Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's to the Bank We Go

Once upon a time, there were no such things as feature-length animated films. They were just cartoons. And there was no such place as the Magic Kingdom. Just an office occupied by a man named Walt Disney.

But that all changed in December 1937, with the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney had taken a major gamble – and won. Audiences proved themselves willing to sit through an 83-minute cartoon. In fact, they were enchanted by it.

They still are. That's why Snow White is returning to theater screens this Friday (re-released in 1993).

Sure, it will eventually be released on video. But why wait? You want your kids to like you, don't you?

Besides, it's more than a classic. It's a cinematic milestone.

In the early 1930s, Walt Disney had a reasonably successful career as the producer of Mickey Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies. These films were short, fast and funny. But Disney wanted more. He wanted to do a full-blown movie.

The popular wisdom of the era was that no sane person would sit through an hour-and-a-half of animation. When Uncle Walt announced his plans to challenge that idea, the film was immediately dubbed “Disney's Folly.” During the four years it took to create Snow White, it seemed like a fiasco in the making.

The production required the services of an army of animators. Its original budget of $250,000 shot through the roof. Disney had invested his own fortune into the film, then had to borrow. And borrow. The bankers were ready to start swigging whiskey with their Maalox.

The film ended up costing nearly $1.5 million, a phenomenal amount for the time.

The movie's jittery backers were not reassured by Disney's attitude. He wasn't a good businessman, and dumped most of the financial problems into the lap of his brother Roy. Walt was more concerned with the technical problems presented by the film. Meetings between the Disney brothers grew increasingly acrimonious.

But the expensive and protracted process was worth it. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a richly textured film with a sense of movement and visual depth that is still rare in animated productions.

It's also a lot of fun. (Though very small children are still easily scared by the evil Queen.)

The story of Snow White's creation and release is dramatic, but there is another, truly ironic aspect to it. In the '30s, Disney didn't have his own distribution company, so he released his cartoons through United Artists. But for Snow White, he switched to RKO Pictures. UA was fascinated by a new thing called television, and was demanding the TV rights to all of Disney's films. Walt never heard of TV and wanted nothing to do with it.

Keep that in mind the next time you turn on the Disney Channel.

Widow's Peak

There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. That advise serves as the main entrée in Widow’s Peak, a black comedy from Ireland that tries to serve a thick stew, but runs short of ingredients. The bitter taste of its trick ending is largely diluted by half-baked direction.

Not that Widow’s Peak doesn’t have its moments. The script has some great verbal twists that pay tribute to the time-honored Irish ability to use language as a lethal weapon. Widow’s Peak has the kind of dialogue that would make for a good play, but the movie never lives up to the screenplay’s promise.

Set in a small Irish village in the 1920s, Widow’s Peak is a back-handed picture of a culture in which the men die early and the women lead long, contented lives as repressed widows. This graveyard matriarchy is ruled by Joan Plowright, who divides her time between snotty gossip and moral hypocrisy. This keeps her busy, but not so busy that she doesn’t find time to emotionally suppress her son (Adrian Dunbar) and give the local spinster (Mia Farrow) unwelcome lectures.

The miserable peace of this society is quickly disturbed by the arrival of a new widow (Natasha Richardson). She’s young, worldly and immodest, and she has romantic eyes fixed on Dunbar. Richardson instigates a feud with Farrow, a small quarrel that quickly escalates into a full-blown war and begins to expose the town’s darker secrets.

Widow’s Peak sounds like a Celtic version of Peyton Place, except for the fact that there’s something odd about the feud – which is where the trick comes in. Without it, the film would fall completely apart.

The Favor

Unless your name is Luis Bunuel, you shouldn't devote one third of a movie to dream sequences. That's one of the first mistakes made in the sex farce The Favor. Another tip is that you shouldn't do a sex farce if you don't intend to have some sex in it. The Favor is mostly tease, without much strip. Even worse, it's the kind of comedy in which the story is possible only as long as the characters behave like idiots.

Harley Jane Kozak (Arachnophobia) plays a happily married woman who still isn't over her teenage crush on her high school boyfriend (Ken Wahl of TV's Wise Guy). They never went “all the way,” and she can't get the possibility of it out of her mind. So, she asks her best friend (Elizabeth McGovern) to do the deed and report back with the glowing results.

