"Who Will Rescue Me?"

I'm lost at sea without a friend
This journey, will it ever end?
Who will rescue me?

So... goes the ballad that opens The Rescuers (1977), as Little Orphan Penny drops her message in a bottle into the swamp. I swear Shelby Flint's vocals dribbled out over the sides of my television like syrup. Who will rescue me from this treacle?!?

It wasn't always this way with The Rescuers and me. In fact, as a child it was one of my favorite movies. (When you voted for it in a poll some time ago, I was excited to revisit it!) As it turns out, sometimes childhood loves are best left in childhood.

Has this ever happened to you with an old formerly beloved movie?

As you can see in the still above, the animation team let the texture of the canvas bleed through and for a few seconds as the movie kicked off I thought "how lovely" (I'm not always so pleased with today's beautiful and shiny but often sterile animated images) but as the movie progressed it turned out not so lovely at all, a mess of inconsistent animation that often looked rushed through production.

For those who need a refresher, The Rescuers is about a girl named Penny who has been "borrowed" from her orphanage by a pawn shop owner named "Medusa" (wicked highly enjoyable voicework from Oscar regular Geraldine Page). Medusa wants a gargantuan diamond called The Devil's Eye which is buried in a cave that Penny is small enough to slip into in a creepy place called Devil's Bayou. Penny's bottled cry for help reaches the Rescue Aid Society, an international organization of ethnically and geographically stereotyped mice who meet in the United Nations building: HIGH CONCEPT!

While the characters are cute enough -- particularly elegant rodent Bianca (Eva Gabor) and a dragonfly named Evinrud -- the primary emotion that The Rescuers seems to be going for is pity. It works but "pity" isn't the most cathartic or endearing emotion to rest a whole movie on. Penny is either too young, too dumb or too helpless to be carrying this picture. The other significant problem is that despite a scant 78 minute running time, there's not enough plot to fill it with. Time and again we have a plot complications that are as thrilling as treading water. The narrative doesn't actually move until the complication is over. Like so:

1. Oh no, the mice are in trouble.
2. Cue frantic activity on or offscreen!
3. Whew, the mice are okay. So...
4. Back to the plot where you left it. Proceed.

And let's not even talk about the excessive amount of time we spent with the albatross Orville [yawn]. He's mere connective tissue to take you from Act 1 (New York) to Act 2 (Devil's Bayou) and last time I checked no intermission between acts ever lasted as long as Orville's fumbling flying routine.

The pictures sole bright spot then is Madame Medusa.

Seeing the movie as an adult, it's shocking to realize that she's nearly a carbon copy of Cruella de Vil: She enters the picture throwing open a door violently; She loses her temper constantly; She drives like a madwoman in vehicles that leave huge puffs of smoke behind them; She has a bumbling human henchman she despises; She has a one track mind (fur/diamonds) and she even has a scene where she slows down her "car" creepily while searching for the hiding protagonist, that immediately brings the famous "soot" scene in 101 Dalmatians to mind. When she's not recalling Cruella she's lifting Miss Hannigan from Annie.

In other words, she's no original.

Disney Generations: Cruela begat Medusa begat Ursula.

But if we needed Medusa as a missing link evolutionary step to get us from Cruella to Ursula than we owe Medusa a bag full of those diamonds she covets. Movie buffs have long noted that Disney has two types of villains: rotund or spindly. Medusa splits the difference, her arms and legs are skinny and her movements scream "bony villain" with their sharp angles, yet her body is saggy and slovenly. You know she's not the slip of a thing that she used to be. In 10 more years, she'll be a big as a house(boat). 

Though I can no longer claim I have any affection for The Rescuers, I still completely dig Medusa and her darling crocodiles Flotsam and Jetsam.... I mean, Nero and Brutus! They're keepers. Or at least placeholders until Ursula, Flotsam & Jetsam arrive 12 years later for The Little Mermaid.

The Rescuers: C
Related Posts: Beauty & The Beast and 101 Dalmatians.

X-Men: First Adaptation

Andreas here. In his recent review of X-Men: First Class, Nathaniel pointed out how movies keep trying to master "television's most powerful asset (long form storytelling) without having the right equipment by which to master it (weekly hour-long episodes)." This is exactly why, to my mind, the most successful adaptation of the X-Men comics to date wasn't directed by Bryan Singer, and doesn't have a numeral after it. It's the Marvel/Saban-produced X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran for 76 episodes in the mid-'90s.

Like many superhero-themed TV shows, X-Men: TAS served as a "greatest hits" compilation, compacting decades of comics storylines into dense, bite-sized portions. It showcased some of the comics' most thrilling narrative arcs and most terrifying villains, like Apocalypse and the Sentinels. While the X-Men films have only scratched the surface of most characters, reserving the vast majority of screen time for Xavier, Magneto, and a few privileged others, the animated series had time to explore its mutant ensemble, devoting whole episodes to individual crises.

Better yet, X-Men: TAS used its guise a kids show (complete with lasers, spaceships, and time travel) to introduce a new generation to a range of social issues: institutionalized oppression, harassment, self-loathing, political assassinations, police states, and more. It was covertly progressive and slyly written in ways that are still impressive today. The show ended its run over a decade ago, yet its main authority figures (who doubled as bad-ass warriors) were a black woman and a disabled man.

So while I'm still excited to see X-Men: First Class, I doubt it'll top X-Men: The Animated Series, which embraced and exploited its source material's superpowered soap opera. (It was also my childhood gateway drug into the nerdy world of superheroes and comics, so that nostalgic attachment helps.)

