19 Comments

I second the You Hurt My Feelings recommendation. I caught a screening last night and loved it.

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Hey minor correction but the movie is called INTO THE WOODS (not IN)

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founding

Scott asks the question that has made me want to claw my eyeballs out ever since Disney started pumping out these "live-action" remakes -- for God's sake, WHY? Why not put all that money and effort into something original instead of stretching the IP so far and so thin that it just gets transparent and loses its snap? Or why not build another theme-park ride and move on? *

Speaking of which, I was in Anaheim for a conference a couple of weekends ago, and I can highly recommend the new "Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance" experience at Disneyland. Now that was cool.

* Of course I know the answer to these questions.

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Oof. Some weeks just feel like WORK, you know?

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May 25, 2023Liked by Scott Tobias

How? How? How does Rob Marshall keep getting work? I realize not every choreographer-turned filmmaker can be Stanley Donen or Bob Fosse, but Marshall can't even competently block a scene, even though his whole stage career literally involved MOVING PERFORMERS ABOUT A STAGE! He won awards for it and everything! Yet on film, he barely even knows how to effectively move his actors from Point A to Point B. And he sure as hell doesn't know where to put a camera. I try to judge every movie on a case-by-case basis, but if Marshall's name is attached to something, I'll go out of my way to avoid it.

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May 25, 2023·edited May 25, 2023

…who the **** is Scuttle?

Edit: I have never seen the DTV sequels so maybe Scuttle shows up there and is a special bit of fan service for the ultimate latchkey kids. Otherwise…

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Just based on the clips I've seen already, if The Little Mermaid doesn't break audiences' patience with "make it as much like the cartoon as possible, except worse in every possible way" remakes, maybe nothing will. (Well, besides the fact that they'll eventually run out of cartoons to remake.) But maybe the question shouldn't be "why do they keep making these?" but "why do people keep watching these?" If the answer is that kids like them because kids like anything, then please, take your kids to better things.

It didn't have to be this way! Branagh's Cinderella was no modern classic but it went down smoothly, even if a lot of that was the actors' charm. Heck, even the prototype version of this, the 101 Dalmatians remake from the 90s, did its job well and squeezed a delightfully manic performance out of Glenn Close.

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"Rob Marshall cannot direct a musical sequence to save his life."

Nothing better than direct assault! I thought Chicago was one of the dumbest things I'd ever seen outside of Richard Gere's performance, which was pretty rad. Thankfully I haven't seen any of the other films mentioned.

Also, "why does this movie exist?" can be asked about a distressing amount of mainstream American cinema, no?

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That Little Mermaid image reminds me of a publicity still from Secretariat with Diane Lane and John Malkovich mouths agape.

Referenced on Blank Check recently.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1028576/mediaviewer/rm3797650688

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As much as I'd love to see a movie this weekend, the only things I'm itching to see are playing too far away (and a certain major league baseball team is in town and all routes to said theaters require me to drive by that ball park). But in happier news in the Atlanta area, The Tara Theatre reopened last night.

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founding

"Traditional animation lent itself well to the timing on big numbers like “Part of Your World” and “Under the Sea,” because there were no limitations on rhythm and movement, but the choreography is so sluggish in CGI that it feels like rendering speed was somehow an obstacle."

this has been soooo true for all of these. by using human people instead of cartoons, the musical numbers move at such a slow pace that the whole thing feels explicitly more boring.

the energy and speed of something like Beauty and the Beast's Gaston is rendered (ha!) completely inert in these new productions

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