Reviews by JxSxPx

Something of a toothless The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short wants to play the 2007 – 2008 financial crises as something a long-con heist film, but we already know how it works out. It also wants to be a satirical jab at the entire thing, but halfway through veers into serious dramaturgy. There’s lots of energy, and a series of collaged images that stretch back through time to explain the society we’re living in that wrought these irresponsible capitalistic practices, yet one cannot shake the feeling that it’s missing something.

Maybe it’s that the film presents itself mostly as a series of disparate personality types stumbling onto something that was right in front of everyone all along. Steve Carrell is a socially awkward, aloof man with a negative percentile bullshit tolerance, and a desperate need to be right. Ryan Gosling reprises his role from Crazy, Stupid, Love, but plays it for maximum smarm and no heartfelt redemption arc. Christian Bale tries to give his character an inner life, but is undone by a series of quirks – a glass eye, his character’s inability to socialize – that provide most of the character development. Finn Wittrock and John Magaro as adorably naïve and giddy boys trying to get a seat at the adult’s table, with Brad Pitt’s neurotic acting as their guide and sage advisor.

Throw in random cameos from Margot Robbie in a bathtub, Anthony Bourdain in a kitchen, Selena Gomez and Richard Thaler playing blackjack, and have each of them explain complicated, labyrinthine banking procedures, and The Big Short seems more interested in creating a lot of noise and not a lot of substance. This shouldn’t be too surprising, as director Adam McKay films banking offices and sterile buildings with all the excitement and juice of an action film.

Numerous sequences feature lots of bells and whistles, at the expense of the dialog pouring out of the character’s mouths. Sometimes, being a good director is knowing when to keep the camera still and letting your actors delivery massive amounts of exposition with coherence. Randomly focusing in and out of the frame, our panning, cutting, splicing and dicing to the point of visual noise while complicated concepts are being explained is just poor decision making.

When the film stops spinning long enough to give us a quiet moment of contemplation or reflection, it stands out in marked contrast to everything whirling around it. It’s not that The Big Short is bad, because it’s not. It’s enjoyable, but with subject matter this juicy, and a cast this loaded with talent, it is frustrating that it isn’t better. Somewhere along the way someone decided that they didn’t have faith in the material to stand on its own, or on the audience to synthesize the information dumps, so they included everything they could think of to thrown in. Look at the shining objects while we explain tough things!

There’s too much that’s good to completely write off The Big Short, but there’s not enough here to explain its presence in the Oscar races for Picture, Director, and Supporting Actor (sorry Bale, I love you, but you’ve been better elsewhere, and no one in the ensemble really stands out). Everything in it feels slightly mechanical, and we can see how everything is going to work out and where it is headed. But props to the film for being one of the better ones to explain and wrestle with depicting the modern financial crisis.

Maternal love is the tie that binds throughout Room, a harrowing but rewarding glimpse into the lives of a young woman and her son held in captivity. Well, that’s where Room begins its journey, and it continues on into their struggle to weave themselves into the outside world. Much of the story examines the ugliest things we are capable of doing to each other, the explosive damage that can turn inward, and our struggles to heal those scars, as much as we can.

If that sounds emotionally draining, much of it is. How could this story not be? Told through the eyes of a five-year-old boy born into captivity, the product of the repeated rape and sexual abuse of his twenty-four-year old mother, he knows nothing but Room. And all of the objects within it are the only things that feel real to him, everything on outside is the stuff of make believe and legends. What we think of a common place, he thinks of as the stuff of fairy tales.

Yet, even in these darkest moments, there are real moments of human empathy and connection. Joan Allen’s presence as the grandmother struggling to reconnect with her daughter, and meeting a grandson she just learned existed could be exhibit A. It’s great to see Allen on the big screen again, and her underplayed acting style feels so lived in and real. A scene where she speaks with her grandson while cutting his hair, explaining that in times of crisis they all lean on each other to share strength and support, practically glows with familial love and empathetic support.

Perhaps in another year, or if Rooney Mara and Alicia Vikander had not been nominated in the wrong categories for their movies, Allen would have been a well-deserved Supporting Actress nominee. She is just that good, and it’s been a long time since she’s had a role this juicy. She could have easily played it up for hammy actorly relish, but she digs deep into understanding who this woman is.

