jsliberatore

An odd choice, maybe, but this is my absolute favorite Disney movie. So perfectly voiced, the characters are timeless and endlessly quotable.

"You call washing dishes and sweeping floors a work of evil?"

"That, my boy, is a mountain of knowledge."

"I hate sunshine! Hate! HATE sunshine!!"

"Where did he go?' 'To Bermuda, I suppose..."

Among Disney classics, it's really one of a kind. Villains have a very minor role, there is no princess, no happily ever after, not a lot of "action" or slapstick comedy. The characters don't really change all that much, either. There's no grand story arc. It's just a silly, lighthearted romp with a cranky old wizard, a highly educated Owl ("Educated owl??!"), an awkward young boy, and a bit of a moral. It's the kind of movie Disney wouldn't make anymore, because it doesn't have obvious commercial appeal. But it really is a charming, lovable movie, easily rewatchable.

Though some folks think it's a poor telling of Arthurian legend, it's actually a pretty close adaptation of its source material, "The Once and Future King," by T. H. White.

The Disneyfication of Star Wars is on full display here. Nice visuals, plenty of fan service, and shallow, vapid, Marvel-esque characters.

Here's a bounty hunter so ruthless and unhinged that Darth Vader worries he needs to reign it in... "No disintegration." I want a show about that character! But what does Disney do? Fett meets some generic Sand people who fit the "Old Wise Native" character trope. Then he becomes a vanilla Tough Good Guy, indistinguishable from the protagonists in any number of unimaginative PG-rated Spaghetti Westerns. Disney is just not capable of making a show about the Boba Fett from the original trilogy.

Pretty disappointing, but hardly surprising.

Another installment of Transformers with dinosaurs... paper-thin characters imperiled by CGI monsters. The movie merges two disjointed plots, papering over the whole "dominion" footnote, as an excuse for a JP family reunion bottled up in yet another jungly dinosaur sanctuary.

In no particular order, I'm supposed to believe:

(Spoilers below)

Chris Pratt's magic hand inoculates him from all danger.

No matter how fast the dinosaur, it never gains when chasing main characters.

Malta is apparently like Dagobah; if you just go there, you end up right where you need to be.

The evil megacorp Biosyn is run by morons, even by supervillain standards. Prominent bio-engineering critic Ian Malcolm has had a lectureship there for six weeks, and for some reason he has all access to the lab? They store a bunch of mutant bugs just... in the room... so that they can swarm with the slightest provocation? And then there's a button that sets them on fire, but just a plain old glass window they can break through? And again, with practically no clearances, you can SHUT OFF POWER to the complex?? Isn't this a lesson they learned from the first movie?

A few burning bugs take five minutes to set a swampy jungle ablaze.

I just don't get the laser pointer that sics a dinosaur on somebody. This is a holdover from the last film I know... but you know what else points a laser at people? A rifle.

Finally, in one of the laziest sequences of the film, let's just put some dinos down there in the tunnel. No explanation as to how they got in... but we need to off the main villain... so what'll it be....? Oh, how about.... Dilophosaurus. They killed Newman... so that's poetic, right?

Is it fun? Eh, maybe. I know nobody expects this movie to be good, in say, a "Mystic River" sense. But I have to wonder, is a movie the like first JP even *possible* today? Can Hollywood still make an engrossing story with believable characters in real peril? I guess they figure it's not worth the effort.