My Own Little World

One of the more puzzling movies for me to look at is the 1991 Disney adaptation of Beauty and the Beast . Being so beloved by so many, I feel like I have almost a responsibility to like it, which I do. The music is catchy and some of Disney's best, while the animation is top-notch and holds its own against the spectacular hand-drawn animation of The Lion King  and The Prince of Egypt . That being said, I've always felt that the story was a little lacking in character development. Enter Disney's "live action renaissance," the period of the past few years in which Disney has gone all in with remaking some of their animated classics in live-action form. So far, they've had middling to positive success in doing so with Alice in Wonderland , Maleficent , Cinderella , The Jungle Book , and Pete's Dragon ; and if you look at Disney's calendar of upcoming events, you can pretty much guarantee that your Disney classic of choice will be getting the same trea...

There are times when I will be watching a film, really enjoying it, and suddenly feeling like something is off. I often cannot put my finger on what exactly the flaw is, but because I can’t put my finger on it I dismiss it and still say the movie is good. There are other times, however, when after talking with other people about the film, I understand exactly what the flaw is. Watching Murder on the Orient Express was one of those experiences. I love myself a good old-school mystery in the vein of Hitchcock films like To Catch a Thief , and my prior experiences with star and director Kenneth Branagh (in particular his four-hour unabridged adaptation of Hamlet ) as well as the rest of this star-studded cast made me very excited to see this film. I didn’t expect a fantastic film, but I was secretly hoping that it would revitalize this largely dead genre. Unfortunately, Murder has one really big flaw that makes it largely forgettable: it doesn’t know how to balance knowledge ...

In closing the door on 2016, I realize that there are a lot of films that I have seen that unfortunately I was unable to review for one reason or another. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want you guys to know what I think of most of these films, so just like the last couple of years I will be doing a few posts over the next month or so wrapping up all of the films I got a chance to see from this past year. This time, I've got Emma Watson, some birds with hot tempers, and musical Irish boys for you... Colonia  - Skip it.  Quite bland. Emma Watson is decent as usual, and Daniel Bruhl does a pretty good job too. However, they're not able to really do that much with their characters because of a poorly written script and a lot of cliched moments. The filmmaking isn't terrible, as the pace works quite well, but on the whole there's a lot more justice that could have been done to make this interesting topic an interesting movie. Grade: 39   The Angr...