I remember when my friend, a mom and a Disney expert, told me that she hated the Disney millennial movie classic Lilo and Stitch. When Lilo and Stitch was released in 2002, the Mouse House was in the red after having suffered several high budget flops like Dinosaur and Brother Bear. Disney needed a hit. Lilo and Stitch was no Lion King money maker but the story about a rambunctious little alien named Stitch who befriended a little Earth girl named Lilo made enough money to save Disney Feature Animation studios. Most millennials have fond memories of Lilo and Stitch. The movie, however, doesn’t hold up that well when rewatched as an adult. Especially if you’re a parent. “I hated Stitch particularly,” my friend said, “He’s supposed to be this adorable puppy figure wrecking the house but the stakes are too high. I couldn’t laugh at any of his antics. I just wanted Nani and Lilo to kill the little thing and then slow-roast him with a nice garlic sesame sauce.” I knew what my friend meant when she said that the “stakes were too high.” No parent watching Lilo and Stitch can fully enjoy the story. Watching Stitch destroy Nani and Lilo’s home as Nani tries desperately to convince the Child Protective Services (CPS) case worker that she is a competent guardian for Lilo is absolutely triggering. Here’s the deal: Lilo and Stitch is a movie about an impoverished mother-figure trying desperately to keep CPS from putting her child in foster care. Technically Nani, the mother-figure in Lilo and Stitch, is actually Lilo’s big sister. Nani and Lilo’s parents are dead and Nani has guardianship, but she also suffers from all the institutional oppression that single moms face in American society. There is no low-cost daycare available, so when Nani has to work as a waitress she brings Lilo with her to sit at one of the back tables. Nani has no car and the necessity of her working means Lilo is alone a lot of the time. Lilo also clearly has a lot of unresolved trauma from the death of her parents. She gets into fights at school. She destroys property, runs away, and openly disobeys Nani to a dangerous extent (Lilo at one point nails the door of the house shut while a pot boils away on the stove.) Nani and Lilo’s situation has drawn the attention of Child Protective Services. And here I have to put my foot down. Come on Disney! Give us evil stepmoms! Give us octopus-tentacle witches! Give us dragons and poisoned apples and princesses locked in towers. But don’t fucking give us Child Protective Services! Seriously! Nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING triggers a parent like hearing those three letters: CPS. Every parent, no matter how loving, still lives in fear of CPS. We tremble at the thought of having our kids taken away from us suddenly and with no reason. We bite our nails every time we find out that our child went to school with dirty clothes or when our toddler falls off the couch and screams. Did he bump his head? Does he need to go to the hospital? And will the hospital call CPS? Anyway, in Lilo and Stitch Nani is busy trying to keep her little sister out of the system when Stitch, a maniacal space alien, crash lands on Earth in Hawaii. Lilo loves Stitch, thinking he’s some sort of weird dog, but Stitch destroys Lilo and Nani’s house. He tears the place to shambles right when Nani is trying to convince an imposing case worker called “Cobra” that Lilo has a safe home environment. This is nerve-wracking enough, but the danger is compounded by the fact that both Nani and Lilo are indigenous Hawaiians. The long horrifying history of indigenous children being taken away by the US government and placed in abusive boarding schools (where many indigenous children died) looms in the background.
Back in 2002 the reception towards Lilo and Stitch was generally positive. People were aware that the animation was a bit more low-budget than the glamour we were used to with The Little Mermaid and Aladdin but the movement was nice and fluid and the characters were endearing enough. Viewers also liked how Nani and Lilo were drawn with more realistic body shapes as compared to the 90s wasp-waisted Disney princesses. In the end, however, I agree with my friend. Once Disney introduced the constant looming threat of CPS taking away Lilo, the movie ceased to be fun. At least for parents. And Stitch absolutely should have ended up slow-roasted over a flame whilst dipped in garlic sesame sauce.
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Look, I know The Crawling Eye is cheesy. I know this film is so dumb that it was literally featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000…. but I don’t care. The Crawling Eye is a good movie. I like The Crawling Eye. The film was made in 1958 but somehow it still possesses that pre-War British black-and-white thriller atmosphere I adore. It’s no The 39 Steps but The Crawling Eye has good plotting, no-nonsense dialogue and a fantastic suspenseful build-up that even now in 2023 can keep your attention glued to the screen. Does the movie have flaws? Yes, of course. The climax, when the audience gets to see the crawling eye, is a bit disappointing. I won’t deny that. The fuzzy close-up of the gooey disgusting eye is passable but the limp string-controlled “tentacles” are ridiculous. They have all the fearful energy of overcooked pasta. I still snicker a bit at the child actress, completely devoid of fear, calmly standing with a supposed “tentacle” around her waist while the adult actor tries to desperately rescue her. The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenburg Terror in the UK) was made during an era where no audience members were truly fooled by monster effects. Folks don’t know about the pre- Star Wars era of movies where being scared by the monster on the screen required a hefty suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer. It was a lift-with-your-thighs-not-your-back level suspension of disbelief. Did scary movies exist before computerized special effects? Oh heck yes! Watch M and see if you don’t get scared. But those movies relied on acting and plotting and dialogue and lighting and editing to give chills. If make-believe monsters were involved, they would have little screentime. The Crawling Eye opens up with several climbers huddled together on a cliff face while mountain-climbing in the Alps. Automatically this setting gets my happy adventure endorphins pumping. Yes, it’s dumb to think that you can have a glorious mountain-climbing experience six