The evening star, is shining bright...

A couple of concept art images, courtesy of Filmofilia.

All right, I got a little sidetracked with everything going on, but here it is, my review of Disney's Princess and the Frog.

As silly as I felt, being a 20 something going to the theater to see a Disney movie, I have to say that I really enjoyed watching it. While the movie is not quite perfect, it definitely succeeded in taking me back to the days where I looked forward to The Lion King and Aladdin.

Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, who have worked on many other Disney movies before, the story is basically a fairy tale about a young girl named Tiana (Akina Noni Rose) living in 1920s New Orleans, who is working hard, maybe a bit too hard, to achieve her dreams of owning her own restaurant. While her mother (Oprah Winfrey) and her friends, especially spoiled but friendly southern belle Charlotte (Jennifer Cody), are proud of her, they feel that she is missing out on her youth for the most part.

At the same tame, a playboy prince from the country of "Maldonia" named Naveen (Bruno Campos) has been cut off by his parents due to his overly lavish lifestyle, and is in search for a rich young girl to be his ticket to the easy way out. Unfortunately, a run in with a crazed voodoo man known as Dr. Facilier (Keith David) has him transformed into a frog. When Prince Naveen finds Tiana in a princess-like dress at a masquerade party, he assumes the curse inflcted on him can be lifted by following the fairy tale hinted at in the title.

Unfortunately for him and Tiana, it doesn't quite go as expected, and what follows is a long trip through the magical bayou, along with a firefly named Ray (Jim Cummings) and a jazz-loving alligator named Louis (Michael Leon-Wooley), to meet voodoo maven Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), who may be able to help them with their predicament.

I'm gonna dive right in to the 2D animation, because I know that's what everyone wants to know about. The stills that I saw on the internet looked great enough, but they looked even better in motion than I initially expected. Some of the characters looked a little out of proportion in the earlier designs, but it's hard to notice in the movie, because one can't help but marvel at the backgrounds and incredible attention to detail. It's clear that this movie was Disney's way of saying that 2D definitely isn't dead, even if it is not as common in animated movies as it was a decade and a half ago.

The story and themes were very strong throughout the movie, and I thought they were quite refreshing for a story like this. One thing I had to work a little to get around was the ending, when despite all of Tiana's hard work it was ultimately her new husband and her friends that get the restaurant she was dreaming of. The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to realize how true to life it was. Hard work can get you pretty far, but connections, and a little help from your friends don't hurt either. It was cool, however, to see a Disney princess carry such good values. Personally I think Tiana is right up there with Mulan and Belle as one of the more memorable princesses in the Disney line.

Speaking of the characters in the movie, most of them were very interesting, supported by great performances all around and some even better songs that I wish were a bit longer. I can tell that some things, such as Facilier's development and Naveen and Tiana's romance, were a little rushed, priobably to allow for a shorter runtime. Nevertheless, they were still pretty good, especially any moment involving Tiana, Charlotte or Dr Facilier. Noni Rose has a beautiful singing voice and can use it well, and David's shady voice makes his supernatural con man sound even more intimidating.

To give you a final idea of how good this movie is, I'm going to try and compare it to other Disney movies of its caliber. I would say it's on par with Aladdin and the Little Mermaid, better than Hercules, but not as good as the Lion King or the Emperor's New Groove. That's a pretty good place to be.

Hey, uh, about that post I was gonna make...

...I think I'll be making it either Sunday or Monday, with the latter being the most likely. I need some time to think it through.

Sorry about that! In the meantime, enjoy some wolf-related shenanigans courtesy of College Humor.

I wonder if New Moon is out of the top ten at the box office yet...

RIP Campus Buzz on WUML 91.5: 2007 to 2009

Several semesters of student news, sports, weather and talk with a twist have come to a close, at least for now.

I'm talking about the news show on UMass Lowell's very own WUML 91.5 FM, known as Campus Buzz. The semester has come to an end, and my friend and fellow DJ Jess has let me know that she probably won't have time for the show next semester. Since I'm not a student anymore, I can't really squat for it either.

Nevertheless, it was a good experience for me and everyone involved, and a lot of fun to work on. Who knows, maybe it will come back someday too.

For now though, I'm kind of in the mood to post this feature article about the Buzz that I wrote for the Connector in the spring of 2009, but never had the time to publish due to all the work I had to do to graduate. I guess it shows everybody that I can write about more than just movies.

So, here you go guys, enjoy:

...

STUDENT NEWS AND TALK WITH A TWIST

WUML's Campus Buzz is still going after two years, but it's much smaller than when it started out. What is the program's future?

by Matt LoGrasso

The show starts in about sixty seconds.