Golly! Just imagine the mirth-filled complications.

Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt play the chumps who spend most of their time being jerked around by their own stupidity. Not that Kozak and McGovern are much better; it's just that they, at least, have a few good lines.

Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping

Kidnapping isn’t simply a crime in Columbia – it’s a business. A very big business, as demonstrated in the documentary Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping. Directed by Colombian and first-time filmmaker Camila Motta, Secuestro focuses on her own family’s tumultuous experience when her sister, Sylvia, was grabbed off a street in Bogota in 1985 and held for ransom.

Sylvia was finally released, but only after several months of anxiety and hard-boiled negotiations between the kidnappers and Camila’s father, a businessman who was forced to bury familial feelings behind an icy wall of financial dickering.

A similar degree of cold-bloodedness is used by the filmmaker in constructing Secuestro. Though Motta is detailing an event that’s obviously left deep psychological wounds in her family, she rarely belabors the point. It’s not until late in Secuestro that we realize just how close her father is to a total emotional breakdown. Through most of his conversations with the kidnappers (we hear the actual tapes), he plays a penny-pinching jerk who seems more concerned with cutting a cheap deal. As horrifying as this sounds, his behavior was critical to his daughter’s survival – the kidnappers expected him to bargain fiercely and would have distrusted him if he’d done otherwise.

The kidnappers, meanwhile, were busy cutting their own deals. The gang’s leaders were promising people good pay in exchange for help with the job. (In the end, however, they left their business partners with nothing but chump change.) And during the protracted ransom negotiations, they discussed selling their victim to another kidnapper in order to score a quick profit. The film even implies that the gang had a financial portfolio on the Motta family. Despite some vague political allusions, the criminals were more versed in the Wall Street Journal than The Communist Manifesto.

It’s the filmmaker who brings the politics into Secuestro. Interlaced through the movie are references to the culture of violence that’s existed in Colombia since the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas. Motta argues that this has left a political legacy in which it’s viewed as acceptable for one group to brutally suppress others in order to achieve their wants and desires. The connections between conquest and kidnapping are simple: if the haves can do it, then so can the have-nots.

This crazy pattern of violence is Secuestro’s real subject matter, and Motta is chillingly accurate in her presentation of a culture drenched in the blood of a stolen land.

And Motta isn’t just talking about Latin America. She now lives in New York. It’s the entire Western Hemisphere she’s concerned with.

The Rock

Some scientists believe that during the last ice age, the male brain evolved into a rigid set of behavior patterns.

If this is true, then the first draft of The Rock may have been told round a campfire during a mammoth hunt. The movie is thoroughly drenched with testosterone as its cast of real men go out and do manly things with other real men.

Of course, that is what Sean Connery does best even if it does mean that he is coasting through his twilight years by playing the pensioners' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Repeated comments are made in The Rock about the age of Connery's character. Then the old boy turns around and kills fifty some commandos without even getting winded. Obviously, Connery is one senior who doesn't have to take any guff from the youngsters.

He does, however, have to tolerate plenty of hooey from a loony kick-butt script. The Rock is carved from a slab of pure machismo with a strong vein of paranoia added in large portions. The movie plays like a cross between The X-Files and Ian Fleming as it presents its characters as the key players in every alleged conspiracy since the assassination of Lincoln.

For example, there is the movie's main villain. General Hummell (Ed Harris) is the highly decorated leader of Marine Force Recon, an elite team of the Special Forces who are routinely sent to wage covert war in countries that don't even know they are under attack. Hummell is a fiery-eyed idealist who despises the fact that the families of his men are never properly compensated when a Recon soldier gets killed in the line of duty. Of course, the duties that they perform are not even suppose to exist which is why the military is so stingy with the funds.

Lacking a union, Hummell handles the situation the old fashion way. He and his troops steal fifteen short-range missiles equipped with a chemical weapon so deadly that the screenwriters actually had to dig out a chemistry book to look it up.

Then Hummell and his crew take over Alcatraz prison, the stony island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. His demands are simple: either the US government finally pay these families or else San Francisco will be peppered with enough deadly toxin to rival the cleaner parts of New York City.

