The FilmNerds Blog

Earlier this week, Disney announced that Guillermo del Toro would be helming a film version of its classic theme park attraction The Haunted Mansion (no, you’re not crazy; they already tried it once with Eddie Murphy back in 2003). This marks Disney’s latest attempt to turn one of its theme park attractions into a movie franchise, with previous attempts meeting varying levels of success (Pirates of the Caribbean yes, Country Bear Jamboree no).

In light of that news and because I spent my middle school years visiting Walt Disney World on a weekly basis, I decided to come up with three pitches for new movies or even movie franchises that could be built around classic Disney theme park attractions. Now most of the rides in Disney’s theme parks are based on films, so this list is based only on rides or attractions with no ties to pre-existing films.

The Hall of Presidents

The Ride: One of the original opening day attractions in the Magic Kingdom back in 1971, The Hall of Presidents features Audio-Animatronic figures of every US President. The leaders of the free world come to life on stage and offer their timeless wisdom to the crowd of bored children who would rather be on Splash Mountain.

The Pitch: Night at the Museum meets 1776. A wax museum with figures of all the presidents comes to life at night and personalities clash. Bill Clinton and JFK set out to crash a sorority slumber party. George W. Bush keeps calling FDR “Hot Wheels” and pushing him perilously fast through the hallways. William Henry Harrison dies in the first five minutes. Plenty of opportunities for stunt casting (your suggestions are welcome below).

It’s A Small World

The Ride: A musical boat ride through all the countries of the world, united by the spirit of unity and the desire to crush the remaining sanity of parents with their endless, repetitive melody.

The Pitch: High School Musical set in the United Nations. When the new Secretary General takes office, he decides to use his background in musical theater to resolve the world’s problems and demands that all UN speeches be delivered in the form of a song. The magic of music begins to loosen up those uptight UN delegates as world peace and spontaneous choreography begin to break out everywhere. The love ballad duet between the Israeli and Iranian delegations is truly a show-stopper.

Maelstrom

The Ride: Located in the Norway pavilion at EPCOT, this ride takes visitors on a journey through Norwegian mythology, complete with vikings and angry trolls.

The Pitch: Pirates of the Caribbean with vikings. Granted, Disney already owns Marvel and thus owns the upcoming Thor movie which deals heavily in Norse mythology but there’s an opportunity to go more of a whimsical adventure route with this type of material. Johnny Depp would of course play the womanizing drunk viking.

The FilmNerds RoundTable crew is back with an in-depth discussion of Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending blockbuster Inception. Listen as host Matt Scalici and guests Ben Flanagan, Ben Stark and Francesca Scalici discuss how Inception may influence Hollywood and talk our way through some of the film’s unanswered questions, including the mysterious ending . Click on the link below to listen or right click to download it. You can also find the podcast on iTunes by searching for “filmnerds” at the iTunes store.

http://filmnerds.com/podcast/Inception.mp3

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

We come to a curious installment on this list of the Top 50 releases of 1983 as for the first time we are dealing with a re-release of an older film. I considered skipping The Rescuers since it was originally released in 1977 but thinking back on why I started this project, which was to re-create the 1983 movie-going experience, I decided ultimately to include it.

I’ve been unable to find any further background regarding this (if you have any information, please drop some knowledge on me in the comments section below) but Disney’s theatrical strategy for the year 1983 appears to be fairly simple: money for old rope. Disney re-released three of its previous hits in 1983 (Robin Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Rescuers), usually pairing the films with a new animated short (in the case of The Rescuers it was Mickey’s Christmas Carol).

There are a few likely reasons behind this strategy. Firstly, the home video market in 1983 was still in its infancy and for many Disney fans a re-release was their only opportunity to see some of their favorite classics again. Secondly, with the exit of the original crew of Disney animators following The Rescuers, the new Disney crew was having a bit of trouble creating the same kind of magic that their predecessors had managed to turn out on a regular basis. Disney’s releases throughout the 80′s releases were certainly never major financial disasters but they failed to capture audiences and critics in the same way that so many of the great ’60s and ’70s Disney films had and perhaps the folks in Burbank were beginning to get just a little bit concerned about maintaining the integrity of the Disney brand.

