Movies Seen Recently: Jack the Giant Slayer, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Inside Out

51sfCaoZUqL._SX200_QL80_[1]Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – I’m mostly glad that this take on “Jack and the Beanstalk” wasn’t a standard-issue Hollywood revisionist take (you know, where the good guys from the original story are really the bad guys and vice versa, like in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Maleficent and…).  Other than that, it was basically the situation from Disney’s Aladdin (orphaned underprivileged boy who yearns something more meets princess with no mother trying to escape the confines of privilege) transplanted to a different fairy tale; even the main antagonist is the grand vizier who wants to marry the princess for power.  Oh, and there are CGI giants, too.

photo_2_0ad5fc860e97ff1c479cd8dd4e897cd6[1]The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) – Ah, Don Knotts — the human exclamation point!  The plot is really only there as a backdrop, and the fact that the hot chick gravitates toward his “earnest bumbler” persona is the most unbelievable part of the story.  But it’s fun to watch nonetheless.

51TLWXNmpvL._SX200_QL80_[1]Inside Out (2015) – Well, my twelve-year-old daughter liked it.  Me, I thought it was a rare Pixar misfire: an ungainly premise (each emotion — or, at least, the designated five — has its own complete personality?), a nonsensically concrete mental landscape (why the heck is there spacial distance which takes time to traverse in this metaphoric environment? it makes as much sense here as it did in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash), and, really, a bizarre rationale for emotional states (“My Joy stumbled and fell down a hole and can’t get up!”).  One could argue that I’m not the target audience, but I would counter that Pixar has normally treated me like I am the target audience.

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4 thoughts on “Movies Seen Recently: Jack the Giant Slayer, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Inside Out”

  1. Love Don Knotts, too. I think my favorite of his movies is Private Eyes. Can’t beat him and Tim Conway when they paired up. Apple Dumpling Gang was also pretty watchable. And so was the western one he did where he was a dentist and gets married to the spy so she can join the wagon train. The name escapes me right now.

    Haven’t seen Jack the Giant Killer yet. Still on my to be watched list.

    I thought the same thing about Inside Out. It was just bizarre and kind of stupid. It did have some fun one-liners, though. My kids love Anger and quote him all the time.

    1. Yeah, Knotts and Conway were a match made in humor heaven. My wife loves Private Eyes, and hates when I point out that, um, they’re there as police detectives — NOT PRIVATE EYES.

    2. Re Inside Out: Ditto — glad to know it’s not just me!

      I really like every other Pixar movie I’ve seen (which is all of them except for Cars I and II), but dang, I have a hard time understanding all the love for this one. Me and my better half both found the whole thing quite tedious: annoying characters in a flat story that played out in a landscape of ‘clever’ metaphors made concrete. Like the father’s emotions, I’d rather have been doing something else. The only part I enjoyed was when Joy and Sadness and the imaginary friend took a short cut and started to dissolve into abstractions; I thought that sequence was actually pretty smart and visually witty.

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