What principally connects Aladdin’s hero and heroine is their large and very white teeth. (Michael McDowell’s character in the original Beetlejuice script possessed “ vaguely Middle-Eastern features” - “spirit”-like - so we’ve come full circle.) He didn’t make me think of a summer-stock Robin Williams but a summer-stock Beetlejuice - with pecs. (Smith doesn’t need to be physically inventive, which is good because he’s not.) He can pass for a singer. Early on, he attempts Robin Williams–like flights of fancy, but then, as if remembering he’s not Robin Williams, he’ll launch into a Fresh Prince impression - and then swing back to camp while the animators make him big or small or any size at all and juggle multiple props and costumes for him. Many raspberries were blown at the trailer that introduced Will Smith’s blue genie, but Smith fits Ritchie’s conception fine. Come to think of it, that was my favorite thing in the movie. You have to wait until the credit sequence to see entire, non-CG bodies in fluid motion. My only real peeve is that he uses too many cuts in the dancing. Ritchie evidently dreams not of magic carpets but of roller coasters, and he seems to have approached this as a Young Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Lamp. The movie has no down time, no moments for dreaming that would risk making audiences impatient. There’s a driving, lewd Broadway energy to Ritchie’s work I’d never noticed before that syncs up with this second-rate material and hurls it into the heavens - or the lower circles of hell, depending on your perspective. With Guy Ritchie at the helm, it hits them hard. The movie engineers our responses, too, and if I were a Disney stockholder, I’d be pleased at how well it hits its marks. Aladdin might as well have put a VR headset on her. It feels as if yet another man is trying to engineer her responses. This Aladdin’s sole innovation is a feminist Jasmine who refuses to be controlled, but the song is so saccharine and the vistas are so synthetic that it doesn’t feel as if she’s being liberated. There’s an unintentionally creepy undercurrent to “A Whole New World,” in which the thief Aladdin (Mena Massoud) takes Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) on a magic carpet ride around the city of Aqaba/Agrabah - which her father, the sultan, has never permitted her to see. In the old days, when stars - or their stunt doubles - danced along parapets and leaped over precipices, you’d admire their agility here, you admire the seamless interweaving of real and fake. It’s set inside a matrix where the real and digital worlds are indistinguishable, and where actors (apart from the one marquee name, Will Smith) seem chosen for their resemblance to animated characters. A movie like the new Aladdin isn’t shot - it’s generated. When executives decided to wring even more revenue from their animated musicals by transforming them into live-action features (after stopovers on Broadway), it was with the knowledge that nothing need be left to chance, ever. Cloud MN | St.All hail the Disney Company, world-dominating kingdom of kitsch. Rio Grande St #2072, Salt Lake City, UT 84101 | Artsopolis Network Members: Akron OH | Austin TX | Bainbridge Island WA | Birmingham AL | Boston MA | Cape Cod MA | Charlotte NC | Cincinnati OH | Cleveland OH | Colorado Springs CO | Columbia SC | DuPage County IL | Durham NC | Flagstaff AZ | Flint MI | Fort Lauderdale FL | Indianapolis IN | Kalamazoo MI | Kansas City MO | KeepMovingOKC | Macon GA | Main Line Area PA | Marin County CA | Marquette County MI | Mendocino County CA | Middlesex County NJ | Milwaukee WI | Montgomery County MD | Nantucket, MA | Napa Valley CA | Nashville TN | Niagara County NY | Oklahoma City OK | Orange County CA | Orlando FL | Ottawa IL | Palm Desert CA | Pittsburgh PA | Providence RI | Richardson TX | Roswell GA | Sacramento CA | San Antonio TX | San Diego CA | Sarasota FL | St. © Copyright 2023 - Utah Cultural Alliance.
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