How To Train Your Dragon lands soon!

Once upon a time, a clumsy young Viking caught a dragon….

2010’s best movie hits store shelves in a couple of weeks. I’m buying the Blu-Ray/DVD pack, and I don’t even own a Blu-ray player, yet.

I can’t say enough good things about this movie. It’s a grand-slam home run—a work of wonder that succeeds on all levels and can be enjoyed by all ages. It plunges you into an astonishing world you’ve never seen before, pulls the heartstrings, barrel-rolls like a great rollercoaster and brings to life a cast of amazing, likable, thoroughly believable characters. You don’t want it to end. It’s funny, exhilarating, heartbreaking and very, very satisfying.

Last March, it flew in under the radar and took critics and audiences by surprise. It opened to rave reviews and merely “okay” first-weekend business. But it bowled over everyone who saw it, generated incredible word of mouth, stayed in the top 3 for weeks, and eventually became one of the year’s top moneymakers and Dreamworks’ most successful film.


It's become my all-time favorite movie, for many reasons:

It's an incredible animated film…
It's one of the best fantasy films ever made…
It's got a smart screenplay, sharp direction, great acting, breathtaking design and an amazing music score…

And...for crying out loud, it's got dragons and Vikings! Two great subjects together like peanut butter and chocolate!


I never thought about it like that before, but, yes: This is the movie equivalent of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Perfection.


I can’t wait to revisit the world of Hiccup, Toothless, Astrid, Stoic the Vast, Gobber and the other inhabitants of The Isle of Berk. And I envy folks who get to discover it for the first time. Watch this one together with your kids. And fasten your seatbelts.

Alice in Wonderland

Few would deny that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland fails on a lot of levels: It lacks emotion, it’s episodic, the story has no goal…

And yet…

It’s my favorite Disney film. It haunted my dreams way back in my sixties childhood when Disney animation was a rare treat (I think small children can relate to Alice’s fear of being lost in Tulgey Wood, and that—if you experience this film at a young age—the movie retains a deep-rooted sense of peril that’s lost on those who initially view it as an adult.) Time has been kind to this movie: Watching it today, all the narrative problems still exist, but the film amazes, dazzles and completely succeeds at conjuring a cohesive, unforgettable world unlike anything else in the history of cinema.

Visually, it’s a masterpiece that looks fresher and more daring with each passing decade. It playfully weaves nearly two dozen songs—many of them mere fragments—into its colorful soundtrack. It’s not sappy or preachy. It actually sticks fairly close to the book’s storyline. It substitutes visual puns for Lewis Carroll’s wordplay, and mostly succeeds. And, after all the criticism fired at the movie when it debuted in the fifties, no other studio has created a more successful adaptation. I rather liked the TV movie a few years back featuring Martin Short, Christopher Lloyd, Gene Wilder and Peter Ustinov (it’s on iTunes), but it had its own share of pacing problems and took just as many liberties with the book. We’ll see how Tim Burton fares next year—I’m looking forward to it.

Let’s look at the negatives of Disney’s version: The ever-annoyed Alice often seems bratty and arrogant, and she learns nothing from the adventure. The journey has no compelling goal. The fragmented plot is episodic to a ridiculous extreme: Whole sequences can be removed without making any noticeable difference. The music, while generally terrific, frequently becomes brash and intrusive, particularly when it’s used to emphasize gags.

So, what does the movie offer to make it worthwhile? Sheer, incredible visual wonderment. Fantastic backgrounds and amazing use of light and color from the minds of Mary Blair and Claude Coats. Memorable character designs. Terrific animation.

Plus, it contains The Awesome Sequence: One long, perfect chain of scenes—The Cheshire Cat, The Tea Party and Tulgey Wood—that I’d rate as one of the most brilliant twenty minutes of film in Disney’s history: Genius designs, great dialogue and pacing, big laughs, craziest moments and—for once—Alice displays some genuine concern about being lost in Weirdsville. During the song Very Good Advice, I love the fact that the forest animals don’t help Alice; They simply sob themselves into non-existence. Unexpected and unique. If only the whole film clicked on the level of these scenes…

The Cheshire Cat, of course, is this movie’s big gift to pop culture. Creepy, funny, mysterious and odd, he turns out to be a hilarious S.O.B. who sets Alice up for disaster for his own amusement—thus joining Wendy-hating Tinkerbell as a beloved Disney character who tries to arrange the heroine’s execution!

And, on a completely different note, this movie inspired one of the best dark rides in any Disney park. But that’s another post.

So here’s a toast to Alice in Wonderland, the problem movie that continues to delight. Flaws and all, it deserves to be called a classic.