Nadir-Fest 3 of 3!

ADAM That was contemptible. That was awful. That was unquestionably the worst one.

BETH By far the worst.

ADAM I could make a BuzzFeed-style list of twenty-five things that I hated about that movie.

BETH Let’s start.

BROOM Go for it.

ADAM Well… you were talking the other day about being in a visual world where it feels like no one is home and no one is watching out for you. It really felt like that. Sorry, my thoughts are all clotted up, I’m so angry about this movie.

BROOM “You need some closure.”

ADAM The contemptible message of the movie. The father-son dynamic. The absurd gay stereotype… At least at the end he got to sing along to a Gloria Gaynor song; that must have been exciting for his character. I’m sorry, somebody else jump in here, because I’m just pissed off.

BETH I’m only angry that I had to watch it. I’m not necessarily angry about it. But it was terrible. 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.

ADAM It had that manic knowingness and topicality that is like a noxious growth in these kinds of animated movies in recent years. It was obviously way too expensive.

BETH So did they fire all their animators and hire a whole new team?

BROOM It’s a very different sort of skill; I don’t imagine there are that many traditional animators who also do CGI animation. I’m not sure where these people came from. They’re not Pixar people.

BETH It seemed like they had a totally different sensibility from Disney people.

BROOM When you said that this was totally nerdy, I feel like that is exactly the essence of it. And Adam, when you said this was like my prior comment about entering a world where there’s no love for you, that’s not the feeling I get from this movie. That’s the feeling I get from movies that I feel have been made by sleaze, by calculating men of a certain insensitivity.

ADAM I just meant that it felt visually unwelcoming.

BROOM I said during the movie that this movie was made by its characters, grown up. Here I felt I was in the company not of sleaze but of stunted nerds.

ADAM That offensive opening, when they’re like, “Once upon a time — Naw!” … “Let’s open the book — Naw! Enough wit’ da book!”

BROOM You said it seemed like an identity crisis.

ADAM They might as well have had Gilbert Gottfried as the father. It was gruesome.

BROOM I really feel confident that behind this I can sense nerds. People who find it a strain to think about emotions. I feel like they strained to the point they could reach, and then had this inspiration: “Hey, you know what I might want to make a movie about? How my father never believed in me, and no-one was ever nice to me, and I was just an innocent nerd who liked karaoke, or was gay, or wasn’t good at sports or something. You know how no-one in the entire town liked me? We should make a movie about that!” And then they started to sketch out how that would work, but they don’t really understand it.

BETH Yeah, it’s Asperger’s-y! The whole movie was really Asperger’s-y! And that’s why it was so hard to watch.

BROOM Yes. All of the “humor,” all of the constant references — it’s like a Rainman thing. It’s what nerds do. It’s why they keep reciting Monty Python skits to each other. “No one understands us… but, well, you know what they say in Star Wars!” And it was striking to me that the elements of the movie that felt most expert were the weird sci-fi elements that never belonged in this story in the first place. The spaceship comes down and suddenly it’s like, “oh, look at this, something they really thought about!”

BETH Because that’s what’s comfortable for them.

BROOM That’s who they were. And I think the movie was uncomfortable to watch exactly because it was by nerds who were 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 that movie.

BETH They haven’t really resolved it for themselves.

ADAM And their vision of social acceptance is “It’s two strikes at the bottom of the ninth! Will he make it?” That was just a piece of scissored-out movie from some other movie that was inserted here. It felt so hackneyed, which fits with your thesis.

BROOM But they knew what that was. That was intentional. They put the “end of the movie triumph” at the beginning, and then they had him and his father lying there saying “Everything’s great now, right?” And the point is obviously it’s not great, nothing’s been addressed. But then the actual closure they give at the end is still totally insufficient. During the movie I said that they needed to make the father admit that he had felt the same kind of shame and that’s why he was passing it on to his son. But he didn’t! He didn’t understand himself at all, he didn’t explain anything. And when he finally turned it around and said “I believe in you,” he still didn’t actually believe in him! He just had come to realize that being a father meant that he had to say “I believe in you.” The writers couldn’t imagine any greater, more authentic kind of support from this terrible parent.

ADAM Who greenlighted this? Who thought that this was going to sell, or promote the brand?

BETH I think they just went through a lost era in the mid 2000s.

BROOM Didn’t we all?

BETH Michael Eisner was sort of called out for letting the brand get out of control, and… did they fire him or something?

BROOM I don’t know. You might be confusing different stories, because I know that some time earlier than that, Roy Disney was protesting to the board along the lines that the Disney ABC lineup was bad for the Disney brand, that they should save the word Disney for features, that they should save the characters and not stick them on sitcom promos…

BETH Okay, before you post this I’m going to find what I think I remember. [ed: put it in the comments, kiddo!]

ADAM Do you 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?

BROOM What year was Adaptation?

BETH ’02.

BROOM Because that makes fun of the phenomenon outright, and it seemed relevant at the time. It’s died down since then. So this was particularly late. It was just fodder for their compulsion to emulate things — like the joke at the end about how Hollywood would make their movie. Well, that’s how Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure ends, among many other things, so it’s not even their joke. They didn’t own any of it.

ADAM “You’ve got hate mail!” AOL was of course 10 years old, at this point. Nobody had AOL in 2005. That’s the sort of thing that made me say that the people who made this movie not only were nerds but also were a thousand years old. “Kids use cellphones! Let’s put that in the movie!”

BROOM It’s really a whole attitude toward what humor is. Was there a single joke in this movie that did not consist of taking a chunk of existing reference material and putting it in the movie?

ADAM “Oh, snap!”

BROOM “Oh, snap!” Exactly. That’s something people say. It is like Asperger’s: “I’ve heard humans do this!” That’s how nerds talk to each other. They’re comforted by doing it to each other. 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.

ADAM “Modern Mallard says…” Ugh.

BROOM I appreciated that Ugly Duckling here was really just kind of an ugly duck.

BETH Instead of a cute nerdy girl.

BROOM Well, the point is that the ugly duckling is going to grow up to be a swan and is just in the wrong family. This is a movie about nerds as kids, and they were saying “yeah, we were ugly.”

ADAM But at least when this movie was called Mean Girls, the characters were actually warm and relatable.

BROOM They just don’t know what that is. And when you said there was gay-baiting in it, I don’t think so. I think they worked on it. I think that guy was there making the movie and was thrilled to have a character shout, “My Streisand records!”

ADAM I appreciate that it was not hateful gay-baiting. It was meant to be affectionate. But it was just…

BETH It was just clueless.

ADAM Uuuuugh.

BROOM I knew this was going to be the one. I knew this was coming. What I’m worried about is that — despite this having been our day of terror — the next one might be related to this in tone.

ADAM You think we picked the wrong three?

BROOM We couldn’t have improved it, because Home on the Range was the better one. Brother Bear was pretty bad.

ADAM That’s true. Well, we did it.

[we read the Times review]

ADAM I think it’s fitting that the first third of that review read like it came from the business section. As you say, nerds made this movie, but the people who approved it are just evil suits who have no sense of what is humanly compelling.

BROOM I was a little bit stung when you said that Home on the Range didn’t work because it didn’t promote any brands. Because to me, that’s suit thinking. And it’s probably true to some degree… but deep down, the reason that Dumbo and Pinocchio work is not because they were smarter about what they could sell to people, but because they were smarter about what would make a good movie. And yes, it happens that Home on the Range picked a way of making an entertaining movie that doesn’t fit that particular mold. But you wish that they could just think, “if we make a movie that really works as a movie, people will like that and good will come of it.”

ADAM Well look, over at Pixar they’re making movies of things that are not obviously marketable. I mean, Cars is, but Up is not, and Ratatouille is not.

BROOM Wall-E certainly isn’t. That was a very peculiar movie.

ADAM And I get that. But Disney being the franchise that it is, they have to be “Disney movies” if the franchise is going to survive. But this wasn’t that either! Who thinks “Oh, the beloved fairy tale Chicken Little“? What the fuck?

