Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Monday, August 12th, 2024
August 5th, 1994
My friends, I hope you know me well enough to understand that I’m being sincere here, I’m not trying to show off with a wild take. The truth is I recently watched and enjoyed the movie THE LITTLE RASCALS. It kind of rules.
This was not an outcome I expected, or even considered. For the 30 years this movie has existed I’ve scoffed at it, assumed it was crap. Yes, it comes from director Penelope Spheeris, she of excellent punk rock documentaries. But I’m gonna have to pull out the Shaquille O’Neal “I wasn’t familiar with your game” quote here. I wasn’t showing the proper respect. I had some idea she lost it after WAYNE’S WORLD, because I thought BLACK SHEEP was kinda cheesy and all the rest seemed like things I wouldn’t like. I assumed this was some pablum for kids from an era where pablum for kids was extra bad. (See: 3 NINJAS KICK BACK.)
But here I am trying to watch most of the major movies of summer ’94, it was about the only situation where I was gonna give THE LITTLE RASCALS a shot, and almost immediately I realized I was probly gonna like it. It’s silly, it’s for kids, it might creep some people out by having children woo each other like they’re Popeye and Olive. But it made me laugh a whole bunch, it’s daring in the way it straight up does old Hal Roach shit and doesn’t try to conform to ‘90s expectations, it actually makes sense as part of the Spheeris filmography, and (most surprising to me) it’s artfully crafted. I guess mostly in the way that she could piece together a sensible movie with 95% of the cast being 5-7 year old non-actors, but also it’s a great looking movie! Credit to the transfer, which has a good level of film grain. I did not expect to watch THE LITTLE RASCALS 1994 and think “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore!” But here we are.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amblin, Bug Hall, Chris Pederson, Courtland Mead, Daryl Hannah, Eric Edwards, Flea, George Wendt, Lea Thompson, Mel Brooks, Penelope Spheeris, punk, Reba McEntire, Roger Corman, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Family | 21 Comments »
Monday, July 29th, 2024
July 22, 1994
There’s an odd subset of summer ’94 movies: well-regarded directors making goofy fables about America, adapted from quirky novels. These include EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, FORREST GUMP and now Rob Reiner’s NORTH, based on the 1984 book North: The Tale of a 9-Year-Old Boy Who Becomes a Free Agent and Travels the World in Search of the Perfect Parents by Alan Zweibel, who was an original Saturday Night Live writer, co-creator of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and co-writer of the DRAGNET movie. He adapted his novel with Reiner’s regular producer Andrew Scheinman.
Elijah Wood (between THE GOOD SON and THE WAR) stars as the title character, who’s 11 in the movie (like the kid from THE CLIENT) and kind of like a more humble and all-American Max Fischer. He wins little league games, stars in school plays, gets good grades, and is held up by all parents as an example of what their kids should be like. But his own mom and dad (Julia Louis-Dreyfus [TROLL, SOUL MAN] and Jason Alexander [THE BURNING, CONEHEADS]) don’t seem to care, and ignore him to argue with each other, which stresses him to the point of near cardiac arrest and existential crises on the pitcher’s mound.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Elijah Wood, Rob Reiner, Scarlett Johansson
Posted in Reviews, Bruce, Comedy/Laffs, Family | 14 Comments »
Thursday, July 25th, 2024
July 22, 1994
In this retrospective so far we’ve discussed movies based on a radio show from the ‘30s (THE SHADOW), a cartoon from the ‘60s (THE FLINTSTONES), a western TV show from the ‘60s (MAVERICK) and a real guy who many knew from western TV shows of the ‘60s (WYATT EARP). Here’s another one to add to the list: a movie about Lassie, a character likely unknown to the kids who would be its primary audience, but maybe their parents would be expected to have warm feelings. First introduced in an 1859 short story, then a novel and series of movies in the ‘40s, the heroic collie was known to boomers from a TV series that ran from 1954-1973. People my age knew it mainly from parodies, though I remember seeing parts of the show on Nick at Nite or something.
