Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 29th, 2005
Synopsis
Out of the blue, the Stevens family (whacky dad, brainy sister, dorky brother, and so forth) finds out they’ve won a trip to a tropical paradise. Unbeknownst to them, they have in fact been selected to participate in an over-the-top reality TV show, and their holiday turns into a series of slapstick catastrophes.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 28th, 2005
Synopsis
Hilary Duff plays a good-hearted by scatterbrained teenager. Her happy existence in NYC is disrupted (how many Disney teens has this happened to?) when her stepfather starts his new job as head of a military academy, and she is enrolled, willy-nilly. She has trouble fitting in, initially having as nemesis her Captain Christy Carlson Romano, but eventually both she and the institution adapt to each other.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 6th, 2005
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Another cog in the Disney/Winnie the Pooh machine comes to life here, as Pooh’s Heffalump Movie brings back all the characters you love for a story about acceptance, no matter what you look like.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 21st, 2005
Pocahontas is Disney’s animated version of the Pocahontas myth. This movie is not history, but a Disney-fied version of it. European settlers came to North America and disrupted the Native American way of life. John Smith (voiced by Mel Gibson) and his British plunderers attempt to rob the “New World” of its riches. Chief Powhatan, and his daughter Pocahontas (voiced by Irene Bedard), might have something to say about this. In the end, in typical Disney fashion, a moral emerges: both cultures have a lot...to learn from eachother.
Pocahontas hits all the right Disney animated film notes, but not as strongly as other films. The villain, the scheming leader of the expedition Ratcliffe (voiced by David Ogden Stiers), is no one to be scared of, really. He comes off more like a goofball. Ratcliffe is not in the tradition of the great Disney villains we’re used to. The cute cuddly comic relief characters (a raccoon, a hummingbird, and a dog) are not as funny or endearing in comparison to, say, Poombaa or Scuttle (from Little Mermaid). And the romance between Pocahontas and John Smith isn’t as charged as Belle and the Beast, for example. It seems a little forced here. So without a great villain, funny comic relief characters, or a believable romance, what does Pocahontas have? It has scope. The “New World” is a wonder to behold. The animators have done an amazing job. And the “Colors of the Wind” song (an Oscar winner) is quite lovely.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on May 6th, 2005
There are a lot of dumb movies out there. But there's a good kind of dumb and a bad kind of dumb. National Treasure falls into the good dumb category. Nicholas Cage plays Ben Gates, a treasure hunter, an archaeologist I'm really not sure. But his mission is to steal the Declaration of Independence in order to prevent the "bad" archaeologists from taking it. Make sense? There are hidden clues, apparently, in this document which lead to hidden treasure. A treasure Gates' grandfather (played by Christophe... Plummer) told him about when he was a child. In essence, this movie is part Indiana Jones and part Da Vinci's Code.
There are plenty of explosions and chases, no worries there. There's a high level of silliness here, not to mention Scooby Doo logic. But Nicholas Cage is perfectly cast. He is an actor who can walk that fine line between gravity and camp. There's also a love interest and a wise cracking sidekick (played by Diane Kruger and Justin Bartha, respectively). Both performances, particularly Bartha's, take a refreshing crack at the action movie archetypes. Sean Bean is also along for the ride as the main baddie. Bean is always worth watching.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 28th, 2005
Synopsis
Each disc uses a Mickey Mouse cartoon to teach children the basics about such topics as language, geography and numbers. “Mickey’s Seeing the World” uses the cartoon “Mickey’s Around the World in 80 Days” to these ends, while “Reading & Math Fun” uses the much older “Mickey and the Beanstalk” the cartoons are interrupted periodically to put them to educational use in the form of games. This is so far out of my field of expertise that I can’t pretend to evaluate how well this content works, t...ough it strikes me that the educational stuff is sparse and simplistic, and I note on Amazon some very disappointed comments from parents.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 13th, 2005
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 10th, 2005
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 5th, 2005
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 3rd, 2005
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