OVP: Christopher Robin (2018)

Film: Christopher Robin (2018)
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Nick Mohammed, Sophie Okonedo, Toby Jones
Director: Marc Forster
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I think that Winnie the Pooh's place in my childhood means more to my parents than it does to me.  Pooh nostalgia has come in waves for Disney (arguably they're in a position right now where he's on the wane again, perhaps why the Mouse House brought him back in the form of Christopher Robin).  When I was very young I would watch "Up Down, Touch the Ground" and apparently laugh and laugh and laugh when Pooh's "stuff & fluff" stitching would come undone.  This was, however, before I could remember and so in large part my memories of Pooh are looking at the nostalgia for him that sprung up when I was in college (my grandmother getting very into Eeyore being a hallmark in my life, and in retrospect a rather strange side effect of this craze, as my grandmother is not really prone to pop culture trends).  Watching Christopher Robin, though, you don't need to have had a rich connection to AA Milne's world to come away from it feeling safe and warm and buried in its calming embrace.  Forster's film treads familiar territory, but it does so with care and makes this one of the better "live action" re-imaginings that Disney has crafted in recent years.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place after our most familiar associations with Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood have passed.  We now see an adult Christopher Robin (McGregor) who has by-and-large forgotten that Pooh even existed, dismissing him as a childhood flight-of-fancy.  Christopher clearly needs a reminder of who he once was, as he now spends his days as an "efficiency expert" at a luggage company, and plans on sending his daughter Madeline (Carmichael) to boarding school, much to the sadness of his wife Evelyn (Atwell).  Soon Pooh (Cummings, who also voices Tigger) returns to find Christopher Robin & Madeline, and tries to show him what the true meaning of life is with his former friends.

The film is not treading new territory with its plot, and indeed you see an almost exact replica of the film from Disney just a few months later with another beloved Disney property in Mary Poppins Returns.  But Christopher Robin does manage to do something that few remakes are able to accomplish in this era of Disney redoing everything-it feels warm & full.  So many of the Disney remakes, particularly Beauty and the Beast or The Jungle Book, are pointless endeavors where you know the story by heart and no one is adding anything fresh to the tale.  Christopher Robin is the first Disney continuation/remake in a long while where I felt inclined to seek out other films of Pooh's not because I wanted to see something better, but because I wanted more story, where the hook was baited well.  This is done through some solid work from McGregor (always underused, in my opinion, but bringing a light here that he never was able to as Lumiere), as well as heartbreaking work from Cummings as Pooh, a stuffed bear who doesn't understand where the young boy he once knew so well & who so treasured his company, has gone.  If you watch this and don't take your own childhood teddy bear off the shelf for a night, I think you might need your heart examined.

The film received one Academy Award nomination, for Best Visual Effects, and I'm going to be real here-this was a pretty clever & inventive nomination from the Academy.  Likely the spot that would have gone to Black Panther (genuinely I'm curious to see who ultimately wins the Oscar here since Marvel would have been a slam-dunk winner were it to have been nominated), Christopher Robin's effects have an artistry to them, using CGI to create a major character (lest we forget, this is still something that not every film can do well, even if it's become increasingly common in the years since Gollum found a ring) that not only feels authentic, but also is beautiful.  The work here with Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, and the gang is marvelous, both feeling like stuffed animals come to life while supporting the actual delicacy and ambience of the story.  This is exactly the sort of nomination I think looks weird when I investigate a random category for the OVP, but then I watch the film and am impressed the Oscars can still show such care in one of their tech categories.

OVP: Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Film: Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Stars: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson
Director: Bill Condon
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Production Design, Costume)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I'm going to admit I'm a little bit perturbed at Disney right now, so perhaps this isn't the best day to be writing a review of their biggest hit of the year, but I did give them a (very rare) 5-star review yesterday for the first time in seven years, so I suppose tackling Beauty and the Beast in the same weekend makes sense.  This movie, largely borrowing the same motif as their classic 1991 Oscar winner, is one in a succession of live-action adaptations of Disney's favorite animated adventures; after all, we've already seen Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, and Sleeping Beauty brought to the big-screen (with Dumbo, Aladdin, Mulan, and Peter Pan all on their way), so it made sense that arguably their second-wave Disney high-water mark should be brought to life.  Unfortunately, life is what is missing in a dreary, over-produced spectacle that is heavier on getting people to buy merchandise than making an actual movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a tale as old as time, and so really, you don't need a spoiler alert.  If you've seen the original, there's almost nothing new here, other than the implication that the characters are becoming less human as the enchantment continues, rather than it just changing with the fall of the last pedal.  Otherwise, the only newness is a trio of Alan Menken songs, and of course getting to see the animation brought to life by the magic of visual effects.