The same could be said about our two lead actors. Brie Larson has been so good in so many things for so long that her newly placed prominence feels like everyone else is just catching up. I first encountered her in The United States of Tara, where she held her own against Toni Collette, no easy feat that trick, and Viola Davis, ditto. Larson’s work here is revelatory, showing a new expansion of a range that was already formidable based on her performances in Short Term 12 and Tara.

The earliest scenes find Larson trying to normalize their life, making a whole world in a tiny garden shed. Once on the outside, she clings to dreams and memories of a home life that has changed dramatically since she last saw it. Her character’s descent into anger, hostility, trauma, and suicidal depression is slowly emerging. Scenes of her abuse by Old Nick are harrowing, but so is a sit-down interview with a primetime news reporter. To think that she’s capable of such depths of emotion and feeling at only twenty-six is quite pleasing, and it’s going to be a treat to watch her career and talent mature from here. If I had an Oscar ballot, I’d cast my vote for her.

And as good as Larson and Allen are, Jacob Tremblay is just as good as Jack, the young child whose eyes we experience this story through. He is so convincing and realistic in this story, I just couldn’t help wondering how they conjured this performance out of him. Child actors are frequently kept guarded from the more disturbing or traumatic aspects of the films they star in, but that seems unavoidable with this material. His petulance feels like a normal five-year-old, and his insular traumatized reactions to the outside world feel all too real. His eventual awakening to the possibilities of the outside world is so slowly and fluidly done, I just couldn’t believe how fantastic this child was. No cutesy precocious child-actor stunts here, his work recalls the fantastic work of Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Undeniably tough material, but Room is one of the best pieces of movie-making from 2015. That Larson is dominating year end polls for Best Actress is no surprise, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we look back at her performance again in the decade wrap-up. Or if Tremblay goes on to become an adult star, the spark of greatness is already there in this performance. Room is hard stuff, but the rewards are many and splendid. 

For me, a new film from Todd Haynes is something of an event. He makes so few, and when he does, they’re always hypnotic, frostily intellectual, and composed of immaculate images deploying the same use of colors and composition as Douglas Sirk. Yes, you could say I am a big fan of his. Carol did not disappoint me.

The meeting of Patricia Highsmith and Todd Haynes feels like a match made in queer cinema heaven given the impressive results. Far too often queer love stories are rendered as tragedies in cinemas, tales of star-crossed lovers destined to spend their lives apart from each other. Carol gives the feeling of possibility to this romance, not ending with a declarative yes or no, but with a thoughtful maybe.

Highsmith, generally, as an author was concerned with the psychological implications and motivations of her characters, and the same can be said of Haynes as a director. Far From Heaven takes the Sirkian images and story beats on display, but digs deep into the widening emotional and mental awakening of its sheltered housewife. Carol tracks the sexual, emotional, and mental maturation of Therese (Rooney Mara) through the prism of her relationship with Carol (Cate Blanchett). These two films would make for a great double-feature.

Haynes does remarkably well with this 50s milieu. Much like Far From Heaven, this has him returning to ape Douglas Sirk imagery and style, but he does it with flair and is clearly a student of the master. It never feels like pastiche, but like the consciously chosen influence being repurposed to its own needs. One could easily see Sirk making a film like Carol back in his time. Haynes work here is consistently solid, and I believe he was robbed of a Best Director nomination.

Carol is a sustained glance as porcelain figurines slowly fracture, these cold exteriors masking the raging emotions underneath. Therese practically vibrates with erotic awakening and lust in her first glimpses and exchanges with Carol. Or the fury and angst that swallows up Carol in her custody battle, a bitter, dirty fight between her ex-husband and social circle slowly entrapping her into domesticated heteronormative hell. When these emotions escape into ugly furies, they are all the more shocking and moving. So much of Carol is left understated, requiring you to read between furtive glances.

Much could be written about the sex scene between the two women, but it isn’t exploitative or titillation. There’s an emotional connection in addition to the erotic. There’s a neediness and hunger that comes with slow-boiling romance and deferred urges. That this scene comes back to haunt the heroine is no shock, given the times and the nasty divorce looming large over it all. Their extended road trip, which comprises a large amount of the second act, plays like a yearning to break free of social constraints and judgment, which makes the hopeful ending all the better.

