Once On This Island

Year: 2016

Director: Ron Clements & John Musker

Cast: Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Jemaine Clement

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Disney is in the midst of what some might prematurely term a Third Golden Age, but let us always remember that following the likes of Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons doesn’t leave newer entries with a high bar to clear. While I loved Tangled and Big Hero 6, Disney’s computer-animated output has never reached as consistent and satisfying a level as its two previous Golden Ages, which produced timeless works like Snow White, Pinocchio, and The Little Mermaid.

If you hold the much-ballyhooed Frozen up to the likes of Beauty and the Beast, the pitiful quasi-musical would melt in a microsecond. And while the box office-gobbling Zootopia is good, it’s an inconsistent allegory that hangs its hat on a Shakira track. So I urge you all to approach the highly praised Moana, Disney’s 56th theatrical animated feature, with a grain of salt, especially as it’s married to the other lavishly praised love object of 2016, Broadway songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a terrific and talented person, but maybe not the second coming of Sondheim.

Forgive me theatre friends, for I have sinned. I have spoken against the church.

First, the plot. Moana is precede by the cute but inconsequential anatomy-based short “Inner Workings,” depicting the battle between an office drone’s head and heart (his job is a hilariously dour cross between the opening of The Producers and 1984 – the short has a killer electronic score and a cool mixed-medium design, but it’s no “Piper.”)

So, Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) is the daughter of Chief Tui (Temuera Morrison), the leader of a secluded island village. Moana longs to be an explorer out in the ocean, but nobody is allowed beyond the reef surrounding the island. However, when a dark force begins draining the island of tis resources, she must embrace her destiny, sail past the reef, find the deserted demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), and persuade him to return the Heart of Te Fiti, a mystical stone imbued with the power of creation. She must deliver him to the spot where he stole it (which is guarded by the lava demon Te Ka) in order to halt the encroaching darkness that threatens her island.

It’s definitely an inconvenient truth.

So, I’m gonna make a bold assumption and guess that you’ve seen any Disney movie before. If so, you’ve likely already experienced some element of Moana, which scavenges bits and pieces from Mulan, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, Pixar’s Brave, and pretty much every entry in the canon, polishing and renaming them like a regular Scuttle. Failing to carve out new territory isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes Moana uses its Disney ancestry to buff out gaping holes in its character arcs, assuming you already know how these stories go, so they don’t have to put in the maximum effort to have them makes sense this time.

Also, I hope you love adorable sidekicks, because Moana is rotten with ‘em. Moana could start an adorable sidekick baseball team with its roster, including a comically tiny pig that the movie pretty much straight-up admits will eventually be slaughtered, ditto an idiotic chicken named Heihei (Alan Tudyk, for some reason), a magical animated tattoo, and even the Actual Literal Ocean. Not since Aladdin found himself saddled with a genie, a monkey, and a flying carpet has there been such a  surplus of wacky reaction shots and goofy hijinks. None of them are execrable, like Frozen’s Olaf, Prince of Darkness, but it’s an overdose of saccharine at times.

But the best thing about Pixar’s island-themed short “Lava” is that no animated island projects could possibly be worse that that, so Moana is in a very safe place.

Well, that probably wasn’t a strong start to a positive review, but let’s carry on and see if we can’t pick things back up again. Moana is a charming film, even if it’s a little childish at times. Hell, it is for kids, and they’re gonna adore the ever-loving sh*t out of it, so who am I to complain? Although Moana could definitely do better than a frightfully repulsive pun about “Tweeting” that is damnable for its anachronism, but mostly because it’s just the pits, even worse than when Frozen bald-facedly stole the “we finish each other’s sandwiches” line from Arrested Development.

Wow, Frozen is really taking a beating tonight. Sorry, folks! I like “Let It Go.”

But let’s talk about the reason anybody over the age of 14 was excited to see Moana: Lin-Manuel Miranda, who co-wrote the music with Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i. While I will never dispute that the musical orchestration itself is ever less than fantastic, his lyrics always seem to tend toward the descriptive rather than the poetic. Here’s an actual line from “I Am Moana (Song of the Ancestors)”:

"I am the daughter of the village chief / We are descended from voyagers… I am Moana."

