On this week’s edition of “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.” Then, the “Pop Life” panel, comedian Micheal McCreary, tech expert Takara Small and author and broadcaster Dan Riskin, discuss the term ‘outsider’ and the benefits of being unique.
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
This week on “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.”
“I read this thing was that you should go into a room and take it over, psychologically. So, in other words you want change the room in your own way. I can’t remember if it was Stanislavsky or acting coach or teacher, or who it was.
I used to go in and do things just to make an impression. I don’t even know if I had to but I did. With ‘Taxi’ there’s my famous story where I go in and they’re all in there and I’m going to go sit in the hot seat and read it. And it’s the first audition for that I had for the show and I said to them, “There’s one thing I want to know before I start. Who wrote this shit?” and I threw it on the table. It was like Louie walked into their lives. That was bold, but it worked. ‘Taxi’ was like a gift.”
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
Much of Tim Burton’s live action remake of the Disney classic “Dumbo” concerns itself with putting on a great show. Set in a travelling circus whose ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito) is always looking for new ways to entertain people, the movie made me ask, “Is it possible to put on too much show?”
The Medici Brothers Circus has seen better days. Crowds are sparse and to keep the travelling circus afloat Max has sold off their show horses. When former circus star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns, injured from the war, his dream of starring in the big top are dashed. The only job available is tending to newly acquired elephant Jumbo. Medici purchased the pregnant pachyderm with the hope of having a baby elephant on display will sell tickets.
When the baby is born Max is convinced that Little Jumbo’s gigantic, floppy ears will turn him into a laughing stock and actually turn audiences off. It’s not until Farrier’s kids, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), discover Little Jumbo—now dubbed Dumbo after a catastrophic big top debut—can flap his ears like wings and fly that Max sees a way to earn back his investment. Enter amusement park entrepreneur V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) with an offer that could save the circus or endanger everyone, most of all Dumbo.
“Dumbo” treads familiar ground for director Tim Burton. His best films tell stories of outsiders like Pee-Wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood, lovable characters who weren’t quite made for this world. He’s drawn to outcasts but finds a narrative route for them to find a connection and a sense of community through their abilities and art. “Dumbo” breathes the same air, focussing on old-fashioned caricatures of circus folk like strongmen and mermaids, and, of course, the underdog elephant whose unique ability makes him a hero.
As such “Dumbo” feels like a Tim Burton movie rather than a remake of the 1941 film. His trademark whimsy is fully on display in the form of highly stylized design, fanciful casting and costuming and, “What’s a Tim Burton movie without Danny DeVito?” It looks and feel like a Burton film for better and for worse.
The better is his unique and heartfelt love of the unloved. He coddles his characters, imbuing Dumbo with soulful eyes to compliment his outsize ears. It’s almost impossible to understand how anyone couldn’t see the beauty in this unusual creature. Dumbo is a waif, an innocent whose inner beauty and strength is well beyond his years. Burton gets the character and keeps Dumbo mostly front and centre as the action swirls around him.
Here’s the issue. There’s too much action. The original film was a brief 63 minutes, a tight telling of the tale. Burton almost doubles that length, adding in anti-corporate subplots, action sequences and new characters. Near the film’s end, however, the extra elements feel superfluous, unnecessary. Sometimes more is less. The heart of the story is found in Dumbo’s character not the layers of CGI action that surround him.
Having said that, “Dumbo” is a treat for the peepers. Every detail from the costumes to Medici’s grinning faced-train are pure Burton eye-candy. Fun performances from DeVito and Keaton keep things lively and the pro-animal message is heartfelt adding up to a movie that doesn’t seem to trust its star, a flying elephant, to be enough of a draw.
We’re about to reach the tipping point of the summer and it’s not even the end of May. In a summer crowded with sequels like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Pitch Perfect 2, reboots like Terminator Genisys and Jurassic World, remakes like Poltergeist and Entourage, a TV show blown up for the big screen, along comes Tomorrowland, a big budget film based on an original idea.
Not every film this year is a sequel, prequel or the like, but Tomorrowland, with a budget topping out at $190 million, is the most expensive original film to come down the pike this year.
Borrowing its name from the futuristic themed land found at Disney theme parks, the movie stars George Clooney and Britt Robertson as a former boy genius and gifted teenager who, according to the press materials, “travel to a place somewhere in time and space only known as Tomorrowland where their actions directly affect the world and themselves.”
Disney is deliberately keeping plot details under wraps, hoping the allure of mysterious trailers will draw people in. It’s the opposite of the usual strategy of showcasing the film’s high lights in a two-minute promo.
I was at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, California—imagine the Disney version of Comic Con—in 2013 when Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof unveiled the name of the movie, but little else. In a splashy presentation they claimed a “dusty old box” labelled 1952 found in the Disney Imagineering archives had inspired the story. Containing a mysterious mishmash of items, including a 1928 copy of Amazing Stories magazine, a photograph of Walt Disney and Amelia Earhart allegedly taken after her disappearance, a short animated documentary and an unidentified metal object, they said the idea of the film is to ask “what if these mystery clues were real?”
