None of them tainted their careers, but I somehow doubt that anyone will name this as a career highlight. But hey, you can't blame actors for wanting to get into bed with Disney. It's easy money and the chance to star in what is more than likely a guaranteed money-maker. Rising tides raise all boats and prestige work doesn't pay the bills, or for itself.
However, despite the box office dominance of these films, things went strangely quiet on the live-action remake front after their release. Although, Disney eating its own artistic output to generate more is par for the course since the Renaissance era. That era birthed an entire direct-to-video sequel enterprise that "blessed" us with classics like 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure, Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, and Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. There was also the TV shows based on The Little Mermaid, Hercules, and The Lion King. (OK, that last one was technically a spin-off within the franchise, but my point still stands.)
The point is, every few years Disney gets the bright idea of returning to the well instead of forging ahead with new ideas. Typically this is regulated to mere spin-off materials and ephemera and not big-budget mega-productions with actors and special effects, but I suppose they had to eventually add something new to the formula. These films roll in the cash and do well enough critically, for the most part. But do they provide anything new to the stories? Are they able to stand on their own merits? Or are they merely glossy product churned out of the movie-making factory presided over by a happy-go-lucky mouse?
Our modern trend started with Tim Burton's 2010 variation of Alice in Wonderland. In theory this should have been a slam-dunk; a perfect combination of auteur and material. And for much of the running time is a fun excursion into Wonderland until the final twenty minutes or so takes us on a strange detour. While not the best literary adaptation in Burton’s repertoire, nor is it his best film, it is an enjoyable, utterly charming, and visually stunning film for much of the running time.
The story, which has been told so many times that you’ll probably feel like you’ve read the book a half-dozen times even if you haven’t read it…ever, concerns a young girl’s journey into adolescence, and, eventually, adulthood. She is smart, logical, questions the rules yet tries to enforce them, and she is prone to flights of wild imagination. That is the Alice of both the film and the novel. But here is where her character differs: no longer is she the plucky girl of seven-and-a-half who envisions Wonderland as a beautiful topsy-turvy nonsensical fever dream, but a young woman of nineteen who is trying to reinforce, to rediscovery her purpose and sense of self-worth.
It works really well. The Alice tales were never really, entirely, for children. They taught no lessons, they had no real logic, but they could inspire the imagination to take flight. And John Tenniel’s drawings were quirky, mordantly witty, and frightening all at the same time. I loved it as a child, but I cherish the story more as an adult. The story is strong enough to work as a parable for reclaiming your strength and sense of wonder in your inner child to propel you into adulthood, to reclaim your power and freedom to live without fear.
Burton visually captures Carroll’s words and Tenniel’s illustrations and brings his own mad-cap, darkly quirky vision to it all. It makes logical sense that Alice has pallor this side of death, Burton loves to make people as close to grey as possible. That her eyes appear sunken in is from Tenniel’s drawings. The Bette Davis-esque styling of the Red Queen (a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the chess piece from Looking Glass) is Burton, but her bulbous head is Tenniel. Each character’s design meets somewhere in the middle of these two different yet similar aesthetics. I loved to just immerse myself in the world that was unfolding in front of me. It was how I had always pictured Wonderland in my head. (The Mad Hatter is close to a visual depiction of what I always say in my head, but lets not talk much about Johnny Depp's performance.)
So why does it have to end in such a silly little action scene?
The Joan of Arc armor Alice wears is visually stunning, and a close match-up to the armor that the (male) knight wears in the poem. And the Jabberwock, a scary and menacing sight, is a literal interpretation of the illustration provided in Through the Looking Glass. (Minus the vest, of course.) Watching the chess pieces square off against the card pieces was cute enough. So was seeing fellow “Jabberwocky” mythological creatures the Bandersnatch, which looks like what would happen if a bulldog mated with a prehistoric bear, and the Jubjub bird, which has a strong resemble to a Phorusrhacos. But must it end in such a busy way? Was Disney worried that little ones wouldn’t have held their attention if the movie didn’t feature a prominent battle scene? It’s possible. We have been conditioned within the last few years to expect every movie to feature grand battles and huge explosions. We know the battle scene is coming as we've been warned about it from the beginning, but it's so lifeless and dull in comparison to the quieter scenes like Anne Hathaway's White Queen making a potion, or the reunion tea party with a tweaked out March Hare and violent, manic Dormouse.