thousand feet above sea level while wearing only a turtleneck. To the twelve-year-old boys raised on media like The Adventures of Tintin comic books, however, a good woolen sweater is all you need for a climb. Read any boy’s adventure tale where hypothermia is just a passable condition that can be cured with a swig from a hip flask and you’ll know what I mean. The opening shot of The Crawling Eye looks like a regular, rugged, exciting trip. Unfortunately things go wrong for our turtlenecked alpinists. One of the men gets his head torn off by an unseen menace. We then cut to a train whooshing through a tunnel as the opening credits roll. On the train are two beautiful sisters, Anne and Sarah Pilgrim, who are part of a clairvoyance sideshow act. As the train approaches Mount Trollenburg, the mountain where the alpinist lost his head, Anne suddenly gets a creepy urge to get off the train. She becomes agitated and insists that she and her sister stay at the mountain. Anne cannot explain why she has such a sudden urge to visit the mountain but only states repeatedly that they have to go to Trollenburg. Anne’s unnatural and sudden urge to visit the mountain is a well-placed suspenseful setup. The Creeping Eye has excellent plot pacing and knows how to keep the audience engaged. Anne and Sarah get a room at the Hotel Europa, a small inn at the base of Mount Trollenburg. We meet a few more characters, including a scientist from the UN named Alan Brooks. Brooks has also arrived at the Trollenburg mountain at the request of a researcher, who is worried about an odd cloud that has formed around the mountain’s peak. The inn has very few guests because of the mysterious decapitation deaths that have been occurring to alpinists on the Trollenburg. The creepy atmosphere hangs thick around the place. Sarah Pilgrim meets two friendly British mountaineers, Guilhardt and Brett, who are prepping to climb up to a small hut on the Trollenburg. Later that evening at the inn Sarah and Anne give a demonstration of their mind-reading act. Anne has to psychically visualize certain objects Sarah hides behind a screen. Anne first accurately describes a snow globe with a model of a mountain and a hut. Then Anne falls into a trance describing the mountain and the hut and Alan Brooks realizes that Anne is describing the actual hut on the mountain where the two British mountaineers are currently staying. Anne describes one of the mountaineers named Brett leaving the cabin in a trance. It’s a satisfyingly spooky scene in a cheesy horror movie sort of way. A rescue party leaves to climb up the mountain to rescue Guilhardt and Brett. Brett suddenly arrives back at the inn, acting strangely. Brett is shaky and talks about how the inn is too hot. When Anne shows up in the inn’s lounge where Brett is having a drink, Brett tries to kill her. Another man rescues Anne and punches Brett unconscious. Brett falls to the floor, splitting open his scalp in the process. Sarah then notices that Brett isn’t bleeding from his wound. His body apparently has no blood. I can’t explain why, but that image of Brett’s open, wide, bloodless wound is one of the creepiest shots in cinematic history. It just hits a very scary nerve with me. Later it’s found out that Brett has been dead for awhile. The crawling eye creature killed Brett, reanimated him and sent him back to the inn to kill Anne. The crawling eye didn’t like how Anne’s clairvoyance was giving away the crawling eye’s actions.
There’s a bunch more stuff that is admittedly less interesting for me. Like most cheesy horror movies, the action gets dull once the delicious build-up ends and we’re left with actually fighting the stupid rubber puppet. But you know what, go ahead and roast me because I like The Crawling Eye. I love the mountain setting. I love the idea of a Swiss inn tucked away at the foot of a haunted crag. I find the characters- especially the Pilgrim sisters- surprisingly likeable. I absolutely adore the exciting, suspenseful slow-burn set up of the film. I have no problem late at night popping in my DVD of The Crawling Eye and watching it as visual comfort food. Because, like I said before, The Crawling Eye is a good movie. I remember the first time I watched Star Wars. I was a kid in the 80s. My family was watching a VHS copy of Star Wars: A New Hope. We saw the white armor-plated Imperial Stormtroopers board a Rebel vessel. We heard C3PO fret about “the princess.” Then we saw Princess Leia load a disc onto the R2D2 droid. I was brought up on old school Disney movies and first generation Mario Bros games. I knew what princesses did. They wore pretty dresses, got captured, fainted and had to rely on being beautiful enough for the male heroes to consider them worth rescuing. It was a simple formula. When I first saw Princess Leia, I was not very impressed. Yeah, she had the flowy white gown on but it was very underwhelming. Leia was just wearing a white turtleneck with some sheets draped over it. It looked slapped-together. (By the way, what was it about sci-fi movies in the 70s always putting their main characters in turtlenecks? Did people during the Carter years really think turtlenecks were the future?) Anyway, back to Princess Leia I was young and my first impression of Leia was very “meh.” I didn’t like Princess Leia’s hair. The two iconic buns tied around her ears did not please me. Everyone knew that princesses needed long flowing blond hair, not something that looked like a pilot’s helmet with headphones. Princess Leia’s expressions also threw me. She never seemed scared. She wasn’t pleading or seductive or kind. Princess Leia didn’t traipse through nature singing songs to her woodland friends. Princess Leia looked grim. She looked like my second grade teacher when I had forgotten to do my math homework. By my Disneyfied elementary school definition of “princess,” however, Princess Leia did have some “princess” qualities in her during that first scene in A New Hope. When the Stormtroopers confronted Leia, she immediately ran and hid. It was a very expected princess maneuver. And then, and I’ll never forget this shot, we saw Princess Leia again. She had not fainted. She had not screamed for help. Instead, we saw Princess Leia lean back into the frame with a studied expression, staring at the Stormtroopers. And Princess Leia was holding a gun. I know this sounds weird, but this shot of Princess Leia with a gun preparing to ambush Stormtroopers who had just surprised her completely blew my pre-adolescent mind.