BROOM What is the real story of Chicken Little?

ADAM There isn’t one.

BROOM “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s about it, right?

ADAM “Let’s make a movie about the Tortoise and the Hare. And the hare will be fast talking, maybe Eddie Murphy will play the hare…”

BROOM Ooh, I like it!

ADAM And the tortoise will be, like,…

BROOM Bill Murray.

ADAM And the tortoise will have a sidekick, like a talking carrot…

BROOM But in the modern day, why does the hare go so fast? He’s trying to be cool and hip but he’s overcompensating. And he’ll learn to relax from the tortoise.

ADAM And then maybe everyone thinks the hare won the race, and he’ll be on a billboard, and it’ll be very meta. There’ll be “Hare” products…

BROOM But then they’ll have some common enemy. You think of them as enemies, but it’s going to be a buddy movie in the end. Because they’ll have to work together to fight off some kind of common enemy. Maybe there’s a bear, or some kind of big monster that they both need to go after. Or Russians, or Arabs or something, that they have to join forces against.

ADAM I’m embarrassed that Sandra Tsing Loh worked on this movie.

BETH This is going to get one star in my Netflix account.

BROOM Rotten Tomatoes reported that 36% of critics gave this a positive review.

ADAM Who? Read me a positive review.

BROOM Well, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe said that the film was “shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances.” And Angel Cohn of TV Guide gave the film 3 stars alluding the film that would “delight younger children with its bright colors and constant chaos, while adults are likely to be charmed by the witty banter, subtle one-liners and a sweet father-son relationship.”

ADAM Ugh.

BROOM Angel Cohn was later found to be dead and blind.

ADAM Also, Zach Braff is as annoying as he is thought to be.

BROOM He was putting on a stupid little character voice. So why did they even hire Zach Braff?

ADAM If there’s anything good to say here, it’s that now you know which is the worst one, when people ask.

BROOM I already knew, though. Guys, I had seen a little bit of this on Youtube already, and seen that they used the rolling ball clip from Raiders of the Lost Ark within the first fifteen seconds of the movie.

ADAM When the water tower was rolling, it was like, “Ugh, they’re doing Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And then OH WAIT, we’re in a movie theater actually showing Raiders of the Lost Ark!

BROOM And even that — the actual ball rolling through the screen showing Raiders of the Lost Ark — even that itself is an existing lame thing that they didn’t make up.

ADAM I wish there had been more modern catchphrases in this movie. What if Chicken Little had been able to say to his father “Homey don’t play dat”?

BROOM Yeah! “Cowabunga, dude!”

Nadir-Fest part 2 of 3!

ADAM I liked that!

BETH I did too.

BROOM Yeah, it was fine.

BETH It was so much more fun than Brother Bear.

BROOM Not to mention others that weren’t part of our day of supposedly the worst ones. This movie was fine. It was probably the most insubstantial yet.

ADAM Yeah, it was genial and not much else, but we laughed authentically multiple times.

BROOM It was in the same spirit as Emperor’s New Groove. Not quite as clever or well balanced but still fine.

ADAM Much more star-studded!

BETH Judi Dench!

BROOM Like I said, who would have thought that there was a movie where Judi Dench and Roseanne Barr play two-person scenes together.

ADAM This was the most likeable role Roseanne has ever had.

BETH She was good!

BROOM Similar to the way that David Spade was the most likeable he’ll ever be in Emperor’s New Groove. Yes, Roseanne Barr as a sassy cow might be the best way to use her.

ADAM What was Judi Dench’s line that we giggled at?

BROOM “Three cows can’t catch a criminal!” or something like that. She seemed to be enjoying herself. And the moviemakers seemed to be enjoying that she was game.

ADAM She’s not above that. I mean, you’ve seen all the Bond movies.

BROOM Right, she’s a slummer.

ADAM Her dignity here is enhanced by the fact that you don’t have to directly look at her. It makes you feel less bad for her.

BETH There was, I felt, a definite homage to Warner Brothers here, in a lot of the jokes and style.

BROOM And the look. I thought it looked like Chuck Jones.

BETH It did.

BROOM The bad guy’s face looked like a Chuck Jones design.

BETH Yes, and his coloring.

ADAM I thought that at first, but I decided by the middle that I thought it was more Spongebob-y than Warner Brothers.

BETH I have no knowledge of Spongebob.

BROOM But when the guy had a foot-long welt on the top of his head, you said something about “I haven’t seen that in a long time,” referring to Looney Tunes.

ADAM No, I understand that there was also homage to Warner Brothers.

BETH And it was also coarse. It felt unlike Disney in its joking around.

ADAM It was not magisterial the way Disney sometimes tries to be.

BROOM But it isn’t as though they were selling themselves out. It felt like Emperor’s New Groove and it also felt like the descendant of some of the late-60s early-70s era movies, the Robin Hood era. It had some of the easygoing quality of those movies. I swear the vultures in this were the Robin Hood vulture.

ADAM Nutsy.

BROOM And it had someone doing that Pat Buttram voice. And it had that same old dog you always see. It felt very Disney-like in that manner. But they’d never done a full-on Western before, and they’d never done cows.

BETH I have no problem with this movie.

BROOM I do have a problem with this movie, which is that 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 wanted them to just tell me what happens.

ADAM I had the uncomfortable feeling that they intended to repopulate Big Thunder Mountain Railroad with these characters, had the movie been successful.

BROOM It’s entirely possible.

ADAM My hat is off to history for that not happening.

BETH It did occur to me toward the end: why would kids care about a real estate transaction?

BROOM I do think there was probably a miscalculation in the plotting. The evil scheme was really incomprehensible to kids.

ADAM That’s because this was pre-foreclosure crisis.

BROOM He steals the cattle, and then the ranches get foreclosed on, and then he buys the property, because he wants to own all the property, because he’s… getting revenge on ranches where he used to work where he wasn’t appreciated? It’s convoluted.

BETH It’s over kids’ heads.

ADAM I don’t know. How complicated is it? He’s a bad guy; he’s stealing all the cows!

BROOM I think if I were a kid, once it was introduced that he has basically magic powers, I would have wanted to see more of that. Why didn’t he do more songs?

BETH That was awesome!

BROOM The color-changing sequence?

BETH Yes. It was great.

ADAM It was. Although I thought that the little “Pink Elephants on Parade” routine was kind of weak tea.

BROOM I thought it was an intentional homage to their own past. It’s a fine line, because you don’t want to lean too heavily on it. “Get it? It’s Pink Elephants!” And it wasn’t excessive, but they probably should have just stuck to their own thing.

BETH I still enjoyed it.

ADAM I would show this to my children unreservedly. But I probably won’t remember any of it.

BROOM It also reminds me of the “Wind in the Willows” half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. There were some kind of bad guys who were like these bad guys, and nobody cared; it was about a deed, and nobody cared.

ADAM Who are the bad guys in that?

BROOM A bunch of weasels take over Toad Hall. It’s about real estate.

ADAM As a real estate attorney, I was excited to see the signing of a deed as the pivotal exciting moment. It’s not like, “we’ve got to interrupt the vows before the marriage is finalized” — it’s “we’ve got to interrupt the signing and notarization of the deed.” Which is exciting.

BROOM Have you ever worked on a deal where a train runs off the tracks and prevents the deal from going through?

ADAM In the middle of a closing room? No.

BROOM There were a lot of fat jokes. When we look into the response I imagine that people are going to ask why in 2004 there were so many fat jokes.

ADAM There were fat jokes? I didn’t notice any.

BETH You know, a lot of “you’re the biggest cow I’ve ever seen!”

BROOM There were jokes about Roseanne, there were jokes about the bad guy. There was a lyric in the song about his pants being too big. There were fat jokes about everyone the whole time. In my head I was trying to work out a defense: why is it that this is actually fine? They’re allowed to make jokes about a cartoon character that’s as wide as he is tall! That’s too fat! That’s fat enough to say is funny! And then there was Jennifer Tilly as the blonde-joke character, but she wasn’t quite a “dumb blonde.”

