Reviews and commentary about current and classic cinema. Curated by Stanford Clark.
I am drowning my sorrows from the Los Angeles Dodgers’ NLDS loss last night with this fun new trailer and poster for Pixar’s next animated feature Onward.
And check out this fun trailer reaction video with the film’s stars Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.
And here’s the new poster art.
This movie looks weird, wild, and wonderful. Can’t wait to see it.
Onward opens in theaters on March 6, 2020.
Some serious marketing started today for Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 58th animated motion picture Frozen 2. A new poster along with a new “special look” video have been plastered all over social media.
The new poster is spiffy.
And this “special look” video includes some of the new song “Into the Unknown” written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and sung by the voice of Elsa herself, Idina Menzel.
Frozen 2 opens in theaters November 22.
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Saw the 40th anniversary screening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) on the big screen this week courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Fathom Events.
Check out this interesting interview with special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull about the making of the film from the official Star Trek website.
I also thought this interview with composer Jerry Goldsmith was interesting, too.
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Welcome to this week’s podcast! Hope you all had a great end to your summer.
It Chapter Two (Warner Bros.)
I talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2019 D23 Expo, held in Anaheim, California on August 23-25, 2019.
Make sure to check out the cool D23 sizzle reel of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Here’s the trailer for Pixar Animation Studios’ Onward.
Disney+ launches on November 12. Looks great, can’t wait!
(And I meant to say Fess Parker as the star of Davy Crockett…my bad.)
Listen to the podcast below or subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes. Have fun at the movies this week and thanks again for tuning in.
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In today’s podcast, I share my thoughts about Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (Universal, 2019). Also, I discuss the past, present, and future of the Fast and Furious film series.
Ludacris, who stars in many of the Fast and Furious movies, recently posted this to his Instagram feed.
Vin Diesel has been posting pics from the FF9 set on Instagram, too. Here’s one of them.
Listen to the podcast below or subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes. Have fun at the movies this week and thanks again for tuning in.
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Three classic films to discuss this week:
Listen to the podcast below or subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes. Have fun at the movies this week and thanks again for tuning in.
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The Lion King (2019) remake from The Walt Disney Studios. I reviewed this film on last week’s podcast and on the blog, too.
Listen to the podcast below or subscribe to the podcast on Apple iTunes. Have fun at the movies this week and thanks again for tuning in.
Fancy technology and new CGI tools can’t save this dull, uninspired remake of Disney’s beloved animated musical The Lion King.
Directed by Jon Favreau [Iron Man (2008), The Jungle Book (2016)], this new photorealistic re-telling of The Lion King is mostly a shot-for-shot and almost word-for-word remake of the 1994 original animated film from Disney Animation. The filmmakers have provided us with a beautifully-shot nature documentary-style of film (with animals that speak English, that is…) that sacrifices art for realism.
The realism, while very well done, strips the story of one of the things that made it great in the first place—the incredible art and animation created by the artists at Walt Disney Animation Studios. Without the art and heightened interpretation of the natural world as done by the Disney Animation team, the film just becomes an impressive but lifeless technological shell of its former self.
A major disappointment in choosing to follow the original script so closely is that the new vocal and musical artists brought on board (namely Donald Glover, the voice of grown-up Simba, Beyoncé, the voice of grown-up Nala, and music producer Pharell Williams) weren’t given anything new or interesting to do (Beyoncé gets half a new song near the end of Act II and is also involved with a Lion King-inspired album soon to be released but that’s it). I hate to be prescriptive here, but I was hoping for at least some new songs or some new material for these incredibly talented people to participate in that would make this re-telling more unique (think of what Disney did with the Broadway production of The Lion King).
The comic relief characters Timon (voiced by Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (voiced by Seth Rogen) are funny enough and, thankfully, get a new line or two that actually made me laugh, but still should have been given more to do as well. And, sadly, the great actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s interpretation of the villainous Scar can’t compare with the campy and scary performance of Jeremy Irons from the original animated film.
Every five minutes during the screening, I just wanted the projectionist to roll the 1994 original instead of this needless, uninventive rehash. I know that Disney is probably not going to stop with these remakes, at least not in my lifetime, but I sure wish they would just appropriately honor and re-release the original animated films on the big screen and focus their tremendous creative and financial resources in more original ways.
The Lion King remake is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for “sequences of violence and peril, and some thematic elements.”
My score: 2 out of 5 stars
Images ©️ Disney
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The Lion King (2019) remake from Disney; opens in theaters July 19
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is playing films from 1939, aka “Hollywood’s Greatest Year,” every Friday in July. Check out the full schedule here. Also make sure to check out the excellent TCM-produced documentary about 1939 on Friday, July 6 at 6:45 PM ET.
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Thanks for tuning in to this week’s podcast! And Happy U.S. Independence Day to you and yours!
Spoiler-free review of Spider-Man: Far From Home
I’m halfway through my TCM Essentials viewing project. Three recent films of note were all from the mid- to late-1940s:
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