Enchanted

This was a movie that originally I was going to review for my weekly SNMR column over on my regular blog. But then I thought how fun it would be to get the scribester's take on this syrupy-sweet Disney film because I just know how much he looooooves to watch them. However, I don't think that's going to happen, due to some issues he's dealing with right now that are far more pressing than this column. If at some point he'd like to add his review to this post, I'd love to read it.

GREEN'S "IT'S LIKE YOU ESCAPED FROM A HALLMARK CARD OR SOMETHING" REVIEW:

A young, beautiful maiden, Giselle of Andalasia (Amy Adams), is about to marry Prince Edward (James Marsden) and live happily ever after. On the way to the wedding, Giselle is pushed into a magic well by the insanely jealous and evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) who is disguised as an ugly old hag.

The well turns out to be a portal that leads to a place where happily-ever-afters don't exist! Once Prince Edward learns where Giselle has gone, he enthusiastically goes after her, followed by Pip, the talking squirrel and Nathaniel (Timothy Spall), who is promised a relationship with the queen if he can successfully kill Giselle. Enter Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a New York divorce lawyer and his daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey), who take Giselle in and reluctantly let her stay the night...

When this movie was playing in theaters, I never gave it a thought to take my kids to see it. When it came out on DVD and my kids saw it in the store where I buy many of my movies, they begged me to get it for them. This I refused to do, since I thought the movie was going to be stupid. Months later, when I saw that the price had come down significantly I bought it but didn't unwrap it. At the same time I borrowed it from the library, figuring if I watched it and if it truly was as dumb as I thought, then I would return the copy I bought and get my money back.

What I didn't expect was to like this movie as much as I did. (I must've liked it - I watched it three times in a span of four days.) Sure, it's a syrupy, sappy, saccharine sweet fairy tale of a movie. But that's okay because it doesn't presume to be anything else. What makes this film so good is that they've taken the best elements of the classic animated Disney fairy tales Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and combined them into a part animation, mostly live action film that I, in spite of myself, couldn't help but smile and laugh at.

Amy Adams, who brings an enthusiasm to her roles that not many actors today can match, is simply brilliant as the wide eyed, eternally optimistic Giselle, the would-be princess who is suddenly thrust into the wilds of New York City by the evil witch. James Marsden is equally good as the incredibly goofy Prince Edward. If this film has a weak link in the cast, it is female eye-candy Patrick Dempsey, who at times is really into his role but other times looks like he's bored and disinterested in his character. Susan Sarandon is good as the voice of the animated witch but when she comes to New York, her costume looks like she's a vamp-tramp hooker or something worse, rather than queen-evil-incarnate. Look for actress Jodi Benson in a bit part as Dempsey's secretary. She provided the voice of Ariel in the 1989 Disney animated classic "The Little Mermaid."

"Enchanted" had three of the five nominated songs at the Academy Awards in 2008, which at the time I thought was silly. How could one movie carry three-fifths of the best movie songs of the year? Though none of them won the Oscar for Best Original Song, they still are really well done and add life and fun to the film.

The special features on the DVD are short but well done, explaining some of the CGI effects used and choreography of the musical numbers.

If you're able to sit through this movie and not laugh or smile at least ten times, then you're inhuman or you're lying. This movie is a feel good winner in every sense of the word.

***** out of *****

Enchanted (2007, PG, 107 minutes), starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall, Susan Sarandon, Idina Menzel and Rachel Covey. The screenplay was written by Bill Kelly and directed by Kevin Lima.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Apparently Scribe and I are in the midst of a summer lull in posting reviews to the blog, for which I apologize. The following review was not originally scheduled but written as a result of the sudden death of writer/producer/director John Hughes at the young age of 59.

I had a nice review going that was almost complete when blogger ate it. So here goes again. Perhaps scribe-o will throw his review in here too at some point, though I know he's not a fan of John Hughes...

