's not all. There's also the cheap-ass jokes (some of them are funny, but "Air Herc" just seems painful today), and the scoring that seems to insist on having goofy music drone on in the back of EVERY SINGLE SCENE apparently. And, trust me, I love Saturday morning cartoons! They're goofy and awkward and absolutely loveable - or they were, anyway, when they were still a thing that existed. (Godless <i>VeggieTales</i> re-edits don't count, I'm afraid.) But...there's just something that seems off about seeing one with a budget THIS HIGH. If you're going to employ, what, probably hundreds of animators overall, toiling for years, shouldn't you be aiming for something a little loftier? It's almost insulting! But still, admittedly, kinda fun.<br />
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(Though, given how kid-friendly most of this is...oh, how I don't envy the parents in the audience who had to explain that Oedipus joke!)<br />
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By the way, can anyone explain to me just where the hell this movie's supposed to be taking place? Mount Olympus is in Greece, of course. But then we have Heracles referred to by his more well-known Roman name! But, for the sake of confusion, Zeus is still Zeus instead of Jupiter. And then either-Pain-or-Panic-I-can't-tell-them-apart as the little kid makes the joke about calling "IX-I-I"! Oh, but clearly he's just so freakin' stupid that he doesn't even realise what empire he's in or something. Come to think of it, though, Bobcat Goldthwait strikes me as someone who has no idea where he is sometimes too! So, that JUST MAKES SENSE.<br />
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It's hard to think of much to say about <i>Hercules</i>. Again, it's competent, in a formulaic way. It's entertainment that's alright to just let safely wash over you, as though you're a Greek God and it's the soothing waters of the River Styx - at least it's not an actively painful experience. You just have to wonder why it got a theatrical release when something smaller would've suited this project just fine...<br />
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Well, I suppose you have to go all-out with your budget like that if you want to score famous big-name stars like Wayne Knight and Paul Shaffer!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This is, of course, as close as Greek mythology actually gets to "happily ever after"!</i></td></tr>
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<b>TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND WORTHLESS DIRECT-TO-DVD AND BLU-RAY AND GAME BOY ADVANCE VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL</b>: It's insane family madness galore in <i>Hercules II: My Big Fat Greek God Wedding</i> when Hercules and Meg announce their intentions to get married! While Zeus is thrilled by the news, Meg's dad Creon (Eric Allan Kramer) is not, feeling she's somehow dishonouring her family. But how far is he willing to go to stop her from making such a huge "mistake"? Why, OF COURSE he's willing to make a deal with Herc's Wacky Uncle Hades, who was presumed dead, but actually he's not; obviously, when the other spirits in the River Styx recognized him as someone famous, they rushed him to a top-secret science lab in Athens, or something. It's probably a trick or something. But can Hercules possibly set things right, without spoiling the family-friendly goat-themed bachelor party Phil went through so much trouble throwing for him? Um. Probably. (Who wants to bet that the publicity material for this would involve at least one use of the phrase "wedded blitz"?)JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-26642754907211668662012-08-29T22:32:00.002-07:002012-08-29T22:32:23.440-07:00D52 Week 34: The Hunchback of Notre Dame!As a general rule, with the past Disney films we've covered, when someone boasts of how a particular movie is "unusually dark", what they secretly mean is that it's forgettable at best, horrible at worst, with no real personality. "<i>Sleeping Beauty</i> is unusually dark compared to other Disney films of its era!" Yeah, because everyone's drawn somewhat more angularly? Because our villainess has a less vivid skin tone than even some albinos, which is used in place of giving her an actual personality? Big deal! "<i>The Black Cauldron</i> is one of Disney's darkest films, period!" Well, OF COURSE it is. Having to put up with Gurgi would give ANYONE dark thoughts.<br />
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Darkness hasn't served Disney well in the past, is my point. But, somehow, <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> is different, not to mention even darker than either of those two films, because it's taking on real-world issues! Social injustice! Religious intolerance! Strumpetism! The idea that someone with a name like Frollo can be anything other than wacky! The really surprising thing is that it's actually willing to <i>analyze</i> these rather serious issues that it drags into the fray, and the result is one of Disney's most surprisingly thoughtful films, and probably the most underrated part of the Renaissance.<br />
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...though, somehow it's appropriate that people lock this film away in the belltower of their minds instead of trying to appreciate it at all.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Grated, you can't blame people for not being overly warm to this one. It's NOT, by any means, a feel-good movie. I remember complaining, months/decades ago, of how the Disney films produced when Walt himself was still alive presented strangely robotic female leads who can do nothing but smile ingratiatingly, no matter how terrible their situation is. It's distracting, yes, but it was also his concession to the audience, in an era when people probably wouldn't have been willing to accept a depressing cartoon. "She's happy now, because we all know there's going to be a happy ending", it seems to promise. I understand a bit more why that had to be done now that I've seen Quasimodo's attitude toward his own situation here. He still projects the same sort of graciousness when dealing with his Overwhelming Villainous Step-Parent, but now, there's no hiding the sadness in his voice. It leads to a richer, more emotionally evolving storytelling experience.....but, damn, it really IS depressing! I appreciated the story they tried to tell, but I can see why people hoping for, y'know....a more stereotypical cartoon weren't too enthusiastic, and consequently, why Disney doesn't re-release it all that much. It's a shame, though.<br />
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Quasimodo still has something in common with those characters, though: We first meet him carrying on a rousing conversation with pretty birdies. He's a lovely Disney Princess after all!<br />
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What's really surprising is the way this movie is willing to actually <i>analyze</i> the serious issues it brings into play. Co-directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise clearly know how to not let the comic relief sabotage a story entirely, apparently even when they're as obnoxious as the comic relief here! No, the gargoyles are nowhere near as well-integrated as the comic relief in their previous film, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> - but Prince Adam's castle staff is a pretty tough act to follow in that regard any way you shake it. Victor, Hugo, and Laverne* are the sort of tedious anachronistic belch-happy characters that bring down more Renaissance films than I'd honestly remembered, and yeah, I suppose they had to be in the movie enough for Disney to promote this as something that the kiddies might like, and that sucks. But the balance is less damaging here than it was in <i>Aladdin</i> or <i>The Lion King</i>, and I'm sure Trousdale and Wise deserve a lot of the credit there. I can't imagine how this film would've turned out without them! (As a side note, they also seem to be disproportionately fond of ending their films with climactic rooftop battle scenes involving a non-traditionally handsome fella protecting a sexy lady from some other dude who looks more human on the outside, but is definitely far less so on the inside, who in the end plummets to his death.)<br />
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Also rather <i>BatB</i>-esque: Songs that actually advance and enhance the plot! Sure, they're not as catchy as the songs there, but it's not like they're supposed to be, either. They're more like dramatic musical monologues, and they're VERY well done. It's safe to say that the star of the show is Frollo's "Hellfire", also probably the single creepiest song in the Disney canon. (It's not normal to rub a scarf against your face THAT fervently, dude.) Actually, in general, Frollo is a really interesting villain. When we first met him, I was genuinely afraid that he was going to be a rather Lady Tremainesque figure - awful just for the sake of being awful, existing for literally no other apparently purpose. And I wasn't looking forward to a repeat of that! But then....while still irredeemably, invariably awful, they actually gave him depth, with his own fucked up view of the way the world works, and he's certainly not infallible, even by his own ridiculous self-righteous view of him...self. He's, like, an actual person or something! A really shitty person, but really shitty people are still people, too! It's nice to see that David Ogden Stiers' surprisingly limp Governor Ratcliffe (the script's fault, not his!) was but a brief diversion from the otherwise steady procession of interesting villains. The studio's redeemed themselves for now; I guess they don't have to burn in the pyre........yet.<br />
