A Goofy Movie
Posted on 28. Mar, 2012 by Bran Rainey.
A Goofy Movie is an animated musical comedy released in 1995 by Disney and directed by Kevin Lima. It’s mostly based on the Goof Troop TV show, albeit with different character designs, and was produced partly by Disney’s television studio despite having a theatrical release. Because of this, the movie doesn’t have the best animation or attention to detail, and looks a bit low budget by Disney standards. It didn’t have the strongest critical reception either, getting some pretty mixed reviews: it’s actually listed as “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, even though the famous critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel enjoyed it. Personally, I think it’s a great film, but it certainly isn’t perfect.
The story concerns Max (voiced by Jason Marsden, singing voice by Aaron Lohr) and his relationship with his father, the classic Disney icon Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer). Max is in high school and wants what most teenage guys want: to fit in, have friends, and get the girl. In the first act, he highjacks a school assembly to ask out the girl of his dreams, Roxanne, but in doing so ends up getting in trouble with the principal. When Goofy hears that his son is causing trouble, he takes parenting advice from his neighbour Pete and tries to get his son “under his thumb” (i.e., earn his son’s respect) with a little bonding time on the open road.
If someone told you that there was a Goof Troop movie, would you expect much more than a made-for-TV cash-in? Surprisingly, this movie is more than that. Yeah, it’s a goofy cartoon (get it?) with tons of slapstick, but it never forgets to include the undercurrent of drama required to maintain your attention for the running time. When the film needs to be quiet and mature, it can be — and there are quite a few touching, insightful little moments thrown in — but A Goofy Movie never forgets that it’s essentially a big-screen Saturday morning cartoon. Personally, I think that’s what makes it so good. I don’t want Goofy’s movie to try to be The Lion King. As a family road trip movie, it works.
The film is also a musical, and though the songs aren’t the greatest tunes you’ll ever hear, they’re not too bad either. They work within the context of the film, and one or two of them do stand out as being memorably good — most notably the first song, “After Today”. The song that marks the beginning of the road trip, “On the Open Road”, isn’t that spectacular on its own but is accompanied by countless visual gags that elevate it. There’s isn’t much to complain about, but nothing to write home about either.
The animation, as I said, is a bit bad by Disney standards. Watch the backgrounds and you’ll see extras conspicuously frozen in place, elements that are clearly painted onto separate cells (having mismatched colours as a result), and there’s even a few sequences that appear to have been artificially slowed down in post-production, causing the frame rate to drop erratically. It’s nothing worse than you’d see in a TV show, however, and the movie makes up for it with some very clever use of colour; I especially like the red light that illuminates the map every time someone looks at it dramatically. It isn’t subtle, but that’s what makes it fit this style of animation so well. For a feature film, a bit more effort could have been put in, but it’s passable.
A Goofy Movie isn’t a grand epic tale that digs deep into important issues — it’s a fun little tale about a boy and his dad. Goofy is definitely my favourite Disney character, and the script does an incredibly good job of keeping him ridiculous while still making me feel some genuine emotion about him. Like in Goof Troop, Goofy is a single dad, but now that Max is a bit older, he finds himself struggling to maintain his relationship with his son. Max is embarrassed by his dad in that way teenagers frequently are… and when your dad is Goofy, it’s a pretty believable embarrassment. I can empathize with Max’s desire to gain some independence from his parent, but I can just as easily sympathize with Goofy. The relationship is done very well. Some people might have wanted something with a bigger scope, but I think this modest story does the movie a favour: the emphasis is on what made the TV show good, while still expanding it to fit a movie format. Maybe a “Goof Troop Saves the World” movie could have worked, but that formula has been done to death. This works fine.
Is it a masterpiece? Probably not, but A Goofy Movie is still one of my personal favourites, bias taken into account. I grew up with those old Goofy cartoons, and I can see a lot of myself in Max and his relationship with his father. Sometimes, it is hard for a little boy to tell his dad, “I love you.” If you don’t understand that, you probably won’t understand what makes me like this movie so much. And if you don’t like Goofy… well, don’t expect him to suddenly endear himself to you.
If you’re a fan of Goof Troop, or if a father-son road trip movie with Goofy sounds like something you would enjoy regardless, check this one out. Maybe it’s not really the best Disney movie, but it’s far from the worst.
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Adventureland
Posted on 21. Mar, 2012 by Bran Rainey.
