Disney Movie Marathon Continues Some More!

I love Sherlock Holmes and detective stories in general when I was a kid, so I would have loved this back then, but it still wasn't bad today. It holds up very well and it was a lot of fun.

Disney Movie Marathon Continues!

I think this one might be better than "Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure," though I like both of them (yes, I am five years old...deal with it). I like the lonely little girl who wants to learn about fairies, and I even like her father, who is so sure that nothing is "real" unless he can see it and touch it and measure it. I like the little girl's assertion at the end of the movie: "You don't have to understand. You just have to believe." It's very difficult to have faith, and harder still to hold onto faith when you don't understand what's happening in your life. I think these movies have lessons that adults could stand to learn as well. Plus they're so pretty! My inner five year old is pleased.

Disney Movie Marathon!

Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue

I might get a ton od shit for this, but I'm looking forward to this movie. "Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure" was adorable, and this one looks cute, too. I saw the trailer and wanted it right away. If nothing else, my friend Danielle will watch it with me and we'll pretend it's for the kids, Jozalyn and Arionna. :-p

The Princess and the Frog (April 27, 2010)

This movie caused quite a stir. It's Disney's first classic animation movie in years (for awhile here, computer animated movies have ruled the day) and while there's nothing wrong with computer animation, I have to say, this movie is absolutely beautiful. Seriously. Some of the scenes are sop lovely that I had to catch my breath. The story is groundbreaking in another way, too. Tiana in this movie is Disney's first black Princess. It's about damn time, too. And like all the other Disney princesses, she's got spunk and attitude to spare. She doesn't wait around for her Prince to rescue her, in fact, she's not much interested in looking for love at all. Tiana works two jobs trying to save money in order to open a restaurant (a dream she inherited from her Daddy before he died). The prince in this movie isn't a gallant warrior, either, he's a carefree layabout. He doesn't like to settle down, he likes to throw away his money, and his family are sick of his shenanigans. When he reaches New Orleans, he gets mixed up in some voodoo (from the coolest Disney bad guy in years) and before he knows it,. Prince Naveen is a frog. He sees Tiana in costume for a masquerade ball and he mistakes her for a princess, but when he kisses her in hopes that she'll turn him human again, things don't go as planned.

This movie is a ton of fun. The songs were catchy (I love Randy Newman) and there are some scenes that made me laugh out loud. I also loved the love story of these two opposites who meet and bicker for most of the movie until they realize their feelings for each other (I'm a sucker for stuff like that).

Up (april 12, 2010)

I'm a little behind the times here. I've had this movie for awhile, but I haven't watched it. Part of me was worried it wouldn't be as good as everyone keeps saying it is. Part of me is just lazy. But I watched it tonight, and I'm glad I finally did.

Right from the very beginning, I liked this movie (I also cried right from the very beginning and throughout most of the movie...it really is sad in a lot of ways). It starts with a little boy meeting a little girl and the two becoming inseparable. they grow up together, get married, and have a full life together. then the woman dies, and the old man is left in the world alone wondering what to do with what's left of his life. This is incredibly sad and I can relate a lot to the feelings (even though I'm not THAT old...I feel pretty damn old sometimes). The old man is about to be sent to a nursing home when he gets the idea to attach a bunch of balloons to his house and sail away on one last adventure.

As you can see from the premise, it's sad right from the beginning. Well, maybe "touching" is a better word. It's sad that the man has lost his wife and doesn't know what to do without her, and he's cranky and reticent about making new friends because for so long, she was his world. Of course the movie is populated with other characters. A Dog who has a collar designed to communicate what he's thinking (and it's pretty accurate from the dogs I've met). A boy who wants to earn a merit badge by helping an elderly person. A rare, exotic bird trying to escape capture and captivity. Together these characters do indeed have one hell of an adventure. I advise you to watch this movie (just make sure you have a hell of a lot of tissues around when you do).

Tuesday, February 9, 2010: "Cinderella III: A Twist in Time"

Disney DTV sequels get a bad rap. True, a lot of them may suck, but not all of them do, and some of them even try to do something cool with the source material. This is the case with "Cinderella III." Taking place a year after the original film ended, we see that Cinde3rella and the Prince are happy together while the wicked stepmother and stepsisters are miserable. Serves them right, right? Everything goes well for Cinderella until one day through a series of unfortunate events, the stepmother gets a hold of the fairy godmother's magic wand and turns back time to the day Cinderella tried on he slipper and won the prince's heart. Using magic, the stepmother makes the glass slipper fit Anastasia, and suddenly everything is changed. Cinderella must try to set things right again and make the prince realize that she, not Anastasia, is his true love.

I always felt kind of bad for Anastasia in the original "Cinderella." she never seemed as bad as her sister, and I'm clumsy too, so I always identified with her character, and I enjoyed seeing more of her personality in this sequel. I also like how the story really doesn't seem forced...it seems like a real continuation of the original film. The prince and Cinderella have what seems like a cute, fun, playful relationship in the beginning of the movie, and we get to see more of the Prince as a real character here, not just the archetypal dream guy on the white horse. One of my other favorite movies as a kid was the musical "Cinderella" with Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella, and in that movie, the prince is a real character and we get to see more of his emotions and feelings, so I appreciated the way this movie tried to put a face on the prionce instead of making him one-dimensional. I was impressed. The animation quality isn't really as spectacular as Disney can be, but for what this is, it's a fun little movie that does some interesting things (stay tuned for the end credits, because there's a surprise coming).