BETH The Lisa Kudrow character.

BROOM She was supposed to be a flake, but she was basically right about things. They did have anger issues. I liked that being tone-deaf was her protection against the magic music.

ADAM I liked when they fought with the dancing girls in the sheriff’s office.

BROOM “The sheriff’s office” was a bar.

ADAM The star was on the door because it was the talent entrance?

BROOM That was the stage door. Yes. I liked the joke right before that, where they showed us seven different things in a row that people mistake for gunshots. In reference to Brother Bear: I thought these palettes were much better. This is what it looks like when professionals are doing color design. This is what stylish palettes look like. It doesn’t look overworked and overdone. And in fact I think on several occasions here they were making fun of Brother Bear, which I assume was being made at the same time.

BETH Maybe they were.

BROOM Like when it went to widescreen for no reason.

BETH Yeah, I think they were. In the palettes too.

ADAM You’re right, they must have been competing teams working on these at the same time.

BROOM It went to widescreen in his fantasy sequence, and there’s also the moment when she gets a stupid moose head on her head and it waggles around until she takes it off. Don’t you think that of these two movies, this team would have been, like, the cool kids? That other movie was lame. Now, I wasn’t saying that the palettes made reference to Brother Bear. I’m just pointing out that you praised the palettes of Brother Bear, but that was actually over-the-top tastelessness, where you’re forced to pay attention to the colors because they’re distracting. Whereas this one, where we’re not talking about the colors, actually looked good.

BETH The type of scenery here lends itself better to very saturated palettes. I think that’s partially why it worked.

BROOM I think this had so much more professionalism to it. And Alan Menken is so much more professional than those other guys.

BETH So which was the song that was supposed to be embarrassing?

BROOM I thought remembered hearing something about that yodeling song marking the death of Disney animation. But it was fine!

BETH So why was this so poorly received? It just wasn’t that bad.

BROOM I don’t know! I thought I heard that this was so embarrassing that they were never going to make another animated movie again, but that can’t have been right. It was just a bonbon. It had nothing to it.

ADAM Well, it is sort of strange. Most of their movies seem to be in service of having a strong character who can carry the licensure banner and be a figure in the parks. How did they think this fit into that tradition at all?

BROOM It’s just a movie to entertain people for a very short time. Was it 65 minutes?

BETH 75.

BROOM It felt very short.

ADAM It’s not a fairy tale. 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 You can’t aspire to be a cow the way you can a princess.

BROOM But do you believe in what you’re saying?

ADAM I do. We like those early movies not just because they’re good movies, but because they’re iconic movies where the characters are larger than life, and have a role in a child’s fantasy life. This is just a stupid movie.

BROOM I guess I do agree with that. This is too overloaded with little bits for any of them to count as meaningful. I think that Judi Dench’s cow wore a hat was about as strong a characterization as this movie offered, and nobody’s going to need a doll of that.

BETH It wasn’t youthful enough. There weren’t teenage characters.

BROOM There was no love story. There was no sentiment really, except for “we’re gonna lose the farm” sentiment.

ADAM Even Pearl didn’t get a boyfriend at the end, which I sort of assumed she would.

BROOM I thought the sheriff was going to get together with Pearl at the end. He seemed like he was a little smitten when he handed her the notice at the beginning.

ADAM They danced together. I liked that the heroes were a trio of strong women. It was sort of like Dinosaur in that regard.

BETH But when you’re a kid, it’s like you’re watching your aunts. You’re not watching pretty people. There’s no one to want to be.

BROOM It was kind of a movie about, like, the witches of Eastwick. It wasn’t really for kids.

ADAM You think about Disney movies and you think about, like, Tinkerbell, or Dumbo, the characters popping through the screen. And there’s none of that here.

BROOM Which is part of why it felt like Warner Brothers, since that’s what’s characteristic about Warner Brothers cartoons compared to Disney. Disney has always been about relating to characters from the heart, where Warner Brothers have been about “Now the rabbit is going to jump off a cliff! Now some stuff is happening!”

BETH Which is fun.

ADAM But even in the Warner Brothers cartoons there are iconic characters.

BETH Developed over time, though.

ADAM Maybe it’s just from repetition. If you saw one Roadrunner cartoon, it would annoy you, but after you see a hundred…

BROOM In the first couple minutes of this, I thought they were making a big miscalculation, because Roseanne Barr is not sympathetic.

ADAM She got better.

BROOM She did get better, but I think the intended design of the movie may have been that she was our hero. She starts the narration, we follow her into this scenario, and she’s going to be our brash American unsinkable protagonist. But then she kind of disappeared behind the better actors. And they evened out their relative importance. And I wonder if it’s because they didn’t get the performance they needed from her. Or if it just wasn’t working, so they decided it would be a zany buddy movie instead of a movie about her interests. Because that would have made more sense.

BETH I don’t think it was conceived that way. I don’t think they ever intended for it to be about Roseanne’s journey.

ADAM It’s not about anything. It’s just a bunch of old tropes that they were having some fun with. I liked Tiny Toons, as you know, and I liked it in part because it had these old vaudeville scraps that were being reanimated in this jokey way.

BROOM That’s what this was, entirely.

ADAM That’s a Saturday morning thing, not a Disney thing.

BROOM It was animated with vitality. It was animated in a very knowing, retro, post-Ren and Stimpy kind of way…

ADAM That’s what I meant by Spongebob-y.

BROOM …but with affection. With the same affection that you get from Spongebob. These animators think it’s cool to be there. That is not how I felt about Brother Bear. There I felt like: these animators are so grateful that they got accepted to their job at Disney, and they will do whatever is asked of them to make the Disney machine run. Whereas here these were people who think it’s fun — in a nerdy way — to imitate old animation styles, to do classic stuff.

BETH It seemed like everyone was having fun. The actors and the animators.

BROOM But it’s true, we’ve sort of passed into the era where the best show on Broadway is The Producers, which is a show in quotes, or Book of Mormon, which is like “can you believe that we did this Broadway style?” instead of an actual show. And that’s what this is too. It’s like, “it’s so a cartoon!” But they did that wholeheartedly.

BETH It was just painless.

BROOM Yes. I was really taken aback, given what I thought it was going to be.

ADAM I’m still dreading Chicken Little.

[we read the negative Times review and reader reviews as well]

BROOM This is just overkill. This movie may have had some problems in crowd-pleasing the right way at the right time, and it may have been inconsequential, and yes, it may have been a bit forced in its comedy. But Brother Bear was so much worse!

BETH Were people just so down on Disney by this time that they would have had to do something actually great in order to save themselves?

BROOM I don’t know. I really thought we were going to see the studio go down into the mud, but now I feel like it must have been something else that killed them. This wasn’t so bad as to close a major studio!

BETH I think it’s a branding mistake. They needed to do something more Disney-ish, and they went the opposite direction.

ADAM It says here on Wikipedia that before the release they had already decided to shutter the animation department. And it’s hard to see this as going out with a bang. I feel like it’s sort of set up for failure in that context.

BROOM It’s just remarkable that this is their death knell.

ADAM But it was only their death knell for two years. The Princess and the Frog is traditional 2D animation.

BROOM As is Winnie the Pooh. Look, it wasn’t a great movie…

ADAM But it was adequate.

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM It was pleasant.

BROOM It was just mild. So Netflix was right: I did like that better than the previous one. Of course I did.

ADAM On to the next!

[Nadir-Fest part 1 of 3! We subjected ourselves to an all-afternoon triple-header viewing session intended to get us through a dreaded low point as quickly as possible. Parts 2 and 3 to follow.]

BROOM Our day of bad movies has begun correctly. The ways in which this was bad…

ADAM Were manifold.

BROOM … and also surprising to me. I found myself thinking about how a project like this comes to fail, because I think this movie failed, and yet I don’t think the initial impetus was doomed. I don’t think that every element of it was incompetent. It just didn’t work, and I found myself thinking managerially, imagining that I was working on it and knowing that it was going bad, and thinking, “What do I do? What is the key thing to do to try to make this better?”