Despite coming from Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels (between WAYNE’S WORLD 2 and TOMMY BOY), the 1994 LASSIE movie is a very sincere drama for families, with a bit of a meta set up. At the beginning little Jennifer Turner (Brittany Boyd) is watching an old Lassie episode on TV but her older brother Matt (Tom Guiry, THE SANDLOT) says “Thought I told you not to watch this crap” and changes the channel to the video for “Breaking the Girl” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Basil Poledouris, Clayton Barclay Jones, Daniel Petrie, dog movies, Elizabeth Anderson, Frederic Forrest, Gary Ross, Helen Slater, Joe Inscoe, Jon Tenney, Lorne Michaels, Matt Jacobs, Michelle Williams, Richard Farnsworth, Tom Guiry, White Zombie
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Family | 7 Comments »
Monday, June 17th, 2024
June 17, 1994 was such a big day that in 2010 Brett Morgen released an ESPN 30 For 30 documentary called JUNE 17TH, 1994. It covered Arnold Palmer playing his final round at the U.S. Open, the commencement of the first FIFA World Cup hosted by the United States, a ticker tape parade for the New York Rangers after winning the Stanley Cup, Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals, Ken Griffey Jr. tying a Babe Ruth home run record, oh yeah and O.J. Simpson’s infamous slow police chase in the Ford Bronco. One important event of the day that it did not cover was the release of Mike Nichols’ WOLF starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. And I will not be covering it either, despite its story of an older generation getting all macho to compete with a younger one stealing their jobs and women, because I already wrote about it in my Summer Flings series.
There is however one topic I will be covering that was far too provocative and/or non-sports-related to include in the documentary, and that’s the movie GETTING EVEN WITH DAD starring Ted Danson as Dad and Macaulay Culkin as the party getting even.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gailard Sartain, Glenne Headly, Great America, Hector Elizondo, Howard Deutch, Jim Jennewein, Kathleen Wilhoite, Macaulay Culkin, Sam McMurray, Saul Rubinek, Ted Danson, Tom S. Parker
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Family | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, May 8th, 2024
It’s tempting to say that 3 NINJAS KICK BACK is the bottom of the barrel for a kids movie, mainly because of the amount of farting that happens in a particular scene. But I checked my review of the first 3 NINJAS and I called it “some real bottom of the barrel dreck, almost as bad as any off brand DTV throwaway kiddy garbage you’ll ever encounter,” so that one might’ve been worse. The best thing I can say about this first released 3 NINJAS sequel is that in the tradition of THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II and THE KARATE KID PART II they go to Japan for part of it. That takes some effort.
I say “first released” because they actually made 3 NINJAS KNUCKLE UP in the same year as the first movie but they had some kind of distribution problem and didn’t release it until 1995. Can you imagine? A whole two years where 3 NINJAS KNUCKLE UP was a lost film. That’s why part 2 recasts two of the kids but part 3 returns to the original line up at their original age. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Wagner, Charles T. Kanganis, Dustin Nguyen, J. Evan Bonifant, Max Elliott Slade, ninjas, Sab Shimono, Sean Fox, Shin Sang-ok, Victor Wong
Posted in Reviews, Family, Martial Arts | 31 Comments »
Monday, January 8th, 2024
I really wasn’t in the market for a Willy Wonka prequel, I did not think it sounded like a worthwhile idea, or that this new movie WONKA looked good, as much as I enjoyed director Paul King’s two PADDINGTON movies. So I wasn’t even planning to see it until it turned out to be the first thing showing at the SIFF Cinema Downtown, formerly Cinerama (1963-2020). It has been my theater of record for decades, but after owner Paul Allen died the people running his company wondered “What is there to gain from maintaining a beloved city institution?” and closed it shortly before the pandemic. We all assumed the worst for a couple years, but thankfully the Seattle International Film Festival organization acquired the theater (just not the name) and fuck it, if they were showing WONKA I was gonna see WONKA. I’ve seen so many Star Warses and Batmen and Tarantinos and 70mm retrospectives in there over the past 25 years, waiting in long lines, feeling the excitement of the crowded lobby as they take my ticket, but this is the first time the excitement was only about being in the building.
