January 27, 2014

45. طعم گيلاس … (1997)

written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

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Criterion #45. Moving this along because it’s good to watch movies.

Iranian! Foreign language, foreign script! It’s been a while. Let’s dig into this.

First off, what is the name of this language? I thought it was correct to call it “Farsi,” but some investigation leads me to understand that for an English speaker like myself that would be needlessly affected, like calling German “Deutsch,” and that I should just call it “Persian,” which is all that “Farsi” means.

(And, for good measure: “Farsi” is actually only an Arabic modification of the original Persian word for Persian, “Parsi.” The political history is apparently such that nowadays Iranians generally call their language by its Arabic name, “Farsi,” with a kind of footnote “but the correct word is Parsi.” Anyway, the point is, that needn’t concern us in English.)

(P.S. And in case any of you dreadfully ignorant Americans need reminding, as I very very obviously do not and did not, Arabic (spoken in Iraq and westward) and Persian (spoken in Iran and eastward), are completely unrelated language groups, but after the Arab conquest of Persia in the 600s, Persian speakers adopted Arabic script, and thus modern Persian is written using a close variant of the Arabic alphabet. I pity your Western ignorance for needing to be spoonfed this very basic information about the world around you. For shame. I for one clearly had this all well, well in hand prior to googling it and reading Wikipedia.)

(P.P.S. But seriously: I think I would have basically gotten it right if asked nicely. But now that I’ve looked it up we’ll never know.)

So here is our title: طعم گيلاس …. If you copy and paste those letters and fiddle around with them you’ll see what fancy stuff your computer is ready to do with Arabic/Persian script. The letters automatically jump into right-to-left order when you link them up, and switch shapes on context (with different forms depending on whether a letter appears at the beginning, middle, end, or isolated). They feel a little sticky and alive and unpredictable. We Latin alphabet users don’t get to see that kind of magic in our ordinary typing. Savor it! And apparently the computer also knows something (though not everything) about what order to put the words in, because once it picked up on the Persian I had a heck of a time getting “(1997)” to show up to the RIGHT of the title. The cursor jumps around in weird ways when it thinks you want to go right-to-left for a while. Even just selecting the text is weird. Try it, it’s fun.

Obviously this font size is inappropriately small for Persian. Luckily, none of is are actually reading what it says.

Okay, okay, let’s get to it.

طعم = ta'm (the ' is a glottal stop, the first sound in “uh-oh”) = Taste
گيلاس = gīlās (the macrons just indicate long vowels) = Cherry

The romanization on Wikipedia is Ta'm-e gīlās…. The romanization on IMDB, which seems to have been distributed at the time of the film’s release, is Tam e guilass. (I speculate that the “gui” may be an artifact of its appearance at Cannes, where French speakers would have needed the “u” to make clear that this was a hard rather than a soft “g.” Yes?) As far as I can tell the “e” particle is just contextually implied.

So word for word this would be “Taste of Cherry” and this is indeed the English-distribution name of the movie. But as far as I can tell from google translate, written Persian doesn’t generally use articles or distinguish plurals, so “The Taste of Cherries” might be equally valid. It’s certainly more the implied title of the movie. (Subtitle for the relevant line of dialogue is actually “the taste of the cherries” — though I’m not sure the spoken phrase is identical to the title; I can pick out “gīlās” but not “ta'm”.) “Taste of Cherry” seems to me a bit needlessly gnomic and foreign-film-ish.

And this all ignores the ellipsis, which seems a rather significant feature of the title. “Taste of Cherry…” doesn’t really make any sense, since the phrase is semantically too abstract to sustain any sense of time. But “The Taste of Cherries…” is sensible enough. If a little cheesy. I don’t know what to google to find out whether ellipses indicating lapses into reverie are equally cheesy in all languages. But cheese isn’t my problem, it’s Kiarostami’s. I put it to you that the name of this movie is: The Taste of Cherries…

Now that’s overwith, we can finally get to the part where I say something about the part of the movie that isn’t the title.

First I will let Mr. Kiarostami say a few words on his tastes, taken from the disc’s sole bonus feature, an interview:

I don’t like to engage in telling stories. I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don’t like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don’t like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power. And you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films that are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater… Some films have made me doze off in the theater. But the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.

I include this because it is a sort of manifesto for a certain kind of moviemaking, stated bluntly, and in a way, everything I have to say in response to this movie can be said in response to this, its rationale. (This allows the reader who has not seen the movie to engage more directly. You see? Very considerate of me.)

Though I guess such readers will need me to say outright: I thought Taste of Cherry (yeah, whatever) was indeed the sort of film he likes, the sort of film he wanted it to be. It is unapologetically slow and quiet and subdued. It introduces a situation revolving around isolation and the contemplation of suicide, and then lets the mood and meaning of that situation seep into the lyrical but simple imagery of a man driving around in a mostly barren Iranian landscape of grassless dirt. One is lulled, if not to sleep, at least to a peaceably bored calm. The muted grinding of tires on gravelly roads is as soothing and meaningless in a movie as in real life. It only took a few minutes for me to understand why it was going to be okay for a full-length movie just to consist of slowly driving around: for the same reasons that people enjoy actually slowly driving around.

And what are those reasons? I can’t help but return to the subject that has preoccupied me (to say the least) for the past year or two: the condition of being a brain, and the care and feeding of brains. (Or “minds,” if you prefer.) What kinds of things do minds like? One point of view would be that there are two distinct sorts of things, and Kiarostami lays out them out side by side in his quote above: one is to be stimulated, and one is to be unstimulated.

Another point of view takes a step back and says there is really only one thing that brains like: to be stimulated and unstimulated in equal measure. Balance. One can imagine some ideal median degree of stimulation, but in practice this is an impossibility and what one really aspires to is something like a well-modulated steady wave of stimulation alternating with unstimulation. My sense, in fact, is that the alternation is part of what brains like, just the way people enjoy swinging on a swingset more than they enjoy sitting at rest on a stationary swing.

When I was younger, my patience for “art movies” like this one was quite a bit shorter than it is now. I definitely had a good open mind about such things: I wasn’t particularly prejudiced, culturally, and I was certainly very much game to be transported into a meditative state if that was what a movie had to offer. But whenever it became apparent to me that a movie (or any sort of art) wasn’t going to prescribe anything in particular for me to do with my mind while watching — that I was under only very lax supervision by some kind of Montessori hippie movie — I would spontaneously feel that I had better things to do and think about. Encouraged to let my mind wander as I liked, I would accordingly do exactly that, and it would eagerly wander away from this lazy movie, toward things I cared about.

As I got older and more defensive, more intrinsically interested in picking apart the mysterious fallacies and hypocrisies of human society, the peculiarity of such movies would hold my attention even when the movie didn’t, and my wandering attention would drift outward, to think about the movie as an artifact, about the people who made it and were showing it, and about the dubious “artsy” attitude that had thought there was some virtue in confusing watching-a-movie with not-necessarily-watching-a-movie. I grew cynical: such films didn’t really want me to freely have my own thoughts; they wanted me to have the thoughts they intended, but they also wanted to congratulate themselves, and wanted me to congratulate myself, for my arriving at those thoughts freely, without coercion. Or rather, pretending in bad faith to arrive at them freely, while actually secretly following the filmmakers’ breadcrumb trails of high-intellectual clues, which generally led nowhere all that great: just to a big crumbling piece of stale bread. High art wanted to have its cake and eat it too: no prescribed experiences, but exceptional experiences nonetheless.

It seemed to me impossible for such art to justify its existence in preference to such superior unprescribed experiences as, say, looking at a tree, or looking at a kaleidoscope. Or looking at nothing and letting the mind wander. I can have all the rewarding thoughts I want with my eyes closed. So who needs authors if they’re not going to author an experience? Only god can make a tree so give me a freaking break, am I right? The Empire Strikes Back made more sense to me than the likes of Le grande illusion not because my mind was so dulled and stunted that I could only find enjoyment being strapped into a rollercoaster, but rather because my imagination was so free and strong that I could only recognize a rollercoaster as genuinely having determined or even demarcated my experience in any way worth naming.

And I still stand by the legitimacy of this point of view. When Kiarostami speaks derisively of movies that “take you hostage,” I find that unsympathetic and wrong. Being manipulated is one of the great pleasures in life; being stimulated is one of the two great pleasures of the mind.

But nowadays I also understand the sense behind movies that cater to the other great pleasure. I finally see the real purpose of all that Montessori art. They were not for people with unfettered imaginations. They are for people whose minds are already full, who have made a habit of overthinking, and for whom the “unstimulation” offered by a tree or a kaleidoscope is something — crazy as it sounds to a child — that has come to seem rare and precious to them. Since they can’t always see the world through their thoughts anymore, they desperately want to be offered the world directly, by other people, by artists. The target audience for a Taste of Cherry is people who go “ah!” when there is quiet because they have come to expect no quiet.

This is generally called “being an adult” but I resent that. People can use their minds however they choose at any age and the number of available trees to look at is the same for adults as for children.

I understand a “down-time” movie now much as I understand a “guided meditation,” which also would have baffled me as a child, as it should. There is something quite sad about having gotten to the point where one feels comfortable being oneself only when being guided to it by someone else. And this is what art films are. But the state of mind in which one is desperate to be granted the right to inattention by the thing you are compulsively paying attention to is very real. It is for this state of mind that such movies are designed to work, and having unfortunately attained that state of mind, I can attest that they do work, and are moving as such. At least this one was.

It also begins to make sense to me that such movies are often associated not just with the ambitions of high intellectuals but also with the political cinema of poor or oppressed populations. The mind that is constantly enmeshed in a struggle against overwhelming problems is a mind that will by force of habit not be able to help but fill in blanks, and thus will seek an art of as many blanks as possible, in the hope that at least some will manage to remain blessedly blank even after the mind gets a stab at it. I have come by my anxieties wholly apolitically, of course, but the principle is the same.

It’s tempting to say that I hope for the day when I will find these movies pointless again, when I’m no longer anxious enough to need to be fed boredom. But actually, in having come this far down the path of overstimulation and gotten to personally comprehend the value of naptime cinema, see what its deal is, I have divested myself of my old cynicism that art-house calm is affectation, or that what’s being asked of me is to fake freedom but actually follow the leader. And the cynicism was the only reason I didn’t like such movies. Without that cynicism they may well be no better than looking at a tree, but also no worse. And I like letting my mind wander. I am actually perfectly content to let my own imagination be the form and substance of my experience, and why shouldn’t that be part of the public culture of going to the movies? Or any other part of society?

In retrospect I do wonder now if my skepticism about Montessori attitudes was exactly the damage done to me by public school, was exactly the stunted Americanized attitude that it’s said to be. Undoing that sort of damage means realizing that I like being given free rein, in all things, including movies. Why not?

They are there for me to watch. When you put this disc in your DVD player you can see a golden-brown world of dirt. That sounds, like so many things, good. And even better: it is a world that wants to be seen, that was made to be seen. I don’t expect ever again to doubt the value of that. There will always be occasion for the gentle downswing of my mind’s stimulation cycle.

[In sum: there is nothing wrong with manipulative, hostage-taking, overstimulating movies. But there is something wrong with disdain for the opposite. The big cultural/socio-psychological problem is partisanship for one or the other. People like Kiarostami (as self-represented above) just contribute to polarization when we really need integration.]

Interestingly enough, when this movie first came out, Roger Ebert caused a stir by writing a one-star review, saying that he thought more or less what I gave as my childhood attitude, above. That the movie was an emperor with no clothes, pretending to profundity by being ostentatiously boring and empty and wasting the audience’s time. All points of view are subjective and thus legitimate and I’m sure in that moment it seemed that way to him. But I can’t imagine the post-surgery meaning-of-life waxing-blogosophical good-ol’ Unca’ Ebert of 10 years later being at all impatient or cynical about this film. He was all about letting his mind wander; he was all about the taste of cherries. Wake up and smell the taste of cherries. Life is just a bowl of the taste of cherries.

I enjoyed it, and I benefited from the time it gave me. I thought about what it was about, and about myself, and about the world. I was moved when it seemed to be moving more or less in synchrony with these thoughts, which was most of the time. It seemed in fact to be about… the issues above, the privations of thought and the relief of the unthought of the sensory world. (It is of course characteristic of the unstimulating art movie experience that whatever you are inclined to think about seems to be wahat it really is about. But in this case, y’know, I think it really was.) On the movie’s small, quiet scale, I felt a slow trickle of feelings of tension and apprehension, and nuances of real discomfort, comfort, hope, and hopelessness. Toward the end I realized that the steady trickle had accumulated a small but real quantity of feeling, and that the filmmaker might be playing a long game where he would end by suddenly flushing it, which might well make me well up or feel horror or joy or something. And after spending an hour-and-a-half in slow time, I was prepared for him to give me one meticulously prepared shove into bigger feelings.

Well, that’s not what he did. This movie ends with a high-concept coda, in which the possibility of cashing in the accumulated emotion is pointedly set aside, apparently on principle (again, see filmmaker statement above). Instead he shows us [spoiler redaction, if this is a spoiler, though maybe it shouldn’t be]. A lot of the discussion of this movie focuses on coming to terms with the anticlimactic jolt this gives the audience, and its possible significance. Certainly in the first few minutes after viewing that’s what was on my mind. But then I came to terms with it, and the terms are: it’s not really that important to the movie. If you’re suddenly startled by someone being near you because you were wrapped up in a book, it might take a while for your heart rate to come down, but hopefully it doesn’t take nearly as long for you to realize that what happened to you wasn’t actually very interesting. The ending isn’t really all that interesting.

There was no music at all (in one scene there was some very faint and scratchy music on a radio but completely under dialogue) and among my peaceful thought processes was “I wonder what I will do about the music selection; maybe I’ll just take some of the ambient driving sounds that make up so much of the soundtrack.” But then a-ha, at the very very end some music starts up and runs through the credits. It’s immediately recognizable as Louis Armstrong playing “St. James Infirmary Blues” (used without credit and, I wouldn’t be surprised, without paying for it), but something is odd. It seems to be two different performances being played simultaneously, or different parts of the same performance. The effect is a little eerie but, while watching the movie, pretty subtle. I’d say it was done to foil the copyright robots on Youtube except this was 10 years before anyone even considered being a tube.

At least some of it, I’ve determined, is from his 1959 studio recording on “Satchmo Plays King Oliver” (though from an “alternate take,” not released until 1979?), but it has been chopped up and shuffled around to skip the vocal. (Maybe the double-exposure effect is just done to help disguise all the splices?) And that 1959 recording ends on a high note, whereas this ends on a low note, so I can’t for the life of me figure out where the latter part of this track comes from. Nobody online has done this detective work and my patience ran out after a while.

Anyway, here you go, track 45. It starts under the last line of dialogue but it seemed better to get the beginning of the music than avoid the few seconds of talking. I faded in as a compromise.

Sometimes the faster I write the longer they get.

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January 24, 2014

44. The Red Shoes (1948)

written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

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Criterion #44.

Not just any Red Shoes but The Red Shoes. My movie literacy has gone up one point.

I already said my bit about the reassuring embrace of Technicolor here, but this is obviously the better place for it. This is one of the most Technicolor movies ever made. The virtues and effects of this movie are exactly the virtues and effects of its palette; it is, like The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia, an incarnation of the spirit of Technicolor.

Much of that Technicolor worldview is nourishing to me, and makes me envy and admire the people of the past, whose heads were so naturally full of such simple, sturdy stuff. But those heads had other sorts of stuff in them too, older stuff, equally characteristic of their era but of no particular value to me. Some such stuff was in effect here. I refer in particular to operatic doom, which provides both the obsession and actual outcome of The Red Shoes. We’re on the same spiritual-aesthetic plane as Fantasia, but tilted downward; instead of a dreamy optimism, we get a dreamy fatalism. The movie’s trajectory of doom makes sense to me only as a well-worn formula; by the story logic there is no actual tragic necessity. And, to my mind, neither is there any tragic necessity in the aesthetic logic either, even though that is clearly the filmmakers’ intention.

“To my mind” is an important caveat in such matters.

Beth and I recently read (in this enjoyable anthology) Molly Haskell’s essay on “The Woman’s Film,” which I recommend. Haskell observes that the tear-jerking scenarios found in “weepies” offer wish-fulfillment fantasies that reveal their audiences’ psychologies… but they only offer wish-fulfillment in its most conservative form, which tends to perpetuate rather than alleviate the audience’s problems. Women who feel trapped by the constraints of their social roles find a validating outlet for their feelings in exaggerated cinematic images of those feelings, e.g. movies about grand women who make grandly painful sacrifices… but being gratified by images of the poignant nobility of suffering only reinforces the oppressive paradigm, in which being trapped is in fact inescapable, necessary, and right. People will pay to be reassured that their resentments are necessary; they will not pay to be shown a way out, because that will entail feeling shame. (My summary.) This is her feminist thesis and it’s a good one. I only summarize it here because I want to invoke the general principle, which lingered in my mind while coming to terms with The Red Shoes.

I don’t think the illogical doom of the ballerina in this movie is based on the exact same oppression as “the woman’s film,” but it is based on that same principle: that some particular mode of suffering has gotten baked into a paradigmatic necessity. I am forced to think about this, rather than feel it, because I psychologically don’t need it, and thus don’t get it. The filmmakers expect it to seem inevitable and necessary to the viewer, and it just doesn’t. “Why doesn’t she just, y’know, not kill herself?” I want to ask, at exactly the point when I’m supposed to feel a horrible ache welling up inside me. I’ve certainly felt pre-programmed pangs of recognition in all sorts of other movies, movies that have more to do with my own stuff. But the secret ache behind this particular storyline (trope-line) obviously comes from another kind of life, one that hasn’t been mine.

I wished for years that I could get into opera, because in every aspect other than that opera-y quality it seems like something I would really love. But by now I have come to recognize that no matter how much I school myself and open my mind to it, I’ll never get to where real opera fans are, because that opera-y quality reflects important psychological underpinnings for what goes on at the opera, on and off the stage — and I must accept that it, whatever it is, is not deeply true for me in the way that it genuinely is for its target audience. The question is: what sorts of doom feel necessary, what sacrifices have trapped the audience member in his or her own life? Opera’s baggage clearly has something to do with social roles, if not quite with as narrow a focus as “The Woman’s Film.” I think in the era when these tropes formed, homosexuals and artists and, generally, sensitive men and forceful women (= tenors & sopranos) all felt stuck under the cruel thumb of the social code, just like the oppressed housewives in Haskell’s piece, and thus couldn’t help but identify, unconstructively but sincerely, with doom after doom, penance after penance, consumption after suicide, flung from the parapet until the cows come home.

