"Brave"

I just got done reviewing a couple of horror movies, so now lets do a nice family film.

“Brave” is one of those movies that I got done watching and thought, “Hrm, is that all there is?” (I had the same experience with “Primer” recently).

Until now, I have unabashedly loved every movie that Pixar has made since Toy Story in ‘95, for a multitude of reasons.  For fifteen years, Pixar raised the bar in filmmaking (not just animation).  With each new film, they have set a new standard for storytelling in film, whether redefining film classics like “The Magnificent Seven” (with “A Bug’s Life”) or “Chinatown” (with “Monsters Inc”), or reinventing the superhero or spy mythos (“The Incredibles”, “Cars 2”), or creating out-rightly original stories (“Up”, “Wall-E”).  

But what Pixar has done best is create stories of unprecedented creativity with serious stakes and honest heart, particularly with a degree of emotion and complexity of character normally only seen in serious dramas, and rarely seen in a “family” films.
In “Finding Nemo”, Dory’s monologue takes the audience by surprise, as does the opening where Marlin has to face the loss of his wife and all but one of his unborn children.  In “Toy Story 3”, the characters are forced to face not only the loss of their closest friend, but, in an unexpectedly dark turn, their own mortality.  The opening scenes of “Up” tell a wonderful and heartfelt love story in five minutes without a word spoken, and that’s just the opening of the story.

However, “Brave”, while showing it’s own degree of imagination and heart, lacks the degree to which Pixar has produced consistently for a decade and a half. On the other hand, (and this is where my frustration comes in) what “Brave” does best, better than any movie before it, is reinvent the idea of the “Disney Princess” movie. The idea of the “Disney Princess” has been a staple of Disney marketing for over a decade, all based on a number of films which Disney has made since Walt’s first feature film, “Snow White”, which are all based on fairy tales, and which all involve a prince and princess falling in love and ending up together at the end. The marketing side seems to be the natural (used loosely) outgrowing from the Alan Menken Disney musicals of the early 90’s (“The Little Mermaid”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin”), which, in a matter of four years carried the number of “Disney Princesses” from three (the other two being “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” to six.

While none of these movies seems to have been made explicitly with the “Disney Princess” marketing in mind, once the marketing ploy began, it has glommed on to every film of this paradigm that Disney has produced.  However, from the late 90’s to the mid 2000’s, quality in Disney animation production (with the few exceptions of “Treasure Planet”, “Lilo and Stitch”, and “Atlantis”) dropped as remarkably and quickly as Pixar’s reputation grew.  So, in 2006, Disney made John Lasseter, who was then the head of Pixar, the chief creative officer at Disney.  Lasseter, who had been directly responsible for numerous projects at Pixar, including “Toy Story” and “Cars”, has, in that time, worked to influence change in Disney animation productions more in line with Pixar.

Since that time, Disney has produced two more of the “Disney Princess” films: “The Princess and The Frog”, and “Tangled”, the latter of which being Disney’s version of the story of Rapunzel.  These films have both strongly reflected Lasseter’s influence, reinventing numerous defining characteristics of the “Disney Princess” paradigm, making for stronger characters and more complex stories.  However, none of these films has yet challenged the one staple of the “Disney Princess” stories, namely, the need for a prince.

This is where “Brave” succeeds.  Far from following the standard paradigm, “Brave” doesn’t have a prince.  Actually, it has three, and, far from being handsome or charming, they’re all goofy and awkward.  In the story, Merida, who is required by tradition (and her mother) to choose one of these ridiculous suitors to be wed, decides, instead, to break and challenge tradition, and refuse.  From this, the conflict between Merida and her mother divides them and leads to Merida inquiring after a witch she meets accidentally for a potion to ‘change’ her mother.  Her mother is changed . . . into a large black bear.  Now, Merida must learn to change her mother back before her mother is found, mistaken for the killer black bear Mor’du and killed.

The course of this story is, for a “Disney Princess” movie, unlike any other before it.  Merida’s mother isn’t evil, far from it; she just wants what she believes is best for her daughter.  The witch Merida finds isn’t evil, either. She’s not very good . . . that is to say, she’s rather mischievous, but she’s not pushing for some great evil scheme, dark purpose, or all consuming want, she’s just trying to make a living.  Merida herself is shown to be her father’s daughter, brash, loud, daring, tough, and a little foolish.  Overall, where numerous previous films have broken with convention here and there, but “Brave” breaks all conventions for a “Disney Princess” movie, which is, in turn, one of the themes of “Brave”: break convention, break tradition; a powerful lesson for anyone, especially Disney animation.  Also a powerful lesson for Disney marketing.

In all, even after writing this review, I’m still conflicted over my feelings about “Brave”.  It’s a good movie: heartfelt, imaginative, and fun.  I’m just not sure that it is up to Pixar’s usual standards.  For Disney Animation, it’s a victory.  For a Pixar movie, its mediocre.  For a “Disney Princess” movie, it’s a revelation.

