The Leverton Review

 I recently rewatched this movie, and it was an interesting experience because there are films that I can rewatch again and again and never get tired of them, but this is not one of them.  It's kind of surprising because I remember watching this movie and having my mind blown by the great premise of it. The movie is 30 years old, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that it's about a man who gets trapped in a time loop and eventually escapes the time Loop. The man is played, I don't want to say wonderfully, by Bill Murray, but aptly by Bill Murray. He acts like Bill Murray.  Bill Murray never acts. Maybe he acts in a few movies, but this is not a movie where he's really acting.  Here he's just playing the typical deadpan Bill Murray character. There are some great comedic moments where he's trying to commit suicide, and he takes the ground hog with him, and he's just talking like a wild man, so there are parts that are great. I have kind...

   I have to be honest I did not finish this series and there are two primary reasons for it, well three. The first is I got bored, and I thought I could be doing other better things with my life, perhaps not more productive but better. The reason I got bored with this very quickly, like within the first episode and a half, is because the acting is bad, and they take a really great premise, and they don't really explore it whatsoever. I'm going to spoil it a little bit because as I said I didn't really like it, I mean you can do with that what you will, if you think you really want to watch this maybe don't read the rest of this review. The premise of this series is that a company invents a dating app and the dating app works by matching you to your perfect partner through genetics or not exactly genetics, but there's some complicated and convoluted pseudoscience crap in there. In the story it apparently works and instead of talking about the implications of a world...

  I watched the original Toy Story movie when it came out, and I probably watched the second one when it came out as well. Recently I watched both back to back in the same day, and I have to say, while the first installment of the franchise is a monumental piece of filmmaking because it ushered in a new era of animation-parts of it don't really hold up. I mean that a lot of the animation of the human characters is horrifying, it looks really, really creepy. The second movie, even though it came out a few years later, the animation looks much better, although it's not totally perfect. The animation at this point was not at a stage where things are not creepy. For example, there is a dog character in the film that is animated more like the idea of a dog than an actual dog. They were still having troubles animating real creatures. The toys look really awesome in this and I have to say even though the story of the sequel is a lot more complicated than the original I actually prefer...

Toy Story is definitely a monumental film. It's the first 3d CGI animated film. It has great voice acting from Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, and the characters of Woody and Buzz are very well-defined. The conflict is set up quite nicely and there's a satisfying story within the movie. There are moments that are genuinely terrifying for children and for adults. Another great thing about the film is the iconic song You've Got a Friend in Me.  Randy Newman really excels at writing those kinds of songs. Having said all of that and getting a mountain of praise out of the way for the movie which it completely deserves it, the film doesn't really hold up. The animation is very creepy, it is solidly in the uncanny valley. The toy characters are fine because they're toys, and you don't expect toys to look life-like. In that sense, it was a great choice to kick off computer animation with a film about toys.  But there are some human characters in the film, and they are horrify...

  So some of you may know about my project to watch all the films that were or have been or will be released by Walt Disney Studios and this is certainly one of them. It's part of a documentary series called True Life Adventures, which uses footage that was filmed in Africa in a 30-month period. It's a documentary about lions mostly, but it does focus on other animals in Africa. There are two main reasons to watch this film and two main reasons to avoid it. Well, maybe three reasons, to watch it and one reason to avoid it.  The first reason is if you want to watch all Disney films this is certainly a Disney film, so you should watch it, although there's no animation or anything that really makes it a Disney film. The second reason to watch it is connected to the reason not to watch it, it's a nature documentary from 1954 so that's about 70 years ago. I'm sure we have learned more about nature than we knew back then and some of the ideas presented in the film are...