Adventureland is a 2009 dramedy directed by Greg Mottola. Though it was advertised as if it were a spiritual sequel to Mottola’s previous hit film Superbad, the movie is actually very different in tone. Unlike Superbad’s Hollywood-style portrayal of teenage love, Adventureland goes for a more realistic approach, with characters who feel like they’re genuinely fumbling and a more bittersweet conclusion. Poorly received at the box office, the movie is actually much better than most people give it credit for; I think the shoddy reception is due mostly to the aforementioned marketing, which gave the wrong impression and set up false expectations for the entirely wrong audience. If you’re coming in expecting a goofy flick to watch when you’re drunk, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as the jokes in Adventureland are few and far between — but the film has an earnest honesty to it that makes it very powerful when you’re in the right mood.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as James Brennan, a shy, introspective nerd who plans on going to grad school after the summer. But after the unexpected job loss of his father, Brennan finds himself taking up a summer job at the local amusement park, Adventureland. Here he meets the mandatory assortment of kooky characters: the snarky slacker Joel (Martin Starr), the hot chick Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), local macho man Mike (Ryan Reynolds), and the love interest, Em. Kristen Stewart plays the lead female role of Em in her typical lip-biting style, but it does work in this instance, proving that she really doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from being in Twilight. She can act when her character actually has a personality.
Where Superbad tried to be a straight comedy with only small dramatic elements to keep it afloat, Adventureland tries to do the opposite. In this, the film is fairly successful.
The characters are, for the most part, well-written and well-developed throughout the narrative; even the archetypal hot chick has a little more depth than you would expect, dating the main character for a brief time and letting some details spill about her background and outlook. The movie has something in common with Lost and Delirious, in that the characters act so consistently stupid and make such obvious mistakes that you want to slap them — but their actions fit their age and situation, and you can’t help but relate to them. If you were ever a teenager, you’ll recognize the people in Adventureland. Even the two-dimensional, undeveloped guy who punches everyone in the nuts is a realistic character, really: I know several people I met in high school who still act like that and never seem to have any depth no matter how long I’ve known them.
Drama is where the movie really shines. Where it starts to falter a bit is the comedy. The structure of the film pools a fair mix of drama and comedy into the first act and partially into the second, but it’s always in the form of a dramedy rather than a comedy — meaning that the scenes are mainly dramatic and have light humour to punctuate them, rather than being primarily funny. The problem is that the movie doesn’t really do this consistently, and ends up becoming a straight drama by the halfway point. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but when the movie starts out like that it starts to wear on your nerves a bit and makes you think, “What happened to the jokes?”
I’m not saying Brennan should wear a clown suit, but the tension is just a tad too much in later scenes of the movie, to a point where it almost starts to seem melodramatic. These are teenagers, yeah, they blow everything out of proportion and act like every little betrayal is a bullet to the head — but they’re teenagers, they’re supposed to be sarcastic and blow off a bit of steam while doing so. For a movie with so many stoners in it, there’s a distinct lack of funny stoned people and an overabundance of philosophical prats. It’s not too bad, but it kills a bit of the movie’s rewatchability — once you know what happens, you can’t muster up that edge-of-your-seat I-want-to-know-what-happens-next feeling, and it becomes a lot less entertaining.
Adventureland is a good film. Hell, it’s a great film that deserves way more recognition than it gets. Is it perfect? Not really; it does go a bit far with the drama at times. But it’s so much closer to being perfect than most movies like it, you have to see it at least once. It’s no Dazed and Confused, but how many movies are?
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Posted on 15. Mar, 2012 by Bran Rainey.
Technically Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is actually two movies, but they aren’t paced like two separate movies so I’m reviewing them together. I’ve heard people moan that splitting the final book into two parts was just a marketing ploy, and while I’m sure dollar signs were spinning in some executives’ eyes when the idea was greenlit, I still support the decision. In a perfect world, Goblet of Fire could have been split into two parts instead of this movie, but in the absence of a perfect world we’ll just have to make do.
Splitting the source material into two films means that the final confrontation against Voldemort and the Death Eaters is allowed to span roughly five hours instead of the usual two and half, and this means that the story can linger and pace itself a little bit better. For a series as massive and epic as Harry Potter, a suitably huge conclusion would be needed to cap it off — and for the most part, the director David Yates succeeded once again. Part 1 is a leisurely first act that draws you back into the characters and setting quite effectively, with plenty of action creeping into the second act just to keep the viewers on their toes, then Part 2 is for the most part just a super-extended third act. And while my gut instinct for a situation like that would be to criticize Part 2 for stretching out what’s traditionally supposed to be punchy and to-the-point… I can’t deny that the enormous climax of Deathly Hallows just works.
