The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Today, while exercising, I finally got around and finished watching, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” released in 2023. This was streaming on Starz for a long time, but now it is available to stream for free on Roku. Now, I will let everyone know what I thought of this surprising prequel to the franchise.

Kyle Amato started his review out by asking, “What reason was there for a new Hunger Games film? Nostalgia for a decade ago, when YA reigned supreme just as Marvel was rising to power? A last-ditch attempt to wring some money out of a known property? The greatest question of all: why is The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes actually good? Why did they make a real movie for no reason? No one needed this to be a gripping, bleak drama about a young man coming to understand how the world works, a young man opportunistic in a way that always seems to leave people dead. But, for some reason, the Hunger Games prequel is possibly better than the original film series, with strong performances from relative newcomers Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler and Josh Andrés Rivera. I’m as surprised as you are!”

Sixty-four years before Katniss volunteers as tribute, Coriolanus Snow, played by Tom Blyth, is an ambitious teenager wanting to restore his family’s fortune and power after a devastating war. While he lives in his rundown family manor with his grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) and cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer), he hides his difficulties at the academy from his richer friends. His deceased father would always say, “Snow lands on top,” and he wants to make good on that thought. The 10^th Hunger Games are coming up quick, and with ratings falling, the head gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul, played by Viola Davis, enjoying herself, has thought of a new threat. The top of the class will be advisors to this year’s tributes, and the winner will receive a huge cash prize. Coriolanus is assigned to a traveling musician named Lucy Gray Baird, played by Rachel Zegler, a fierce performer apparently set to die in the arena. Fortunately, Coriolanus has a few flans to help Lucy Gray survive, but he might make a few enemies while doing that.

Evidently having learned from the mistake of making “Mockingjay” two parts, director Francis Lawrence decides to give everyone the full story here at a nearly three-hour runtime, which is something of rare limitation in cinema. Amato said, “The Hunger Games wrap up with an entire hour to go, giving the film an extended grim climax that really makes the entire endeavor make sense. Though Songbirds & Snakes has some familiar YA trappings, the inevitability of Snow’s descent into his future as a murderous dictator naturally colors the action. While I have nothing against Katniss’s fight to remain a person while becoming the face of a revolution, watching a bisexual lunatic scheme his way through a corrupt system is inherently more interesting.”

Blyth is the standout, taking a very internal character and writing his war between cruelty and compassion all in his expressions. Amato noted, “Though Zegler has an incredible voice and stage presence, Lucy Gray Baird is more of a concept than a full-fledged character, but she shows that hope is not lost even if the actual revolution is decades away. he’s asked to do a lot, and she accomplishes it all. Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis are opposite sides of the reality spectrum, Dinklage embodying the miserable reality of Panem and Davis playing up the Frankenstein surreality of the richest of the rich.” Also, we get Jason Schwartzman as a crooked weatherman who is hosting the Games, taking up the role from Stanley Tucci in the original films. Amato mentioned, “The cast never feels low-rent in a way you’d expect from a standard franchise revival.”

Few prequels defend their creation, but this film makes the case well. Not only do we get to see the early version of the dangerous games Katniss must go through, we get to understand the suspicion behind their creation. While the Games felt like an evil reality to overcome for Katniss, Coriolanus sees them as flawed and useful, helping stitch them into the fabric of Capitol life. Amato said, “There’s an eeriness to the film, denying catharsis except from your memories of a film that came out eight years ago. Even that might be tough, as pretty much everyone I know dropped off after Mockingjay Part One.” “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” deserves to do well, a cruel surprise for a satisfied audience.

I had been wanting to watch this prequel for a while. I didn’t see it in the theaters, and now I think I should have. The only problem I see is that this is nearly three hours long. I don’t know if I would have been able to sit in the theater for that long. Then again, I sat through the entirety of “Avengers: Endgame” in the theaters. Maybe the lockdown made me lazy, and I need to see films in parts now, but I have seen it now, and I’m happy. If you’re a fan of the franchise, you should see this on Roku. This is a good prequel, one of the few good ones, and I think everyone will enjoy it. If you can’t sit through the movie in one sitting, then you can watch it in parts, like I did.

Thank you for joining in on this review tonight. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next review in “Disney Month 2025.”

Roller Coaster Rabbit

“Roller Coaster Rabbit,” Disney’s 1990 “Maroon Cartoon” (shown before “Dick Tracy”), reunites Baby Herman (April Winchell and Lou Hirsch), Roger (Charles Fleischer), and Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner) in a funny, fast-paced homage to the Hollywood cartoons of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Roger has become a little smarter, if not brighter, rabbit. When Mom (Winchell) tells him to watch Baby Herman while she has her palm read at a carnival, he begs her not to leave him in charge. Remember what happened last time? However, Mom nicely persuades him: “You’ll do it or it’ll be rabbit stew for dinner!” Predictably, chaos occurs the minute she turns her back.

