Posts Tagged ‘Strange Magic’

Alan Cumming: Kids can deal with more darkness than we think

strange-magic-07-636-380By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Strange Magic, a new animated jukebox musical fantasy from George Lucas, follows in the footsteps of Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. All are musicals, all are for kids and all feature a villain geared to make young pulses race.

“I do think we underestimate how much darkness kids can deal with,” says Alan Cumming, who plays the film’s chief baddie, the Bog King,

Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Strange Magic is set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover.

Cumming’s character, with his glowing eyes and a skeleton that is more exo than endo, certainly embodies the movie’s message that beauty is only skin deep.

“All these kinds of films are based on a tradition that goes way, way back to the Grimm Brothers,” says Cumming.

“In a way, the reason these stories are told is to teach kids some sort of moral lesson. You have to scare people but ultimately show that he has a nicer side to him.”

Lucas, who has a ‘story by’ and producer credit on the film says, “with the Bog King we did tone him down a bit because it is a delicate balance. We’ve shown it to a lot of kids and most of them aren’t affected by it at all. My daughter, who is only 18 months, saw the trailer with the Bog King in it on a screen, not on a TV and she wasn’t moved by it at all. But of course 18-month-olds aren’t afraid of anything yet.

“Kids are not as fragile as you think they are. All the stuff, that it warps their brains, I’m not sure about that,” he said.

“There is a certain reality to imitative violence, which is monkey see, monkey do, and that is dangerous, but at the same time a well brought up kid doesn’t fall into that.”

Lucas, who has been working on this project on and off for 15 years — “I liked to do it in between working on Star Wars and writing scripts and things”— says there are only three moments in the movie that are “bothersome.”

“It has been my experience with my kids that if you sense something coming up you just put your hand over their eyes and usually they’re faster at doing it than you are.”

STRANGE MAGIC: 3 ½ STARS. “an animated jukebox musical set in a fairy world.”

Everyone knows the children of George Lucas, Han, Luke and Leia, will be closing out the year with the December release of “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.” What is perhaps less well known is that another Lucas fantasy kicks off 2015.

Lucas was inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to create the story for “Strange Magic,” an animated jukebox musical set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover.

Evan Rachel Wood stars as the voice of Marianne, a tough Pat Benatar-type fairy with colourful wings, leather lungs and an attitude. She wasn’t always like that, once she was a gentle fairy princess engaged to the handsome Roland (Sam Palladio) but his unfaithfulness broke her belief in love and now she is alone.

Over in the Dark Forest the Bog King (Alan Cumming), a bad-tempered cockroach looking creatures whose skeleton is more exo than endo, has also lost faith in love. “Love destroys order,” he says, “and without order there is chaos.” To make sure love does not taint his kingdom he imprisons the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth), maker of love potions.

The fairy and dark forests collide when a bootleg batch of Sugar Plum’s potion leads to kidnapping and a showdown—and sing-off—between Marianne, the Bog King and their followers.

“Strange Magic’s” story is old fashioned. It’s “Beauty and the Beast” banged together with some Shakespearean farce and even a hint of “The Dark Crystal,” but there is nothing old fashioned about the presentation. The lush animation will blow the retinas off your eyeballs. The creature design owes a debt to Jim Henson and movies like “Labyrinth,” but they are marvelously realized with state of the art CGI and inventive voice work.

Director Gary Rydstrom fills the screen with memorable images, from Marianne splayed across a bed made of a rose bud to the wild kaleidoscope psychedelia of the film’s finale.

Your eyeballs will dance, and with a wall-to-wall musical score made of pop hits from the past fifty years, you might expect your feet to follow, but it’s here the movie doesn’t always deliver. It’s all well and good to transform “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” into a Broadway style belter but the abominable Muzak version of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would have been better left in the vault. The soundtrack plays like a K-Tel album of love songs—everyone from Elvis and Bob Marley to Heart and Lady Gaga are represented—has a Moulin Rouge-ish feel but isn’t quite as effective as Baz Luhrmann’s megamix.

“Strange Magic” takes some simple ideas—beauty is only skin deep and love conquers all—and sprinkles them with fairy dust to create a musical that plays like “Moulin Rouge” for kids.

Alan Cumming puts “hours aside for revelry and relaxation” while working.

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By Richard Crouse

Alan Cumming’s new character was years in the making. In Strange Magic, a new musical fantasy from the mind of George Lucas, he plays the villainous leader of The Dark Forest, the Bog King.

“Some years you only do three days on it,” he said. “The gaps between when you perform it are so huge. You’re coming back to it with some familiarity but not that much because you might have recorded a song in a couple of hours that you’ve never known before and never hear again and six months go by and you have to go back and sing it again. It is a very interesting, drastic process doing a film like this.”

The toughest part, however, was not spilling the beans on what he was up to.

“You have to sign a confidentiality clause and it was very hush hush. I’d suddenly be going to LA and I’d see friends who’d ask, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m working on a top secret George Lucas project.’ ‘What is it?’ “I can’t say. It’s top secret.’ Early on I didn’t even know the proper story so I couldn’t have told it. It was quite nice having a secret.”

Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Strange Magic is an animated jukebox musical set in a fairy world where you can never judge a book by its cover. Cumming’s character, with his glowing eyes and a skeleton that is more exo than endo, certainly embodies the movie’s message that beauty is only skin deep.

“You have to scare people but ultimately show that he has a nicer side to him.”

The release of the movie caps a busy period for the Scottish born actor. He’s currently on Broadway starring in the revival of Cabaret and can be seen on television in the Golden Globe nominated role of crisis manager Eli Gold on The Good Wife. Off stage, his memoir, Not My Father’s Son, was a recent New York Times bestseller.

“I don’t have many moments right now,” he says. “It’s been a very hectic time but I’m really enjoying stuff. I still am able to have fun. I have Club Cumming in my dressing room. I actually relax and have fun with friends there. It’s not ideal. I would love to have more days to do nothing but I think it is really important when you are really busy in your day to put some hours aside for revelry and relaxation.”