Whatever the reasoning, Disney’s strategy paid off as its three re-releases dominated the G-rated movie market in 1983. The Rescuers raked in $21 million and finished second among G-rated releases behind its older sister, Snow White (more on her in a few months, I guess).

While it ranked as a major success for Disney both during its initial release and its 1983 re-release, I think it’s safe to say that The Rescuers doesn’t appear to hold the same cache today among fans of the Disney Animated Classics. Most of us could sing a song from or recite a line or two from One Hundred and One Dalmations, The Jungle Book or Robin Hood but does anyone out there really have a distinct, specific moment from The Rescuers that sticks out in your mind?

That’s not to say that it’s an unenjoyable film while you’re watching it, just that it doesn’t seem to have the same resonance that some of its Disney brethren have. The heroes are likable enough, two mice named Bernard (Bob Newhart) and Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor) set out on a mission to rescue an almost unbearably cutesy little girl named Penny. Bernard and Miss Bianca work for the Rescue Aid Society, a sort of mouse version of the United Nations complete with ever-so-slightly offensive Asian mice.

Penny is an orphan who has been kidnapped by Madame Medusa (voiced by Geraldine Page in her most menacing role until Interiors), a pawnshop owner who needs a small child to fit down a whole in the Louisiana bayou so she can obtain a fantastic jewel called the Devil’s Eye. It’s not a premise we dwell on for very long as essentially the point is that Madame Medusa is putting the girl’s life at risk and doesn’t care.

Madame Medusa has her fun moments but as Disney villains go, I’m betting she’s one of the least recognizable today. I suspect that’s because there’s not much originality to her. She’s basically a slight variation on Cruella de Vil, arguably one of the greatest and most memorable of all the Disney villains. Disney animators were initially considering using Cruella as the villain in The Rescuers, an idea that was ultimately shunned out of a desire to avoid producing sequels. Frankly, I think it would have been a good idea but I appreciate Disney’s desire to create something new, something studios certainly don’t bend over backwards to do these days.

Plot-wise, The Rescuers just feels a lot like its main villain, largely unoriginal and cobbled together with elements from previous Disney movies. It’s a fun ride but you’re left in the end feeling that you haven’t really seen anything new.

One thing that is rather original about the film is the opening sequence, a rather artfully put together montage of canvas paintings set to the film’s theme song “Who Will Rescue Me”. The song is pretty corny but the visuals are very interesting and unlike anything I remember seeing in other Disney films.

I wish I was going to get a chance to review an original Disney film from 1983 rather than a re-release because it would give me a better feel for what kind of content Disney was really producing during that era. As it is, I have to be content watching a film that I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed revisiting in theaters but that just doesn’t hold up as a particularly memorable film years later.

Next Up: The second Stephen King adaptation on our countdown, Christine.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

We now reach our first film of the countdown to gross over $20 million at the box office and it also happens to be the first of three films released in 1983 based on the works of author Stephen King. All three films performed almost identically at the box office so you’ll be seeing them in fairly rapid succession here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Heading into 1983, King had already had two successful films made out of his novels in 1976′s Carrie and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece The Shining (a film adaptation which King vehemently disapproved of) and was also becoming a reliable hit-maker in the print world as well. But 1983 marks a new point in King’s career, a year in which he went from being a well-known novelist whose work lent itself to the screen to being a major entertainment franchise. According to Box Office Mojo, King has been the creative inspiration for 38 theatrically released films, making him possibly the most oft-adapted American writer of all time. Not every film made from King’s work has been of equal quality (as we’ll see in the next few installments of Back to the Movies) but it’s clear that as a writer one of King’s greatest strengths is coming up with a premise that everyone, including movie producers, finds intriguing and fraught with possibilities.

