Tag: Disney
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Never Been Kissed: a wacky misunderstanding, or should somebody call the police?
Without thinking about it too much, the basic premise of Raja Gosnell’s Never Been Kissed sounds perfectly fine: an adorkable young adult gets a high school do-over. What could go wrong? And indeed, roughly the first half of Never Been Kissed is likable, powered almost entirely by Drew Barrymore’s trademark charm and quirk. But the…
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker smothers all hope and wonder
My brilliant wife had the following absolutely perfect appraisal of the first two entries in the new Star Wars trilogy, which I will paraphrase here: “Most of the criticism of The Force Awakens was absolutely correct, but I loved it anyway. Most of the criticism of The Last Jedi was absolutely wrong, but I loved…
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Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 traps superheroes in motels and courtrooms
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 sure went down easy when I saw it in a theater a few months ago, but it suffers on rewatch on the small screen. And needless to say, it was shortly rendered wholly obsolete by the best animated superhero movie of all time, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. While the real…
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Winnie-the-Pooh is a labor reformer in Disney’s Christopher Robin
Given its sluggish pace, depressive tone, and dramatization of the origin of Paid Time Off for postwar UK laborers, whom exactly was the intended audience for Christopher Robin? Kids with premature midlife crises and uncommonly long attention spans? Adults with low vocabularies and an acceptance of brain-bending metaphysics? Think about it too hard, and it’s…
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Gorging on Nostalgia: Solo: A Star Wars Story
Like a big bowl of candy, Solo: A Star Wars Story certainly went down easy. But also like a big bowl of candy, generations raised on too much Star Wars are going to gorge themselves sick on nostalgia. Who filled that bowl, and why? When Disney acquired the Star Wars rights, and promised a new…
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Johnny Depp delivers a truly strange performance in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is a healthy dose of frivolous fun; I don’t care what the critics are saying. I could do without Orlando Bloom’s cardboard performance, or the minature controversy around Keira Knightly being airbrushed on the posters, but that’s not what the movie is about. As with the first installment,…