I didn’t know women could FIGHT BACK! I didn’t know that someone who was a friggin’ PRINCESS could do things like ambush enemy soldiers in a fake-retreat-rearguard-attack maneuver. Like, wait, what? Now granted, Princess Leia’s ambush attack didn’t get her very far. She shot the Stormtroopers, missed, ran again and this time was hit by a Stormtrooper blaster. Still, that iconic shot of Princess Leia quietly leaning into the frame while holding a gun peaked a lot of girls into feminism. The idea that women didn’t have to run away but could stay and fight was a welcome inversion of the feminine paradigm. I wouldn’t consider Star Wars to be a feminist movie. That galaxy long, long ago and far, far away seemed to be populated only by men and Princess Leia. Star Wars does not pass the Bechdel Test by any stretch of the imagination. That being said Princess Leia with that gun in A New Hope is an icon. Seeing a woman possess a stereotypically lacey title like “Princess” while being a rebel leader, military strategist, soldier and assassin broke a lot of female character norms at the time. And, needless to say, I like her hair now! We all have traumatic memories of scary childhood movies. There are a lot of movies that absolutely terrify us as children but simply come off as laughable when we rewatch them as adults. (I’ve reviewed The Crawling Eye here earlier). There are some kids movies, however, that still scare you even AFTER you’ve grown. I’m an adult. I’m powerful. I can do what I want. But what I absolutely CAN’T do is rewatch these scenes from my childhood movies and not still be scared. Let’s list them, shall we? 5. “She can’t hear you.” If you haven’t watched The Witches then you were deprived during your childhood. Sorry, but that’s just facts. I can’t say enough good things about the 1990 movie The Witches. It had Angelica Huston as the High Witch ffs! It has Rowan Atkinson! It has the criminally-overlooked Mai Zetterling playing the young boy protagonist’s ex-witch hunter grandmother. The Witches is a horror comedy based on a Roald Dahl book. It is beloved by all millennials everywhere. And every child who has watched The Witches remembers *that* witch. It’s the witch played by Anne Lambton. The scene with *that* witch starts out with Hugo, the young boy main character, playing up in his tree house. He looks down and sees an elegant woman trying to coerce him from the tree. Hugo sees by her eyes that she’s a witch. He clings to the branches in fear as she tempts him with gifts. It’s really scary. Maybe it’s Lambton’s wide-set eyes or the creepy way she talks to a snake she just happened to have in her purse (yes, a snake). Or maybe it’s the way she says to Hugo “She can’t hear you” when Hugo calls out to his grandmother. Either way, Lambton utterly nailed her performance. That scene from The Witches still creeps me out. Jim Henson’s Grand High Witch puppet hasn’t aged well but Lambton’s wide snake-like eyes and the quiet way she tells Hugo “She can’t hear you” is scary. Period. 4. “I…. I…. am still Emperor!” The Dark Crystal just weirds me out as a whole. The puppetry, designed by Jim Henson, is a wonderous example of what pre-CGI practical effects can do. I can’t deny that. However The Dark Crytal just doesn’t really sit right with me. Hard to explain why. Maybe it’s that scene at the beginning where the Skeksis Emperor dies. The Skeksis puppets were clearly modeled after vultures (a MUCH maligned bird, I must say) and everyone remembers the scene where the grotesque beasts crowd around their hateful dying Emperor. The brittle old turkey tries desperately to hang onto his last breath. “I’m … I’m … I’m still Emperor!” he rattles, grasping his sceptre weakly. The Emperor dies, and none of his family cares. They’re full of hate and cunning, no grief. But the Emperor had been hateful too. His dusty corpse disintegrates almost immediately because apparently lack of love in life speeds up the decomposition process. It makes sense in an odd way. The scene creeped me out as a kid and it’s still creepy watching it as an adult. 3. “Oh why did we leave her alone?!” I was really really scared as a kid of the scene in the Disney animated Sleeping Beauty where Maleficent hypnotizes Aurora. The music is spooky. In fact, the song was so haunting that I was disappointed to learn that Tchaikovsky (who had composed the original score for his “Sleeping Beauty” ballet) had meant the Hypnosis Score to go to a silly cat dance. There is no damn way that haunting music evokes silly cats. It’s so bizarre. Even after I saw the ballet I was like…. “Nah.” Sorry Tchaikovsky, but that eerie minor key score is meant for evil. Not kittens. The whole scene is frightening. We see the room where Aurora is alone, weeping, and then the lights go out. We see the fire suddenly condense into a spinning green orb. We see a ghostly shape of Maleficent. Her yellow eyes stare out from the fireplace and then disappear. I couldn’t watch that part as a kid, it was too scary. Another scary aspect of that scene, and I think this was unintentional on Disney’s part, was how Aurora suddenly appeared two-dimensional while walking towards the tower. The shadow was drawn on Aurora in such a way that it appeared that she was like a cardboard figure, not a flesh-and-blood human. Again, I don’t think the animaters drew Aurora like this on purpose. It was just a sort of awkward shadow effect. But it scared me as a kid. Does hypnosis suddenly turn you into cardboard? Do you stop being a human if you’re hypnotized? Either way, even if you’re an adult while you watch that scene, you’re gonna get creeped out. 2. “Oh here’s a treasure! You’ll want that won’t you my dear?! Yes!” And back we go to Jim Henson for the cinematic childhood trauma! Man, the guy really did a number on us millennials. We all know the scene of Sarah and the Junk Lady in Labyrinth. The whole scene is upsetting from start to finish. The scene starts where Sarah, just wanting to escape her scary adventure but knowing she has to rescue her baby brother, begins to gaslight herself that the whole awful experience is just a dream. Her brother is safe. Her parents are home. She’s fine. Denial is a very recognizable psychiatric defense against trauma. Hell, it’s the first stage of grief in Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. Then Sarah opens the door of her familiar, homey bedroom and is greeted by a horrifying hellscape. A deformed old woman weighed down with junk barges in and admires all the beautiful toys Sarah has in her room. It’s like a scene out of the TLC show Hoarders. The old junk lady start piling junk on Sarah, telling her how all her beautiful