"Escape From Tomorrow": Exploring the Darker Side of Disney Left Me Feeling Lost

Now Available on Blu-Ray and DVD

I don’t understand what the hell I just watched.  I was really excited about watching this one, for it sounded like a fantastic piece of counterculture taking stabs at Disney.  After all, almost the entire film was shot on Disney World property without permits and without Disney’s knowledge.  That in and of itself intrigued me enough to give this one a look.  However, I walked away from this flick disturbed and confused, unsure about the messages the director was trying to communicate or whether he understood them himself.

Jim is a husband and father with his family on vacation in an unnamed theme park, though Disney iconography is clearly everywhere.  After he receives a phone call wherein he loses his job, he begins a journey into madness… I guess.  See, I’m really unsure I can even say this movie has that much of a plot.  The majority of the film’s runtime is Jim taking his kids on rides and arguing with his wife, as the trip is clearly stressing him out.  However, this day in the park will also lead Jim in a multitude of bizarre directions, like stalking two underage girls and repeatedly encountering an obese person on a scooter who he thinks is out to get him.  And while I did get a chuckle out of one or two gags, much of the film’s bizarre black comedy just left me feeling grossed out, particularly the pedophilic glances Jim gives to those teenage girls.  It all comes across as just soul-crushingly sad, but it never really unifies the depressing moments into a cohesive message about how Schmisney World is pushing Jim to this point.  Instead, I grew to despise our protagonist, and even with a ninety minute runtime I was checking my watch to see how long before the film ended.

And then we hit the third act, where I just gave up trying to even comprehend what was going on.  To name just a few of the stranger plot points, Jim gets captured by a scientist who turns out to be a robot, his daughter gets captured by a witch who is a shamed former Schmisney princess, and he contracts a made-up disease that makes him shit out everything in his body and start coughing up hairballs.  I don’t even know what to say about this.  It’s almost like the movie gave up on trying to tell its audience anything of note and decided to just go down the rabbit hole of Jim’s psyche.  I wouldn’t be so disappointed if the mad symbolism ever actually added up to anything comprehensible, but it doesn’t.

I really wanted this movie to be more than it ended up being.  There’s seeds of some truly funny and dark satire of Disney to be had here, but it never fully realizes them.  Rarely, a joke will land or the film will make a sly reference to its own illegality, but these moments are so fleeting that it could only sustain my amusement for mere seconds at a time.  In the end, we’re left with an incomprehensible mess of a film that tries way too hard at being a deeply bizarre commentary and just ends up feeling bizarre.

How do you feel about Disney?  Are they a corporation worthy of critique and criticism?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Request Review: "Iron Man 2"

The following review assumes you’ve seen the film.  If you have any interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you probably already have, so I’m not going to pretend I’m making a recommendation to anyone who hasn’t seen this installment.  Groovy?  Groovy.

Allow me to preface this with a disclaimer: Iron Man 2 is not a bad movie.  However, it isn’t an especially good one, and is the worst of the post-Iron Man Marvel Cinematic Universe.  For being a franchise that has had nine installments as of this writing, the Cinematic Universe has been consistently above average for the superhero film genre, and Iron Man 2 is no exception.  But just barely.  This film is an obvious holding pattern to try to keep the character of Iron Man relevant in the period between the first film and The Avengers, and while it succeeds at being that, it doesn’t succeed at being much more.

To this film’s credit, though, I must compliment it on not opting for making the villain’s goal to attempt conquest on a global scale, but rather works on presenting a revenge tale.  Modern action films usually don’t settle for less than earth-shattering conflicts, so it’s nice to see Marvel willing to take a risk on a more personal story.  That said, though, Ivan Vanko is a really uninspired villain.  For the majority of the film he acts as a straight-man foil to Tony Stark’s annoying business rival, Anthony Hammer, and the few scenes where he does take direct action are brief, token, and inconsequential.  He feels like he’s there as the film’s obligatory villain, but he’s not really developed enough beyond his most basic motivation to be at all compelling.

Speaking of not being compelling, Tony Stark himself turns the clock back on all his previous character development, playing up his egotism to even greater heights in hopes of recreating his charm from this film's superior predecessor.  Robert Downey Jr. does a great job in his role, and I particularly like the developing chemistry between Tony and Pepper Potts (though I still don’t understand how the two kissing can look like “two seals fighting over a grape” as Rhodey so eloquently puts it.)  However, the way that Stark is scripted makes him feel juvenile in light of all the self-awareness he attained over the course of the first film, which is particularly striking in a franchise that has prided itself on its dedication to continuity.  I realize that the in-plot excuse for his behavior is that he’s dying and trying to cover it up through his antics, but all I saw was an attempt to give audiences more of the same antics from the first film when Stark’s character has grown past the point where it’s believable.  Yes, Stark is a narcissist, but he's supposed to be beyond the point where he's hurting others through his narcissism.  That was the entire point of the first film, and this greatly undermines it.