It ain’t exactly Shakespeare. However, a song where he really pulls out all the metaphorical stops is the villainous ditty “Shiny,” sung with gusto by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement. It’s a bombastic celebration of wicked wordplay that sparkles amidst many great pieces of music, including several tracks that are brave enough to include entire verses in native Pacific Islander languages, using the orchestration itself to carry the soaring emotional heft. I’m also partial to the opening verse of Moana’s “I Want” song, titled “How Far I’ll Go,” which is in a challenging minor key that I’ve literally never heard before from a children’s film. It’s a great soundtrack, except for maybe “You’re Welcome,” a solo number which Dwayne Johnson clumsily tumbles through like the Rock that is his namesake.

It’s a perfectly lovely film, even if it isn’t perfectly perfect. It has two charming leads, a solid theme about respecting the past and discovering who you are, and two perfectly horrifying monster designs that I guarantee some kid is having a nightmare about this very second. I have my problems with it (especially the introduction of the sentient ocean, which only deigns to help out Moana when the plot needs a deus ex machina), but I’ll definitely buy the soundtrack, which is the highest praise a Disney movie can ask for.

TL;DR: Moana is a serviceable animated adventure with a mostly great musical soundtrack.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1077

Q2 Review Purge

Howdy, folks! You may have noticed that Popcorn Culture hasn’t updated in over a week. I’m very sorry for that, but I also have a very good reason. I’ve been in a midsummer frenzy, packing up my apartment, job hunting, prepping season 2 of Scream 101 (big announcements are on their way), And I just spent all of last weekend working on the set of All the Creatures Were Stirring, the feature film debut of my friend Rebekah McKendry, which I’m absolutely thrilled about. And then this weekend was my birthday and volunteering for Blumhouse at the ScareLA haunted house convention. All of these things, you may notice, are not formally considered “writing this blog.”

Popcorn Culture isn’t going anywhere, but in this scheduling melee, I’ve decided to once more unclog my backlog by releasing atypically brief reviews of films I’ve watched in previous weeks (and months, ugh that I haven’t had time to give my full attention to. It was either that or call a plumber. Let’s get started!

Pinocchio

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A lonely woodcarver builds a marionette named Pinocchio that he wishes was his son. His wish is granted, breathing life into the puppet, but Pinocchio must prove his integrity before he becomes a Real Boy.

I know, I know. I should never have made that grand statement that I’d be marathoning every movie in the Disney canon. That was an incredibly foolish thing to so, given my track record for successfully completing marathons. But I did get a step or two further down the trail from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio is a massive improvement on Snow White’s sometimes spotty animation, the beautiful backgrounds and consistent character designs holding up much better under modern scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t quite there. This is a film filled with incident, but there’s not really any rhyme or reason to its plot. Pinocchio is launched through a series of visually compelling and frequently terrifying vignettes with absolutely no connective tissue. The film completely forgets the bit about his nose rowing when he lies after one scene, and Monstro devours Gepetto entirely offscreen. When you need to have other characters explain to one another what’s happening in the plot, you know there’s some deep structural damage there.

But in a nascent medium like feature animation, story is only half the battle. Pinocchio’s ridiculously advanced sense of camera mechanics and framing in a hand-drawn medium is at the height of the craft, so Pinocchio’s a must-see for artists of all kinds. Like they haven’t already seen it. Plus, it’s weirdly obsessed with butts, so there’s that.

Rating: 6/10

Fantasia

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Corey Burton 

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A series of short form animation pieces set to classical music.

Talk about not having a plot! Fantasia takes Pinocchio’s slack script and completely demolishes it, replacing it with a flurry of pure visual mayhem. A mind-bending blend of animation live action, and symphonic music, Fantasia was like nothing that had ever been seen before or since, perhaps Walt Disney’s greatest artistic triumph. I, of course, am a heathen, so I’m bored silly by it.

