Disney Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Ramblin' with Roger

Money or mitigating mistakes?

Would I have to relive parts of my twenties? OH, God, please, NO.

One finds these on Facebook all the time. Would you rather have this large sum of money, or do something that would be perceived as nobler?

I look at these options, and the choice was surprisingly easy; I’d take the cash. This does not come from either greed or shallowness. Rather it is from the recognition that the mistakes I made – and to quote Sinatra, “I’ve made a few” – are what makes me, ME. This is NOT to say that there aren’t choices I’ve regretted, only that undoing them would mean I would presumably unlearn the lesson of my errors.

To play the scenario out, there’s no guarantee that fixing the mistakes would lead to a good result. I was struck by the fact, in the Stephen King novel 11/22/63, that the protagonist has to make several different attempts going back in time to try to thwart the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More prosaically, there’s an irritating newish Disney show called Best Friends Whenever, about time-traveling teens, and they too find going back to fix things not so easy.

Would I have to relive parts of my twenties? OH, God, please, NO.

Sometimes mistakes are good. I was giving a presentation at the Friends of the Albany Public book review on The Gospel According to the Beatles. Some of the group’s greatest creativity came from “mistakes,” such as the line “two-foot small” in You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, instead of “two-foot-tall.” Moreover, there is a philosophy that one should embrace errors as part of the serendipity of life. Many inventions were “mistakes,” someone trying to make something else.

Hey, maybe the mistake was not saving enough for retirement, or for The Daughter’s college fund. Taking the money would SOLVE the error.

Online, someone fretted that having lots of money would be too likely to change his life, a legitimate concern, giving the history of some lottery winners. I wrote:
Think of the things
You can do with that money
Choose any charity
Give to the poor
This reference to Caiaphas singing in Jesus Christ Superstar – Damned For All Time/ Blood Money – was totally lost on the participants, alas.

But what say YOU?

MOVIE REVIEW: Inside Out

The kudos for Inside Out, and great box office to boot, are well deserved.

As luck would have it, The Wife, The Daughter and I attended the same Sunday afternoon showing of the new, animated Disney/Pixar film Inside Out at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany as our friend Jon with his kids.

Afterward, we went to eat supper, and Jon, who is a therapist, noted how well the movie did in capturing the various human feelings, as understood by the psychological community. This is because Pixar used consultants to infuse what scientists have learned about the mind, emotion, and memory and worked to get those childhood emotions just right.

Everything was going great for an 11-year-old girl named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) until she has to leave her beloved Minnesota when her father (Kyle MacLachlan) gets a new job in San Francisco. Mom (Diane Lane) and Dad try to make the transition easier, but the emotions in Riley’s mind get off-kilter.

The emotion voice actors were fabulous: Amy Poehler (Joy), Phyllis Smith from the US version of The Office (Sadness), Bill Hader (Fear), Mindy Kaling (Disgust), and, appropriately, Lewis Black (Anger). Props too to Richard Kind as Bing Bong.

About halfway through, I heard some bored or perhaps scared three-year-old behind me who was ready to leave, but the kudos for this movie, and great box office to boot, are well deserved. In fact the Daughter has already seen it a second time, she liked it so much.

In that conversation with friend Jon, I hit upon a fundamental truth being expressed in the film, something even we nice adult people unfortunately tend to do a lot. The few critics who did not like the film totally missed the point of the journey, which came from a real, recognizable place, of dislocation.

This movie isn’t as bright and shiny as some other PIXAR films, which I realized only in retrospect. We saw the 2D version, so I can’t speak to what enhancements the 3D version might have brought.

The preview movie was Lava, about two singing volcanoes, which my daughter thought was “cheesy,” my wife thought it was too long at seven minutes, but I thought was cute, clever, and geologically informative.

MOVIE REVIEW: Tomorrowland

If it’d been up to me, I might have passed on seeing it. Tomorrowland was beset by middling reviews.

Worse, the (not unusual) manipulation of the Disney audience to see the film was quite impressive but really irritating. “Get your backstage pass” to this great film, the network promotion machine hawked on several programs The Daughter watches.

Its box office (relative) failure – as of June 14, 2015, domestic box office of $83,607,000 and foreign box office of $93,500,000, against a production budget of $190 million – put the kibosh on more Disney science fiction.

