Fantasia 2000 (1999)

  In 1940, Walt Disney set up a new kind of animated film. A film that has been seen as landmark in the history of animation and Disney. This film was Fantasia. It was a film that would combine animation and musical symphonies with different kinds of new animation in several different segments. Disney thought that this would revolutionize almost every thing he ever worked on or created. Fantasia as released in 1940 to a positive critical and audience reaction and was put as the 2nd best film of 1940 by the National Board of Review for the reasons that it was influential new kind of animated film. Disney on the other hand was not so enthusiastic. He thought the film was a failure and was nothing like he had imagined or expected. The dream of combining animation with musical symphonies was lost for years on end until in 1998 when Roy Disney (nephew of Walt Disney), came up with the idea of a sequel to Fantasia named Fantasia 2000 which would contain seven new segments of animation and music including one classic favorite (The Sorcerer's Apprentice). It would be released in Cinemas in 1999 and in Imax from January 1st 2000 to April 30th 2000.

When I first heard of Fantasia 2000, I had thoughts of low expectations. This was because the first Fantasia was so brilliant that I never thought a sequel to this film would succeed it as it is very rare to have sequel surpass their predecessors e.g Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Godfather: Part II. As soon as this sequel pressed on my eyes, I was completely and utterly mesmerized at the quality and superior animation that was devised in this sequel. The new segments I thought were completely revolutionary and this was definitely a sequel that would for me surpass it's predecessor.

Now for my review in which I will review this film by review each segment in the film to make things interesting.

Symphony No. 5 in C minor-I. Allegro con brio by Ludwig van Beethoven


The first Fantasia 2000 segment starts off to the musical note of Beethoven's Symphony No.5 with some abstract shapes and colours which take the shape of butterflies trying to escape a multitude of bats in spectacular splashes of light. This segment's surrealism gives the film a grand opening and makes it an accomplished segment because the musical number fills in very well with this segment and gives it a different and unknown kind of animation for viewers to see which is surreal art. Surreal art is one of my favorite kinds of art and I was very pleased to see it in brilliant form.

Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi


For the second segment of Fantasia 2000, The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi was chosen to be played along with the animated story of a group of whales who are able to fly due to a supernova occurring in the water they live in. They are then able to fly into the clouds to another nesting grounds of water. This segment is a grand spectacle of Computer animation as well as traditional animation. The Computer animation which is used in the whales is brilliant because for a time like 1999, this was groundbreaking technology and it is wonderful to see it in animation because it gives animators inspiration to go to new grounds of animation. This segment is my favorite because it has grand tune towards it and the story of it is brilliantly put forward to this animated tale of magnificence. There is a part of this segment in which the whales rise from the water into the new world in the clouds. This part shows a great representation to drumbeats of war which made me prefer this segment more and more because it looked different to any other kind of animation I had ever seen.

Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin

The third segment of Fantasia 2000 takes us to the streets of New York during the Great Depression. The musical number is the famous Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin which gives the segment a jazzy and tuneful theme upon itself. This segment's animation was inspired by the animation of Al Hirschfeld whose animated productions have delighted audiences around the world and certainly when it was used here. This segment remains a complete success because it is terrific at relating the perils of the Great Depression with children as well as adults and if anyone could relate trauma and perils in a colourful and charming way then they would become great tellers of harsh times. The whole layout of this segment is brilliant and it deserves a standing ovation. I did not think it was one the best segments but it was not a bad one.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major-I. Allegro by Dmitri Shostakovich

Our fourth segment is based upon the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Story of the Steadfast Tin Soldier. This segment is drawn upon traditional animation in classic fairy tale fashion of music and art. I don't have much to say about this particular segment apart from that I thought the music went very well with this tale of animation and I think that is what remains is that the animation is very similar to animated films like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King and that makes it very relatable to modern audiences and children. The musical number which comes from Dimitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No.2, creates a connection with this fairy tale in the sense that it becomes almost as similar as the segment itself making it perfect for the task.

 

The Carnival of the Animals, Finale by Camille Saint-Saëns


The fifth act of the film takes place among a bunch of flamingos who go by their boring routines until another flamingo comes along with a yo-yo to ruin it all for them in comical fashion. This brilliantly built along to the musical tune of Camille Saint Saens' The Carnival of the Animals. Although this segment is short, it does provide a lot of fun for different types of audiences and is created to be very funny as well as being brilliantly constructed to provide a great new segment.