So I had no expectations for WONKA, but if I had, it would’ve exceeded them. It’s a sweet and funny old fashioned movie musical with a surprising amount of the Roald Dahl spirit. That includes not just inventing new whimsical confectionary innovations that make people hover, sprout green fur or grow the confidence to improve their relationships, not just colorful names and word play, but also a preference for the Dickensian poor over the arrogant rich, and a morbid fascination with ugly awful jerks worthy of the Twits, the Trunchbull, Aunts Sponge and Spiker, etc. When Bleacher (Tom Davis, PREVENGE), the lovelorn henchman of exploitative boarding house owner Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman, LOCKE), first smiled I realized that his craggy rows of teeth really looked like a scribbly Quentin Blake drawing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Calah Lane, Hugh Grant, Jim Carter, Keegan-Michael Key, Mathew Baynton, Matt Lucas, Natasha Rothwell, Olivia Colman, Paterson Joseph, Paul King, Rakhee Thakrar, Rich Fulcher, Roald Dahl, Rowan Atkinson, Timothee Chalamet, Tom Davis
Posted in Reviews, Family, Musical | 12 Comments »
Thursday, August 24th, 2023
August 19, 1983
THE GOLDEN SEAL is a PG-rated movie about a 10-year-old boy named Eric (Torquil Campbell) who befriends a seal matching the description of one from Aleutian myth and local poacher legend. It’s directed by Disney-animal-movie veteran Frank Zuniga and written by John Groves (TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO), based on the book A River Ran Out of Eden by James Vance Marshall (a.k.a. Donald G. Payne, whose novels were also turned into SANTA FE, WALKABOUT, and THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD).
I expected this to fit somewhere in that cloying kid-and-animal subgenre we know today, and yeah, there’s a section in the middle with montages of seal frolicking. But it kinda leans more on being an old fashioned family adventure movie. There’s a remote island, a violent storm, a rope bridge, a cave, some rescuing, some father and son conflict. I kinda liked it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: adventure, Alaska, Aleutian Islands, Frank Zuniga, James Vance Marshall, John Groves, Michael Beck, Penelope Milford, Richard Narita, Sandra Seacat, seals, Seth Sakai, Steve Railsback, Torquil Campbell
Posted in Reviews, Family | 11 Comments »
Thursday, April 20th, 2023
Somehow I, a person fascinated with both Ronny Yu’s kangaroo kung fu movie WARRIORS OF VIRTUE (1997) and the medium of unlikely DTV sequels, lived for many years unaware of the existence of WARRIORS OF VIRTUE 2: RETURN TO TAO (2002). Once I did learn of it I found it in a DVD collection called “6 Family Fantasy-Adventure Movies” along with the other Miramax library titles PINOCCHIO (2002), NEVERWAS (2007), A WRINKLE IN TIME (2003), THE NEVERENDING STORY III: ESCAPE FROM FANTASIA (1996) and, in a strange coincidence, MERLIN’S APPRENTICE (2005), directed by Yu’s frequent editor and BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR 2 director David Wu. They also released it as a double feature with that version of BEOWULF starring Christopher Lambert. It has no Ronny Yu involvement and, worse, no kangaroo involvement, which I’m sure is why nobody ever heard about it. I mean, if there’s a movie where April O’Neill is trying to find the Ninja Turtles and when she does they “lost their powers” so they’re just people wearing different colored headbands then I never heard of that one either. Though I kind of want to.