Still, The Wife, The Daughter, her friend Kay and I went on a hot Sunday afternoon to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. The movie was down to two showings a day, and rightly so; there was only one other person in the theater, a middle-aged woman.

If I say I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I would, it’d be damning with faint praise. In fact, I did like good chunks of it.

For one thing, the film looked really cool, a function, I assume, of director and co-writer Brad Bird, best known for fine animated films such as Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and The Iron Giant. The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, which I attended, is where a boy named Frank (Thomas Robinson), a would-be inventor, gets invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy) to be a part of the REAL title place.

Sometime later, teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a saboteur for good, ends up with a button that seems to, briefly, provide a gateway aid fabulous-looking place… oh, heck, read the narrative HERE.

I liked that this movie was attempting to be an antidote to all the dystopian rhetoric that does seem to dominate popular culture. Perhaps the best part of the narrative may be a speech by Nix (Hugh Laurie, of the TV show House, MD) in the latter stages of the film.

It asked some important questions, more than occasionally in a ham-fisted way, such as none of the teachers answering Casey’s questions about the issues they’ve laid out. Still, the Daughter was inspired by Casey, who almost never gave up, and who even inspired the much older Frank (George Clooney) to keep trying as well.

The actors, including Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key as the shopkeepers, were entertaining, and especially young Raffey Cassidy. It is true, though, that Britt Robertson, in the middle stages of the film, looked a lot like someone attempting to react to a blue screen.

If the story didn’t make complete sense, generally blamed on cowriter Damon Lindelof, the showrunner for the TV program Lost, I wasn’t as bothered by it as some. It was more coherent than the first two hours of Interstellar, which may be a low bar.

I’m musing over the complete, and therefore bloodless, annihilation of some people in this film, not to mention the intense fighting with the bad guys, which really warranted a PG rating, as opposed to a PG-13. Maybe I’m just overthinking this.

Anyway, it’s not a great film, clearly. Still, parts of it will likely stick with me, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

May rambling #2: Leterman, and Vivaldi’s Pond

James Taylor interview by Howard Stern on May 12

You might want to bookmark this because it’s updated regularly: Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)? Most recently, it’s former New York governor George Pataki, who’s been out of office since 2006.

Obama To Posthumously Award “Harlem Hellfighter” With Medal Of Honor For Heroism on June 2, 2015. That would be Sgt. Henry Johnson, who I wrote about HERE.

On July 28th, 1917: Between 8,000 and 10,000 African-Americans marched against lynching and anti-black violence in a protest known as The Silent Parade.

“Playing the Race Card”: A Transatlantic Perspective.

The Milwaukee Experiment. How to stop mass incarceration.

The Mystery of Screven County by Ken Screven.

From SSRN: Bruce Bartlett on How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.

Does Color Even Exist? “What you see is only what you see.”

The linguistic failure of “comparing with a Nazi.”

Vivaldi’s Pond by Chuck Miller.

Arthur is dictating the future, albeit imperfectly. Plus AT&T did a good job predicting the future.

Woody Allen On ‘Irrational Man’, His Movies & Hollywood’s Perilous Path – Cannes Q&A.

The Tony Awards for Broadway air on CBS-TV on Sunday, June 7. Some nifty theater links. Listen to songs from Something Rotten.

Lead Belly, Alan Lomax and the Relevance of a Renewed Interest in American Vernacular Music.

Trailer of the movie Love & Mercy, about Brian Wilson.

James Taylor interview by Howard Stern on May 12, in anticipation of Taylor’s new album release on June 16th, listen to HERE or HERE. A friend said, “it was Howard at his best. James forthright, thoughtful and plain honest.”

Why Arthur likes Uma Thurman by Fall Out Boy, besides the Munsters theme.

SamuraiFrog ranks Weird Al: 70-61.

For Beatlemaniacs: Spirit of the Song by Andrew Lind Nath.

The Day That Never Happened and Let’s Drop Beavers from Airplanes and Tater tots and termites.

Apparently Disney Used To Recycle Animation Scenes.

Muppets: Rowlf ads.

Of course, there’s a lot of David Letterman stuff. Here’s How Harvey Pekar became one of his greatest recurring guests. Articles by National Memo and Jaquandor. Or one could just go to Evanier’s page and search for Letterman.