Ever prepared for such situations, the FBI fly in Special Agent Goodsped (Nicholas Cage). He has a doctorate in chemical weaponry and is extensively trained in demolition. Unfortunately, Goodsped has no real weaponry experience and thinks that hand to hand combat is a euphemism for bedroom hanky-panky.

Which forces the FBI to confront one of their own covert problems. For the past thirty years, they have illegally imprisoned John Mason (Connery), a mysterious British agent who was caught stealing a microfilm containing every dirty secret from the alien landing at Roswell to JFK. For three decades, Mason has refused to reveal the location of the microfilm. He has also refused to explain how he once managed to escape from Alcatraz. Since Mason was able to successfully slip out, he is also the only person who knows how to secretly slip back into the old fortress with a bay side view.

A substantial exercise in gratuitous violence is guaranteed for all. So much ammunition is used in The Rock that by the movie's final reel the heroes are having to blast guys with rockets. Which means that The Rock almost succeeds in delivering the right summertime mix of low content and high energy. It even discovers a weird and funny odd-couple team in the form of Connery and Cage as they bicker their way through every firefight.

But the last third of The Rock begins to splutter and lose stream. Ultimately, the movie becomes a victim of its own demented sense of overkill. Like its two heroes, The Rock runs out of ammo prematurely and that is a big mistake. After all, the audience isn't paying good money just to watch these people act.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

The original Jurassic Park took in more money than many countries make in their yearly GNP. This blunt fact is the main plot focus behind the sequel. Of course, director Steven Spielberg already has more money than most nations, so why he needs the extra loot is any one's guess.

If this review sounds as if it belongs in The Wall Street Journal, then it has accurately summed up the basic impact of the movie. The Lost World: Jurassic Park has its fair share of thrills and chills. It also has its stumbles. But mostly, the film has no particular reason for existing. The original Jurassic Park had at least some childlike awe and wonder to offer along with the merchandising. The Lost World primarily suggests that Spielberg simply felt the need to increase his already ample bank account. At least this theory would explain why the movie is singularly lacking in spirit and fun.

Dino action is the only thing that The Lost World has to offer. Fortunately, the sequel delivers more gut chomping moments than the original as a T-Rex family puts a Jurassic spin on the old nature-or-nurture debate. Lost World has more dinosaurs than were seen the first time, which also means that the sequel has a larger cast for the inevitable feast.

At the top of the dino menu is Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), the skirt-chasing mathematician who previously came close to being snack food. Malcolm is still upset about the mini-massacre that took place at the original Jurassic Park, but his efforts to go public about the incident resulted in getting him branded as a complete wacko. When Malcolm discovers that there is a second island that was used for breeding (and is still booming with the critters), he is torn between feelings of outrage and a need for redemption.

The realization that his current girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), is already on the island convinces Malcolm to again confront his primordial fears. Besides, this guy just seems to have a thing about cute paleontologists. Along for the ride is Malcolm's teenage daughter (Vanessa Lee Chester), whose only function is to get herself routinely in peril.

Malcolm and the other members of the team (Vince Vaughn and Richard Schiff) are sent to document how the dinosaurs have adapted to their environment. Apparently the earlier disaster has turned John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) into a Green Peace activist and he wants the surviving dinosaurs to romp in isolated splendor. But Hammond's company is now operated by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), his greedy nephew who thinks that San Diego would be a swell spot for a new Jurassic Park. So while
Hammond's team is busy photographing raw nature, Ludlow's boys come swooping in to bag some specimens for display.

Oddly enough, neither team is particularly prepared to achieve their contrary objectives. Malcolm is ready to leave upon arrival while Sarah carelessly meanders among house-sized beasties. Meanwhile, Ludlow's hunters are led by a borderline psycho (Pete Postlethwaite) who is solely fixated on the idea of going one-on-one with a T-Rex. You can almost hear the dinner bell clanging away in the jungle.

The Lost World is packed with superb special effects and non-stop action. In fact, the movie suffers from too much action. Lost World never has time to adequately develop any sense of tension even while the entire cast is running for their lives. None of the characters are ever developed beyond the level of a few stock statements and the plot rarely evolves from A to B. Only the many dinosaurs hold any interest, and after awhile, their eating habits become more boorish than gruesome.

