Skip to content

Posts from the ‘1986’ Category

May 15

friday the 13th part 6

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

I haven’t had the chance to check out Friday the 13th: A New Beginning because Netflix doesn’t have it streaming online yet. From what I could find out, I haven’t missed much. In fact, the fifth film in the series focused on the inner demons of Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) and didn’t actually include Jason Vorhees as a stalking supervillain. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives puts the series back on its proper footing and almost acts as if the fifth film didn’t happen.

 

Read more

Feb 12

An American Tail

As the first animated feature film released by Universal, An American Tail is a slushy and lazy production. Directed and produced by Don Bluth, this picture carries all the sluggish hallmarks of sub-Disney material. The animation short-cuts and the plot dullness is hard to get around and the shrillness of the movie’s main character compounds the many problems into one headache-inducing stew of mouse crap.

Read more

Jan 16

2 Comments

The Great Mouse Detective

Understated and charming, Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective is one of those movies from the middle of the canon that isn’t necessarily considered a big hit for the company. It was still considered a successful project after the flop of The Black Cauldron, however, and The Great Mouse Detective represented a welcome return to simpler fare.

Directed by committee, The Great Mouse Detective is a quietly adventurous film that caps off with one heck of an exciting chase sequence inside Big Ben. The tale and the characters are adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes series and are based on the children’s book series Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus.

Read more

Dec 5

Labyrinth

Back when I saw The Dark Crystal, I noted that I essentially liked the idea of Jim Henson’s pictures more than I liked the pictures themselves. This point gets more ammunition with Labyrinth, the 1986 motion picture that many cite as being one of his most inventive. Like The Dark Crystal, Brian Froud’s art is at the core of it and formulates the sense of the world Henson tries to immerse us in. But like The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth doesn’t succeed in getting us where we need to be.

Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones serves as screenwriter, while Henson and Dennis Lee came up with the bones of the story. While 1982′s The Dark Crystal didn’t feature any human characters, Labyrinth uses a mix and that’s where a lot of the film’s cult value comes in to play. David Bowie is the Goblin King and a teenaged Jennifer Connelly plays the heroine of the story, so that’s worth noting.

Read more

Dec 10

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky carries most of the artist’s themes with pride, telling a beautifully naturalistic story about humanity’s relationship to nature and how we need it regardless of whether it needs us. Miyazaki constructs something marvellous here, utilizing a few film clichés effectively to make a terrific family experience t hat is brimming with colour and deep philosophy about the richness of our planet and why it is so important to support.

Miyazaki’s European influences shine here, as the architecture and characters come from his travels on the continent. Wales factors in especially with the way the towns and the working class nature of the people come across in the picture, but this is a story that could really take place anywhere. It, like most of Studio Ghibli’s work, is never so ensconced in one place or one time as to make it sluggish. It is a timeless piece of work.

Read more

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 175 other followers