Charles Solomon said in his review, “The film combines the lavish look of Disney’s early “Silly Symphonies” with the slapstick lunacy of the best Warner Bros.’ cartoons. The action is similarly madcap but during the ‘40s, director Rob Minkoff and his crew never could have gotten away with that one anatomically suggestive gag about a huge bull and a balloon. They’ve also tucked in a few inside jokes: A faded poster in the background reads “See the Little Mermaid!””

“Tummy Trouble,” the first Roger Rabbit short, dove the audience into a chaotic realm where the hilarious antics never let up. “Roller Coaster Rabbit” is funnier because it’s more intelligently paced.

Solomon noted, “Instead of bombarding the audience with nonstop gags, the cartoon gradually accelerates to its no-holds-barred climax, a hair-raising ride on a roller coaster that makes Magic Mountain’s Viper look like a playground slide. A combination of drawn and computer animation gives this sequence a dizzying realism that will have the more timorous members of the audience clutching their seats.”

At the time, “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” looked to be the last cartoon for Roger Rabbit until the sequel to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” was released, which doesn’t look like it will happen now. Solomon pointed out, “In a recent telephone interview, Walt Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg said: “We have a couple of ideas for other cartoons we’re working on, but we haven’t decided whether or not to continue producing them--that’s something we have to decide with Amblin.””

This short is not available on Disney+, but you can find it on YouTube. If you enjoyed the first Roger Rabbit short, then I recommend you see this one. You will enjoy this one thoroughly, I promise you. This is for all Roger Rabbit fans.

Tomorrow I will look at a comedy that is good, but probably will be another film I won’t be rewatching, in “Disney Month 2025.”

Tummy Trouble

Played before the start of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” is “Tummy Trouble,” the first installment in Disney-Amblin “Maroon Cartoon” series starring Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman, released in 1989.

Director Rob Minkoff and his team meet the challenge of matching the great start of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Mother (April Winchell) once again leaves Roger (Charles Fleischer) to watch Baby Herman (Winchell as a baby, Lou Hirsch as the Adult), who immediately swallows his favorite rattle. Roger hurries him to the hospital (“St. Nowhere”) and chaos begins.

Charles Solomon said in his review, “The animators use Roger as a rubbery physical comic. His eyes swell to the size of kettle drums when he is surprised, and his nose, tail, ears and tongue stretch with the Silly Putty elasticity of Daffy Duck in Bob Clampett’s wilder “Looney Tunes.””

Solomon continued, “But Roger’s personality is closer to that of the monumentally inept Wile E. Coyote of Chuck Jones. His misplaced faith in his ability to solve any problem makes him the architect of his own defeat.”

At the end of the short, Roger and Baby Herman walk off a live-action set, repeating the story of the what we just saw. That trait works nicely, however the cartoon would be complete without it.

“Tummy Trouble” is the first Disney animates short that was released after almost 25 years. Solomon noted, “Its manic pace and slapstick humor burst with the zaniness of the Warner Bros. cartoons and Tex Avery’s MGM shorts, rather than Disney’s more restrained “Silly Symphonies.””

For decades, animators and fans have requested that short films that were once the support of the American animation company return. Solomon mentioned, “As audiences rediscover the pleasures of watching a cartoon before a feature, instead of a Coca-Cola commercial, they may start demanding them.”

Disney animators immediately started working on the second Roger Rabbit short, “Roller Coaster Rabbit.” “Tummy Trouble” was a tough short to follow.

If you are a fan of Roger Rabbit and loved “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” then you should see this short. It’s available on Disney+, so you can easily sit through this one. You will love it and laugh throughout; I can assure you that.

Tomorrow I will be looking at the next “Roger Rabbit” short, “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” in the continuation of “Disney Month 2025.”

Mr. Boogedy

People around my age range must remember growing up and watching the “Disney Afternoon” on weekdays from 3-5pm and on weekends, “The Wonderful World of Disney.” Those were the days of great cartoons, but yes, I do believe they might have made some that weren’t good, but we didn’t know that back then.

Often, “The Wonderful World of Disney” would play Disney’s theatrical releases, but a lot of the programs in the beginning was material made for the show. One that I didn’t know about until Doug Walker mentioned it in one of his “Disneycember” reviews is the 1986 short, “Mr. Boogedy.” You would say Disney was trying to tell a story about the Boogeyman. Under the Radar said in their review, “It all worked pretty well for a straight-to-TV thing at the time, but at this point I just wanna bring it to people's attention as something pretty much in the realm of "so bad it's good".”