Teasing the potential audience into buying tickets is an intriguing but risky idea. It’s a risk Bird was willing to take. He turned down the chance to direct Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens to make Tomorrowland, saying, “it’s rare to do a film of this size that’s original, so those opportunities can’t be missed either.”
But will it be an opportunity that moviegoers will embrace? Suggesting that Hollywood only feels comfortable with movies that are presold via brand recognition is an understatement. Whether it is a familiar title with a number added or any movie from the mighty Marvel stable, the big studios aren’t in the habit of taking chances and it’s not their fault. It’s ours.
One of the main complaints I hear from people is that there are no interesting movies in release and yet Furious 7 and Age of Ultron have grossed amounts equal to the GNP of some small nations. By supporting big budget “branded” movies we send the message that original stories don’t interest us, only ones that give us what we expect.
While we have the chance why not take a chance on a movie that takes a risk? That’s the tipping point. Check out Tomorrowland or Ex Machina. If sci fi isn’t your thing, how about Aloha or Inside Out? There is room for all kinds of movies but why not vote with your feet and let the studios know that their steady diet of sequels, prequels and reboots is quickly nearing its best by date.
For a movie set partially in the future “Tomorrowland,” the new action-adventure starring George Clooney, feels kind of old fashioned.
The movie begins in the recent past and the distant future. Precious child inventor Frank (played as a child by Thomas Robinson, Clooney as an adult) has made his way to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, jet pack in hand. There he meets Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a young girl who slips him a mysterious pin that allows him access to Tomorrowland, a future world where all the modern problems have been eradicated.
Years later a similar pin lands in the hands of Casey (Britt Robertson) the daughter of a NASA engineer and all round smarty-pants. Tracing the origin of the pin leads her to Athena, Frank and a mysterious world that has changed somewhat from Frank’s youth. “When I was a kid,” says Frank, “the future was different.”
Director Brad Bird has made a big, handsome movie, ripe with imagination and eye-popping images that attempts to create the same kind of nostalgic awe as vintage Spielberg. He comes close but misses by a hair. Instead he draws out the story for two-hours-and-ten-minutes, taking too long to get to the fairly meagre why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along-and-save-the-world premise. The pacing feels like it is from another era when audiences were more content to sit back and drink in the atmosphere.
The realization of the future world is impressive. From the interconnected swimming pool pods to the special effects—You will believe George Clooney can fly!—to the Jetson’s style architecture it’s an eyeful. “Will you stop being amazed!” Frank says with exasperation, and no, we may not as long as Bird is entertaining the eye. It’s only when he tries to engage the intellect that the movie falters.
Classic sci fiction has never shied away from Saving the Earth and “Tomorrowland” should be congratulated for it’s world-is-going-to-heck point of view, but (MILD SPOILER ALERT) its preachy ‘The world could get better but no one is willing to put in the effort,” stance and ‘The future belongs to the dreamers” attitude it is naive.
“Tomorrowland” is the rare kind of summer movie, one that values its originality and ideas. Too bad it isn’t as forward thinking as the name would suggest.
Based on the true story of Walt Disney’s (Tom Hanks) attempts to convince cantankerous “Mary Poppins” author P.L. Travers (Emma Tompson) to sell him the movie rights to the story, “Saving Mr. Banks” may be the only documented case of a writer holding an entire studio hostage.
Walt Disney made a promise to his daughter that would take twenty years to fulfill.
The young girl loved the magical nanny Mary Poppins, and wanted her father to bring her to life on the big screen. Trouble was, writer P.L. Travers wanted nothing to do with Disney.
“These books,” she said, “don’t lend themselves to chirping and prancing.” Fearing his adaptation of Poppins would careen “toward a happy ending like a kamikaze,” she tried to explain that Mary was the “enemy of whimsy and sentiment.”
Still, Disney wouldn’t take no for an answer and that’s where “Saving Mr. Banks” begins.
In a last ditch attempt to woo her, Disney flies Travers to Hollywood to work on a script with songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman (Jason Schwartzman and B. J. Novak) and screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford). The idea is to shape a movie that everyone can live with, but Travers, a pinched women whose withering remarks leave welts, is uncooperative.
(Side note: If she really was this contrary in real life, one has to wonder how the controlling Travers would have felt about having her actual life portrayed one screen.)
As the movie unfolds a psychological drama reveals itself in the form of flashbacks to Travers’s life as a child in 1907 Queensland, Australia. Turns out her contrary nature with the filmmakers comes from a deep seeded desire to protect the memory of her father, bank manager Travers Goff (Colin Farrell), a loveable scamp who drowned his inner torment with a sea of booze, and was the inspiration for the “Mary Poppins’s” patriarch, Mr. Banks.
“Saving Mr. Banks” is a serious movie about a whimsical movie. It also has darker underpinnings than you might imagine about the origins of “Mary Poppins.” The glossy Disney sheen casts its glow but the tone of the film is downbeat. Travers is a tough cookie, but heartbreakingly so. She’s a little girl lost, the product of an unhappy childhood that haunts her into adulthood.
