Saving Mr. Banks is a fascinating look at the circuitous "collaborative" process Walt Disney, his creative team, and author P.L. Travers engaged in in bringing the character Mary Poppins to life on the big screen in the early 1960s. This touching, funny film is really two stories nicely tied up in one appealing package. The first story is of P.L. Travers's childhood in Australia in the early 1…
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Secret Of Nimh ~ Secret Of Nimh
There's a dark underpinning of meanness and a lack of humanity contained within several of the short films in Short 6: Insanity. The animated "Bad Plant" and "Billy's Balloon" are both misanthropic contributions, and only "Franky Goes to Hollywood," which documents a day in the life and career of the dog who starred in Armageddon, and the Sound Bit featurette, "Beyond the Rhythm," really transc…
This is the eighth in a series of DVDs designed to highlight short films and interactive content. Each issue is loosely curated according to a theme: Dreams, Utopia, Seduction, or, in this case, Vision. It's also divided into four sections: narrative, documentary, music, and spoken word. As with most short-film collections, there is a tendency here to try to appeal to everybody, which leads to …
Have you ever had a dream in which you've been cleaning a bathroom while filmmaker Henry Jaglom (Venice/Venice) talks over the phone about movie sex? Well, now you can have that experience vicariously via Rainier Judd's brief, weird introductions to each chapter in this short film anthology on the theme of seduction (of one or another kind). The section called "Marquee" offers Seth Edelste…
A skeleton grabs a sword and slashes viciously at Sinbad. A 9-foot-tall Neanderthal man fights to the death with a saber-toothed tiger. All the while, the boys and girls in the fourth row forget about their popcorn and are hypnotized by the images on the screen. It's hard to believe so many years have passed since the last Sinbad movie held kids spellbound at Saturday matinees. The movies were …
Three years after A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), Charles Schulz's beloved "Peanuts" characters hit the big screen again in the enjoyable Snoopy, Come Home. This time, everyone's favorite beagle turns the kids' world upside down when he receives a mysterious letter from a girl named Lila and hits the road with best friend Woodstock, evading sadistic would-be pet owner and other perils along …
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