things are so much more precious than her baby brother. It’s all very creepy and sad. We see Sarah start to forget her brother and her family. Sarah slips into a catatonic state as she looks at herself in the mirror, putting on lipstick. Fortunately Sarah is pulled out of her trance after she reads a book (apt metaphor!). “It’s all junk!” Sarah declares, causing the room to collapse. She suddenly remembers her baby brother and, with the help of her friends, clambers out of the trap. 1. “Mama! MAAA-MAAA!!!” Here it is folks, the #1 traumatizing scene from a kids’ movie that is somehow even MORE traumatizing when you watch it as an adult. Oh man, this scene is hard to watch, especially if you’re a mom. Lampwick is a naughty boy who skips school and drink beer. When Lampwick and Pinocchio are enticed to Paradise Island and Lampwick is turned into a donkey, yikes. He transforms in front of a horrified Pinocchio, unable to stop the process. His last words are “Mama! Maaamaaa!” before his cries turn into donkey brays. It’s really horrifying. I don’t know why I didn’t find that scene scary when I was a kid. Probably because as a little girl I got bullied by older boys like Lampwick so I saw the dude as having it coming. More upsetting to me is the scene where Jiminy Crickett spies the crates full of donkeys- who are actually children- getting shipped off to Paradise Island. THAT scene is upsetting. You see the kids weeping and saying “I want to go home to my mama,” but instead the kids got their clothes ripped off and whipped naked. People didn’t play in 1940 my friend. Food was short. Child labor was still common. People were already gearing up for a second World War. A bunch of children in donkey form getting tortured probably seemed like pure escapism at the time.
Or maybe an omen of what was to come. I have heard WWII veterans talk about how they were only 16 years old when they landed on Iwo Jima as marines. How many of them were crying for their mama as they were drafted and sent off to fight? Yikes. These movies are all great movies, don’t get me wrong. They’re definitely worth a rewatch. THAT being said, please give yourself some self-care afterwards. They’re still creepy. I was obsessed with the movie Twister back in the ‘90s. I had just moved from Massachusetts to Indiana. Indiana was flat, covered in corn and- according to my mother- had no trees. When we pointed out trees to her on the drive from the coast, she would state “Those aren’t trees, just tall broccoli.” The midwest was a bit of a culture shock. School consisted of not just fire drills but also tornado drills. I had never done a tornado drill before. Tornado drills are completely different than fire drills. You run outside for a fire. You head to the most interior part of the building (the gym showers at our school) for a tornado. “What if there’s a fire AND a tornado at the same time?” would be inevitable smart-ass question my classmates would ask the teacher during a tornado drill. “Pray,” our teacher answered. It was Indiana during the ‘90s. We didn’t have active shooter drills yet. Columbine had not even happened until a couple years later. The year I moved to Indiana the movie Twister was released. I was OBSESSED with the movie. My sister and I watched it close to five times before it left the theaters. “It will lose everything on a small screen!” I would tell my mother, “We have to see it now.” Twister is a purely effects-driven movie. And oh my memory is sharp when it comes to how stunned I was when I first saw Twister. That first twister we see, the long slender white twister, was so beautiful and so eerie. I still remember the chills running down my spine as the twister slowly glided almost parallel to the ground like a graceful, deadly snake. When I decided to watch Twister again for the first time in quarter century, I wondered how the effects would hold up. Would I still get the same chills watching those storms? And I regret to inform y’all that… no. Nope. The effects from 1996 don’t really impress in 2023. It’s ‘90s CGI folks. It’s grey. It’s fuzzy. It’s sub — Sharknado. It’s as eye-popping as the rubber puppets from the ‘50s creature features. Our modern-day eyes have become too jaundiced. Twister no longer holds up under the scrutiny of 21st-century gaze that has been trained to spot the smallest imperfections in AI-generated photos. So is Twister worth a re-watch despite the laughable Netscape-era effects? Oh hell yeah! Especially for us ‘90s people here. Twister is a blast of nostalgia from the late 20th century years. I mean, the scenes of people frantically grabbing paper maps (yes, paper maps) and hurriedly gabbling over CB radios where the storm chasers should turn next is worth the rental price. It’s like, “Oh right, we used to have to use those shitty hard-to-fold, constantly-tearing paper maps back before Google started holding our hands during long car trips.” Plus there are slight gems hidden among the grey pixelated twisters in the film. The scene where a tornado rips through a drive-in movie theater showing The Shining is still exciting. (Yes folks, drive-ins were beginning to die in the ‘90s but they were still around). Also Helen Hunt is always fun. She has the cheerful mom energy going on. She’s the parent who’s happy to let you chase twisters through the mud but will absolutely ground your ass if you try to sneak out of the house after 10 pm. Plus we have a pre-famous Philip Seymour Hoffman as “Dusty,” an almost feral storm chaser who is mostly kept around as comic relief. Dusty is a one-note character but Hoffman still makes him entertaining. Even the bloopers are fun. The film opens up on a small farm in 1969. A farmer is frantically leading his family to a storm cellar because of an approaching tornado. “TV says it’s big! Might be an F-5!” Never mind that no farmer in 1969 would be talking about an “F-5” tornado since the Fujita scale rating tornados (F- zero through five) was not developed until 1971. Screenwriters should have probably googled (well, “Ask Jeeves”-ed) the history there before filming the scene. I also rather like the complete disregard for continuity at the end of the film where Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton battle a monster tornado while the sun shines full on their faces during close-ups. It’s a lovely day for a picnic and a fuzzy brown tornado. Honestly if you were born after 9/11, Twister isn’t going to do much for you. For the rest of us older millennials however, Twister is awesome. It’s a movie meant for teenagers, portraying an idealized version of adulthood that’s full of adventure and blazing your own trail. It hooked us 90s teens good.
