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...

    So ... you all remember how I was really annoyed by The Power of the Dog ?      Despite being an early prediction for the big trophy, I found that attempt rather shallow and self-congratulatory. I am more than perfectly fine that the Best Picture award went to the much better CODA . I thought it was much more enjoyable as a piece of film, and unlike The Power of the Dog , it did showed honest interest in the community it was reporting to champion. In the case of CODA , that was, of course, the deaf community.      But it's actually not CODA I want to talk about in detail at this time. That movie's milestones exist along a timeline that extends ... further back than I can track today, but at least as far back as  March 30, 1987, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf actor to receive an Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God . Randa Haines’ 1986 film centers on the romance between a hearing man and a deaf woman a...