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One sticking point that I expected to have with this movie - because it's impossible NOT to have this shit spoiled ahead of time - is the idea that Quasimodo ends the movie alone, as far as sex-having-ness goes. "It's because he's UGLY, isn't it??", I was prepared to ask accusingly, before laying out a bitchy, self-righteous argument about the movie's undermining its own messages. And then I actually <i>watched</i> it, and it's....not that bad. In a weird way, there's something very relieving about a Disney film where there's more than one good guy interested in our Resident Hot Lady! That's just how life is - not everyone's gonna get what they want all the time, and they're <i>definitely</i> not gonna stumble into a lifetime of wedded bliss with the first nice person of the opposite sex you meet, despite what so many Princess-themed Disney flicks seem to believe so very strongly. Heartbreak is inevitable. Arguably, I think it teaches an even better lesson: Rejection sucks, romantic or otherwise, and there will always be SOME people who reject you, but that's no reason not to brave the world anyway. Take it from me, it's better than being a hermit living in a belltower. Much has been made of how Disney changed the ending from the original story's delightful Everybody Dies scenario, but - let's face it - it was a given that they'd have to make it lighter. And I can't think of a more sensible way to end this story sans sadness.<br />
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It's really hard to imagine a film like this being released today without being surrounded by a firestorm of controversy. There would inevitably be arguments about how it's somehow anti-Christian, even though David Ogden Stiers' Archdeacon is an unrealistically good guy, and one of Frollo's biggest mistakes is defying him! And, well, it's a pretty sure thing that this WOULDN'T be rated G if it had been released today, what with all the helling and the damning and the licentious-ing, and also, Esmerelda's pole-dancing. And, y'know, it's a shame that we seem to live in an increasingly short-sighted time, because everyone's missing out on what I'd say is the second-best Disney Renaissance film. (If only it hadn't been for those pesky gargoyles. Curse you, Jason Alexander!!)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlinOyrQTViTBfPeovedLJLxG7wwyxxkUqugEtbR98X6E54THCeVxnMjC5_mAmQu_GFkzPIydENhAZw-vsgso6Hbb_MlD43XAwRnKEEplCCPWrTlt17Q6mjs3Fmrqt7GB1wyOHj8oCICo/s1600/The+Hunchback+of+Notre+Dame.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlinOyrQTViTBfPeovedLJLxG7wwyxxkUqugEtbR98X6E54THCeVxnMjC5_mAmQu_GFkzPIydENhAZw-vsgso6Hbb_MlD43XAwRnKEEplCCPWrTlt17Q6mjs3Fmrqt7GB1wyOHj8oCICo/s400/The+Hunchback+of+Notre+Dame.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT THAT CERTAINLY DESERVES DAMNATION</b>: When Quasimodo accidentally steps through a time portal, he is whisked forward to the present day and plopped out into a crowded football stadium, thus setting forth the events of <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame III: The Hunched Quarterback of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish</i>! Noticing his freakish exterior, Notre Dame's Coach Jack Coachen (Bill Engvall is broke and pathetic enough to do these, right) immediately recruits him right then and there, replacing former star quarterback Chad Forthdon (Calum Worthy). The nefarious Chad defects to Duke, where he reveals everything in Notre Dame's playbook to the Blue Devils' even more nefarious (and strangely familiar) Coach Mitch Frollo, giving him an unfair advantage the next time the two teams meet. In due time, it's revealed that the true reason for their long-standing rivalry that the film just made up is Mitch's desire to obtain Notre Dame's leprechaun mascot, who is secretly a real leprechaun (voiced by Jon Lovitz), for use in secret and evil magickal rituals to revive his ancestor whom you might remember! Alas, it all comes down to Quasimodo's bitchin' football skillz to save the team for another year. (Spoiler alert: He probably does. Sigh.)<br />
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<i>*Victor Hugo's middle name was Marie. Why is "Marie" not an acceptable name for a she-gargoyle??</i>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-13347040179084237942012-08-22T04:59:00.000-07:002012-08-22T04:59:46.985-07:00D52 Week 33: Pocahontas!Well, you have to give <i>Pocahontas</i> credit for one thing, at least. It's a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans than <i>Peter Pan</i>!<br />
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But, yes. Everyone knows that <i>Pocahontas</i> is a film with an incredibly naïve worldview, a film with the audacity to pretend that everything's gonna be alright between European settlers and Native Americans from now on, and - furthermore - a film that abandons pretty much every genuinely interesting thing that actually happened in its subjects' lives for the sake of retelling <i>The Fox and the Hound</i>, as a romance, with human people. (I suppose there's also a healthy splash of far-less-magical-and-interesting <i>The Little Mermaid</i> in here, too.) But let's give them the benefit of the doubt, okay? Don't the <i>majority</i> of biopics oversimplify their subjects' lives and throw out the most uniquely interesting bits in favour of telling a more comfortably familiar story? That's just what they do, because, in all fairness, it's quite difficult to compress most interesting lives into less than two hours. Surely we can just put aside the pseudo-historicality of it and just enjoy it as a sweet and romantic romance, right??<br />
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Well, no. No matter what, Mel Gibson is always Mel Gibson. Even Disney Mel Gibson!<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Seriously, what does this girl possibly see in John Smith? That's the nagging thought that was running through my mind all throughout this movie. Would <i>you</i> date him? I know <i>I</i> wouldn't (though, thankfully, he probably doesn't roll that way anyway)! Yes, he's moderately nicer than the other British settlers - you can tell he's supposed to be the sympathetic British guy because he speaks with an American accent - but that's really not saying a lot. He's still a douche. That's like saying you'd rather date an Indian Cobra than a King Cobra! Yeah, it's less dangerous, but it's <i>still</i> an unpleasant venomous cobra! I mean, when she first meets him, he's all ready to blow her brains out; he seemingly only relents after he remembers that the Virginia Company didn't bring along any women whatsoever, and he has to find <i>somewhere</i> to fire off his trouser-musket, right? How romantique! And then he disregards her native greeting, because Mel Gibson, being Mel Gibson, "prefer(s) hello". And then he calls her people "savages", which also has the unfortunate side effect of reminding everyone that Mel Gibson's <i>Complete Savages</i> was totally a thing that happened; the cherry on the icing on that scene's awfulness layer cake cake comes when he grabs her by the arms and refuses to let her leave. Because that's totally not an abusive way to treat women or anything! I bet you want him inside you NOW, don't you???<br />
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On top of that, in order to kinda sorta be with him, she ends up turning down Kocoum, for no good reason. He's "too serious" for her?? But nobody can take him seriously with those silly, silly bear paw nipples! Other than that, though, there's not really anything wrong with the dude. This is where the movie borrows shamelessly - and blandly - from <i>The Little Mermaid</i> and, well....most Disney films involving princesses, to be completely honest! "My world sucks, theirs sounds SO MUCH BETTER", she doesn't say, exactly, but it's an acceptable paraphrase. I'm sure tons of Native Americans shared those sentiments. That's why they were so happy to have their land taken over by the new and exciting white man, after all! Oh.........nevermind. Well, perhaps it would've went better if they, too, "listened with their hearts" and became fluent speakers of English in, like, five seconds, because that's TOTALLY something that happens! By the way, am I the only one who ended up occasionally losing track of when the characters were speaking actual English, as opposed to Some Tribal Language Auto-Translated to English for the Audience's Benefit? Disney could've handled the language barrier a lot more smoothly, I thought. But maybe I was just neglecting to listen with <i>my</i> heart also...<br />
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Anyway, I suppose you can't blame Pocahontas too much for turning him down. She IS a bit young, anyway, and she needs time to experience experiences and whatnot! That's understandable enough. However, it transitions from "understandable" to "really callously selfish" when Kocoum gets shot, partly her fault, and her only reaction is sadness, because.....she might not get to see John Smith again? Are you fucking KIDDING me??? You're not even gonna take a SECOND to mourn the dead guy over there??? In trying to portray Pocahontas in a politically correct manner, Disney has managed to frame her as kind of an awful young woman whose obstinate flightiness gets two people shot, one of them fatally, the other severely enough that they have to be shipped back to England to recover (because months at sea does WONDERS for gunshot wounds)! Unlike pretty much any other female Disney protagonist from the past who has love interests, Pocahontas ends this film alone. Unlike Pixar's <i>Brave</i> - not that studio's absolute greatest work, but still probably my favourite Disney-distributed princess-themed movie - it's not a noble statement about waiting until The Time Is Right or anything like that. It's not uplifting. It's just depressing. Guns are depressing. (Though, I'm really impressed at these colonial bullets that don't even make holes in clothes, let alone flesh. Why did we ever do away with those??)<br />