But the battle scene is not the only problem. The futterwaken, or the silly little dance that the Mad Hatter does, sounds like a dirty term and looks like a dance that has been beamed in from a different film. It doesn’t fit the tone of a film which earlier had Alice making her way through a moat of served heads to get to the Red Queen’s castle. And that is why this version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland isn’t the definitive one that it could have been. After perfectly capturing the tone, essence, and spirit of Daniel Wallace's paternal conflict in Big Fish and Roald Dahl's wicked fairy tale world in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton, probably because of decisions by Disney, made some odd choices for this film. It’s still utterly charming and a fun time, visually stunning, and a decent expansion of the characters and story, but not as great as it could have or should have been.
After the billion dollar box office haul, Burton was naturally courted by Disney for another live-action adaptation of one of their beloved properties. For a brief period of time, it looked like Maleficent was going to be that project. He eventually decided not to pursue the the film and instead went on to make Dark Shadows. He will eventually return to the House of Mouse in 2019 with Dumbo. (Burton, why are you making it so hard for me to continue to love you?)
If Alice in Wonderland was the aviary scout returning with over a billion dollars in worldwide grosses and definitive proof that there was a mass audience for this kind of thing, then Maleficent was the proof four years later that the scouting mission wasn't a one-off.
If you have ever wondered what a Disney rape-revenge movie would look like, then Maleficent is the movie for you! There’s a fascinating, very adult movie lurking somewhere underneath the Uncanny Valley hellscape of Maleficent’s shiny surfaces, but it’s continually compromised by having to try to fit safely into a family entertainment molding. The entire thing is more fascinating as hybrid failure than it is as an entire work.
The major problems of the movie start early and reoccur often. Janet McTeer’s narration is ham-fisted and unnecessary. The Moors, the mythological forest where Maleficent lives and much of the action takes place, lacks grit, texture, or any tether to a physical world as it’s an oppressive CGI monstrosity populated by cutesy critters and a few impressively designed creatures. A simplistic worldview of “men are bad, women are good; friendship is good, sex is bad.” While the forest and its denizens are clearly striving for Hayao Miyazaki-like wonder and awe, but clearly doesn’t understand or capture the more complicated worldview that his film possess.
Still, there’s a few bright spots buried within. The most obvious one is Angelina Jolie’s performance where she’s clearly having a ball getting to play as big and broad as she wants. She’s most unnerving and engrossing in the role in her stillest moments where her preternatural regality and inhumane otherness give her Maleficent an animalistic edge. Sure, watching her bellow and rage is pleasing, but she’s downright scary in scenes where she speaks slowly and her movements are limited towards a tilt of the head or a subtle movement in her facial muscles.
While the CGI is omnipresent and rubbery, there’s still a rich sense of color that is so blinding and vibrant that it threatens to bleed out of the frame at any moment. There’s also a certain beauty and haunting grace to the living tree creatures, especially a gigantic serpent-like beast that glides through the earth with the fluidity of a dolphin in the sea. And Maleficent’s servant, Diaval, a crow she changes into a human (Sam Riley), a wolf-like beast, a feathered horse, and a dragon. While the dragon’s effects pale in comparison to Drogon on Game of Thrones, its feathered design and slithering movements are quite engaging in the moment.
Yet for these measly positives, the film is largely a muddled and confused misfire wrapped up in a cellophane case to try and keep it all sealed up. The “brand deposit” description thrown around by Disney’s own movers and shakers perfectly encapsulate what is wrong with these live-action retreads. They turn the company into a dog eating its own vomit by leashing the creative teams and only giving them so free a reign to explore. Maleficent has some darker impulses, but they’re routinely defanged and declawed by the Mouse House’s demands.