In fact I would imagine that almost everyone in the 19th century felt to some degree trapped between the intimate encouragements of Romantic art and the restrictive Victorian public reality. (I’m working this out for myself but I recognize, sideways, that this is very well-trod ground for cultural theorists. If you want to read (and then shrug at) an academic treatise on what opera is really about, sociologically speaking, I think pretty much every university publisher has a book for you.)

So I can understand historically. But I can’t feel it. For my psychological part, I feel like I am a pretty good person as I am; all my sacrifices to social pressures have always felt all too contingent and dirty, not the least bit necessary or noble. Not to say I haven’t made them. But I don’t generally get a lot out of operatic tragedy because it doesn’t feel to me like real catharsis; real catharsis would let me cry about the false premises. Tragedy implies the existence of those damnable Fates ruining everything. What Fates? Premises all. My enemies are all people and/or premises. Plus death itself, natch.

I do admire, in the dry sense of the word, that Powell and Pressburger were able to genuinely and classily carry these sorts of ideas intact from the high and hoity world of opera (and, yes, yes, more to the point, ballet) over into film. Their movie at least doesn’t feel quite as kitschy-clueless as the same plot does when it appears in Hollywood movies; here it feels like there is some real expressive continuity with the cultural world the movie is about. It feels distinctly well-pedigreed. And outside of the dubious tragedy, I actually found that very gratifying. In fact even the dubious tragedy I can appreciate for its aura of sincerity. One feels this movie has been made in exceptionally good faith.

The opening moments, when eager young music students bound into the balcony seats to see their teacher’s ballet score, seemed wonderful to me: invigoratingly genuine and unapologetic about taking this world and these passions seriously. It gave me opportunity to reflect on the anxieties that attend all my enthusiasms, and so many others’ today. “Elites” have to contend with being “elites” one way or another; even to those who detest it, the Marxist critique hangs in the air and must be swatted away. Here there was no swatting because there was nothing to swat at: the movie really is about the ballet, the ballet, the wonderful ballet! Having to die for art is a bit silly, but being passionate about it is not, and before the movie gets silly it is not silly at all. Valuably so.

The movie has all the polish and ease of Hollywood product but is decidedly well-bred at the same time, a combination that is, to this American viewer, disarmingly rare. British films seem so often to fall too far to one side or the other of the Atlantic stylistic divide. (Though I guess I also admired The Long Good Friday for getting it right.) Moira Shearer is, in a way, the embodiment of the same unexpected combination. She certainly looks and sounds like a “movie star,” and yet she also seems genuinely relaxed and confident and educated and entirely unbrittle.

That sense of ease, and of place and color and texture, is plenty rewarding enough. I would have loved this movie to have exactly the same atmosphere but no plot. No rise and fall, no love triangle, no tragic choices. Just what it’s like to be in the business and put on a ballet. A few passing hints of darkness would have meant far more to me than explicit doom. The centerpiece of the film, the otherworldly “Red Shoes” ballet, is already intended to be read as a compressed dream-parallel of the real characters’ lives. Great! That’s enough then. All the filmmakers’ ideas about the sacrifice and obsession of art would have come across just as clear even if they had only been delivered surrealistically in the ballet. The sequence is as great and striking a thing as they say, lush and weird and cared-for, a cousin to the brief Dali dream in Spellbound and clearly the source for many dream ballets to come. To my taste, that should have been the one window through which the winds of doom blew across the face of this movie. That is the real nature of art, after all: it is the window. I wish the filmmakers had been content to keep the functions of the frame and the centerpiece separate.

Or else let them bleed more thoroughly together and have the whole story be blatantly run through with surrealism and menace. In fact perhaps this is the better critique. The commentary talks about the movie as a Hoffmann-esque fairy tale. If that were how it really played, my tolerance for doom would have been much broader, since in fairy tales, doom seems like an expression of general fear rather than specific angst. It is the relative Hollywood-naturalism of the main story (up until the last few minutes) that makes the tragic outcome seem like something self-pitying and psychological. (The commentary eventually says that the film “goes a middle route,” which is exactly my complaint.)

To summarize: I’m always game for a dream of rich color, and this is a very fine one, but it’s too obviously not my dream. If I dreamed it I would suspect I’d been Incepted. I will gladly watch the ballet sequence again any time I come across it. The rest I can certainly get something out of but not quite as much as I wish.

Debra Messing and Walt Disney are both very appealing and give the movie its natural magnetism. Zeppo is fine I guess.

Robert Helpmann, whose presence really rubbed me the wrong way in Henry V, was just as unpleasant here. I get a very nasty, vain vibe off of him. Reports are that he liked to be mean to everybody, confirming my impression. I know it’s a gay “type” but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a hateful type. His ballet choreography is good enough — Moira Shearer says something similarly unenthusiastic in her interview. Apparently he was a moderately big deal.

The presence of the real Léonide Massine forms a strange bridge between the actual world of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, De Falla, Prokofiev — which in my mind is faraway and long-lost and classy — and the world of Hollywood, the cowardly lion and Cary Grant, which lives on in a perpetual and cozily garish present. How anyone could have wandered from one to the other is beyond me. Like that clip of the guy on “I’ve Got a Secret” who witnessed Lincoln’s assassination (the real Lincoln). Massine just looks like some guy, some guy who’s not above playing movie make-believe.

Criterion has done their standard nice job. Netflix twice sent me the old 1999 disc instead of the listed 2010 edition, but I wasn’t going to miss out on the fancy restoration, so I waited until I could get a library copy. I’m glad I did. The color is lovely and the color is the point. Commentary is a hodgepodge of interview materials with a host, but very well assembled and consistently interesting.

Martin Scorsese is all over the extras, telling us in various ways how much he loves the movie. It makes sense to me that he would. But it’s also a little odd to think about him deeply identifying with a ballerina. His comments all reveal his sensitive eye and cinematic sense; I would gladly listen to him do a commentary track on any movie. Here is his much more concise (and positive) way of saying, in the commentary, more or less what I’ve said above:

“…in a funny way, the love story, for me, is almost just a device. Really just a device to hinge all these—— this recreation of a world, where, as Michael [Powell] put it, “art is worth dying for.” I don’t know if I’d agree with him, but… that’s what the film’s about apparently. I didn’t know that. I—— [begins laughing] He told me that once! [stops laughing] But it’s great to have that kind of passion. I think it’s great to have that kind of passion, if you agree with it or not, that art is worth dying for. For filmmakers to get together and concoct this and perpetrate it onto the world, at that time, is fascinating. The guts and the risk that they took. Especially after World War II. What I like about it sometimes: it seems out of control, that their emotions are out of control. Not the characters but the people who made the film. That the passion is out of control and I think that’s something that’s very rare. Something very rare is created when that occurs.”

Bizarre bonus feature is a full-length audio track of Jeremy Irons (!) reading the novelization (!) written by P & P themselves much later, commissioned by Avon Books in 1977. I’ll admit I didn’t listen to the whole thing; it seems like a decent enough novelization. Jeremy also reads the original Andersen tale, which I had not read before and which unsurprisingly merits a Yikes.

So, music. This is of course one of those movies where the score is really built into the action – i.e. where there’s a composer character who writes music that we hear, plays it on the piano, etc. In the first couple decades of sound film there was a lot of that sort of thing, but I think this is the first in the Criterion Collection to go there (unless you count Spinal Tap and “Lick My Love Pump”). Score is by Brian Easdale, pretty much known only for his Powell & Pressburger scores and for this one in particular. From what I’ve heard of his music, he was a real talent, as good as the much bigger names in film music, and with a touch of the high in his technique that goes a long way.

Though it is so very, very long, our musical selection simply has to be the ballet, which is one of the most significant “classical compositions” in all of film scoring, and perhaps the single best diegetic work of art (“opus Hollandaise”) in any movie. (I could swear this subject had been discussed long ago on this site but I can’t find it right now.) This ballet seems to me comparable in quality to the most renowned “real” American and British ballets of the same era, including the two by Bernstein that have always been favorites of mine… but the use of ondes martenot, quite a few shock chords, and some shameless “dream sequence” special effects (wind machine!) also give it a distinctly cinematic sound, as much a relative of Rosza and Spellbound as of Bernstein et al. A sort of perfect amalgam of a “cinema-ballet” style.

So I guess disc 2 of our Criterion soundtrack anthology will have fewer tracks on it than the first, because this one runs 15 minutes long. Here it is, track 44. This is Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

The recent commercial recording gives a movement breakdown. I don’t have access to that recording so this is somewhat speculative, but based on their timings I imagine those movements begin at these times in our original track (+my summary of the action):

0:00 I. Allegro vivace [The shoemaker / The girl and the boy / She wants the shoes / She gets them]
2:28 II. Allegro moderato e molto ritmico [Dance of the shoes / Nightlife]
3:50 III. Poco più mosso [Dance hall / The scene dissolves]
5:13 IV. Lento tranquillo [The girl heads home / The shoes won’t let her]
6:05 V. Largo [She is trapped / Into dream landscape / Pas de deux with newspaper]
8:09 VI. Presto, quasi cadenza [The shoemaker reappears / Lost in an underworld / Alone]
10:14 VII. Allegro assai [Ballroom / Pas de deux with lover / Waves of applause]
12:41 VIII. Sostenuto [Church / She is forbidden to enter / She tries to cut off the shoes / She is danced to death / The shoes are removed / The shoemaker retrieves the shoes and offers them to the audience]

The piano score was published in 1950 but it’s quite rare. They did play this at the Proms a couple years ago.

You know, watching that yet again just now to type up the action, I feel like I must say: the sequence is really very good. A warm, spooky embrace. At the moment when the hopelessness peaks and the camera begins to pull back (at 9:30 in the mp3) I consistently get a little rush of I-don’t-know-what-emotion-this-is emotion. That’s the supreme form of aesthetic experience, I think. This movie has a lot to offer. Maybe I’ll grow to accept the rest of its embrace, on its own terms, on subsequent encounters. But for now I’ve watched it enough.

Sentences are not forming very well for me right now and this whole overlong entry comes from the tedious rather than the breezy part of my brain. I’m not at all pleased with what I’ve written here. But I’m just going to move on to the next movie rather than wait around for a breeze. All in good time.

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January 15, 2014

Fables (1668–94)

Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95)
Fables (1668–94)
(selected and) translated by James Michie (1979)

This was what I’m calling “roll 34” in my Western Canon sweepstakes: 482, which is the line for Jean de La Fontaine. Only one item under his name: Fables.

La Fontaine’s verse is prized for its elegance and piquancy in the original language; his fables have been classroom French examples for centuries. Well that sounds splendid but I don’t speak French. After doing a bit of comparison shopping for translations I settled on the Penguin selection seen above.

Many of the fables are just retellings from Aesop; others come from Indian sources. Later in his output La Fontaine ventured more of his own invented fables, which tend to be wordier and more involved. (That is, if I was correct in my sense of which were which.)

For the old chestnuts, the charm of the style would seem to be the main attraction here; his audience already knew the fables themselves as well as we do. La Fontaine retells these little animal stories in a style that is both precious and sardonic, chatting cheerfully and smirking cynically in equal measure. The ideal, it seems, is to be simultaneously free and controlled, breezy refinement. How very seventeenth-century-French, non? The verse follows a similar muse: the schemes of rhyme and meter are generally irregular, whimsical, improvisational, but the element of rhythm is always kept in play. It has sort of a jazzy formal spirit.

That sounds like it might be pretty good, and sure, in many ways it was pretty good, but I’ll be frank with you: my desire to write anything about this runs very shallow. I think that’s because the moral content, which is after all the point, felt neither enriching nor amusing. After each one I had a sense of having been a bit scolded, rapped with a ruler, and felt myself forced to contend with the lesson. E.g. “It’s best for people only to associate with their equals.” Gee, I don’t know, is that really good advice? Was it good advice then? How mean-spirited is this? Do I agree with it even a little? Am I worried about it? How much politico-historical thinking do I need to do to neutralize the discomfort I feel? Why does this 300-year-old smirk feel so personal?

That sort of agonizing is inevitable for me when faced with self-assured criticism and advice. Criticism and advice always unnerves me because it is the knife-edge across which kindness ceases to be kindness. And this book is chock full of it.

Eventually, after finally reaching the end of my wrangle with whatever “oh snap!” La Fontaine had just laid down, I would feel drained. I had to go through that just to read this damn cute animal story? I had a pretty strong hunch that La Fontaine didn’t actually care about these morals as much as he was letting on, nor did his readers; that they all lived in a time when worldly cynicism and metaphors to match were in and that all this finger-wagging was just a posture. Well, I really dislike that posture. Moralizing gives me the willies and moralizing just as a way to be marvelous is even worse.

Like, I don’t even feel very comfortable with that grasshopper (cicada, here) and that ant. When the ant refuses to take pity on the grasshopper because it’s your own damn fault, don’t let the door hit you on the way out to FREEZE TO DEATH, the lesson, it would seem, is not just that one should pull one’s own weight, nor even that one can reap only what one has had the foresight to sow (like in the much more palatable “who will help me bake the bread” story), but, more disturbingly, that your neighbor (as well as every consenting teller and hearer of this fable) is self-righteous to the point of bloodthirst. Forget what Jesus said, everybody really knows that charity is only for the blameless, ha ha ha. And blame after all is very easy to mete out. That stuff’s hard enough for me to take hearing it in public debate these days; somehow it feels even more insidious coming out of a witty old Frenchman talking about some très charmant bugs.

I went through a lot of “who says??” while reading this, which ate up much of the charm. You might tell me, “The point should have been the charming poetry, not the morals! Don’t worry so much about them.” But that’s like telling me to enjoy hard-right-wing political cartoons because “Forget the politics, they’re such delightful cartoons!” I don’t know that they are that. I don’t know that the two are separable.

Admittedly, a great many of the fables had a softer touch and were directed at the softer targets of vanity and pretension. That I found easier to take. I was, in fact, occasionally amused. I did appreciate the breeze of the style. This has all been just to say that I was never fully delighted, because my hackles were always a bit up.

The translations seemed to me good; better than the others I’d sampled. I guess you’ll want to try one. Here’s the one I mentioned earlier. Book V, Fable II: THE CLAY POT AND THE IRON POT.

Said the iron to the clay pot:
‘Let’s see the world together.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not,’
Said the other. ‘I’m not sure whether
I would be wise to forsake
My corner of the ingle —
After all, it would only take
The slightest shock, one single
Accident to shatter
My body irrevocably.
But for you who are made of matter
Tougher than mine, I can see
No reason to stay inside.’
‘But I’ll be your bodyguard,’
The iron pot replied.
‘If we happen to meet some hard
Impediment on our way
I’ll stand between you and harm
As a buffer.’ The pot of clay
Was persuaded. Arm in arm,
Brother escorting brother,
As best they could they set off
Six-leggedly, knocking each other
At the least stumble or cough.
The clay pot was bound to suffer.
Within a hundred yards
His bodyguard and buffer
Had smashed him into shards.
He had only himself to blame.

In life we observe the same.
One should only associate
With equals. He who does not
Is sure to suffer the fate
Of the vulnerable pot.

Who says who says who says??

I had also checked out of the library a bilingual edition of the complete fables, with slightly less attractive but perfectly passable translations, and intended to supplement the short Penguin volume with a trip through this giant hardcover volume. But as I neared the end of my first round, a rare sense of agency came over me and, in a bid to reduce the amount of masochism in my life, I granted myself leave to declare this assignment finished once I got to the end of the Penguin selections. I had, after all, read an entire book of La Fontaine’s fables. The gods, I thought, would not be angry.

Well, I guess they were, because when I went to find out my next selection the randomizer gave me an unambiguous reprimand. With a nasty twinkle in its eye, La Fontaine style. A little too ironic.

In that same spirit of non-masochism I am going to end this entry here. There is, after all, more to come.

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January 9, 2014

43. Lord of the Flies (1963)

directed by Peter Brook
from the novel by William Golding (1954)

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Criterion #43.

I’ve always taken the classic status of Lord of the Flies for granted, but it’s actually sort of an oddity: this cynical poison pill of a book that has managed to become an institution. It’s a perennial: just watch the copies sprout every year on the assigned-for-summer-reading tables in bookstores. I may be wrong but I suspect this one book is singlehandedly responsible for the idea that one of the things a young adult novel can aspire to be is “devastatingly grim.” These days that may apply to all young adult novels, but of course it’s gotten pretty attenuated, go Katniss.

In the included 1983 interview, William Golding muses that people can only get satisfaction out of such a pessimistic book because they are fundamentally optimistic. People like to read such things, he says, because they feel it’s healthy to have a counterbalance to their basic inborn hopefulness. Then he likens it to Candide: an antidote to a specific species of over-optimism that the culture subconsciously wanted to see brought down a few notches, to bring their outlooks back into balance.

Good stuff, and the interview made me like Golding, but in reflecting on the meaning of Lord of the Flies my mind keeps getting snagged on this feeling that it’s actually sort of like Funny Games, which I’ve talked about here elsewhere (in particular here). Like that movie and other works of philosophical vengeance, Lord of the Flies conflates fear of people with fear of harm, because they are so conflated in the author’s psychology. It sets to work trying to prove by contrived example that fear of people is reasonable and necessary. This is a form of philosophical self-defense: if I can make you all feel my horror (of you), perhaps you will become fearful like me and I can then relate to you better and hopefully fear you less. William Golding as seen in the 1983 footage gives me exactly that same sense of vengeful meekness I got from the profile of Michael Haneke, the injured timid soul quietly sharpening the sword of art. For jabbing at ghosts.

Lord of the Flies is, he more or less says, his response to the shock of the revelation of the Holocaust, and the horror of trying to come to terms with the fact that he “had a Nazi in him” — that had he been born in Germany, he would surely have gone along for the ride. Everyone did, and still does, have to come to terms with that thought and the nausea it induces. But the important thing is that it is a thought, and it is nausea; it is a feeling, not an obligation. If you don’t have the feeling, lucky you, you don’t have to deal with it (and you still get to not become a Nazi!). Being a “highly sensitive person” goes beyond cultural borders. Golding spends the rest of his interview talking, in a sense, about how anti-social and basically shy he has always felt, which gives the lie to his fear that he would probably have joined up and been a Nazi under other circumstances. No, I suspect he would not have; he would have been preoccupied by how he didn’t feel he belonged, didn’t feel the “normal” urge to join up. Sucks to your ass-mar, mein Herr!

There is a dirty form of satisfaction that comes of having your righteous indignation stoked by a public call to woundedness. “Yeah, me too! They hurt my feelings too, those dirty bastards!” This is how Fox News works, as well as Upworthy: there’s enough to go around on Facebook for every creed. This sort of thing needs a name like Schadenfreude to remind everyone that it is dirty. For the purposes of the next few sentences I am going to coin, um, victimelation. That’s terrible. Please submit suggestions in the comments. Anyway Lord of the Flies is a classic work of victimelation (that really sucks, I’m sorry). It makes a great noise that it’s about showing us what evil lurks in the hearts of all men (hence the nods early on to our protagonist Ralph’s moral failings), but really it’s quite clearly for us to identify with Ralph and Piggy and say “Damn them! Damn those horrible, terrifying, murderous other boys.” And we do! I do! Certainly nobody reads it and thinks “hey, Kill the Pig! Cut Her Throat! cool!”