I'll close with my big wish as a cinephile and animation junkie: why can't we get more high-quality, feature-length, animated superhero movies, à la Batman: Mask of the Phantasm? Bad example, I guess, since that was tragically unprofitable... but the idea's still good! I'd definitely pay $8-10 to see X-Men: The Animated Movie on the big screen. Oh, and Marvel, while you're catering to my dreams: can you please bring back the Sentinels?

What dreams would you like Marvel to fulfill?

Quickie Requests... June Brides?

Have you all been enjoying our sudden obsession with theme weeks, first Moulin Rouge! and now X-Men?

Next week and probably for the rest of June --  it being, well, June -- we'll have a very loose wedding theme (Don't worry if you're not so romantic. Normal blogging shall continue as well). That'll kick off with Wednesday's night's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" episode celebrating Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) on its 25th anniversary. I haven't seen that one in well over a decade so I'm very curious. Have you seen it more recently?

Who are your favorite cinematic brides?

Which onscreen weddings do you think about the most?

Stage Door: Ghost Musical, War Horse, Sandra Bernhard, Tony Predix

Future Live Blog Alert! The Tony Awards are this Sunday evening, June 12th on CBS with Neil Patrick Harris hosting. We'll do a live blog even though we haven't seen most of the productions. It's still the Tonys which means: song, dance, celebrity, weird gaffes that you'd think wouldn't be possible in a show celebrating LIVE performances... i.e. shouldn't they know how to handle live events?

So be here if you're so inclined. Now on to our four theater topics with film tendencies.

1. GHOST THE MUSICAL 
Since all hit films (from 1984 and onwards) are now required to become stage musicals at some point, this had to happen. Should we predict right now that whoever plays Oda Mae Brown wins the Tony when this hits Broadway? 

I was going to write up this "preview" embedded below but sometimes you gotta admit that there's no topping another write up. I challenge anyone to beat Movie|Line's headline... "YOU IN DANGER, LEGIT THEATER"

2. WAR HORSE THE PLAY / MOVIE
I've been a bad Oscar pundit and haven't yet picked up the novel on which this hit play and Steven Spielberg's upcoming movie are based. From what I've gleaned about the show and its competitors, I can see where Michael Muston at ArtsBeat is coming from when he says:

“War Horse” is a children’s story. It’s not a remarkable piece of dramaturgy. It’s all in the staging. People are going to conflate in their heads the play with the staging, and it’s going to win the Tony.

As for Steven Spielberg's film version... there hasn't been all that much news yet but when I saw this tweet from MTV's Josh Horowitz I initially interrupted it as "he's seen the movie!". Overexcitability much, Nathaniel?

One assumes, after smelling salts, that Josh meant the play and has already imagined its suitability for hankies, Oscars, and iconic bearded auteurs.

3. SANDRA BERNHARD
For my birthday celebration my friends took me to see Sandra Bernhard's new show "I Love Being Me, Don't You?" which was indecent with 'look how many famous friends I have!' shenanigans: Justin Bond, Rufus Wainwright and Liza Minnelli came out for duets and Chaddo Ralph Rucci designed her stunning wardrobe.

Though thrilling on paper, the guest appearances were too unrehearsed to be the highlight of the show. The best moments were 100% undiluted Sandy... (More Sandra --with video -- and the Tony Award Predictions)

Click to read more ...

Unsung Heroes: The Animation of 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch'

Hey everybody. Michael C here from Serious Film. I wasn't necessarily feeling it when I sat down to write this week's column so I went searching for a subject I couldn't help but get enthusiastic about. Five minutes after I pulled Hedwig down off the DVD shelf and Presto I can't type fast enough. 

When the movie musical experienced a mini-renaissance at the start of the last decade I doubt I was the only one to notice a disturbing trend. For some of these broadway adaptations it's as if appearing on the big screen required them to apologize for being musicals. Chicago couldn’t do a number without first cutting to a close up of Rene Zellweger’s retinas to assure everyone that all the strange singin' and dancin' was in her imagination. When Dreamgirls’ characters ventured offstage, as in “Steppin' to the Bad Side”, it's cut as if they’re hoping no one will notice it is the characters singing and is not just a song on the soundtrack.

Even when movies were unapologetic about being musicals, like Sweeney Todd, the movie's advertisements went to great lengths to conceal its Broadway roots. The tagline on the Sweeney’s poster should have been “Stephen who?”

During this time period, one of the movies that defied this trend was John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). I remember working in a movie theater the day the poster arrived. No ticket buyers for this were going to be surprised when the characters burst into song. 

Hedwig embraced the rock musical. It wanted to squeeze every last drop of joy, pathos, wit, and fun out of it. Like Cabaret, it was logical to construct the story around a series of stage performances, but within that structure Mitchell stripped it down and decorated it like a punk teenager graffitiing his text books with Sharpie. The star/director throws in everything from split-screens to follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-alongs (with the occasional *ahem* car wash) but I think his most brilliant movie was to hire animator Emily Hubley to create a short film to accompany the song "The Origin of Love". With lesser material the addition of all these elements might seem like flash over substance, clutter for the sake of it, but the songwriting here is so strong that it can support grand gestures. 

Hubley's scaled down, hand drawn animation is a perfect fit for Hedwig's cheap, trailer park punk aesthetic. A more polished animation style would have stuck out horribly. It's simplicity allows it to add a bit of dazzle and underline the substance of the piece all without distracting from what's really important, namely, the character of Hedwig and what this all means to her. When the song climaxes with Hedwig singing directly into the camera until the animation gradually takes over half the screen it's easy to miss how well this technique works because of how surprisingly moving it is.

I don't know exactly how else to praise Hubley's work except to say that it is just plain beautiful. Origin of Love is my favorite song from Hedwig (which places high in my favorites from musicals in general) and as strong as Mitchell's performance of it is, he was right to conclude it deserved something extra.