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Nonetheless, Pocahontas manages to still do the (ostensibly) right thing, though, by throwing herself in front of John Smith to save him from execution, at least. Because he's the one who deserves not to die? Well, okay, I guess they get a pass on this one, because it's based on an actual lie that John Smith told, as opposed to a lie that Disney made up themselves. But they certainly <i>don't</i> get a pass for how surprisingly dispassionate it is! Here's a scene that Disney already did fourteen years earlier, in <i>The Fox and the Hound</i>, with....well, with a fox and a hound. How does THIS film, with actual human people with real people personalities and, also, a much nicer budget, make that scene SO MUCH LESS impactful?? I figure it's a mix of differing approaches to the soundtrack - <i>The Fox and the Hound</i> - and the fact that, all told, I wouldn't be all that disappointed if Mel Gibson got shot in the face, relative to some people. Relative to, y'know, anyone else in this film, at least. Certainly, if it had to happen to someone, I'd rather it happen to him than Kocoum? At least his bear paw nipples amuse me.<br />
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By the way, I know I've been spending the last few weeks essentially complaining about the inclusion of comic relief, so I'd just like to reassure you that I don't always hate jokes. The comic relief in <i>Pocahontas</i> is pretty much the only thing that made it tolerable for me! I actually liked Meeko and Percy's weird burgeoning relationship! I actually thought Manservant Wiggins was a much better use of the great David Ogden Stiers' talent than the more important character that he played! ("I like gruel!" is probably the best-delivered line of the movie, but I'm weird.) If you can possibly think of a plot for a film involving Meeko and Percy and Wiggins on some sort of wacky adventure together, well, there's a very good chance that I'd rather watch that film than this one! (But it came so highly recommended!) It certainly helps that, unlike the comic relief from the last couple weeks, Meeko and Percy and Wiggins aren't terribly, unbearably flatulent, nor do they spend a lot of time referencing anachronistic celebrityfolk, nor are they Gilbert Gottfried. Still, they can't match the comic prowess of the Unamused Reaction Shot Owls - Taylor will attest to the fact that their one second of screentime got the biggest laugh of the night out of me. If only Grandmother Willow (who is not one of the best-aged CGI effects of the 1990s, by the way) had served up a few more terrible, terrible puns for their heavy-lidded benefit.....<br />
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But, alas, she didn't. The comic relief is mostly so separated from the action that it can't really save it. Governor Ratcliffe is not only the least interesting of the Renaissance villains, but he's also a terribly neglectful pet owner, evidently. AND a pretty neglectful manservant owner. You'd be better off watching ANY OTHER Renaissance-era Disney film, honestly, unless you're just THAT ENTHUSIASTIC about one-second reaction shots. But, um, it IS a really good one, to be perfectly fair.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhESTZb1vau5eULS6EbUcPsS4KQu9Ad8okUveYJhkwfaoJpwqlywtVcozU0PbqvI5Bl8w-ij4bWzaPuLzGpaAOiT0IVPB8x2rq5LfhLYe88eVaCtw3WIqdRZUWbAI-BWTcNfY78rwNkpoI/s1600/Pocahontas.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhESTZb1vau5eULS6EbUcPsS4KQu9Ad8okUveYJhkwfaoJpwqlywtVcozU0PbqvI5Bl8w-ij4bWzaPuLzGpaAOiT0IVPB8x2rq5LfhLYe88eVaCtw3WIqdRZUWbAI-BWTcNfY78rwNkpoI/s320/Pocahontas.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Dogsitting week means a terribly rushed comic with awkward and inaccurate character designs!</i></td></tr>
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<b>TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND TRAIL-BASED TEAR-INDUCING DIRECT-TO-VIDEO DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: Senselessly and brutally slaughtering the very concept of historical accuracy, <i>Pocahontas III: The Legend of Sacagawea</i> features Pocahontas finally catching (multi-coloured) wind of the whereabouts of her long-missing little sister, Sacagawea (Allisyn Ashley Arm). As it turns out, she's befriended two rogue explorers by the name of Lewis Meriwether and Clark Williams (Cheech Marin and Mo Rocca), who are in the process of producing a startlingly accurate highway map of the western New World. Unfortunately, Secret Agent Ratcliffe has been freed from prison by King James' evil successor, King Damien of England (Eugene Levy) in order to be employed as a spy, with a very important mission: pilfering Lewis and Clark's highway map so that England may once again regain control of the North American freeway system. Suddenly, our heroes' only hope of survival lies in befriending Toissaint Charbonneau (Dave Coulier), a powerful lumberjack moose from outer space!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-19853608415735698262012-08-16T00:52:00.001-07:002012-08-16T00:52:34.235-07:00D52 Week 32: The Lion King!<i>The Lion King</i> is, by a significant margin, the most successful of Disney's Renaissance era films, which is honestly kind of surprising, because it's also probably the strangest. <i>The Little Mermaid</i>? Not particularly weirder than the original tale, though certainly less depressing! <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>? They actually came up with reasonable reasons to have household objects sing songs and, furthermore, to make people drink fluid poured forth from Angela Lansbury's nose! <i>Aladdin</i>? Who cares if Aladdin is arbitrarily Arabian instead of Chinese, because you're not expected to pay attention to anyone who isn't Robin Williams anyhow! But <i>The Lion King</i> is pretty inexplicable, when you get down to it. It's kinda sorta Disney's adaptation of <i>Hamlet</i>, except with animals. And not anthropomorphic animals living in an otherwise human-style society, like <i>Robin Hood</i>, even! They're normal animals, living normal animal lives, and they even eat each other like normal animals, except they talk and worship certain lions as kings-slash-demigods. The worst side-effect of realistic animals is that, of course, our main character's Disney love interest is, at best, a cousin of some sort; at worst, his half-sister. Because, y'know....it's a fun film for the entire family! <i>*wink wink*</i><br />
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And which popular pop artist's music is the obvious choice to accompany this backdrop of murder and political feline turmoil and incest? Why, do you even have to ask? Elton John, of course!<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Remember what I said about <i>Aladdin</i> last week, and how it suffered due to seeming unsure of what sort of tone it hoped to achieve? <i>The Lion King</i> suffers from this even worse! Maybe it's not so bad at first. So what if Zazu kind of detracts from the attempts to portray Mufasa's kingdom as majestic, in any way? I can overlook that much. (Like Sebastian before him, you have to wonder how he's still employed....though Sebastian at least had entertainment value going for him.) But then, serious stuff starts happening. Mufasa gets killed by a surprisingly convincing herd of CGI wildebeest! Simba gets framed and has to go on the run! Scar sends the area surrounding Pride Rock into a really severe drought within the span of, like, one year, just because he's such a shady guy, and there's death and destruction everywhere! It's all very serious business, so OF COURSE it's constantly offset by jokes about how Pumbaa is flatulent, and generally malodorous. Isn't that hilarious and original?? When I was a kid, I remember thinking Timon and Pumbaa were kind of hilarious, because....well, I guess because I was supposed to, being a kid and all. But they're.....kinda not. That's their entire shtick. Pumbaa smells terrible, and Timon constantly talks about how terrible Pumbaa smells. That's it!!! Isn't that a depressing little relationship they have going on there? They're not living a carefree life; they're living a <i>content-free</i> life! I've known slackers, and even by the standards of slackerdom, Timon and Pumbaa just don't fucking do much, at all!<br />
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It's a shame, too, that they stink up this movie with their stinkiness, because the more serious parts of this can be pretty compelling at times. Jeremy Irons (who seems to have, at one time or another, been in just about every well-known Shakespeare play EXCEPT <i>Hamlet</i>) as Scar is yet another case of the excellent villain casting streak that started with <i>The Great Mouse Detective</i>. You're either a liar or an evil sociopath yourself (hi, Jim's family!) if you claim that the scene where he kills Mufasa ISN'T one of the most chilling things in any Disney film ever! And he has hyenachoirs who pop up for the sole purpose of singing his praises in a green glowy cave! You have to be REALLY IMPRESSIVE to have spontaneous hyenachoirs, now don't you?? By the way, as we all know, green glowiness is cartoon shorthand for radioactivity, because Scar is clearly in the process of enriching uranium. Because he's EVIL. At least, that's the logical assumption - can you think of a more reasonable explanation for the dark, barren condition of Pride Rock after he takes charge? It's some sort of nuclear winter, folks! Nothing else makes sense! Though, that still doesn't explain why it suddenly rains after he dies. Um. Someone else can explain that one? In all seriousness, though, he's another well-drawn villain. It's just too bad that the circumstances surrounding him are so....unfortunate.<br />