I’m not well equipped to handle non-narrative film or non-lyrical music, though I do recognize that this is an excellent example of both. It’s a glorious burst of pure animation imagination, informing the look and feel of dozens of Disney features in the years to come with its vibrant colors, fantastical animal designs, and graceful sense of motion. The mythological sequences are a little too twee to hold my attention, though once again Disney doesn’t stray from full tilt horror, depicting ghastly creations like the Chernabog in “Night on Bald Mountain” or the surprisingly tense flood sequence facing poor Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

I definitely forgot there were dinosaur fights in Fantasia, so that part was cool, but by far my favorite segment is an early piece using abstract color and line work to depict the emotional movements of a composition. It’s a gloriously compelling segment that is the closest anyone has ever come to a visual depiction of sound. And then there’s fairies and hippos and crap for like two hours. Like any anthology, which is undoubtedly what this is, the sum is much less than certain parts of its whole.

Rating: 6/10

Not Another Teen Movie

Year: 2001

Director: Joel Gallen

Cast: Chyler Leigh, Jaime Pressly, Chris Evans 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In a parody of 80’s and 90’s high school rom-coms, a popular jock is dared to make the indie rebel girl into prom queen material and falls in love with her along the way.

Remember the massive run of “____ Movie” parody flicks made up of pop culture offal and shattered dreams that ran in bulk from the early to mid-2000’s? Yeah, I try to forget about them too. But now we live in a world where those movies have been diverted from theaters and are pumped directly into Netflix (Tooken, anyone?), so we can look back on America’s unhealthy obsession with some degree of clarity and moral high ground. Let’s just pretend we didn’t give A Haunted House enough money to earn a sequel.

This is a low bar here, but among the Scary Movies and Date Movies and Meet the Spartanses, one movie actually stands out as being not quire so terrible as all that: Not Another Teen Movie. Perhaps it’s due to the presence of latent superstar Chris Evans, who brings a delightful blend of steely overconfidence and goofy charisma to the role. Perhaps it’s the soundtrack, which cherry picks the most instantly likeable 80’s hits from Brennan’s Bin of Beloved Pop Classics. Or perhaps it’s because the film actually has a damns sense of focus, parodying the teen movie genre as a coherent whole rather than winging off in random directions in pursuit of hot topics and trends from the millisecond it was released.

The obvious pitfalls are still present (whole scenes are lifted from other movies almost untouched, ands some of the humor is just too random to make heads or tails of) but Not Another Teen Movie is striving to be an actual parody, using elements of its genre, and it’s intermittently successful. That makes it infinitely better than even its closest competition. The fact that there are a few laugh-out-loud jokes that don’t cop from other movies and a handful of trenchant, actually analytical observations on the genre means that this movie is the Citizen Kane of its cycle. Even if it sports a totally random, ill-conceived musical number and a deeply boring football scene. Although, to be fair, pretty much every high school movie has a boring football scene, so they got that right too.

Rating: 6/10

Mean Girls

Year: 2004

Director: Mark Waters

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A new girl at school is coerced into infiltrating the evil popular clique to take them down, but she unwittingly becomes one herself.

Reviewing Mean Girls is a challenging undertaking as a millennial. The film is such a zeitgeisty hit that it barely reads as a movie anymore. It’s just a carousel of Tumblr gifs, Twitter bios, and whispered quotes in the back of classrooms. But it has gotten that way for a reason. It’s a damn good movie. Well, it’s a damn good comedy.

The script is witty and sharp, with a plot loose enough to allow the characters to flourish yet still keep track of the throughline. The punchlines show off that then-undiscovered Tina Fey pop, and the characters watch Friday the 13th Part 2 on Halloween, so they clearly have their heads screwed on straight. With a gratuitously fantastic ensemble and a Lindsay Lohan in her prime to give voice to the sharp screenplay, Mean Girls can’t help but be a winner.

The actual filmmaking is totally cardboard and anonymous, but who the hell cares? Mean Girls is the last great teen movie (well, Easy A gives it a run for its money, but still), and its clever premise is both a generation-defining clash of the high school classes and a sweetly powerful movie about the damage teen girls can cause to one another and why.

Rating: 9/10

The Last Five Years

Year: 2014

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Tamara Mintz 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A relationship is shown out of order in a series of musical numbers depicting its inception, triumphs, pitfalls, and eventual destruction.