Carol is a two-hander, mostly, and the lead actresses do not disappoint. Blanchett, of course, is one of our current greats. An actress of tremendous depth and skill, and her reading of Carol is as fabulous as the costumes Sandy Powell has put her in. Immaculately designed from head-to-toe, Carol’s exterior masks an inside that is yearning to connect and be free. Blanchett’s big dramatic moments are handled with care, like her scene where she makes a deal regarding child support, or another where she puffs on cigarettes and counts down the seconds until she can see her daughter at a gathering with the in-laws. Her Oscar nomination is well deserved.

Rooney Mara’s is as well, even if she is in the wrong category. Mara’s Therese is clearly a leading role, and placing her in supporting is an impressive bit of category fraud. No matter, Mara is reserved and meek, clearly in awe of this magnetic older woman who has taken an interest in her. Therese, it could easily be argued, is actually the leading character as much of the film is told from her perspective. It’s impossible to catch Mara acting, and her fragility hasn’t been used as effectively since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Her large eyes communicate much of what is left unsaid, and her yearning glances prove that sometimes words are useless in cinema when a close-up could tell the same story so much better.

Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler shine in the major supporting roles, and both them deserve more love and accolades then they’ve been given. How consistently good in several projects have the two of them been? Paulson’s tough girl act is amusing, and feels lived in and authentic. Chandler’s broken husband is a complicated figure, at once pitiable and petty. Strangely likable, he loves Carol and just wants his happy home back together, misplacing her need for agency in an era where such a thing was deemed nonexistent. Other actors come and go, but these two are the only players whose performances really linger.

For the life of me I cannot understand why this wasn’t given a Best Picture nomination. It deserves one, for damn sure. My best guess is that it’s a film about women, and men play only supporting roles to their stories. No matter, Carol will outlive many of the actual nominees. It’s another damn fine piece of movie-making from one of our current directing greats. 

Lou Gehrig died a year before this film was released, and that should tell you everything you need to know about it. It has no concern for telling the factual truth about Gehrig, it wants to present him as a saint. This is not biographical film-making, this is pure hagiography. Lou Gehrig’s story is an amazing bit of American mythology, and it deserves to be told, but it deserves to be told truthfully.

That’s the part where The Pride of the Yankees trips over itself. It’s not interested in providing a good dramatic story, but presenting a monument to a heroic figure. For his numerous sports accomplishments, or for the way he faced his death sentence with dignity, Lou Gehrig deserves some slight bit of embellishment, yet The Pride of the Yankees overdoes it.

Watching this, would you have guessed that Gehrig and teammate Babe Ruth had a famously prickly relationship? Or that manager Joe McCarthy treated him as a surrogate son? Or that his wife and mother battled each other frequently, and with a chillier disposition than the film limitedly presents? No, because it sidesteps those moments, or shutters them off to the sidelines. Here, Gehrig is a simple good-boy, the kind of “aw, shucks, ma!” character for which James Stewart is the subject of much satirical jabs.

The narrative tends toward monotony, with a heavy dose of folksy charm and Americana symbolism. The only major story beat that maintains your interest is the romance between Lou and wife Eleanor, and the final thirty minutes, which depicts the beginnings of his illness. If nothing else, The Pride of the Yankees rallies itself for a solid final fifteen minutes. That climatic speech is sucker punch of authentic emotional outpouring in a film that has trafficked in easy sentiment prior. Gehrig’s final walk to a darkened dugout, and then we fade to black, our hero struck down in his prime by cruel fate.

The film may not know when to cut elements, but it was smart to end there. What else was left to say? Shame this kind of approach couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout. Yards and yards of fantasy were woven into the script. Was it necessary to keep Dan Duryea and Walter Brennan as two warring reporters constantly arguing over Gehrig’s career prospects? Was that mid-film dance number essential to telling this story? Some of this is just hopelessly dated dreck – the maudlin way it presents Gehrig’s charitable work, or the cavity-causing glimpse into his youth. There’s no meaningful examination of his life and career here, just loose fidelity to the facts, and morale boosting for a nation on the brink of war.

Yet there’s still that final scene. It’s the only one anyone remembers, and with good reason. While a majority of the film surrounding it is the sight of a real-time embalming, that final scene is what the rest of it should have been all along. Gary Cooper’s earnest delivery and Teresa Wright’s teary-eyed stoicism ingrain themselves in the brain, and are powerful enough images to understand why they were Oscar nominated in the first place. But one great scene does not a great film make.

