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Entries in Disney (235)

Thursday
May232013

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Fantasia"

Sorry for the delay on this one. Last night got away from me a little. Okay, a lot. Like Mickey's multiplying brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" the problems in finding blog time just kept expanding. But here we are. This week I asked the Best Shot club to  look at Disney's ambitious Fantasia and choose their Best Shot from the "Rite of Spring" sequence since that riot-inducing Stravinsky composition is now 100 years old and I have a thing for Centennials. Ambitious "Sorcerer" level bloggers were asked to also choose a best shot not from the film as a whole but one from each musical sequence.

 Refresh your screen periodically for more...


Cinesnatch
 I knew Vinci would go the sorcerer level and choose a shot from each segment because he does that anyway even when I don't ask. Image explosions every week over at that blog! 

The Film's The Thing Abstew's magic couldn't cure him of being too sick to write up the shots this week but he still found time to conjure them. Dedication!

Hop Low (swear to God, he has a canonical name, and you can thank me whenever there's a Disney night at bar trivia that I've just helped you to win), the best example in Disney's many long decades of work of instilling personality into a non-speaking character whose face never changes. His clumsy, out-of-step dancing is pretty much as sweet and delicately-expressed as it gets, right up until he finally gets it together in and quickly arrives perfectly in place just in time for the music to stop. That's the moment in the shot I've chosen: when even the clumsy little kid is able at the last second to get everything perfect. An absolute treasure of American animation.

Antagony & Ecstacy is a True Sorcerer of the "Best Shot" series and gives you seven articles for the price of one, covering everything from Mickey Mouse's expert redesign, anthropomorphic mushrooms and exquisite control of color palettes. (If you aren't a regular reader of Tim's blog and you are obsessed with Disney animation, you are missing out. He writes about it often and with much insight)

We Recyle Movies Anne continues to break her writing hiatus for this series and we love her for it. She's also got a shot for every segment and also knows her film history. Here's one observation I wholeheartedly second:

Ostriches eating oddly-shaped fruit is never not funny.

The Entertainment Junkie Jason all loves those animals on parade, the mixture of profane and sacred and has a real recurring thing for reflected images in this series -- which I totally get. I always want to choose them, too!

Dancin' Dan remembers which parts he fast-forwarded as a child (The Rite of Spring - ha!) and loves the feeling of gliding, captured in the "Waltz of the Flowers" section

My own choices are coming soon...

NEXT WEEK'S FILM, the spring finale of Hit Me (which will return in late June or early July), is the 1963 classic "Hud" starring Paul Newman which won three Oscars including Cinematography. It's available for rental on Netflix and instant watch on Amazon Prime.

 

Monday
May062013

The Linkover

Vulture whose butts have we seen on Game of Thrones. Funny interactive even if you don't watch the show
LA Times AMPAS just keeps on changing its rule. That board of governors is the fussiest and most bored ever, right? Always tinkering! Members are now no longer required to see foreign film and shorts at Academy screenings in order to vote on them. I personally liked the more restrictive voting in those categories. If I had my way nobody would be able to vote on anything unless they'd seen all the nominees in the category.
Slate wonders where Jay Gatsby's mythical mansion really is/was (The Great Gatsby
Pajiba wonders what Marvel Studios could do to make Daredevil work onscreen 
CHUD it's not every day that a movie spoiler comes by way of costume design (The Amazing Spider-Man 2)
MNPP Which is hotter George Clooney retro edition
Ender's Game website has gone live in anticipation of the trailer. Messages from the crew asking us to "stay informed" It seems to be mostly informative backstory journals at this point. Until Viola Davis is schooling me, I ain't learning this!

it's Bradley's world
Awards Daily Bradley Cooper might not be done with Oscar yet. He's now set to star for Steven Spielberg in American Sniper, a true story about a Navy SEAL who fell victim to another soldier's PTSD
In Contention Bradley will also star in Chef for August Osage County director John Wells

pretty pictures
imgur '50 greatest matte paintings from the movies.' a fine tribute to a lost art now that CGI fills in where set-construction leaves off
/film new images from Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind is Rising which we were just talking about in our
Animated Oscar Predictions (in case you missed them)
Hyung86 cute illustrations of Disney characters as college students. My favorites here are actually Hercules and Pocahontas

Saturday
Apr272013

A Voyage to the Link

Retronaut Amazingly sexist rejection letter from Walt Disney to an aspiring female artist
Technicolor Disney has reference photos for animation mashed-up with final art. Cool 
LA Times AMPAS may expand past 6,000 members this year. They're talking about diversifying and may relax their membership cap
Cinema Blend 80s/90s hitmaker Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction) to return after a long absence for another sexual thriller, this one about an open marriage and a trail of bodies. Expect big stars to headline as the troubled couple.
Out Soderbergh interviewing Soderbergh? The director's gay brother talks to him about Behind the Candelabra. (Someone remind me why this isn't opening in movie theaters again?)