The premise of The Dead Zone, directed by a young David Cronenberg, is fairly simple and not all that unfamiliar sounding to fans of science fiction and horror. A man with the bizarrely boring name of Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) gets into an auto accident and awakens from a coma five years later to find that he has psychic abilities. As a premise, it could go either way: in the hands of a mediocre writer it could turn into a series of small episodes where Johnny uses his abilities to solve minor problems for people like some sort of superhero (in fact, that’s exactly what happened with the television adaptation of this story made for USA Network a few years ago). In the hands of a more twisted mind, it becomes a fascinating vehicle to explore what a true curse such a gift would become were an average person to find themselves in possession of it.

After his initial discovery of his gift helps to save the life of a young child, Johnny suddenly finds himself becoming a local media sensation, viewed as a fascinating freak show to some and a delusional wacko to others. Johnny does what he can to stay out of the limelight but when a desperate sheriff (played by the awesome Tom Skerritt) comes to him for help in an unsolved serial murder case, Johnny feels that lending his talents to the case is the right thing to do.

How that situation resolves itself I will leave unspoiled as it serves as a sort of climax unto itself, a standalone episode within the film that works as a fascinating example of where Johnny’s story could go if using his gift weren’t slowly destroying him both mentally and emotionally.

The second half of the movie almost serves as an entirely separate story, with Johnny trying to start his life over in a place where no one knows about his abilities. There’s also another advantage of moving away from his hometown for Johnny in that it allows him to put his former fiance Sarah (Brooke Adams), who ended up getting married and having a baby while he was in a coma, out of his mind once and for all. Or so he thinks…

What makes the second half of the movie really interesting, in addition to Walken’s superb acting throughout, is the appearance of Martin Sheen as the maniacal rising star politician Greg Stillson. As a huge fan of Sheen’s great work on “The West Wing” as a beneficent, principled president I got a real kick out of seeing him play the complete opposite, a dirty politician who has used pessimism and anger to facilitate his rise to power. Sheen’s performance, like his character’s storyline, just skirts the edge of being overblown and ludicrous but somehow manages to stay believable, thanks not only to great acting and directing but also to King’s attention to detail in his story. King manages to drop breadcrumbs all along the way in the story that all begin to pay off in the film’s final act.

Minor spoiler alert for this paragraph and the video below: A great example of this film’s ability to actually pull off a scene that could be disastrously outrageous comes when Johnny shakes hands with Stillson and has a vision of the future that essentially determines Johnny’s motivation for the rest of the film. In this vision, we see Stillson as the President of the United States in a room at what is presumably Camp David. He pressures a general into putting his hand onto a briefcase-sized hand scanner before inputting a sequence of numbers. Stillson then walks out of the room to face a group of advisors to whom he makes a chilling proclamation.

(End Spoiler)

It’s a scene that I’m convinced shouldn’t work and wouldn’t work if had a different writer, a different director or a different actor involved. But as with a lot of things in this movie, the combination of King, Cronenberg and the superb actors involved make potentially ridiculous scenes into believable and chilling ones (Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that the fact that they are believable is exactly what makes them so chilling).

According to most of the reviews of the day, The Dead Zone is far and away the best of the three Stephen King movies released in 1983 (almost every review nearly spits when referring to Cujo, released two months earlier). It’s a tough call, but I’d say for me The Dead Zone is perhaps my favorite of the 14 films I’ve seen for this project thus far. If nothing else, it has led me to strongly consider picking up King’s original novel, a major achievement considering I’m not much of a reader. The Dead Zone certainly isn’t the scariest King-based film ever made but it is one of the most interesting, character-centric films I’ve seen based on his work.