I will not include The Sorcerer's Apprentice as it is from the original Fantasia in 1940 and need not be reviewed as it is one that is famous and that most of us know about. However I will include a video as a reminder.

Pomp and Circumstance – Marches 1, 2, 3 and 4 by Edward Elgar

To start our final two acts, we have Donald Duck appearing in a story based on Noah's Ark with Donald as Noah's First Mate. This is combined with Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Marches to create grand march between the animation and the music. It successfully attains that goal by making traditional animation fun to watch as we see Donald Duck messing about with the animals while also being reunited with his wife towards the end after believing that she might have died when the flood came. If there was ever going to be a third Fantasia, I believe this one would be chosen as it contains Donald Duck in an unforgettable cartoon.

                         

Firebird Suite – 1919 Version by Igor Stravinsky

Our final piece is taken from Igor Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. The animated story is that of a woodland sprite who is accompanied by a deer to bring happiness toward the forest they live in by having the sprite make everything shiny and wonderful until we come to a nearby volcano where inside a firebird lives. As we might expect the sprite gets destroyed by the firebird but is resurrected by her companion to remake what happened earlier but this the sprite manages to spread grass and trees and shiny stuff around the volcano and the forrest surrounding it. This Segment is a metaphor for the 1980 eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano. It manages to gives us one final grand animated tale which combines macabre and fantasy in one huge spectacle of light and destruction. I thought it was a great tale and definitely deserves a standing ovation.

                                                                 

                        

This concludes Fantasia 2000. It is a film that deserves to be recognized even if it was a box office disaster. It will remain with me a classic animated film because as I have said many times it is very good at combining new kinds of animation such as the whales in the second segment and the sprite in the last segment. If any animated tale could achieve that then they would bring new delights for audiences and critics. I enjoyed every piece of this film and deserves multiple audiences as well as praise from anyone.

I will give Fantasia 2000 4/4 stars and you can catch all my review at Blogspot. 

                       

Inception (2010)

A film that most film critics have been raving about in the last year, Inception has taken people to a new level of filmmaking and has impressed film fans and critics to an acclaimed status worldwide. It was named the best film of 2010 on numerous occasions and won four Academy Awards including: Visual Effects, Cinematography and two Sound Awards whilst being nominated for four others including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. To me this Christopher Nolan's third best film after Memento and The Dark Knight.

Now for my Review of Inception. The term "Inception" is defined as someone planting an idea into someone's mind using a device which lets humans invade another human's sub-conscious (dreams). This film's plot is about a skilled thief played brilliantly by Leonardo Di Caprio, who needs to perform Inception on the heir of a Business Empire in order to get back to his home. Now if this technology existed, we would never be considered safe anymore even if we really thought this was groundbreaking. The thief Dom Cobb, is said to be the best at stealing information from a human's mind and he proves this at the beginning of the film when he and his partner Arthur played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, steal information from the mind of Mr Saito played by Ken Watanabe as part of an audition to see if the best extractors can perform "Inception". 

The whole premise of this film makes it sound like a Stanley Kubrick film as we can recognize some motives and ideas constructed in the visual style of Kubrick's films. This film has so many great ideas inside it and uses those ideas to create a two hour long maze of a film as if it were created to make us confused and feeling motivated to use our minds to work every piece of what was coming next. I honestly thought I that this film was not an amazingly great film but I thought it was a good film even if it did borrow some ideas from films of Stanley Kubrick and the science-fiction action film, The Matrix (1999). My reasons for my liking of Inception are as follows:  Point 1. Its Art Direction, Visual Effects and Original Score make it one of the best looking films I've seen in recent years. Those three elements are so brilliantly put together that it gives the film a greater edge towards it. Point 2. The Cast was very wise choice especially with the enigmatic performance of Eames played by Tom Hardy. The actors in this film make it a very realistic film as it explores corporate espionage in it's ruthlessness and dishonesty. One actor I was pleased to see out of the rest was Tom Berenger. Berenger has acted in many films including my personal favorite War film Platoon (1986). I have never seen him in anything recent and it was a delight to see him on top form as the corporate bad guy who is also the godfather of the subject of Inception played by Cillian Murphy.

Inception is proof that blockbuster and art can be the same thing. I listed it as the sixth best film of 2010.

I will give this film 4/4 stars. This was my review of Inception and you can get all my reviews via Blogspot.