EXCLUSIVE Preview: HOUSE OF HEM #1, a collection of Marvel comics stories written and drawn by my friend Fred Hembeck.

I love Rube Goldbergesque experiments.

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

The Ranting Chef’s Two-Timing Number One.

I made SamuraiFrog’s This Week in Neat-O, which is kind of…neat. And Dustbury shared the same piece.

Dustbury on Procol Harum.

I suppose I should complain, but it’s so weird. Twice now in the past month, someone has taken a blogpost I’ve written and put it on their Facebook page. The person has kept a citation to my original post, which I imagine could be stripped as it gets passed along. But I’m so fascinated someone would even bother to do so that I haven’t commented – yet.

GOOGLE ALERT (not me)

Roger Green, Art Green’s grandfather, “was born and bred in Rangitikei, and ran the family farm, Mangahoe Land Company, during the 1960s until they put a manager on it in 1967.” (Arthur Green is in New Zealand’s version of The Bachelor.)

MOVIE REVIEW: Big Hero 6

Stay to the end of the credits of Big Hero 6 because… well, just do it.

A couple of weeks ago, The Wife and the Daughter went to the Colonie Center mall, near Albany, to see the movie Big Hero 6 in 3-D; I had a choir rehearsal. They both liked it a lot, though The Daughter said it was a little sad.

They went out of town to visit my in-laws the day after Thanksgiving, and as it turned out, the local second-run theater, the Madison, had started showing the movie in 2D, which was fine with me. I hadn’t been to the venue since it had been refurbished several weeks ago.

Hiro (voiced by Ryan Potter) is a techno-geek who graduated high school at age 13 but has little direction beyond hustling people in illegal bot (robot) competitions. His older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), realized that Hiro needed focus, and brings him to a competition at Tadashi’s college. But after a tragic fire, Hiro is morose.

His brother had invented an inflatable medical robot named Baymax (Scott Adsit). The robot wanders off, and Hiro discovers that someone has stolen the technology he created and is using it for nefarious purposes. Hiro and his brother’s school friends use their creativity and intellect to turn themselves and Baymax into superheroes in order to identify and stop the villain.

First off, I LOVE the setting of San Francokyo, the locale that has blended the two cities in fun and creative ways. The animation was quite fine. The voice actors, which also included Damon Wayans Jr., James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Abraham Benrubi, and Maya Rudolph as Aunt Cass were solid.

I enjoyed the storyline, though most of the heroes in Big Hero 6 aren’t always particularly as well defined as they could be. And if the story mentioned how the boys were orphaned when Hiro was three, I missed it.

On the plus side, there are difficult lessons that Hiro has to learn about justice and forgiveness, and Baymax (who I kept hearing as Betamax) helps him learn them through the compassionate programming that Tadeshi encoded. Hiro also gets support from his brother’s friends, who become his friends.

My buddy Greg Burgas wrote this on Facebook, and I think it’s correct: “At the heart of Big Hero 6 is the need for young people to process complicated emotions in a positive way, which seems to me far more mature and interesting than a lot of kids’ movies.” But I didn’t think it was just a kids’ movie. There’s a great action scene when the heroes use their powers and just get in each others’ way, which seems logical for people with skills they are just developing.

I read one negative review that said that the movie wasn’t funny. I thought good chunks of it were LOL hilarious, especially when it involved Baymax. Another thumbs-down review wondered where the audience was for this movie, thinking it was too intense for small kids and too boring for adults. I know The Daughter would likely have been frightened by it when she was five, but at ten, she was fine. Her mother, who is an adult, and her father, who purports to be one, were seldom restless.

Someone pointed out that, in the midst of some faux comic books the heroes were reading was one very real comic book, one I once owned. Marvel Premiere #32 featuring Monark Starstalker was written and drawn by Howard Chaykin back in 1976. This was a very obscure item, even in the day, and I’m curious why it was chosen.

Stay to the end of the credits, because… well, just do it.

There was a short before the movie, The Feast, “The story of one man’s love life is seen through the eyes of his best friend and dog, Winston, and revealed bite by bite through the meals they share.” It was cute, but I might have enjoyed it more if the hipster film buffs who had been blathering about DeNiro and other actors had SHUT UP when the Steamboat Willie intro came on. There was little dialogue in The Feast early, but their yakking was still distracting.