Sometimes a movie is all about performances. It’s a good thing, too, because without Jeremy Jordan and out-of-left-field musical prodigy Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years would crumple like a bouncy castle in a power outage. The movie is essentially (500) Days of Summer cross-pollinated with an opera, and though its tone management is ferociously askew (Kendrick is saddled with an Adele album’s worth of ballads, with Jordan receiving all the poppy, high energy stuff), it’s a small-scale love story that lives and dies on the actors’ ability to apply human emotion to a battery of arbitrary musical numbers, which they do with aplomb.

There are some intensely memorable longform musical sequences at play here, but The Last Five Years is crippled by a devastating problem: It’s pointless. The out-of-order gimmick is but a lark, and we leave this couple having gained no particular insight into why their story is worth telling. The only reason it’s not told in chronological order is that no musical could have been so mismanaged as to backload so many weepers. This is a vehicle for two delightful young performers, not a necessary entry into the cinematic canon of doomed relationships.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1684

Disneython: Whistle While You Work

Year: 1937

Supervising Director: David Hand

Cast: Adriana Caselotti, Harry Stockwell, Lucille La Verne

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

So, knowing my penchant for totally following through on marathons and finishing them 100% on time, Sergio and I have decided to embark on a chronological expedition through the Walt Disney animated feature films canon, which currently numbers 54 and will certainly have risen before we get even close to finishing. As you can imagine, this will probably be a typically sporadic and unevenly paced marathon, especially when we arrive in the black holes of the Disney filmography that include flicks like Saludos Amigos or Oliver & Company.

However, I am excited for Popcorn Culture to explore realms that aren’t full of blood and guts, though sometimes they’re no less terrifying. Now, I’ve already reviewed three films in the canon (Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia) so that lightens the load somewhat, though I may attempt to revisit them by the time we reach that end of the marathon. But that’s business for another time.

Today we’re visiting the film that started it all, and by “all” I mean “literally everything we know about feature animation today”: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

You’ve probably never heard of it.

On top of being the first American feature length animated film ever, being one of the most successful films in the Depression’s stunted economy, and altering the craft of animation forever, Snow White is a very important film for the Disney company itself. Not only was it their first film to be based on a well-known fairy tale, completely obliterating any popular knowledge of the original version, but it was also the first Disney film to center on a princess. There was no way to know how important this factor would be for the Disney filmography, and in fact it wouldn’t be known for over a decade, but the Princess would soon come to dominate Disney animation for better, for worse, and forever.

So what of that landmark princess? As if you didn’t know, Snow White (Adriana Caselotti) is the fairest maid in all the land, a fact which ignites the jealous fury of the Evil Queen (Lucille La Verne). The Queen hires a Hunstsman (Chris Hemsworth Stuart Buchanan) to murder Snow White, but he gets cold feet upon witnessing her purity and urges her to run away into the woods. There she finds a hut inhabited by seven dwarfs, where she is allowed to stay in exchange for cooking and cleaning and forehead kisses.

When the Queen discovers this, she disguises herself as an Old Hag (Disney was never a particularly progressive company, let’s get that out of the way right now) and feeds her a poison apple, sending Snow White into a sleep of death, from which what dreams may come must give us pause. The only cure is Love’s First Kiss, so it’s a good thing she didn’t ho it up with that charming Prince she met back in Act One. Incidentally, the phrase “True Love’s Kiss” is never uttered in Snow White, leaving at least one shred of Disney iconography for a later film.

See? We’re learning already!

Although Snow White seemed to already have a grip on pretty much everything that defined Disney animation, it’s still the first of its kind and as such has its share of rough patches. First off, it has a child’s attention span, never spending more than a minute on any major plot point, yet taking obscenely long detours for such consequential scenes as “the Dwarves wash their hands” or “post-dinner hoedown.” The pacing is sloppy at best and the deus ex machina in the climax would make even J. K. Rowling blush.

Plus, although their costumes are iconic even to this day (for good reason), the designs of the two primary human characters are undeniably crude. While the company had a handle on anthropomorphic animals and fantasy creatures, creating something meant to resemble a human being posed a bit of a problem for them, giving us a slightly drunk-looking cherub of a princess and a drag queen monarch with a rictus grin.

I half expect her to start lip syncing to “Dreamgirls.”

