Thursday, December 1st, 2011
The Muppets
It’s easy to get a Jim Henson contact high from watching The Muppets—even if, as Dana Stevens eloquently puts it, it’s just as easy to “kvetch and cavil about the details” like Statler and Waldorf, the ever-senescent season-ticket holders counted on to lob verbal tomatoes from the balcony. We begin the journey in Smalltown, U.S.A., [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Tron: Legacy
It being a Disney movie, the hero of Tron: Legacy never inserts his hard drive into his paramour’s sex drive; they don’t even cyber. If they had, they might have prompted an error message: The film is destined to produce computer-generated progeny of its own. That said, I actually kinda enjoyed this software saga; I’m [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 deserves the praise it’s been given; and, to my surprise, the 15-year lag between this film and its progenitor actually serves to enhance its poignancy. When, in this installment, the playthings are exiled to a daycare center, it seems more like an old-folks’ home. Their owner, Andy, is off to college; his [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Ponyo
Escaping the balmy summer heat in an air-conditioned theater playing Ponyo is like taking an epistemic holiday. Arguably, I suppose, one could say that about many movies―particularly foreign ones―and that’s certainly one of the medium’s charms; but rarely are movies as breezily surreal as this animated import by Hayao Miyazaki. The setting is not far [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Up
These days, Pixar stands alone in being a reliable source for “family” entertainment that doesn’t leave any quarters cringing. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I recoil whenever anyone self-identifies as a “Pixar dork”—as if it were unusual to appreciate something that’s both critically acclaimed and gobbled up by the masses. That peculiarly self-serving form [...]