 I am as old as Star Wars. The first movie came out the year I was born and those three movies had such a big impact on me that it's almost impossible to say. I remember going to watch the trilogy at a drive in. I remember one of the first times we ever rented a VCR was to have a Star Wars marathon during New Years. But as I grew older, Star Wars kind of faded into the background. The first part of this process was connected to the prequels. I did not like them at the time, although to be honest I only watched the first one when it came out, which was admittedly a mistake because the third one is actually quite good. Then the sequels, I kind of felt that I had to watch them just as a sort of loyalty to the franchise. I was disappointed with them for reasons I will not mention here, if you haven't seen them you don't know what I'm talking about, and if you have seen them you know quite well what I'm talking about. But this series rekindled that love I had for the who...

I don't know what I was expecting when I first started this book but whatever I was expecting this wasn't it. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of butterflies. I know they're colorful, but actually seeing them up close gives me the creeps. Most of the conclusions of this book are somewhat obvious, even to someone like myself who doesn't know a lot about butterflies. I think I was expecting more of a scientific explanation as to why butterflies are different colors or how butterflies actually communicate with each other, but this is more of an essay on the butterflyness of butterflies. There are some scientific facts thrown in there like for example the fact that butterflies seem to remember what happened to them in their caterpillar stage, and we don't know we do not know yet how that happens. But this is the second book in a row that I have read where it's presented as being a scientific look at an animal but devolves into a sort of personal narrative about someo...

The best way to describe Bob's Burgers is to say that the characters are characters first, and then cartoon characters second. Bob is a socially anxious, balding man who runs a business with his family, and despite being great at his job is not successful. His wife Linda is very supportive, but will abandon the business the moment she needs to do something for her children. Tina, the oldest child, is a good description of a teenage girl, who is very creative, but not actually that smart - she's not dumb, but the writers don't fall into the trap of portraying her as either very intelligent or very stupid. She has a wild fantasy Life but seems to have inherited her social awkwardness from her father. In her case it's a little more extreme because when she's stressed she makes a repetitive huh sound. Gene, the middle child, is the one who I think is honestly portrayed a little unrealistically. He says most of the one-liners in the show. There are storylines that treat ...

This was the film that saved Disney's Studios and enabled it to be a cultural institution. It made so much money that Disney was able to pay off their debt, finance most of their productions in the 1950s, and start to build Disney World. Despite a few artistic successes, most of the films released in the previous decade by the company had been both commercial and artistic flops. What makes this film so good? The first striking thing is that Cinderella is actually a real, believable character who makes choices and has wants and desires. This is in contrast to Snow White, who was just singing with birds all day. And while she sings about wanting her dreams to come true, it's clear that she wants to escape her situation and not necessarily find a Prince. The prince in this story is the one who lacks any agency. He's just introduced by this huge and quite funny portrait, and then he falls in love with her. Another fun part about the movie is that there's this whole subplot ...

  This is a trashy movie, in a good way. This is the kind of movie you put on when your brain does not want to have any deep thoughts. The jokes for the most part are formulaic, the plot is full of twists, but that's only because it's full of holes and somebody decided to do things just for the humor of it, but there isn't actually very much humor in this movie. There's one moment that made me laugh out loud, but there wasn't any other moments where I was really smiling or chuckling. So don't expect to laugh very much at this comedy. But Sandler and Aniston do have a lot of chemistry, even if this is just an excuse for Sandler to take one of his friends on some expensive vacations all around the world. He gets a lot of criticism for doing this, but if some company with a lot of money wanted to do that for me, I definitely would do the same thing, so I understand. This is the perfect movie to watch when you are washing the dishes or playing sudoku.

  This documentary is in the stellar by any means, but it does give you a basic grounding of what happened during the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. I take away from it two conclusions, that the pair of terrorists, two brothers who were the children of Chechen immigrants, were incompetent as terrorists and unfortunately the police chasing them were equally incompetent. Why do I think the terrorists were incompetent? They spent a great deal of time trying to construct bombs to kill and meme the most amount of people, and despite placing the bombs in a very crowded area, they initially only (thankfully) murdered three people and maimed a great deal more. If they had to just use the gun and started shooting they would have killed a lot more people, as America's problems with school shootings can attest. Then later they murdered someone because they were trying to steal his gun but didn't realize that gun holsters have security features which can prevent someone from stea...