I also found S.H.I.E.L.D.’s presence to be incredibly forced.  They seem to exist here for three reasons: first, to further solidify their presence in the Cinematic Universe; second, to provide some plot-tidying exposition to further explain Vanko’s motivation; and third, to provide Stark with the means to discover his magic MacGuffin element to tie up that particular subplot.  I get the feeling that the original idea was to incorporate S.H.I.E.L.D. more heavily into the then-upcoming Thor, but the screenplay writer decided this would be easier to whip up short notice as his deadline fast approached.  It was a sloppy introduction to the agency that would play such a prominent role in the films to come.

Am I harsh on Iron Man 2?  Yes.  Does that mean I think it’s a bad movie?  Again, no I do not.  But I think it’s a fairly average one, and from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that’s disappointing, which is why I am so harsh on it.  To be fair, this review is largely in retrospect, as it was the third installment in the Universe, and at that point, Iron Man was the only truly exceptional piece to the puzzle.  But even as a direct sequel, Iron Man 2 just isn’t up to snuff against its predecessor, and almost every subsequent Marvel film blew it right out of the water.

Think any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s installments are worse than Iron Man 2?  Let me know in the comments below and, if you’d like, I’m more than willing to take a second look at any of them for another Request Review.

"47 Ronin (2013)": An Unexpected Not-Disaster

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

I had been dreading watching this movie, and I had hoped to get out of the month of April without having to do so.  But there’s a bit of a dry spell coming up in notable DVD releases, so I sat myself down and gave this one a watch.  And you know what?  It’s really not that bad.  Actually, it’s kinda good.  Not great by any standard, but for as dumb as the premise makes this one sound, I found the film engaging and entertaining.  I certainly don’t regret watching it, and while I completely understand why fans of the original 47 Ronin could hate this, as a standalone film, I don’t find it to be too offensive.

The original 47 Ronin is a classic Japanese film depicting the dishonor of 47 samurai after the death of their lord, who then take revenge on the one responsible for their lord’s death and reclaim the honor of their clan.  This 47 Ronin follows the same basic plot, but changes the setting to a more mythologically based Japan where demons and witches exist, and features a sideplot wherein Keanu Reeves plays a half-Japanese, half-European man raised by demons.  As terrible as this sounds on paper, the film doesn’t really make Reeves the focus for extended periods of time, but really uses him as more of an excuse to tie mythological elements into the ronin’s quest.  It transforms the film into a fantasy adventure story, and while some may view this as desecration of a classic, I found the world-building and creature designs to be rather inspired.

Furthermore, I found myself really enjoying the effects-driven action sequences.  In general, they do an excellent job of communicating the flow of a complicated battle scene without relying on exposition or devolving into mindless brawls.  The choreography is smooth, and while I found a couple of the 300-style slo-mo effects to be a bit jarring, the film’s action as a whole is quite well-executed, particularly with regards to some of the CG fantasy fights.  The costuming as well was gorgeous to look upon, making this film a visual treat if nothing else.

Unfortunately, as I said, this film isn’t great, particularly in the acting department.  Keanu Reeves has never been a very good actor, but at least this movie doesn’t let him open his mouth all that much.  The true offenders are almost everyone else in this film, speaking in jilted sentences that seem to have punctuation in all the wrong places.  I suspect that many of the Japanese actors in this film were not fluent enough in English syntax to make their dialogue sound natural.  Either that, or the director wanted this to sound like a poorly dubbed anime.  Either way, the poor acting in the more conversation-heavy scenes can grow almost comical in its absurdity.  There were also a few scenes that seemed really bizarrely edited, either through lack of scene establishment or lack of relevance to the overarching narrative.  It’s nothing that breaks the film, but there were a few moments where I had to ask myself what the hell I just saw, like a random flashback to how the two main villains first met that goes by so fast you could almost miss it by blinking.

Overall, though, 47 Ronin isn’t a huge cinematic sin of a film.  If you can take it for what it is, it’s a competently fun fantasy action flick with a few forgivable missteps.  I honestly think that this film’s biggest sin was calling itself 47 Ronin.  The legacy of the original masterpiece is going to be almost impossible to live up to, but then to add fantasy elements to a story originally grounded in reality is not going to endear this movie in the eyes of the original film’s fans.  If the movie had rebranded itself as something other than 47 Ronin and differentiated the details of the story enough from its inspiration, I don’t think this movie would have been panned nearly as hard by its critics.  I, on the other hand, can appreciate this movie for what it is, and not what I expected it to be.

Ever see a film you thought you would hate and came away pleasantly surprised?  Let me know about it in the comments below.