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By which I mean, he's clearly evil, because he's the only black-furred lion. Right? Blackness automatically means you're evil, which is a wonderfully sensitive message, especially for a film that's actually set in Africa. Nice job, Disney!<br />
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Sure, it's less overt than some past gems of Disney racism, like the Asian cats in <i>Lady and the Tramp</i> and <i>The Aristocats</i> and, god, at least two others, right? But it's something they've been really eager to hammer home during the Renaissance so far, isn't it? Purple Ursula was considerably darker-skinned than the other merfolk, who were....well, whatever the deep-sea equivalent of being Caucasian would be. And Percy McLeach WAS darker-skinned than the other, like, two or so humans in <i>The Rescuers Down Under</i>, I don't care what the people who claim that's just because he spends all his time standing in shadows say, because that's just silly. I'd sooner accept villainy-related lack of bathing as an excuse, but whatever. Even Jafar was noticeably more ethnic than everyone living in Agrabah, which was otherwise the whitest city in the entire Middle East! (Seriously, I defy you to name someone whiter than Scott Weinger.) And now, Scar too. One film I could see. A couple? Sure. But, by this point, it....kinda seems like the Disney creative teams collectively had some, um, <i>issues</i> with people who look different. Some things never change, I guess! At least we can count on next week's film to be more racially sensitive - oh, wait, NO.<br />
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Well, whatever. Scar's still a pretty compelling villain, by himself. He's not helped by the presence of his henchhyenas, though. Were people really clamouring that much for the animated reunion of Cheech and Whoopi-Goldberg-as-Chong-for-some-reason? And then we have Ed, who.....is not Jim Cummings' brightest moment. They are, basically, to Scar as Timon and Pumbaa are to Simba, bringing down what is otherwise a pretty grand story. And it's hard to tell whether or not they should be viewed as some sort of racial allegory, as well. Yes, hyenas don't get along with lions all that well, because they're selfish and awful and they like to drive lionesses away from their kills sometimes. From a natural perspective, it's perfectly understandable why lions wouldn't be cool with living with them. Because they're selfish and awful. But, god, just the way it's PHRASED. Scar talks about it like they're trying to integrate some poor maligned minority, and suddenly everyone's disapproval of it sounds completely AWFUL, and it's really uncomfortable how they get scapegoated for all that awful rural blight that's going on. But, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, no, there aren't any racist undertones there. Even still, isn't it kind of hypocritical? Mufasa, in one of his more dickish moments, expects the gazelles or whatever to be totally chill about being murdered, because the lions decompose into gazelle food, aka grass, after dying of natural causes, so by extension it's totally okay to make the gazelles into lion food, aka bloody gazelle flesh, after making them die of very much unnatural causes, because Circle of Life! God, what a douche, right? NOT trying to justify it would make him look better! But, alas, he did, and now he has to live with having said that. So, um....the gazelles are supposed to be okay with being taken advantage of like that, but the lions have no such compulsion to do so with the hyenas??<br />
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Visually, this is definitely some of Disney's finest animation ever. Mostly realistic, with just enough cartooniness to make all the cute fuzzy (or feathery) critters expressive enough to tell a story. It's a similar case to <i>Bambi</i>, from waaaaay back when - you can tell that the animators spent a lot of time researching actual animals, but they also know when to give the animation a hallucinogenic quality to underline whatever's going on at that moment (though, they do that considerably more here). I can't fault this film visually. I can, however, fault it musically. I'm not going to deny that Elton John is very talented at that whole songwriting thing, but the act of writing standalone pop songs is a very different thing indeed from writing songs that work within the context of a musical. It certainly doesn't help that Tim Rice is, as a lyricist, not up to the standards of Howard Ashman or Alan Menken. Together, they produce one of the least memorable Disney soundtracks in recent memory, to be perfectly frank. "Circle of Life" is a perfectly decent theme song, and "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" is good fun (though a good deal of the credit there goes towards the unusually stylistic animation), but "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" Not with a song that strangely limp I can't! It feels like it's constantly on the verge of taking a leap to another level, like you're just hearing the lead-up to a grand explosion of emotion....but then, you don't, and it's not. That's all there is. As for "The Morning Report"....well, it sure makes the (re-)addition of "Human Again" in <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> look perfectly natural and reasonable and worthwhile by comparison, now doesn't it?<br />
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So, without being able to fall back on particularly strong musical numbers, <i>The Lion King</i> pretty much lives or dies on its story. And, again, the half of it that isn't about porcine body odour is quite nice! But.....again, half of it IS about porcine body odour, so this movie was probably a lot better when you were a kid than it was now. Especially now that you're probably soul-crushingly aware of Simba and Nala's dirty little webbed-footed secret.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNE3bibyM3qquFnX8mIzIS_q8aqLpyUQjr2ALt62eVMbdKlQdhkYfSMupX6QxCcu_xZ2d8Zqnzuip7YK_i6n0mQ_YsL9sWW6LXOw3l8dk3WaXJ0ZhhfcBwBa8E03s7LsGAGMw9oR9lE_E/s1600/The+Lion+King.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNE3bibyM3qquFnX8mIzIS_q8aqLpyUQjr2ALt62eVMbdKlQdhkYfSMupX6QxCcu_xZ2d8Zqnzuip7YK_i6n0mQ_YsL9sWW6LXOw3l8dk3WaXJ0ZhhfcBwBa8E03s7LsGAGMw9oR9lE_E/s400/The+Lion+King.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND GENERALLY SCORN-INDUCING DISNEY DIRECT-TO-DVD SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: <i>The Lion King 2½</i> takes place during <i>The Lion King 2</i>, picking up after the climactic finale of <i>The Lion King</i>. I don't know where it takes place relative to <i>The Lion King 1½</i>, because I haven't seen it yet, thank god. Anyway, Scar apparently had a cub. Let's call him Scab, I guess. He can be played by Adam Hicks. Scab witnesses Scar's death, and looking for emotional support, he consults Cousin Simba, who tells him how he went through the whole thing. But - here's the wacky misunderstanding - Simba directly quotes Scar's "you killed him" while telling his story, and Scab things Simba was telling him to that NOW, in the present! So, Scab goes on the run, where he befriends a carefree Giant African Land Snail (Jim Belushi) and his malodorous <i>Archispirostreptus gigas</i> friend (Jamie Kennedy), who teach him how to live life in a carefree way, by eating wild pork. Everything seems lucky for Scab, now an awkward young adult, until his gross maternal love interest (Phylicia Rashād) shows up to snap him back into reality, forcing himto return to Pride Rock and confront his awkward misunderstanding so he can properly reclaim his throne, as a terrible evil lion's terrible evil son. And so continues the Circle of Life, which recycles entire plots, too!JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-14433307246921242982012-08-14T01:02:00.000-07:002012-08-14T01:02:01.352-07:00Jesse's Summer of Improvised Vegetable Shakes: Carrot!Okay, so I've finally got around to this one. I absolutely adore carrots in liquid form, perhaps to a strange degree! You don't even KNOW how excitable I get when I come across a fruit juice blend that happens to prominently feature carrot as well. Of course, they're not always easy to find, so I've gotten in the habit of keeping pure carrot juice on hand, to enhance any other kind of juice I might end up drinking. Not only is it tasty, but it delusionally allows me to believe that the sugary beverage I'm drinking is somehow healthy for me! It's a win-win!<br />
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When the time came to try shake-ifying carrots, I thought back to some rather tasty honey-glazed carrots I made a few years back. First, I lightly steamed my lucky chosen carrot, and chopped it up, and threw it in the blender, along with a squirt or two of honey, for sweetness. Rounding out the shake package, of course, was some whole milk, and a splashlet of vanilla - because I just like vanilla, okay?<br />
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The verdict? Perry the Platypus is hilarious.<br />