Treasure Island is Walt Disney's first totally live action film, and it follows the story of the novel more or less faithfully. The film is completely derailed in a very entertaining way by the performance of Robert Newton as Long John Silver. It's this performance that cemented in the popular imagination what a pirate should look, sound and act like. He's got one leg, a parrot which, surprisingly to me was a real bird and the pirate accent, happened to be the actor's natural accent just exaggerated. The movie holds up, which is strange considering it's 73 years old. An interesting bit of trivia about the movie is that it was filmed completely in England, because they had some rule that a certain amount of the box office receipts in England were saved, and film companies were then forced to produce films in England, so all the exotic locales are just places in England and the boy actor Bobby Driscoll was too young to work in England and Disney and his father got fin...

Usually I try to give my reviews without any spoilers, it's going to be impossible to talk about this movie without revealing what happens in it. It's the story of Kill Boksoon, who is an assassin trying to balance her career with raising a child by herself. She inhabits a world that is dangerous and deadly, but with a firm set of rules. These rules have been established by her boss, the owner of her company. The film does a really great job of constructing a world in which hired assassins work for what seems to be the Korean version of a Fortune 500 and where the police assist them in their endeavors. The action in the film is brutal, realistic and yet at the same time cinematic. The fight scene in the bar where she takes on several of her former friends and massacres them is destined to be a classic. There's a great moment where she has been betrayed by all of these people she considered to be friends, and she is desperately fighting off several skilled assassins and ther...

This is the last of the package films of the 1940s which were produced because of the financial troubles that the Disney Studio was enduring because of the second World War, a cartoonist strike, and a pile of debt. The film is an animated version of two classic stores for children - the first is Wind in the Willows, in the second is the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I have never seen the first because this film was split up after its release, and both parts were re-released, but I have seen and was traumatized by the second. The first is I have to say a very charming version of a story from Wind in the Willows, how Mr Toad goes to prison and loses his home and eventually gets it back. Which basically he steals his home back, just not really a lesson that children should be learning - but the animation and the acting is charming. The second Story - the end of Sleepy Hollow,  I clearly remember the last 2 minutes of the story and how terrifying it is. It's not as terrifying now that I...

I am not a particular fan of anthology series. This is because they frustrate me in the fact that some of the episodes will be great, and some will be horrible or forgettable. This one has the same problem. Some of the episodes are great - for example the robot tourist episodes are funny, and the episode entitled bad sailing could be a feature length movie it's that good. There are a few other ones that are good, but I can't explain the premise of the story without giving away the story. But mostly that episodes either attempt to blow you away with great animation - although a lot of it does stray into the Uncanny Valley - or they try to shock you with some titillating or horrifying scene. It gets boring after a while. So I would suggest if you do check this out to find the best episodes and just watch those.  

  Walt Disney said that this was his favorite movie that he made, because it is the most like his childhood. Unfortunately, it is a really hard movie to find. I think that's because it hasn't really stayed in the collective imagination. I think the reason for it is that the story doesn't really distinguish itself from other similar stories a person has to overcome misfortunes to learn valuable life lessons. Another part of the film that does not make a lot of sense is the combination of animation and live action. Disney originally wanted this to be his first all live action film, but he was pressured into adding animated scenes because people expected animation from a Walt Disney film. The animation is a little bit confusing, it's not like the combination of live-action an animation in his previous films. It just interrupts the flow of the movie. So should your kids watch it? I think it's not worth the effort it's going to take you to find it to watch it.

This is Halloween. It's interesting to me to see what movies will become classics and what movies will be forgotten. This is definitely one of the classics. The animation is the proper balance of spooky and cute. The music sticks in your head, especially the song I referenced in the beginning of this review. The plot deals with Jack Skellington the king of Halloween Town and the fact that he is bored and suddenly decides to take over Christmas. The biggest question for me when thinking about this movie is, is this the best Halloween movie? Or is it the best Christmas movie? If you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it. It might be a little scary for younger children, but for older children it's fine.