ADAM Let’s start by saying what was good about it. Because I thought it was really lovely to look at it. They just went out of their way to make it lovely.

BETH I think they were pretty proud of that, too.

BROOM I thought the coloring looked blatantly like it had been done on a computer. The flat way that it was colored, but especially the crappy rounding shadows that looked like they had been applied in Photoshop. And I thought the foreground lay against the background in a dead-looking way.

ADAM Well, maybe I don’t have the technical competence to see that, but I thought that compared to, say, the way that Pocahontas thought it was lovely, this was actually much prettier to look at. There were a lot of satisfying touches, like the way they changed colors in the early morning light.

BETH I thought some of that was a little incompetent. But 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 strange and wrong. They were trying for accuracy and not hitting it, but being very overt about the attempt.

BROOM Are you talking about that mottled-light tree effect?

BETH Yes!

BROOM That was the first time I thought, “that’s an animation special effect, and it’s not entirely working.”

ADAM What was this?

BETH Early on, they were walking through sort of a sun-dappled forest landscape, and they were, you know, all splotchy, and it didn’t work. But it was interesting that they were trying.

BROOM I’m surprised that you thought the palettes were good. To me they were, like many aspects of the movie, a case of “I can see what you’re trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work.”

ADAM Well, look at those fish [in the animated DVD menu still onscreen], for example.

BETH This particular palette is kind of awful, but…

BROOM Well, it seems characteristic to me. The colors were all sort of tasteless, cheesy. It’s like you’re at a Disneyworld hotel, and everything’s some kind of souped-up salmon color.

BETH It’s like one of those moving “paintings” at a Chinese restaurant. Of a waterfall.

BROOM On a video screen, you mean?

BETH Kind of, but it’s not really on a video screen. It’s like a “moving painting.” Do you know what I’m talking about?

BROOM I think so. I’m not sure I’m picturing exactly what you are, but that kind of restaurant world of taste, and lack of taste, is how I felt about the way this looked. Someone’s idea of beauty was being played out, sort of, but it didn’t feel sharp.

ADAM The color palette was very unlike the color palette in your apartment.

BETH I just liked that they were being daring and diverse.

BROOM I agree for obvious reasons that it’s appropriate to compare this movie to Pocahontas. And I actually thought the palette was the strongest thing Pocahontas had going for it. The bold illustration style of Pocahontas is much more appealing to me than this touchy-feely pastel world.

BETH But as a child, watching the colors in this movie, I would have been riveted, because every shot was different, had different colors, and that’s enough to keep me watching.

ADAM As I child I was offended by when the Smurfs would go walking in the forest and it was just the same four trees rotated over and over. I think I would have been captivated by all the effort that went into this.

BROOM It has a kind of abundance, certainly. But especially with the presence of CGI elements — like that rippling water in the menu — my eye feels like there are actually too many colors there. There’s a certain sense of artistic care that comes of things being really chosen, whereas here it felt like there was just a lot of stuff.

BETH I agree with you as a grown-up. But as a kid, I think I would be taken with it.

ADAM Before we get into the things that didn’t work, was there anything else that worked?

BROOM Much as during The Fox and the Hound, which this resembled, I felt like the setup itself was promising. There were moments when I was sincerely thinking about the storyline and the substance. People from two different worlds; how are they going to relate? Being forced to empathize with your supposed enemies.

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.

BROOM Which was more politically offensive, this or Pocahontas?

ADAM It’s interesting — 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.

BROOM I feel like we’re in pretty much the same dimension here as there.

ADAM Yeah, we’re talking about two “Great Spirit” movies. Maybe I’m teasing out distinctions that aren’t there.

BETH Maybe it feels like they should have known better by now.

ADAM It felt like they had a lot of Native American consultants working on this movie. There was probably a lot of very studied attention to dignified detail about Native Americans’ lives. Even though the characters were all named after cities in Alaska.

BROOM Pocahontas was more explicitly sanctimonious about multiculturalism. This was a movie about universal empathy. I felt like the construction of this movie had more to do with basic human issues than the construction of Pocahontas.

ADAM That was about the clash of two different cultures, yes.

BROOM This one is basically the same concept as in The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin turns him into animals so he can learn about life as an animal. So of their two “Indian” movies, this one felt less offensive to me as far as its Indianness.

ADAM Pocahontas just seemed a little daffier. It was less self-important, and thus easier to take.

BROOM Yes, its ridiculous musical sequences were at least a spectacle, unlike these.

ADAM “Did you ever hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?” I mean…!

BROOM The thing is, that’s kind of a catchy song, by comparison… Pocahontas is one of the very worst movies in the entire sequence thus far, I would say, and this project resembled it somewhat, but it failed in different ways.

ADAM 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.

BROOM Well, I think that’s the dimension in which the movie failed most significantly: it’s supposed to be all about character, and they didn’t give us real character. Not even in the designs.

BETH They hardly distinguished them. I didn’t even know who the main character was until the other one died.

BROOM A time-honored technique for directing the audience’s attention! Yeah, the dead one was the most charismatic of the three. And then the hero’s journey of discovery is supposed to be about him being a teenager who thinks he has all the answers but doesn’t, and 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!” That was it, and that’s why this was super-boring.

ADAM Did you like Tanana?

BROOM The grandmother? No.

ADAM She was only onscreen for about thirty seconds, which was weird. I thought she was going to come back in some way. I guess she comes back at the very very end.

BROOM Her design was gross. Her eyes were too big and her face was funny. I didn’t like her.

BETH I didn’t dislike her.

ADAM Did you like the little bro’ bear? I must say I found him sort of appealing and cute.

BETH I found him annoying.

ADAM It was too much, but there were aspects of him that got me. I teared up a little at the end.

BROOM Is that true? You don’t need to be ashamed about it.

ADAM I was embarrassed, but…

BETH No, it’s good!

BROOM Which part of the end?

ADAM When he decided to stay a bear!

BROOM You teared up because of the emotion of that? I was truly shocked by it.

BETH I was too.

BROOM It seemed like the wrong ending.

ADAM Can we talk about that?

BROOM and BETH Yes!

ADAM It is really weird, first of all. But maybe it’s just our human prejudice that makes us assume it’s better to be a human than a bear.

BETH But this guy has lived all of his life, except for a couple weeks, as a human.

ADAM He did look better as a bear.

BROOM Everyone looked better as a bear. The humans were all unappealing.

ADAM And he did have to atone in some way for killing Koda’s mother. It wouldn’t have been right to just leave Koda to his own devices after having killed his mother.

BROOM Did you get the impression that becoming a bear was presented as a noble sacrifice?

BETH No. He preferred being a bear.

ADAM It was like what’s-his-name staying on the Avatar planet at the end. Or like the Swiss family Robinson staying on the island.

BROOM But when I watch Close Encounters and he gets on that ship at the end, he’s done with planet Earth, I think, “whoa! I don’t know if that’s gonna work out for you!” And here, there was that, plus above and beyond that… The whole movie is presented as a coming-of-age story; like in The Sword in the Stone, this is all his education. You become an animal to learn something about God’s creation. But with this ending it seemed like they didn’t understand that, so the moral becomes “it’s good to be an animal.” It stops being about learning anything.

BETH Were we supposed to think that he decided to be a bear because he discovered that he loved his little brother bear?

BROOM “He needs me,” is what he said.

ADAM It would have been better if bear-to-human was a portal that they could slide through at will.

BETH It sounds like if you just go up to the top of that mountain you can switch.

BROOM It’s possible that some of these questions are answered in Brother Bear 2.

ADAM I was pleased that there were no overt fart jokes in this movie.

BROOM You’re right. The humor was terrible, but it was not infantile.

BETH But it was really bad.

ADAM The poster is a picture of Kenai and Koda in close-up, and the caption is “Nature Calls,” so I was worried. But it turned out to be more dignified than that.

BROOM Their indulgence of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis was way out of proportion. I mean, I’ve never thought those guys are funny.

BETH Those guys aren’t funny, and kids, especially, have no reason to think those guys are funny.

