Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I enjoyed:
Cinderella (2015)
The Jungle Book (2016)
Pete’s Dragon (2014)
Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I did not enjoy:
Beauty and the Beast (2017)
The Lion King (2019)
Now, I could go into each and explain the things that I did and did not like about each movie (and certainly, there were things I did and did not like in each one), but given the amount and the general structure of these remakes, plus general quandary that are the Alice and Maleficent live action films, there is a question that mostmany some people ask which is:
Today marks the 90th anniversary of the premier of “Steamboat Willie”, which Disney marks as the birthday of one Mickey Mouse. Mickey is a bit hard to write about, because what do you say? Walt was very good at writing a story, and his story about Mickey is more or less the story of the company itself. With Mickey as the company mascot, the two are so entwined that to tell the history of one precludes the other. Mickey is such an iconic symbol he is recognized across the world, as recognizable as the Buddha, Jesus, and the Coca-Cola logo.
But he’s also a character.
He’s been in shorts, in films, on TV, on radio, in comics– if Disney could make it, Mickey was on it. Lunch boxes. Toothbrushes. Gas masks. There is a definitive character to him, a distinctive “Mickeyness” that he has no matter where he is.
“…the effect of that huge surface environment, on you, personally, is vast. The effect of the program is incidental.” – Marshall McLuhan
“The medium is the message” is one of those concepts that sounds too simple considering how big and important it is– kind of like how E = mc2 doesn’t look to be the groundbreaking revolution of 20th century physics that it is. “The medium is the message” is about how the mediums and technologies change our lives in a more immediate and concrete sense than any one idea, even looking across history. Which had more impact, Martin Luther’s 95 theses or Gutenberg’s printing press? Which was more important, the Ford Model T or the assembly line? Which shaped the 20th century more, Einstein’s theory of relativity or the atom bomb? McLuhan focused on the transition of popular media from print (books, magazines, etc.) to electronic (radio and television). His point was that the invention of the television and its use as a commercial home appliance had a more direct and immediate impact on our culture than any individual program televised. It’s not that the programs don’t matter, it’s that the technologies through which those ideas travel are often overlooked in favor of those ideas.
So why am I talking about a theme park?
James Cameron’s Avatar was… not a good movie. I mean, yes, it’s gorgeous and the technology used to create the film is fascinating, but as a movie? Can you name five characters from Avatar? Or describe the plot in a sentence without using the words “Pocahontas” or “FernGully”? Avatar is actually one of the most clear examples of “the medium is the message”, in that the plot and ideas of Avatar matter far less to the world writ large than the impact of the technologies that were used and developed in its filming. Avatar changed the way we make movies far more than it did any particular aspect of storytelling. So when Disney adapted the world to a theme park, it actually made more sense than it seemed. Avatar was always more about immersing the viewer in its environment than its story, which makes it perfect for the medium of theme parks.
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” – Jean Baudrillard (Accredited to Ecclesiastes)
What are the themes of Ready Player One?
We should, at this point, know the themes of The Matrix. Themes like “humanity cannot be contained”, or like “man’s hubris will be our downfall”, or perhaps the most important: “reality is always better than a dream”. The Matrix indulges itself in its themes, presenting as less of a film sometimes and more of a Socratic dialogue with automatic rifles. It’s Plato’s Cave crossed with the brain-in-a-jar theory, updated for the late 90’s, with Y2K looming and computers becoming household appliances. Artificial Intelligence– the idea that a computer might become smarter than its programmer, was awesome in the original sense, and people are still wary. But the choice, as it were, always comes down to the red pill or the blue pill. Do you stay in the dream, in the cave, in the construct, or do you go out and face reality?
Ready Player One doesn’t seem to have that problem.
I have wanted to talk about Ready Player One for a while, but I wanted the, for lack of a better word, “hype” to die down first so that there could be an attempt at a reasonable discussion. But there’s one more thing that I feel I should do before getting into the themes and problems with the film, and that’s to essentially deconstruct why it’s not actually all that special.
So there’s this movie, which is ostensibly about a corporation that is trying to take over a place in order to use it for commercial purposes. Doing so would disenfranchise a not insignificant portion of a marginalized population. But that is more or less background noise until the final fight– the main story is a mystery, where the main character searches for clues with the help of allies in order to solve it. Part of the gimmick of the film is the huge amount of references to classic media.
So there’s this movie, which is about a group of five kids that are promised a prize unlike any other. A mysterious man guides them through a place of wonder and horror and fantasy. Our main character is a boy who is rather unremarkable in most respects, but his intuition and understanding of what makes the place wonderful is why the mysterious man thinks he is worthy of receiving the ultimate prize. The film also condemns those who lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in life.
SPOILER WARNING: I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but as with any review, it’s a bit buyer beware. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t get angry with me if you think I’ve spoiled something.