Nonetheless, despite its uncertain ground as a narrative piece, as a work of animation, it is utterly exquisite (with that one obvious exception). The Disney visual sensibility is acutely present here, with a relentless surge of playful, creative imagery that constantly prods the line between cartoon realism and Looney Tunes absurdist antics. Snow White stays firmly entrenched in a quasi-realistic fantasy mode, but the animated medium truly allows it to push the envelope to develop the tone of each scene, from the unmitigated spookiness of the vaguely humanoid dark forest to the subtle visual joking present in the interplay between the animals of the forest.

Snow White also pushed the envelope of exactly what could be achieved with hand-drawn animation, There is a constant array of shots of water, just to prove that they’re possible, whether it’s a splash, a bubble, or Snow White’s rippling reflection in a wishing well. The animators were constantly challenged to capture real-life physics and experiences, including a fluttering bed sheet that is downright gorgeous.

Overall, Snow White is slightly better as a trendsetter rather than an actual narrative film, but oh what a trendsetter it was. It’s a timeless, iconic piece of work that completely earns its massive, multi-generation defining legacy with a lighthearted, technical superb pizzazz.

Sergio's Corner: Well I assume that Brennan has clued you in on the sheer impact this one film had for the Walt Disney Company as well as the lives everyone born in western culture here thereafter. So without further ado I will include a brief synopsis of my thoughts on what was originally known as “Disney’s Folly”.

Snow White is Disney’s first princess and don’t let her lack of a chin in the original cartoons fool you, she is Disney royalty to be sure. With a voice of a Vargas girl and a body to match, Snow White really embodied the time period she was born out of. She was delicate, pristine, and willing to perform all household chores without the promise of matrimony--- now there’s a keeper. All joking aside, Disney’s first movie about his first princess isn’t really about Snow, no, it’s about the Dwarves… or little people. Though they don’t get top billing, Disney’s seven little men certainly get more screen time and (in the case of Grumpy) more character development than Snow ever did. 

They make the movie come alive and help move it along more so than Snow ever could, seeing as how she only ever helps usher the plot by singing or cleaning. Though these seven little men are stunted by their descriptor, it makes them no less magical nor less memorable. They are proof that in Hollywood there are no small parts, only small actors, quite literally. They are also the reason that I rate this film as highly as I do because otherwise this film would dissipate into the vapidity that is Snow White’s character. 

Sergio's Rating: 7/10

TL;DR: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a masterful animated film that changed the game forever.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1213

Born To Be Wild

Year: 2016

Director: Byron Howard, Rich Moore, & Jared Bush

Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Friends, furries, countrymen… Lend me your ears. On my third anniversary with a certain Disneyphile, I had occasion to attend the opening night of Zootopia, the newest film from Disney Animation’s CGI wing (which, let’s face it, is not as good, but Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, and Big Hero 6 soften the blow). Frankly, I was not sold by the deeply unimpressive trailer, which frontloaded a sloth gag as old and creaky as Gandalf’s knees, and the improbably high Rotten Tomatoes score only served to make me more suspicious. However, I am pleased to announce that I come bearing good news! But first… the plot.

AKA: The part in between the constantly replaying Shakira song.

In Zootopia, animals have evolved past their savage, wild ways. Predators and prey now live in harmony, doing all the fun things that people do, like taxes and Tinder and eating ice cream, only furrier. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a small town bunny with a dream, to serve and protect the citizens of the bustling metropolis Zootopia as a member of the police force. The first bunny on the force, she doesn’t fit in with her burly, aggressive coworkers and gets stuck on parking detail. Overeager to pursue justice rather than follow orders, she ends up on the bad side of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), who gives her 48 hours to solve a missing mammal case, or else her badge is revoked.

Her unlikely partner in this endeavor is the con-man (or rather, con-fox) Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), at which point Zootopia promptly becomes, against all odds, a buddy cop movie. In the process of their investigation, Nick and Judy discover a vast and dangerous conspiracy that will challenge everything they know about the world… and themselves.

AKA: The people who aren’t Shakira.