GREEN'S "I'LL BET YOU NEVER SMELLED A REAL SCHOOL BUS BEFORE" REVIEW:

On a beautiful spring/early summer day, uber-slacker Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) decides to skip a day of high school, bringing along his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck). They spend a very memorable day touring downtown Chicago, including eating at an extremely upper crusty restaurant, seeing a Cubs game, visiting an art museum and watching Ferris' impromptu singing performance in some parade. Meanwhile Ferris' sister Jeanne (Jennifer Grey) is upset because her brother gets away with everything and never gets caught. School principal Edward Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) knows Ferris is ditching school and goes on a personal vendetta to try and catch him this time.

This film was released in 1986, as I was finishing my junior year of high school and working at the local General Cinema in the mall, at that time a small four screen theater. I have a fondness for many of the movies that were playing at that time because I could see any movie I wanted at any time for nothin'. And I did! Because of that there are scenes in this film that I've seen hundreds of times, like the parade float scene to name one. And let's face it, there were some of us who thought high school was a bit ridiculous at times and would have loved to skip school, even for a day. I would have gotten caught however. Karma, if you believe in that, doesn't run my way too often.

Writer/director John Hughes does an excellent job bringing out the talents of then relatively unknown actors. Overall the casting was excellent, even the bit parts, like Ferris' happily clueless parents, Rooney's ditsy secretary and the snooty restaurant maitre'd. The film has many funny moments and many quotable lines. Plus, all his other accomplishments aside, this is the film that made Ben Stein famous.

You may think that Hughes' films are cheesy and I, for the most part, will agree with you. There definitely is an element of undeniable cheesiness to Hughes' films, but to me that's one of the reasons why they are so much fun. Every film can't be an Oscar-caliber dramatic masterpiece, and Hughes' films don't pretend to be. However, if you say Hughes was a talentless hack, I'll have to disagree. In my mind a hack is someone who copies the work of others, who really has little or nothing of value to add to a genre. What makes Hughes' films memorable, and thus why they helped define the decade of the 1980's, is that no one really made films about high school and that whole experience, up until that point. At least none that I can think of.

I think this film was great and one of Hughes best, among the many memorable movies that he wrote/produced/directed. I hadn't watched this film in a while but enjoyed it tremendously all the same.

****½ out of *****

SCRIBE'S "SO THAT'S HOW IT IS IN THAT FAMILY" REVIEW:

I titled my review that because it's the only funny part of this overrated mess of a film. The opening scene where Ferris gets his buddy Cameron to impersonate his girlfriend's dad is the first and final inspired portion of a film that never seems to know what it wants to be. It's almost as if Hughes tried to throw everything that was successful from his previous efforts into a fantasy about a mysteriously popular kid skipping school for the day. Nobody skipped school better than me at this time so I could relate to the idea of not wanting to go in. But that's about all I could relate to.

Without getting too sociopolitical on your asses, Hughes' films were a study in whitebread suburban Eighties life. I couldn't relate to the characters in his films, nor the experiences they had, nor the incessant whining so often associated with the spoiled characters. In my circles, people who treated their parents like they were idiots still had to pay for it. For me, watching this film was like studying a foreign culture and realizing I didn't like them very much.

For one thing, the impossibility of Bueller's popularity is an enormous stumbling block. Green, like I, remembers the Eighties. What distinguished that decade from the others was that there were so many cliques and so much segregation that it was unlikely that some guy wearing a varsity jacket who doesn't play sports and sounds like a neurotic New York Jew in Chicago would have been popular with every single clique in his high school. Another thing, there really isn't anything cool about Bueller. He's kind of a smarmy nerd. We would have kicked his ass in my high school...well, actually I would've just watched like I always did.

Hughes came near to brilliance with "The Breakfast Club," an admittedly stock character filled two-act play type of film that tapped beautifully into suburban and adolescent angst like no other film before it. The success of that movie seemed to convince him that he needed to start creating whitebread fantasies instead of gritty realism and that's what we have here.

There isn't a single laugh in the film after the first scene and the "story" meanders until the incredibly contrived moment with Cameron's parents' car flying through the garage.

If anything, this was the beginning of Hughes' descent into utter garbage which culminated with the "Home Alone" series.

0 out of *****

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986, PG-13, 103 minutes), starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones and Jennifer Grey. The film was written, produced and directed by John Hughes.