3 Best Releases From Walt Disney Productions Studio

Kids deserve better than yet another dull, going-through-the-motions misfire. The animation world was recently startled by Warner Bros.' announcement that they planned to shelve their recently completed feature Coyote vs Acme for a quick tax write-off, rather than spend money to release it. Not to be outdone, Disney Studios offers up Wish, an animated feature that is the kind of artistic misfire that deserves to be hidden away and never spoken about again. This is a creation so alternately bewildering and banal that it's implausible that at no point during the entire creative process did anyone point out the seemingly obvious fact that virtually none of it works on even the most basic levels. Continue Reading →

Friedkin’s second film is a bruising affair that finds the fledgling director wielding style to produce maximum psychological damage. In the early days of his career, William Friedkin found himself playing second banana to his collaborators. For instance, one of his earliest biggest TV directing gigs was on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Then, when he made the leap to feature narrative films, his debut was in service of Cher and Sonny Bono’s cult of personality.  Continue Reading →

In the wake of the death of its founder and namesake, the Walt Disney Company found itself in a bit of a tailspin in the late 60s and 70s. They were unwilling to stray too far away from being purveyors of family entertainment but failed to recognize shifting audience tastes. For about a decade after Disney’s passing, the studio’s cinematic output consisted of regular reissues of their animated classics and decidedly juvenile live-action offerings. New animated films were few and far between due to spiraling costs. Their live-action films were lousy with place-kicking mules, hirsute district attorneys, and the further adventures of Herbie the Love Bug. Herbie proved their last significant box-office hit when it (he?) debuted in 1969. Continue Reading →