If you have seen any amount of promo for Zootopia, you might assume (reasonably) that the film is some sort of animated sloth delivery system, but you would be wrong. As hard as they’re pushing those side characters to sell sloth plushies, the bulk of the movie is blissfully free of their musty antics (why they’ve zeroed in on the sloth when a blissed-out yak and a heart-meltingly adorable fennec fox have more, and stronger, screen time is beyond me, but I guess I should pull an Elsa and let it go). What the trailers completely fail to communicate is that Zootopia is an ingeniously crafted modern fable that takes the form of a hardboiled mystery procedural, something I feel was pretty vital to mention. But alas, this is not a review of the Disney publicity department, so let’s move on.

You guys know I love me some world-building, and Zootopia has it in spades. There is one intractable conceptual problem, in that the anthropomorphic citizenry frequently refer to themselves being animals to excuse certain behaviors. However, in a world with no humans, the concept of an “animal” as a wild or uncivilized creature couldn’t exist. That is, unless Zootopia takes place on a post-human extinction Earth, Planet of the Apes style. But I digress. Wildly.

When you’re presented with the concept “animals doing people things,” it’s pretty easy to come up with a half dozen gags off the top of your head. It’s a gimme concept. However, I’m delighted to report that the filmmakers were far from lazy when constructing their animal utopia. In addition to a series of clever but typical gags about animal behavior (wolves love to howl, lemmings have a tendency to be followers, goddamn sloths are slow), Zootopia really digs into a fresh concept: What are the implications of a society composed of hundreds of different animal species? What habitats would they need? What municipal structures would be necessary to foster inter-species cooperation?

Zootopia has its most fun when it is exploring these concepts through delirious visual gags and gorgeous city structures, fostered by the feverishly creative, lush environs courtesy of production designers David Goetz and Dan Cooper. It’s a well thought-out universe, the result of meticulous study, and an excellent breeding ground for the film’s Big Ol’ Message. Zootopia has a strong moral, an appropriately modern treatise/racial allegory about diversity, cooperation, and prejudice that would be obnoxiously preachy in any other movie. However, it is so organically developed through characters and their environments that it becomes even stronger for it, as intrinsic and natural to the film’s universe as fluffy bunnies.

It’s also, like, and important message or whatever, but world-building, you guys.

It really is a fun time at the movies, consistently enjoyable for children and adults alike. I always respect family entertainment that has a brain in its head, and Zootopia is a very sharp, deliberate film with a real sense of purpose. It’s a creative mix of seemingly disparate genres, a wacky yet sometimes dangerous romp with actual stakes, and it teaches you not to be so rude to parking enforcers. It’s a win-win-win!

That said, the tsunami of critical adoration this film ha been receiving is bonkers. It’s a solid, sweet family film, but not even The Shawshank Redemption has a 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. For all its genuine quality, it’s still a new age animated movie, with all the inane pop culture references and slyly inappropriate “for the parents” jokes that that entails. These moments are of a slightly higher caliber than your typical kids fodder, but Zootopia isn’t free from those pitfalls.

I would give the film an unqualified recommendation to anybody with two eyes and heart, but it isn’t the second coming of Pixar. Not that a movie need to be that in order to be pretty damn remarkable.

TL;DR: Zootopia is a fun, smart exercise in children's filmmaking with a solid, ironically human message.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 985

CinemaBeach: Never Never Land

Year: 2013

Director: Randy Moore

Cast: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Because it's uncouth to tell personal anecdotes on official review sites: Sergio and I got a chance to see a sneak peek of this movie at the Cinefamily Theater with the cast and crew for free because I have connections.

Namely, being on an email list. (Shhh, don't tell anyone.)

It was a really exciting experience, especially considering that we almost didn't get in at all.

See the notepad in my pocket? That's how official I am, yo.

Also we got free Mickey and Buzz Lightyear masks, which make everything worth it.

For those of you not in the know, Escape From Tomorrow  is a psychological horror film that was shot guerrilla style at Disneyland. For over 45 days, the cast and crew snuck around Disneyland and Walt Disney World (each of them were given a year-long park-hopping Disney pass which must have accounted for about half the budget), shooting on a handheld camera and keeping their scripts on their iPhones so as to avoid detection by the Disney police.