The book is really a bait-and-switch. Things really go wrong on this island not because of inevitable bestial cruelty inside everyone present, but because one of the little boys, Jack, is a thoroughgoing villain. There certainly are real villainous little boys, but they are all have their reasons, and the reasons aren’t the great inner darkness. At my high school reunions I keep having to face the fact that, oddly enough, even the most frighteningly messed-up of my classmates are now just, you know, messed up, which is not actually so frightening. If anything sad. Not a murderer among them, yet.

The book shows us people being whipped into a deadly frenzy by fear of an imagined beast… and then goes on to tell us that there is a beast and it is inside each of us, and we had better be wary of it. It is a scary story about the error of being scared by scary stories. Fear, fear the error! says the author, with feeling. So where is the Piggy to know better than William Golding?

I write all this because I am oh most assuredly one of these meek/bitter guys with an urge to show ’em all how awful they are. But I want to do better than that. Just because the other boys scare me, and being alone scares me, and civilization scares me, and war scares me, doesn’t mean than when it comes time to sit down and create something for the consumption of others I want make it a cautionary boogieman story about the horror, the horror, a candygram from hell from inside a rotting pig’s head. Maybe better would be to write something nice about the real possibility of not being scared of everybody.

So that’s that thread of my response. But please class all of the above as ambivalence, no worse. Because I still like this book, as an excellent crystallization of my personal fears, and thus as entertainment. Scary is fun if you understand it to be subjective; not how the world works but how we sometimes feel. And as Golding said, that’s essentially how it’s read. We all know not really to take the philosophy to heart, just sample its spice, go “ho ho! What if! What if!” and then cheerfully move on to the next course.

It’s a very good piece of single-image art; it has a fine unity. You can hold the whole notion of the book and its title in your head in one gulp. A perfectly-sized aesthetic/conceptual gulp. That’s a special kind of achievement, worth treasuring. “Iconic” we call it sometimes, but an ad campaign can make an icon; what I’m talking about is the thing itself. “Animal Farm” is another one, perhaps a bit underweight. “The Great Gatsby” is surely beloved for this reason above all others. It fits exactly inside its own cover.

I guess I can segue to talking about the movie by talking about the cover. The cover of the recent Criterion release is typically enticing and effective, even if it is rather obviously modeled on the classic 1980 paperback cover painting. (On a personal note: up until this very moment at some level I always quietly, very subconsciously, understood the thing in the lower right with the flies on it to be a large baguette. I realize suddenly now that I have been thinking this. And that it is not a large baguette. In a way I am sad to see that thought go. Come back, baguette! No no, I’ll be fine.)

And this is my segue because Criterion’s snazzy cover is a very misleading representation of this movie; it offers exactly what the movie does not, which is atmosphere, foreboding, a touch of mysticism. The movie pointedly does not have such things on offer, and so to my mind cannot live up to the promise of the material. Peter Brook took a bunch of kids to an island and got himself some nice black-and-white quasi-documentary footage of well-cast kids re-enacting the events of Lord of the Flies. It’s quite an achievement as far as it goes. But that’s essentially as far as it goes. The assembly has no sense of perspective other than a very few arty shots here and there, no throughline that conveys the ominousness of time, space, narrative inevitability, malign forces beneath the surface, any of what’s so basic to the flavor of the book. It lacks the ambiance of fear, which is the essence of fear. It just has events and “editing.” At times it feels, I am afraid to say, like a produced-for-school-use teaching tool, a filmstrip, a crusty old video. Something flavorless, educational, disposable.

On the commentary Brook says that his intent (determined in no small part by budgetary considerations) was to create a verite sort of Lord of the Flies because the great virtue of cinema was that photography could offer “evidence,” and that the book’s message would be substantiated in the audience’s mind by the undeniable reality of these boys in all their real boyish moral malleability, in cold documentary black-and-white, showing what this sort of evil might really look like. I think it backfired. The non-actor kids don’t act in a distractingly polished way, but neither do they reveal any of the truths that the book has in mind. Because those aren’t their truths to reveal; they might not be anyone’s. The things I actually see and actually believe have to do with these real live kids’ real live desires to do right by this movie they are being instructed to make. It looks like what it was, weird summer camp. And sure, weird summer camp is a little like Lord of the Flies, but not enough to film documentary-style and have one stand in for the other. Lord of the Flies is a nightmare parable of children, not the thing itself. But that’s the movie they made.

I’ll grant that the intermittently arty 60s low-budget thing does have its own sort of philosophical perspective, a new-wave-y one, but for me it’s a perspective incompatible with fear. “This all happened, or could have happened, or maybe didn’t happen,” it says to me with cool equanimity. Who cares? Behind the opening credits are some still images in the manner of La Jetée that efficiently establish the premise: English boys’ schools, war, a plane crash. The deadpan of this technique establishes the tone: consider this from on high. Prepare to sit here with the Fates and, perhaps, feel a pang. The film seems to think this is a tragedy rather than a cautionary tale.

Accordingly, the pivotal scene, when the Lord of the Flies speaks to Simon, has been omitted. The filmmakers address it briefly in the commentary as though they considered it an obvious aberration in the book, correctly done away with. They’ve made their own reading of the material. I can’t see what that reading sees or knows or offers that isn’t just a denuded form of my reading (i.e. the right one).

In addition to a commentary track, they also have a track that is an abridged version of Golding’s complete reading of the book. Listening to the text in (loose, awkward) conjunction with the movie brought into relief that the book places you among children; the movie documents children. What adults forget about childhood, and can never see again, is that when 10 year-olds are completely certain they are out of adult supervision, they have an intense and frightening confidence. Their dealings with one another have all the force and authority that adults sense in one another. When you are 10 and another 10-year-old looks you in the eye and challenges you, it is full. The film cannot find its way there. These children are playing at wildness on cue and the adult artists around them are all too ready to congratulate themselves for getting at the real nitty-gritty. Not even close. That locker room menace cannot be captured outside of the locker room. Kids know far too well. This is why, in fact, child actors ARE necessary; because the famous “beautiful lack of self-consciousness” of children is a sham, so you either need a child who is exceptionally good at mimicking authenticity, or who is exceptionally committed to revealing the real – just like adult actors. Children’s entire lives are about manipulating adults; the flimsy “it was like that when I got here” manipulations end up being a smokescreen for the real, highly nuanced ones. “We worked these kids into a real frenzy to film this scene around the bonfire; they were completely out of control!” Yeah sure. I’ll have what she’s having.

What the film does offer, like those filmstrips would, is a kind of uncanny avatar of the book. “Oh, wow, that probably is what Piggy would look like if he actually were, you know, a real person! Hm. I’m not sure I was supposed to see that.” Like Bob Hoskins playing Nintendo’s Mario — yeah, that’s probably the right casting, but then why does it feel so wrong? Brook had it quite backward: somehow seeing it all photographed deflates rather than substantiates; I came away believing this story much less than before.

Great packaging though. (This is Criterion’s 2013 revamping of the release.) And nice bonus features etc. as usual. A special highlight is the clip from a documentary about Peter Brook’s “International Centre for Theatre Research” with some 1973 footage of an old friend, apparently before her self-esteem had quite settled into its long-term configuration. (Or possibly just on drugs. Or on the natural high of experimental theatre work. Or, I think, all three.) And behind the scenes footage and interviews etc. There hasn’t been a one of these movies yet where the commentary and bonuses haven’t made me like it more. Or haven’t made me think I liked it more. Which perhaps is just an undesirable illusion. The length of this entry probably arises from my subconscious desire to give what I perceive to be “due consideration” to a movie that, had it not been ensconced in the DeLuxe Treatment and just been a thing I saw on TV, I probably would have been content to dismiss quickly as amateurish and unsatisfying. Quickly and perhaps with more spirit; “due consideration” is nearly the same thing as nerves.

Music: is by Raymond Leppard of all people. You will notice when reading biographies of Leppard that they never say “harpsichordist, conductor, AND COMPOSER.” The score is sorely clumsy and hurts the movie significantly. His thought process is all too apparent: “ooh, a movie about choirboys gone bad, delicious, well then, I will have some choirboy music for them, you know, some Kyrie eleison sort of thing, very proper and so forth, and then perhaps as a march, quite British, but then of course there will be another version of it, transformed into something all very brutal, you know, with timpani and such, boom boom boom, to show, you know, the horror of it all. And then I suppose some flutes and whatnot for, you know, the greenery.” That might have been a workable outline for the music (though I am skeptical) but it certainly can’t be the music itself. It is the music itself. Here is the end titles.

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January 2, 2014

In a nutshell

High philosophy from my subway ride just ended:

The risk of Enlightenment objectivity is that by defining “truth” in terms of how universal it is, we open ourselves to tyranny by the weakest link. Fear of this tyranny underlies most of the tensions in today’s world. This fear of the obligations owed to objectivity easily supplants the old pre-Enlightenment fear of malice by a foreign subjectivity. The complete equivalence of the two fears seems to me a complete rebuttal of the premises of the Enlightenment.

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December 30, 2013

42. Fishing With John (1992)

Written and directed by John Lurie

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Criterion #42. Our first non-feature: a TV show, the complete run of 6 episodes.

I remember when it was still possible to come across weird stuff on TV. Now that we have hundreds of channels you’d think it would be a heyday for coming across weird stuff, but it’s not: more TV has turned out to mean more formulaic TV. Very few of those hundreds of channels are run with the spirit of the nonchalance that seemed to hold for decades, throwing on weird stuff in the middle of the night because why not, who really cares. Nowadays they care, and dare little.

It feels like the whole ethos of trawling for weird stuff is gone. The internet took it over and normalized it. Google is the behemoth of our time because all day every day is a trawl now. Even the most intimate “hey check this out” has been co-opted by calculating business interests. “You won’t believe this one weird artist’s unbelievable work that will drop your jaw” is a scam, delivered several times a day courtesy of the lamest people in your life. We harden to protect ourselves against the grift and bit by bit it becomes impossible for our jaws to truly drop. The old feeling of being a lone explorer happening across some undiscovered island has been usurped by the hateful metaphor of the virus: It’s viral! It’s a viral hit! Get infected! That really hurts, Charlie. And it’s still hurting!

Reading this little reminiscence (which may or may not be by someone I know) earlier this year put me in mind of that old pleasure of coming across the incomprehensible on TV, and how essentially 80s it now seems. This is another thing from the early 80s that someone once described to me as having had a similar effect on him. Late-night TV used to be its own world with its own laws.

For myself, in a slightly different vein, I think of the grinning bewilderment of the day I came across this without warning. How is it that this is being shown on TV, and yet it still feels like I will never have it common with anyone but a very few? Or, in yet another key, the day a few years later that I flipped channels to find this and sat in expectant confusion, which is to say transported, for the whole thing. How must the world really work, seeing as this exists? Time to rethink.

Such experiences are also the subject of, among other things, this (1976) and, I gather, this (1983), spine #248, which I am dreading a bit.

The sadder loss in the present day is the other side of the equation: nobody seems to want to make weird stuff anymore, either. People certainly want to make “this one weird thing that will drop your jaw,” or “this kind of amazing album by this kind of amazing band” but nobody wants to be a real freak in the night because almost nobody believes in unilluminated night or unlisted stations anymore. The hip of being weird so as to resemble late-nite mystery was overtaken by the mere hipsterism of being encyclopedic. All weirdness is just part of a typology. How horrible.

I guess the word I’m looking for is “underground.” When the mass culture goes underground (into the bomb shelter), where does the underground go? They walk among us, maybe. I guess that’s what Fight Club was about (17 years ago!). Who’s keeping it real today? Where’s my counter-culture?

The answer probably is: if you want to find it you have to dig, and be honest, you don’t really dig, do you. No, I don’t. I just expect that flipping channels will eventually turn stuff up. I probably just need to be more adventurous in my explorations if I want a sense of adventure. Okay fine, good advice, thanks.

Well, anyway, these thoughts were provoked by watching “Fishing With John.” This is one of those things that you might well flip to and be surprised existed. Utterly relaxed, pointless, TV jazz. John Lurie, first-class New York hipster (in the original sense), makes a hipster fishing show where his cool celebrity guests get to be cool, in the sense that nobody tries to do anything in particular, such as be clever or catch fish or really anything. It’s a show about it-is-what-it-is. It’s just TV mystery vacation. Is there anything cooler than utter lack of anxiety? Not in those days. Maybe now, but not then.

The presence of an authoritative-sounding PBS-style narrator is silly in itself, and then he is made to say silly things (“How deep is the ocean? Nobody really knows for sure.”), and so the whole fabric of TV-showism is brought in on the joke. The point: TV is weird, fishing is weird, celebrity is weird, this show is weird, life is weird. And weird is, obviously, good.

Lurie’s commentary is as thoroughly low key as what’s onscreen, so he never comes out and says that he had any particular intention per se, but he does say several times how much he enjoys watching fishing shows and also making home movies of his own fishing vacations. And I think that’s really about it. The show is just some more time spent in that same goofy vacation zone of the mind. I can go there by watching a fishing show or actually going fishing, or in this case, by watching a weird pseudo fishing show made, while actually fishing, by a guy who likes fishing shows. This was very much John Lurie’s vacation but we’re welcome to watch and have our own.

This is an artifact of a less anxious time that really wasn’t so long ago. Let’s try to reach toward such things in a genuine spirit. Being cool can be ours again if we just clap our hands and believe.

[Speaking of which, I saw a production of Peter Pan a couple weekends ago at the Yale School of Drama where at the end the bombs of World War I fell and Peter Pan was gassed to death, with gas-masked Wendy the only survivor. What’s sad is that the audience basically gets what’s being gotten at by a stunt like this. A child knows better – that’s some blatantly absurd adult self-pity. Adults need to get over themselves. They did when I was a kid and they still do.]

I feel in fact aware of how uncool and unrelaxed a way of talking about this show this whole entry is, and possibly this whole blog has always been. (With the exception of a few cool entries.) Another thing this show reminded me of was the “creative arts” summer camp I went to as a pre-teen, which was somewhere at the intersection between fingerpainting and hip, and was very in keeping with John Lurie’s attitude here. I think the animation teacher may even have tracked some of The Lounge Lizards over the reels of freeform kid-produced chaos.

Here are a bunch of other dimensions of this show I could talk about but won’t: manhood; celebrity and selfhood; commonalities in re: cool/manhood of the various guests (Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper); relation of silliness to spiritual experience (via trance, music, etc. as implicitly linked in the show); relation of home movies to creative moviemaking; career trajectory of John Lurie and current status, including my previous encounters with his music; skepticism vs. celebration of other people’s self-indulgence/self-amusement; fear vs. anxiety as illustrated on the show/psychoanalysis of John Lurie. Other stuff. But what’s better to say is that the show made me want to take it easy. It celebrated taking it easy and I was glad. And writing about any of this stuff, at least right now, would not be taking it very easy.

The music is all by Lurie and is an integral part of the creative fabric of the show. It carries a lot of its “meaning,” insofar as it has a meaning. The meaning is, I’m gonna write some music now. On the commentary at one point he says that writing soundtracks is easy because basically anything works with anything. I enjoyed hearing this voiced, since I’ve thought it myself but have always been cowed by the fact that I know others don’t think it. John Lurie it seems is not cowed by such things, ever.

There are many interesting little cues I could choose, but the show’s theme song is undeniably the correct choice. This despite its being a song, which I have carefully avoided thus far. I figure that since this disc’s being a TV show makes it an exception within the Criterion Collection, it can also be an exception to my rule. Track 42. As is often the case with these, our musical selection about sums up the flavor of the whole thing. It’s silly, but it knows that there’s more to silliness than just being silly. In there somewhere is the nature of art.

This show is some kind of art. Maybe there should be another word than art for what it is. Or maybe, rather, there should be another word than art to describe that stuff we usually mean by “art.” Because this sort of thing if anything strikes closer to home. I felt affection for this DVD because it did not seem to come from very far away.

I recently read Pauline Kael’s long 1969 essay on “Trash, Art, and the Movies” in which she is at pains to praise “trash” while denying that it is “art.” Why is “art” so sacred that we need to reserve the word “art” for it? I would rather apply the word cheerfully to all, you know, art.

Thanks, Criterion, this was a treat.

What I’ve written here is all over the map but if the map is small enough who cares.

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December 23, 2013

Pitch

Movie idea: serial-killer/self-help genre mashup.

Two homicide detectives are on the trail of a sick killer who is using the power of positive thinking and The Secret to easily kill anyone he wants. They must descend into the seamy underworld of self-help – and realize their own full potentials – before he kills again.

First proposed title for this movie was “Smell The Roses.” More on the nose: “How to Win Friends and Kill People” (or, possibly preferable, “How to Kill Friends and Influence People.”)

I guess this is more of a book, not a movie.

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December 17, 2013

41. Henry V (1944)

directed by Laurence Olivier
written by William Shakespeare
text edited by Alan Dent

criterion041-title

Criterion #41.

[The only onscreen title is as seen above, but posters for the original release of the film did call it Henry V. In a spirit of eager pedantry I originally gave this entry the long title, but then I thought better of it. I figure that if even the original posters were against using it, it would be too perverse of me. IMDB has no such scruples.

The above is the official writing credit, but the adaptation is generally attributed to Dent and Olivier together, and to these two IMDB and Wikipedia add Dallas Bower, credited in the film as Associate Producer. I think the commentary track may have offered some clarification on this point, but I forget. I’m not that eager a pedant.]

Technicolor is reassuring, and this comes from the era when it was at its most Technicolorish, the palette of The Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Robin Hood: intense but matte, never electric. The contrasts are brash and loud but in that same forthright way as a WPA poster. In the 40s, noisy juxtapositions of color could still be essentially modest. Color hadn’t yet begun to leer and preen.

Laurence Olivier manfully declaims the “we lucky few, we band of brothers” speech, culminating in a roar of courage from the armored troops… and then seconds later, cut to a closeup wherein one can’t help but notice that he is wearing not just ruby red lipstick but also, distinctly, cobalt blue eyeshadow. And yet the whole 40s colorscape is so sexless and unworldly that the absurdity registers only as yet one more moment of dreamlike color-experience. The entire spectrum has somehow been rendered too assured, too masculine to deliver any sort of crisis of masculinity. Perhaps this is part of why The Wizard of Oz is so beloved by gays. The colors palpably relieve the viewer of gender anxiety.