It’s clear that Mickey and company were chasing the Lord of the Rings dollars, but never bothered to study just what made that trilogy so effective. It wasn’t the massive hordes of CG bodies clashing over and over and over again, but the real time we spent with the characters and caring about their world, their actions, and their stakes. Maleficent is happy to give us a complicated anti-heroine, but Stefan is not even a one-note villain. Maybe a better actor than Sharlto Copley could have brought more ambiguity to the role, but Copley takes any and every excuse to go big. There’s no variation to him as a character or portrayal, just the sight of an actor aggressively humping one-note over and over until his inevitable demise.
The best scene is the morning after where Jolie goes from disbelief to distraught victim to avenging primordial fairy. She eventually reclaims her agency, her power, and uses her anger as fuel to establish the Moors as her own kingdom with her reigning supreme. It’s shocking that Disney would ok such a dramatically rich sequence, and one that is so thematically loaded, that it stands out for the more adult film threatening to blow out of the center at any given moment.
It never does, though. We’re soon quickly saddled with the trio of fairies that must care for Aurora (predominantly played by an appropriately ethereal Elle Fanning), and they’re largely incidental to the plot. They’re merely a distaff Three Stooges, or a horrendously bad motion-capture job of the three talented ladies trying valiantly to make these parts work. Their disappearance from the narrative is large and noted, especially since their absences take place in scenes where Aurora and Maleficent form a surrogate mother-daughter bond. These three are supposed to be her guardian, and they can’t even complete the one job they were given, nor do they ever seem aware that Aurora is just gone for long stretches of time.
Maleficent is at its best when it shines its light upon the implicit symbolism of sexual violence that lurks in nearly all fairy tales, or when it merely shifts its attention to watching Jolie in her regalia that positions her as something both familiar and alien. At least the sisters doing it for themselves rethinking of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale gave something new and unique as a base guide for this movie. It’s sloppy and shackled and not entirely successful as a corrective text, but it tried. You just have to get used to staring at some eerie, ugly CGI and an overpowering mistaken thought that more-is-better.
For all of their faults, at least both Alice in Wonderland and Maleficent brought fresh perspectives to their stories. Even if the final products are muddled, they are fascinating in exploring psychological terrain that the original stories and films ignored, or merely hinted at. I would rather watch their sloppiness play out over and over again then the aggressive blandness of Cinderella.
To borrow a quote from Lady Tremaine, “this thing is so old-fashioned, it’s practically falling to pieces.” I’m of two minds about this thing. On one hand, Cinderella is almost refreshing in its single-minded determination to play things straight and without winking at the audience. On the other, they relatively few new additions added to the narrative hinder the entire thing by placing safely in a cocoon. There’s no risks, but there’s also no rewards.
Ironic considering that Alan Horn, chairman of the Walt
Disney Studios, instructed Kenneth Branagh to take all the time and resources
he wanted to make this one for the ages. Well, all that ended up on the screen
was a practical beat-for-beat remake of Disney’s 1950 animated original. It’s
workman-like without a trace of personal artistry or vision. It’s merely the
aesthetic of the Disney Silver Era played out with flesh-and-blood actors.
This makes for gorgeous costumes and highly-detailed sets,
but it also means there’s not a lot of interest in the narrative going on. The theme
of the film boils down to “have courage and be kind,” and we’re never allowed
to forget this phrase for longer than ten minutes throughout the running time.
If it’s to be something of a personal mantra for Cinderella, a driving force
and coping mechanism to get her through the abuse heaped on her by her stepfamily,
then the film largely fails to explore that darkness. After all, real human
emotion would get in the way of the watercolor aesthetics of the film.
And that is the major problem of this Cinderella. It is more concerned with establishing a series of
gorgeous looks and images than it is with exploring the psychological terrain
of its characters or the real emotions going on underneath. Cinderella seems
remarkably well-adjusted all things considered, and prone to several moments of
escape. It makes her eventual rebellion against her stepmother fairly
toothless.
Cinderella could
easily be renamed Mary Sue in this as she is bereft of flaws and interior life.