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(And I liked the shake, because I like carrots, but in all honesty, I think sweet potatoes possibly lend themselves better to shakes than carrots - but maybe I'd just need to try a more concrete recipe. Anyone?)JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-32547586439756519132012-08-11T04:39:00.000-07:002012-08-11T04:39:12.591-07:00D52 Week 31: Aladdin!No offense intended to you, Mr. Robin Williams, but did you SERIOUSLY think Disney wasn't gonna spill the beans about your Geniein'?<br />
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I don't mean to imply that Disney is inherently untrustworthy like that, though....yes, they definitely are, actually. Mostly, though, what I'm saying is that the dude was, y'know, THE STAR OF THE ENTIRE FREAKING MOVIE. Sure, it's named <i>Aladdin</i>, after its main character, but he's certainly not charismatic enough to really be the star, exactly. (He's voiced by Scott Weinger, who is cosmically not allowed to be the star of anything, after all!) There's a romance of some sort going on here, and some power plays - both political and magickal - by none-too-subtly-darker-skinned-than-everyone-else villains, and best of all a MONKEY, but Disney isn't fooling anyone. This film exists so that people can listen to Robin Williams improv without actually having to look at Robin Williams himself. If only they'd do that to him now, in the present day, after he's decided to abandon all pretence of being anything but a hairy, disgusting gorilla...<br />
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<a name='more'></a>It's really easy, then, to see how one's opinion of <i>Aladdin</i> depends pretty heavily on one's own personal tolerance of Robin Williams. When I was a kid, I LOVED this movie, because I loved HIM. (Not in THAT way.) He was loud, and he said so many things so fast that I just assumed they had to be funny, even though I didn't know for sure at the time, because - again - I was just a child, after all! And, well, to be frank, I'm less enthusiastic about him today. Could it just be that he's less novel today, now that a lot of comedy seems to move hyperactively fast almost by default? Could it be my general fatigue with the sort of comedy that passes random pop culture references off as jokes in and of themselves? (How appropriate, then, that <i>Family Guy</i> recently devoted an entire segment to Robin Williams bashery, without even once seeming self-aware that they do the same freaking thing!) Or maybe it's that I just don't hold a lot of respect for semi-notorious joke thieves. He's likeable enough, but I'm not an enthusiast these days, is what I'm saying. Personally, I think Robin Williams works best when he's restrained, when he's putting all of that manic focus into taking command of a single role, as opposed to just flailing around and doing literally anything and everything that comes to mind. And, well, the Genie is pretty much Robin Williams at his least restrained. It's not that his shtick isn't amusing enough, but - here's the thing - every single tangent he goes off on really detracts from the intended feeling that this is, y'know, a movie, with an actual story. Instead, it comes across as an oddly family-friendly collection of Robin Williams stand-up, with discordant bits of plot scattered about inbetween.<br />
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In fact, just about the entire Disney Renaissance after <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> seems to suffer from some variant of this sort of conundrum - they're just not sure what sort of tone they want to have, at all. (So, get used to me pointing that out repeatedly in the comic weeks, as though it's still insightful each and every time!) Disney continues their impressive string of well-cast villains with Jafar, whom Jonathan Freeman endows with just the right amount of creepy level-headedness....which is then completely spoiled by the casting of Gilbert Gottfried as his comic relief sidekick. Yes, the *idea* of Gilbert Gottfried as a parrot is an amusing concept. He's clearly someone destined to play very unpleasant birds! He's just maybe not meant to play one in a situation where it undermines an otherwise compelling villain at every possible turn. The weird thing - and maybe this is just me - is that I actually found myself laughing more at Jafar's deadpan bitchyisms than anything Iago said, despite ostensibly being the comedic part of the duo. (Question for real-life parrot owners: Are they as unenthusiastic about cracker eatermanship as Iago was? Do they, too, sometimes plot about turning the tables and cramming them down us tyrannical humans' throats?)<br />
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...of course, Jafar loses a lot of his awesomeness in the magic-powered finale, where he is required to immediately start acting like a total moron, just to keep the plot moving. (And why does being imprisoned inside a lamp automatically undo all of his evil magicking, anyway?)<br />
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Shall I dig more into our main characters who we're supposed to care about because they're hormonal teenagers and they totally want to do things to each other, sexually, and that's romantic, I guess? Well, Aladdin's just a dick, to be honest. He's a dick, even if you look past the fact that he takes at least two, maybe three, lives during the chase scene/musical number that serves as his introduction to the audience, not to mention his Sphinx vandalism during "A Whole New World"! He's dickish even without all the wanton musical death and destruction, because he spends the entire movie lying, to everybody, all the time, constantly. While it's acceptable enough when he's just doing it to survive - Agrabah's economy is almost as pathetic as Detroit's....almost - it makes him thoroughly unlikeable when he's doing it to ostensibly loved ones too, especially when Jasmine has him pretty much figured out and clearly doesn't believe his lie that he's still stubbornly sticking to anyway. Then again, can you blame him for lying to this chick? Jasmine is, honestly, kind of offensive, the sort of female character that comes about only as a group of male writers' idea of what constitutes one of them there "strong women" that are all the rage now! And, in the eyes of people like that, being a "strong woman" entails being a humourless screeching owl who will claw your eyes out no matter what you try to say. It's one thing if she's lashing out against an actual injustice, but when she's lashing out against everyone, all the time, no matter how sympathetic they are....yeah. Like the Sultan! He's such an ineffectual buffoon that you have to love him! (Like the Judge from the Phoenix Wright games!) Which is to say that, when Aladdin tells the Genie about how "fun" she is, I have no idea what the hell he's talking about! He must be thinking of a <i>different</i> Princess Jasmine of Agrabah.<br />
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So, long story short, we're left with a film where the most likeable and compelling characters are a grotesque sociopath, a carpet, and a monkey who communicates entirely through monkey noises. Yes, everybody loves monkeys, and Taylor restored my faith in carpetry, and we are undoubtedly living in THE age of sociopathy, so it all sounds fine and dandy, but trust me, if that's what you were looking for, you'd be disappointed by the lack of adorable but emotionless lower primates callously disregarding the rights of intricately woven Middle Eastern rugs. Which is to say, they're not major characters. But, if you have a Robin Williams fetish, then boy, is this the film for you!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifG4Wm3NMYzjGNp42btcZzuqqBXLj5J4be-Uh8BMPF_Ub6r3SZL8DoqPuhvYZ9LTq10sB2ADVeMcHeaaHJH5U0_kWKG2iuLu6fJLqYe3V4I0RvCQkfcGHqVhTy_76x44VKCM8uLoVryVw/s1600/Aladdin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifG4Wm3NMYzjGNp42btcZzuqqBXLj5J4be-Uh8BMPF_Ub6r3SZL8DoqPuhvYZ9LTq10sB2ADVeMcHeaaHJH5U0_kWKG2iuLu6fJLqYe3V4I0RvCQkfcGHqVhTy_76x44VKCM8uLoVryVw/s400/Aladdin.png" width="280" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLE AND HORRIBLE AND EVEN-MORE-WORTHLESS-THAN-THOSE-THAT-ALREADY-EXIST DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: I bet you were wondering how married life has been treating Aladdin, right? Well, a very special direct-to-DVD crossover, <i>Aladdin and the King of Queens</i>, reveals that it's not going so very well, because marriage hasn't changed the fact that Jasmine is a hot-but-intolerable shrew! Fortunately, with a little help from his good friend Kevin James, he just might be able to figure out how to make this work yet! Meanwhile, reeling on his fame from being peripherally involved in Aladdin's exploits, Iago decides to bring some mirth and merriment to Agrabah by entering the world of stand-up comedy. Unfortunately, his routine doesn't go over well, because he tastelessly makes references to unspecified recent tragedies. All seems lost until he gets the most brilliant idea ever - he'll win the audiences back, by retelling the story of the Disney classic, <i>The Aristocats</i>!<br />
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<i>(Yes, this was rather late. Fuck you, CenturyLink.)</i>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-893373037686500612012-08-06T06:17:00.001-07:002012-08-06T06:17:08.970-07:00Jesse's Theory of Better Emotional Understanding, via Not Trying To Understand Emotions At All, Really<div style="text-align: center;"><i>"I know what it's like to have anxiety and depression. I feel anxious and depressed sometimes, too!"</i></div><br />