I am grateful for the way the surface of such movies can relieve me of all sorts of anxiety. My point about the Wizard of Oz could also be put this way: it manages to contain things that appeal to gays while unmistakably not being “for gays.” One always wants to enjoy things without being implicated by them, without having to answer for one’s enjoyment in self-awareness. I always prefer things that do not call me out, or pose and say cheese. The movies of that era, their palettes and everything else about them, treat me with a touching dignity. An entertainment for you, sir. Here is some green, sir, and some red, for your pleasure. Thank you kindly, I say.

I let this movie wash over me, or let myself wash over it, without any great effort to comprehend, because that old-fashioned cultural hospitality is worth a lot to me, whereas the content here is decidedly not. Who gives a crap about Henry V? I’ve always disliked biopics and topic-pics (i.e. whatever genre The Social Network is), and I feel the same way about “history plays.” Namely: who do you think you’re kidding? These sorts of “dramatizations” of the non-dramatic seem to me exactly like the “dancing about architecture” we’re always being warned off. Acting about history?

Sure, it’s a basic human impulse to try to parse our reality into stories; that’s what storytelling is for. I get that. But the transmutation from objective fact into aesthetic form is essentially a magic act, and if you’re not careful, the essential lie of it will be exposed. It’s exactly because magic is a trick that it needs to be intuitive. A magician will turn a dove into a bouquet but never into a car; a certain conservation of matter has to hold. Biopics and history plays feel to me like an obvious violation of the conservation of dramatic matter. There is no earthly way that that can be a this. So obvious a violation, in fact, that I sense that audience and artist alike can only have accepted it through some kind of bad faith, a self-deception. (e.g. Being determinedly delighted by a magician who transforms a woman into a single chocolate sprinkle because the tickets were so expensive, or because the woman was hot.)

In his well-assembled but flatly delivered commentary track, Bruce Eder says — I paraphrase — that history plays came into fashion in the 1590s because the advent of political stability for the first time in centuries brought with it a newfound pride in “national heritage.” The plays cashed in on the national mood. I appreciated the tip-off; to me this is a convincing psychological background for the dramatic bad faith at work in Shakespeare’s plays about kings. The audience – Queen Elizabeth chief among them – was feeding itself an “edutainment” bill of goods as a ritual of political self-satisfaction. Shakespeare lovers have miles to say about the noble genius of the parts, but as for the whole… really, who cares?

Here’s who: people with their own political bad faith. “Hey, let’s film that famous play Henry V for the war-effort, because it’s about war and has those two famous pep-talk speeches. It’ll be tasteful propaganda because it’s about ye olde medieval times and thus relevant only by analogy, just like the Russians did with Alexander Nevsky.” “But wait, what was this play Henry V actually about and what is it actually like to sit through? Isn’t it about a battle fought for cynical and non-noble reasons, and isn’t it furthermore kind of a formless hodgepodge of stuff calculated to be topical in 1599?” “Surely no, because it’s Shakespeare. We’ll edit it if we have to, make it work out somehow. The main thing is definitely to say these words here because they are by Shakespeare, i.e. prestigious. One way or another, we’ll figure out how to get the audience to swallow it.”

So the end result, though it is full of creative intelligence, is another sort of bill of goods, a war-effort spin on the standard “middlebrow” package, which was in its heyday in 1944. The greatness of Shakespeare can be yours! See! The fabled Globe Theatre as it appeared in the oh-so-historical past. Hear! The words of the immortal bard pronounced with loftiest dignity. Gasp! At the grandeur and terror of a hundred-horse medieval battle (that we copied shot for shot from Eisenstein). Struggle! To understand exactly what is being said or going on, but Keep! It to yourself. Rise! To the occasion. Bear! a long and arbitrary succession of events. England expects that every man will do his duty!

Laurence Olivier has, like his modern-day equivalent Daniel Day-Lewis, the virtue of seeming to be at peace. I am more willing to watch him do essentially phony things if he seems relaxed. His legendarily great acting skill seemed to me just a very composed species of broad indication, but I need to see him in more. Robert Newton as the “rogue” Pistol is certainly a charismatic clown but not actually funny. My favorite performances were the French bad guys, who I thought did a better job than most of embodying the text rather than just delivering it with class. The movie as a whole mostly just delivers with class. But there are moments that work. I’ll grant Mr. William Shakespeare and Mr. Olivier the scene where Henry roams the camp in disguise. The famous pep talks are pretty good too.

The art direction is rich and excellent, variously suggesting theater, Hollywood, storybook, medieval illumination, and ever so occasionally, historical reality. The photography is generally attractive. The color I have mentioned. This is a very fine movie to pay no great attention to. I had a perfectly good time letting my thoughts play over the surface and then flit where they would.

The score is by William Walton and had no small part in making his reputation. It is that rarity of rarities, a movie score with a subsequent concert-hall life, where it exists as a short suite (I think in two different versions) and a longer “scenario” with narrator. There are quite a few rerecordings, including one with Olivier speaking. Walton offers up just what you’d expect – a lot of fanfares and other pomp, some authentic period music and some manufactured, the requisite orchestral battles and whatnot – but, as with Olivier, his British composure itself is satisfying. Real “high” composerly care has been taken and it feels luxurious.

The onscreen orchestra’s overture to the play is pretty catchy and I was going to make that the selection, just as Criterion made it their menu music, but it’s only Walton in quotes. So here’s the end credit, which in the suite is called “Agincourt Song” because it is a setting of the authentic 15th-century Agincourt Carol about the events of the play. Pretty lucky for Walton this song existed! Here’s the selection, our imaginary Track 41. This gives a good sense of the movie: a thoroughgoing class act, to be sure… but also, who needs it?

Once more unto the breach!

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December 16, 2013

THE DISNEY CANON!

1: 1937 2: 1940 3: 1940 4: 1941 5: 1942 6: 1942 7: 1944 8: 1946 9: 1947 10: 1948 11: 1949 12: 1950 13: 1951 14: 1953 15: 1955 16: 1959 17: 1961 18: 1963 19: 1967 20: 1970 21: 1973 22: 1977 23: 1977 24: 1981 25: 1985 26: 1986 27: 1988 28: 1989 29: 1990 30: 1991 31: 1992 32: 1994 33: 1995 34: 1996 35: 1997 36: 1998 37: 1999 38: 1999 39: 2000 40: 2000 41: 2001 42: 2002 43: 2002 44: 2003 45: 2004 46: 2005 47: 2007 48: 2008 49: 2009 50: 2010 51: 2011 52: 2012 53: 2013

It is done.

A digest retrospective follows.

1. 1: 1937 (1/7/08)

ADAM It has certain iconic images that are competitive with anything else Disney produced, but as a story it’s much too slow. It’s archaically paced and boring… There’s no actual bit of dialogue or interaction that’s particularly memorable, but all the songs are pretty memorable… I would call this a promising first effort for Disney. But it’s no Ratatouille.

BETH I had thought that the last scene, where she’s in the glass case, took fifteen minutes of screen time. My memory of it was that it was much longer than it actually was, and the rest of the movie was much shorter, I guess because I was so upset by it… I think girls probably like it more, because they want to be Snow White… I was a princess for Halloween when I was nine, but I wasn’t obsessed with princesses. I know people are really obsessed with princesses now. We had My Little Pony.

BROOM Ninety percent of the movie is quasi-comic business with the dwarfs that doesn’t completely work… It’s constructed like a short, with a series of gags on the same theme. Here there were a lot of gags about washing… I liked the lush feeling, like a children’s storybook had come to life and you could enter into it. Even when it was boring, I still liked the way their chairs and doors looked… There’s a dynamic quality to what’s on screen that must have been incredible at the time.

2. 2: 1940 (1/17/08)

ADAM It’s a lot more dramatically taut, although it’s still not a fully developed story. It’s a picaresque with three episodes… The nightmare quality is easily the most compelling thing about the movie. It’s really frightening… I don’t think the movie hangs together as a plot, but I do think it’s got a lot of very suggestive and interesting elements.

BETH It’s like a terrible dream… I hated Pinocchio as a kid. I remember being made to watch it in school and just wanting to run away. Maybe it’s more of a boy’s movie… The entire time, he’s in situations that you don’t want him to be in. It lasts the whole movie; he just moves from one situation to another, and it makes children feel uncomfortable… The animation seemed more confident.

BROOM It may not be like a normal plotted movie in form, but it’s something legitimate in itself. It has its own kind of arc… It felt like they had relaxed into storytelling the best way they knew how. But still within a European framework… It’s supposed to be a story about moral choices, but it doesn’t read that way to children, because the moral choices are indicated in peculiar vaudeville ways… The movie is a technical advancement in every way… I think it does hang together, as an allegory about boyhood and encountering the world. And it hangs together for children in a different way, as a dreamlike succession of compellingly weird things.

3. 3: 1940 (2/08)

ADAM I think it’s not successful… My difficulty in listening seriously to classical music is that I am too liable to drift off and not pay attention, and that tendency does not need to be facilitated… I think the two ballets are the most successful for me, in that ballet music is meant to be accompanied with visual spectacle… If it’s supposed to be high art, why are the cartoons so preposterous? I mean, almost all the segments are pointedly juvenile… I’m not unsympathetic to this movie. I appreciate that it’s trying for something astonishing.

BETH I thought Night on Bald Mountain was the best one, the most stylish and visually rich… The movie would have held up better if it had been more abstract, and not cute cartoon characters running around… I was obsessed with this movie when I was a kid. Most of the drawings I did from around fourth through sixth grade looked like things in this movie. I would draw skies that were purple with lines shooting up from the sun, trying to make it look like the very end of the last one.

BROOM I marvel at the fact that this movie is what it is, that it asks people to look at something very abstract and stylized… I feel like the Nutcracker segment is a high point in animation art… I feel like shot for shot there are artistic choices being made in this movie that are the boldest things Disney ever did. I’m not saying all of them work, but I like that the movie is chock-full of bold choices. It maintains a remarkable level of lush intensity the whole time.

4. 4: 1941 (3/08)

ADAM That was awesome. I love that movie so much. It’s the best one… The whole movie I was quivering with indignation at how mean they were to him; it hurts my feelings. And all of the stock characters are highly appealing and individuated, and the songs are all great… I think that the shortness of it totally works; it feels packed with incident… It’s touching and thrilling and sad… I think this is an early peak which it will be hard to match.

BETH I really did not like this when I was a child, and I think it’s because his mother is taken away. Even though the Times review said it was a happy movie, and Disney himself said it was a happy movie, it did not seem happy. And the ending still seems a little bit abrupt… When I was watching it just now, I thought, “Maybe Adam is Dumbo.” I wondered if that was why you liked it so much… I don’t have any reservations but I remember not liking it, so I would not expect my kids to like it. Maybe boys like it more; maybe boys can handle the material better. I was so upset by it that I did not want to keep watching it… All around, thumbs up.

BROOM The movie is notably different from the previous three in that it’s really dialogue-based and contemporary… For the first time, you aren’t inclined to watch for the craft. They’ve really mastered it and you just watch the story. The sequences play so smoothly. The better musical scoring was a part of it – the underscoring works perfectly and draws you into it. I felt like they had gotten to a level of craft where now they could make any Disney movie… I would be happy to set kids down in front of this now.

5. 5: 1942 (3/08)

ADAM A greater contrast with the preceding movie could not possibly be imagined. The politics of Dumbo are very subversive, whereas Bambi is just a paean to conformity… The movie is like Mickey Mouse to Dumbo‘s Donald Duck… All the characters were cardboard. And the one-dimensional, mechanistic view of human life portrayed here is what makes it uninteresting… The music in this was appalling. This just seemed like a shoddier effort.

BETH It was really dull. I just didn’t think it was engaging. I thought the idea behind it was nice, but I don’t know if there’s a way to do it that could keep you interested in the characters, because the characters aren’t the point… They found a way to make very cute rabbits not be cute. Things like that weren’t working for me and eventually I decided that it was all misguided. I think they had good intentions… It seemed like the animators got excited every time they had to do something dark; I thought the forest fire and the fight in rainbow colors were really excellent. Finally! That all came in the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

BROOM I had mixed feelings, but I wasn’t struggling against the kind of gut distaste that you guys seem to have had. I saw what it was trying to be: primal beauty, and adorable, and a couple of other things. They didn’t quite fit together, but I understood and could sympathize with what each moment was supposed to be… I thought that the cuteness was actually done conscientiously. It didn’t feel like it was going for cuteness in a cheap Hallmark card way, as a ploy. But then there were three scenes in a row that were trying to be adorable, and that was too much, too one-note… The story rode an uncomfortable line between complete anthropomorphism and nature documentary.

6. 6: 1942 (5/08)

ADAM That was totally meta. That was crazy. People paid money to see that in a theater? I found it really entertaining, but it’s hard to imagine that it would be entertaining as anything other than a curiosity… I was interested in the way that all the stories in this movie were told before they were told. They made it very clear that these were just filmed anecdotes. They show the artists thinking up the plane before they show you the plane. Which was weird.

BETH I don’t understand why it’s in their canon. I thought it was going to be a feature, not a bunch of shorts… I thought it was really great, actually… I would tell people to watch it if they see it on television. It’s a good rainy day movie. Very low-commitment.

BROOM It was like something to show to schools… I think it did its job on me. Also, it was about specific South American things that I hadn’t been overexposed to. Lake Titicaca, and gauchos – I’ve never had this particular stuff shoved down my throat before, so I’m perfectly happy for Disney to show me some cartoons about it… I found the movie pretty charming. But it’s totally not in the category of “feature film”… I like the concept behind it, that benign superficial tourism and just the beauty of a country can be sold as a reason that we should have good relations with that country.

7. 7: 1944 (6/08)

ADAM I feel weirdly intoxicated right now… If you set aside the idea of it being edutainment, and think of it as a Freudian descent into the underworld of the mind, there’s a definite sort of logical and inexorable progression from cheerful stories to Satyricon, basically… During the climactic scene, I was weeping with embarrassed giggles… I think this might be appealing to adolescents in its message of impossible-to-satisfy sexual chaos… It may not have been coherent and it may not have had any kind of structure or purpose, but it was definitely trying to go balls out at something… I would tell anyone to watch this movie. Particularly people who are not Disney fans.

BETH [absent]

BROOM We weren’t stoned in any way, but I feel kind of like we were… I liked that it was set in no-man’s-land, with just a weird pink and red background, just a place of pure fun. That indeterminate space where craziness happens… Clearly the impetus for the movie to exist was similar to Saludos Amigos, even if it wasn’t commissioned by the government. But given that project, they made such anti-educational choices. There was very little content, and a lot of it was repeated from the other movie… I feel like this was some kind of a turning point for the studio; there was definitely a sense that this was less cared for. But that last sequence was something.

8. 8: 1946 (7/08)

ADAM That was cheerfully stupid but it was still stupid. I do not recommend that people see this. I think this was the worst Disney production I’ve ever seen… I think it’s reprehensible that they actually marketed this in theaters. It felt like a collection of leavings… This might be a lower point even than the late-70s trough that we’re all familiar with.

BETH I saw a bunch of the individual pieces when I was a kid, because The Disney Channel would air them before or after shows, and I think that’s the best way to view them. When they’re all together, you can notice that they don’t really add up to anything and aren’t that great… It just doesn’t even seem like a movie.

BROOM This seemed genuinely slapdash, far more than The Three Caballeros, though “slapdash” isn’t really a fair word to use for any Disney movie… It was certainly far less entertaining than any of the previous ones. I have the least inclination to watch any of it again. Although I would watch the “All The Cats Join In” segment if it was on, and I would also watch “After You’ve Gone.”

9. 9: 1947 (8/08)

ADAM That was terrible. It was an uneven pastiche of all sorts of crazy things. I thought it was lazy of them to resurrect Jiminy Cricket and Cleo for such a shoddy purpose. Bongo was like, here’s this circus plotline, and then here’s this unfit-for-the-wilderness plotline, and then here’s this bears slapping plotline. Also, as a paean to spousal abuse, it was irresponsible… Just as in The Three Caballeros, the terrible shock of seeing live-action people is almost physically upsetting… Charlie McCarthy is an asshole.

BETH That sucked, okay? It’s like they weren’t even trying, like they weren’t even thinking. Could they not have come up with a story? That was one of the worst Disney things I’ve ever seen… I give Bongo a C-minus… I thought they were definitely inspired by Warner Brothers, but, as I said at the time, they didn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t as funny, it wasn’t as slick, and it just looked like an imitation… I hope I never have to watch it again and I’m really glad you didn’t buy it.

BROOM There are lot of Disney shorts, and we accept that a lot of them are stupid. The only thing that’s distinctive about these is that they were packaged as a feature-length movie and included in the feature canon. But it’s just some shorts, of not very high quality. It’s not that shocking… I found more atmosphere to enjoy and be creeped-out by in the frames than I did in the actual stories… The flavor of this whole movie was: “Let’s just get out the stuff that we have, and use it, and put something in the theaters.” There’s also a feeling of nostalgic sadness saying goodbye to Donald, Mickey, and Goofy, because we’re not gonna be seeing them again in this project.

10. 10: 1948 (9/08)

ADAM It may have been better than the last one but let’s be clear: it wasn’t actually good… “Bumble Boogie” was psychologically satisfying, and sort of creepy… “Johnny Appleseed” was the dreckiest of the segments. I thought the cornpone Parson Weems quality of it was disturbing… I thought “Little Toot” was pretty adorable, in spite of myself… “Trees” was the campiest thing I think we’ve seen in any Disney film… Much of the psycho-sexual quality of “Pecos Bill” was disturbing.

BETH That was the best of the “package” films… I really expected it to be terrible, so it was nice to see some pretty backgrounds and fun animation… Here’s my problem with this movie as a whole: none of the characters – except for the chipmunk – seem like Disney characters. The bodies of the animals – like the bunnies in “Wintertime” – they were husky in a strange way. They didn’t seem as lithe, as nimble, as animals usually do in Disney. And their faces seemed dumber. Johnny Appleseed had this weird, not-quite-characterized face… I thought the characterization of the tugboats in “Little Toot” was better than any of the animals or people in this movie.

BROOM I thought this was an encouraging improvement on both the story and technical fronts… I’m not saying that this was great, but I really enjoyed it, especially because I had no expectations for it. I found myself feeling really pleased that it had some verve and panache. In places… Short for short, almost all of them were better than the average of Make Mine Music, which it was essentially a continuation of… I thought “Bumble Boogie” was awesome.

11. 11: 1949 (10/08)

ADAM That was awesome!… I found The Wind in the Willows totally charming. It was like a Dickens story crossed with a Wodehouse story… I liked that this was not yet in the Disney mold of, like, a spunky hero on a voyage of self-discovery.