Any adaptation of Wuthering Heights that plays the central relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy as the pinnacle of romanticism is well lost. There’s nothing romantic about their abusive relationship, which spirals out into the succeeding generation in the novel’s second part. No great shock that William Wyler’s 1939 version drops the second half, improbably giving the duo a happily-ever-after in the afterlife, and plays out as the kind of stuffy, stagy studio era film-making that puts people off of these things.

Some of this goes back to the source material, Emily Bronte’s novel is un-adaptable, a long descent into repeating abuse patterns mistaken as romantic gestures. Heathcliff is obsessed with Cathy, mistaking the real person for the imagined creature he has crafted in his mind, while Cathy is an opportunist, a shape-shifting creature who promises domesticity to ensure marriage to a rich suitor, despite all of it being contrary to her true nature. They deserve a hellish reunion, one where they can reunite and cause havoc on everyone around them in a chamber of horrors. This is not romantic, but it sure is gothic.

Wyler misplaces the emphasis on the romance, and shortchanges us on the gothic. The tempestuous, often petty, dealings between Heathcliff, Cathy, and Hindley are played in strange keys. Hindley clearly translated from the page remains as an alcoholic brute, with Hugh Williams doing solid work in the thankless role, but the two leads are played as some kind of star-crossed lovers. Heathcliff is frequently cruel to Cathy, and she, in turn, brings others into their mess.

During production, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon famously detested each other. Olivier, looking impossibly handsome with facial scruff and pauper’s clothing, wanted Vivien Leigh to play opposite him, while Oberon was sad about leaving behind Alexander Korda, who she would soon go on to marry. Tension between co-stars can generate into erotic heat in some films, Veronica Lake and Fredric March sparred on I Married a Witch’s set and they charm together in the film. Olivier and Oberon never gel as a coupling, with Olivier unable to shake off his stage mannerisms and Oberon appearing indifferent to the part. She’s passive to the point where she seems to happily take the abuse thrown at her.

If the two leads are a wash, they’re at least surrounding by a parade of character actors who can reliably liven things up. Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Leo G. Carroll, Cecil Kellaway all do work in various sized parts. David Niven and Geraldine Fitzgerald are solid as the Linton siblings, those poor souls who get tangled up in the deceitful web between Cathy and Heathcliff. Fitzgerald’s showcase scene, where she announces her intention to marry Heathcliff and proceeds to call Cathy out, outclasses anything that Oberon does in the film.

The dramatic emphasis may be all wrong in this, but it looks wondrous. Cinematographer Gregg Toland does great work here and deservedly won an Oscar for his expressive lighting. Toland seems to be the only person attuned to the gothic trappings of the source material. He makes the main houses look like torture chambers, vast tombs that ensnare the worst of human emotions. He goes a long way towards making the Californian coast look like the English moorlands.

Alfred Newman’s score is a major problem, though. It’s not bad, in fact, it’s quite good, swelling, romantic, and melodramatic, but it’s wrong for the material. It’s just another element of this film which misplaces the emphasis. Wuthering Heights is not a romantic story, but the heart-swelling strings played during the deathbed reunion of Cathy and Heathcliff play the scene as that, practically twisting your arm into reaching for a hankie.

Oh, that ending though, it practically torpedoes Wuthering Heights, which up to this point had been a solidly assembled if stuffy film. That ending is truly tone deaf, both for the material and the surrounding film. I’m not sure it’s one of the glossy standard bearers of 1939’s Golden Year musings, but it’s finely made if problematic. Watch for Toland’s deep focus camera work, Fitzgerald’s captivating performance, an assortment of solid supporting players, but be prepared for a lot of verbosity and hammy theatrics from the leads. 

One of the defining traits of the studio era was that each of the major studios, and most of the minors, had a consistent house style. Warner Brothers was unafraid to rip from the seedy headlines, to get down and dirty, while 20^th Century Fox favored biographical films and large-scale musicals. Then there was MGM, the studio of immense budgets and even larger glamour. They weren’t exactly known for their raunchy, naughty Pre-Code gems like Warner Brothers or Columbia, yet they produced one of the best in Red Dust.