ADAM Canadian kids might.

BROOM You did laugh when he said “I love dew.”

BETH I did.

BROOM It was kind of funny. Anyway, I expected this movie to be bad because I expected it to be sanctimonious and grating, and it turned out to be bad because it was just boring. And thin. I felt like pretty much every element wasn’t really at the level of execution they should have held it to.

ADAM It was a writing failure most of all. I mentioned Bongo earlier. What was the plot of Bongo?

BROOM Uh, he’s a circus bear…

ADAM And then he has to go into the woods and be with wild bears, is that right?

BROOM Bears “say it with a slap!” That’s what I remember.

ADAM And it was super-boring.

BROOM Bears are boring!

ADAM Well, I don’t think we’re going to have to encounter them again.

BROOM Talk about Phil Collins a little bit.

BETH Among the worst songs. They’ve been bad for a while, but these were worse.

ADAM They were also surprisingly intrusive. They were just suddenly some Phil Collins extravaganza coming at you, at the worst times. That song about how everything sucks!

BETH There was no subtlety to the lyrics at all.

BROOM My favorite part of watching this was that during Adam’s favorite song he immediately started trying to learn the lyrics so that he could sing along with the choruses.

BETH “This is our festival… and best of all…”

ADAM When I saw that part, I thought, “I don’t want to be in a family with these other weird bears.” All of whom seemed self-absorbed or strange in a way that didn’t really make me want to hang out with them.

BROOM There’s something very odd about this discipline Disney has become dependent on, of having a series of original songs in a non-musical, where the songs have generic lyrics about the generic emotion of the moment — “The songs will not have lyrics alluding to bears, salmon, or fishing, because that would be embarrassing” —

ADAM It wouldn’t be marketable on a CD.

BROOM I think of it as going back to Toy Story, with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” but especially the song he sings when Buzz Lightyear is depressed, about “I won’t go sailing again,” which has to be kind of coy about how it relates to what’s actually going on. Because there are to be no songs explicitly about toys. This movie had four songs in that category. I think they do it because they think it’s less absurd than singing about bears, but it actually becomes more absurd. Here comes Tina Turner singing something — is she singing about this bear movie? Because that would be weird. But is she not singing about this bear movie? Because that’s even weirder! That’s how I felt, especially during that first song — the montage is “Welcome to our beautiful Inuit world,” but the song really didn’t directly support that at all.

ADAM Well, “My Heart Will Go On” isn’t really about the Titanic. And it is not coincidental that “My Heart Will Go On” was an extremely successful radio single.

BROOM There was one song in that movie and you only heard it over the credits. That’s standard.

ADAM You heard it throughout, you just only heard the lyrics over the credits. And, like, what was the song for Pearl Harbor?

BROOM Yeah, but that’s how things have been forever. Since the 60s at least.

ADAM “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing.” [ed.: Armageddon]

BROOM We’re watching a scene where a man who killed a bear and then got turned into a bear is telling the son of the bear he killed that he used to be a man and that he killed his mother. That’s a very weird scene, and it’s the pivotal scene in this movie. And Phil Collins is singing a song as though it’s something you might have heard already on the radio… but it’s about that! When you listen to what he’s saying, he’s definitely singing about this bizarre scenario, but in code! There’s something very strange about that. And those lyrics were really grim. The lyrics of “Theme from Brother Bear” are, like, “There’s no way out of this dark place…”

ADAM Did this movie make you want to be a bear more than before? I would say “yes, a little.”

BETH No.

ADAM But only in prehistoric Alaska. It seemed fun when they were fishing.

BROOM Yes, obviously, being part of their festival seemed like it would have been a good time.

BETH There was a waterslide.

ADAM You’re right, all the landscapes did sort of look like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

BETH Yeah. But I like that!

ADAM And they have the garish coloration of the line for Splash Mountain.

BROOM Yeah. It felt like a resort. And, I guess, who doesn’t like a resort?

ADAM The color of those rocks in the menu is, like, Dusty Sedona.

BETH It looks almost like an early video game.

ADAM Like “Monkey Island.”

BROOM Yeah, like one of those adventure games. An “I can’t reach that from here” game.

BETH Where they only had thirty-two colors to work with, so they were all very extreme.

BROOM Well, this would be a two-hundred-fifty-six color game.

BETH Sorry!

ADAM VGA.

BROOM That’s right.

ADAM I didn’t detect anything gay in this movie.

BROOM There was no romance of any kind. There were no women.

ADAM There was a little bit of feminine panic at the beginning, when he was like “Love? What a stupid totem!” “Hey, loverboy!”

BROOM I actually thought that was promising! I thought the best thing in the script was that he gets told his totem is love and he’s like, “Ugh, I don’t want that.” I was ready to get on board. I thought, “yeah, it’s going to be about him learning that love is not something mushy to be embarrassed about, it’s a spiritual and important thing.” That seemed like a good theme for a movie. But no.

[the review is read]

ADAM You wanted to talk about the widescreen? [ed. The first 24 minutes are standard ratio; the image becomes widescreen after the character is transformed into a bear]

BROOM Strange gimmick! When there was that message before the movie warning us that it was going to happen, I thought, “This is critic bait, so that there’d be something to write about in the papers. They did this so they could PR it out there that they had done this.” And yet Stephen Holden didn’t even mention it. I feel like I’ve heard of maybe one other movie that changes the aspect ratio in the middle.

BETH I think I’ve seen a movie that does it but I can’t remember what.

BROOM I thought it was going to happen as we watched, that the image would spread and get wider and wider. But no; it went black for five seconds, and then came back at the full ratio with a not-particularly-impressive first shot.

BETH It was a callback to The Wizard of Oz, kind of.

BROOM But I thought it would be like that, where a door opens and something is wonderful on the other side.

BETH Well, his eyes open and he’s sort of blurrily looking around.

ADAM Meh. It was an underwhelming effect for being trumpeted the way it was.

BETH I wanted to mention that there were “handheld” shots during the killing of the bear, which we haven’t seen before.

BROOM Yes, another technical idea that didn’t work.

[as counterpoint we read the heartfelt five-star reader review from the New York Times review page]

ADAM The person who wrote that comment has a “BELIEVE” bumper sticker on the back of their car, with a mandala and a star of David…

BROOM “Recommended by zero Readers.” Well, the point that there is no villain in the movie is well taken. And yet the movie fails, because they didn’t do a good job.

ADAM I kept thinking about William Faulkner’s “The Bear” while I watched this. And I thought, maybe Faulkner could have learned a thing or two. Imagine how that story would have been improved if there had been a bear’s-eye-view chapter. I think I’m done now.

BROOM Yeah, because we have miles to go before we sleep.

ADAM I think the fact that that was surprisingly entertaining is a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, who totally carried this movie.

BROOM I don’t know that it was carried. But I think you’re right.

ADAM It was entirely faithful to the actual plot of Treasure Island, until the end, and surprisingly compelling. It wasn’t Disney-stupid-plotted, the way they all are.

BETH So why isn’t it more revered?

BROOM I would ask “Why isn’t it more good?” Are you suggesting that this movie deserves a better reputation?

BETH Well…

ADAM It wasn’t a world-class movie, but it was solid. I was entertained the entire time.

BETH I was entertained by it.

BROOM I found it so weird. Did you guys not have the experience I had that this was super super weird? I get that it was in outer space, but it was a weird outer space that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know what the rules were.

ADAM I stopped worrying about that halfway through, when I decided it was “steampunk,” rather than just nonsensical. A steampunk Treasure Island is a great idea.

BROOM It wasn’t really steampunk, though. It was just whatever they thought of. And the stuff they thought of was weird! 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. I thought you guys were going to feel the same way!

BETH I just accepted it on its own terms. The thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was just like my brother.

ADAM He was?

BETH He looked like my brother as a teenager. He had my brother’s hair and some of his personality, and the song was like something my brother would have played on his guitar.

ADAM And it felt weird because you were crushing on him a little bit, right?

BETH No!

ADAM Hear her guilty laugh?

