1999 - FANTASIA 2000 - sort of a follow up to FANTASIA

Fantasia 2000 was made due to the involvement of Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt and a major shareholder in the company.  To say that the other Disney executives were not enthused about this project would apparently be an understatement.  Still Roy Disney was a big deal at the Disney company so this film which was basically an update of Fantasia went forward.

Once again the Disney company marshaled their creative and technical staff.  The format was to be the same, musical segments were based on compositions from classical composers such as Beethoven, Respighi, Gershwin, Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns, Dukas, Elgar and Stravinsky.

 

The plan this time was to hire a series of performers to introduce each segment to make the film seem more "hip."  Steve Martin opens the film with a rather tiresome comic bit.  Quincy Jones shows up in his introduction for Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  Magicians Penn & Tellar do an already dated magic trick.  "Darth Vader" himself James Earl Jones gets a bit and finally Bette Midler introduces some segment which I can't recall.  Sticking all these actors into this film smacked a little like desperation.

The animation was at a very high standard.  When the Disney Corporation put their minds to it, nobody could produce more stunning traditional animation and in his case aided by computer enhancement, than this talented group.

 

This film like the previous Fantasia also did not do especially well with the general public.  The film lost money.  The critical reviews were all over the place and it was clear this wasn't going to be the animation masterpiece Roy Disney had hoped for.  The problem with Fantasia 2000 was that it was for the most part a very boring film.   No amount of elaborate and stunning animation was going to help this film.  Nice try but no cigar as they say.

The film's running time is 76 minutes.

1940 - FANTASIA, Disney's classic animated concert film.

Fantasia was two years in the making. Walt Disney along with conductor Leopold Stokowski decided to aim very high with an animated film that consisted of musical segments created by the Disney organization's talented artists and craftsmen.  The musical segments were to be drawn from  a selection of classical music composers.  At this point the Disney company was at the peak of it's creative powers.  Fantasia was an expensive production with perfection set as the goal.  It was a big ambitious risk for Walt Disney.  

Besides pushing animation to a high level of artistic creativity, Walt Disney also developed an early stereophonic sound system to go with the film which further drove costs  up.  A lot of money was spent on a sound system that had to be installed inside theaters showing this film.  Again, Disney wanted nothing less than perfection for the finished soundtrack in the animated segments.  The excellent live action color photography of Fantasia was photographed by one of Hollywood's top cameramen, James Wong Howe who is surprisingly not credited for his contribution to the film.

The end result was a unique film which featured visual interpretations from composers, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Ponchielli, Mussorgsky and Schubert.  If not all of the musical segments come off (the Beethoven Mount Olympus segment is kind of silly), they are all  spectacular with the animation and special visual effects perfectly blended together.  

 

The plan for the release of the film was to add and replace musical segments every few years which would keep the film in circulation.  Unfortunately the film was so expensive that the initial run didn't really bring in the box office results Disney was looking for.  World War 2 didn't help things as it closed off a lot of foreign markets that would have generated revenue.

Still even with CGI and all the latest technological mumbo jumbo junk that the entertainment industry can muster today.  This film is an amazing achievement when you compare it to the current cookie cutter animated films that are released.

The story credit is given to Joe Grant and Dick Huemer although you can be sure this film is also the result of input from the creative artists and the producer Walt Disney as well.  The running time is  126 minutes.

2011 - SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN, entertaining romantic comedy

This is a very likable romantic comedy with two very attractive leads. The story is really featherweight. An Arab sheikh who happens to be a devotee of fly fishing decides he wants to populate a river in his country with salmon. To accomplish this he hires a fishery specialist who is assisted in this mission by a financial planner.  Because if you are going to raise fish who is better qualified than a financial planner.

The fishery specialist and the financial planner are played by Ian McGregor and Emily Blunt and you can’t get much more charming and charismatic than these two.  However this is a rom-com and there are few obstacles that stand in the way of true love before the end of the film.  One of the most entertaining characters in this film is Kristen Scott Thomas.  She plays the very tough Press Secretary to the British Prime Minister who is looking to exploit the fishing project for political purposes.  Thomas's character gets all the good dialog and she has razor sharp scene stealing comic timing.   

This type of well made romantic comedy really doesn't show up in movie theaters these days.  This genre has been taken over by streaming services that can pump out modestly budgeted love stories with no expensive A list actors.  They usually run about 90 minutes and are so poorly made and insubstantial that when one of them ends up being halfway decent film critics jump all over themselves blathering on about how good they sort of are when generally they’re not.

Getting back to the film.  It's well paced by the director Lasse Hallström it has some nice visual touches and good dialog.  What more can you ask for?  Yes this is the kind of film where you can say "I've seen it all before."  but usually it's not this well made.

The film was written by  Simon Beaufoy, the running time is 107 minutes.

1992 - MALCOLM X, way too long biography

I had to sit through a lot of Malcolm X's childhood and formative years before I finally got to the meat of the drama, Malcolm X's conversion to the Muslim religion. This early stuff unfortunately takes up half the length of the film,  Terrorized by racists as a child who also killed his father, Malcolm X ends up in prison where he begins to focus on the racial injustice propagated  against African Americans.

I'm not saying this isn't interesting or important information but the writer/director Spike Lee should have worked a little harder to telescope the events of Malcolm's early life.  A film that is pushing close to four hours is a lot for a viewer to sit through.  Probably the two dance numbers Lee staged could have been cut to start with since they add nothing to the narrative.

 

Denzel Washington is excellent as Malcolm X (you only have to watch some video clips of the real Malcolm X to see how good he is) especially when he begins preaching the teachings of The Nation of Islam. The film follows his pilgrimage to Mecca, his struggles with the leadership of the Nation of Islam, the perceived threat that white people have of him and his controversial comments about the JFK assassination this film finally become interesting. 

 

You can't fault the cinematography by Ernest Dickerson or the physical production of the film which really captures the look of the 1950's and 1960's.  Spike Lee had to deal with a really tight budget during the production of this film but he did give the film an epic quality.

The film was written by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl, the running time is 202 minutes.