Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Arriving to stores just in time for Christmas is the DVD for Family Guy's upcoming sequel to the original Star Wars spoof "moviesode" Blue Harvest, entitled Something, Something, Something Dark Side. The special this time will spoof The Empire Strikes Back, and the episode will have its television debut in early 2010 when the season starts back with a few new entries before the break. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, series creator Seth MacFarlane announced that they were already at work on spoofing Return of the Jedi, but confirms that he will quit, and not move into the prequel territory. Although, he offers up the Indiana Jones series, Star Trek or the Back to the Future trilogy as the possible next targets. The article also offers two rumored names for the third episode, The Great Muppet Caper or We Have a Bad Feeling About This.

Some bizarre news comes the way of a fellow Blogger account called StopAvatarMovie, which is protesting James Cameron's critically appraised Avatar, due out Friday, because the story is set in the future, but does not contain any primary gay, lesbian or transgender characters. Luckily, in a poll questioning how the author's readers would protest, 92% said they wouldn't. Anyhow, I don't really see how it is offensive that there is no outright gay love in the flick. I am sure, unless the entire thing is going to play out a lot differently than what I'm imagining, that most of the characters' sexual orientation will remain undisclosed, as it does not fit in the story. Also, gay people can't be entertained by a heterosexual relationship on-screen? The cat that writing this wouldn't be touched, and would be offended with others in the homosexual demographic, that enjoyed something like Charlie Chaplin's City Lights or even something like the year's best film thus far in my opinion, Inglourious Basterds due to the lack of explicitly stated homosexuality? Does this mean he expects us breeders to be unable to enjoy something like Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy or the highly praised Brokeback Mountain, due to the characters being different than us? The most bizarre argument of the blog is that Cameron should have casted someone like Kimber James for the role of Neytiri rather than Zoe Saldana. Because, James' other work such as Transsexual Babysitters 8 was definitely touching enough performances to land her in a film budgeted at $500 million. I hope, for the sake of the gay community, as well as cineaste's watching this thing, that it is a joke, although, the more you read it, the more you beleive it is legit.

Variety reports some sad news today, the passing of Walt Disney's nephew, Roy E. Disney. Disney was very influential after his iconic uncle's passing within The Walt Disney Company, mostly working with the financial elements and theme parks rather than racking up actual movie credits, although he did produce, and was heavily involved in getting the ball rolling for Fantasia 2000, finally realizing a dream of Walt's to continue his 1940 classic Fantasia as an ongoing project, as well as a writing credit for The Black Cauldron. He also produced one of my favorite short films of all time, Destino, a restored and completed short from Dominique Monfery, originally started as a collaboration between Walt and Salvador Dali.

Finally, here is a new trailer for Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland, which shows off more of the bizarre Burton landscape we are used to seeing in his films.

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Destino)

If you go to any cinema related message board on the Internet, usually if Walt Disney Pictures is brought up, it is in very negative tone focusing on the company's law suits, urban legends, arrogance and a growing consensus of some of the films as being overrated. Hardly anywhere does normal bloggers give Walt Disney and all of the very talented animators that followed in his footsteps and company the credit they deserve, being a collective group of true visionaries in the animation medium. It is easy to look at the strides Disney has taken in recent years, just 2009 has already featured the Disney-Pixar instant classic Up, and will see the return of 2D animated princess stories with The Princess and the Frog, as well as Disney's distribution of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki's latest Ponyo. Yet, if you look back to 1945, you can see just how influential of a filmmaker and artist that Disney himself, and his companions were. The very popular Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali came together for a collaboration with Disney, eventually writing a screenplay with Disney employee John Hench for a short film called Destino, until the financial troubles the company felt in a post-World War II world would eliminate the means to create the short. However, when gathering segments for Fantasia 2000, Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney would bring the project back to life, hiring director Dominique Monfery to use Dali and Hench's storyboards, Dali's wife, Gala Dali's, personal journals, as well as consulting with the then 92 year old Hench to create what the film would had originally looked like, and adding music from Mexican singer Armando Dominguez to fit in the music inspired art theme of the Fantasia sequel. Monfery would also use an eighteen second snippet from the test footage actually animated by Dali, just re-colored. It is the scene with the tortoises, around the 5:22 mark of the video.

The short, of course, wouldn't end up making the movie, but would be released theatrically alongside the comedy Calendar Girls in Britain and Sylvain Chomet's brilliant Italian animated feature The Triplets of Belleville everywhere else. It would also garner four critics awards and an Academy Award nomination for best Animated Short Film, losing out to the Australian Harvie Krumpet.

But before you get all bent out of shape due to an Oscar nomination, most of my favorite shorts doesn't get close to seeing the famous golden statuette, but what makes the film special is that two very different, yet very influential artists could come together and create such a beautiful film. If you're a fan of Dali's, you could watch some of these images unfold all day, one my favorite scenes being a throwback to the Dali-written, Luis Bunuel directed 1929 Un Chien Andalou (my favorite short film, which one day I will get around to posting on here), starting at about 4:02 minutes in. So, without further ado, 58 years in the making, a true, rare (this is more than likely pirated, so if YouTube deletes this soon, my apologies), classic, Destino.


P.S. I found the picture on a random wallpaper search on Google. Kind of a nice peice of fan art in itself.