So, I definitely wanted to talk about Infinity War this weekend, and I was wondering what I might talk about outside of a straight review or a breakdown of my reaction to it, but I was given a great assist from The New Yorker, of all places.
In "Avengers: Infinity War," characters aren’t introduced; they just show up, and their behavior is entirely defined by the template set for them in other movies. https://t.co/meiJo0iQ4g
And yes, technically he’s right, but reading through the article it’s clear that all of these things that he’s saying that are technically true (none of the characters have proper introductions, it feels like the season finale of a TV show, the ending compels the viewer to put on the next part) are, I think, supposed to be interpreted as negative. But these criticisms are rather dismissive to all the people, films, and characters that allowed this movie to be made, like Homer, The Ten Commandments, and Buck Rodgers.
Those things do fit together in this context, of course.
F for Fake and Ratatouille are kind of the same movie.
I mean, no, they’re not exactly the same. But they’re both mostly about someone taking credit for another person’s art, with strong critiques of the commercial business of art and a subplot deconstructing the relationship that art critics and other art experts have with artists and their creations. They’re even both directed by highly respected auteurs trying to salvage a project that the original director couldn’t complete. It’s just that one of those auteurs is Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and the other is Orson Welles (Citizen freaking Kane). The conclusions that both of the films come to are disparate, but contradictory.
First, a bit of plot summary. Ratatouille is a film about a rat that manages to become the head chef at a Parisian restaurant that somehow used to have 5 stars despite the Michelin rating system only going up to three stars. He achieves this by pulling the hair of his hapless human companion, which controls the human like a marionette. It’s my favorite PIXAR film of all time. F for Fake is an Orson Welles mostly-non-fiction film that is about two of the most notorious fakers of the 20th century. The first is Elmyr de Horay, an art forger that specialized in the post-impressionists, particularly Picasso and Modigliani. The second, and more famous of the two, is Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, who also wrote a best-selling, but fake, autobiography of an even more famous man– a business tycoon by the name of Howard Hughes.
The things to unpack in these films are mostly the questions that they raise about the nature of art and art criticism. Kyle Kallgren’s review of F for Fake begins with the question “Is there such a thing as fake art?” I would posit that both films say the answer is “no”, but for different reasons.
From character archetypes last week to character analysis this week. One of the favorite pastimes of Harry Potter fans (other than complaining about Harry Potter stuff) is sorting characters who are not in Harry Potter into the four Hogwarts houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. There are a few schools of thought as to how to go about this. The simplest is the way that it appears to happen in the books — heroes in Gryffindor, villains in Slytherin, smart people in Ravenclaw, everyone else in Hufflepuff. This, to many, is quite reductive and does not fully encapsulate the complexities of what the houses have come to represent. However, this is also how the houses are seen within the general public due to the nature of how the books were written. Sorting characters is as much literary analysis and, specifically, character analysis, as much as it is kinda fun.
Warning: I’m probably going to directly quote both history of japan and history of the entire world, i guess which will probably involve stronger language than is usually on this blog.
Bill Wurtz’s history of japan was released on February 2, 2016 and had 1.7 million views in two days. It is a nine minute video detailing about 42,000 years of history with a focus on the Japanese archipelago and it’s…
odd.
His sophomore attempt was even more ambitious– history of the entire world, i guess is almost 20 minutes long and covers everything from the Big Bang to now. It hit 3.2 million views in 24 hours. Both documentaries are representative of Wurtz’s artistic style. His body of work in context with itself presents a unified form, even with wildly varying content.
And it is the relationship between form and content that I want to talk about.
“Superman is dead. Superman remains dead.
And we have killed him.” —Kyle Kallgren
There’s a reason that Wonder Woman is the best film out of the whole of the DCEU. Wonder Woman wasn’t afraid to admit that their main character was a god.
The heroes of the DC Comics company have always been more god-like than their Marvel counterparts. From the Teen Titans, to the New Gods, to the Amazons, gods and god-like imagery have permeated the universe. Even Batman, the lone Übermensch of DC’s trinity, is still a keystone to the entire DC universe, which is pretty god-like, in my opinion.
But we’re not here to talk about the princess or the bat. We’re here to talk about him.
10/11/2019
What Great Cover Songs and The Legend of Zelda Can Teach Us About the Disney Remakes
valeriemclean1919 12tone, Arin Hanson, Beauty and the Beast, Disney, Egoraptor, Michael Eisner, Movies, Power Rangers, Sequilitus, Star Wars, The Jungle Book, The Legend of Zelda, The Lion King, The Nerdwriter About Film, About Other Art, About Writing 0 Comments
Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I enjoyed:
Here’s a list of Disney Live Action Remakes that I did not enjoy:
Now, I could go into each and explain the things that I did and did not like about each movie (and certainly, there were things I did and did not like in each one), but given the amount and the general structure of these remakes, plus general quandary that are the Alice and Maleficent live action films, there is a question that
mostmanysome people ask which is:“Why remake these movies at all?”
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