Next Up: The re-release of the 1977 Disney animated classic The Rescuers.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

While reading through some of the 1983 reviews for Jim McBride’s Breathless, I was reassured to find that most critics at the time were just as baffled by what they saw as I am watching it today in 2010. Just stating the premise of the film is flabbergasting enough: it’s an American remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic of the same name (well, technically Godard’s film is called A bout de souffle but it’s well known to American film buffs as Breathless). The classic French film is credited as one of the first pieces of true New Wave cinema and was notable because…well, it wasn’t really about anything.

That’s certainly oversimplifying things but in general, what made Breathless so revolutionary at the time was that unlike the vast majority of Hollywood studio films up to that point, it refused to adhere to typical conventions like using dialog to advance the plot and having clear protagonists and villains. It was also unconventional from a technical standpoint, with virtually no artificial lighting, handheld camerawork and improvised dialog. These were all things that changed the way people thought about film and its affects can be seen even in mainstream Hollywood studio films today.

But that’s the 1960 film. We’re here to talk about the 1983 film. A little research around the old internet will tell you that director Jim McBride considered Godard’s original film to be hugely inspirational to him as a young filmmaker and as a tribute to that classic, McBride wanted to create something that could recapture the experience he had watching the original film.

The inherent problem with trying to recapture the feeling you had when you saw something that reinvented filmmaking is that in order to truly recapture that feeling, you yourself would have to reinvent filmmaking. Half-Hearted Spoiler Alert: this film didn’t do that. Nor was McBride really trying to do that.

What he was really trying to do was to translate the characters and their relationship not only from French to English (and Paris to L.A.) but also from 1960 to 1983. I’d be wrong if I said they didn’t get anything right in this translation but there are a few really notable things that simply got lost in the translation.

In the original film, the male lead Michel is a street tough who models his personality after the coolest guy he can think of, Humphrey Bogart. His American equivalent Jesse (Richard Gere) is also a young ruffian only this time his role model is Jerry Lee Lewis. Here’s the problem with that swap: Jerry Lee Lewis is not a good stand-in for Humphrey Bogart. Anyone looks cool acting like Bogey. Most people look like idiots when they act like Jerry Lee Lewis. Maybe not all people, but Richard Gere sure as heck does.

His bizarre outbursts of dancing and rockabilly wailing are so off-putting, uncool and out of place that it makes it impossible for me as a viewer to root for this guy or even to enjoy watching him do anything. He’s unlikable in a way that makes him hard to watch.

Unfortunately, his female cohort, while easy on the eyes, is not much easier to watch in terms of her performance. French actress Valerie Kaprisky was plucked from obscurity to play Monica, Jesse’s love interest in the film (Michel’s love interest in the original film was an American girl, get it?). While her character is meant to be a brilliant young architect with a bright future ahead of her, Kaprisky looks like a newborn baby deer. Nearly every review at the time points out the constant clueless look on Kaprisky’s face and it’s no less painful 27 years later watching her fumble her way through the melodramatic dialog.

This isn’t a bad movie. There are some moments that really work, particularly the moments more focused on mood than story or dialog. McBride pulls off some masterfully great looking shots and managed to find all the most photogenic spots in Los Angeles and the surrounding hills. While the two main characters are both hard to take in large doses they each have their moments, particularly Gere who plays up Jesse’s immature, jealous rage with great effectiveness.

The New York Times review at the time suggested that it would be easier to view the film in a positive light had it not taken upon itself the comparison to Godard’s revolutionary masterpiece. I’m coming to this movie without any particular affinity for the original film. While I appreciate the influence that the French New Wave movement had on many of the films I love from the ’70s and onward, the original films themselves just don’t do it for me.

That said, I appreciate what Godard was trying to in his version of Breathless and it should be respected. While Godard’s film was effortless and revolutionary, this remake feels forced and unoriginal. It’s quirkiness and penchant for referencing other films may have been partially influential to guys like Quentin Tarantino (who calls it one of his favorite movies) but aside from that there certainly haven’t been many films made like it, and probably for good reason.

Next Up: The first of a trio of  films from 1983 based on the work of Stephen King, The Dead Zone.