Pete’s Dragon and the Most Alarming World of Child Abduction…with Music!
When you’re a kid, you don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the historical basis for the narratives in the fantasy films you grew to love. It’s all about the anthropomorphic Robin Hood figures, talking parrots and genies, flying beds and walking suits of armor, an astronomically large collection of Dalmatians, or a magical cartoon dragon who roasts apples for his child companion. That describes much of my early experiences with Pete’s Dragon (1977), which saw Disney attempting to recreate the live-action-and-cartoon musical magic some thirteen years after Mary Poppins. It’s a film about a little boy and his magical dragon, about a small New England seaside town, about larger-than-life hillbilly villains, and about familiar Disney things like the power of family (even found family) and even the “value” of children. Value would normally have an obvious meaning here. Something like “hey, we should listen to kids because what they have to say matters,” for example. And Disney certainly has that here. Pete (Sean Marshall), the lively redheaded boy who is taken in by lighthouse keepers Nora (Helen Reddy) and Lampie (Mickey Rooney) gets his fair share of moments to remind the adults around him that what he thinks does matter – though other adults, such as the strict and draconian schoolteacher, Miss Taylor (Jane Kean), find little of value in the words of children. Yet, it’s the other value that I found particularly shocking upon rewatching the film for this feature.
Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the Unbearable Violence of Gay Love
In 2005, the United States found itself in a renewed culture war over the place of homosexuality in society. Just two years prior, the Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick to establish sodomy laws as unconstitutional. None of this was new to civil rights activists, of course. Gay rights had been part of the national conversation for decades, especially in the wake of Stonewall (1969) and the DSM’s redefinition of homosexuality as non-pathological (1973). By 2005, the year Brokeback Mountain blew up the box office, Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage and a flurry of bans had swept the country, ushering in an era not just of tacit acceptance of bigotry against gay people but also of systemic, government-supported bigotry. All this was hot on the heels of decades of brutal murders of gay people, and an especially tumultuous 1990s, which saw well over a dozen murders and executions of gay men (and women), some of them so high profile that they would eventually lead to legislation designed to protect gay people from (or at least create greater punishment for) murderous homophobes. For a young man raised in a deeply homophobic culture, all of this was a bit of a shock, not least of all because my mother was a gay woman, and for about a decade up until 2005, my life had been packed with gay people being people with regular people problems. And here we were being asked as citizens to determine if other citizens had the right to live their lives without government interference. For me, there was no question that same-sex marriage should be legal.
Nostalgic Paris: Misery, Imagination, and Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris
Perhaps the most potent problem of our modern era is its obsession with nostalgia. In its least malignant form, nostalgia becomes an excessive love of art and fashion playfully removed from the socio-political conditions of its creation. In its most malignant form, nostalgia turns people into cult-like fascists who desire a return to a time that never really existed. Most nostalgia travelers rest somewhere between: fantasizing about going back to something that felt more familiar, even at the expense of the present. And then there’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which seems to relish in misery, imagination, and nostalgia at varying points and for varying purposes. What ultimately does the film say about nostalgia, then?
Throwing Grendel to the Vikings: Reassessing a 90s Adaptation
Imagine, if you will, the 1990s. You’re making a movie. A movie that doesn’t satisfy your test audiences and requires numerous re-edits that drag your production roughly $15 million over budget. A movie whose director will be replaced by the creator of the novel you’re adapting. A movie whose film composer, Graeme Revell, will be replaced by Jerry Goldsmith. A movie starring Antonio Banderas at, arguably, the height of his popularity. A movie that Roger Ebert will pan and which will bomb so horribly at the box office that fuzzy studio math puts it as the #32 or #1 worst box office flop in history (adjusted for inflation). A movie with so many production problems that it caused Omar Sharif to temporarily retire from acting (1999-2003). In Sharif’s own words: I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.” IMDb (2003) If you imagine all of that and think it’s just not possible that this movie could be shockingly pretty darn good, well, you’d be wrong. You see, the movie in question is The 13th Warrior, based on Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1977)(itself a loose adaptation of Beowulf and the historical writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). And The 13th Warrior, I’m here to say, is surprisingly good in a campy “full of heart” sort of way. Why? I’m glad you asked.
28 Days Later and the Delicious Comfort of Disaster
Living during a pandemic makes watching movies featuring pandemics particularly weird. Yet, there’s also something, well, comforting for some of us. After all, if you plugged into Netflix a few weeks ago, you might have noticed that Outbreak (1995) was one of the top viewed films. I have to think that people were watching for reasons other than morbid curiosity. And when I put out a call to pick a movie from my DVD collection for me to watch and discuss, a number of people gravitated immediately to 28 Days Later (2002) because of its relevance to the now. 28 Days Later is easily one of my favorite films, horror genre or otherwise. For those who haven’t seen it, the film opens with a group of animal rights activists (Animal Liberation Front without the name) raiding a government animal testing facility, which results in the spread of a deadly virus called “rage.” Flash forward to Jim (Cillian Murphy) some 28 days later, who wakes up from a coma to find himself in an empty hospital and no knowledge of what is going on. We learn pretty quickly that the rage virus has overtaken the UK, leading to mass infections, mass evacuations, quarantine, and the eventual breakdown of society. Jim is rescued from certain death by Selena (Naomie Harris) and her ill-fated friend, Mark (Noah Huntley), and together (sans Mark) they meet up with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who encourage them to drive north to a supposed safe zone lead by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston; a.k.a. the Doctor). Naturally, things aren’t as they seem there… Not one bit.