None of this is to take away from Lily James’ performance. James is lively,
lovely, and simply buoyant throughout, it’s just that the script doesn’t give
her a lot of wiggle room to really explore the character. But think of Anna
Kendrick’s neurotic variation of the character in Into the Woods. You saw and felt what the years of abuse had done
to her, you understood why she dreamed and wished as hard as she did. James’
Cinderella takes off on horseback and meets the prince (Richard Madden, tasked
with being handsome and nothing more) in the woods, and you wonder why she ever
returned to this hellhole.
The only characters that make any kind of impression are her
wicked stepfamily. The two stepsisters, played with manic comic energy by
Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger, are entertaining to watch as the
actresses fearlessly dive into playing grotesque, bratty creatures. While Cate
Blanchett, as she often does, walks away with the best-in-show award for
finding ways to expose layers of deferred ambition, jealousy, and heartbreak.
She makes you understand how someone could be driven into being so cruel, and
she plays a lot of it for dark comedy. Blanchett’s clearly playing the role as
if the script hewed closer to the original fairy tale, and you spend a lot of
time wondering if she’s going to cut off the toes and heels of her daughters to
see her ambitions come to fruition. No dice, as the film is all about lip
service to deeper issues and striking glamorous poses.
Even worse is the way that Cinderella squanders its tony cast. Derek Jacobi is wasted as the
king, and Nonso Anozie merely exists as an exposition dump and plot
advancement. The worst offender is powering through Helena Bonham Carter’s daffy
reading of the fairy godmother. That scene should be the centerpiece of the
film, but Branagh sacks Carter with ridiculous fake teeth, bad old age makeup
before her ethereal reveal, and hits the fast-forward button on the action.
Carter’s clearly game for it, but Branagh just wants to power through the beats
as fast as he can.
Originally, Mark Romanek was attached to this film, and he
was let go for wanting to take the story in a darker direction. Man, what might
have been with a director as audacious as him. Don’t believe me? Check out his
myriad of impressive music videos for proof. What we get is enjoyably bland,
too safe for its own good, and entirely afraid of dealing with the social
critique at the heart of the story or the complicated human emotions swirling
underneath. This Cinderella is all
glossy surface textures, and as dreamy and enticing as they are, pretty
pictures aren’t all that a film can be.
For some reason, Disney does quite well in adapting Rudyard Kipling’s immortal stories of a young boy raised in the Indian jungle and his various animal friends and foes. This live-action version (for lack of a better term, as much of it is CGI) leans heavier on the Kipling source than the swinging 60's animated film, and it’s all the better for it. Many scenes are directly from the stories, bits of dialog and poetry including the jungle law and wolf pack song are faithfully transplanted, and a few characters are restored to their literary source.
The Jungle Book only goes weird when it diverts back to the 1967 film for material, or in a few adaptation choices and instances of animation driving us straight into the Uncanny Valley, but it is an otherwise smart, solid, and wildly entertaining piece of movie-making. Praise be to some cinematic entity for this, as Disney’s penchant for live-action re-dressings of its beloved animated properties have been a decidedly mixed bag, and this is clearly the best of the bunch.
Director Jon Favreau assembled a murder’s row of movie star vocal talent for these iconic roles. High marks go towards Lupita Nyong’o as the protective maternal wolf Raksha, Bill Murray’s laconic and insouciant Baloo, Christopher Walken giving King Louie his bizarre inflections, Ben Kingsley lending Bagheera the intelligence and gravitas he requires, and Idris Elba making Shere Khan a ferocious and deliciously menacing villain.
The only major vocal talent that felt at odds with the character was Scarlett Johansson’s gender-swapped Kaa, reduced once more to a villainous character and a one-scene wonder that’s more exposition dump than anything. The scene starts off well, building up a real scene of dread and impending doom, before crumbling under the weight of Kaa explaining the already obvious connection between Mowgli and Shere Khan. I wish the film-makers had restored Kaa’s rightful place in the story as one of Mowgli’s strongest, oldest allies and a major presence in rescuing him from the monkeys instead of repeating the 1967 film’s choices.