Ignore the sequel hate and give this movie a chance.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010: "Stick It"

This is a really cool movie. Like, totally. It's about a teenage girl who's kind of a "rebel without a cause" and she seems to be angry at the world. We meet her when she's being a vandalous lout, and when she's caught, instead of going to Juvie like any self-respecting ,miscreant, she's sent to gymnastics academy. We learn that she used to be a prize gymnast until something happened that caused her to walk away from her love of gymnastics (but we don't learn what this is until near the end of the movie). She pretends to hate gymnastics, but we know that deep down she secretly loves it (after all, it's hard to be that passionate about something you pretend not to care about) and throughout the movie, we get to see her slowly come back to her love of gymnastics again. that's one of the coolest things about this movie. The other coolest thing is that we get to see that gymnastics is really a difficult sport, and the draconian rules for judging the sport turn away even the most ardent fans and performers, and in the end, when the girls are fed up with being mistreated by the sport they love, we feel their pain and we want them to try to band together to do something about it.

As someone who doesn't play sports and doesn't watch sports on TV, you'd think I would like sports movies, but really, I do. I love seeing people work together for a common goal. It inspires me. so I love this movie, and I love how Disney, which has always made movies that kids can relate to, can still do so now, even with kids being vastly different than they were in say, "The Apple Dumpling Gang" or something. "Stick It" has attitude to spare, but it's also inspiring and heartwarming, and it's a movie I love to watch again and again.

Tuesday, February 2: "Finding Nemo"

My Disney obsession continues with what I believe to be the best of the Disney/Pixar movies, "Finding Nemo." I just love this story. The visuals are gorgeous here. I love the ocean and the fish and the other sea creatures on display. I almost wish I could catch this movie in theaters just to see it on a big screen because I bet it's spectacular. But I love the story here, too. Marlin is an overprotective father whose young son Nemo rebels against his dad and soon disappears, leaving Marlin to go on a quest to find him. Along the way, Marlin meets lots of cool sea creatures and Nemo meets some friends of his own, a motley crew of aquarium fish.

This movie has a lot of the timeless Disney elements that I love so much. The humor can be enjoyed by both kids and adults (I was laughing out loud more than once) and the strong themes of family love and parental responsibility were touching. It's hard to learn to let your kids go and live their own lives, and I sympathized with poor Marlin as he had to learn this lesson in a way that was even harder than what most parents have to go through.

This movie was fun, funny, and touching (I cried a few times...shut up) and I loved it to pieces. Everyone should see it.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010: Oliver & Company

This was one of my favorite Disney movies from the first time I saw it. "Oliver Twist" was one of my favorite stories when I was a kid, so of course I gobbled this movie up because it adapted a lot of elements from the Dickens story, plus it had a cute little kitten and some cute dogs. I loved animals, too, so I was sold. When I started building up my Disney movie collection last year, this is one of the first movies I picked up, and I'm happy to see that it's just as much fun as I remember.

I actually teared up a little at the beginning. I hate to see stray kittens get hurt or mistreated. I rescued my cat from being a stray, so I have a soft spot for strays. I tried to cuddle her while these scenes were onscreen, but she was trying to sleep, so she wasn't very receptive to my love. I even found that I liked the opening song of the movie, especially the part that says "Keep your dream alive, dreaming's still how the strong survive, once upon a time in New York City." I love it. That would fit right into RENT, don't you think?

I am a geek.

Anyway, the song "Savoir Faire" is great too, and it's still worth the price of admission here (it's still stuck in my head while I write this) and I still love seeing how the characters stick up for each other and fight for each other (plus this was back when Disney villains were still allowed to be evil and die, which makes the whole "good and evil" idea more prevalent). This was a fun little movie and I'm glad to have it in my collection again. It's just what I needed on this dreary day.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010: Sleeping Beauty

When I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to watch this movie. No really. My mom used her student loan money to buy me and my brother some Disney storybooks, and we had the Sleeping Beauty book, but she took it away from us because she said it was "gory" and "scary." This was back in the olden days of yore before DVD players, back before most people had VHS players, so when we wanted to watch movies, we had to go to the theater, and they were showing a lot of the older Disney movies in matinées on the weekends (which is how I saw "Snow White" and "The Aristocats" in theaters) but my mom wouldn't take us to see Sleeping Beauty, so I never got to see it as a kid. I was excited to watch it today, but also kind of leery that it wouldn't live up to my excitement.

I'm glad to report that Disney magic strikes again. This movie is a little slow and there are some quirks that come with watching an older animated feature (check out the background sometime, it stays still while only the main characters move around, because back then all the animation was done by hand) but other than that, this is a cool little fairy tale and it's pretty well told. A baby princess is blessed by three good fairies on the day of her birth, but the evil fairy (who is actually pretty fucking scary, even by today's standards...my mom was kind of right) curses the baby with death on her sixteenth birthday. The good fairies manage to change the curse from "death" to "peaceful sleep until she is kissed by her true love," but they still try to hatch a complicated plan to protect the princess which of course backfires.

I have to say, I kind of like the princess in this movie. she's feisty and she has a personality. I like the Prince, too. He's willing to defy his father's kingdom to go after the one he loves, if necessary, and when he finds out there's all this magical shit surrounding his true love, he doesn't freak out, he just does what he has to do to rescue her. The three good fairies are pretty cute too, and I liked watching them interact (one particular fight about the color of the princess's wedding dress is especially funny).

I'm glad that this movie is as good as I'd hoped it would be. I'm also glad that I finally got to watch it! It does end up being kind of creepy (seriously, Maleficent might be the most evil Disney villain I've ever seen) but I don't think I'd deprive my kids the fun of watching this movie.