BETH That was one of my favorites. I thought The Wind in the Willows was pretty interesting but not for kids at all. There’s just no way they could follow it. It was hard even for me. You have Scottish and British dialects, and the story is about, like, a deed… I still think that for these to be the first two stories that they tell as regular stories in ten years was a strange choice.

BROOM I thought both segments in the movie required a sophistication of narrative comprehension that kids just don’t have. I remembered seeing both halves, separately, and not being able to really follow either of them… Interesting thing about this movie: there are no truly sympathetic characters… In many ways this movie did seem like it initiated a new direction, toward what Disney is now… This feels like a more conservative, less visually-oriented type of storytelling. I felt like here they suddenly have maybe fifty percent of the elements of the Disney movie “brand” in place.

12. 12: 1950 (11/08)

ADAM While it was more dated than I had ever realized, it’s still very good-natured… Could there be a lusher, more exhilarating moment in the history of cinema than when the sparkles clothe her and she emerges in that wedding gown?… It was cheerful, and maybe not especially well drawn, but it had a pleasant liveliness to the drawing. It was totally bearable. Though there were moments when Cinderella seemed a little too much like someone from a 1950s soap commercial; the anachronism of it jarred me a little, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

BETH I hadn’t realized how many animal hijinks there would be… As a kid, I was always waiting for it to get back to her and her dress… I think it was solid kids’ entertainment, and it felt more contemporary as kids’ entertainment than any of the previous Disney movies. I can imagine kids still watching this.

BROOM This is a seventy-minute movie, and of those minutes, about thirty were cat and mouse bullshit… The fairy godmother scene is the best in the movie by a long shot. Not just because of the dress or the pumpkin, but because it has atmosphere and something exciting is happening… I found the mice very difficult to take. I think if you excised all the animal material, you’d have a pleasant 25 minute movie. This was just tedious… It felt thin, and it felt a little cynical on the part of the studio.

13. 13: 1951 (11/08)

ADAM I didn’t think that was very successful. To me one of the most compelling parts of the book Alice in Wonderland is the sense of malice that emanates from all the characters, which is only imperfectly translated here. It just loses some of its delicious arbitrariness.

BETH I thought it was really good. It was so different from any Disney movie we’ve seen. I thought it felt a lot more daring… I didn’t like this at all when I was a kid. It felt like I was in a nightmare. I was supposed to sympathize with Alice, and I couldn’t bear to. Placing myself in her position made me feel horrible. I felt like I needed to get out.

BROOM I thought it was great. When I was a kid, I was aware of the softer tone of the movie as compared to the book, but watching it now, I didn’t feel like the differences from the book actually detracted from the pleasures of this movie itself… By borrowing one-fiftieth of the wit of the books, they made the movie seem full of interesting material. And delightful, to my mind… I think that the Mary Blair designs looked fantastic.

14. 14: 1953 (12/08)

ADAM This might be my new favorite… The remarkable thing about the movie is that it makes both childhood and adulthood seem unappealing, but does so in a way that’s totally charming. Well, maybe not “unappealing,” but they’re both mixed bags, like life is. It does not feel like a fairy tale… It was ambiguous. And it really packed a lot of adventure into seventy-five minutes. There was not a dull moment in this movie… I thought this was deeply satisfying. And thought-provoking, and subtle.

BETH I liked it a lot… Maybe I’m wrong, but why is this movie not more popular? Is it popular? It seems like we’ve all seen it just once. It’s not a “beloved favorite.”

BROOM I enjoyed it now. But as a kid I didn’t understand what it was supposed to add up to. I think it only makes sense at a remove from childhood, because it’s a depiction of childhood as seen by adults… This was definitely the most sophisticated script so far. There was also, notably, nothing at all artsy in it… Not only were the people animated better, but the staging was better here than anywhere before. Every scene somehow was conveyed in a hugely kinetic way.

15. 15: 1955 (1/09)

ADAM I didn’t realize that dogs were so ethnic… In basically every scene of the movie, I was comparing it to the equivalent scene in Guys and Dolls, which this was sort of the animated version of. This is a little sentimentalized compared to that – it’s not wrong to say that this is an overly greeting-card-like movie. But it was fun… It has an easy, worldly, slightly cynical quality.

BETH I thought the movie was a lot of fun. I don’t think it was a great piece of filmmaking, but it was solidly entertaining… It’s like the song “Uptown Girl,” by Billy Joel… I thought some of the background transitions – where Lady would be in the garden and then suddenly in a terrible doghouse in the rain – I thought those were nice, and something we haven’t seen before.

BROOM It felt very slick and modern. There’s really no difference between this and the version of it that they would make today. Not even in tone… The animation of character acting gets better and better, more elaborate and interesting. Both of the leads were very well done. And that scene with the spaghetti – people don’t just like it because of that image, but because the whole scene is played so well… The movie keeps picking things that have genuine sentimental value and then just going too far. But I didn’t resent it as being totally phony. It’s calculated, but by people who were trying hard to do a good job at something a little bit tasteless. Overall, I was just impressed by the effortless confidence of it.

16. 16: 1959 (2/09)

ADAM This movie was almost exclusively attractive visually. They totally abandoned lushness and went for “zap! pow!” flatness and quasi-abstraction. And it was great, visually… But nobody’s motivations make any sense… Maleficent is sort of the hero of this movie. She’s the only person with any force of personality… I think this is the most arbitrarily fairy-tale-like of all the movies. It’s the one where people’s motivations matter the least and the abstract arc of the fairy tale is the most important, and I think that makes sense to pair with Tchaikovsky, a sort of abstract, classical soundtrack that comes from above.

BETH The colors! It’s like they discovered fuchsia for the first time. I found it delightful, and I thought they were being very daring… The problem is that you can’t relate to anything for a really long time… We don’t know her or care about her… I thought maybe they were utilizing color so boldly because they knew that kids wouldn’t be into the story, and they were trying to get them involved aesthetically.

BROOM The script just doesn’t work. They obviously have a problem, because the story is just “A curse was placed on her, and on her sixteenth birthday the curse came to pass, but then the prince came and saved her.” They decided to put the longest delay in between the morning of her sixteenth birthday and the evening, and they made it be about the dress, and the cake – just artificial delays, because the story doesn’t have anything to offer… It’s all stylized. Every layer of the movie is artificial… Almost every background is beautiful and striking… It had a materialistic attitude toward even the elements of fairy tale stories. There are no emotions in this movie.

17. 17: 1961 (3/09)

ADAM The story was a little flat, but visually it was top-notch. They decided to be cartoony again. For real. It was like the Sleeping Beauty cartooniness taken to a jauntier and more confident level… I think the way that they portrayed the city with line and patches of character that spilled over line was really lovely… I thought that the puppies were not all that well characterized… The dogs themselves, while perfectly adequately animated and pretty acute, were nothing magical. It was the backgrounds that I thought were really amazing. And Cruella herself.

BETH The way they used color was very sophisticated, I thought… When we first saw Anita, I thought, “they’ve done the perfect female face.” I thought she looked pretty, and smart, and looked like a real person. She’s wearing this very fancy, expensive outfit, and seems to have a career and a life. And then she just became a domesticated, kind of frumpy version of herself.

BROOM The designs of the still imagery, and also the lively way that they animated it, starting with the opening credit sequence, were all gratifying… I felt like this movie made Lady and the Tramp feel like a warm-up… I was struck by how television was a recurring theme here. It was sort of showing how Disney had embraced television… I thought the first half of the movie was a lot better than the second half.

18. 18: 1963 (4/09)

ADAM It’s striking to me that this is the first explicitly moralistic one… The movie struck me as sort of slipshod, coming to it now… It felt like budget cuts. It was so drab… I call attention to the fact that the only women in this movie are those squirrels and Madam Mim and the dishwasher woman. But of course there are no sympathetic males either. Everyone’s unpleasant, really… I don’t have much else to say about this movie. It was ramshackle… It was fine.

BETH I was thinking about why I liked it so much when I was 13 or 14, and I think it’s because it feels modern, in a way that everything prior to it did not… Also, it’s always active… I don’t think that this was a great work, but it was entertaining to me in the same way. It never lapses, I felt… It didn’t have as much class as I thought it had. So what, though? As kids’ entertainment it was fine.

BROOM 101 Dalmatians felt like, “wow, look what we came up with! It’s great! The movie doesn’t totally hang together — but look at this new look and style and attitude we came up with!” And here it immediately already felt like, “the formula is in place, let’s turn out another one”… The whole movie gave me the impression that there was no big picture for any of the artists anymore. Real care seemed to have been put into it only on the scale where a single person was working on his own… It felt like a chintzier product.

19. 19: 1967 (5/09)

ADAM I thought it was funny that this was Disney’s response to the 60s. They tried to do the Beatles, but their Beatles were singing barbershop. They obviously said, “let’s get some of this crazy 60s stuff in,” but they had no idea… I liked the shaggy style of the drawing here, with stray lines. It looked like an animated sketchpad… You can see the Hanna-Barbera-ization proceeding apace. Sort of a jauntier, cheaper animation style; less moralizing and more slapstick… “Easygoing” is what I would call this movie. It’s like nobody meant any of it, for the whole movie. And that’s sort of comforting.

BETH I thought Shere Khan was a great villain character… I liked Mowgli’s face. I thought he was cute and easy to watch. A lot of times I think kids’ faces look obnoxious… It feels like it was made by people who had done a lot of pot. A lot about it seemed so 60s-y.

BROOM I certainly liked this movie a lot when I was a kid… The movie is just a series of encounters with characters, some of whom have songs. Well, I guess they all have songs, but some of the songs suck… The slapstick was generally well-animated, but a lot of it was pretty lazy stuff. I guess Sword in the Stone was like that too. I feel like The Jungle Book has a little more human warmth, which is probably why I liked it better… The movie didn’t demand anything of us. There’s no investment to be made in it; it’s just a series of diversions.

20. 20: 1970 (7/09)

ADAM It was sort of like 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp, turned down to five… The movie was just so boring!. It was just painfully dull. “What are all the things we can think of about upper-crust French people? Doing boring shit?” I’m surprised they didn’t have a whole scene that was a porcelain-painting lesson… There were all these things that felt like, “[exhausted groan], so what other obstacles can we throw at them?”… None of it hung together at all.

BETH It was very boring. Especially if you’re tired, it’s really unwatchable… It had a Scooby-Doo quality to it… I did like the backgrounds. The elaborate furniture and that sort of stuff, I thought, was nicely done. It had a mood… I think it was mostly the script. I think the lack of threat was a problem. There wasn’t enough conflict driving the action, throughout.

BROOM I thought the animation was actually all it had going for it. It felt like this non-starter project had been handed over to the art department and they had done a fine, serviceable job of it. What it was lacking was any reason to be, any story interest. I also thought the musical score really dragged it down constantly… The whole movie suffered from the same flaw: total insensitivity to whatever little story there was… The main problem with it was that it was just an animated movie about cats for the sake of there being an animated movie about cats.

21. 21: 1973 (7/09)

ADAM That was like all the delights of childhood in a single package. I remembered everything about it… You can see why Robin Hood is a sex object to me. He has those big huggable eyes, like a Japanese anime hero… I feel totally satisfied. But I will say that it has a sort of “François le champi” pleasure to it, which I don’t think it would have a second time.

BETH It was a little bit dull and it felt cheap, but it was fine. The music felt like Love Story to me, like a live-action romance movie. The rest felt like a very long Saturday morning cartoon. A cartoon that I would have watched on TV as a child. It was nothing: it was not exciting, it was not suspenseful, it was not terrible. It was solid… I guess if I had seen this as a kid I would have liked it.

BROOM I had immediate access to the way I felt about every moment when I was eight, but I’m still not sure what this movie is like from an adult’s perspective… I think the script is more grown-up in its construction than many of the movies we’ve seen, and certainly more than any of the Hanna-Barbera-type cartoons that you’re comparing it to… I can see that it has a lot of standard fare common to other kids’ stuff. But I think from a technical standpoint, the character animation is very good. There are a lot of kinds of acting and expression in it that they haven’t tried before – sarcasm and joking around.

22. 22: 1977 (10/09)

ADAM I thought that was almost unwatchable. I was so upset. I adore the books and that’s part of why I’m so angry about this. It’s interesting that this tried so slavishly to make the point that it was following the books, because it failed so utterly to capture their spirit… I used to think that Sterling Holloway was a great choice for the voice, but it’s just so treacly and bumptious!… The real Pooh has an intense seriousness about everything he says.

BETH I thought it was dull, but it was interesting to me that both Pooh and Tigger seemed like very self-involved characters. That felt new. It seemed new to be so self-referential in general.

BROOM This was three different short features that had been packed into one movie, and I think the quality of those three shorts varied. They weren’t all at the same level, and I think the idea of packing them together was detrimental to all of them… I thought that at least in the first segment, they had in some ways gotten the spirit of it across. The conceit that they’re stuffed animals and these stories are sort of Christopher Robin’s playing with them, but they’re also sort of their own beings in their own world… I thought that was handled carefully. I thought they had struck a nice balance. And then in the latter segments it drifted and started to feel more like an episode of “Gummi Bears” by the end.

23. 23: 1977 (11/09)

ADAM It was very fun. It was totally cheesy and often inadvertently fun, but that doesn’t make it less fun… The music was the best part for me. All the pieces were so corn-alicious… No element of the plot made sense at all… This period of the late 70s feels like the conceited nadir of children’s entertainment. It feels like a bleak time for children’s culture in America. And we were in it!… It was blatantly inferior to the product of the 30s, 40s and 50s. But it was fine. I feel like we’re erecting castles on a continuously sinking platform.

BETH I thought it was great. It was really entertaining… The music was like Herb Alpert backing Joni Mitchell… I thought the story was actually better than usual. I, as a grown-up, was pretty involved in this stupid plot… I loved it; I thought it was so much fun; BUT…

BROOM Part of the fun for us is that it embodied all sorts of clichés and tropes and standards that remind us of our childhoods. Not that it was necessarily of high quality. But that’s still fun… I thought that in many places the animation was particularly exuberant compared to what we’ve seen recently… I felt like I was seeing the rudiments of the post-Little Mermaid style, the slick 90s product — the idea of integrating many different varieties of crowd-pleasing stuff in a contemporary, fast-paced way — but it felt to me a little like they hadn’t worked it out yet.

24. 24: 1981 (1/10)

ADAM It was composed of nothing but clichés the whole time… The plotting was terrible… It had weird racial overtones. You know, this is usually the story about the slave boy and the massuh’s son, meeting on the road twenty years later and they won’t acknowledge each other, and cue the violins… I think that this really may be the nadir.

BETH That was poorly done in every respect… I thought the color choices were strange and off in many of the scenes. I thought the outlining was weird — sometimes there were glow-y parts on the tops of the bodies that didn’t make sense. It looked like a bad Saturday morning cartoon… The music was full of wrong choices for the material.

BROOM That was not very good… A lot of the recent ones seem to have been taking older ones as models to some degree, and this was clearly built on the Bambi model. But they just didn’t have it in them. I felt like they just weren’t smart enough to do it… I feel like this story deserved a tragic ending, but they didn’t have the guts for that, so it ended on a nothing note… The reliance on Warner Brothers routines was, again, sad.

25. 25: 1985 (1/10)

ADAM That felt like a He-Man cartoon. It also had the feel of an eighties cartoon in that the backgrounds felt like watercolor and the action felt like shrinky-dinks, pasted on. The plot felt like a Lord of the Rings knock-off… It was sort of charming. I mean, all eighty minutes I was awake. There were always things happening; there were no digression caterpillars… I totally would have enjoyed watching this as a kid: it had a lot of plot, and I wouldn’t have minded the failure of characterization.

BETH The backgrounds were a lot nicer than I thought they would be. I was really expecting this movie to be a lot uglier. Actually it was really ugly; or at least it had a lot of ugly things in it. And scary things… All the special effects seemed lovingly done, like the backgrounds. The layouts, too — the actual design of the shots… I was expecting it to be worse than the worst that we’ve seen, and it was much better than that. It wasn’t the worst by far.

BROOM It wasn’t scary in an old warm-hearted “being scared is fun” way. It was scary in an 80s way, sort of a Steven Spielberg scary, like Poltergeist… It was certainly very different from anything that had come before. We’re really in an entirely different cultural territory here… There were a lot of sequences where the tone was confused, or where the music was a little confusing… The movie was really an effects showcase, whereas there have been almost no effects in any of the recent movies. For the first time in several decades, it felt like the animators were doing something that they found exciting. Which is not to say that the final product was so great, but it certainly felt enthusiastic.

26. 26: 1986 (3/10)

ADAM It looked like a Don Bluth movie… I would have liked this as a child because I liked anything that was lavishly about travel to a foreign city. This had a queen and Big Ben and Sherlock Holmes and all of the things that England is… I probably would have enjoyed this just fine as a kid, but it’s just a nothing. There’s nothing here.

BETH It didn’t look like a Disney movie, the same way that The Black Cauldron didn’t. It looked like an 80s kids’ cartoon… I liked a lot of the backgrounds. I thought the street scenes, the outdoor backgrounds, were nicely done. The indoor backgrounds I didn’t really like, but whenever it was nighttime outside I thought they did a nice job… This was way too scary for me as a seven-year-old. That was like my worst fear as a child, that some bad guy was going to come and take away my family… I don’t think I would have enjoyed it and I don’t think I would show it… I was pretty bored watching this.

BROOM I think this movie should have been called The Mouse Detective. Because it’s not that great. It was bad principally in the music and timing departments. A lot of what we saw and had to think about would have been bearable had it been done tightly, but it wasn’t. There was a certain amount of flair in some of the animation, but it wasn’t serving any greater cause, so it didn’t add up to anything good… I don’t think it’s right. I wouldn’t show this to my kids. It gets a lot of things wrong. The song sequences are so wrong-headed.

27. 27: 1988 (4/10)

ADAM I have to say: this movie had panache. It was funny… There are at least three songs that I am still humming right now… There were little touches that were really good, things that they clearly took pleasure in doing right… It’s striking to me, as someone who is living in New York and someone who was obsessed with depictions of New York as a kid, that this is not a movie that would be made today. This is a New York full of ethnic toughs, and crime, and graffiti in the subway, and class hatred. No one would ever even think to make a movie now where the good guys are like “‘Eyyyy, get outta my way!”

BETH It wasn’t as bad as the last two. In parts it was funny. And the songs were decent for once… I felt like they ripped off their own movies, a little bit. Like Lady and the Tramp.… The drawing style was still that sleazy, cheap style, and not what we’ll see in The Little Mermaid, which looks wholesome and not sleazy… I actually loved the bad guy in this, but I didn’t think he was appropriate for children. It’s like the fourth kidnapping in a row! As a kid who was afraid of kidnapping: duh, no wonder I was! Everything had kidnapping in it! They tied her wrists up. Everything that I feared happened to that girl… Two and a half stars instead of one and a half stars.