A similar thing happened to me with the continuation of Baloo as a lovable slacker instead of one of Mowgli’s wisest allies, and an honorary member of the wolf pack. I understand that within the Disney canon, this version of Baloo is highly iconic, but with Bagheera, Shere Khan, Akela, Raksha, and the elephants operating much as they do in the source material there’s a certain imbalance that happened for me in keeping him the same. I’m sure other audience members could easily forgive this, and it didn’t hold back my enjoyment in any meaningful way, but it’s more of a creative choice that I think could have been done differently.
In contrast I found keeping King Louie a non-issue, and enjoyed that they changed him from an orangutan, which is not native to India, into a gigantic prehistoric ape that was, specifically a Gigantopithecus. Walken’s off-kilter performance of “I Wan’na Be Like You” is a blast of pure oddity, and makes for a very fun and lively credits sequence when its reprised in full at the end. A scene where he chases Mowgli through a crumbling palace is the one most fraught with tension and thrills, and Louie’s animation is breath taking in these moments looking startlingly realistic.
Honestly, there’s not much to complain about with The Jungle Book aside from minor squabbles. If the worst I can say about it is that the CG-heavy scenery and animals occasionally look like expertly rendered video game cut scenes then it’s already ahead of most major blockbusters in producing effects that aren’t rubbery looking. At times the absolute refusal to look like reality but an imagined jungle of a fairy tale only enhances the mythic qualities of the story.
And I haven’t even begun to discuss Neel Sethi, the newcomer who headlines this movie with charm, heart, grace, and enormous pluck. Hopefully, Hollywood will find future vehicles for his demonstrable gifts and charisma. Sethi is a real find, and I hope to watch his career blossom in the ensuing years as so much of The Jungle Book succeeds or fails upon his believable interactions with creatures and environments that weren’t there during production.
The box office figures meant that we would eventually get a sequel would appear. What's shocking about Alice Through the Looking Glass is that it took six years for it to happen. It lost Tim Burton as director and gained James Bobin, the man behind The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted. This would also prove to be the first flop of this spate of films. Alice Through the Looking Glass suffers from the loss of him, but also from fully removing any semblance of narrative tether to the source material. What we have here is an entirely original (I use that term loosely) story that just so happens to involve the immortal characters from Lewis Carroll’s works.
This is simply a garnish, gaudy, eye-searing mess. A cacophony
of action buffeting against the screen for nearly two hours that signifies
nothing it makes you wonder why it even exists at all. Of course, Burton’s film
ranking in over a billion guaranteed the presence of a sequel sooner or later,
and it’s downright shocking that it took six years for it to happen, but that
doesn’t mean it needed to. I can’t imagine anyone playing devil’s advocate for
this thing.
The film opens with Alice captaining a cargo ship and you’d
be forgiven for mistaking it as the opening salvo for the latest entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Does
this close a loop on Disney’s “brand deposits,” or is this the cinematic
equivalency of watching a studio act as its own Human Centipede? The answer quickly leans towards the second option
as the story interminably chugs along.
One of the worst offenses in Burton’s film was Johnny Depp’s
gonzo Ronald McDonald variation of the Mad Hatter, and Alice Through the Looking Glass never blushes away from orientating
the narrative around him. It means more of Depp’s exhaustive mugging for the camera,
and more of watching a once great actor increasingly cease to give a shit about
his craft or quality of work.
We meet the Mad Hatter’s extended family here, and for some
reason, they all appear with normal pallor while Hatter looks like a Goth kid
got a neon makeover. This detail alone doesn’t make any sense, and neither does
the rest of the time travelling narrative or the mystery of why the Hatter is
the most important person in Wonderland. Other than the fact that he’s played
by the biggest star in the cast, there’s never a good reason given behind
centralizing the narrative around him and routinely hinting at a creepy, limp
romance between him and Alice.
He’s not the only character we get the back story on, as the
Red and White Queens long-time rivalry is revealed to go back to a dumb childhood
fight. We don’t need tragic histories for these characters to invest in them.