Filmed entirely on MGM’s back lots, Red Dust conjures up one of those exotic locales found only in the movies. A rubber plantation in an Indonesian jungle in which the air is filled with eroticism and the threat of danger at any moment. No wonder the characters are frequently covered in sweat, furtively trying to clean themselves off. Is the steam that hangs in the jungle air for the atmosphere, or is it from the carnal heat generated from the central love triangle?

Into the rubber plantation owned by Dennis Carson (Clark Gable) comes wayward hooker Vantine (Jean Harlow). Gable and Harlow, two sex symbols at the height of their erotic pull, make eyes at each other, and we know these aren’t chaste glances. In latter films like Wife vs. Secretary Harlow is practically maternal towards Gable, and in Saratoga their relationship is defined primarily by alternately sarcastic putdowns or flirtations. The romantic sparring and lust generated between them here was never better than it is here. And the film makes no bones (no pun intended) about Harlow's working girl's trade. Gable sticks a large wad of bills down her dress as payment for a night of pleasure, and in another Harlow offers to cut a deal of sex for shelter.

Gable and Harlow are technically our heroes for this film, but they’re also the types of rough-edged people that many Pre-Codes put in the spotlight. Gable’s Carson has no trouble threatening to hit Vantine, or getting rough with his men. After a night of mind-blowing sex, Carson kicks Vantine out of his room, and home. A boat accident, half-explained by a bit player, finds her returning to the plantation and Gable's bed. Then he thinks nothing of seducing his new employee’s wife (a brittle and icily sexy Mary Astor). Meanwhile, Harlow constantly talks tough, and pokes fun at Astor’s high-society woman, practically hissing out “duchess” as a demeaning nickname. They’re slightly awful people, but they’re fun to watch in their amorality.

But it’s not just the carnality on display, which is pretty brazen even by the permissive standards of the Pre-Code era, there’s a distinct hint of class warfare here. Carson’s lust for Astor’s society woman is partially attributed to his idolization of her wealth, breeding, and sophistication. He wants to possess her, and bring her down from the lofty pillar. Think of what Stanley did to Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course, some of it is also because Astor looks positively stunning in her rain soaked clothing, giving peak Harlow a run for her bombshell money.

Even better is the element of comedic farce present in Red Dust. Harlow is wandering into scenes and throwing out brassy one-liners. If anyone walks away with the movie, it’s her, but the three leads are all in fine form. Her performance here is iconic for the notes of sadness she brings to it, a wounded glance at Gable/Astor in embrace comes to mind, as well as the loopy sex appeal she trademarked. Her bath in a rain barrel scene is justifiably memorable, and her persistent needling of Gable really sells it. Later sex symbols took their position seriously, but Harlow had an eye-roll and tongue-in-cheek at the ready for the whole thing. This energy allows her best performances to bridge the gap between sex appeal and near ironic humor.

Director Victor Fleming keeps the entire thing propelling forward to its obviously violent climax. There was no way these characters weren’t going to collide into an explosive moment. It happens with Astor and a gun, after her nervous nature has reached its breaking point with the stalking tiger out in the jungle, and the stalking Gable in her bed. It scares her, while it practically has Harlow quivering in sexual anticipation, and Gene Raymond, Astor's hapless cuckold husband, can’t quite shoot it. No one said Pre-Codes were subtle, and that’s part of their lurid, trashy charm. 

There’s Gable looking incredibly arousing as the embodiment of arrogant masculine sexual energy, Harlow as a hooker with a heart of gold and unlimited reservoirs of sarcasm, and enough erotic energy to power the Playboy mansion for a century, what more do you need from a film? It could be junk in another group of film-makers hands, but it’s a classic example of Pre-Code cinemas pulpy, brash demeanor. This is possibly the most perfect example of what makes a Pre-Code film great, and why we keep returning to the era.

Five years separate Disney’s last entertaining film and this one. What Meet the Robinsons lacks in coherent narrative and character development it makes up for in high doses of eccentricity. There’s low energy dramatics here, and it beats the audience over the head with its themes and moral lessons. No, it doesn’t beat you over the head with it, it presents over and over again with all the subtlety of a chainsaw through Jell-O.