BROOM I had been anticipating that we would see The Little Mermaid as a sudden rebirth out of ashes. But I actually saw this as sort of a halfway point, building toward that from where they’d been… I thought Bette Midler’s musical number was a huge blast of adrenaline for the Disney organization. We saw several different song styles being tried, and then in the middle of this is the mock-“Broadway song,” and it lights up the screen!… I thought the most important thing that they’d rediscovered was timing, which I keep saying the movies lack. This one, finally, had a sense of timing. The sequences flowed… But how good is it really? Not that good.

28. 28: 1989 (5/10)

ADAM I thought I was going to be blown away by how this looked — and it looks fine — but what I was actually impressed by was its wit. Which surprised me. I did not remember that, and I was tickled. There was even redeeming humor in the turgid romantic parts… I liked it for all the right reasons.

BETH I didn’t think it looked that amazing either, though it wasn’t bad — but it was very tight. The music was good, the story was good, and it felt like everyone working on it was excited by the idea of an under-the-sea movie. They were very inventive in coming up with fun things to animate… It felt very fresh. Very 90s, but fresh.

BROOM I think that all of its greatest strengths were in what we would attribute in a live-action movie to “directing.” The whole movie was done very much like Broadway. There’s a very particular way that songs and lines play on Broadway, and it’s something that this movie did consistently and with confidence. And not just the songs; I felt like all of the storytelling beats were from that same school, and done exactly right so that you could just lap it all up easily… I would say about one-half of the animation was better than it had been, and about half of it was about the same… I thought it was great. I really enjoyed watching it, and I haven’t felt that in a long time.

29. 29: 1990 (6/10)

ADAM That was a lot more visually sophisticated than I was anticipating… I don’t think it has respect for kids’ intelligence. The dominant mode of this movie is a sort of wiseacre jokiness… It was like the Simpsons episode where they go to Australia… Although it was superficially attractive, it all looked sort of tinselly, in a way that I found distinctly unappealing. Everything seemed like it was coated in cellophane. It’s clear they took a lot of pleasure in an accurate, toylike approach. It all had a “collector’s” quality to it, which is not wholesome… A weird albino Disney movie.

BETH Did they really use Australia very well as a setting? No! They didn’t do anything with it… The whole bird adventure at the beginning was dumb. You have absolutely no sense of where things are going to go from there. Then they go in a pretty pedestrian direction… The Bob Newhart mouse is a pathetic mumblebum. There’s nothing appealing about that mouse!… I thought it was funny that there was a “wanted” posted nailed to a tree. In the middle of the forest? This took place in modern times!

BROOM It had more shadows indicating three-dimensional rounding than any movie we’ve seen yet. But to me, that gives things a slightly unsavory quality… Everything is just trope upon arbitrary trope… Why did this movie happen at all? There’s no there there. It’s like to create the substance of the movie they just used some machine that churns things out. Whereas to create the individual shots, they actually used something much more interesting than what they had used for Little Mermaid… This was your classic polished turd. It was highly buffed nothingness.

30. 30: 1991 (8/10)

ADAM It’s so shamelessly and unapologetically enthusiastic about what it is that it’s extremely infectious. It’s like Glee fifteen years earlier… It feels like drag. But glorious, pretty, lush drag. It felt like a Judy Garland Christmas special… I feel like the Gaston character is like an indictment of my whole value system. He’s unlike all other Disney villains, which I think is cool. He’s not like a typical lisping uncle — it’s a little more creative… I think this is totally satisfying. As a kid I was enthralled by its wide-eyed itselfness.

BETH I was very entertained by it… Belle isn’t a bad role model. She’s a decent person who likes to read. And she’s pretty. It’s interesting to me that both of her suitors set up these “choose your dad or choose me” scenarios… It’s hard for me to believe that movies about girls going on adventures really appeal to boys…. Because I’d never seen this before, right now I think I like it better than The Little Mermaid, because it was all new to me.

BROOM You can complain about the PC-ization that we’re seeing here, but I think that most of the thinking about “the message we’re sending to girls” pays off, by making this genuinely a more wholesome movie… The main difference between this and the early Disney movies of a similar wholesomeness was that those movies were somehow “open” whereas this felt very constructed, very directed, like a Broadway show. It’s more clearly just a series of displays of stagecraft. It feels a little phony… My fifteen-years-later feeling was that it holds up pretty well, and is good for kids, and I still like The Little Mermaid better.

31. 31: 1992 (10/10)

ADAM I think the Robin Williams sort of cuts the Broadway schmaltz. They have both themes, and they’re both oppressive in and of themselves, but together they’re sort of bearable… Aladdin is pretty cute. He has those big neotenous eyes that make you just wanna hug him… There is a moral, but the moral is, like, “free yourself!” But it’s a perfect message for the 90s. It’s this vapid sort of “do whatever you want!” There’s no actual content to it… What year is this? 93? Totally Clinton. It feels like it’s of that time. Vapid. Ahistorical.

BETH It seemed very of its time. The movie was not boring, and kept me interested the entire time. And I thought the references were amusing, but in a long-term way, unsuccessful. I know those references; kids of the 2040s aren’t going to get any of those weird jokes… I thought I was going to be annoyed by Robin Williams, but he was at his Robin-Williamsy best… The songs were shitty. He can’t sing!… It’s not preachy, like most of the Disney movies have been…. I felt like the people who made this were challenging themselves to see how much they could pile on. It didn’t have the soul of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. Which is fine.

BROOM I like that it’s visually stylish in a way that hearkens back to the old ones and is also totally garish in a new, 90s way, and is exuberant about its garishness. I thought it had the best backgrounds in years… The movie was right on the line for me. Because when I first saw it, I loved it, but now part of me was thinking, “this is so cheesy”… I enjoyed this, but I feel like it’s enjoying something somewhat distasteful. I feel like if you had showed this to the 1940 audience, they would have thought, “that was offensive! and abrasive!”… I think the CGI has aged well, because it was used with taste, with an eye for its otherworldliness.

32. 32: 1994 (3/11)

ADAM That was as dated as any movie we’ve seen in the whole run. That was just a great big wallop of 90s, in a way that is distressing to me. It had that portentous, vaguely environmentalist, vaguely multi-culturalist, heaping political correctness… The only thing that was legitimately exuberant about this, as opposed to fake exuberant, was anything with Jeremy Irons in it. He’s great… It felt like the film version of a Maya Angelou poem… I think the 90s had a sense — this was the period in which history was over, right? And we sort of mistook shallowness for greatness during that period, in a way that is depressing but very much characteristic of a time of basic peace and prosperity.

BETH It was excited about how politically correct it was being… I liked a lot of the nature long shots, like trees silhouetted against the dusk. Things like that. But the movie!… It was slow, too… I didn’t get sad when the dad died, which is weird. I think which means that the movie was flawed somehow. I cry at everything. I really do. I didn’t even get close to crying at this movie… All the songs were terrible.

BROOM I was aware of just how lush a thing any Disney animated movie is, even when it’s not satisfying or good… I think this movie is all screwed up. It felt like all this mythic stuff was just happening because it had been calculated and read about. The reason those things are meaningful in other movies is because they have the quality of having come from the subconscious. Which means not a lot of puns, and not a lot of music overexplaining every moment, which is a holdover from the Broadway aesthetic. If it just had cooled off and let us feel that we were watching a dream, it would have had so much more to offer. But it never did… It’s art without sincerity at a very elaborate level of execution.

33. 33: 1995 (4/11)

ADAM That might be the worst one. Four movies ago we were so excited that this breath of fresh Broadway air was being blown into the Disney musical, and now they’ve already exhausted that possibility… I find this exceptionally offensive because it’s about a really lurid and tragic period in American history. To take a nominally historical subject and make it into just cannon-fodder for your schmaltzy story is terrible… It was just a total pastiche of every cliche image of Native Americans that anyone could think of… They had no personalities… Garish and unpleasant to look at.

BETH They didn’t seem to think about who would be watching this. Does this appeal to kids at all? It’s a love story! As a kid, I never cared about the love story part of stories, and it was all a love story. And then it was war-ish. I just don’t feel like they were thinking about how it was playing to the intended audience… It was just so dull! Even in the beginning, when the ship was going through the storm, I found my mind wandering… Occasionally there would just be a nice picture on the screen… A very irresponsible movie.

BROOM For me what made it was terrible was the intensity of the complaint that I’ve made about previous movies: that they did not understand the reasoning behind what they were doing. It’s based on a fervent superficial familiarity with prior Disney movies… We didn’t believe that the characters loved each other; we didn’t believe that they were characters… The songs are very bad. The lyrics are very bad… Why Pocahontas? “Powerful. Female. Minority.” And because this movie so deeply doesn’t work, because this story doesn’t actually lend itself, it’s so transparent that that’s the only reason this movie exists. And that’s embarrassing!

34. 34: 1996 (7/11)

ADAM That was, like, three-hundred percent. I don’t know if it was good, but it was compelling. I mean, wow. To be clear, this was terribly ill-conceived, and I can’t believe this got green-lighted. But it was just so passionate. Just a wrong property to make into a lush animated musical… I saw it said in one of Elizabeth Taylor’s obituaries that “she brought down studios.” And that’s sort of the level of craziness of everything about this… I think the songs are the least effective thing about this, because they’re so discordant… I mean, it was good. I liked it! Or, it wasn’t “good,” it was memorable.

BETH I thought it was beautiful. I thought that the illustrations were really lovingly done… I can’t imagine a child watching this… It was compelling. My barometer is how frequently I look at the clock to see how much time has passed, and I wasn’t doing it very much… With all of the songs, I was just imagining them imagining how it would play on Broadway.

BROOM It couldn’t be more misbegotten. It boggles the mind… The “Hellfire” song is the best sequence by a longshot, because it’s deeply inappropriate for a Disney movie, and they go all-out. And because it had mystery and atmosphere and doesn’t fully explain itself; it just shows us imagery that’s effective. The rest of the movie is very diagrammatic… They were trying to do an epic melodrama. This is their Les Misérables… It definitely had flair, but I feel like it also needs to be pointed out that it was bad.

35. 35: 1997 (9/11)

ADAM I actually found it a pleasurable experience to watch. I was gripped. I mean, I understood that it was being cheesy and cynical, but I also responded to all the trite devices and the cheap heart-tugging… You know, they are sort of oscillating on this, if you will, David Letterman versus Maya Angelou; those are the only two emotional poles of the nineties… This was more Jay Leno than David Letterman… I’ll admit I was a little moved by “Go the Distance.” I empathize with feeling ostracized because of your superhuman strength and golden tresses… I think we all agreed that they pretty much played out Broadway sincerity by this point. So what were they going to do, if not this?

BETH It was colorful but I found the characters very ugly… The love song sounded like the introduction to a TV show from 1986. And I like that! But it didn’t make sense. I didn’t think any of the songs made sense… I think Aladdin is better. The songs were better integrated, and it felt more lush.

BROOM It’s a film without heart. And it’s detrimental to a movie not to have any heart… I think Hades is a very well designed and animated character, above their normal standards… I just think there was a mismatch between Alan Menken’s doo-wop Broadway style, and the spirit of this movie, which wanted to be like BLAM! BLONK! They shouldn’t really have been singing… I felt like, “I don’t really care about the love between Megara and Hercules!” I didn’t really care about anything enough… There were a lot of nice layouts. Pretty things to see… Basically, a good time, to a low standard of sophistication.

36. 36: 1998 (11/11)

ADAM This movie is obviously responding to the criticism of all the Disney heroines. It’s like, “Fine! You think that Disney heroines are passive princesses? Take that!” It seemed calculated to appeal to both P.C. critics of their female characters and Asian markets… In Beauty and the Beast there are at least three songs that we can all sing happily and that are pretty good. Even the notes of these songs were generic and bad. At that point, why even do a musical?… This was just kind of a journeyman effort.

BETH It wasn’t bad. It actually was fine. I found all of the ridiculousness entertaining. Yes, compelling. Who cared?… It seemed like different things were happening than usually happen in Disney movies, and that’s why I was okay with this movie. Such as gray zombie Huns coming to life… I thought the backgrounds were nice… I wasn’t constantly looking at how much time had elapsed, which is always my indicator.

BROOM It was bad, and in the second half I really lost my willingness to humor it. I thought the basic premise of this movie was not necessarily mishandled, but after it became action sequences and denouement it was all completely fumbled. The entire last act made no sense, literally or emotionally… I thought the animation was generally nice. Though it seemed like it had some real geeks working on the animation staff… None of it felt natural. It was embarrassing if you paid attention to it, so we didn’t. To be accepting of this shows that our standards have dropped exponentially.

37. 37: 1999 (1/12)

ADAM Come on, everyone! Didn’t this touch your heart? I was very touched by the rank sentimentality of this movie… I found the Phil Collins score extremely effective and touching. I would like to stand up for this movie, because I enjoyed it very much at the time; it was one of my favorites of the nineties ones, and still is. Even though it is a little sentimental — but they’re all a little bit sentimental. Even though it’s a little bit archetypal — but they all are… I frankly enjoyed his unnatural physique. Finally the shoe was on the other foot, gender-wise.

BETH I thought this was pretty dull, except that the action sequences were well done… I actually liked the woman here… The music wasn’t as cheesy as it usually is. It was very restrained. They didn’t overdo “musical numbers” at all… The background illustrations were among the best we’ve seen. I didn’t think the faces were good.

BROOM This was my least favorite in a while. I was waiting for something to be meaningful to me but it felt totally synthetic. The opening, about his parents dying, I was willing to take that as something. But all the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, I felt distant from it… This one had more of that skeevy geek-sex veneer on it than any of them. The whole thing has this amped-up synthetic quality… “You’ll Be In My Heart” is actually not a bad song… I thought — especially at the beginning — that the editing pace had been goosed up significantly from where it had been, in a way that numbs me. It was cut like a trailer… And the jokes. And everything.

38. 38: 1999 (6/12)

ADAM I thought that had the same dispiritingly humdrum quality as when we go to see all the Oscar-nominated animated shorts… I think this was sort of in poor taste. Did there really need to be a leaf or an ash or a butterfly wing for every single note in every single piece this time around?… The colors and the look were so garish. Having to have everything magenta and green is the same as having to have a little swoop or flourish for every note, which is the same thing as picking — I mean, “The Pines of Rome”? What the hell is that?… The whole concept of the year 2000 in retrospect is stupid and embarrassing. But pompous at the same time. And this movie is the kind of thing that summarized the year 2000, to me.

BETH I was thinking about how challenging it must be to start with pieces that exist and try to craft a story to them. They didn’t usually work, but they were interesting… I thought the famous-people aspect was really distracting. I think the bad jokiness makes the whole thing feel out of touch. And now weirdly out-dated… They had a lot to live up to. People by this point had such a different relation to classical music than they did in 1940 to begin with.

BROOM The original “Sorceror’s Apprentice” being included just points up what has gone missing over the generations in between… The first Fantasia has so much greater feeling for the music and for what the animation can be, and this one was hampered by the lack of insight into those things in the present day. There’s a certain sensitivity and taste lacking… We’ve worked our way through the 20th century watching Disney become more and more a set of rote gestures. This felt like a good-faith effort to recapture something that they had genuinely forgotten how to think about… As we talk about these movies we lower and lower our expectations because the minds making them seem to have smaller and smaller ideals.

39. 39: 2000 (7/12)

ADAM They sort of head-faked us into thinking this was gonna be another Jungle Book, but it was actually like The Poseidon Adventure... I’m not so sure that this was a failure, the way it seemed like it was going to be at the beginning, when it was all that swoopy CGI and Kevin Costner music… There wasn’t character development, but there was strong characterization… I mean, this movie wasn’t good. It just wasn’t quite the nadir that I was anticipating… If you’re composing the list of the five Disney movies you absolutely never want to see, this is probably not one of them… I’m glad that it was strange.

BETH For seventy-five percent of it, it was really dark… By the time they were in the cave, I was responding to it. I was talking back… Early on — maybe it’s just because I was so turned off by the beginning — no one seemed appealing to me or worth caring about. But then it subverted expectations… I think it’s part of what was gripping about it, that it had this otherworldly quality… The CGI just wasn’t that good. It was very noticeable.

BROOM I found the atmosphere of the movie strange. It felt unearthly. The characters were kind of at arm’s length, compared to most Disney movies… There were the terrible one-liners that a lot of movies now have. And then there were plot events that fit into this formula. And there wasn’t, for me, a sense of character in between. It sort of made the movie feel like it was happening in a strange other space… I’m surprised you two disliked the opening so strongly; to me, it’s the wisecracking that’s embarrassing… The strangeness is in subtle tonal things, but what’s really going on is very run-of-the-mill, standard stuff, with stupid jokes. It’s kind of an insult to us.

40. 40: 2000 (8?/12)

ADAM I was gonna say it was like a “Looney Tunes,” but it’s actually like a “Tiny Toons.” As a kid, I would have been in stitches at the “Wait a minute, what you just said doesn’t make sense!” jokes. “Wait a minute, I’m going to spell out a convention here!”… Actually the humor and the style remind me eerily of “Monkey Island”… Didn’t you think it was ugly to look at? It felt Hanna Barbera… John Goodman was a little earnest for me. It was hard to take watching him save the llama so many times… There is no love story in this movie. And that is very satisfying because it avoids a lot of stupid treacliness. Also no songs… I’m sure if I had seen this when I was ten, I would have been transported.

BETH It was strikingly unambitious in terms of what it wanted to be, but it was completely successful. I think of Disney movies as all trying to be greater than what this was. It was really silly, and the time went so much more quickly than it had for maybe the past ten… But it will never be a classic. It reminded me of watching a cartoon episode of Friends. The types of jokes are not the way people joke now. I think that this type of joking ended with September 11th… I thought some of the backgrounds were nice. It felt Saturday-morning-esque, a little bit. It felt the least Disney of all of them. But that was a fine thing! … It’s a good script all-around. It’s really tight… This was a precursor to the “bro-mance,” about ten years ahead of its time.

BROOM It makes me smile! I take issue with the idea that this is unambitious. I think it’s ambitious in a totally different direction… This needs to be seen as a significant accomplishment, if only because everything that it tries to be is something that so many movies have try to be, and they rarely get even close to working. It’s usually incredibly tedious. But there’s something really fluid and natural and joyful about this movie that I am very impressed by. It’s exactly what Disney usually sucks at! What else did Hercules want to be but this, a movie that we thought was charming and silly the whole way through? There’s rarely a joke that I don’t cringe at in other Disney movies. This was never embarrassing to me.

