movies

“Please. Don’t be boring.”

It’s not a job I’d want as a writer, I’ll tell you that much.

Trying to write the first movie about a black Captain America in such a viciously polarised time is a hell of a poisoned chalice and I don’t envy the approximately eighteen thousand screenwriters who worked on Captain America: Brave New World. What does it mean for a black man to represent America given, y’know, the whole business? That has to be delved into right?

Or does it? Is it fair to insist that Sam Wilson has to make some great serious statement on The Issue of Race, when you would never ask that of Steve Rogers? Shouldn’t Sam Wilson just be able to be Captain America without it being a whole thing?

Personally, and this is just my instinct as a writer, I would have focused on winning the crowd over in the first movie with a really kickass Captain America movie and keep the heavy stuff for further movies down the line once Wilson/Mackie had been accepted by a critical mass of the fanbase as the new Cap.

I don’t know how I would have done that exactly.

I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have done this.

This being a stealth sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk where Captain America feels like a supporting character in his own damn movie.

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The Swan Princess (1994)

There really should be a sub-genre for animators who left Disney during the eighties all ready to set up their own animation studio with blackjack and hookers…only for Disney to get their groove back with The Little Mermaid and eat them alive. We all know of Don Bluth, of course, the one who came closest to unseating the Mouse from its throne. And we’ve also met Phil Nibbelink. Well today we’re going to look at another of these would-be contenders; Richard Rich:

So how’s this for some animation bona fides: Richard Rich was the director of not one but two Disney animated features.

Those features were The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron.

Now now, let’s be fair. Disney in the mid-to-late eighties was in its most hellish creative funk since World War Two. The kind of hellish creative funk that would not be seen again until the early 2000s and…now. Of all the hellish creative funks Disney has been in I’d rank it…somewhere in the middle. Bad times, anyway. Disillusioned by working on Oliver & Company (as anyone would be) he left in 1986, convinced that the old studio was a goner and that nothing could ever change that.

After a stint in the desert making religious animation for the Church of Latter Day Saints, Rich watched the Disney Renaissance take off and decided to make his play for the crown with The Swan Princess, an animated re-telling of the ballet Swan Lake, without any actual ballet (thank Christ). Made on a paltry budget of 20 million dollars, it was worked on for four long years before being released in 1994, where it had to compete against The Lion King. The result was pretty much what would happen if you pitted a real swan against an actual lion, but it did have an extremely healthy second life on video. It’s not the worst of the Disney-chasers of this era, nor is it close to being the best. But it is significant for one very important reason. This was the last feature length, cinematically released animated motion picture that was created entirely by hand. Not a single cel of this was touched by the infernal machine. So let me be clear, no matter what I think of this movie…

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Bats versus Bolts: Piss on You! I’m working for Mel Brooks!

Comedy is a lot like politics, all careers eventually end in failure. There have been plenty of Bats versus Bolts matchups on this blog that have been, as one commenter put it “Glass Joe versus Mike Tyson” but this really is a foregone conclusion. On the one hand, Mel Brooks’ 1974 masterpiece Young Frankenstein, which would place in the low single digits on any creditable ranking of the greatest American comedies of all time. And on the other hand we have 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, a movie so critically lambasted on its release that it killed Mel Brooks’ directorial career stone dead, which is a bit like if Frank Sinatra sang a song that was so bad he was never allowed to perform again. I mean it’s Mel Brooks. If he hasn’t earned a mulligan or two, who the hell has?

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