Gene Phillips's Blog, page 93

TOLKIEN'S "ON FAIRY STORIES": A DELVING, PT. 4

To any readers of this blog: in future I'm going to steer away from movie-reviews and concentrate on examining the concept of otherworldly fantasy in prose, which is what I want to publish, after all.

_______________


Continuing with Tolkien:

In the pages following his remarks on magic and enchantment, Tolkien, having already disagreed with the characterization of fairies themselves as darling little peewees, takes similar issue with how many people define "fairy stories."

He remarks, a little dis...

WRATH OF THE TITANS (2012), IMMORTALS (2011)

As is most often the case in Hollywood, the success of a given film—in this case 2010’s CLASH OF THE TITANS—begets sequels and derivatives capable of imitating only the simplest aspects of the thing imitated.
 
Louis Letterier’s CLASH had its own textual problems.  Nevertheless, though it was riffing on the 1981 Ray Harryhausen film, it put forth a reasonably compelling story concerning the nature of the ancient Greeks’ belief in their gods, and managed to explicate the complicated in...

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (2012)

Prior to viewing THE HOBBIT I was very skeptical about Peter Jackson's overarching game plan, to adapt the orginal Tolkien work into three movies-- all of which, one presumes, will come close to three hours in length, as the first one has.

I enjoyed THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but that was after all a very different animal: a true literary epic that required such treatment.  I was less than enchanted with Jackson's 2005 take on KING KONG, which was crass and self-indulgent in its reinterpretat...

CLASH OF THE TITANS (2010)

I haven’t re-viewed animator Ray Harryhausen’s final theatrical film, CLASH OF THE TITANS, in many years.  At this time it remains my least favorite of Harryhausen’s otherworldly fantasy-films.  Harryhausen’s other venture into Greek myth, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, possessed a strong theme, that of man’s growing independence from the gods who created him.  But the 1981 CLASH seemed little more than a series of episodic fantasy-sequences built loosely around the archaic myth of t...

LEGEND (1985)

I haven't seen the original U.S. version of LEGEND since its original release, so I can't compare it with my recent screening of Ridley Scott's director's cut. My sole comment is that I thoroughly enjoyed the Jerry Goldsmith score, so I imagine that the so-called "techno-pop" score that took its place in the States would come in second-best.

LEGEND comes roughly halfway between two other big-budget 1980s attempts to do cinematic versions of quasi-Tolkien "high fantasy:" 1983's KRULL and 1...

WILLOW (1988)

Scripted from a George Lucas story and given a John Williams-sound-alike score by James Horner, WILLOW proves that Lucas and director Ron Howard should have stuck with taking inspiration from serials. Even calling WILLOW “Tolkien-lite” might insinuate that it possesses even a fraction of the complexity of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
WILLOW is best regarded as a lively sword-and-sorcery opus with a higher budget than most such efforts. As with most S&S, the film builds its fantasy-scape out of...

THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982)

Though famed animation director Don Bluth got his start working on classic Disney cartoon-features, most of his independent works seemed to attempt to outdo Disney in the sentimentality department.  Bluth was not alone in this reaction to the Disney corpus.  In the book SEVEN MINTES author Norman Klein asserts that during Disney’s heyday in the 1940s many animated shorts of the period emulated what their creators assumed to be the appeal of Disney cartoons: lots of ootsy-cutesy crit...

REVIEW: THE RIDDLE-MASTER OF HED

I read Patricia McKillip’s 1976 “Hed” trilogy over twenty years ago, but my memory was basically favorable, though I didn’t recall esteeming the trilogy as highly as her 1974 stand-alone novel “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.”  So I gave the first novel in the trilogy a re-read. 
I give McKillip points for trying to find a novel approach to the “reluctant hero,” which, within the genre of modern fantasy, is practically defined by Tolkien’s Frodo.  Like Frodo McKillip’s hero Morgon...

SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959)

It could be argued that SLEEPING BEAUTY is the first “Disney prince” film, since so much of the action revolves around the male lead. Certainly my best childhood memories of the film—possibly in an early re-release, as I would’ve been age four for the first release—are of the bravura closing act of the film, with particular emphasis on Prince Philip’s escape from the castle of Maleficent. As a child I was particularly fascinated by the magical transformations in the escape-scene, wherein the...

CINDERELLA (1950)

CINDERELLA’s never been one of my favorites. It may be the United States’best feature-length cinematic adaptation of the French folktale, but for me it feels too much like a repeat of tropes made familiar from Disney’s 1938 SNOW WHITE.
I can see the reasons why the Disney scripters chose to ring in a seemingly endless number of adorable little animals, predominantly mice. The storyline isolates Cinderella from anyone but her cruel stepmother and nasty stepsisters, which would have been a...