41. 41: 2001 (9/12)

ADAM It’s a lot more ambitious than The Fox and the Hound, that’s for sure… They tried not to make the characters cliches even though they were all stereotypes. They were each doing a bit, but the bit was a little different from what you’ve seen before… I did have some fun with this movie. If this was your first introduction to the ragtag team of caperers movie, what an awesome movie this would be… It had a lot of crescendo animations. The city was a little disappointing, but things like the columns, and the volcano, and even Washington D.C. in 1914, I thought, looked kind of cool… Aren’t you at least glad they tried something different?

BETH I kept thinking about Ocean’s Eleven. It has, like this movie, a ragtag team of experts that aids in an adventure. And it’s a short, fast movie in which you get to know each of those characters and like them and root for them. And there’s also a lot of action. I think this movie wanted to do exactly that and completely failed. It was incredibly obtuse… The characters looked a little Adult Swim-y, from the early 2000s…. I thought it sucked. I was so disappointed. I thought I would like it based on the trailer. I thought the tropes would provide. And they really let me down. I think it’s mostly the script’s fault.

BROOM Despite being full of stuff and visually very accomplished, this movie managed to have not a single thing in it that genuinely caught my interest… I felt like this was tried-and-true crap being dished up again but not right… There were no moments that were real; there was no time that you got to feel that you were really somewhere… I have a tip for screenwriters: never have your screenplay revolve around a magic crystal… I thought this movie was horseshit and yet I also thought the animators did seem to care. They seemed excited about the way it looked and the stuff they were doing visually.

42. 42: 2002 (11/12)

ADAM It was so sad! I teared up multiple times. There was a lot of social realism that we’ve never seen before and will never see again. And it’s really effective, in part because it’s paired with the surrealism of the aliens. It would be actually really depressing to watch a movie about a little girl whose family is rent apart by uncaring social workers… I thought all the jokes were really affecting. The interaction between the sisters was satisfyingly real but funny… I thought it was great. I thought it looked really pretty but without being over-the-top beeeautiful.… This was probably the best one after the classic ten. It’s the best non-classic one.

BETH The script was great and it had nothing to do with anything Disney had ever done before. It had aliens, but it also had a social worker, it had Elvis. I mean, when have we ever acknowledged outside culture in a Disney movie?… It felt like it was more the story of one person than of a team. All of the 90s movies felt like a bunch of people working on a concept together, and this felt like a very personal story that they managed to tell very well… The way the bodies were drawn was completely different from how they’d been treating women up until now: very strong legs, unbalanced features, not completely proportionate… This is one that I feel like, “oh, I would want kids to watch this!” I thought it was great.

BROOM The tone and spirit of the script was completely different from the norm, but in being about real emotions in the way that it was – which I think is so great – it was tied into the original Disney tradition. Essentially, this is the movie that I’ve wanted them to make, for the last thirty years of movies. And they only did it once… It is beautiful. The backgrounds are all watercolor. They haven’t used backgrounds like that since the 30s, and it gives it such a lush, human feeling. It’s a feast for the eyes… There was a real spirit in all the designs… I was thinking that this was a five-star masterpiece for the first two-thirds of the movie. Some of the air came out toward the end.

43. 43: 2002 (1/13)

ADAM It wasn’t a world-class movie, but it was solid. I was entertained the entire time… That’s a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, who totally carried this movie. It wasn’t Disney-stupid-plotted, the way they all are… A steampunk Treasure Island is a great idea… I thought the very idea of having moral complexity in the villain was significant. Admittedly he switched from all good guy to all bad guy to all good guy, but at least he switched from something to something… I liked that this was a Disney movie where the father was gone and not the mother, for a change… It doesn’t make sense that the treasure of a thousand worlds is mostly rings. Aliens don’t even have fingers!

BETH I was entertained by it… The thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was just like my brother… I don’t know how to watch these movies if I have to think of my actual response. I would fall asleep in order to avoid watching this movie, if I was watching it for real. But I made it be okay! I changed whatever I was seeing into something that was okay… Most of the characters were unlikable. Even the main character wasn’t really likable.

BROOM I found the setting so weird. I didn’t know what the rules were. What is normal and what isn’t? “Steampunk” is supposed to be this stimulating mashup, but this just seemed like a bizarre mix of things… All the aliens looked sort of like snails, or like globs of clay. And an all-farting slug. I didn’t understand what flavor of imagination it was all supposed to be… There’s just less warmth than I want in most of these movies most of the time. The big thing that surprised us about Lilo and Stitch is that it had a modicum of real warmth in it. Here, even the big “relationship,” between him and Long John Silver, was just D.O.A. There was no real feeling there.

44. 44: 2003 (2/13)

ADAM All that very grave multiculturalism at the beginning really felt like the first term of the Bush administration. I kept picturing Karen Hughes wearing a scarf and President Bush lecturing Muslim countries on the dignity of women. It sort of upset me, honestly. Maybe I’m just constructing this after the fact, but Pocahontas felt to me like a more naive, dippy, Maya Angelou-type multiculturalism, whereas this was just so studied and self-important that it kind of grossed me out… I thought it was really lovely to look at it… The main thing that bothered me in the first third of this was the three bro-y bros. But I guess you have to make them relatable somehow, and that’s the chintziest way to do it.

BETH I thought their color palettes were very interesting and vibrant. They clearly cared about which colors they were choosing. And they were diverse, too; they really switched it up based on the locations. But their handling of light was a little wrong. They were trying for accuracy and not hitting it, but being very overt about the attempt… They hardly distinguished the brothers. I didn’t even know who the main character was until the other one died… The humor was really bad… These were among the worst songs we’ve heard. There was no subtlety to the lyrics at all.

BROOM I expected this to be sanctimonious and grating, but it turned out to be just super-boring. And thin. Pretty much every element wasn’t really at the level they should have held it to… I thought the coloring looked blatantly like it had been done on a computer. The colors were all sort of tasteless, cheesy… The movie’s supposed to be all about character, but they didn’t give us any real characters. Not even in the designs… The hero is a teenager who thinks he has all the answers but actually has a lot to learn, but his progression just played as “Go away kid, I’m sullen and annoyed. Oh wait, there’s fun in the world!”… And it seemed like it had the wrong ending.

45. 45: 2004 (2/13)

ADAM I liked it! It wasn’t magisterial the way Disney sometimes tries to be… I had the uncomfortable feeling that they intended to repopulate Big Thunder Mountain Railroad with these characters, had the movie been successful. My hat is off to history for that not happening… It was more like Spongebob than Warner Brothers… I would show this to my children unreservedly. But I probably won’t remember any of it… As a real estate attorney, I was excited to see the signing of a deed as the pivotal exciting moment… But it feels like a mistake from a marketing perspective. Because what is this? This has no longevity to it. You can’t build a ride around this. You can’t sell products around this. And you wouldn’t want to.

BETH There was, I felt, a definite homage to Warner Brothers here, in a lot of the jokes and style. It was coarse. It felt unlike Disney in its joking around… I have no problem with this movie… The yodeling song was awesome!.. Why was this so poorly received? It just wasn’t that bad… I guess because there’s no one to want to be. You can’t aspire to be a cow the way you can a princess. When you’re a kid, it’s like you’re watching your aunts. You’re not watching pretty people… It did occur to me toward the end: why would kids care about a real estate transaction?… It seemed like everyone was having fun. The actors and the animators.

BROOM This movie was fine. It was probably the most insubstantial yet. It was just a bonbon… It felt like the descendant of some of the late-60s early-70s era movies, the Robin Hood era. It had some of the same easygoing quality… The entire second half is all kooky action sequences, and they were either too kooky, or too long, or just dull. My attention flagged… I do think there was probably a miscalculation in the plotting. It wasn’t really for kids… It’s a little like “Wind in the Willows”: There were some bad guys who were like these bad guys, and nobody cared; it was about a deed, and nobody cared… I thought the colors were so much better than Brother Bear. This is what stylish palettes look like. This had so much more professionalism to it.

46. 46: 2005 (2/13)

ADAM That was contemptible. That was awful. That was unquestionably the worst one. I could make a BuzzFeed-style list of things that I hated about that movie. The contemptible message of the movie. The father-son dynamic. The absurd gay stereotype… It had that manic knowingness and topicality that is like a noxious growth in these kinds of animated movies in recent years. It was gruesome… Remember how in the mid-2000s it became very popular in hit movies to have a sequence where all the characters sing along to a song from the 60s or 70s? A la My Best Friend’s Wedding? What if we do it eight times?… If there’s anything good to say here, it’s that now you know which is the worst one, when people ask.

BETH I’m only angry that I had to watch it. I’m not necessarily angry about it. But it was terrible. By far the worst. It was ugly and it was super-nerdy. It thought it had something to say about emotions, but it didn’t actually know what it was doing. The whole movie was really Asperger’s-y! And that’s why it was so hard to watch… I think they just went through a lost era in the mid 2000s… This is going to get one star in my Netflix account.

BROOM It was incredibly uncomfortable to watch because it was by stunted nerds trying to address what it’s like emotionally and socially to be a nerd, but they just don’t understand enough about it to make a movie… All of the “humor,” the constant cultural references — it’s like a Rainman thing. It’s comforting to nerds. That’s what “cosplay” is: “You’re dressed as that thing! You dressed up as the thing!” This movie dressed up as a bunch of different things… When the father finally turned it around and said “I believe in you,” he still didn’t actually believe in him! These writers couldn’t imagine any greater, more authentic kind of support from this terrible parent.

47. 47: 2007 (3/13)

ADAM That one felt like it was for littler kids than any we’ve seen so far. I don’t know if you’ve seen a Disney Channel show recently, but they all have the same style of twelve-year-old boys talking in this wry, meta way. Knowingness that is totally wholesome… It had a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse quality to it. But Pee-Wee’s Playhouse creeped me out as a child. I always thought that felt like an unsafe place to be… This wasn’t particularly attractive to look at. There were large stretches of CGI background where they didn’t bother to put stuff. “Well, it’s either grass or sky”… It got better toward the end… This had its heart in the right place and was intermittently amusing.

BETH I enjoyed it, but I think once you get to be eleven or twelve, you’re aware of what’s cool, and this wouldn’t be cool enough… I thought it had a great message: that it’s okay to fail… I didn’t mind how it looked. I thought they were using color interestingly. They desaturated it sometimes. In that first scene, and the Kung Fu fight scene… I don’t like the use of pop songs in these movies. It’s interesting that the Broadway-style songs, even though they’re equally cheesy, somehow aren’t as jarring.

BROOM I thought the movie as a whole was sweet and fun… I think they successfully made a movie for a range of different ages. I had some issues with the execution, and some story choices, but I basically found it appealing, because its innocent attitude was real. It’s easy to take that for granted and say, “well, of course this kind of positive playful attitude exists,” but it’s a thing that doesn’t show up in mass culture so much any more. So I’m happy that they made a movie that was basically just about play. And the morals they added sat pretty well with it: That you’re always free to take responsibility for yourself. And that no matter how zany your worldview is, you can have a happy home that matches it.

48. 48: 2008 (5/13)

ADAM “I have a swell idea for our next picture! It’ll be The Adventures of Milo and Otis meets The Truman Show meets Inspector Gadget.”… I thought this was basically sympathetic and pleasurable to watch… It was like watching Buzz Lightyear in his Buzz Lightyear mode for an hour and a half… There were a lot of bits in here that I couldn’t decide if they were homage or borrowed. All of the emotional beats in this movie were just business ripped from other things… I thought the agent character was well done because there are people like that and I haven’t seen that particular take-off on an agent stereotype in a movie.

BETH I know it was only five years ago, but: this one felt like it could have been made now. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but this was the first one that feels like it’s contemporary with us… When Bolt puts his head out the window, that’s the moment that I will remember from this movie. The simple pleasures of life. Like at the fireplace, when she says “it doesn’t get any better than this.”… I think there’s some desperation on the part of Disney. I think it’s looking at Pixar and feels like “we need to bring it.” And doesn’t really know how… It was a really good looking movie.

BROOM This was in the “post-Toy Story” category… I like anything that makes contemporary America look like a fun place to be… There are a lot of unfortunate habits and mannerisms in comedy these days… It was interesting where the emotional beats were. In a way, the biggest one was just on driving across America, and being yourself… But the movie didn’t really take you anywhere meaningful. The old thing Disney would do, in the Bambi days, is declare, “life is like this,” and it would be intensely that. Now the idea is: we’re going to make a throwaway movie; it’ll have the requisite single-tear moments; we promise not to embarrass you too much with them… The whole movie was just fine as one of these things.

49. 49: 2009 (7/13)

ADAM It was a little too impeccable. It was so carefully regional and carefully politically-correct-but-not-too-politically-correct… How many “New Orleans details” can we throw into this? How much gumbo was there in this damn movie? And Mardi Gras beads and streetcars… I liked the voodoo man. He was different from other Disney villains in a way that was interesting… When she was a waitress and then an actual literal prince arrived, I was like, “oh really??” Couldn’t she just have been a metaphorical princess, for the Disney princess line? No… It had the nourishing attention-to-detail of American Girl Place.

BETH I was disappointed, but I liked the first twenty-five minutes or so. I liked that it was about someone who had real-world dreams. She wasn’t a princess. She wasn’t striving for something imaginary… I’ve had easier times getting into the past couple movies, I think because the heroes were male. But in this one I initially was relating to the character, and then when it started seeming like a mess to me, I was like, “Oh, I can’t connect to this anymore.” Because my initial thoughts were, “Oh, this is so much more about reality than usual!” I was let down by where it went… The backgrounds were super-lush. I thought the colors were wonderful. I enjoyed looking at it.

BROOM I was kind of bored in the first half because it was so thorough in being familiar… I do think there was something interesting about where the movie went when it came time for a moral: that it’s not about what you want, it’s about what you need, which is different. And that getting what you want is not actually important, and it’s just going to get in your way. It’s a complicated moral, because these movies are all about what you want!… When you flip through a children’s book, the question is, are the pictures spaces that you can sort of zone into? Sure, these were! It was like Thomas Kinkade, inviting me into all these cozy lights… You know, it was fun! I didn’t mind it so much.

50. 50: 2010 (8/13)

ADAM I think the fact that many of the characters had semi-plausible psychological motivations – as opposed to “we must get the MacGuffin” – was satisfying. And the mother’s psychology actually seemed convincing to me, something that a teenager might empathize with… It was just knowing enough for a child… Kudos to them for going back to their theater-fag roots. It really does work well with unashamed fairy tale… I thought she looked good, I thought he looked good, I thought her hair looked really good and moved around in a satisfying way. I thought those lanterns were over the top but actually very pretty… To me this is the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch.

BETH I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought that it was one of the better structured stories that we’ve seen in a really long time. The script was really smart. But I didn’t like a lot of the micro- level things. The jokes felt too 2010 and I think won’t age well, and will seem kind of obnoxious in the future. But maybe in a charming way, the way that The Sword in the Stone seems charming in its 60s-ness… Visually, I have very mixed feelings. I thought her eyes were distractingly, wrongly big. He looked fine, so I don’t understand why they had to do that to her… This is up there for me, too. Not because I connected with anything. I just felt respect for the execution of this story.

BROOM I had mixed feelings… Half of the movie had a very surface-y quality to it, during which I was just thinking, “Oh god, it’s everything I hate about Broadway and video games…” And then suddenly it felt like they were genuinely telling a story, and I relaxed… It’s weird to have a realistic mother-daughter relationship that turns out to be completely false in a movie for kids… What I hate about Broadway isn’t just in the songs. It’s the way the characters were presented, and the way the dialogue was presented. The idea that telegraphy is of course the only possible mode… But the bones of it were not actually an attitude movie. And I enjoyed that movie, the straight story… It worked well enough.

51. 51: 2011 (9/13)

ADAM They were obviously bored, because they had not just one, but two flight-of-imagination fantasy sequences. That was obviously all that was getting them through the day… There were eight people credited for story in this movie. It was kind of a mashed-up version of two or three different stories from the original books, but they didn’t really fit together… Winnie-the-Pooh was sort of self-centered here, but he did still seem like the Winnie-the-Pooh of the books… It all feels like the Finance department. Some business school graduate was like, “What properties haven’t been sufficiently monetized?” And then they were like, “Okay, I guess we can squeeze some more out of this.” And then the animators were like, “What?”

BETH It was 53 intolerable minutes… I think the choice of Zooey Deschanel to be the singer is indicative of the attitude they were taking toward this: “Let’s be twee! This is Winnie the Pooh, it’s inherently twee, so let’s play that angle! Christopher Robin is like the perfect hipster kid!” It was like the Wes Anderson version of Christopher Robin’s bedroom… It doesn’t feel like it belongs… Something I really didn’t like: when his stomach suddenly burst open and stuff started coming out! What was that??… During the sequence of the Backson chalkboard animation, I thought, “You could just make a whole movie that looks like this. Maybe you should, because that would be more fun than what we’re watching. And who’s stopping you?”

BROOM Adam, you complained about the first movie that they had made Winnie-the-Pooh an asshole, that they had completely betrayed the charming childlike spirit of the originals. And I thought you were overstating it a bit. But here everything you said seemed to me true… The strength of the first movie is its really rich character animation. Here everything had that dull, flat, spiritless quality… Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey wet dream is gross and creepy… When the animation first kicked in and the music started, and it was clearly twee-ified, I thought, “Oh, I see! Might this possibly work?” And then after 20 seconds I thought, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.” And then there were 53 minutes left.

52. disney52 (11/13)

ADAM I was delighted by this movie when I saw it in the theater, and I continue to be delighted by it. Even if it is Pixar-ified… I felt generally warm towards the characters — maybe not so much towards Sarah Silverman, but towards John C. Reilly. I thought their borrowings from the real world, their Shrekisms, were actually clever and amusing. And I thought it was visually pleasurable to watch. “Sugar Rush” was over-the-top in a way that was satisfying; it was a mix of Mario Kart and Candyland that felt instinctively right to me… I thought Candyland being this noir underworld was funny.

BETH Overall I really liked it. But I have kind of mixed feelings… I thought the script was kind of weak. I thought that ‘getting a medal’ was very flimsy as an excuse for pretty much everything that happened. But I just went with it. It was fast-paced, for one of the longest movies that we’ve watched… It does contain worlds that you experience fully. “Sugar Rush” was its own thing, and the tower was its own thing. And I as a kid would have kept thinking about it that way. “I want to go back to that apartment building and see it again. I just want to see the crowds in the stands yelling.” I feel like it was fully realized in its setpieces.

BROOM It was formulaic and not in a gratifying way… I enjoyed when they played the actual games. But most of the movie consisted of him and Sarah Silverman trading quote-unquote banter… I was hoping to experience a new fantasy of “what kind of world do video games live in?” But it was just more Monsters, Inc. The massive industrial train-station mega-workplace just seemed so done and lame… Skipping around from game to game is the joy of this concept, so putting most of it 20 minutes in and then being done with it was a mistake… The price of picking something “hot” is that you have to really have legitimate insight into that thing. They glossed over any interest there could have been in making video games the subject matter.