But obviously it is my professional and ethical duty to extend my tangent from the actual Ronny Yu movies until such a time as I have reviewed this DTV spin-off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dennis K. Law, Kentucky Robinson, Kevin Tod Smith, Michael Vickerman, Nathan Phillips, Nina Liu, Rex Piano, Shedrack Anderson III
Posted in Reviews, Family, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, April 19th, 2023
I guess this is a weird reason to revisit a family fantasy classic that’s treasured around the world, but I felt like after spending so much time on WARRIORS OF VIRTUE I had an ethical duty to review another first-English-language-movie-by-an-internationally-acclaimed-director, THE NEVERENDING STORY. I saw it in the theater 39 years ago and I remembered it enough to know WARRIORS kinda ripped off its kid-picked-on-by-bullies-given-large-leatherbound-book-magically-connected-to-a-fantasy-world format. I did not remember that in this one the kid just reads about the fantasy world, he doesn’t go there. But there was another detail that did stick in my brain, one that I had to question because it seems so fucking crazy: could it possibly be true that there are no kung fu animals in this one at all? Believe it or not, that is true. What the fuck kind of lunatic wants a story without kung fu animals to never end!? It’s absurd! But somehow they make it work.
Watching it again, I laughed at how quickly it gets into it – not the fantasy world, but the theme song. Limahl and Beth Anderson crooning “The Neverending Stoooor-ryyy, ooo ooow ooh oooowoo ooh, the Neverending Stooor-ryyy…” over Giorgio Moroder synths and footage of clouds. One thing this opening sequence gets across very clearly is that if you want to see a movie called THE NEVERENDING STORY, you came to the right place.
The kid is named Bastian, played by Barret Oliver (Kid #2, UNCOMMON VALOR). We don’t see too much of his life, but we pick up on a few things. His mom died fairly recently. His dad (Gerald McRaney, MOTORCYCLE GANG) is emotionally distant and tells him to keep his head out of the clouds, which the credits already told us is the opposite of what you gotta do in a neverending story. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barret Oliver, Deep Roy, Gerald McRaney, German cinema, Giorgio Moroder, Michael Ende, Thomas Hill, Wolfgang Petersen
Posted in Reviews, Family, Fantasy/Swords | 28 Comments »
Friday, September 16th, 2022
They used to say that August was the “dog days,” when all the shitty movies get dumped. Yeah, okay, maybe some of them. But August 7, 1992 was when they released one of the best movies of the ’90s. A movie I continue to watch every couple years and absolutely love. One of those movies that’s kind of seen as a commentary on its genre but really it’s just a high watermark for it. This was even the movie that won best picture that year. Oh yeah no I’m not talking about 3 NINJAS yet, I’m talking about Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN. I was planning to revisit it as part of this retrospective but jesus christ it’s September already, and I’ve already reviewed it before, I’ve even reviewed its Japanese remake before (it’s good!). If I was gonna write about it again I’d want more time to really focus on doing it justice and I can’t do that right now, I’d have to rush it. So instead here I am reviewing some real dog shit released on the same day. These are the choices we make as writers.
I had never seen 3 NINJAS before, but obviously I wasn’t gonna skip a movie that has three or more ninjas in it. It’s from director Jon Turteltaub (THE MEG), who had only done the Barbarian Brothers comedy THINK BIG (1990) and something called DRIVING ME CRAZY (1991) at this point, but somehow he got this released by Touchstone Pictures. Then he continued his Disney relationship by following it with COOL RUNNINGS (1993), WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995), PHENOMENON (1996), INSTINCT (1999), DISNEY’S THE KID (2000), NATIONAL TREASURE (2004), NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS (2007), and THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (2010). Man, he got lucky though, because this is some real bottom of the barrel dreck, almost as bad as any off brand DTV throwaway kiddy garbage you’ll ever encounter. I guess Michael Eisner only cared about that “we’re not spending DICK TRACY money on anything anymore” edict we discussed in the ENCINO MAN review more than he cared about finding movies worthy of showing to people. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan McRae, Jon Turteltaub, ninjas, Patrick Labyorteaux, Professor Toru Tanaka, Victor Wong
Posted in Action, Family, Reviews | 15 Comments »
