Luck

The big problem here: the viewer can never quite shake off the feeling that he's watching a knockoff Pixar piece. It’s a through line that conveys a sense that every detail of this work is just a little off. For instance, it’s a tiny bit weird that a movie that rather consciously adopts certain touches of very modern life—not just cell phones and other tech, but even certain characters displaying the execrable habit of wearing excessive numbers of earrings—also uses a forty-plus-year-old song as its key piece of soundtrack. Yeah, I get that it fits lyrically, but still. And many of the characters (trinketed and otherwise) are just a little bit off in their depicted forms; you have to believe that the artists on the Disney side of the street would have gotten them just right, down to the tiniest character-defining details. And, perhaps most crucially, the story seems to be a little too complicated; there are too many machinations to work through to get the audience to follow along with the plot; too many actions require too much explanation. So the whole production gives off something of a secondhand vibe throughout, like the merchandise you get cheap at the discount store rather than the name brands at your usual market. Add to all that the fact that casting is not a strength here—no one among the principals gives a standout performance—and it’s really only the prominence of a cat in the story that lifts the thing even up to MEOW status (and that character actually shows very little in the way of catness; his felinity is mostly a plot convenience). Overall, I suppose this is an object lesson that the animation genre, despite being highly developed and mass produced for decades now, still is not so easy to get fully right. Maybe you can have on your side the luck of having a major studio or tech company to back your project...but you’d better bring an awful lot of skill to the show, too. Don’t just rely on fortune, in all that word's meanings.

The Lion King

A re-view review. Animation: gorgeous, with an intense focus on naturalistic appearance (except during some sequences, particularly musical numbers, where something more stylized is more appropriate). Story: it’s Hamlet, for crying out loud. Can’t hardly complain there. Script: clever and funny when it wants to be, elegant and beautiful when it needs to be. Songs: among the best and most memorable in the entire canon. Characters: a set of possibly the best defined characters in all of the studio’s output. Put it all together and it’s no wonder this flick made a billion dollars (and probably continues, through various form, to fill the Disney vaults with lucre). There’s just a sliver of difference in how this particular viewer reacts to this film versus the previous two in the studio's sequence--probably just some personal quirk that leaves me preferring the others as just slightly better. It is certainly not any argument about the objective quality of this work that has me slotting it at number three of the bunch. Regardless, this is a worthy member of the triumvirate--a set of three films, released in sequence, that represent one of the most astounding achievements in the history of movies. They don’t make ‘em like this any more, nor did they make anything close to this before BATB rolled around and Aladdin opened up the whole new world. There is a reason--three of them, actually--why Disney came to rule the cinematic circle of life, and it’s apparent when you watch this movie. The PURR is almost loud enough to be a roar.

Rat Race

It takes a few minutes to get cooking, but once it does it provides plenty of satisfying comedy. And Jon Lovitz has one of the funniest scenes that I have ever seen in a movie.

Girl, Interrupted

Not bad, but it didn't really seem to say all that much. I suspect that, if not for the presence of Angelina Jolie (right in her first bursting onto the scene--and into fantasists' minds--moment), this movie would hardly have merited all that much attention.