Empire Ryan Reynolds for Tarsem Singh's Selfless? This only leads to one logical question...
My New Plaid Pants what kind of revealing costumes will Tarsem put him in? 
Variety Jane Fonda about to get the immortalizing hand-in-cement treatment
Playbill the revival of Cabaret on Broadway already has Alan Cumming returning as the emcee but they're obviously looking for a starry Sally. Initial rumors said Anne Hathaway but now Emma Stone is the rumor
Slate "the secret autobiography of Tom Cruise" ...what's behind the grinning mask?
Guardian Pedro Almodóvar calls I'm So Excited his "gayest film ever". Hmmm. It's also supposed to be some sort of metaphor for Spain's economic crisis.

one more thing...
I was just bitching about Into the Woods but the idea of a new movie musical version of Guys & Dolls sounds great. Especially since the original film version isn't exactly a "classic" outside of being, well, old. It's especially good news if both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Channing Tatum really are on board. But if it doesn't get a good director I'll worry. A lot. 

off cinema
i09 huge breakthrough in artificial skin. How long until we see Blade Runner style replicants? 
Gothamist last three days to see Edvard Munch's "The Scream" at MoMA. When I was last there I wrote about Tilda Swinton in a box but I neglected to tell you how embarrassed for everyone I was when I went to see The Scream. People were not looking at it but posing beside it with their Scream Face on (which always ended up looking more "Home Alone Face"). some people were so confused about the pose/provenance that they were doing Monkey See, Monkey Do. TRAGIC!  

Watching "Hugo" at MoMA

In the middle of a nearby exhibit about architecture, there's a 3D screen showing pieces of Hugo because of the famous train station set. My bestie snapped a photo of me unawares looking on (above). Some of the scenes they played weren't even set-specific though. Unfortunately this meant that I couldn't even escape Chloe Moretz at MoMA.

Also tragic!

Thursday
Mar072013

Linker's Game

Pajiba on the fall of the once brilliant Orson Scott Card. How is this the same man that wrote Ender's Game (coming soon to a movie theater near you)?
New York Times "Nora Ephron's Final Act" this piece about her death was written by her son.
Gothamist chooses the 12 Best Movie Theaters in NYC. Solid choices though I do think Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza are just so uncomfortable seating-wise, and the latter isn't one-of-a-kind like Film Forum so I try to never go there.

Vulture a sitcom smackdown between Sex & The City and 30 Rock. As someone who loves both shows, I thought this was a fascinating comparison but the readers got really super ultra angry
CHUD on the upcoming werewolf Netflix series Hemlock Grove. (I do think it's interesting that Netflix is moving into production but I fear for audiences. After years of getting a lot of things for free the model seems to be moving towards having about 14 different subscriptions to see all the stuff you wanna see.)
In Contention I've tried to write about everything that's going on with Steven Spielberg a million times this week (He's so busy! Those Lincoln losses must have lit a fire) but I'm giving up and now linking you over to Tapley who will explain it all.

two thing that are not happening
In closing I'll just be let it know that I think it's very smart that Sam Mendes has opted to pass on directing Bond 24 which is wise since the series might not be able to top Skyfall given the billion dollar gross and the 50th anniversary hoopla and the Oscar stats which more than doubled the franchise's entire history with the Academy! I think it's very sad that Disney is not developing any handdrawn animated feature.

Tuesday
Jan082013

Cinderella Unenchanted

JA from MNPP here - back at the start of December we took a look at the news that Never Let Me Go and One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek had supposedly set his sights on reimagining Cinderella live-action-style for Disney, with Saoirsie Ronan maybe stepping into the glass slippers, and Cate Blanchett playing the villainous Stepmother. To me this certainly seemed an odd fit for him and I said at the time that, knowing his sordid history with the studio system (woe be The Wolf Man production), I wasn't sure why he was tossing himself back into the belly of the beast.

Well maybe he finally sat down and watched Tarsem's Mirror Mirror because sure enough, cut to a month or so later and he's dropped out of the project because of "differing views on how to tell the story." I guess Disney wasn't keen on having Gus the singing mouse reenact the video for "Closer."

Chris Weitz (About a Boy) wrote the script so my guess is, if he's keen to direct something big like this after the Golden Compass semi-debacle, he's got a shot at the gig, or they'll just hire some boring director-for-hire... but for a moment let's pretend we work at Disney (close your eyes and feel the felt mouse-ears cap on your head, I know you can do it) and it's our job to find the perfect director for a live-action Cinderella. Who do you hire? Imagine what someone with real vision could do --- what would David Cronenberg make that pumpkin carriage look like? Or the scene with the slippers! He'd go all old-school Grimm on it with the foot-goring. Sigh, I dream too big.