BROOM I think it’s just an uncomfortable laugh.

BETH Unlike you, Adam, I don’t get crushes on cartoon characters.

BROOM And you would tell us if you did.

BETH I would. I would admit it.

ADAM It did bother me at the beginning that there were no coherent rules of space and time.

BROOM There were no rules of anything. Like, what is normal and what isn’t? When you go on an adventure within a fantasy world, there needs to be a sense of what is out of the ordinary for the characters. In Star Wars, when they go to the port city, they make very clear that “this is a sleazy and dangerous place,” and when you see all kinds of aliens, you understand that in the characters’ world, it’s weird to them to be among all these lowlifes and foreigners, but it is not inherently weird to them that they are aliens, or that they are space travelers. Or when Darth Vader attacks, we understand that it’s bad news, and an unexpected event, but that it’s not weird that he travels in a spaceship or wears a helmet. But in this movie, there’d be a big fanfare and we’d see a vista, and I’d have no idea whether Jim is thinking “Oh my god, it’s an amazing space station!” or if he’s just thinking, “shrug, space station.” And that’s really disorienting.

ADAM Did it bother you that his mother was wearing a kerchief, but on a space station?

BROOM The mom looked like she was sixteen!

BETH Yeah, “twelve years later” she hadn’t aged at all.

BROOM She looked like she was his girlfriend.

ADAM It was a little uncomfortable when they were dancing together.

BROOM The mom had no characterization at all. And in the opening scene when he’s a little kid, other than having a magical talking book, he and his mom are basically in a modern suburban bedroom. But then you find out that she actually runs the Admiral Benbow Inn, and their world is actually 18th-century old-timey. Plus robots. The whole idea of that kind of mix-and-match is from a strain of high-concept sci-fi fantasy writing that started to go in that direction — I don’t know when, the 70s and 80s maybe — but it shows up here without the kind of intellectual excitement that needs to motivate it. Steampunk was supposed to be this, like, stimulating mashup, but this just seemed like… a bizarre mix of things.

ADAM I was using the idea of steampunk as a way to get through the movie, and it made me feel better about it. Because then I didn’t have to wonder things like “why are they steering with a big wheel?”

BROOM It wasn’t really that I had a lot of explicit questions. I just felt ungrounded. And, to be honest, by the second half the movie I was having an easier time with it.

ADAM Partly because it isn’t plotted like a traditional Disney movie, many of the hiccuppy Disney things we dislike weren’t in this one. I mean, I guess there was a sort of an “I wanna know!” musical moment at the beginning, but not really.

BROOM But ultimately this wasn’t the same as the story of Treasure Island. And they abused the Long John Silver relationship.

ADAM It was exactly the same!

BROOM In Treasure Island, Jim develops a sort of false father-relationship with Long John Silver— in a much more subtle way, not during a falling-in-love montage, which is basically what we had here — and then his trust is betrayed. And Long John Silver continues to manipulate the relationship even as there’s something authentic about it, and this is a troubling source of poignancy. It’s not just, like, “is he a good guy or a bad guy?” He’s a mixed character, and Jim has to learn his independence from him. Rather than getting to a place where he’s sniffling “Awright, y’old pirate, I got somethin’ in my eye, goobye!” at the end.

ADAM I understand. The book’s Long John Silver isn’t a good guy, whereas this Long John Silver is a good guy.

BROOM Well, he wasn’t a good guy either, even though they ended with this sentimental parting and then his face in a magic cloud. He didn’t actually do anything that made him more of a good guy.

ADAM Yes he did! He let the treasure go to save Jim’s life!

BROOM All right. But he also threatened to kill Jim several times before that.

ADAM Before that! That’s because he too had some growing to do. Of course this is not as morally complex as a novel.

BROOM It was totally unbelievable that he would let the treasure go to save Jim’s life. (Also, it’s totally unbelievable that an entire planet is a machine full of space pirate treasure! Just kidding.) But really, when Long John Silver makes this momentous choice to give up all the treasure and save Jim instead, his line is just something like, “Ohhhhh fine I’ll do it!” And then seconds later the movie itself is making fun of it, when he says “It’s just a lifelong obsession; I’ll get over it.” That’s the writers doing a lazy thing that’s very popular these days, where a script says outright, “We know the story logic doesn’t really work! Ha ha ha ha! Sarcasm!” The Simpsons does this all the time. But the point on The Simpsons is “you can’t take this seriously!” A Disney movie shouldn’t do that. And it did it several more times, too. “Oh, of course this doesn’t make sense, but this is funny patter and it’s clever and sly of us to acknowledge it!” But it really didn’t make sense.

ADAM Well, obviously, it’s not as good as the novel. But I thought the very idea of having moral complexity in the villain at all 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. More than you can say for Uncle Scar.

BROOM Once I saw that the movie was going to go in that direction — they show us Jim losing his real father, and then gaining this new father figure — I thought, “wow, do they have the guts to actually go through with this? To go where the story goes?” Which is that Jim comes of age. He has to recognize that his father figure is flawed, and he has to choose to be without a father, to be independent. And that is not what happened in this movie.

ADAM Well, that would be more of a downer. I mean, come on.

BETH But he shows that he’s independent when he…

BROOM Surfs.

BETH Exactly. When he surfs to save the ship.

BROOM Well, at least it was better than Atlantis.

ADAM I liked that this was a Disney movie where the father was gone and not the mother, for a change.

BROOM The mother was more or less gone. That character was nothing. Those opening scenes were the worst, because I wanted to get my bearings, and they were just giving me this mother who was like a half-baked non-character from a nineties sitcom. She didn’t have anything at all to do with the milieu.

ADAM She was a little like the Malcolm in the Middle mother.

BROOM No, that character was sort of crazed and funny. This mother was, like, Courteney Cox. “Hi, I’m some lady. I guess I’m playing some lady!” She was nothing.

BETH She didn’t have a lot to work with.

BROOM I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt did maybe too conscientious a job trying to “act” the “part.” But it’s strange to hear someone trying to find the truth in stuff like “by the solar flares of Arcturus, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” All these stupid lines.

ADAM I think the guy who did Long John Silver was very good.

BROOM Yeah, he did a pretty good job.

ADAM This was exactly how I think of Long John Silver. Is that because I’ve seen some other depiction of Treasure Island where he’s just like this?

BROOM Well, the most famous one is the Disney one from the fifties, which is supposed to be good. I haven’t seen that since elementary school. I’d watch that again.

ADAM I thought it was good that Scroop was scary, and a real villain, but that there was just a little of him, not too much.

BROOM There was a character like that in the book, right?

ADAM Yes. They fight in the rigging and he falls into the water and dies. It’s all exactly like this. That’s partly why I liked the movie, because I just read Treasure Island and every time something happened, I would think, “Oh! Now he’s in the apple barrel!”

BROOM Except of course here it was a space-ple barrel. And as with everything in this movie, a space apple means some kind of gross squirting equivalent to an apple. Everything in the movie had been altered to look more like an avocado.

ADAM But nonetheless, it was satisfying that it was tracking so closely to this book that I very much enjoyed.

BROOM I’m glad you enjoyed the book. I agree that’s a good time.

BETH It’s a very good book.

ADAM The movie did have some frustrating “It’s the nineties, mom!” sort of intrusions. But not that many, and they seemed to feel embarrassed about them. They put most of them in the mouth of the nerdy scholar character.

BROOM I hated him. He didn’t contribute anything.

BETH And then there was that robot, too.

ADAM Ben Gunn?

BROOM I thought Ben Gunn was better than David Hyde Pierce’s character. And why was Emma Thompson in this at all? Why did there have to be a half-baked love story?

ADAM Why not?

BROOM “We have a strong woman character! oh she got injured, she’s going to lie down now.”

ADAM That’s what happens in the book!

BROOM The character’s not a woman in the book. And she had to have these weird fetish stockings. And her weird cat-face wasn’t…

BETH Attractive.

BROOM … or comforting or anything. She looked alien.

ADAM She was an alien!

BROOM The aliens looked alien in a way that didn’t make me feel at home.

