When you think about movie princesses a few names come immediately to mind: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora and Belle. This fab four have come to define what being a movie princess is all about. Or at least they used to.
Once upon a time a movie princess was a damsel in distress, swathed in pink and jewels, waiting for Prince Charming to come to the rescue.
Lately, however, the movies have given us a different kind of princess, one who is more into grrrl-power than girly-girl. This weekend Disney helps redefine their traditional princess in their 56th animated feature film, Moana,
The thirteenth official Disney princess is inspired by Polynesian mythology. Sixteen-year-old Moana (voiced by newcomer Auli’i Cravalho), daughter of a Samoan island chief, has a deep spiritual connection with the sea—the name means ‘ocean’ in Maori—and a severe case of wanderlust. Unfortunately for her overprotective father has just one rule for his family and subjects: No one goes beyond the reef. “It’s the one rule that keeps us safe,” he says.
When the island’s crops fail and fish stocks begin to deplete the high-spirited princess sets off on a quest to lift the veil of darkness enveloping her home. An ancient folktale tells of demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) and his theft of the heart of Te Fiti, a carved stone that holds the essence of life. If she can find Maui and make him return the stone heart, perhaps she can save her people.
“Moana” is an action-adventure with the emphasis on the adventure. “There’s more beyond the reef,” she says, imagining a world that for her only exists in folk tales. That spirit is infused in every beautifully crowd-pleasing frame.
The story and adventure is relatively uncomplicated, but photo realistic animation and new Broadway style songs by “Hamilton’s” Lin-Manuel Miranda should maintain interest for young and old. After a slow-ish start, which sets up the story, things get lively and fun when Moana’s journey begins and she teams with Maui. At this point the characters get more interesting and the story less earnest.
One show-stopping number, “Shiny,” a glam rock freak-out performed by Jemaine Clement (who channels Tim Curry), rivals anything from recent Disney for sheer entertainment value. “I was a drab little crab,” he sings, adding, “I will sparkle like a wealthy woman’s neck!” Add to that some marauding coconut pirates and Lava Monsters, and you have a joyful addition to the Disney catalogue.
Best of all, you have a new style princess, one who looks to the future while paying homage to the past.
Richard reviews “Fifty Shades of Frey,” “Kinsmen: the Secret Service,” “The Last Five Years” and “What We Do in the Shadows” with “Canada AM” host Marci Ien.
An opening shot of a pale hand reaching out of a coffin to switch off an alarm clock signals that “What We Do in the Shadows” is not your average vampire movie.
Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, creators of the series “Flight of the Conchords,” are Vladislav and Viago, two of a group of vampires who share a house in modern day New Zealand. Like their flat mates, Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) and the Nosferatu look-alike Petyr (Ben Fransham), they’re having trouble adapting to undead life with roommates. “When you get four vampires living in a flat, obviously there’s going to be a lot of tension.” They have the same arguments all roomies have—the splitting up of chores, forgetting to put newspaper down before killing someone in the living room—and things don’t get much better when some new blood in the form of Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) decides that being a vampire really sucks.
Just when you thought mockumentary and vampire movies had played themselves out along comes “What We Do in the Shadows,” a vampire mockumentary that feels fresh and funny. The movie answers some burning questions—How does a stylish vampire get dressed for a night out when they can’t check their look in the mirror?—and has fun with undead mythology but it is when the film treats the characters as regular, technology challenged, pain in the neck people, that the movie really draws blood.
The Reel Guys, Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin, wrap up their coverage of TIFF with a look at Midnight Madness and the lonely characters of Foxcatcher
Richard: Mark, we’re at the tail end of the festival, a time for reflection and sleep. Every year when it winds down like this — from full throttle to a trickle almost overnight — I always think of the last line in The Usual Suspects. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s been echoing in my head today: “And like that, poof. It’s gone.” Of course it’s not quite over, but the pace is manageable for the first time since Day 1. I look back fondly on movies like The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game and Whiplash, but they seem like a long time ago now. Latter-half festival movies I really liked were 71 and a thriller from director Ruba Nadda called October Gale that suggests Patricia Clarkson might be up for a Liam Neeson-style action hero makeover.
Mark: I usually spend the second half of the festival watching foreign films I should have watched during the first half of the festival, having been distracted by all the stars and glitter. So let me say some great things about Labyrinth of Lies, a German film set in 1957 that tells the true story of the prosecutor who brought Germans working at Auschwitz to justice. It’s hard to fathom that the German people were in the dark about what happened there, but you can feel the horror rise in the prosecutor’s mind as he slowly realizes how many people were involved and that the rot went right to the top. Movies like this usually don’t look very good, but every shot is artfully done. The movie is gripping and important.
RC: Courtesy of the Midnight Madness program comes The Editor a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders. It’s an odd film, but one that perfectly pays homage to the Italian horror films that inspired it. And there’s one that I’ve missed but am going to try to catch on the weekend. What We Do In The Shadows is a comedic mockumentary. Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement plays one-third of a trio of vampires trying to adjust to life in a New Zealand suburb.
