D52 Week 33: Pocahontas!

Well, you have to give Pocahontas credit for one thing, at least. It's a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans than Peter Pan!

But, yes. Everyone knows that Pocahontas 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 The Fox and the Hound, as a romance, with human people. (I suppose there's also a healthy splash of far-less-magical-and-interesting The Little Mermaid in here, too.) But let's give them the benefit of the doubt, okay? Don't the majority 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??

Well, no. No matter what, Mel Gibson is always Mel Gibson. Even Disney Mel Gibson!

D52 Week 32: The Lion King!

The Lion King 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. The Little Mermaid? Not particularly weirder than the original tale, though certainly less depressing! Beauty and the Beast? 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! Aladdin? 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 The Lion King is pretty inexplicable, when you get down to it. It's kinda sorta Disney's adaptation of Hamlet, except with animals. And not anthropomorphic animals living in an otherwise human-style society, like Robin Hood, 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! *wink wink*

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!

Jesse'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!

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?

The verdict? Perry the Platypus is hilarious.

(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?)

D52 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'?

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 Aladdin, 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...

Jesse's Theory of Better Emotional Understanding, via Not Trying To Understand Emotions At All, Really

"I know what it's like to have anxiety and depression. I feel anxious and depressed sometimes, too!"

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!

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...

D52 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 my beloved Taylor but somehow isn't already aware, Beauty and the Beast is pretty much her favourite Disney film, ever. (To be fair, though, I'm assuming she HASN'T seen Home on the Range 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, Beauty and the Beast actually was genuinely good! Relative to the previous Renaissance fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, 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.

Which is to say, yes, I did get some after all.

Jesse'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.

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!

D52 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 The Rescuers?" As though The Little Mermaid instantaneously gave the company the right to immediately return to full-blown arrogant cockiness. But, how was Disney supposed to know, really? Proportionately, Mermaid wasn't a much larger box-office smash than The Fox and the Hound, 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? The Black Cauldron 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, The Rescuers 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!

D52 Week 28: The Little Mermaid!

Here's something I was discussing with my tasty li'l cupcake, Taylor, while we were watching this, that I feel would be worth recycling here, for her to re-read, and also, the one or two other people who might pay attention to this blog. (And the poor souls who stumble upon my blog while hoping to find actual, substantive information on "Bongo", which nobody remembers, at all.) Romance, as a "genre", seems to be subjected to even more scrutiny than just about anything else, and that's because, well....it's one of the most subjective things in fiction, isn't it? You can judge a mystery by how well the logic ties together, for instance, and even something as objectively subjective as comedy CAN kind of be measured. (PROTIP: Chickens are always amusing.) But romance....EVERYBODY has a different view of what romance is, and so, in my mind, setting out to write a romance is a really risky thing!

For instance, some people see a sense of noble sadness in unrequited love, whereas others think it's just creepy. (When it happens in real life, who feels what way about it tends to depend very much on who's, um, giving, and who's receiving.) And some people feel brightness and happiness and general optimism when they hear tales of "love at first sight", whereas others will say, hey, c'mon, dudes, that's just silly and impractical. And then there are the idiots who think falling in love with one person means abandoning everyone else of importance in one's life, which is...well, I'd like to think that's more objectively stupid, but maybe it's not? Actually, for proof of how much people's taste in romance differs in weird ways, look no further than Twilight. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FIND THAT ROMANTIC. And there are apparently weirdos out there who find The Little Mermaid romantic, too, though I am, shall we say............not one of them.

D52 Week 27: Oliver & Company!

Did you know? The Disney Renaissance is just around the corner! Next week, it officially kicks off with The Little Mermaid, and....well, okay, I have a confession to make, I've never actually seen it in its entirety, I don't think. I've heard the songs, and I remember the silly male anatomy-related controversies, but for one reason or another, I've never actually watched the movie itself. So, for now, I'll unquestioningly agree with what the animation scholars tell me. It must be good, right? I mean, the main character is a redhead, and they're some of my favourite people, sexually.

But first, Disney needed a kick in their pants to recommit to the movie musical format. And so, here, we have a smaller-scale effort in the musical department. Oliver & Company deserves credit for being, in a way, what ultimately served to point Disney towards one of their longest winning streaks in years. What else does it deserve credit for? Ummmmm......well, Young Joey Lawrence probably appreciated the work to bridge the gap between Gimme a Break and Blossom, maybe?