Films and Feelings

   Way back in 2016 , Moana's quest to return The Heart of Te Fiti ran perfectly parallel to both Moana's own sense of unrest and her community's need to return to their voyaging roots, motivations that were all intrinsic--and also very well-established in that first act. The opposing forces were also clear--not just in the presence of lava monsters or killer coconuts, but in the attitudes she faced from her overprotective father and her swaggering demigod sidekick. Her ultimate discovery, that the island she was trying to restore and the monster she had to thwart were one and the same, was likewise an organic extension of her inherent compassion and discernment.       That first film understood the basic chemistry of the adventure narrative, and how it sang when thoughtfully applied to the Disney aesthetic, so they don't really have an excuse for bungling the mixture this time around.       For a film determined to fit in as many charac...

       Historically, the process of musical-film adaptation has been scored on retention --how much of the story did the adaptation gods permit to be carried over into the new medium? Which singing lines had to be tethered to spoken dialogue? Which character got landed with stunt casting? Which scenes weren't actually as bad as you feared they'd be?      Well, Jon M. Chu's adaptation of the Broadway zeitgeist, Wicked , could possibly be the first to evaluated on what the story gained in transition.       The story imagines the history of Elphaba, a green-skinned girl living in Oz who will one day become the famous Wicked Witch of the West. Long before Dorothy dropped in, she was a student at Shiz University, where her story would cross with many who come to shape her life--most significantly, Galinda, the future Good Witch of the North. Before their infamous rivalry, they both wanted the same thing, to gain favor with the Wonderful...

Loyal readers may remember last month when I talked about Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue and how I casually alluded to the larger framework of disability within film and promised to talk about it one day. Well, this isn’t like with my Disney Princess series where I teased the project for years before finally getting to it. I’m making good on that promise here today. You’re welcome.  Now, when I say “disability within film,” that’s a really large slice of the pie. The discussion of disability in Hollywood is a vast and complex field of study. There’s obviously overlap across the broader discussion, but people of different disabilities experience ableism differently, similar to how members of different ethnic identities experience racism differently, and it’s a machine that has to be dismantled on multiple fronts.  But with this piece, I’m not so interested in airing all the ways the industry has let down members of these communities. Today, I’d ...