That's it-there's nothing particularly fresh to the story, which means it's kind of pointless; if you don't add anything, people can watch the original.  It's hard to knock the film entirely, as it's a good story, but there's no heart here, there's no soul in this movie.  Emma Watson is a fine actress, I'm not one of the people who totally are against her as a performer (I particularly liked The Bling Ring and The Perks of Being a Wallflower), but she is badly miscast here as she doesn't have the voice of Paige O'Hara.  Really, though, other than Audra McDonald (who is such a better vocalist than the rest of the cast it's kind of distracting) no one here is a particularly compelling singer, or at least giving their all (not even McGregor, who as Moulin Rouge! indicated, has the ability to sing well, though that was admittedly 16 years ago so he might not be in the same vocal prowess).  Even though this is a musical, the sound mixing is poor and the singing mediocre, and as a result it frequently feels like we're seeing a cheap knockoff version of the movie, except there's movie stars in literally every corner of the film.

This gaudiness resounds throughout the picture.  I texted my brother during the iconic dance sequence, and said "it seems strange that the worst dress Jacqueline Durran puts on Belle is the yellow ballgown," and I stand behind that.  Durran, one of the best costume designers in motion pictures today, is usually so on-point, but feels saddled here by trying to live within the memory of our childhoods, rather than giving us something unique like Sandy Powell did in Cinderella.  It makes the film feel clunky, like a commercial more than its own product.  Even the wonder of the library scene or the occasional flourishes outside the confines of Disney feel stretched (literally the only non-animated part I liked was Dan Stevens' tiny growl at the end).  Menken's best new number (probably "Evermore") is considerably worse than the least of his original numbers, and no one in the film finds the right tone in their characters.  I tried really hard to see if I was just judging this movie against the original too harshly, as it's one of my favorite films, but even objectively, this movie is dreck, and combined with The Jungle Book is proof that Disney needs to stop trying to force nostalgia down our throats because eventually even the originals are going to feel lukewarm.

Also, before I go insane-did anyone else notice the weird microsecond editing choice of flashing Audra McDonald before the credits of the movie, or was that just my Netflix glitching?  I can find no discussion of this anywhere, so giving my sanity a rest would be greatly appreciated.

OVP: The Impossible (2012)

Film: The Impossible (2012)
Stars: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast, Geraldine Chaplin
Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Naomi Watts)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are some movies that feel short because they're, well, short.  Others feel that way because they fly by.  And then there are those that feel short because you're constantly peaking from behind your hands, as you wince and force yourself to view something that clearly happens in real life, and is a tragedy.  The Impossible is one of those films.  By the time you've ended it, if you aren't desperately rethinking either your stance on federal aid or your future travel plans to Bangkok, you missed too much and need to go back and grin-and-bear-it.

The film tells the tale of a family of five, on a vacation in Thailand, right in time for the cataclysmic 2004 tsunami that ravaged Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa.  I hadn't peaked ahead, and so I will throw out a SPOILER ALERT to ensure that no one who doesn't want to peak ahead doesn't accidentally do so, and so I had no idea who would live (or remain intact) throughout the film, though I imagined that a good chunk would make it (at the very least, the kids were living through this thing, as Hollywood doesn't make these sorts of films about dying children).

The family is split apart by the tsunami, with Watts and eldest son Lucas (Holland) stranded on the beach and McGregor and the two younger boys in relatively better shape than the injured Watts and the moody teenage swings in temperament that Lucas exhibits.  The film divides the chapters out rather neatly, as you are always left with a big question mark in the previous storyline, as if this would have worked better as a television series than a movie, as the structure of the film is quite solid, especially for a true story (biopics tend to be so formulaic and so "hit the big notes" that they lose a lot of those great cinematic moments in trying to awe by showing the familiar).

The family could easily have been anyone, and Watts and McGregor both take advantage of this fact and also sacrifice a bit in their "everyday-ness."  The performances have a relatability that instills a lot of great fear into anyone in the audience-these are people that live across the street from you, that work in your office, they look just like your own family, and they were put in this horrific, frightening situation, and so you spend much of the first half of the movie wondering the same questions the director wants you to-"what would I do in this situation?" "would I have stayed behind looking for my family when all hope seemed lost?" "And should I start swimming more at the gym?"

But in that relatability (I'm aware this is a made up word, but it's early in the morning, I've had a long week-just go with me here, you know what it means), you lose quite a bit of what makes the characters extraordinary.  Both Watts and McGregor spend so much time trying to make their characters normal, it takes away from the extraordinary things they are accomplishing-a wall of water the size of a house just swept you and your three children over an entire hotel, and you all five survived-that's not something normal people do, or experience, and I wish that they had sacrificed some of the ways that you can identify with the characters with a bit more character development.

I will say that, while physically insane, the Watts performance in particular (and I love Naomi Watts-King Kong and The Painted Veil and Mulholland Drive-yahoo!), seemed more about the makeup and the physical endurance than about the actual woman behind all of this bravado.  I don't feel like I knew Maria in the same way that you get to know the three boys.  Where was the great scene involving Maria that we got with Geraldine Chaplin (P.S. Between this and Django, I am love, love, loving the classic star cameos that are coming out in my January-theater outings)?  I feel like I admired this woman that Naomi was playing, and that I was impressed by her, but in the end, I don't feel like I got to know her, and I think that causes the film to lack and somewhat fail, even when the tears were easy for the director to mine from the audience.

What about you?  I'm almost done with all of this year's acting nominations (both Wallis and Riva will be seen today), so expect reviews of the final two Best Actresses later today.  And speaking of Best Actress-any thoughts on who will or should win?