There's something distinctly obnoxious about having mood disorders that also fall into the realm of words that everyone uses to describe themselves whenever anything mildly unpleasant happens to them. They're always so pleased with themselves, because they can actually understand what someone less fortunate is going through, which is a noble and wonderful thing for them to do, they think. As well-meaning as they may be, of course, they're wrong. Feeling a little bit down once and awhile isn't the same thing has having a clinical depression, which makes you feel really, REALLY down, more often than not! Feelingly mildly anxious when doing something that's generally regarded as being stressful isn't the same thing has having Social Anxiety Disorder, which entails heart-pounding terror when doing things as simple as checking the mail!<br />
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You can blame it all you want on simple, harmless ignorance, but making such rash assumptions about things that can actually make people so very miserable is anything but harmless, I'd think...<br />
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<a name='more'></a>That's been my mom's mantra through everything I've been going through lately - or, hell, everything I've ever been through, really! "I don't know what you problem is, I feel anxious sometimes too, but you don't see me being some panicky faggot baby over it!" It's just not the same! She was in a fairly nasty car crash when she was a teenager, that screwed her spine up permanently. You don't see me claiming I know what that's like just because sometimes my back is a little sore when I wake up after sleeping in an awkward position! No, because you see, that would be an insensitive thing to do! Really insensitive! <u>Sitcom husband insensitive!</u> So, why is it apparently not insensitive when she does the same thing?<br />
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Or, well, how about an ostensible friend from some time ago? It's hard to adequately express just how incredibly stupid I feel for going through the trouble of dropping everything for them, abandoning my lifestyle, moving a considerable distance, and making more general sacrifices than I'm sure they realised, on the absurd assumption that this person actually knew what they were talking about when they said they totally understood my anxiety disorder, totally, because they totally had the same thing. (Spoiler alert: They didn't. Seething bitterness over one's asexuality....isn't the same thing.) Ultimately, I suppose that's when I first started to learn the lesson that people just like to make assumptions about anxiety, assumptions that they OBVIOUSLY know what it's like, not really thinking about who could possibly wind up emotionally bulldozed in the process because, hey, it can't POSSIBLY be worse than they shallowly assume it is, can it? When someone offers to help you overcome the same obstacles they have, you'd better make damn sure that they ARE the same obstacles; otherwise, you're just going to end up resenting each other. They'll think you're weak and pathetic; you'll think they're insensitive and callously cruel. (You'll be the more correct of the two in this scenario, by the way.)<br />
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It seems to me that good friends actually <i>don't</i> assume they know what the things their friends are going through feel like. That always seems to be what people assume they should do, isn't it? Sure, we can, and should, try to understand the objective facts of their situation, and acknowledge it, offering help if we can. It's really easy, from that point, to take that tiny extra step of assuming that you know EXACTLY what they're going through; but, tiny as that step may be, it seems to be a pretty devastating shortcut to having even LESS of an understanding of their emotions, with catastrophic results, illogical as that might seem at first to everyone, including Jesse From One Year Ago. (What a moron he was!)<br />
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It might seem like a step back at first, but simply accepting that your friends will feel the way that they feel, period, is a lot more helpful. You might think they're not handling their situation as well as they could, but you should always assume they're operating under more variables than you, yourself, can probably imagine; such is how emotions work! It's not because they're weak, and it's not because they're pathetic, and it's certainly not because you're better than them. It's just because everyone's different, and so everyone handles things differently. Diversity in outlooks is one of the most wonderful things about life....even when it comes to handling situations that are the exact opposite of wonderful in ways that are also seemingly the exact opposite of wonderful.<br />
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So, if you have a friend, family member, significant other, or otherwise-loved-onery listening to what <i>they</i> think they need....because you're probably gonna get it really, really wrong if you think you somehow know. Don't keep doing that to them. PLEASE don't keep doing that to them.<br />
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<i>(The preceding was written during a pretty nasty case of sleep deprivation, so if it doesn't make sense....that's why. I assume my sleep schedule will level out after the stressful events of this Tuesday are over. Thank you for your, erm, patience.)</i>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-40423261104618379312012-08-01T04:46:00.000-07:002012-08-01T04:46:13.686-07:00D52 Week 30: Beauty and the Beast!Do you ever feel pressured to like a movie, just because someone terribly important to you already absolutely adores it? If you're one of the rare people who happens to know <a href="http://nerdcredred.blogspot.com/">my beloved Taylor</a> but somehow isn't already aware, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> is pretty much her favourite Disney film, ever. (To be fair, though, I'm assuming she HASN'T seen <i>Home on the Range</i> yet.) And, well, yes, of course I've already seen it, but I was only in elementary school at the time. (Or grade school, or primary school, or whatever you prefer.) So, it's not like I remembered it vividly or anything. I found myself actually worrying about it a little bit! "Oh god, what if I end up not liking this? Will she disown me? Will I not get any tonight?" There's a lot of pressure when it comes to having to form an honest opinion about something someone close to you holds so near and dear to their hearts. So, you can imagine my relief when, yes, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> actually was genuinely good! Relative to the previous Renaissance fairy tale, <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, it's definitely a lot more focused, with a less head-scratching story, and a sense of emotion that its predecessor couldn't be bothered to muster.<br />
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Which is to say, yes, I did get some after all.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Have you noticed just how rare it is for human protagonists and protagonistas in Disney films up to this point to actually be, y'know, likeable? They're generally pretty insufferable, really! They're either numb and personality-free, in the way Alice or Cinderella were, or just completely bitchy, like Aurora or, um, Kid From <i>The Black Cauldron</i>. Often, they have mind-numbingly shallow ideas of what constitutes romance. By comparison, Belle is a revelation! She actually has a personality, and a relatively sexy one at that! The only things she really bitches about are exactly the things one SHOULD complain about, like having one's father imprisoned, for instance! She has hobbies outside of hollowly lusting after handsome princes! Even that alone would pretty much make this the most tolerable Disney fairytale yet, but then they went and made a movie that has other positive points going for it, too!<br />
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Like, well, the Beast's castle staff, for instance! <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> is such an impressive production that even its bit characters are leaps and bounds ahead of, well, the majority of characters in Disney films past. David Ogden Stiers as Cogsworth? Can't argue with that! (After all, the secret of his comedy is..........timing.) Jerry Orbach as Lumiere? Hell yes! If anyone could elevate that character above standard stereotypical lusty Frenchman territory, it's him. Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Potts? I defy you to think of anyone, ANYONE AT ALL, who could possibly be more suited to the task of voicing a matronly tea receptacle! Jo Anne Worley as, um, the wardrobe? Eh, sure, why not, it doesn't matter anyway because she only gets, like, two lines. (Incidentally, though, while watching <i>Belle's Magical World</i> for Taylor to grab screencaps, I remember noting that Worley actually put more effort into acting than, well, anyone else in that entire "film".) Amazingly, even though they're essentially all comic relief characters, they don't stick out like sore thumbs in the way that Disney comic relief characters generally do. Instead - and this is a remarkable achievement, really - they all feel like an organic atmospheric component of Prince Adam's castle.<br />