This is a classic Coming of Age story. A young girl has to go on a perilous adventure to save the island that is her home. She encounters many Adventures and eventually succeeds in her quest. The film is notable for a few reasons - the great music, the accuracy in which Oceanic cultures portrayed, the visually stunning animation, and the fact that this is Dwayne Johnson's best role. Although, I have to say that I did not like the character design of Maui. His muscles in his tattoos are fine, but his face for me sort of veers off into the realm of the Uncanny Valley. But it's a great film for kids.

  This is, fortunately, was another box office disaster for disney. Numerous theories have been put forward as to why this is the case - one blames confusing marketing, audiences did not know that John Carter was a Sci-Fi romp, another blames the fact that the original series written by edgar Rice Burroughs was an inspiration for a lot of the popular sci-fi franchises, especially Star Wars. Yet another theory proposes that the film might have failed because this was around the same time that isney acquired the film rights to a lot of Marvel properties so instead of investing into making John Carter into a francDhise they kind of let it die of death. The film is fun, it is a romp, but I am not disappointed that they didn't make any other films like this. If you are a fan of sci-fi, you'd probably like this.

Not living in the United States I only experienced the hamilton phenomenon second hand. This is a faithful recreation of the stage show hamilton. It reminds me of a quote I heard recently from a TTikok. "It's a safe space here you don't have to pretend to like Hamilton" and the second guy goes "but I actually do like Hamilton." It's good, the songs are great especially "the room where it happens." Casting the founding fathers of the United States, who for the most part were slaveholders, with non-white actors really underlies how important the question of slavery and racial relations are in the history of the United States. It seems that some in United States try to believe that slavery is an incidental thing that happened in the history of the country but rather it is a foundational thing that happened in the history of the country. 

  Have you ever wondered why Cruella Deville is as evil as she is in the 101 Dalmatians franchise? Me neither. But this film is the answer to a question that no one asked. I appreciate the fact that it is not a reboot of a popular franchise, nor is it a remake of one. It's a standalone origin story. The film is pleasant enough - but clearly I'm not in the demographic for it. My daughter watched it when she was 13 and she really enjoyed it. So if you have a creative child who is around that age, this movie would be perfect for them. I'm not quite sure how the Cruella of this movie morphed into a person who was fine with murdering dogs, but that's okay these films are fiction and therefore enjoyment purposes only.

This is in the words of its director, Peter Jackson, a documentary about a documentary. The Beatles, at the time of the original filming of the documentary, were the most successful recording artists in human history and one of the most culturally influential groups. So this documentary is interesting if you like their music but it does put their personalities on full display. And not all of them were especially nice or mature individuals. It's a good record of the tensions that their style of creating caused within the group and it's a good record of how they eventually came to break up. It's kind of sad to see it end, but in the end they were just a rock band. The documentary concludes with the famous rooftop concert and iconic as it is I can imagine it would have been quite annoying that you are at work and suddenly rock music is blaring at you. So give it a watch if you're a fan of music or the music of The Beatles specifically but if you are neither of those this i...

Yes, the big red panda is a metaphor for something, but that should not stop you from watching this delightful coming of age film. A lot of people feel that this movie would have been more commercially successful if it wasn't so localized in the environment of a Chinese girl growing up in Toronto in 2001. As a Canadian, I think that was a great decision. Tell me how many movies you have seen where the setting is in Canada. I bet you can't say very many of them. And that's because people have this idea that Americans can only relate to stories that happen in America or exotic locations, and Canada is neither America nor exotic.  I think movies are how a lot of people learn about the world, even if those movies are fictional. Canada deserves to be known like other parts of the world. Of course this is not a 100% realistic depiction of Toronto but seeing those red street cars made my Canadian soul feel great. 