That’s not to say that the two films are masterpieces. Being made in 2011 amongst the craze of pointless CGI and superhero movies, it seems like the post-production visual effects team decided to be lazy and just reuse some PlayStation 3 graphics instead of doing actual work. For $250 000 000, don’t tell me they couldn’t have made the effects look better than that. Half of the movie feels like a video game cutscene, Attack of the Clones style. But then, I’m really biased against CGI in general. I’ve always held up the other Potter films as my example of CGI done well (you either use it sparingly or have enough dough to make it look flawless), but Deathly Hallows hangs a big asterisk over my example, and that just annoys me.
There’s also a serious problem with the subplot distribution. For whatever reason, either the screenwriter or the director decided to put all that negative stuff about Dumbledore that was in the book into Part 1 — but then didn’t actually follow up on it satisfactorily in Part 2. Unlike in the book, Deathly Hallows doesn’t redeem Dumbledore, and his winking smile to Harry when we do get to see him one last time just sort of makes him look like a prick. What was that about? The majority of the story was done quite well in Deathly Hallows, and it’s not like they didn’t have enough running time to expound on everything they wanted. The humanization of Dumbledore is pretty important to the series’s themes, but if they wanted to cut it so badly, they could have at least cut all of it.
Overall, though, the two parts of Deathly Hallows are pretty good. Not incredible, but none of the Potter series was really incredible anyway. They’re just fun.
See also: my review of Half-Blood Prince, my review of the first five Harry Potter movies.
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Lost and Delirious
Posted on 08. Mar, 2012 by Bran Rainey.
Lost and Delirious is a 2001 film adaptation of Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath. Directed by Léa Pool as her first English language work, the movie plays fast and loose with the source material, changing the tone and message significantly. Frequently lambasted by film critics for its melodrama, trite metaphors, and shallowness compared to the novel, the film nonetheless has a decent-sized following, especially (in my experience) amongst young lesbians.
If you’ve read other reviews from me, you might have noticed that I have a thing for heavily flawed movies that manage to still be good. This is one of those movies.
The film follows a quiet, introspective girl named Mary, played by Mischa Barton. In the beginning of the movie, Mary tells us that her mother has passed away, and her emotionally-distant father has decided to enroll her in an all-girls boarding school. Arriving there, she soon meets her roommates, Tori (Jessica Paré) and Paulie (Piper Perabo). In shocking juxtaposition to the main character, Paulie is outspoken and open about everything, never flinching when the truth needs to come out — except, of course, when it comes to Tori, whose parents can’t be allowed to know the true nature of their relationship.
The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was pretty damn good, but it gets worse on every subsequent viewing. The reason, I think, is that it’s extremely lopsided — movies are a combination of plot, characters, visuals, music, pacing, and theme (the last three forming the broader category of atmosphere), but Lost and Delirious doesn’t do many of these aspects well. The plot scores an absolute zero, hitting nearly every single cliché in the queer and feminist books and being as boring as humanly possible. The visuals are fairly bland, with only one scene being memorably well-composed and many, many scenes which comprise a series of heavy-handed visual metaphors. The music is… well, there’s a reason critics have called it melodramatic. Even the theme, though it’s not done terribly, is kind of… generic. Are you surprised that a movie about lesbians and a shy girl is about feminism? Surprised that a movie set in an all-girls boarding school has something to say about patriarchy?
No, I understand fully why critics hate this movie. It’s very, very flawed, doing many key aspects of filmmaking utterly and completely wrong. But it does one important thing right: characters. The characters are amazing.
Regardless of what you might personally think of them (trust me, you’ll probably want to slap them a few times during the film), one thing you can’t deny is that they are completely honest. Yes, the overwrought musical sequences are melodramatic… but the movie is about teenagers going through what is, to them, the end of the whole damn world. The lengths Paulie goes to to win the heart of her girlfriend are absolutely insane, but I can name three people in my life who would actually do that.