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And they get some amazing songs to sing, too! Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's score is simply stunning, and very well could be my favourite collection of Disney songs, ever. Somehow, they're ALL good! Even "Human Again", which was correctly removed from the original, properly proper version of the film, would be a thoroughly above average addiction to a typical Disney soundtrack. It just so happens that in this particular film, it was up against things like the ridiculously catchy "Be Our Guest". That's tough to match! And then we have not one but two great character theme songs, for Belle and Gaston. Not to mention the theme song for the movie itself, which I will be pathetic and admit made me choke up a bit. There's just something about emotional songs where you can hear the singer's voice break ever so slightly that really gets to me I guess - Taylor mentions that, at one point, Belle was supposed to sing "Beauty and the Beast" as well, but in this one case, I've gotta say, letting Angela Lansbury have her way with it was definitely a better idea. (Though, both of those ideas were infinitely preferable to letting Céline Dion sing it. I didn't like it back in the 1950s when Disney had the Mellomen contribute renditions of Disney songs thoroughly stripped of their personality, and I certainly don't enjoy her doing the same, alongside the ridiculously named Peabo Bryson.<br />
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The Beast (aka Prince Adam, though that's not even confirmed in the film itself, to be fair) is very probably the most compelling romantic lead Disney has ever managed to produce, too. I mean, yeah, everyone probably knows the original story, so they probably didn't need to go through the effort of painting him so convincingly as a genuinely ambiguous figure - and yet, they did anyway. When the film opens, he's painted in a fairly villainous light, and you can't even attribute that to filmmaking trickery. Because, well, he IS being villainous! Belle enters his life at a moment where he teeters on the precipice of losing his humanity altogether, of outright becoming a complete monster - which surely would've consumed him even before the Elaborate Glass-Encased Flower-Based Curse Timekeeping Device made it official! Does the fact that he was teetering on that point inherently make him a bad guy? Anyone who'd argue that point is clearly sort of naïve! He was still a young guy, too, thrust into what was a rather blatantly unfair situation, and <i>everybody's</i> life has had the possibility of going in either direction, even yours! We often simply don't realise it because we're so comfortable with these sorts of choices that we've made, that we don't realise they were choices in the first place. (If you're reading this, chances are you're a good person. Unless you're Jim, in which case, you're not.) What makes the case of Prince Adam different from every other Disney film where a character is saved from their life by simply falling in love? That's a simple question. This film, magical finale perhaps exempted, doesn't treat the simple act of falling in love as the magical solution to his problem, but more justifiably, as just the driving motivating factor that drives him to regain a bit of control over his own problems.<br />
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The only thing about this film that really DOESN'T quite work is the ostensible moral about inner beauty. What sets off this chain of events? Prince Adam runs afoul of an attractive enchantress disguised as a hideous old beggar. How does the beggar secretly being young and attractive make this any more horrible of him? It doesn't! If anything, it seems to undermine the lesson at work, because this person is a terrible liar, and if anything, not giving handouts to compulsive liars is probably a good practice. And aren't there hideous old enchantresses, too? Perhaps if Prince Adam had genuinely offended someone on a personal level, I'd be more understanding of the spell cast on not only him, but everyone under his employ. But, he didn't, and given the circumstances, this enchantress practically comes across as the secondary antagonist of the film, after Gaston! And then, at the other end of the spectrum, we have the Beastified Adam ostensibly learning his lesson about inner beauty....by falling in love with Belle, who is physically the exact opposite of a hideous old beggar. Do we really believe that he would've been so (relatively) tender and caring towards her if she hadn't been smokin' hot, especially for 18th century France? No, he probably wouldn't have - which means that even the terms and conditions of the aforementioned enchantress's curse have, at their core, not terribly much to do with the lesson she originally wanted to teach him in the first place! As a moral tale, this film is actually a complete disaster when you analyse it, so it's a damned good thing that it works so compellingly as a romance!<br />
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I'm sure there are plenty of people who disagree with that, of course. Like I said a couple weeks ago for <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, everyone has a different idea of what constitutes actual romance. Regardless of how you might feel about that, can we at least agree that this has more heart than any film Disney had released in, well...at least a decade or two? It's sweet, it's not crude, and it actually cares about its characters. Well, except for Gaston. But NOBODY cares about Gaston, except for Gaston, and poor unrequited Lefou. Even if they did royally screw over Maurice's weathervane (seriously, get a look at that thing the next time you watch the movie), I can't really hesitate in calling this the best movie of the D52 project thus far, and one that probably won't be topped, either. And I'm not just saying that because of Taylor. :)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi304W81-omeXPnIV7fhueq1gRMmWImRFmhpMWD1FPeSsV1f8F0Rjo29MJa632qwyJrCyphfQ-Lo2SUvbUt5ZK4xpiGR0geJuM6mMilHgWjE3QZSjeapDYtqkq3otgiwTnuh719MML4yRQ/s1600/Beauty+and+the+Beast.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi304W81-omeXPnIV7fhueq1gRMmWImRFmhpMWD1FPeSsV1f8F0Rjo29MJa632qwyJrCyphfQ-Lo2SUvbUt5ZK4xpiGR0geJuM6mMilHgWjE3QZSjeapDYtqkq3otgiwTnuh719MML4yRQ/s400/Beauty+and+the+Beast.png" width="280" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLE AND USELESS AND UNNECESSARY AND UNWORTHY AND THOROUGHLY UNJUSTIFIED DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: <i>Booty and the Beats</i> is a pseudo-sequel set in the present, starring Tyler James Williams as MC Emcee, a world-famous rap star coming off of a breakup with his previous girlfriend, an event which caused him to write an entire album of songs about how women are stupid and worthless and mere objects, an album which is beloved by fans and critics alike, for some reason. He is presently touring the world in support of said album, which has brought him to beautiful France, where he is set to perform two huge concerts on consecutive nights in front of the historic Beauty-and-the-Beast Castle, for some reason. During his first performance, he spots a beautiful girl in the audience, Michaela Cavanaugh (Bridgit Mendler), whom he is utterly enamoured with! He tries to ask her out after the show, but she turns him down, on the basis of the terrible chauvinist message behind all his new songs. Consumed with despair, he flees into the castle to have some time alone to weep openly, where he is comforted by the ghosts of Prince Adam's servants, re-enchanted for some reason, including a subpar new Lumiere. Most notably, Mrs. Potts gives him newfound courage by telling him a story, based on an unused script from an aborted Beauty and the Beast animated series, about this one time the Beast ended up having to babysit Chip, and EVERYTHING went hilariously wrong until he finally sucked it up and asked Belle for advice! Though this has nothing to do with his situation, MC Emcee is nonetheless re-energized. At his second concert, he throws out his setlist in order to perform a new song he wrote, about his deep, unfaltering love for Michaela, whom he had only met once before, but of course it's not seen as creepy. She loved it, and the two get married, despite the objections of MC Emcee's ruthless and villainous record producer (Peabo Bryson!), who gets thrown off the side of the castle. In the distance, the spirits of Belle and Prince Adam hold each other and smile in approval at the new, young couple's heartwarming love.JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-72693801470331962642012-07-30T20:29:00.003-07:002012-07-30T20:29:57.419-07:00Jesse's Summer of Improvised Vegetable Shakes: Sweet Potato!So, um, yeah. Sometimes I agree to weird stuff, and then make it even weirder by deciding to make it an official thing! Vegetable shakes? Sure, why not, let me arbitrarily make this a thing.<br />
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I'd originally intended to start off with a carrot milkshake - that's the idea from which my summer experiment emerged - but it seems like SOMEONE in this house is dead set on stealing my carrots, every single time I buy them, as soon as possible. So let's settle for something that probably makes more sense as a milkshake in the first place. Something SWEET. Sweet potatoes!<br />
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<a name='more'></a>I actually had managed, somehow, to avoid trying sweet potatoes altogether until about a year ago. How? They weren't all that common up here, I guess. But they are now. Everyone's got sweet potato fever! Suddenly, you can find sweet potato fries at just about every reasonable restaurant, some of them with specialized dipping sauces. It allows me to pretend I'm being moderately more healthy than the asshole in the booth across the restaurant shovelling non-sweet regular potato fries down his throat, even though I'm probably not, seeing as how I'm dipping them in liquefied marshmallow and all.<br />