 Most people will probably remember this movie for a controversy which sunk its chances at financial success. If you are wondering, the movie includes a scene where two characters far in the future who are adult women kiss each other. This caused the movie to be banned in most of the Arab world and the People's Republic of China requested the scene be deleted from the release of the film in China, which Disney bravely refused to do. But because of that decision, the film is considered a flop. I don't think it's a bad film, but it's a confusing one. It tells the story of Buzz Lightyear the human being on which the toy from Toy Story is based. And this film is supposed to be the film that is so popular that Andy has a toy from it to play with. It's strange to me because I don't think even without the controversy that this film would be remarkably popular with kids. It has some very heavy themes - like getting older, wasting your time and regretting the decisions y...

This is I think the last of Disney's anthology films from the 1940s. It's hard to say which of these is the best and which of these is the worst, personally I enjoyed this one. I think, unlike others in the Anthology series, the art was produced for this specific project. The animation is excellent, especially in the little toot section and the Boogie section. Now the music is a matter of personal taste, but it's all from the 1940s, so if you don't like that era of music, you probably won't like the music in this film. Personally, I really enjoy the music of The Andrews Sisters, so I really liked that part of the film. Now, the classic question would children enjoy this? I think it doesn't really have a coherent theme, so if you had them watch the sections rather than the whole thing, it would be probably a better experience for them. One interesting note is that often we have this idea that movies or books are of their time, so we can excuse racism or something...

 Make mine music is a hodgepodge of animated vignettes created because Disney Studios at the time wanted to keep its film division alive, but they did not have enough animators due to the fact that during the second World War most of them were drafted and those who weren't drafted were creating propaganda films for the United States government. So different projects were mashed together, and this was released in 1946 as one of the last of these mash-ups. Some of the segments have a great deal of charm, for example Casey at the bat and Peter and the Wolf, which I am sure everyone has watched even though they haven't watched this film. Other parts are problematic - for example, there's a whale that sings minstrel songs and one segment seems to encourage domestic violence. So I would say it's the weakest of the 3 Disney compilation films from this era. If you want to watch a good example of this kind of film, check out Saludos Amigos.

 Even though this is a film, even though this is about a tragic series of events, I was bored by it. It involves the murder of a journalist, and the attempt to cover up the murder by the political elite of Argentina. The only interesting aspect of it is the fact that there is a segment where they do man and woman on the street interviews and ask passers-by what they think of this investigation - and many of them say that it's all fabrication it's an attempt at making news entertaining - and then shortly after a number of people were convicted in the journalist murder. So I guess the moral is being careful of what you answer to local news reporters because you probably do not know the ins and outs of different cases.

 This is a bizarre yet breathtaking film. If you have never seen any of Studio Ghibli's work - this is a good place to start. The film is full of amazing animation both in terms of the characters, but also a simple things like grass moving in the wind or what an interior of a car looks like. The story itself is a bit confusing in that some of the events don't make sense, for me, it fundamentally boils down to a story about how people treat each other in an interpersonal sense but also how they treat things belonging to other people. The spirits are all inspired by Shinto, so they might be a little bit strange or confusing but watching it with my kids they were delighted with the cuteness of some of the characters - or the horror of the others.  It might not be appropriate for younger children, this was our second attempt to watch this film. We tried to watch it a few years ago and my daughter said it was too scary for her. I would have to agree that this is one of the greatest...

There seem to be some thick people who do not realize why this film is racist. There are three major reasons. Reason one - the black characters speak in an exaggerated dialect which is difficult to understand and probably never existed in real life. Their dialogue is based on the Uncle Remus stories, which were written down by a white man during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. Probably, it is likely, the written version of the dialect did not and does not accurately represent the language that those people spoke. And while the black characters speak in this exaggerated dialect, the white characters do not have a Southern accent at all, which would be quite unusual for the time period.  Why not just make all the characters sound the same? Reason number two - the black characters are talked down to in a paternalistic way. A middle-aged woman speaks to an 83-year-old and like he is a child. The movie wants us to disagree with the decision she has made, but it doesn't sa...