53. disney53temp (12/13)

ADAM I have almost entirely positive things to say about it… The songs managed to be sort of Broadway and a little bit contemporary, but sound relatively natural with the action… I think this is the first one we’ve seen in a long time where there was a semblance of character development and backstory that was more than just “yearning.” … I really admired the politics of it. I think in general it’s better to make politically progressive movies than not, but this really wore its progressivism lightly… It looked totally gorgeous. And a really subtle use of 3D… I think this was super-good. Solid.

BETH The negative things I have to say are almost all about the songs, which I felt were very weak. Remarkably annoying. The lyrics were overly cutesy and cloying. The jokes were just not funny, to me. They were trying too hard… This movie is going to feel dated in 20 years because of the style of the songs… I basically didn’t have a problem with the snowman. I expected to… The animation was great!.. It wasn’t trying to be Pixar. Even though it was influenced by it… I feel like I’ve never been as attracted to a cartoon as I was to Kristoff. He was very well drawn and acted and written.

BROOM It did feel like a sequel to Tangled, but I thought it was a hundred times better. Even in terms of the songs, it was a more coherent overall tonal package. But the actual specifics of the music and lyrics were rote and uninspired… Kristoff was great. He was my favorite “guy” in one of these movies… The 3D was beautiful, and the lighting was beautiful… This is their best fairy-tale-and-we-mean-it movie since Beauty and the Beast... I really liked the sensitive new-age psychology of it, that when she’s afraid she becomes more dangerous… It did not lack for trying to be hip and appeal to the kids, but it did what I’m always hoping for them to do, which is to do that with some class, and care about it.

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Except this isn’t the end, quite.

Stay tuned for final reflections from the panel.

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December 7, 2013

Disney Canon #53: Frozen (2013)

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BROOM While we’re waiting to place our orders, let’s start by talking about the short that preceded the movie, “Get A Horse.” Many of these movies have been released with theatrical shorts but this is the first time we’ve watched one, so let’s talk about it. I think that falls within the range of our project.

ADAM I thought it was promising. The humor was a little broad but it was a very effective use of 3D.

BETH It was. When the curtains swished, I thought, “That looks like a real curtain! That stage looks like a stage!” I was impressed, and I thought it was charming that they really mimicked the old animation style accurately.

ADAM Although they did modernize Mickey Mouse’s head.

BROOM Very very slightly. It was a loving and careful re-creation of the old style, which is a thing that in this project I’ve frequently said I don’t think they can even do when they try. And here they did.

ADAM And it looked cool. The effect of them going back and forth from the movie world to the real world was neat.

BROOM The short was just a piece of technical showing-off, and it was a good one. It had a little too much sadism in it. By the end I thought, “This doesn’t all quite fit with the old Disney spirit.”

ADAM Right, it was a little Itchy & Scratchy.

BROOM Some of those old cartoons do have casual pitchfork-in-the-ass sadism, but here it happened six times. It was when the pitchfork got pushed further in that I thought, “ooh, I don’t think they would have done that in the 20s.” But I really enjoyed and respected the whole thing.

BETH I actually was fooled at first, thinking that we were going to see an old cartoon.

BROOM They got you.

ADAM Well, why don’t we just start. Because we don’t know how long the waiter is going to be. Well. I thought it was great. I have almost entirely positive things to say about it. In fact I can’t even think of any negative things.

WAITER How are you guys doing?

BETH Good!

ADAM We’re gonna just have dessert.

WAITER Sure! What can I get for you?

ADAM The… pumpkin pot-au-creme.

WAITER Pot-au-creme.

ADAM And the apple crisp.

WAITER Pot-au-creme and apple crisp.

BROOM That’s it.

ADAM And I’ll have a Laphroaig with a single ice cube.

WAITER Sure. Any drinks or anything for either of you guys?

BETH I’m gonna have the Taylor Fladgate.

WAITER Anything for you, sir?

BROOM Nope, just the water. Thank you.

BETH Thank you.

WAITER Thanks guys.

ADAM See, I knew that would summon him. Let me start over.

BROOM You thought it was great.

ADAM Almost entirely positive things.

BROOM In fact you can’t even think of…

ADAM … any negative things to say right now.

BETH That’s awesome.

BROOM I also thought it was great and I also have almost entirely positive things to say. But I could think of some negative things to say if we had to.

BETH The negative things I have to say are almost all about the songs, which I felt were very weak. Remarkably annoying.

ADAM Let’s talk about the songs, because I disagree with you.

BETH Wow. I thought that the lyrics were overly cutesy and cloying. The jokes were just not funny, to me. They were trying too hard.

ADAM Okay, I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But I thought the bigger risk was that the songs would be intrusive and weird. They managed to be sort of Broadway and a little bit contemporary, but sound relatively natural with the action. For a Disney musical.

BETH Okay, sure.

BROOM I agree with both of you. Maybe you do too.

BETH Yeah, I agree that the integration of the songs was nice.

ADAM I mean, I can’t remember any of the songs now.

BETH I can’t either. Truly.

ADAM But at least they sounded kind of like natural speech, and they had a slightly current pop flavor to them.

BETH I thought they were a little overly current-pop, and this movie is going to feel dated in 20 years because of the style of the songs.

BROOM I don’t think either the style of the songs or their integration were wrong. I saw the movie as an attempt to work with the impulses they had during Tangled and improve on them. And in almost every way they did. Even in terms of the songs, I think they did improve on making the movie a more coherent overall tonal package. But I also thought that the actual specifics of the music and lyrics were rote and uninspired. The script was sensitive to character in a way that the jokes in the songs weren’t; they were just borrowed from a Broadway playbook and grating.

ADAM I think this is the first one we’ve seen in a long time where there was a semblance of character development and backstory that was more than just “yearning.” [drink is delivered] Thank you.

BETH [drink is delivered] Thank you.

ADAM Maybe it wasn’t very much, but Elsa had some complexity. She wasn’t a villain, but she had legitimately motivated coldness. She was likable even in her dislikability.

[Discussion about various character relationships for a while, in a way that is unfortunately too dependent on spoilers to convey. Maybe the transcript will be instated here after the movie leaves the theaters. Or something.]

BROOM I thought that Kristoff was great. He was my favorite “guy” in one of these movies. Maybe ever.

BETH I agree. He seemed like he did smell kind of bad. In a cute way.

ADAM He had that big nose.

BETH He was very well drawn and acted and written.

ADAM I thought he was great. I mean, I was torn, because Hans was also really cute. And funny.

BETH I didn’t like his nose. It was too pointy.

ADAM I mean, who doesn’t yearn to meet someone at a party and finish each other’s sentences?

BETH That song concept was agreeable to me.

ADAM I thought “finish each other’s… sandwiches” was a funny line.

BETH Uh-huh. [ed.: BETH was in fact in the bathroom during this song.]

BROOM But that was right on the edge of the kind of joking that I thought didn’t fit with the movie.

WAITER All right. There we are. Pumpkin pot-au-creme. And the apple tart.

BETH and ADAM and BROOM Thank you.

ADAM Let’s talk about the politics, because BROOM mentioned them [in the redacted part of the conversation]. I too really admired the politics of it. I think in general it’s better to make politically progressive movies than not, but this really wore its progressivism lightly.

BETH I wasn’t really thinking about its feminist underpinnings while I was watching it. It was just a story.

BROOM You know what the “Bechdel test” is?

ADAM I was thinking about that the whole time.

BETH I’ve heard the term but I don’t know what it is.

BROOM Alison Bechdel, a lesbian cartoonist, coined this notion in her strip sometime in the 80s…

ADAM One of the characters says, “I’ll only see movies if they pass this test: There have to be two women… who have a conversation with each other… about something other than a man.”

BROOM And most movies do not pass this test.

ADAM An embarrassingly large number of movies do not pass that test.

BROOM Probably all of the Disney movies thus far. I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but many of them. But this one does.

ADAM I thought about that a lot, because I thought, “they’re really going for it!”

[Spoilers on the degree to which they went for it.]

BETH So let’s talk about the snowman. I basically didn’t have a problem with him.

BROOM Me neither.

ADAM Yeah. I was really surprised.

BETH I expected to, when I saw him in the ads.

BROOM I don’t know what to call that voice he was doing — sort of a Jewish New York simp.

ADAM He was doing something like the Gilbert Gottfried parrot, lite.

BROOM I kept thinking of Richard Simmons.

ADAM I thought he was funny because the humor wasn’t ‘tude humor. It was legitimately funny because it was so totally out of place for the rest of the movie.

BROOM I was so concerned about ‘tude, going into this, because on the poster they’re smirking some serious smirks. But in the actual movie they barely ever made that face.

BETH Apparently Disney put a lot of effort into marketing this to boys.

BROOM Because it’s about two women.

ADAM I saw a preview for this and it was all Sven and Olaf cavorting on the ice.

BETH They’re trying to trick boys into seeing it, basically. Because they know that boys would actually think it was fine, and like it.

BROOM Somewhere, maybe in the review I read, it was pointed out that this is the first Disney animated movie that is co-directed by a woman. Who also wrote it.

ADAM What was her name? Jennifer Lopez?

BETH Jennifer Lee.

ADAM There was also a Lopez.

BROOM That’s the songwriters. They did Avenue Q. Which was sharper than this. When she sang about how when she sees a cute guy she wants to stuff her face with chocolate, I thought, “I don’t think this script would have had her say such a thing!” Then it did, later. But I think they got it from the song. That really felt like a wrong note in this movie.

ADAM I thought it looked totally gorgeous. And a really subtle use of 3D.

BROOM Yes, the 3D was beautiful, and the lighting was beautiful.

BETH The animation was great!

ADAM The ice looked great.

BETH And even just the bodies.

BROOM I’m so glad you guys are saying this stuff, because while I was watching I was worried that I was just having a severe case of, you know, Critic’s Toothache Syndrome. “Maybe I’m only liking this because I’m just in a different mood today. And susceptible to the effect of actually being in the theater. Maybe I would have liked all those other ones if I hadn’t been so cranky, because this seems great to me.” But no, you agree, it was legitimately better.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM I mean, even the trolls I didn’t mind.

BETH I liked the trolls a lot.

BROOM I thought their song was one of the most interesting moments in the movie, because the discomfort the characters are feeling, the audience sort of shares in a happy way, thinking, “I don’t know… are they supposed to be falling in love?”

ADAM Well, when they start singing that song…

BROOM But you don’t know until the song is going. And even then…

BETH I was preoccupied during most of the movie thinking, well, there’s clearly a romantic connection here, so what are they going to do with it?

[Spoilers about what they did and didn’t do with it.]

ADAM I’m glad the trolls weren’t all voiced by black actors. Just the most prominent one.

BROOM So, you’re the only one here who has any memory of “The Snow Queen.” Can you tell us what happens in it?

ADAM Not this! I’m trying to remember exactly what happens. I mean, somebody’s heart does get pierced with ice. And there is a voyage to an ice castle where the snow queen lives. But I don’t think it ended like this. And I think there was some Jesus in it.

BROOM Well, there would be.

ADAM It’s weirder. This was pretty satisfying.

BROOM I really liked the sensitive new-age psychology of it, that when she’s afraid she becomes more dangerous. That she is born with power and she becomes dangerous because she’s told to fear her own power.

BETH I thought about you so much. “This is exactly BROOM’s stuff!”

BROOM I really identified with it and was moved by that. And I thought, “does this come from Hans Christian Andersen?”

ADAM No!

BROOM It seemed like a very 2013 thing to put in a movie. But also a thing that I would never have expected Disney to go so far as to put in a movie, because it’s a step beyond the existing pat fantasy psychology; it’s a little subtle. I wish that the songs had risen to it. But, you know… I thought “Let It Go” was basically close to the mark for what it was supposed to be.

ADAM “Do you want to build a snowman…?”

BROOM That one was problematic.

ADAM Oh, I don’t know. If you have to have a call and response song…

BROOM When she sang that line the first time, I thought, “oh god, please don’t let the next line have ‘snowman’ at the end of it too.” And it didn’t… but then later in the song she did sing ‘snowman’ on two parallel consecutive lines. Dammit, they did it. They did that thing. “Do you want to build a snowman…? It doesn’t have to be a snowman…!” Argh! Stephen Sondheim, go away!

ADAM What’s wrong with that?

BROOM It’s just, like, a Stephen Sondheim trick from 1970, and stop already! Stop doing that!

ADAM To have a rhyme where the word is just repeated in a slightly different context?

BROOM Yeah, to indicate vulnerable melancholy. The song goes into an extra loop to be poignant.

ADAM You mean like a fifth bar.

BROOM It’s like, the lyric can’t get away, because the feeling is stuck and festering. It came at the end of that song, when they’re grown up and she’s singing into the keyhole, and it’s already sad, and then there’s that beat where she adds “… it doesn’t have to be a snowman…” I feel like, “you guys just got that from your stupid musical-theater-writing class! It’s so rote! This movie is already doing better than you are!” In fact in that moment, my thought was, “The lighting guy is doing such a lovely subtle thing compared to what the songwriters are doing.” And the music itself: basically every song said “You know how there are songs that go like this? Well, we wrote one of those.” They never had any turns that you didn’t already know and expect.

ADAM Wasn’t there a song that went: [hums ‘Go the Distance’ from Hercules]

BROOM That’s from Hercules. That song is more interesting musically than any of the songs in this, and that’s not a very interesting song. All of these songs were like, “phrase 1; phrase 2; phrase 3; phrase 4” the four things you already thought they were going to do. And then the bridge. And there’s nothing to them. That works when it’s a comic song, like the snowman’s song about summer. In that case it helps the joke that it’s “just one of those songs.” But when it’s supposed to be a big anthem, you want a little more than that.

ADAM Why did they have like an Africa drum tribal thing at the beginning?

BROOM It felt totally inappropriate.

BETH It made me fear what the movie was going to be. But then it disappeared until the very end.

BROOM I guess it was an attempt to be Scandinavian. Like, the sounds of the trolls. But they didn’t even get close to it.

BETH It sounded like The Lion King.

ADAM If you compare this to, say, the two moose in Brother Bear, they could have done that with the sauna-keeper or the reindeer, and they didn’t. I appreciate that.

BROOM This is their best fairy-tale-and-we-mean-it movie since Beauty and the Beast. I put it to you. Does anyone want to agree with me?

BETH I agree.

ADAM By that do you mean with the possible exception of Lilo and Stitch?

BROOM That was in a whole other category. It wasn’t a fairy tale.

ADAM Yeah. I think this was super-good. Solid.

BETH And its own thing. It wasn’t trying to be…

BROOM Well, it did feel like a sequel to Tangled, but I thought it was a hundred times better than Tangled.

BETH I was going to say it wasn’t trying to be Pixar. Even though it was influenced by it.

BROOM I thought this movie — and the previews we saw, for that matter — were the best 3D I’ve seen yet. And I just saw Gravity.

ADAM The 3D was a lot better than Gravity. Maybe it’s because it’s animated, but Gravity had that Captain EO jaggedness to it. I’m not sure how to describe it.

BROOM This 3D had a very soft, gentle touch. It was really well done.

ADAM There were hardly any spears in your face.

BROOM The very first thing in the movie was, but it was a good one. Very effective. In Gravity when her teardrop is a sphere and it comes at you, there’s an effect of “hold on everyone, look what I’m doing!” This movie never said “hold on everyone, look what I’m doing.”

ADAM Well, well done Disney. What else do I have to say? BETH, I think you sort of look like Princess Anna.

BETH Thank you. To me she looked like my cousin Molly.

WAITER Should I clear this stuff out of the way for us then.

BROOM Sure.

ADAM Thanks.

BROOM Both sisters had the ski-jump noses and the twisty lips that might be ready to do some ‘tude, but they didn’t do it. It was a lot of the same slickization of feminine features that offended me in Tangled, but there it offended me in part because they made her out to be this fabulous theater girl. Anna, yes, she had a lot of “spunk” and “attitude,” and it was fake, but in a way that didn’t feel like a selfie.

ADAM Like a duckface.

BROOM Yeah. There was a selfie quality to Tangled. This didn’t have it.

BETH I’d be interested to see Brave now just to compare.

BROOM I also appreciated that this was a basically sexless movie. They dressed up and looked pretty and wanted to attract men, but there was no undercurrent of sex in it.

BETH They did have really good bodies, though.

BROOM That’s just a given.

ADAM And both of their male heroes were very handsome. I would be happy with some slash fiction.

BROOM Not being turned on by the male physique, I wasn’t sure how Kristoff read to those who are…

BETH He was the cutest one ever.

ADAM He was totally dreamy.

BETH I feel like I’ve never been as attracted to a cartoon as I was to Kristoff.

BROOM Well, that’s great, because I was attracted to his humanity, because he did not seem at all porny. A lot of their “good-looking guys” have seemed kind of porny. Whereas this felt to me like an actual “guy,” that girls might like because he’s genuinely guy-y. The ways that he was kind of a clod were characteristic of a real type. I know people of that type.

ADAM I liked the villainous old prince from Weselton. “A chicken with the face of a monkey” is funny.

BROOM Why did he say that?

ADAM I don’t know. I liked that he cut loose in this incongruous way.

BROOM I was so glad that this was our last one. I mean, obviously it’s not our last one for all time, but it comes at the end…

ADAM … of a hot streak.

BROOM Of a hot street? Is that an expression?

ADAM Streak.

BROOM Oh. I like “at the end of a hot street.” Here’s why I felt positive about this one: because they were living up to positive values that matter without feeling retrogressive. It was very 2013. It did not lack for trying to be hip and appeal to the kids, and it just did what I’m always hoping for them to do, which is to do that with some class, and care about it a little bit. And they did.

[ADAM begins looking up the New York Times review]

BROOM I would see this again. And those of you reading this: I recommend you see it in 3D. It really contributed to the sense of being in the spaces of it, which were so pretty. BETH, I would readily tell your family to go see this at Christmas time.

BETH I was considering it.

[we read the New York Times review, which casually contains major spoilers and should not be read until after viewing]

ADAM There you go.

BETH We really did it.

BROOM So: loyal readers. Next what’s going to happen is…

ADAM You don’t need to tell the loyal readers. They’ll get it.

BROOM Well, we have to have a sign-off on this one. Stay tuned…

ADAM That’s true. Stay tuned for the future!

BROOM Stay tuned for the recap post and then for summary contributions from all involved.

BETH Yes. We just need a couple bucks more.

ADAM You should just put in the tip.

BROOM Well, what is it?

ADAM You should leave… eleven.

BROOM So the question is, how am I going to get the title and ending screens? I’m going to have to find a site that’s already ripping this movie off.

BETH Oh, you’ll find it. We’re all set, thank you.

WAITER Thank you so much. Have a great night.

BETH You too.

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