Here's the Second Clip!

Scenes that will Shape the Entertainment Industry

Here, my friends, are two scenes from the film Enchanted. Classy and delightful, they will be some of the trend setters for the next generation of movies. (I'll post the second clip right after this one)

Films Every Child Should Watch (Or, Films that Shaped My Childhood)

1. The Parent Trap - the original Disney
2. Pollyanna - also the original Disney
3. Swiss Family Robinson
4. The Sound of Music
5. Fiddler on the Roof
6. Sleeping Beauty
7. 101 Dalmations - animated version
8. Robin Hood - Ok, this title is counting for three films: the Errol Flynn, Richard Todd, and animated Disney version
9. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
10. The Music Man
11. Beauty and the Beast
12. Lady and the Tramp
13. The Jungle Book
14. Bambi
15. Dumbo
16. The Rescuers and the Rescuers Down Under
17. The Aristocats
18. Enchanted
19. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
20. Mary Poppins

And here are two series NO ONE should go without seeing:

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh - the ORIGINAL ones

Veggie Tales

On Howard Shore's Fellowship of the Ring

Movie soundtracks have in the past 10 or 15 years come into their own. Frequently, the music is actually better than the film it accompanies. And though there are so many soundtracks I love, if there was only one score I could save, only one which I could preserve, it would be Howard Shore's Fellowship of the Ring.

This is a score set apart from others, a score truly unique. The listener doesn't need to know what's going on in the story, for the music itself expresses a story. It has a life of its own. And, what is most important, it is the most musically universal score I've ever heard. It combines vocal sounds with instrumental ones, and it splits instrumental sounds equally between strings and brass and wind. This universal quality enables Shore to play with his themes, and to keep the soundtrack from becoming limp and stale.

The CD begins with foreboding music, then moves into the sounds of chaos and darkness, with wisps of mysterious string melodies playing throughout. Then it slowly becomes light and cheery, with the sound of a well-tilled field and brightly colored fences, the sounds of joy and the familiar. Ah, the flute and the fiddle! The village tavern, Rip Van Winkle, such are the impressions on my mind.

Now, I could go on and describe each track and images it brings, to my mind at least. But it would be far, far better for you to get the soundtrack yourself and listen, really listen to it. What images does it bring to mind? What emotions stir in your breast? Listen to it repeatedly, let its tones become a part of your very being.



And you will forever be the better for it.

Smoldering Embers

Secrets hidden away. Races with time. Government conspiracies. These Hollywood cards, each worth so many dollars in the minds of screenwriters, are pulled out of the hat far too often. They’ve even begun to infiltrate children’s films, though, as usually happens when an adult theme is modified for kids’ stories, the result is generally less intriguing than the adult equivalent. No film expresses this pathetic trend better than the Walden Media release City of Ember.

Born and raised in the underground city of Ember, Lina Mayfleet wants nothing more in life than to fly over the broken cobbles of the streets with the speed of electricity. After trading her assigned job at the pipeworks with classmate Doon for his job as a messenger, she continues on in her humdrum existence. That is until the power of their underground city begins to fail, when Lina and Doon find themselves caught up in a whirling race with opposing forces to try to find the way out of their decaying city.

But it wasn’t merely the city that was decaying. The whole script was. For a story that is rather over-used to begin with, the screenplay needed to be exceptionally fine in order to succeed. But almost immediately, the script lost touch with the viewer, and it limped along its 90-minute span, progressing from crisis to crisis for lack of anything better to do. It was incredibly rushed, copying Lina’s desire for speed, and yet ironically, the continual barrage of crises made the film really begin to lag by midway. Towards the very end of the film, I found myself saying, “Another important moment. So exciting. How much longer is this thing gonna take?”

The few engaging scenes were due only to the good acting of Saoirse Ronan (Atonement star and rising actress) as Lina. She brought the little charm there is to be found in the film with her cheery face and energy. The rest of the actors, lacking anything substantial to work with, stood around waiting for a miracle. Even the great Bill Murray looked lost, confused, and helpless.

It’s sad, because I really did want to like the film. I support Walden Media and their message. I like to find movies to show to my brother and sister. And though its content really wasn’t too bad, City of Ember, with its weak story and much weaker script, didn’t pass muster. Don’t waste your time on this movie; imagine the underground darkness of the Mines of Moria with a weaker version of National Treasure, and several touches from the book The Giver, and you’ve got it. We’d better let the embers of this one burn out.

No Sunshine Here

There are hours when you spill coffee down your best shirt and then fall down the steps on your way to the washer. There are days when you wake up late for class and then find last night’s gum between your library books. And there are weeks when you watch first one, then another, phenomenally terrible movie.

A few weeks ago, I had one of those weeks.

Two films: Sunshine Cleaning and Little Miss Sunshine. The former tells of a struggling single mother, who balances her time between her married lover and attention-deficient son and sister. During the film, she works through her relationships, particularly that with her sister, which is complicated by their different responses to their mother’s suicide in their youth. Little Miss Sunshine speaks of the Hoover family, a group of six who define the term dysfunctional. When the potbellied little girl has a chance to become California’s “Little Miss Sunshine”, the whole family, from the Nietzche-reading teen with a vow of silence to an unspeakably foul grandpa, must pile into a broken down van in an attempt to get her there in time.

Besides the word “sunshine”, both movies share the same producer, Marc Turtletaub, but other than that, they seem to have nothing in common. But both films were terrible, and for ultimately the same reason. I’m afraid my exposition will be rather brief, as I do not wish to dwell long on these vulgarly odious films.

It was noted in a previous Nota Bene from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man how careful an artist must be when creating an image of terror, for terror is a very real thing. When such terrors are created, but not resolved, a ravenous lion has been released onto an unsuspecting populace. In a very real sense, an unresolved thing of evil echoes through all eternity with malicious tones. This was the problem with both of these films. The characters had essentially the same disgusting lives they possessed at their story’s beginning. There was no real character progression. Thus viewers were and are left with the same terrifying image they commenced with. I came away from both films with a darkness that pervaded the soul, and I tremble to imagine what movies like these could do to a viewer who had no hope in life.

Be careful, filmmakers, what you create.

Tim Hawkins - Cletus Take the Reel

This is a delightful parody of the music video, an insipidly tasteless media form.