Fierce Creatures (1997)

A lot of people seem to mistake this film for being a sequel to A Fish Called Wanda (1988), but it is indeed a follow up or as Kevin Kline called it, an Equal. A Fish Called Wanda was an immense success and it happens to be one of my favourite films because it is just to good to be ignored. But this film would produce an equal named Fierce Creatures. The name Fierce Creatures comes from the name of a Monty Python sketch written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones (Michael Palin and John Cleese being the only members of Monty Python to star in both of these films).

In 1996, John Cleese hired directors Fred Schepisi and Robert Young to direct the film Fierce Creatures which Cleese had written shortly after A Fish Called Wanda. When the film was released in cinemas in 1997, nearly most of the people and critics who saw it were disappointed with the film as it just didn't make anyone amused or interested because it wasn't nearly as funny as A Fish Called Wanda. 

Fierce Creatures is a story about a New Zealand Businessman named Rod McCain (Kevin Kline) (a metaphor for Rupert Murdoch) who purchases a zoo named Marwood (based on Marwell Zoo in Hampshire, United Kingdom but is named after John Marwood Cleese) in London, England. The corporation that McCain owns Octopus Inc., requires it's investments to return 20% of the profits it earns to Octopus and if it doesn't it is sold or put on the scrapheap. McCain hires a retired British Hong Kong Policeman (John Cleese) to run the zoo. When the policeman controls the zoo he insists that the zoo adopts the new "Fierce Creatures" policy in which only very lethal animals will be kept in the zoo to increase popularity and revenue. This plan fails as the zoo keepers protest in favour of running the zoo the way it was normally run in the past. A businesswoman from Octopus Inc. played by Jamie Lee Curtis and the businessman son of Rod McCain (also Kevin Kline) quickly take control of the zoo with disastrous results.

When I first saw this film, my first impression was that it was not going to be as impressive as A Fish Called Wanda. I then saw it and thought to myself, should this film have called itself Fierce Creatures because we only see the moment of the Fierce Creatures within the space of half an hour and then it disappears with the film degrading out of control as soon as Kevin Kline enters as the son of the New Zealand Buisnessman. This character that Kline plays has moments of laughs but in the end could be described as nothing more than stupidly pointless. This is because he never seems to be of some use to the film, he's not enjoyable to to watch because he tries to get laughs with this character but he makes this character somewhat unlikeable. John Cleese's role in this film is foolish in the extreme, mainly because he is to old to be playing his character and his parts that are meant to be laugh out loud for example, the scene when the younger McCain and Jamie Lee Curtis pay him a visit about the zoo, they seem to think that he is philandering around with more than one woman when in fact he is trying to keep more than one animal quiet in his bathroom. There was more than one character I liked in this film and unusually it was the Michael Palin Character, who keeps a tarantula named Terry (after member of Monty Python, Terry Jones) and Rod McCain. I liked the Michael Palin Character because unlike A Fish Called Wanda where Palin played a stutterer who could not speak, he plays a chatterbox who does not shut up and there are some very amusing scenes with him. The character of Rod McCain was enjoyable because he insults virtually everyone around him and it is funny to see when he is usually on the phone closing down another enterprise and also getting the rights for China's public executions.

Fierce Creatures in a nutshell is a worn out, tiresome film that I think has destroyed a part of John Cleese and Kevin Kline's as they have not been in anything better after this film. It certainly was as good as I thought it might be.

I will give Fierce Creatures 2/4 stars. This was the count and you can see all my reviews via Reviews from the Count on Blogspot.

                                                        

First Film Review by the Count: Grindhouse (2007.dir.Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez)

The definition of the term "Grindhouse" is that of an old rundown American cinema that would usually show exploitation/horror films with extreme sexual content from the 1970's to early 1980's. Examples of such films include The Last House on the Left and Cannibal Holocaust both of which have managed to gain cult status with fans worldwide. The Grindhouse cinemas suddenly just disappeared in the middle of the 1980's and were completely forgotten about for nearly 22 years. This was because people were completely shocked by the extremeness of the films shown. But let's face the facts, they were terrible films with the exception of The Last House on the Left. In the United Kingdom, some Hammer Horror Productions were shown in our equivalent of a Grindhouse known as a Fleapit.


