It’s not enough to just make a horror movie. Most times horror movies have to have mood, and tone, and aesthetic, and pacing. Some of the greatest horror movies have a distinctive style all their own and are helped by their cinematographer. Director Jed Hart’s “Daddy’s Girl” is a very good and very creepy short film, and his short is improved ten fold by the amazing cinematography by Craig Dean Devine. Continue reading
After doing research online I learned that these clumsy sequels to “An American Tail” are actually intended to be in-betweenquels. “Fievel Goes West” is, as many fans have debated, the final film in the chronological timeline. That doesn’t make much sense since the character Tony is nowhere to be found in “Fievel Goes West,” and the Mousekewitz’s only have two children, rather than two and a half. In either case, it’s probably best not to think about it, and just accept these movies however you want to.
The globe trotting Mousekewitz family find themselves now living in Manhattan again, their new home after New York, and the West apparently didn’t quite work out for them. This new movie is set directly after the short lived animated series on television, so this is kind of a new continuity rather than the one after “Fievel Goes West.” I assume to understand why the Mousekewitz’s are back in New York, you’d have to have seen the series, but the least they could have done was inject a few lines to help the audience catch up.
“Fievel Goes West” is a childhood favorite and a fitting end to the legacy of Jimmy Stewart. Not only does Stewart play an old dog who was once an old West hero, but Stewart was a man very fond of family friendly entertainment. “Fievel Goes West” is a film just as good as the original where the Mousekewitz family find themselves being exploited by a capitalist cat who wants to enslave the mouse community before eating them. Masquerading as a Southern mouse promising a new start in the old west town of Green River, the Mousekewitzes make another trek in to a new frontier after the crowded slums of New York didn’t quite work out for them.
Like a lot of Don Bluth’s films, “An American Tail” feels like a very personal animated film that tells a universal story about the immigration experience. It’s sad that “An American Tail” has gone somewhat pushed to the corner of the animated world over the years, since it’s such a touching movie and brilliant exploration of family and bonds. Fievel is one of the most likable and human protagonists of all time. He’s not heroic or overly courageous. He’s just a young mouse looking to make his way in the world and explore the vast open land that lies before him.
I assume somewhere down the line we had to fill in the holes and explore how the battle between heaven and hell ensued. I’m just not sure we had to spend the majority of the sequel doing so. “Allelulia!” is mostly a misfire of a sequel to the raucous and wonderful “The Devil’s Carnival” that fills in the questions from the first film. In the duration of the follow-up, we get to discover how the war began, how the battle became personal for hell’s minions and heaven’s warriors, and there’s even the origin of one of the Devil’s Carnival’s most infamous minions who we see a great deal of in the original film.
Though director Lamont Johnson’s “You’ll Like My Mother” is generally well received, I found it to be a mostly flat thriller with a lot of the attempted suspense lost in translation. “You’ll Like My Mother” is a mix of “Misery” and “Flowers in the Attic,” in where a young woman tries to reconcile with her dead husband’s family and gets much more than she bargained for. The late Patty Duke plays Fran, a very pregnant young woman who ventures in to Minnesota in the dead of winter to visit her husband’s family and perhaps make peace with them.