So go ahead and stream that sucker. Enjoy the trip back to the ‘90s when all we had to worry about was bad weather. My son and I have just returned from the Disney live-action remake of the 1989 The Little Mermaid. How was the movie? Well, it’s a mixed bag. The Little Mermaid really lags when it’s under the sea and trying to be a frame-for-frame match of the 1989 animated version. It’s grey, it’s slow, it’s dull, it’s slightly depressing and frankly it’s irritating because all you can think of is how much crisper the animated version was. Seriously, the scene where a shark attacks Arielle and Flounder as they explore shipwrecks goes down like slow-pour cement. Once the movie moves out of the water however and unshackles itself from the 2D animated classic it finally gets a chance to stretch its legs. We see the island where Eric lives with his adopted mother. We see the nervous romantic chemistry between Eric and Arielle. We see Arielle’s face as she notices the dancing feet of people in the marketplace. We see the subtlety of expression between the poised but affectionate Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni) and Grimsby (Art Malik). On dry land, The Little Mermaid shows the audience what we want: an expansion of the Disney “Little Mermaid” universe that only a live action movie can produce. The opening of The Little Mermaid is surprisingly dark. We see a shot of violent, unreal ocean that’s probably pure CGI. Over the ocean is a quote from the Hans Christian Anderson original story: “… But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers much more.” We then cut to a ship full of aggressive male sailors, their faces twisted with hate, as they try to kill an apparent mermaid swimming by their boat. It took me back a bit for sure. Dang, was the whole movie going to be this dark? Was Disney just going to go whole-hog and end it like Hans Christian Anderson originally wrote: with the little mermaid killing herself because she refused to stab Eric in the chest as he slept naked in bed next to his new bride? Yikes. But no, despite the dark opening scene Disney’s live-action Little Mermaid still remains mostly in young adult movie territory. The underwater action movie scenes, as I noted before, are leaden, dreary CGI imitators of the energetic 1989 animated movie but Disney still does 19th century sailing boats well. I remember being in first grade and thrilling at the sight of Eric’s boat filling the screen in the first shot of the 1989 Little Mermaid. I love the haunting beginning of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (there was only one Pirates of the Caribbean movie made, btw. Disney was one and done with Pirates of the Caribbean and never made another film in the franchise. Yup.) The live-action The Little Mermaid continues the tradition of its animated predecessor and other Disney films by showing absolutely fabulous shots of 19th century sailing vessels. Seeing the sails billow out as Eric’s boat surges forward, gets caught in storms and sinks still makes the heart palpitate. These shots are also a good argument to see The Little Mermaid on the big screen in the movie theaters instead of streaming it at home. Other parts of the film have some bad CGI missteps. Sebastian the crab with his irritated lower lip thrust in the 1989 Little Mermaid is beloved by generations of Disney fans. The 2023 Little Mermaid unwisely made Sebastian look like a realistic crab, which absolutely diminished his character presentation despite the best efforts of voice actor Daveed Diggs. Scuttle, voiced by Awkwafina, doesn’t do much better but Scuttle and Sebastian get to sing a peppy hip-hop duet called “The Scuttlebutt.” It’s a song that wasn’t in the original 1989 film and it’s very catchy.