"Army of Darkness"

Quick note: "Army of Darkness" is the sequel to "Evil Dead 2".


Although, it really stretches the definition of the word 'sequel'. At least, not in any sense that Hollywood is familiar with. In fact, it's the only sequel I know of that has been of a completely different genre then it's predecessors.


Where the previous two films were fairly straight forward supernatural horror movies, "Army of Darkness" is the 'Evil Dead' equivalent of "A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" with mixins of "Jason and the Argonauts", “Bride of Frankenstein”, "The Three Stooges", and a somewhat unsettling reference to "The Day the Earth Stood Still".


“Army of Darkness” is a fun movie . . . if you’re a thirteen year old boy.  It’s fun even if you’re not, but that seems to be it’s target audience.  How could it not be? To a thirteen year old boy, this movie has everything: swords and sorcery, an awesome battle against an army of the dead, demons and monsters, slapstick comedy, and a chainsaw in a pear tree! (Hell, it even has tits . . . Just for a second, but they're still there)


As a grown up (in a manor of speaking), “Army of Darkness” is still a lot of fun, and not only for the nostalgia (or the tits). That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of nostalgia for me. When I was a teenager, I thought Bruce Campbell’s character was awesome, and I would recite line after line: “Alright you primitive screw heads, listen up: This . . . is my BOOMSTICK!”, “Give me some sugar, baby”, “Klatu Verata Nnnn . . . Necktie, Nickle-”, “By God, let’s give’em what for!”, “Keep your sardine can on, bucket head!”, “Sure, I coulda been king . . .”.  To this day, I still recite my favorite lines along with the movie.  But, now that I’m older, I also notice things that I haven’t before, particularly details.
For me, there are three kinds of movies: movies that I only need to see once, movies that I like to watch when I’m in a particular mood, and movies I can watch over and over again, no matter what mood I’m in. The mark of this kind of movie is that I notice something different everytime I watch it.  “Army of Darkness” is definitely in the third category.


Even just watching it over the weekend, noticed little things.  Not just the fact that, in the pan across the front lines of the army of the dead, every other skeleton is a guy in a mask, and the rest are puppets, but other things.  Like the look of boredom and confusion on the faces of the villagers while Ash is giving the “Boomstick” speech (why is he giving a sales pitch to a crowd of 14th century peasants, and does he honestly think they know what a ‘sporting goods department’ is?).  Or the fact that, besides a book on chemistry and a book on Steam Plant Production and a couple of comic books, Ash has a 2 liter of Coke in his trunk.


There are little details like that that I’ve never noticed before.  There are also parallels to the other movies that I hadn’t noticed before, like the floating witch, or the force in the woods chasing Ash, or the use of mirrors.  


In all three movies, the first person to be revealed as possessed floats errilly in the air and speaks in a warped voice without moving their mouth.  In “Army of Darkness”, the witch even makes the same quick head reveal that Cheryl does in “The Evil Dead”.


In “Army of Darkness”, when Ash quests for the book, his horse is spooked by and he is chased through the woods by (presumably) the same force which chased and stalked the people in the previous two films.


In “The Evil Dead”, Ash reaches out to touch his reflection in a mirror, and his hand passes through like it was water.  In “Evil Dead 2”, Ash’s own reflection reaches out and begins to throttle him. In “Army of Darkness”, Ash’s reflections come to life once again, but after he has shattered a mirror, so the reflections are all small.  This may lead to one of the silliest sequences in the entire series, but it’s also arguably one of the most creative, and definitely one of the most fun (“London bridges falling down . . .”).


It seems to me that one of the places where “Army of Darkness” gets a lot of flack is the silliness of it.  However, I would argue that much of the creativity and originality of the film lay in the silliness.  I’ve already mentioned the mini-Ashes, but also the whole leadup to the “Good Ash, Bad Ash” scene, or the fact that he’s fighting himself at the end, or the skeleton’s skull popping open at the end, showing his brains.


Actually, I think Sam Raimi deserves a lot of credit for this film.  Unlike it’s predecessors, who, while containing numerous elaborate effects, had comparatively limited cast and setting, “Army of Darkness” is a big production.  It’s huge!  There’s a period setting, complete with costumes, large sets, and horses. The camera work is also more impressive, particularly the large scale scenes depicting large crowds or more complicated shots, like the one where the camera follows Ash up through the battle preparations to the top of a tower to look out over the enemy army.


The only major problem that I have with it is that, with all the opportunities for creativity, “Army of Darkness” is highly derivative.  While I know that I said that I felt that much of the creativity and originality lay in the film’s silliness, there are numerous opportunities to be much more creative with the use of elements from the previous films, scary or not, funny or not.  I understand that they may have had a limited budget, but “Army of Darkness” had a much larger budget than that of the previous two combine, and, I feel, anyway, that, as much fun as it is, it is the least creative and least original of the two.