In the studio, director Jessica Berry is managing the board, monitoring the transmitter, cueing up music on Spinitron, and getting ready to read her lines over the air. Brian Gullekson, Tom Robinson and I are taking out various sheets of paper, mine with news typed on it fresh off the AP wire. We crack a few jokes and talk about what we did over the weekend. Then, the station ID and the name of the show plays over the air, and Berry starts reading her opening lines after it plays out.

So begins yet another Monday at the WUML Radio Station, just underneath Sheehy Hall in the former fallout shelter. It is here that the Campus Buzz show, the weekly news, talk, and music show, is broadcast every Monday during the semester from 4 to 6 p.m.

Campus Buzz has been in operation for about three years now, having been started off by the former news director Kate Watt. Berry started off as a WUML intern on the show a year and a half ago, hoping to gain experience in the field of communications.

“I found out about the show a little over a year ago, through an advertisement on the UML Today newsletter, and I became interested,” she said. “I knew that the show would need a
new director soon, and Kate had built it up so much. I did not really want the show to die, so I took up the job.”

She now runs the show, with support from Mike Hughes, a former sports anchor for Campus Buzz, and help from student meteorologist Tom Robinson, the current sports anchor Brian Gullekson, and myself, news anchor Matt LoGrasso.

When Watt graduated last year, times were tough for the first semester without her. The staff for the show used to be much bigger, including a couple more student meteorologists, another sports anchor in addition to Gullekson, and another director dealing with public relations. Most of those people failed to show up to work on the show during the new semester, due to other obligations and time constraints. As a result of this, the show struggled to find content, more specifically interviews. It was at this point that Berry, the new director of the show, decided to take the show towards a more laid-back direction.

As a result, the show has become a little more oriented towards a format that encompasses news, talk, and music. In addition to news, weather, sports, and campus events, there are segments when the staff holds discussions about subjects that are relevant to students.

Hughes has been helping out since Berry took over the show, searching the shelves for CDs to play during the breaks and at one point even reading the sports news on the show. For him, it has been nothing short of an enjoyable experience.

“It’s great. I get to hang out with people who love what they’re doing, and I get to voice my opinion, for better or worse,” he said. “For the most part though, I get to take a step in to what I want to do for a career, you know, a little taste of working at a radio station.”

Gullekson, the current sports anchor, has been with the show since the beginning. He also has other responsibilities to tend to, such as his band Short Fuse Burning, and his duty as the folk music director at WUML. Despite his busy schedule, the show manages to be no trouble for him at all.

“It’s a great way to wind down, after a day’s worth of classes,” he said. “I like being on top of campus news & events, both for my own personal good and by the ability to spread it
through word of mouth. I also like to be able to tell people where they can find campus news, and I’m happy to be a part of that service.”

Although Berry is proud of the show’s success, she admits that it isn’t exactly perfect. She thinks the show could definitely use a wider audience, and perhaps some more interviews.

“I figure that maybe the show could use some more segments and a little more structure to it, but what we need more than anything is some more interviews,” she said.

...

I should have another post later tonight or tomorrow, so stick around.

The Squeakuel? Really?

So, it's starting to get closer to Oscar bait season again, and as that time gets closer, some interesting news pops up about this year's nominees for Best Animated Picture, courtesy of Variety! and SlashFilm.com's writer Russ Fischer:

Variety has the list of submitted films, which goes as follows:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
Astro Boy
Battle for Terra
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Coraline
Disney’s A Christmas Carol
The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Mary and Max
The Missing Lynx
Monsters vs. Aliens
9
Planet 51
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure
A Town Called Panic
Up

You can read more about it right here at SlashFilm.

Anyone who's seen my previous rant about the Oscars has a pretty good idea of how I feel about this, but despite how political all of this feels I got a few thoughts about it.

I hope that if anything comes out of this, we get a release of The Secret Of Kells here in the states, because it looks really good. It might end up getting the Persepolis treatment in the eyes of the Academy though, which doesn't really fare well for it unfortunately.

Also, I have no idea what Tinkerbell or the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie are even doing there. Luckily, it doesn't seem like that will make much of a difference anyway.

Most people would think Up! is most likely to take this one, but I don't know, there seems to be a lot of decent competition listed here as well. I guess we'll have to see what comes up.

David Fincher does it for teh lulz

Just popping in to share an awesome, funny nugget of info about the new Blu-Ray of Fight Club from CHUD writer Alex Riviello:

In possibly the best home video prank since the Elite Night of the
Living Dead disc started up with a scratched-up print and out of sync music
before revealing the beautiful new restoration, the new Fight Club
Blu-Ray doesn't even start up with the movie at all. Pop the disc in your
blu-ray player and this is the menu that will pop up-


Terrifying, no? Especially for the guys who absolutely don't get the film
and somehow see it as machismo fantasy- it's going to ruin their day. Of course,
after a few seconds the menu disappears and the real one pops up. Kudos to David
Fincher for messing with his fans like that. Drew Barrymore apparently gave the
ok to her good pal Edward Norton for the joke, and Fox implored reviewers not to
reveal it before release this Tuesday.