Is The Little Mermaid worth a view? If you have kids then yes. Go for it. There are some messaging problems with The Little Mermaid of course. The large, powerful, non-married, outspoken Ursula is still portrayed as all that a woman should NOT be while the petit, pretty, voice-less Arielle is shown as the platonic ideal of a woman worthy of a man’s love. But frankly The Little Mermaid has a long tradition of pissing off feminists. Why break it now? Plus, as my son and I left the theater, I saw an entire party of 10-year-old girls getting ready for the next showing of The Little Mermaid. One mom took a picture of the girls posing in front of the movie poster. One girl pointed to the character of Ursula, posing menacingly in the corner, and said “I like her! She looks sassy!” The kids will be okay. Look, I’m getting too old for this shit. I just saw Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse and it’s fucking exhausting. Seriously. I feel like I put in a full day of work after watching the entire movie and all the flash-flash-flash-FLASH-FLASH-FLASH of the animation. The movie is clearly doing something right though. I saw the movie with my son and a friend and her kids and NONE of them could shut up about the film after we walked out of the theater. “That was the BEST MOVIE EVER!” My friend’s daughter said, her eyes bugging out of her head in that adorable way adolescents do after watching a summer blockbuster. I’m sure my eyes did the same thing after I saw Fellowship of the Ring but fuck y’all, that movie was a religious experience. I’m not going to lie. There’s a lot in Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse to admire, provided you don’t have any neurological problems that can be triggered by flashing colors. The beginning of Spiderman is absolutely horrible. The opening sequence takes place on Earth-65, a universe full of vague pastel vomit backgrounds, shitty dialogue, jerky ugly animation and a female Spiderman named Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). The spasmodic animation is intentional on the part of the animators. I think it’s to give the imagery a more comic book quality but frankly the look is awful. It’s like the horrible shaky-cam style of shooting action sequences that Gladiator debuted in 2000 where the shots juttered so much that no one could see what the hell was happening. Anyway, the pre-credit sequence (and it DOES turn out to be a pre-credit sequence, which surprised me because it had gone on so long I thought it was the first third of the movie) is a grind. Stacy battles a Leonardo da Vinci-type villain while dropping lots of unfunny one-liners. This is interspersed with Stacy having lots of angsty dialogue with her dad (who looks so much like the dad from The Incredibles that I wondered if it was a crossover) and pulling hard-to-follow moves that look like a bunch of neon pink “Post-it” notes fluttering over the screen. I realized that if the rest of the movie was going to be like this I was in for a bad time. Fortunately we don’t see much of Stacy’s Earth-65 in Spiderman. After the opening credits roll, we go to Earth 1610 where we meet a male Spiderman Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and OH MY GOD WHAT A RELIEF IT WAS TO BE BACK IN THE BRONX! Look at all those cool blues and greens and greys after the neon-pink hellscape that was Stacy’s universe! Look at all those wonderfully-depicted backgrounds showing New York in 2023! Look at the lovely expression in all the characters’ faces and movements! I was captivated by the sullen teen boy lope of Morales leaving a party after being chewed out by his dad. A chill sequence of Morales and Stacy casually web-swinging through the Bronx gave me quiet joy. I also loved the way the Spiderman characters were able to express themselves with their eyes while wearing masks. It’s something that I don’t think a live-action Spiderman could pull off. Certainly Toby Maguire as Spiderman in the first Sam Raimi movie had to struggle with conveying emotion while in costume as Spiderman because the mask covering his face was static. And CGI was nowhere near the level in 2002 to make Spiderman’s mask show emotion. Morales’ New York was balm for the brain. Even the animation during the Bronx portion was smoother (though still slightly more jerky than I would have liked.) The movie’s villain is called “Spot” (Jason Schwartzman) and his powers allow him to jump from one dimension to another. Spot’s character design seems based on the villain Rorschach from Watchmen. The Spot character morphs from being a slightly dorky wannabe-villain to a truly dangerous and frightening character.
Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse remains strongest when we stay in the Bronx. Spot’s fight with Spiderman in a bodega is funny. Watching Morales’ struggle in the subway to transport a couple of cakes to a rooftop party is hilarious and well-timed while showing the familiar struggles of living in New York. Unfortunately Spiderman does not stay in the Bronx. I’ll leave out a twist in the end which I loved but suffice it to say that when the movie actually does go across the spider-verse and leaves New York, my attention wandered. Not invested, sorry. But maybe I am just old. I watched my friend’s adolescent daughter’s eyes glow as she said that Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse was now her very favorite movie. Clearly the movie’s creators had hit the right demographic. And I am just too old. We all love Jumanji. That’s a given. Jumanji is one of those movies that is the perfect cinematic experience. And by Jumanji I mean the Robin Williams film from 1995. I don’t mean the recent 21st century films with Dwayne Johnson. Don’t get me wrong, I have no quarrel with those Jumanji movies, but they’re definitely not the same as the 1995 film. Jumanji, a movie about a haunted board game that brings violent jungle-themed monsters from its own dimension over to our world, is the perfect Father’s Day film. No, seriously. Jumanji doesn’t exactly hit the viewer over the head with its message about fathers and sons but the emotional core is there. In fact, for a movie full of rampaging stampedes of animals trampling a mid-90s New England town, Jumanji can be surprisingly complex in some of its themes on family. Child psychiatrists would have a field day with the character of Russel Van Pelt, a murderous British hunter in a pith helmet who is devoted to killing the Robin Williams character Alan Parrish. Van Pelt is played by Jonathan Hyde, the same actor who plays Alan’s emotionally distant father Sam Parrish. One thing that has struck me rewatching Jumanji with my son is how well the special effects have held up. Jumanji is almost 30 years old and watching Alan Parrish get sucked into a haunted board game is still kind of horrifying. It’s a huge contrast to Twister, which was made a year after Jumanji. Twister, unlike Jumanji, has not aged well in its visual effects. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) did the effects for both Twister and Jumanji. The beginning of Jumanji, where two children named Alan and Sarah start playing the board game, is absolutely freaky. We see Alan roll the dice. The board game shows the words “In the jungle you must wait/ ’Til the dice read five or eight.” We then see Alan watch with curiosity and then horror as his finger tips stretch out thinner than a sheet of paper. Alan Parrish’s arms follow his fingertips. They stretch out like long snakes and finally his whole body squeezes out in a torturous way and whirls above the game as Alan screams in terror. “Roll the dice!!!” we hear him shriek at Sarah before he disappears. He already knows that the dice must be rolled to five or eight or he is doomed. That scene is scary. And it’s still scary watching it almost 30 years later. Jumanji is a testament to how well-crafted effects which are imbued with the correct emotion can stand the test of time. Even the massive lion that Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter (Bradley Pierce) unleash from Jumanji still impresses. I also love the running gag of the disintegrating cop car belonging to long-suffering police officer Carl Bentley (a hilarious David Alan Grier). Bentley’s car becomes more and more damaged by the Jumanji game’s shenanigans throughout the movie until it’s finally eaten by a large carnivorous plant. Other effects have aged less gracefully (the less said about the fuzzy digital monkeys the better) but overall Jumanji’s CGI has held up surprisingly well. The practical effects of Jumanji are a bit more hit-and-miss. I loved the large elegant Parrish mansion festooned with jungle plants and flooded with monsoons. Less convincing were the large plastic spiders that attacked Alan (Robin Williams) and Sarah (Bonnie Hunt) towards the end of the film. And we can still see the rubber flexing around Robin Williams’ face when he is stuck in the wooden floor. Another problem I have with Jumanji is the ending. It’s a kids movie so obviously it’s going to have a happy ending. The problem I have is that the ending to Jumanji is a little *too* happy. *Spoilers* After Alan wins Jumanji, he and Sarah are immediately transported back to 1969 when they both started the board game. He and Sarah are children again. Alan’s parents are still alive. Alan and Sarah get to re-do on their childhoods without any of the Jumanji-induced trauma that spoiled their first childhoods. It’s just a bizarre message to send to kids. Hey kids, as long as you play by the rules all the bad things will totally go away! Your trauma will disappear. Your dead parents will come back to life. You’ll get a do-over on all the parts of your life that damaged you during the first time around. It’s all good! But of course that’s not true. Trauma is often permanent. Time does not reverse and give you a second chance. Dead parents do not come back to life. You don’t get do-overs. A lot of bad things that happen are permanent and you just have to manage them or work to persevere despite the past.
The lesson that sometimes bad things happen and there’s nothing you can do about them is a hard lesson for children to learn. And Jumanji kind of whiffs on that. Plus at the end we see Alan and Sarah as adults again. This time however they are on the second timeline and are happily married with a baby on the way. Which made me wonder a bit. Alan had been stuck in Jumanji from 1969–1995 in the first timeline, but Sarah had been in the real world. She would have known about stuff like the Challenger explosion and the Loma Prieta earthquake and Jeffrey Dahmer and all of that. Did she warn anyone while growing up again during the second timeline? Or maybe she did warn people about other disasters and since we’re all living in the second timeline, we don’t know about those disasters because she prevented them. And the disasters we do know about Sarah couldn’t warn us about because they didn’t happen in the first timeline. Whatever. I don’t know. It’s just a movie. And a good movie. I love Jumanji. Even if it still freaks me out. Warning: Huge spoilers for the movie “Hopscotch.” It’s a forgotten classic. Please watch it and then come back to this article if you haven’t seen the movie already. Hopscotch is a movie of its time and consequently a bit old fashioned. Released in 1980, Hopscotch received bad reviews and flopped at the box office. Part of the reason for the movie’s failure was its terrible tagline: “He’s about to expose the CIA, the FBI, the KGB… and himself!” It was a dumb, gross joke that completely mis-marketed one of the most intelligent movies of the decade. National Lampoon’s Animal House, released two years earlier, had suddenly redefined comedy into a cruder, more obscene format and the early eighties already had Porky’s, Revenge of the Nerds and a whole bunch of grosser stuff waiting in the wings. The creators of Hopscotch, an intelligent espionage comedy full of older actors and a complicated international plot, made the mistake of trying to cater to the National Lampoon crowd. They saddled the film with a salacious tagline and an “R” rating (purely for language. Glenda Jackson’s bare shoulder is all we get for nudity)…. and nobody came. Hopscotch, in a nutshell, is a movie about taking revenge on your boss. The starts out with CIA agent Miles Kendig (played by Walter Matthau being peak Walter Matthau) hanging out at German beer halls and genially intercepting a Russian intelligence agent named Yaskov (Herbert Lom.) Kendig shakes down Yaskov for some microfilm and the two men part ways with no apparent hard feelings. They’re both old spies set in their ways, driven more by their love of routine than their love of country. Alas trouble is brewing for Kendig. A younger man named Myerson (Ned Beatty) has been promoted to Kendig’s supervisor and Myerson is a complete prick. When renting out his summer house, Myerson specifies to the realter “No kids, no pets, no Democrats.” Myerson, irritated by Kendig’s complete inability to be intimidated by him, angrily demotes Kendig to a desk job. Kendig refuses to take the demotion lying down and instead shreds his personnel file, quits the CIA and goes dark. That was apparently easy to do in 1980. Myerson is furious. He immediately sets forth plans to find Kendig and eliminate him. Kendig’s CIA protegee Joe Cutter (played by a young Sam Waterston pre Law & Order) is more amused than angered by Kendig’s stunt. Cutter, nevertheless, has