Having met the Robinsons, I couldn’t tell you any of their names. Apart from main characters Wilbur and Lewis, the rest are just a random name added on to a defining quirk. There’s a grandpa with a backwards head, a housewife who conducts a frog orchestra, a guy obsessed with a meatball cannon, a girl obsessed with trains and a weird accent, and a dog with glasses. This is but a small collection of the ensemble, and we haven’t even gotten to the villains yet.

Disney adds another gay-coded villain to their collection, a gangly, tall creep with bad teeth, a skintight suit, high-heeled ankle boots, and a spectacular comb over. Bowler Hat Guy isn’t a very good villain, but he’s mildly diverting. He’s good for a laugh, but his epic plan is stupid, and the reveal is obvious in a scene towards the end of the first act. Even for a children’s film, Meet the Robinsons distrusts in our intelligence to follow the story.

Where Meet the Robinsons excels is in crafting imaginative images. Granted, there’s not much of a story to go along with them. The story is cobbled together from disparate parts of Back to the Future franchise, The Jetsons, and a dash of The Matrix. But Meet the Robinsons taps into a child’s imagination for a vision of the future in which people travel in bubbles, squids are butlers, robots are personal assistants and made of rubber, and there’s some cute and charming stuff involving a displaced T-Rex. I’m not sure it adds up to a satisfying conclusion, but it’s entertaining in the moment.

No shocker to learn that this was the first film, partially, overseen by John Lasseter. It plays as a bit of a course correction, and the growing pains to the modern day revival are evident. It’s an warm bit of fluff, and nothing more. I’ll take this minor success after so many unsatisfying viewing experiences. It doesn’t bring anything new to the Disney stable, but it is good enough as a corrective and pleasant way to spend 90 minutes. I can’t imagine too many people want to return to it again and again, though. 

Disney’s second try with Chicken Little is no more successful than the first, and at least that one had the good taste to be a short film. There’s just simply not enough story in Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes for feature-length animation. Chicken Little frequently feels engine-less, spurting around in every direction, and confuses pop-culture references and pop songs for emotional weight.

Whenever a children’s film shoehorns in a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop songs, it always makes me worry. If done correctly, it can be charming, but it’s frequently used to hammer home the already obvious, beating jokes like a dead horse, and used as short-hand for character development when none is present. Chicken Little does this over and over and over again. An alien invasion is scored to R.E.M.’s alternative rock classic “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a montage of Chicken Little trying to get to school is underlined by Barenaked Ladies “One Little Slip,” and the rest of it is just too depressing to continue mentioning.

It’s a shame that Chicken Little never coheres into anything worthwhile, as a few disparate parts work well enough on their own. The vocal cast is clearly game, and there’s not a lousy performance in the bunch. Zach Braff and Garry Marshall create a believable father-son dynamic, and there relationship is one of the brighter spots. The film never slows down long enough to develop it, but the potential was there.

A few gags land here and there, like the opening that has Marshall’s character doing voiceover narration wondering how to open the story. Two abandoned attempts poke fun at prior Disney films, and, much like Hercules, this is the sight of Disney eating its own tail. The final film-within-a-film is a nice gag about giving real stories of heroism and daring the Hollywood treatment, even if that punch doesn’t completely land given the film-by-committee vibe that pervades the entire running time. This is the film that proves if you threw enough random things at the audience, and never slow down for a minute, some things are bound to stick. It’s a step-up from Home on the Range, but only in the way that a stubbed toe hurts less than a broken one.

You know, prior to this excursion into the entirety of Disney’s animated feature catalog, I would have easily pointed towards The Aristocats, Oliver & Company or Pocahontas being the worst of the bunch. But I guess my brain shut out just how terrible Home on the Range is. (For the record, I still think Pocahontas deserves the lowest spot since it takes a historical event and whitewashes it to fit the princess mold.)

Home on the Range was advertised as the final hand-drawn animated feature to come from the studio, and it ended with a limped whimper. The Post-Renaissance was a continually downward spiral, with the persistent feeling that the studio was burning off its leftover ideas and releasing films that were over-thought, over-worked products of studio demands. Thank god they eventually released The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh, which may not be masterpieces, but they’re at least evergreen films which perform the typical narrative beats of their respective styles with aplomb. Oh, and those were loving animated.

This looks like Disney trying to do Chuck Jones, but missing the key ingredients which made his severe angularity and expressionistic backgrounds pop with zesty energy. They threw in references to Sling Blade, Little Caesar, and Spaghetti Westerns, I’m shocked they didn’t throw in a wink-and-nod to the Road Runner and Wil E. Coyote. But that may have gotten them into legal trouble, but at least it would have provided a potentially smart meta-joke.