I can't really think of a better prank for someone to pull. I think a know a few guys who would throw the Blu-Ray player out the window when they saw that. Nice one, Fincher.

Double Review: This Is It/Christmas Carol

OK, first let me just say Happy Belated Halloween! There wasn't much going on that evening with friends, but I did get to take my little cousins trick or treating, and I got to carve this sucker right here:

Those smaller pumpkins sure are hungry.

I thank Tom Nardone of Extreme Pumpkins.com for this idea. I bought the second book of his, and wow, those ideas are pretty elaborate. I might save that Godzilla pumpkin for next year. Whatever you guys did, I hope it was fun!

Unfortunately, Halloween's long over now, but at least it's almost time to step into the holiday season coming up. I'll be talking about Disney's latest Christmas box office offering soon, but first I want to talk about Kenny Ortega's MJ documentary This Is It, which as you all know was only out for two weeks.

To be honest, there's not much that I have to say about this movie. As a documentary, there really isn't a whole lot of behind the scenes stuff going on, or a lot of interview time. A lot of time seems to be spent on showing off the performances and musical numbers that would have made it into the concert. I gotta say I understand it though. I mean, there's not much about MJ's life that the public doesn't already know about.

Speaking of MJ, you could barely tell there was anything wrong with the guy. If anything, he looked better than he did throughout this entire decade so far, and his dancing was still pretty good. He seemed to leave a lot of it up to the backup dancers, but nevertheless, he still seemed to have a ton of energy. Even though I probably wouldn't have been able to afford tickets for it, the show certainly looked like it was going to be amazing. There was a lot of flashiness and excess that some might have deemed unnecessary, but for a guy that had as big a public persona as Jackson, you almost expect that kind of thing.

To sum it up, I would have liked to hear a few more thoughts from the other performers involved, but I did like the musical numbers. "The Way You Make Me Feel" looked especially cool.

Now to move on to Robert Zemeckis, Jim Carrey, and Disney's early gift to us, A Christmas Carol.

Again, there's not a whole lot to say. I'm not gonna lie, I found the film to be pretty unremarkable.

I couldn't really see Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, at least not the way I saw Patrick Stewart or Alastair Sim in the role. Throughout the film, I still wasn't able to see him in it. He had the mannerisms down, to be sure, but the voice acting still sounded very much like Jim Carrey pretending to be an old Englishman. In other words, he was over acting yet again. What makes that worse is that none of the other voice actors in the film really stand out. I figured at least Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit would be somewhat memorable, but it just seemed like such a standard, by-the-numbers performance, and the same can be said for all the other roles in the film as well.

The CGI also kind of bugged me. The textures weren't Pixar-level good, but I guess they were good enough, and I do like how they help to enhance the creepiness of the ghosts. Some parts though, especially the part with the Ghost of Christmas Past, just look like a video game cutscene. All the pointless pop scares and stuff also made it seem very gimmicky too, which doesn't help the reputation of 3D movies much, although maybe that's just a side effect of seeing it in IMAX. At least the uncanny valley isn't quite a huge factor in this film like it was in The Polar Express.

As an adaptation, this film is okay. It includes a lot of passages from the book that a lot of the other adaptations of this story don't but it didn't really do anything new with the story aside from all the gimmicky 3D stuff, which was kind of a letdown. Granted, the trailers for this film didn't give us much anyway, but the 3D aspect could have been utilized to give us so much more.

I wish they had not focused so much on making this a wacky family film, but I guess everyone saw that coming a mile away anyway, so I'm not sure anyone else will mind.

On one last note, I want to apologize for not getting to see Where The Wild Things Are or A Serious Man. I heard good things about both, but I just didn't have the time, and with me getting a job in retail and Black Friday on the horizon, it's probably going to be even more difficult to find time to get to the theater.

I am, however, curious about Roland Emmerich's 2012. I anticipate a trainwreck, but maybe that's why I want to see it so much. Maybe this video from Garrison Dean and io9.com will enlighten me:

Well, bye for now!

You must be this tall to ride the BRAAAAAAINS

From left to right: Columbus, Wichita, Little Rock, and Tallahassee. All images courtesy of Ain't It Cool News and Sony/Columbia Pictures.

Some would argue that the appeal of zombies at the movies is dying down these days (no pun intended).