They’re creatures of pure imagination and fantasy, and they should remain that
way. Trying to humanize them makes them woefully uninteresting, even if Helena
Bonham Carter’s over-sized toddler reading of the Red Queen is still a riot of
entitled rage. Alice Through the Looking
Glass continually makes these lazy contortions towards human emotion, but
they’re always lost amid the garnish CGI displays and flaccid character
motivations.
Nothing works here. The greatest irony is that the mistakes
of the first film are not only repeated, but blown-up into gigantic proportions
all the while we’re hammered with the theme of the past being impossible to
change but necessary to learn from. I see that Disney learned the wrong lessons
and merely chased the dollars. They threw more money than I could dream of into
this thing but forgot the simple, important things like story, characters,
motivations, and coherence.
There was a time when Disney would simply release their films from the vault, either on the big screen or on the home video market, then throw them back after a predetermined period of time. It was a simpler time. Frankly, I miss it.
Here we are seven years into Disney’s self-cannibalization and they've transitioned away from the oldies like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella and towards films that are barely old enough to legally drink. Beauty and the Beast is an opulent musical, because Disney spares no expense, and curiously inert in many ways. For all of the razzle dazzle, there’s something strangely hollow at the core of this Beauty and the Beast. It strikes all of the poses, but I’m not sure if it possess the wounded soul of the 1991 animated film.
This version of Beauty and the Beast is a delight in many ways, most of them for the old fashioned simplicity and outlandishness of its musical numbers. There’s no post-modern winking to the camera, but there are several moments where everyone involved is clearly trying to smooth over some of the more questionable aspects of the material. Or perhaps they’re trying to add in some sense of modernity, but they’re clunky more often than not. For every moment like Mrs. Potts admitting the culpability of the service staff in their master’s cruelty, there’s the entirety of Josh Gad’s LeFou as mincing coded gay sidekick.
Beyond this, there’s a general sense of more-is-more bloat that overpowers the material. “Be Our Guest” features visual references to Singin’ in the Rain and Esther Williams’ aquatic musicals, and the number begins to succumb to its own precociousness and weight. “Be Our Guest” was already a dazzling showstopper in its animated incarnation, and I’m not sure it needed more bells and whistles involved. Then there’s the subplots which occasionally turn the narrative into a slog, not only LeFou as emotionally conflicted gay tagalong, but dead mothers as bonding experience or Belle inventing a prototype washing machine.
Then there’s everything else going on in Beauty and the Beast, and it’s simply wonderful. The entire cast is game for everything thrown at them, with Luke Evans’ Gaston threatening to steal the entire show. Granted, the likes of Kevin Kline, Audra MacDonald, and Stanley Tucci are underused. Kline is a musical-comedy veteran (he won a Tony for Pirates of Penzance), and he never gets a moment to really strut his talents while MacDonald isn’t given enough to sing and Tucci is simply reigned in too much for my liking.
Opulence, inclusivity, and a general sense of warmth and hope pervades throughout, and it feels like a balm for the current times. It may not aim for the artistic heights of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, or even for the emotional depth of Disney’s 1991 film, but it’s a solid entry in the company’s current live-action crop of retreads. It’s pleasingly made if somehow more reliant upon aesthetics than emotional connection, but sometimes that’s all you’re in the mood for.
There's no sense in fighting against these things at this point. While they're an entirely mixed bag, Disney's managed to create enough of them that are in the range of fair to great to not entirely wish for the enterprise to implode. Of course, they've already announced a slew of these things, including but not limited to the aforementioned Burton version of Dumbo with mainstays Michael Keaton, Eva Green, and Danny DeVito, Aladdin from Guy Ritchie, a spin-off about the genies, Night on Bald Mountain going solo, and an origin story about Cruella De Vil with Emma Stone. These are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, there's many more to come.
Here's hoping we get more of them like The Jungle Book and far less like Alice Through the Looking Glass, if the Mouse House must entertain the continued existence of these things.
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