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Snow White is still one of the best animated films. It not only forged feature animation but recaptured the particular dark optimism of the European fables.
I think the scene where Snow White wakes up in bed is still THE most important scene in animation history.
Why that one?
What we have to remember about animation is that it was not SELF-EVIDENT that it would stylize characters based on their personality. It could have been used (for someone less artistic, it would have been) simply to turn realistic people into animated forms.
Instead, however, Disney used animation to translate essential characteristics of personality into physical traits, which defined the art of animation forever.
When Snow White wakes up in bed, she names the dwarfs by SIGHT based on the artistic process of drawing them.
To an audience that had never seen an animated film, Snow White is teaching them how they work and how to watch them. The drawings reveal personality to the audience as they do to her.
Her ability to name them (ours to recognize the logic) is the test for animation AS a concept.
There's a reason Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin) called Snow White the greatest film ever made. You can feel its influence on Welles, Fellini ...
"Spectacle synthesis" was the term he used. Where diffuse and concentrated feelings meet in one representation. That's Snow White.
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I rarely say this. But this is a demeaning film. Its POV is sexist in a way that makes everyone worthless. It's SO cynical. It has the rare dishonor of being a film I hate thematically far more than the actors and visuals deserve.
The reason is not just its execution, which prioritizes cheesy narration to sell every small emotional detail, falsely excusing the visuals from being as creative as they could be. That just makes it boring.
What makes it truly vile is its completely unempathetic worldview.
Movies that lack empathy for men are not uncommon but rarely are they this ambitious. Every male drive and desire is shown as evil in Bitter Moon, utterly condemnable. Even the capacity to love is portrayed as WEAKNESS. A man's desire to kill himself is portrayed as inevitable.
Instead of him just vanishing from the entire 2nd act and waking up after a literal nap for the ending, I would include him!
I love the idea of the Clover Organization being beaten by a normal guy, not because of his strength, but his normalness.
And I know M. Night craved subversion. But David does NOT seem like he's been doing this for 20 years. He and his son are shown to be PITIFULLY disorganized and unambitious if you think about it.
Their last scene together is in the hardware store! It's so painfully underwritten.
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Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a 2001 CBM made 10 years late. Expectations in 2011 were COMPLETELY different. Does this mean the film is “underrated?”
It’s respectably loony. Cage expresses it facially to a level of enjoyment that prevents it from being boring.
But it sidesteps its ability to be, even on its own terms, a "good movie."
Its problems are in conventions. The henchman villain is dramatically inert. The girl has no energy at all, not dramatic, not romantic, nothing. She really should have had crazy charisma.
They set it up that anything Ghost Rider "rides" transforms in his image …
so the natural punchline would have been a ridiculous sex scene, Cage screaming on fire as she transforms into a hardcore demon queen. Something WAY over-excessively, memorably, nonsensically perverse.