Since about 2002, there has been a bit of a zombie craze that took a hold of Hollywood for a while, which was mostly sparked by movies such as the brilliantly funny Shaun of the Dead and the well directed 28 Days Later. Since then, zombie movies have been flooding the box office with gory, gruesome spectacles for the past few years. Unfortunately, most of these films aren’t exactly held to the same standard as Shaun or 28 Days Later. George Romero started making movies again, but they turned out to be very lackluster compared to the original Dead movies. Everything else, including terrible Resident Evil sequels and even a movie about zombie nazis, has been largely forgettable.

While Zombieland has some flaws here and there, it is by no means as forgettable as any of those other newer zombie films. What started out as screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhet Reese’s idea for a TV series eventually transmogrified into, with the help of director Ruben Fleischer, a somewhat disturbing but fun night at the movies.

The story concerns, and is narrated by, a young, geeky, pantophobic shut in we only know as Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg). He is able to survive the zombocalypse thanks to a personal list of rules he cooked up as he gained more experience dealing with the undead through his travels across the country. His odds of staying alive increase, and to an extent decrease a little bit when he meets a pop-culture junkie and gun-toting good ol’ boy named Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) on a wrecked stretch of highway. The two join together in a temporary partnership. Columbus interested in finding his parents in Columbus, Ohio, and Tallahassee is searching for a delicious, spongy golden Twinkie to snack on, which is arguably his way of dealing with the loss of a very special someone in his life. Things get kind of complicated when the pair run into a couple of teenage grifters, the sweet but strong Wichita (Emma Stone) and her little sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). As the film shows us their adventures slaying zombies and just generally doing whatever they want, Jesse learns that it takes more than a set of rules to stay sane and happy in Zombieland, and all the characters slowly learn that living is just as important as surviving.

In this scene, Columbus uses his speed and smarts in an attempt to not become dinner for a couple of hungry zombies.

It is made clear really early on that this is a comedy first and a zombie film second, but these zombies are genuinely shocking and scary. They’re the fast types made popular by the 2004 Dawn remake and 28 Days Later, and what they lack in built-up suspense they make up for in gore and the element of surprise. The latter also helps a lot with the comedy too, as evidenced by most of the opening scenes showing numerous encounters with them.

Speaking of that, there are some great shots in this film. The poetic brutality of the opening title sequence almost rivals Watchmen’s in how great it is to see it roll out. It also helps set the mood for the movie, which seems to get more light-hearted as the film goes on. The way the rules are used visually throughout the movie is a nice, funny little touch, and I wish we saw a little more come out of the concept for “Zombie Kill of the Week.”

The film had a very huge “road trip” vibe to it, and that played in to getting to know the characters. Tallahassee, Columbus, Little Rock and Wichita are all flawed individuals, but judging from what is seen of their personalities they all seem to fit together well as a group that seems like fun to hang out with. The way that they spoke to and interacted with each other actually seemed very believable, even with how over the top the movie is. I’ll admit that the romance between Wichita and Columbus seemed a little extraneous, but it sort of added a little extra emotional punch to the end. Of course, the funniest scenes usually involve Tallahassee and Columbus and their clashing personalities.

One wants love, the other wants a Twinkie. Whether or not they get what they want, they kick ass in any scene they're both in.

While I realize that some of Tallahassee’s better lines come from a few other movies, in a way that kind of makes them funnier. Some of the jokes in this film are a bit oriented toward people who have a light knowledge of movies. This especially comes into play when they run into the huge cameo once they get to Beverly Hills (if you don’t want it spoiled for you, I would suggest not reading my last post concerning this movie). There isn’t much I can say about it without spoiling it, but I will say this: as somebody who grew up with and still loves Ghostbusters, that cameo was definitely a crown jewel among the funnier scenes in the movie. It helps that it was written very well into the script too.

As entertaining as this movie is, though, I felt kind of put off a little by the quick pacing. As Eisenberg narrates the events of the film, it almost feels like he is rushing things along. He tends to gloss over a lot of details when he talks about Tallahassee’s former life before the zombie apocalypse, and he doesn’t say too much about Wichita or Little Rock either. These seemed like really great and fun characters, and even if it increased the film’s runtime it would have been nice to get to know them a little better. Apparently, according to the internet movie database, there are also a sizable chunk of continuity errors too, making the overall production of the film seem a little less streamlined than I originally pictured.

Despite that, this film definitely works as a horror and comedy film. The splatters of blood and guts and consistent laugh-out-loud moments fit together like peanut butter and chocolate, all thanks to a well written script and great performances from the cast all around. If it ends up having a sequel, then I can’t wait to see it, because the movie definitely left me wanting some more of these characters.

On a side note, this movie came out at the perfect time too. The mixture of zombie gore and comedy this movie provides is great for getting into the mood for Halloween. Hell, I was munching on a huge Snickers bar as I typed this review.