Does that mean the movie can be forgiven for all it does wrong? No, not at all. A great movie takes a personal, emotional scenario, blows it up, and turns it into an experience that accurately conveys the complexity and meaning of the situation to the audience, including and especially outsiders who wouldn’t have understood the situation otherwise. But Lost and Delirious just isn’t a great movie — it’s a cult movie, or maybe you’d call it an insider movie. A movie made by a lesbian, for lesbians; by a woman, for women; and it makes no attempt to include the outside world in its equation. You’re in, or you’re out.
So no, Lost and Delirious isn’t good — but it isn’t necessarily just the clichéd mess that people claim it is. If you can relate to the characters, relate to the melodrama, relate to the age and place where a trite visual metaphor seemed supremely poetic — then you can get swept up in the movie and walk away feeling like someone just stabbed you in the heart. But if you can’t relate to it, you’ll be throwing popcorn at the screen. That’s just how it is with this one.
For the record, I’ve never read the source material myself so I can’t comment on why and how the movie could have been improved in that manner. However, I read that the newest edition of the book has a foreword by the author praising the movie, despite its differences. Take that as you will.
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Survey of American History mid-term exam
Posted on 05. Mar, 2012 by Dan Soucy.
Identify the significance of the following people:
Pocahontas
Pocahontas was famous for her romantic relationship with John Smith. They met when he settled in Jamestown and she invoked magic to learn English, resulting in the famous couple. Well, except maybe not. As she was actually 10 years old at the time, any stories of sexual relations between her and John Smith are mostly apocryphal. However, she was notable for maintaining a lengthy stretch of peacetime between the tribe, headed by her enormous father Powhatan, and the settlers. She served a role that would today be considered ambassadorial — she frequently visited both settlements and kept communications strong, so few violent misunderstandings were had. This peacetime was named after her: the brilliantly original “Pocahantas’ Peace”. The story had a happy ending when she married John Rolfe, moved to England, and died immediately. Rabies, you know how it is.
The Puritans
The puritans were a sour bunch. Puritanism, once defined as “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be happy” sprang up in the wake of King Charles I, a Catholic who was quite displeased with this ‘Protestant’ hooliganism. He began persecuting the shit out of them, so they left for the New World (the “Great Migration”). They greatly valued “religious freedom” — their own, anyway. Once there, they established churches as the centre of everything and tolerated no religious dissent whatsoever. If people didn’t want to go to church, they were exiled or executed. This solved all their problems and their colony was ultimately very successful (in the sense that they didn’t all die) because they all worked together and actually made an effort to feed themselves.
Robert Carter III
Robert Carter III was a wealthy statesman and proprietor of the revolutionary age, and a member of the New Swedish Church. He suffered from a sort of mid-life crisis when he realized his god probably wouldn’t be okay with his ownership and abuse of some 500 slaves. So he freed them and felt better. In today’s dollars, the move cost him millions upon millions and nearly all of his estate. It was the largest single emancipation of slaves (until the civil war) as well as a huge “fuck you” to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who still hadn’t freed any of theirs. He was forgotten by history, probably because he made the Founding Fathers look like chumps.
John Malcolm
John Malcolm was an English sea captain and taxman, sent to the New World to keep the colonies under control. He enjoyed his work far more than any tax collector should, and everybody hated him — they gave him a ‘nice’ tarring and feathering (i.e. he got to keep his clothes on). One day, when he was just casually yelling at a child in the street, George Hewes had the nerve to interfere. When told not to interfere with gentlemen’s work, Hewes made a fowl joke about his past. So he smacked that bitch-ass commoner with his cane. Later that day, Bostonians from all over (Boston) came to get him and gave him the Rebel Special: tarring and feathering, for reals this time. The humiliated and greatly annoyed Malcolm went back to England, but it turned out nobody liked him there either — he spent the rest of his life trying to get elected into Parliament so he could crack down on those traitorous Americans.
George R. T. Hewes
George Robert Twelves Hewes was an ordinary shoemaker, too short to join the army (his dream job). He personally delivered a pair of shoes to John Hancock, governor of Massachusetts, the highest honour a shoemaker could achieve at the time. Fifteen years later, John Hancock was his bitch. Hewes was present at the Boston Massacre as well as a participant in the Boston Tea Party. He famously told John Malcolm to suck a dick and got his face bashed in as a result. He probably would have been forgotten, except that for the longest time, he just refused to die. He lived to be nearly 100 years old and easily outlived any of the other revolutionaries. In the 1830s, people became interested in his story and started work on his biographies. And in all that time, all Hancock managed to do was write his name really, really big, like a first-grader.
