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Enchanted (2007)
It's always a treat to revisit 'Enchanted'. It works equally brilliantly as a heart warming romcom, a hilarious fish-out-of-water caper, a clever satire of Disney tropes and a joyful celebration of Disney magic. It wouldn't work at all if it wasn't for Amy Adams absolutely nailing the movement, mannerisms, speech patterns and a complete lack of cynicism, associated with 50/60s hand drawn Disney animations. She never looks for a second like she is doing it tongue-in-cheek, she just is a "Disney Princess" made flesh. The key to any truly great musical parody (Spinal Tap, The Rutles etc) is having songs as good, or better, than as those you are homaging. So they got in Alan Menken, who did most of those classic 90s scores. "Happy Working Song", "True Love's Kiss" and "That's How You Know" are as good as anything from actual Disney musicals. Some of the intercutting between the secondary plot threads does look a little jumbled in an effort to keep focus on Giselle and Robert's evolving romance but that's a nitpick.
Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story (2022)
This 3-hour, 2-part Netflix documentary cleverly and wisely spends most of it's first part building up and reminding the viewer of just what a ginormous celebrity Jimmy Saville was in Britain. I was just too young to have remembered that, I was very much aware of him but his star was on the wane when I was watching TV as a youngster. Plus if you're younger than me, or not British, you'll need that context to know who he was at all. The doc makers have done a sterling job trawling the TV archives for every bit of footage of him saying weird things and embarrassingly for those featured, the many, many times he was courted by fellow celebrities. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, at least three Doctor Whos, Ricky Gervais, Captain Kirk, the Prime Minister, the Queen and even the bloomin' Pope. The probably "very soon to be King" Prince Charles and his then wife Diana come off particularly badly, so does Thatcher, the three of them seemingly viewing Saville as some sort of quasi-official advisor. The film has an extra cheeky habit of finding clips of Saville coincidentally sharing the limelight with other disgraced British celebrities from the past, for various other reasons. Rightly, or wrongly, I felt a bit sorry for 'Jim'll Fix It' Producer Roger Ordish, who is interviewed at length. It seemed like he'd spent 20-years happily making kid's innocent wishes magically come true on a program that is now remembered as the work of the devil.
The second part focusing on Saville's crimes and his victims feels less well put together and more shallow. Beyond simply not give the serious aspects of Saville's story more weight, it lacks any wider discussion of the powerful effect money, celebrity and political influence can have on silencing the truth, recently highlighted by the Weinstein and Epstein scandals. His story also has relevance to things like the Oxfam charity exploitation scandal. As always, I think it's a stupid idea when these retrospective documentaries, which are composed from 100% old square 4:3 TV archive footage, go with a super-wide 2.35:1 aspect-ratio just to look "cinematic", when this means cropping the footage to a ridiculous extreme, especially when it looks to have been newly scanned in HD. This isn't a perfect documentary but it's still "glued to the TV" type stuff.
It's always a treat to revisit 'Enchanted'. It works equally brilliantly as a heart warming romcom, a hilarious fish-out-of-water caper, a clever satire of Disney tropes and a joyful celebration of Disney magic. It wouldn't work at all if it wasn't for Amy Adams absolutely nailing the movement, mannerisms, speech patterns and a complete lack of cynicism, associated with 50/60s hand drawn Disney animations. She never looks for a second like she is doing it tongue-in-cheek, she just is a "Disney Princess" made flesh. The key to any truly great musical parody (Spinal Tap, The Rutles etc) is having songs as good, or better, than as those you are homaging. So they got in Alan Menken, who did most of those classic 90s scores. "Happy Working Song", "True Love's Kiss" and "That's How You Know" are as good as anything from actual Disney musicals. Some of the intercutting between the secondary plot threads does look a little jumbled in an effort to keep focus on Giselle and Robert's evolving romance but that's a nitpick.
Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story (2022)
This 3-hour, 2-part Netflix documentary cleverly and wisely spends most of it's first part building up and reminding the viewer of just what a ginormous celebrity Jimmy Saville was in Britain. I was just too young to have remembered that, I was very much aware of him but his star was on the wane when I was watching TV as a youngster. Plus if you're younger than me, or not British, you'll need that context to know who he was at all. The doc makers have done a sterling job trawling the TV archives for every bit of footage of him saying weird things and embarrassingly for those featured, the many, many times he was courted by fellow celebrities. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, at least three Doctor Whos, Ricky Gervais, Captain Kirk, the Prime Minister, the Queen and even the bloomin' Pope. The probably "very soon to be King" Prince Charles and his then wife Diana come off particularly badly, so does Thatcher, the three of them seemingly viewing Saville as some sort of quasi-official advisor. The film has an extra cheeky habit of finding clips of Saville coincidentally sharing the limelight with other disgraced British celebrities from the past, for various other reasons. Rightly, or wrongly, I felt a bit sorry for 'Jim'll Fix It' Producer Roger Ordish, who is interviewed at length. It seemed like he'd spent 20-years happily making kid's innocent wishes magically come true on a program that is now remembered as the work of the devil.
The second part focusing on Saville's crimes and his victims feels less well put together and more shallow. Beyond simply not give the serious aspects of Saville's story more weight, it lacks any wider discussion of the powerful effect money, celebrity and political influence can have on silencing the truth, recently highlighted by the Weinstein and Epstein scandals. His story also has relevance to things like the Oxfam charity exploitation scandal. As always, I think it's a stupid idea when these retrospective documentaries, which are composed from 100% old square 4:3 TV archive footage, go with a super-wide 2.35:1 aspect-ratio just to look "cinematic", when this means cropping the footage to a ridiculous extreme, especially when it looks to have been newly scanned in HD. This isn't a perfect documentary but it's still "glued to the TV" type stuff.