You see, Disney is a ruthless corporation that rules over exhibition of its trademark images with an iron fist. If caught (and they very nearly were on several occasions), the consequences could have been dire, ranging from being shut out of the parks permanently and thus being unable to complete the film (or ride Splash Mountain ever again) to being sent to jail. Shots has to be extensively choreographed using sun charts to most effectively utilize natural light. Out of fear of being found out, director Randy Moore even took the measure of editing his film in South Korea, far from the watchful eye of The Mickey Mouse Chain Gang.

The film premiered at Sundance and reviewers and doubts were raised that the film would ever receive a release, limited or otherwise. At this moment in time, Escape From Tomorrow is slated for a simultaneous  limited release and Video On Demand release on October 11. Disney wisely has decided to avoid taking legal action at this time, hoping not to inadvertently drum up publicity for the film.

The film opens on Jim (Roy Abramsohn) on a Grand Floridian balcony (one of the film’s few manufactured setpieces) receiving news that he has been let go from his job. Determined to nevertheless make the most of his final day of vacation, he drags his nagging wife (Elena Schuber) and two kids (Katelynn Rodriguez and Jack Dalton) around Walt Disney World, only to be haunted by disturbing visions (like glaring evil eyes sprouting from the “It’s A Small World” dolls). A pair of young Parisiennes (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) capture his imagination and his increasing obsession with them is mirrored by his decreasing attachment to his family and the candy-colored World around him.

While the first act of the film is largely aimless, it charms with nostalgic trips to the classic rides that have defined American youth for decades (a personal joy of mine was deciphering which sequences were shot at Walt Disney World and which were shot at Disneyland – a geography I am intimately familiar with, having grown up in Anaheim). There is some simmering family drama at work here, but the joy is found in little moments (little by necessity, due to the nature of the filming) of snappy wit and infrequent but gleefully weird effects sequences.

The mostly pleasant but meandering first two thirds of Escape From Tomorrow spends its time spewing up intriguing symbols and subplots like a bad flu outbreak, a mysterious and hypnotic evil witch, and eerie premonitions. This all promises to tie up if not totally neatly, at least in an enjoyable and unstrenuous manner but then all hell breaks loose.

The plot points that have until now been gliding along smoothly begin to smash into each other, piling up in a devastating fiery wreck as a panoply of grandiose setpieces and ambitiously inscrutable symbols come crashing down on the relative peace of what was an otherwise totally workable narrative. Not one single loose end gets any sort of closure and the film resolutely refuses to end, sprinting along and leaking psychotropic absurdities for a good fifteen minutes past the natural endpoint.

But man, what a method of filmmaking. It might be just a gimmick, but here in the Happiest Place on Earth the gimmick is everything. Filmed in crisp black and white to accentuate the nostalgic aspects of the exploration of Disneyana, the film is buoyed half on fond memories of the theme parks and half on slack-jawed utterances of “How did they do that?”

Because there certainly isn’t much more to it than that. The acting is wooden across the board (pun absolutely intended) and the film suffers unduly from a lead actor who is content to mug at the camera in feeble attempts to approximate human emotion. The only standouts are Alison Lees-Taylor who chews the scenery as an evil witch and, of all people, young Katelynn Rodriguez, an actress who hasn’t even made it to double digits yet who outshines every single adult member of the cast.

It’s a shame such detailed work went into making what turns out to be a rather scattershot mess, because it very clearly means something important to Randy Moore. Unfortunately his immense passion for complex themes and symbols far outweighs his ability to communicate them. Attentive viewers can maybe glean some subtextual analysis of the artificiality of the Disney Empire, but that would be giving too much credit to a man whose ambition knows no bounds and is not bound by the laws of narrative clarity.

There’s a terrific movie in there somewhere, but it would take a much less green filmmaker to dig it out of the muck. Nevertheless, Escape From Tomorrow is an undeniably fun film to watch. Whether you’re there just to stick it to Disney or to see some top notch cinematic tomfoolery, this film should be your October go to. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, take the money you would have spent on the movie and buy yourself one tenth of a Disneyland ticket instead.

TL;DR: It's a miracle that Escape From Tomorrow Exists at all, but coherence is sacrificed to radical methodology.
Rating: 5/10
Should I Spend Money On This? It's definitely worth seeing for film buffs or bad movie lovers. The guerrilla style is fascinating and the brain-melting twists reek of camp.
Word Count: 1100

Ready or Not...