MB: Ahh. Midnight Madness, where the audience can be scarier than the movies. My favourite late night was spent in It Follows, about zombie-ism as a form of STD. There’s almost no gore in the film, just an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by moody atmospherics. It’s also shot with the detail of a magic realism canvas and supported by the most disturbing soundscape I’ve heard since John Carpenter’s work in the Seventies.
RC: You want disturbing? How about Channing Tatum with an under-bite and Steve Carell with a fake nose and dead eyes? Foxcatcher is a quiet, restrained film, one that demands the viewer to lean forward to appreciate, so when three loud gunshots ring out they shatter the quiet in a jarringly effective depiction of violence.
MB: What’s really scary about that movie is how horribly sad and lonely the characters are. Same thing is true for the characters in Maps to the Stars and Jason Reitman’s Men Women and Children. Affluent misery seems to be a big theme at this year’s festival.
Hollywood’s two most famous birds must be Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker. Between them they’ve starred in almost three hundred films.
This weekend Donald and Woody are joined by Tyler Blu Gunderson, a rare male Spix’s macaw, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg making his second big screen appearance in Rio 2. He’s joined by a cast of fine feathered friends, including a Yellow Canary (Jamie Foxx), a rapping Red-crested Cardinal (will.i.am) and a sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Jemaine Clement), as they leave their home in Rio de Janeiro for the Amazon rainforest.
The colorful co-stars in Rio 2 are animated which makes them a much more agreeable lot than Tippi Hedren’s cast mates in her most famous movie. In the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds she plays a wealthy socialite visiting Bodega Bay in Northern California when hundreds of ravens, seagulls and pigeons begin viciously attacking the townsfolk.
Some of the birds were props, but many of them were all too real. Actors with ground meat and anchovies daubed on them to entice the birds escaped with nips and scratches but Hedren took the worst of it during the shooting of the movie’s famous attic scene.
She had been told mechanical birds would be used to in the sequence that sees her trapped in a small room while birds attack her. When she arrived at the shoot she saw a cage built around the set and realized the plan had changed. For a week real birds were thrown at her by stagehands. Pecked and scratched by birds attached to her by elastic bands she screamed and sobbed as one of them gouged her eye. It was such a traumatic sight Cary Grant, who dropped by the set to say hello, said, “You’re one brave lady.
It’s no wonder Hedren chose Marnie, and not The Birds, as her favorite Hitchcock leading role.
As distressing as the shoot for The Birds might have been, the movie is now considered a classic.
That can’t be said for a film inspired by Hitchcock’s avian terror.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror director James Nguyen says the inspiration for his movie dates back to 2006 when he saw a flock of seagulls flying toward him at Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco. The sight reminded him of Hitchcock’s film, but he thought, “What if I make a movie where instead of seagulls and crows, it’s birds of prey? There’s nothing more shocking than eagles and vultures.”
The self-financed film took four years to finish and laid an egg in theatres before it became a cult hit as one of the worst film ever made.
When asked what Hitchcock would have thought of Birdemic Nguyen told Empireonline.com, “I think Mr. Hitchcock would forgive a lot of its imperfections and say, ‘James, you did what you could. Do another one and try to do it better.’”
“Gentlemen Broncos” is a coming-of-age, sci fi comedy about plagiarism. It’s also the latest film from “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess. That means it’s even more idiosyncratic than the description given in the first line of this review.
Written by Jared and (wife) Jerusha Hess “Gentlemen Broncos” tells the story of aspiring fantasy writer and home schooled teenage outcast Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano). He writes strange sci fi stories that lead people to ask if “some kind of weird surgery” inspired his work. After attending Cletus Fest, a fantasy convention where he hoped to pick up writing tips from his hero, writer Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), his creative life becomes complicated when his novel, “Yeast Lords,” is turned into an extremely low budget film, and plagiarized by Chevalier.
Up until now Hess’s films have been strange slices of life buoyed by strong comic performances and some good jokes. But what felt so fresh in “Napoleon Dynamite”—the oddball comic timing and unconventional American Grotesque casting—this time out feels gimmicky, as if Hess and company are masking a lack of original ideas with his tried and true and, by now, on his third film, somewhat tired trademarks. As a filmmaker he has a unique voice but, like the drunk guy at the party who speaks louder than everyone else to get his point across, Hess is stylistically shouting to cover a lack of jokes.
Angarano, a talented young actor in the Michael Cera mode, is fine here but gets bowled over by a cast of curiosities. Jennifer Coolidge, as Benjamin’s mother rides the line between eccentric affectation and real life, raising a few laughs along the way, but Jemaine Clement, best known as half of “Flight of the Concords,” is nothing but eccentric affectation and hilariously so.
His take on the über pretentious novelist—who sounds like “Logan’s Run” era Michael York and signs off his speeches with the coda `May the glistening dome of the Borg queen shine her light on us all,”—is over-the-top and silly, but brings the funny.
In a tutorial to a class of aspiring writers he speaks of “the power of the suffix” when creating names for fantasy stories. Adding the suffix “onius,” “ainous” or “anous” he says, will yield the perfect name. For example, “bronco,” becomes “broncanous,” probably the best new word of the 21st century.
Unfortunately that’s the highlight, and that joke was given away in the trailer. “Gentleman Broncos” left me wanting more and less of Hess—more of the freshness he displayed in his earlier work, less of his clichéd trademarks.