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First, I steamed up a sweet potato - shocking, I know. Then, I threw that soft mushy goodness in the blender, added some milk, ice cubes, vanilla, and cinnamon, and let it blend them, as blenders are wont to do. (My spice cabinet is woefully inadequate, I'm sorry.)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAWk8WlWvIwYmNmVuD080Rs9KtKY3t_sBY7OnbVBdpWMdAaUgLXGP9Z-w1U7SbQMZwv9mJM6DygUVhWjarBTs2UBf24HLP0CbnruAX4x0nxdCI0Q7ggwwZrZy5Iptxv-7glWZxGBl9ZI/s1600/SweetPotatoShake.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAWk8WlWvIwYmNmVuD080Rs9KtKY3t_sBY7OnbVBdpWMdAaUgLXGP9Z-w1U7SbQMZwv9mJM6DygUVhWjarBTs2UBf24HLP0CbnruAX4x0nxdCI0Q7ggwwZrZy5Iptxv-7glWZxGBl9ZI/s320/SweetPotatoShake.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The verdict? My entire kitchen and everything and everyone in it is blurry, if my phone's camera is to be believed.<br />
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(Oh, and the shake was actually pretty good.)JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5391599420518492379.post-30906106127792747462012-07-24T02:56:00.000-07:002012-07-24T02:56:27.481-07:00D52 Week 29: The Rescuers Down Under!It's easy for someone in this day and age to look back and say, "Why, golly gee willikers, everybody! Disney was on such a hot streak by this point, why would they even bother making a sequel to such a minor film as <i>The Rescuers</i>?" As though <i>The Little Mermaid</i> instantaneously gave the company the right to immediately return to full-blown arrogant cockiness. But, how was Disney supposed to know, really? Proportionately, <i>Mermaid</i> wasn't a much larger box-office smash than <i>The Fox and the Hound</i>, which also had a relatively big budget. And what happened when Disney took THAT film's success to mean they could have some degree of confidence in themselves? <i>The Black Cauldron</i> happened, that's what! By this point, Disney had been financially bipolar for SO LONG.....how was Jeffrey Katzenberg supposed to NOT grow more paranoid with each and every box office success? Minor though it may be, <i>The Rescuers</i> WAS a success, and through Katzie's haze of paranoia, a safe sequel to a relatively recent success probably seemed like, well....the safest possible way they could proceed. Of course, NOW we know that it..............wasn't. Insert your favourite cliché pertaining to hindsight here!<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Of course, while I understand why a <i>Rescuers</i> sequel exists, I'm having a harder time understanding why THIS, specifically, is that sequel. Sure, Bernard and Bianca make their initial appearance early enough, complete with a sitcom-quality misunderstanding derailing Bernard's attempt at a marriage proposal, and there's a few scenes with Jack, or Jake, I can't even remember which, because he's probably the least important character to have ever been involved in an honest-to-goodness love triangle. They don't start having any connection whatsoever with the main plot involving Cody and McLeach and your friendly neighbourhood Giant Eagle, though, until there's only about a third of the film left. Couldn't Jakejack have saved the kid all by his lonesome, anyway, without having to enlist international help? Sure, he's only one rodent, but if a Bob Newhart mouse is capable of single-handedly pulling a drowning child back to the surface, I posit that ANYTHING is possible!<br />
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Also questionable is the Australian setting. And I don't mean to imply that there's anything awful about setting your movie in Australia or anything! I don't have a personal vendetta against Australia, I swear! It's just that it seems to be trying too hard - like Disney was having a late reaction to the popularity of <i>Crocodile Dundee</i>. "See? We can do that, too! Look, it's the Sydney Opera House, so you KNOW it's Australia!* And there's a koala, and a platypus, and accents, and it's all so very Australian so PLEASE LOVE US!" Which is my typically terrible way of saying that it feels like a setting that emerges not so much from the story itself, organically, but because it was simply the most (theoretically) profitable place they could think of to set an otherwise fairly threadbare story.<br />
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And yet, with both the Rescuers part AND the Australia part of this Rescuers-in-Australia film as questionable as they are, this still winds up being considerably more fun than the first film! You can partly just attribute it to the vastly superior animation, the first 100% digitally animated film in fact, with the CAPS system co-developed with Pixar. And it's just.....so, so pretty. Yeah, there's some part of me that feels a little guilty for saying that, since it's replacing the ol' human touch with cold, mechanical, computery exactness, but.....sweet Jesus, it's so fucking pretty! And then you have the voice direction, with is VASTLY improved from the original. Bob Newhart actually sounds like Bob Newhart! Eva Gabor actually sounds like (a rather old) Eva Gabor! John Candy clearly gets to have more fun as Wilbur than Jim Jordan ever got to have as Orville! (Though, <a href="http://nerdytogether.blogspot.com/2012/07/d52-week-29-rescuers-down-under.html">Kevin already did a far better job than I could hope to do at explaining why all the stuff surrounding his spinal injury - the most fun and whimsical sort of injury, y'know - are maybe not entirely comfortable</a>, which I concur with.) And then we have our villain, Percival C. McLeach, who would be a pretty typical and boring poacher were he played by just anybody - but he's NOT played by just anybody, he's played my George C. Fucking Scott, so he ends up being pretty interesting after all.<br />
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I have to wonder why Bernard and Bianca are suddenly supposed to be a couple that we're supposed to care about, though. Were there any romantic undertones to their relationship in <i>The Rescuers</i>? I don't believe so! And now, all of a sudden, Bernard's ready to get hitched and we're supposed to unquestioningly buy into the concept that They Should Totally Be Together, even though they had no romantic interest before? ("But Jesse", you say, "a lot can change in thirteen years!" You mean like....mice invariably dying of natural causes?) I'm supposed to just blindly trust that Bianca would honestly be better off with Bernard than the Australian chap, solely because Bob Newhart is more famous than Tristan Rogers? The first film got by just fine without a silly love triangle, so this hardly seems necessary! Just like....all the other things I mentioned that were unnecessary in this film. But it's still pretty fun, in spite of those things!<br />
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I suppose I don't have much of interest to say this week, and I'm sorry. There's not much insight that one can really make about <i>The Rescuers Down Under</i>, though! It's bright, it's colourful, it's....probably a touch too violent, and I feel genuinely sorry for Joanna the Goanna. That sad little wave goodbye as Percy goes careening over the waterfall? That's genuinely kinda sad, too! Now whose lunchbox will she pilfer from, I ask you? And, yes, okay, maybe it IS the second film in twice as many weeks to have a big action climax wherein the Big Bad and our male mouse protagonist go flying off a high ledge of some sort, into a huge cloud of mist, only for the hero to come flying out shortly thereafter, very much alive, on some sort of flying thing. I never claimed this was a creative movie in any way! It's definitely an inferior effort to the two films that surround it, that's for sure. But....I don't know what else to say other than "It's still pretty fun"! Because that's what it is. Pretty fun. Good fun, and nothing else, which is at least more than the original had to offer.<br />
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.....oh, but there's one more egregiously soul-destroying thing about this film that I wanted to mention!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0_j8EsSrjmAyvxN5fwJGrzzF_QaKbuz4_Fs3uOFfSc6jfdLGvQ1HX_jESGnixiIrQEaCrX5_mKH4GO1BfVvNzv_PEpHfUvdwtHsWuwiJ1t7g0anDIG2zxujAjV2BgOK_6OIGeV1NeFzc/s1600/The+Rescuers+Down+Under.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0_j8EsSrjmAyvxN5fwJGrzzF_QaKbuz4_Fs3uOFfSc6jfdLGvQ1HX_jESGnixiIrQEaCrX5_mKH4GO1BfVvNzv_PEpHfUvdwtHsWuwiJ1t7g0anDIG2zxujAjV2BgOK_6OIGeV1NeFzc/s400/The+Rescuers+Down+Under.png" width="280" /></a></div><br />
<b>TERRIBLY AWFULLY UNNECESSARILY UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-DVD-AND-BLU-RAY DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK</b>: <i>The Rescuers Down Under in Los Angeles</i> sees Bernard (really old Bob Newhart), Jake (Tristan Rogers, who would probably kill for a direct-to-DVD role by now), and Bianca (um...Arianna Huffington?) whisked off to the beautiful city of Los Angeles, where Jake's folksy Outback ways cause them embarrassment time and time again, because he just doesn't understand how large American cities work, at all! Ha ha ha! This time, they're on the trail of an art-smuggling movie producer (Eugene Levy?) who has kidnapped a child (Skai Jackson) for....no discernible reason? It's just a plot device to get the Rescuers [Down Under] involved. Features a cameo by Mike Tyson as "Mike, the Mouse Meditating in the Park"!<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*It's actually illegal to show the city of Sydney in a movie without showcasing the opera house. Don't believe me? THEN GO AHEAD AND FIND AN EXCEPTION.</span>JessTehSkoxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00844330048507228469noreply@blogger.com3