Tag Archives: Disney

A Day Fo(u)r Movies: Black Swan, Tangled, True Grit, Harry Potter 7.0

A Day Fo(u)r Movies: A Field Report

January 5th, 2011

It is not really a secret that I’m not much of a moviegoer. I like movies, and even like going to the movies, but it was never really part of my social fabric growing up, which made it more of a family activity (and thus something that I didn’t do often once the family was dispersed into various locales in the post-secondary years).

While I’ve written about a few movies over the course of the blog’s existence, it hasn’t happened very often. This is both because I haven’t seen very many movies while they’re in theatres, and because I don’t necessarily respond to movies the way I respond to TV shows. While I generally tend to lean away from highly evaluative discourses when looking at TV, perhaps objective to the point of stripping away my own opinion on occasion, with film I lean even further away from the subjective: usually I end up really wanting to have a discussion about a film instead of wanting to “review” it. And since there are various other locales to have conversations of that nature, this blog rarely ends up hosting them.

However, I figure that I tweeted enough about by moviegoing adventure yesterday that I should at least offers some reflections. Taking advantage of the $6 tickets available on Tuesdays, I figured it was time to get to the theatres for the first time since Inception in July – however, since I’m only on holiday vacation for so long, I was in a bit of a rush. As a result, I lined up a four-movie marathon: four movies in a single day is difficult to juggle at even the largest multiplexes, but I found the four films that made it work.

And so, some thoughts on Black Swan, Tangled, True Grit, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One after the jump (and some thoughts on what it was like to see them all in one day, as well).

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Rumination vs. Revelation: Pixar, the Remarkable, and Toy Story 3

It’s not often I write about movies in this neck of the woods, but it’s hard not to use Cultural Learnings as an outlet for my thoughts about Toy Story 3. Not only is this a Pixar film, but it’s a Pixar film which deliberately taps into my childhood nostalgia: I was 9 when Toy Story was released, and 13 when Toy Story 2 hit theatres, so this is arriving at a time when that sort of nostalgia is both most welcome and most intellectually stimulating (as I’m considering culture and the media I consume in a much more critical fashion than I was back then).

Toy Story 3 is a solid sequel to the second film, and a wonderful conclusion to the cinematic trilogy, but I personally feel as if it is the least successful (relatively speaking, of course) of the three films when separated from our nostalgia and the emotional resonance the series has accrued over time. Whereas there are moments in this film which are more powerful than those which came before, and Pixar continues to separate itself from the pack by tapping into the audience’s emotional connection with this franchise in a fashion which has eluded Dreamworks with Shrek, Toy Story 3 is the first in the trilogy to feel repetitive, albeit in a purposeful fashion designed to emphasize key themes from the second film which become more complex in the context of the third.

Considering this is Pixar, they pick the right themes and execute them to perfection when the time comes to bring the series to its cinematic close, but there is a lack of discovery within the film’s adventure, establishing it as an extremely engaging rumination more than a revelation – what will follow is my attempt to explain why I’m not head over heels in love with the film as a whole even after being head over heels in love with its conclusion.

[I went a few paragraphs without any major spoilers, but then I sort of throw all caution to the wind, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet I’d suggest bookmarking this until then, and you’ll have something to read after getting back from the theatre.]

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