ADAM You didn’t look at Mr. Arrow and think, “now there’s a stand-up guy”?

BROOM The rock-face guy?

ADAM The rhinoceros, yeah.

BROOM He was a rhinoceros? I thought he was a rock monster.

ADAM I thought he was a rhinoceros.

BETH I thought he was more like a rock monster.

ADAM Like a rhinoceros made of rocks.

BROOM Okay, I’ll work with that.

ADAM Go back and look. You’ll see.

BROOM Here’s what I was thinking during the movie: “I don’t want to be having critical ‘Disney’s gone downhill’ thoughts. Those are adult thoughts that are irrelevant to the intended audience. So let me watch it the way I would have as a kid, which means opening myself to not caring, and not caring that I don’t care.” It also means opening yourself up to be disoriented. As an adult, I can generally work out the rationales behind things, but if I don’t do that and just watch it, will I be disoriented? And I was. And I figured that when I was a kid, I would have just accepted that disorientation. And that maybe it’s supposed to be part of the fun of fantasy that everything is so weird. But then I was like, “but I don’t like this feeling! I prefer to know what’s going on!”

ADAM I spent most of the time thinking things like “I wonder if they’re going to put him in the apple barrel!” I was disappointed that the complex chess of their face-off on the island didn’t come to pass. Or the part where he pretends to be a ghost and scares off the crew.

BROOM When the book gets to be military tactics about the siege of the fort, that’s less interesting to me, and I appreciated them cutting that out. But you apparently like that part.

ADAM I didn’t dislike that part. You don’t like the way he sneaks on to the boat and pilots it to the north cove?

BROOM No, watching him sneaking around the island is good. But it does feel like a cheat to me — I think I wrote this on my site years ago — that in this book for kids about buried treasure, when they get to X marks the spot, it’s not actually there anymore and you’re denied the scene you’ve been looking forward to, where they’d dig up the hidden chest and open it and see a lot of sparkling gold. Ben Gunn already has it in his cave, right?

ADAM Yeah. But you get to go in the cave and see it there.

BROOM Yeah, but there’s not a proper Howard Carter reveal moment. Here they had a moment like that, but it was pretty ridiculous.

ADAM That the treasure of a thousand worlds is mostly rings. Aliens don’t even have fingers!

BROOM What’s really ridiculous is that the booby trap destroys everything! It doesn’t just kill the intruders, which would have made sense, but destroys the entire treasure. “Someone tried to get in and steal it? Well then, the time has come for all of it to be destroyed!”

ADAM But that’s just because it turned into Indiana Jones at the end.

BETH Exactly. It was just like that.

BROOM But even in Indiana Jones, the traps are there to kill the people.

BETH And the treasure. Everything is destroyed.

ADAM That’s just what it was. They were like, “we’re bored by Treasure Island so we’re going to switch to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”

BROOM But hold on. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there are traps to prevent people from getting to the treasure. And then at the end, there’s a restriction on the Holy Grail that you can’t take it out, and when they try to take it out, it triggers the entire structure to collapse on them rather than the Holy Grail leave the temple. That’s not the same thing as…

ADAM They also did the “I can’t save them both!” moment of reaching.

BROOM Yes. That was stolen directly. It was also stupid that with all of this incredible sci-fi magic going on, their presence is triggered by them walking through an ankle-height museum security red laser.

BETH It’s the nineties!

ADAM They needed to show it somehow. What other way can you think of to economically signal “booby trap”? It’s like Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise is dangling from the ceiling with the beams around him.

BROOM Or the classic Entrapment with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. They could have just shown it like in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he thinks he’s outwitted the hidden mechanism, but then you see it shift and start up.

BETH But that takes too long.

BROOM You’re defending it? You just don’t like my tone. You want me to stop complaining.

BETH I just don’t have a problem with their stupid laser.

ADAM Broom, this is as good as it’s gonna get for a while!

BROOM I know.

ADAM I don’t have anything gay to say about this.

BROOM Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

ADAM He’s not gay.

BROOM He’s not?

ADAM No.

BROOM Let’s look this up.

ADAM I’m sure there will be unscrupulous gossip. I’m sure the first search after his name will be “Joseph Gordon-Levitt GAY.”

BROOM And you know that he’s not?

BETH I’ve looked him up. I don’t think he is.

ADAM I’m pretty well-informed about these sorts of things.

[He is looked up. He is probably not gay]

BROOM I’ve talked before about kids’ movies in the 80s having nobody at the wheel, how they got really harsh and brutal and dirty. Feeling a little disoriented this time made me think, “Maybe that was actually just the time in my life when I was open and vulnerable enough to be affected by such things. Maybe if I let myself be affected by it now it’s still there.” Or maybe I was overplaying the sense that it was creepy to try to get that feeling back. But it was genuinely a strain for me to feel at home with this, and I don’t think it’s just because everyone was a snail. I think it’s also because there’s less warmth than I want. There’s just less warmth in most 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.

ADAM Everything they put it in it that was not in the original made it worse.

BROOM Going back to what it’s like to watch movies as a kid: a kid has such a strong intuitive sense of who are the nice people, and where love is potentially going to come from; might it come from these people? And that’s why people love The Wizard of Oz, because when she says “I’m gonna miss you most of all,” you as a kid think, “yeah, because he’s nice! He’s a nice guy, that scarecrow!” In this movie, and most of these recent Disney movies, there’s no-one in it that I as a kid would have trusted. And I don’t think it has to be that way.

ADAM I think I would have thought the mom was nice, and that Jim was nice but cool, and that Long John Silver was nice ultimately. And I would have been relieved that Long John Silver turned out to be nice. And I would have known that the captain was nice but stern. And that the professor was nice but ineffectual.

BETH They’re all nice, but the underlying emotion is not there. You know these characters are supposed to be nice, but you don’t feel it.

BROOM And that distinction is something that kids definitely have access to. I remember being able to distinguish between movies that were obviously supposed to be one thing but kind of felt like something else, and the movies that actually felt the way they were supposed to. Like The Secret of Nimh, or The Last Unicorn… there were these animated movies that were a little bit less inviting than it seemed like they believed they were. And it was like that scary aspect to them was in part the sense that, like, no-one’s going to give you a hug, here. Even when they hug each other, they wouldn’t give you a hug. I don’t quite know how to put it. But that’s what I started to feel when I asked myself what this movie felt like.

ADAM “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

BROOM Yeah, butter wouldn’t melt in this studio’s mouth. Like a bad babysitter. Someone who doesn’t really know how to babysit who comes over and is like [gratingly] “all right, so what do you kids do?” That’s the feeling I get off the recent Disney movies.

ADAM Let’s read the review.

BETH I think the New York Times will basically like it.

ADAM I think they will appreciate the historicity.

BROOM They sometimes show up and say the cranky stuff that I say, like, “Look how Disney has fallen in this era.”

[We read it. It is very negative.]

ADAM Oof.

BROOM I think he’s right.

ADAM We’re grading on a curve.

BROOM A problem I’ve been thinking about a lot, in my life, is how to hold to one’s own opinions and standards in the face of a context that seems to imply a different set of standards. And that’s how we’re reacting to these movies. “Okay, so this is what this movie was; how good was it at being that?” And I think it’s a useful to me when there’s a review like this that holds its ground and says “That, the thing itself, sucks! The ‘bad parts’ are not the only thing that was bad about this.” I feel like, “Right! That’s what I need to learn to do all the time.” So, then, you might well ask, why are we watching all the Disney movies? Seeing as we’re well below sea level at this point? Uh… Well, I thought Lilo and Stitch was pretty entertaining and pretty sweet, and I didn’t have a problem with that.

ADAM It certainly seemed more sincere than this. But this was better than that review. He only wrote it that way because he hasn’t yet seen…

BROOM The next one.

BETH I don’t know how to watch them if I have to think of my actual response.

ADAM Yeah, if she had to engage with it sincerely, she’d be like, “What are we doing??”

BROOM Yeah, I don’t think you’ve said enough, Beth. Say more before we end this.