No, the only time Home on the Range whips itself into any actual emotion is during the villain’s big number, “Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo.” This big bad isn’t very menacing, memorable, or engaging, only notable for Randy Quaid’s committed vocal work and for having a passing resemblance to the actor. Oh, and his reoccurring motif is that he can hypnotize cattle by yodeling. His big song is bright, colorful, vibrant, clearly indebted to the march of playing cards in Alice in Wonderland as it is equally indebted to Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

For every adventurous choice made, it’s immediately undercut. Roseanne Barr as the leading voice in a children’s film is a ballsy choice, what isn’t is to muzzle her brash humor into the family-friendly brand. Robin Williams, Martin Short, and Eddie Murphy got to go-for-broke in their films, frequently riffing in ways which was at odds with the surrounding film yet still humorous, but she gets stuck with bodily humor and lazy writing and non-descript character.  

Given the troubled production behind many of the Post-Renaissance films, it’s not surprise to learn about the unique sounding origins. Conceived as a story about a timid cowboy encountering a cattle hustler in a ghost town, which may or may not have been populated by spirits, it quickly went over-budget and stuck itself in development hell. Wanting to salvage what they could, they kept some names, character designs, and basic outline to produce this. This is the safest, blandest film to be made from those materials, and the final budget was somehow ballooned to $110 million.

You wouldn't know it from looking at the screen. There's no grand scale ambitious sequences, nothing to rival the artistry of Sleeping Beauty's moving tapestries, or Beauty & the Beast's fairy tale wonderlands. I'm sure the pre-school set finds this movie perfectly tolerable, but I don't think 76 minutes has ever gone by so laboriously for me before. Home on the Range is so slender that it's practically anemic. It tries hard for laughs, which are only rarely there, and provided a momentary silence on hand-drawn animation from the leader of the field, in America anyway. This is not how one pictured Disney going out.

I cannot muster up much in any direction regarding Brother Bear. The story is assembled from various disparate parts of prior Disney films, and it continues the Post-Renaissance tradition of indifference. Many of these films feel like they’re the product of too much group-think and studio interference, beating out much of the scope, originality, and ambition along the way.

We’re a long way from the messy, artistic heights of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or the masterpieces like Beauty & the Beast or The Lion King, which it openly rips from. Not even ten years after those neo-classics, we’ve descended this far down. I just don’t know what happened to the Disney studio. During this era the rise in direct-to-video sequels probably had something to do with it. Why bother to make something great, when you came make something designed to sell then spin it off into a massive amount of merchandise and inferior sequels?

The only artistic choice that announces itself as something different is the switch in aspect ratios. Having never watched Brother Bear before, I simply thought there was something wrong with either my TV or the file went weird on Netflix. I’m still not sure why it changes from a more limited view when the main character is a human to the expansive scope when he changes into a bear, but at least it’s something distinguishing. It is perhaps needlessly artsy, but it gives the film some personality, if only briefly.

The rest of it plays out in broad strokes that Disney has done many times before. Cute talking animals, easily digestible cultural flourishes, tonally contrasting sidekicks, dead relatives, and ancestral spirits reaching down from heaven to awaken the lead’s journey – everything is present and accounted for. None of it is given a fresh spin, unless the goofy comic sidekicks being Canadian counts. I’m not entirely sure it does.

Is there an original image, idea, or character in this movie? I don’t think so. A general sense of indifference permeates the film, a feeling of “good enough” to not diminish the brand too much. The animation is only so-so, a step down from the previous Treasure Planet’s lush space opera or Atlantis: The Lost Empire’s comic book angularity or The Emperor’s New Groove’s slapstick old school style. It’s the generic prestige house style, but corners have obviously been cut. It feels closer to something from the Bronze Era.

Shortly after this film’s release, Disney announced that they were transitioning from 2D hand-drawn animation to 3D computer-generated animation. I get the sense that Disney was just burning off the last few films they had in production, eager to dive into the new format, and only continue with hand-drawn as a means to create more sequels to their famous titles. Brother Bear is not a good film, it’s not the worst thing they’ve produced either, but it is the sight of brand dilution.