Now for my review. In 2007 the film Grindhouse was set up by film director Quentin Tarantino who is a known fan of Grindhouse Cinema as well as other genres of films like Spaghetti Westerns and Hong Kong Action Cinema. Tarantino teamed with Spaghetti Western film director Robert Rodriguez, to have two films and some fake trailers for films that don't exist, all to be put into one long massive explosive homage/tribute to Grindhouse. First would be director Robert Rodriguez' film Planet Terror and then Quentin Tarantino's film Death Proof followed by the fake trailers in the middle. Both films were to be shot in the style of Grindhouse so the cinematography would be jumpy, scratchy and even a missing reel was in on purpose put in Planet Terror. Both films were box-office bombs and met with mixed critical reception.


Planet Terror involves a group of people who aim to escape a zombie plague which is caused when nearby Military officials accidently release a deadly toxin/gas that turns all the local townspeople into pus and blood ridden zombies  who stop at nothing to kill people. Now that is pretty basic Grindhouse plot as usually there wouldn't be much plot to these films in the first place but let us not be mistaken this doesn't make it a very good film. The acting in this film does a lot to help itself because you have Bruce Willis playing the twisted Lieutenant and Naveen Andrews playing a sinister scientist who for some reason chops people's testicles off if they don't comply with him. There was only one actor who I thought was wasting his talent and I'm sad to say that it was Josh Brolin as the menacing doctor who treats the infected townspeople. Josh Brolin should  know better than to  than to star in this film while also proving his talent in No Country for Old Men in the same year. The best thing that anyone could say about Planet Terror is that is a very honest film because it doesn't release itself from it's premise which is trying to remain a successful tribute to Grindhouse with cheap wooden acting and being a badly written film. It's success is because it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't and I believe that Robert Rodriguez has created a good homage because it is for most people who were around back during Grindhouse, as if they were re-visiting the bad past but in a good way. It is neither a good film or a bad film but it carries out the mission employed by Tarantino. 


On the other hand Quentin Tarantino's homage Death Proof is anything but an honest film. It's basic plot is about a sadist who goes around killing women with his allegedly "Death Proof " car. When I saw  this film I couldn't actually mentally imagine how Quentin Tarantino the man who created Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction could drag himself down to this, a boring and confusing film with nothing that could be describe as honest or at least attempting to execute what had been Tarantino's initiative. Tarantino appears in the film briefly as a bartender but fails to deliver his lines as everyone else in the film talks like Quentin Tarantino which means that other actors are better at doing Quentin than Quentin is as himself. The Sadist is portrayed by Kurt Russell, a veteran actor famous for Escape from New York and Poseidon. Now funnily enough, Kurt Russell is not a bad actor and in Death Proof he gives a dark and quietly sinister performance as Stuntman Mike, the Sadist. I enjoyed watching  Kurt Russell in this film but I really didn't care much for any of the rest. On terms of Honesty this film goes from Drama to Horror to Thriller and then descending into Action at the end where we have a large car chase completely ripped off from the film Vanishing Point. I suppose that Tarantino wants to use motives and themes from other films just to make his own films. This part I thought was the weakest end of Grindhouse.


If there was anything I did like out of the film it was the fake trailers. I thought that they were right in the style of Grindhouse Cinema because they looked just like what I had imagined or wanted to imagine right from the start. The trailers were for films that don't exist and they included: Machete, Don't, Thanksgiving and Werewolf Women of the SS. I was pleased to see that Don't was created by Edgar Wright whose films Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead I have treasured ever since I first saw them. Don't was just in the style of the Hammer productions being played in the British Fleapit. The rest were interesting apart from Werewolf Women of the SS which I thought was really letting the side down because of it's unrealism. Machete was constructed into a feature film in 2010 by Robert Rodriguez. Thanksgiving was another good piece of work by Eli Roth, the director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, however this does not make up for his work in Death Proof.




I will give Grindhouse 2/4 stars.


This was my review of Grindhouse and you catch all of the Count's reviews in due time.

                                                                               

First Review Announcement

Tomorrow I will commence my first review. The review will be of a film that has been memorable to not only critics but also to me as well. This will be a review of the film Grindhouse (2007). It is a film that has had a lasting effect on me for the last four years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindhouse_(film)

First Post of First Blog by the Count

Hello to all my fellow followers of my blog. From now on I will be making posts for reviewing old and new motion pictures. Please read because it would be great to know what people think about my opinions on films today.