This book is good, but it is deceptive. I can imagine a great deal of people picked up this book because they thought it would be an in-depth examination of the science behind working dogs. The title certainly seems to suggest that this is what the book will be about. Rather, the book is about one woman's relationship with her dog and how she used that relationship to explore some, but not all, aspects of working dogs. She does a good job of examining the fields in which she is interested, and for the most part does seem to rely on science. I would say she trusts a little too much in law enforcement, although she does call out charlatans in this field. But I think she wants to make a clear division between the slave hunters using dogs and police dogs of the Modern age, although there really isn't much of a clear division it's more of an evolution of a tool that is used for various purposes. And that tool does have a racist history. The history in the book is a little weak a...

The favorite is an ahistorical historical drama. It is about the relationship between three women - Anne, Sarah, and Abigail. Sarah and Abigail are cousins, and Anne is the Queen of England. The filmmakers chose to dwell on the most salacious details of this relationship - the rumors that the queen was in a sexual relationship with Abigail were spread by her rival Sarah in real life. The film interprets these rumors to mean that the queen was indeed a lesbian and that Sarah and Anne had a relationship and then later abigail and Anne had a relationship. But whether the queen had a lesbian relationship with a close advisor is the least interesting thing about Queen Anne. She was Queen at a very dangerous time for England - her father James was a Catholic and certain elite members of English society basically staged a coup called the Glorious Revolution to get rid of him in favor of his oldest Protestant daughter and her husband William of Orange. She abandoned her father and allied herse...

 This is yet another of those package films that the Disney Company released in the 1940s and early 50s due to the fact that the studio was in great financial trouble as a result of the second World War. Some of these Anthology films are good, like Saludos Amigos and some are bad like the Three Caballeros and this one is 50% in one category and 50% in the other category. This is because there are only two stories in this movie - the first was originally designed to be a standalone story and the second was added to make it a package film. The first story is about a bear who returns to nature from the circus and has various misadventures - and the second is a retelling of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. The second story is much better because for some reason it is narrated by Edgar Bergen, the creator of Charlie McCarthy the famous dummy. So it's kind of like an early version of Mystery Science 3000 although admittedly not as funny. ...

It was quite interesting to watch this movie after watching the first seven or so Disney feature films - this is a film that grabs you from the beginning and holds your attention until the end. The opening number Arabian Nights sets up the story perfectly. It's a tune that really sticks in your head, which is true of the other great number, prince Ali. The plot is really well paced and there's no slow moments in the film, characters really work well together and all of their motivations are clear. It's clear by this time, Disney Studios had the financial resources to put money into the production of its films, and they were the best at what they did when this film was released. Obviously, I enjoyed the film, but I think there are parts that just didn't hold up. The first time I watched it I thought Robin Williams's performance as the genie was hilarious, but it contains a lot of references that audiences, today would have trouble understanding. For example, there...

Studio Ghibli films are immensely difficult to describe, but at the same time immensely entertaining to look at. It's almost like an Escher drawing come to life in the foreground and in the background is the subtlety of an impressionist painting. The plot of the film, such as it is, deals with a young woman who is cursed to live her days as an old woman and breaks the curse through her own ability to care for other people. The two major themes of the film are anti-militarism and ageing - and how ageing is not necessarily a bad thing. I liked the film, but it isn't my favorite studio Ghibli film - that would have to be either my Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away. But if you like Ghibli films check this one out and even if you've never seen one of Ghibli; films it's also worth watching

  I have watched Maybe about 35 k dramas in various genres, and this is the first to deal extensively with the fact that Korea is one country with two political systems. It does this in a sort of fantastical way, where a lot of the harsher aspects of life in North Korea are softened. One of the consultants on the show said that it is about 60% accurate. This is done mainly for the purpose of the story because if it were entirely accurate it would be a very short show - what it does do very well is portray North Korea as a country where people actually live. I know that's a strange thing to say, but I have watched media from different historical era, from different countries, documentary films and fiction films, so I can imagine what it's like to live in Mexico, the United States, Russia, or India. And while my imagination might differ wildly from reality, I can kind of have an idea what life is like for people who live in those places. But apart from the brutality of the North ...