It’s a character that could have been a flat line, a portrait of an unhappy woman with a perm-scowl and a bad attitude, but as Thompson allows her icy façade to melt Travers takes on dimensions. By the time we realize that Mary Poppins is not there to save the children but the troubled father the movie starts to pluck the heartstrings but because of Thompson’s skill it doesn’t feel manipulative.
Hanks is effortless as the folksy Disney. He hands in a quiet but lovingly rendered portrait with some real heart and lots of nuggets of wisdom.
Ditto Schwartzman and Novak, who breathe life into the creative process with enthusiastic performances and Paul Giamatti as limo driver Ralph. It’s a supporting role that doesn’t forward the story much but does add some nice light moments that seem to blunt some of Travers’s more deeply set psychological issues.
On the minus side “Saving Mr. Banks” hopscotches between time zones in Hollywood and Australia, a contrivance that slows both stories down, dividing the focus and keeping the audience off kilter for the entire running time. It’s a tough balance and the film doesn’t quite pull it off, but makes the uniformly excellent performances to cover the movie’s languid pacing.
A titan in Hollywood and one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, the Mouse House is looking back at their rich history in a very interesting way.
For instance, Get a Horse, the dazzling new short that plays before Frozen in theatres, is the first original Mickey Mouse theatrical cartoon in almost two decades.
But more than simply being a reintroduction to a beloved character, it’s also a deft marriage of old and new techniques that features, through some technical wizardry, the first vocal performance from Walt Disney since the 1960s.
In the live action roster there’s the Oscar hopeful Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the making of the classic Mary Poppins, and Tomorrowland, an epic sci-fi saga that was allegedly inspired by the contents of a mysterious box found in the Disney archives.
The ninety-year-old company has one eye on the past and the other very much on the future.
“We like to think of our legacy as a springboard to the future and not something that anchors us so you can’t move your feet,” says Walt Disney Animation Studios General Manager and Executive Vice President Andrew Millstein.
“There is a great wealth of characters and visual material but in its day the best of Disney was innovative and moved with audiences. We should do the same. Whether it is Get a Horse or Frozen or Big Hero Six, in terms of our approach to stories or animation or technology, we’re building on our legacy for our future.”
So what should audiences can anticipate from Disney in the next few years? Millstein says audiences should, “expect the unexpected.”
“We have to be fiercely original. We have to give audiences things they haven’t seen before. We want to surprise audiences. We want our stories to be compelling, the worlds to be great, the technology and the visuals to be stunning. If we do our jobs well, that is what’s going to happen.”
Millstein knows what he’s talking about. He’s been with Disney since 1997, when he started there as a production executive in the studio’s motion pictures group.
“It makes me feel very proud that I am part of a company that is creating content and films that you know are going to live for a long, long time,” he says. “We’re part of the zeitgeist of modern history.”
For most people, Walt Disney is a brand name, or a flickering black-and-white image best remembered for hosting the Disneyland series throughout the 1960s. But for animator Burny Mattinson he was a real living, breathing person.
“I first met him as a traffic boy when I first came to the studio,” said Mattinson, a Disney employee since 1953. “I was in the elevator and he stepped in. I said, ‘Good morning Mr. Disney.’ He looked at me with a cocked eyebrow and said, ‘It’s Walt, son.’ That was my first adventure with him.”
Mattinson had many adventures in the studio, including working on Aladdin, Beauty & the Beast and the original Winnie the Pooh shorts in 1964 and ’74. Those shorts were wildly popular, but were originally planned as a feature film. Mattinson remembers watching the rough cut of the film with Disney.
“He came out afterwards and said, ‘You know, I think we should cut our losses. I don’t think audiences are going to like this kind of humour. It’s too mild. Let’s put it out as a featurette.’ So we cut it to 20 minutes and lost a lot of footage. We put it out as Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and it did very well, and Walt said, ‘Well we have the rest of this footage, let’s put it out as A Blustery Day. Which we did and it won an Academy Award the following year.”
Recently Mattinson’s career came full circle when he was approached to help relaunch the Pooh Bear and his friends from the Hundred Acre Woods. The result is Winnie the Pooh, a movie Mattinson says, “is kind of like visiting an old friendly family you’ve grown up with.”
Mattinson has another family connection to the film. The movie’s opening moments are live action, featuring a Winnie the Pooh stuffed doll his wife made in 1964. It was set to be used in the 1964 movie, but when it wasn’t he gave it to his children.
“My kids played with it,” he says, “and their kids played with it. It’s kind of raggedy; it’s gotten a lot of patina of age on it but then when the bosses said they were going to shoot a new live action opening I brought it in and showed it to them and they said, ‘Yes! That’s it.’ It’s finally gotten its chance.”
On this week’s edition of “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.” Then, the “Pop Life” panel, comedian Micheal McCreary, tech expert Takara Small and author and broadcaster Dan Riskin, discuss the term ‘outsider’ and the benefits of being unique.