But the real surprise about The Lost World is Spielberg's willingness to create a second-rate copy of his own work. Jurassic Park was by no means a masterpiece (just a standard critter picture with a monster-size budget). Yet the original film did have moments of genuine feelings (e.g. the field of peacefully glazing brontosaurs) and nail-baiting suspense (e.g. the vibrating pools of water indicting the movements of the T-Rex). By comparison, the sequel is the kind of dim and diminished work that one might expect from a lessor filmmaker.

So what is Spielberg's problem? Does he really need the money or is he just spinning some artistic wheels while waiting for inspiration? The most likely answer is that he couldn't say no to a dumb, if oblivious, idea.

Which is a shame. If a lesser director had made Lost World, then we could spend our time dissing the guy for being no Spielberg. As it is, we have to remind ourselves that Spielberg is actually better than this film.

The Frighteners

Ghost busting may be a dying business, but somebody has to do it. Or at least that would appear to be the grimly sardonic attitude of the con artist hero in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners. Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) really is able to see the ghosts and demonic shades populating the "other side." But he mostly uses his unique abilities as a quick means to turn a few miserable dollars.

From the get go, The Frighteners has enough cynicism to easily qualify as a Nineties movie. The film's basic tone is a wired mix of black humor and jaded sensibilities. Even Fox has finally managed to successfully bury his usual boyish looks beneath a five o'clock stubble and a slack jawed face. Through most of The Frighteners, Fox's self-employed psychic investigator has the battered appearance of a drunk who has gone through too many morning afters.

But Bannister's real problem is that he may have to find a new town in which he can work his scam. Though Bannister is able to see and communicate with ghosts, the real work is done by his partners (Chi McBride and Jim Fyfe). They actually are ghosts, which means that they have a good ability at scaring up business. All Bannister has to do is go to the site of their prearranged haunting. Once he whips out a photographic spot meter and a dilapidated machine that looks like a cross between a radio and a toaster, he is able to convince the customer that the poltergeists have been removed.

However, the perfect racket is headed for some problems when an exceeding nasty spirit begins slaughtering a sizable chunk of the local population. Even worse, the powerful fiend is somehow linked to Bannister who keeps seeing numbers flashing on the forehead of the next victim. As each person's number comes due, Bannister becomes the prime suspect on the constabulary's otherwise limited list.

All of which means that The Frighteners has some good potential as a satiric horror tale. But the movie's strongest emphasis is on grimness. From beginning to end, the film is imbued in a fatalistic twilight that is almost as grey as the cloudy skyline that perpetually hovers over the town. Even the jokes are as dank and dark as the local cemetery where Bannister routinely shops for potential clients. The Frighteners is less a comedy and more of a horror film with a calculated attitude problem.

The one stock comic figure in The Frighteners is Milton Dammers(Jeffrey Combs), an FBI agent who specializes in cases concerning the paranormal. With his Hitler haircut and twitching body, Dammers is the guy who was obviously too crazy for even the X-Files Department. But as played by Combs, the character is too firmly rooted in sadistic pathology as Dammers' personal sense of derangement kicks into high gear the moment he first appears.

Likewise, the romantic charm of Lucy Lynskey (Trini Alvarado) plays more like an expedient plot point rather than a passionate spark. She is a psychologist who becomes convinced that Bannister is truly gifted, especially after her boorish husband succeeds in changing her marital status to widow. Alvarado creates a sympathetic heroine, but she also projects a perkiness that seems strangely inappropriate to the rest of the proceedings. Besides, her character seems more daft than smitten as she continual defends Bannister despite his own peculiar skill at appearing overwhelmingly guilty.

Only McBride and Fyfe as the deceased business partners have any luck with doing comedy. Occasionally aided by the Judge (John Astin in a barely recognizable appearance), they are reluctant ghouls who whine after every sting about the petty nature of their second rate after life.

What The Frighteners mostly suggest is that director Peter Jackson is still straddling a borderline between shock theatre and the art house. The movie often displays Jackson's singularly striking visual skills. It also suggests an interesting talent that is uncomfortable with sly humor. Jackson lacks a light touch, which is what The Frighteners most desperately needed.

The movie's extensive special effects are often fantastic and there are a few genuine chills. But mostly, The Frighteners is a moody morality play that never quite articulates a clear point beyond its own grittiness. Unless that is the point, in which case The Frighteners is a major statement piece.