Today is very special for all of us. Well, me and Shannon.  Tonight is the realization of a long-standing dream and a pillar of our friendship - tonight is our Bridgit Mendler concert.

For those of you who don't know, Bridgit is the star of the Disney Channel Original Series Good Luck Charlie. But nobody cares about that because she has an ALBUM OUT. Yeah, that sounds mercenary and it is. Disney is a soul crushing money making machine. But Ms. Mendler is actually really talented in the cheesy pop field (in which I hold my B.A.).

We first heard her single "Ready or Not" in the Cinemark movie theater where we were watching Pitch Perfect with her sister, who was visiting. This is significant not only because she would fall in love with the movie, dragging me to it in the theater again the next week and generally being an enormous fangirl, but I would also later get a job at that very same theater (that I would subsequently quit but that is neither here nor there).

I later bought the single and then the whole album (it was on sale on iTunes and I had a gift card) and when we hung out over winter break, we listened to it and forged a bond. Bridgit Mendler has been an important part of our college experience and in our friendship, and that is why I am excited about going to a concert that will mostly be populated by twelve-year-old girls.

In honor of this day - and our friendship - here is

The Top 5 Disney Pop Princesses

#5 Demi Lovato

Highlight: Heart Attack

Demi isn't my favorite, but the girl's got pipes. She got her start on the Disney Channel in the TV movie Camp Rock and the series Sonny With a Chance. Although she had a brief struggle with addiction, a nervous breakdown, a stint in rehab, and a hiatus from acting, she climbed back on top, becoming a beloved judge on The X Factor and releasing an album of surprisingly solid pop hits.



#4 Hilary Duff

Highlight: Come Clean

This song was the official song of my breakup in 2012 because Hilary Duff is woman. Hear her roar. She made it big in Lizzie McGuire before moving on to other kid friendly films like A Cinderella Story, Raise Your Voice, and The Perfect Man. Lately she's been working in TV and indie films, but is mostly spending time with her husband, hockey player Mike Comrie and their one-year-old son.



#3 Selena Gomez

Highlight: Hit the Lights

Selena Gomez's breakout role was Alex Russo in Wizards of Waverly Place. Her tumultuous relationship with annoying teen superstar Justin Bieber raised her star even higher (You go girl. Use that douche for all he's worth!), and she's most recently embraced a more adult role in the 2013 comedy Spring Breakers. Her album When the Sun Goes Down proved that Gomez has a strong voice and could produce solid dance electropop with the best of them.

#2 Bridgit Mendler

Highlight: Hurricane

Bridgit is the most recently anointed Disney pop princess, but she has proved herself as something of a bubblegum savant. She is the only girl on this list to have received a writing credit on every single one of the songs on her album. So yes, this is another album by committee with Disney pulling the strings, but Bridgit had a personal hand in the making of each track, and it really shows. Her album Hello My Name Is... isn't necessarily an artistic triumph but it is a surprisingly mature and fun pop record.

My favorite anecdote: When writing her Cher Lloyd-channeling track "Hurricane," Bridgit and her producers were discussing the overall theme - that of an on-again off-again relationship and the problems it caused. As this conversation was going on, she was scribbling in her notepad and when the idea was finally solidified and they set out to write, she turned her pad around and said "How's this?"

She had written the first two verses of the song during their conversation.

So. It's not philosophical or deep. But she's really freaking good at it.



#1 Britney Spears

Highlight: Lucky

Let us never forget Britney Spears got her start on The Mickey Mouse Club. Disney is in her bones, and the fact that she has had a massive pop career does not change that. Britney was a superstar by the age of 17 and her career has spanned three decades. She's had two entire Glee episodes to herself!

Yes, she had a complete and utter meltdown in the mid-2000s but could you imagine being in her position? It's a credit to her that she lasted as long as she did. Anyway, she made a massive comeback and her most recent album Femme Fatale debuted at number one, she judged The X Factor alongside her sister-in-mickey-mouse-ears Demi Lovato, and her song is (inappropriately) featured in the new Smurfs movie. Unquestionably, it is the best thing about that film.

Word Count: 832