to follow Myerson’s directives. The rest of the movie is basically Kendig playing a cat-and-mouse game with the CIA while in the process humiliating Myerson to the utmost degree. In the end Kendig does not appear to escape the long arm of the CIA. Kendig tries to fly away in a vintage WWII biplane but is shot down by Myerson. We never see Kendig’s body, just the faces of Myerson, Cutter and Yaskov as they see the smoldering remains of Kendig’s plane floating in the sea. “Sonuvabitch is dead finally,” Myerson says, turning away from the sea and heading back towards the CIA helicopter. “Sonuvabitch better STAY dead!” Cutter says. “Pity,” Yaskov replies, walking towards Cutter, “I shall miss him.” And here’s where things get interesting. My family and I absolutely love the movie Hopscotch. We have watched it together ever since we first got a TV and a VCR. The videotape of Hopscotch we rented from the video store put the movie in TV format with both ends of the screen chopped off. It was no big loss for most of the film. Missing the full majesty of late seventies fake wood decor and box TVs was hardly a tragedy for cinematic history. The TV format, however, becomes a huge problem during the climax of the film when Yaskov and Cutter are looking at Kendig’s plane. We are meant to see both Yaskov and Cutter in that moment. Yaskov and Cutter know Kendig well and at that moment they both believe Kendig is dead. In the TV format, however, we only see Yaskov. Cutter’s expression when he yells “Sunovabitch better STAY dead!” is absolutely necessary for his character arc. He’s yelling because maybe he wants to be heard above the helicopter rotor blades, but it may also be because he is in shock that his friend Kendig is now dead…. and Cutter actively participated in Kendig’s death. We can’t exactly tell what Cutter is feeling in the TV format because the power of the moment is muted. We can’t see Cutter’s face. Fortunately Youtube has provided a fully — restored cinematic version of Hopscotch that anyone can watch for free. In that version we see the entire screen as it was originally shot…. including the moment when Yaskov and Cutter stare at the wreckage of Kendig’s plane. Yaskov fully believes Kendig is dead and his expression is of resigned melancholy. Pity that Kendig is dead but he- like Yaskov- did not work in a career where there was a high likelihood of a peaceful retirement. They both knew the risks. Cutter, however, looks like he is about to laugh. Cutter, with the exception of Glenda Jackson’s character who plays Kendig’s girlfriend, knew Kendig the best. Cutter knows that Kendig would never paint himself into a corner or get himself into a situation that he would not be able to get out of in the end. It’s a game for Kendig. It’s as simple as hopscotch, whether it be grabbing a suspicious pack of cigarettes in Germany or faking his own death over the white cliffs of Dover. “Sonuvabitch better stay dead!” Cutter yells. Well-played Kendig, he’s thinking, well played…. but stay down. Stay down. Cutter’s expression in that moment oscillates between him wanting to cry and him wanting to laugh. Cutter knows that Kendig isn’t dead, but he also knows that he will never see his old friend again. Old CIA spooks who fake their deaths don’t usually reappear. You won’t see Hopscotch except on Youtube or possibly the Turner Classic Movie channel. And if you have reached this paragraph I hope you truly have already watched Hopscotch before starting my spoilerific essay. If you haven’t, however, you are in for a treat. I have deliberately not mentioned some amazing scenes.
But make sure you are watching the cinematic version of Hopscotch and not the TV VHS version. I’m a huge TERF and I do not like Lia Thomas. I don’t like how Lia Thomas cheated female athletes out of their medals and their swim records. I don’t like how Thomas thinks it’s okay for individuals who had the athletic advantage of passing through male puberty to compete against women. I don’t like how women athletes are being gaslit by AMAB trans athletes that a slight fall in testosterone levels puts individuals with a male-sized heart, male-sized lungs, male-sized shoulders and male-sized musculature on an equal playing field with women. We all know that’s not true. I also don’t like how Lia Thomas disrespected women’s boundaries by insisting on changing in a women’s locker room. There have been no reports of Thomas acting inappropriately towards Thomas’ other teammates. That being said, the mere act of insisting on using a shared space with women when you know you present as a 6'1" masculine presence with a broad shoulder breadth and a penis is an act of offense. It’s meant to intimidate women. So no, I don’t like Lia Thomas. That being said, I really can’t stand by and let current attacks on Lia Thomas pass without comment. If you have been on Twitter lately (and God bless you if you have because the Bird App is horrifying) you may have noticed that Lia Thomas is trending again. The transphobes are out in force and they are finally going to EXPOSE LIA THOMAS!!! How are they going to expose Lia Thomas? Is Lia Thomas gonna de-transition while saying “Thanks for the gold medals ya stupid bshz?” Have there been accusations of illegal activity made against Thomas? Nope. Lia Thomas just got “exposed” for (wait for it) BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH ANOTHER TRANS WOMAN!!!! Um. Okay? Yeah, so, um, that’s the big scandal. Lia Thomas has a girlfriend named Gwen Weiskopf. Weiskopf is a trans woman like Thomas. Weiskopf is also a consenting adult, like Thomas, and yeah. They make a cute couple. Huge scandal guys. And that leaves me scratching my head. Like…. at this point, how is Lia Thomas supposed to live her life? Trans women already get a lot of grief if they try to date cis lesbian women. Some of that is justifiable because frankly pressuring women who have made it explicitly clear that they do not want to be sexually intimate with people with penises strays dangerously far from the concept of consent. I’ve talked about this before, but I should also say that plenty of cis lesbian women do date trans women willingly.
Either way though THAT’S NOT WHAT LIA THOMAS IS DOING HERE! Apparently Lia Thomas is not allowed to date trans women. That’s the argument the transphobes on Twitter are making right now. What? Look, at this point people need to leave Lia Thomas (a consenting adult) and her girlfriend (another consenting adult) alone. Just leave consenting adults doing non-illegal stuff alone. Seriously. Lia Thomas has upset a lot of people, but she seems to make Gwen Weiskopf happy. And the rest is none of our business. |
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