BETH I don’t know how to watch Disney movies if I’m supposed to actually think about them for real.

BROOM You’re allowed to be really angry and disgusted if that’s where it takes you.

BETH I don’t know. I would fall asleep in order to avoid watching that movie, if I was watching it for real. I considered it, while watching. I was thinking, “I feel kinda tired; maybe I’ll just fall asleep.” But then I thought, “No! I need to do this. I want to be present for this.” And then I made it be okay! I changed whatever I was seeing into something that was okay.

ADAM She made her own context!

BROOM But that’s scary. Does that not scare you?

BETH It didn’t feel scary to be doing it.

BROOM So basically, I create this context, by being a weird OCD taskmaster who creates a context where you must stay awake during this movie and then you must talk about it as though it were a movie worth talking about. And so you construct whatever brain you need to make that happen, instead of going to sleep, which is your actual critical take on the movie.

BETH Essentially.

ADAM Oh man! I gotta go.

 

[he goes to get his things]

BETH So… I’m serious. I don’t even know how to respond to this with my real brain. I don’t have any criticism of it because I made it be okay, so I could watch it. And now I just accept it. I just accept what it was.

BROOM Right. So my question is — and this is hard for me too — if your real brain would go to sleep, do you have an option in between? Something like, “I’m not going to stop paying attention, but I’m allowed to get angrier and angrier about how my time is being wasted”?

BETH I probably do. There is probably some kind of middle ground. I’m just not sure how to access anything other than, like, what I really feel, which is “I don’t want to watch this! I really don’t think this is good!”

BROOM But you’re on board with this project as being kind of fun in theory.

BETH Yes, yes, yes! I am.

BROOM So how does that part of you relate to the part of you whose real response is “I don’t want to watch this”? Can it not say, “I’m going to be righteously pissed off at Disney at the end of this”? Because the choice to go to sleep is itself a kind of “making it okay,” by zoning out. Are you afraid to be angry?

BETH No. I don’t know.

BROOM Are you afraid to be a mean critic of an innocent little puppy like a Disney movie? Because it’s not an innocent little puppy!

[Adam goes]

BROOM I’m going to transcribe at least everything up to this point. His discomfort with this part of the conversation is part of the conversation.

BETH I was trying to watch it openly, like a kid. Because that’s something we’ve been talking about, and, like you were saying earlier about music, if you open yourself to things, you can pretty much like anything. You don’t need to be critical about things, you can just accept them. And so I felt like that’s where I got with this. I just accepted everything about it. So it started, and I thought, “Oh my god, this is really lame. This is really lame.” And then I just switched into a mode where I thought, “Just let it wash over you; just let it be what it is.” But from there I’m not thinking critically. I’m not thinking like a film student. I’m not thinking analytically about it. I’m just watching it.

BROOM All of the things I have to say afterward, it always takes me a little time to let them precipitate into words. And that’s because, like I said, I’m trying to do that too. And this time, the genuine experience I was having was that I felt a little funny about it. Which is a totally legitimate response. The innocent, open part that a kid does is to watch something and at the end feel like, “I felt weird while I was watching that,” or “I didn’t feel anything while I was watching that.” And analytical criticism is just to then say, “Well, I want more than that from movies. Why didn’t that work? Let me try to figure out what just what on.” That’s what my family always used to do. We wouldn’t go to the movies with a plan like “and then we’re going to talk about it!!” We just went to the movies. But then afterward, the processing would always begin, where we’d all want to talk about what that thing was that just happened to us, which had been completely unspoken at the time.

BETH But you know, I feel a little bit numb, like nothing happened to me. And it’s because I put myself into a place where I wasn’t going to actually experience it, I was just going to “take it in,” sort of removed.

BROOM Maybe there’s different categories of these things. Because “just taking it in” feels very natural and complete to me. But your feeling like you didn’t actually experience anything because you “just took it in” means something must have been blocked out. I was trying to “just take it in” in the sense of quieting my tendencies to analyze until afterward. But in the process I was experiencing things that made me feel mildly weird.

BETH I just wasn’t feeling anything. I don’t know.

BROOM Like watching a McDonald’s commercial.

BETH I guess.

BROOM That was another thought I had. When I was a kid, there was just crap on TV all the time, which I would just watch as itself. I wouldn’t constantly think “Is culture good? Is this a good commercial?”

BETH I feel like this is something I would see at my cousin’s house, at someone else’s house. At times like that I would think, “Okay, this is what’s going to be happening for the next hour and a half; I’m just going to roll with it.” And that’s what this felt like. I kept looking at the clock. Which I always do when I’m watching one of these.

BROOM I remember in high school once being at someone’s house with people who were being nostalgic for their earlier youth, as happens in high school, and they had the laserdisc of The Chipmunk Adventure — the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie — and the girl whose house it was was saying “Oh my god! This music!” And they watched the whole movie — “they” included me — which was a movie of no nostalgic significance to me and of no artistic significance to anyone. And it was just a case of “Well, now I have to sit and wait until this is over.” And that thought was not me having a higher critical standard, it’s just what the movie was. And yes, that is what this movie was too! And so the challenge here is that now we want to try to put that into words. So if that’s what you have to say, go for it.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That it was a nothing wasn’t surprising to me, though it was a little surprising that it was sort of weird and gross.

BETH That you thought it was weird and gross is surprising to me, because I didn’t have any thought like that, once. I didn’t think “this is weird” even once. I just thought “This is it. This is what I’m watching.” So then I feel like, “What did I do to myself to make it impossible to feel this?”

BROOM Maybe you’re just not as oversensitive as I am to weirdnesses like that. I have always been very ready to feel, like, “uh-oh, that texture is weird, it makes me vaguely uneasy!” I don’t think that’s necessarily universal.

BETH I don’t know.

BROOM I remember when I was a kid and He-Man would be on, I would think “I don’t understand how anybody could like this; this is not my show,” and occasionally I would also think, “It’s so weird and boring and foreign that its foreignness is a little creepy.”

BETH I felt that way about He-Man too. It was so dark — visually dark — that there was a sense of darkness in the cartoon.

[we go on at length about what was uninviting about He-Man]

BROOM And there was something in either just the aesthetic experience of contemplating that, or else in the attempt to get there, the experience of trying to be the kind of person it was for, or trying to understand who it was for and getting lost. “Where and what is this for?” This is, yes, what you would see at someone else’s house. This matches someone else’s world. This is someone else’s horizon. And that would make me a little uncomfortable.

BETH Yeah, I experienced that kind of thing all the time, as a kid. And I know that probably, if I were a kid, this would also give me that feeling, but I didn’t feel anything.

BROOM Was there anything in this movie that when you were a kid would have struck your fancy, even through a veil of total disinterest? Anything, like, “hey, that ball looks like it’d be fun to hold,” or something like that?

BETH Well, I think I probably would have thought Morph was cute. I think that would be it.

BROOM Morph to me sums up what was creepy about this movie. Because some of it was cute, but then again… He was like a blop of spilled Pepto-Bismol, and, like, they hugged him. He had no motivation. He was capable of absolutely anything. He wasn’t really on the side of good or bad. He was scary in the way that worms are scary to me, because, like, “they can move…but what are they??” And yet sometimes he was cute. And that’s a weird razor’s edge to be playing on.

BETH Yeah. It was unusual. You’re right, it was a weird movie. It was weird that they did that to the story. Most of the characters were unlikable. Even the main character wasn’t really likable.

BROOM He was a troubled kid, and you hoped one day he’d be untroubled. And then they say, “yeah, he’s at military school now and everything’s great,” but you didn’t get to actually feel like “I like him now!”

BETH He really just looked like my brother at seventeen, with his parted hair and dour, overly-sensitive demeanor.

BROOM But your father didn’t walk out on your brother. It’s God that walked out on your brother. He went off to sail the seas of space and never returned.

BETH Are you recording this?

BROOM I am. I may not transcribe all of it. But I may. You never know. I may transcribe it in a smaller font after Adam goes.

BETH I’m done.