“Mr. Boogedy” introduces us to the Davis family, who are excited to be moving to the fictional Lucifer Falls, New England, which may be “Nilbog.” Carlton, played by Richard Masur, is a novelty salesman who’s hoping to attract interested customers, being the only novelty salesperson that is closer to people once they move. Together with his wife, Eloise (Mimi Kennedy) and kids, Jennifer (Kristy Swanson), Corwin (David Faustino), and Aurie (Benjamin Gregory), they move, only to find themselves in possibly a haunted house.

At first, almost everyone believes the strange occurrences are just the father playing practical jokes. However, they soon find out an entire dark history to a few ghosts who haunt the house, including Mr. Boogedy (Howard Witt) who a harbinger named Neil Witherspoon (John Astin) had warned them about when they moved. Under the Radar said, “I won't give away much more than that, but the history to these ghosts are dark enough that you kind of have to wonder what was going through their minds at the time.” Along with the amazingly bad visual effects of 80’s TV and a vast of familiar actors have given “Mr. Boogedy” to have a cult following in its absurdity.

After being released on TV in the late 80’s, the short has faded into obscurity. However, since Disney+ is around, they have decided to release it on there. It’s easy to sit through, seeing how it is 45 minutes long. Under the Radar admitted, “If you're like me, and love looking for ridiculous movies that will make you laugh for all the wrong reasons, it's a solid watch. Terrible, but in all the best ways. It's all a pure, thick slice of 80's cheese, and may bring back fond, first-scare memories if you caught it on TV back in the day.”

I have to be honest; it is a product of the 80s. However, this is not something I see myself returning to after watching it one time. Honestly, I can’t even remember the short. Maybe that’s just the way it is. It’s one of those shorts that don’t leave a lasting impression on you. You watch it, then easily forget about it. Like I said, it wouldn’t hurt to watch it, so if you want to watch it on Disney+, I don’t think it will hurt.

Tomorrow, I will be looking at another short that is actually good in “Disney Month 2025.”

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Roger Ebert started his review by comparing, “The opening scenes of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” might remind you a little of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Both films begin with a nostalgic memory of what it was like to grow up in a small Midwestern town, back before everything became modern and a sense of wonder was lost.”

What the two films also have in common is a love of language. The screenplay for “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” released in 1983, was written by Ray Bradbury, based on his novel, and it’s one of the rare American films to taste the sound of words, and their rhythms. That’s true in the writing, and it’s also true in the acting. Ebert pointed out, “Jason Robards, who has the lead in this film, is allowed to use his greatest gift, his magnificently controlled speaking voice, more poetically in this movie than in anything else he’s done in years.”

The movie is a fantasy, the story of how Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival came to town one night (arriving on a great carnival train with no engineer at the front and no passengers in the cars), and of how the carnival’s main attraction was temptation.

What could it tempt you with? What anything you wanted the most. With the Robards character, an old small-town librarian with a young song, what he wanted the most was life and youth. This task he gets set on is a hard one. If he can resist that want, he can redeem the whole town. If he resists, everything goes wrong. The scenes with the carnival are an interesting mix of special effects and nostalgia, including a merry-go-round that spins backward into time.

The carnival owner, Mr. Dark, played by Jonathan Pryce, is quite possibly a sidekick of Satan. Also, his assistants include the very beautiful Dust Witch, played by the splendid, lovely Pam Grier in a career change role after her decade of tough women.

“Something Wicked This Way Comes” is a horror film, but it’s all around a different type than the ones we got at the time. Ebert said, “The new breed of horror movies are essentially geek shows, exercises in despair in which all hope has been abandoned and evil rules the world. Bradbury’s world of fantasy calls back to an earlier tradition, to the fantasies of Lord Dunsany, Saki and John Collier (but not H. P. Lovecraft!) — horror fantasies in which evil was a distinct possibility, but men also had within them the possibility of redemption.” Robards is given a choice in this movie, and it is a choice. Things don’t need to end in disaster.

Ebert noted, “There’s another interesting thing about this movie. It’s one of the few literary adaptations I’ve seen in which the film not only captures the mood and tone of the novel, but also the novel’s style. Bradbury’s prose is a strange hybrid of craftsmanship and lyricism. He builds his stories and novels in a straightforward way, with strong plotting, but his sentences owe more to Thomas Wolfe than to the pulp tradition, and the lyricism isn’t missed in this movie.”

In this descriptions of autumn days, in the genuine conversations between a father and a son, in the shameless fantasy of its haunted carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with style.

Honestly, when I saw it, I can give it credit for given an atmosphere, but I don’t think this will be one that I will see it again. I know there is a fanbase for this one, and it is a movie you can see around Halloween time, so you can see it on Disney+ and it won’t hurt. However, I don’t see myself returning to this one after seeing it once. Check it out and enjoy, as I do believe this does has potential and people can enjoy it.

Look out tomorrow when I look at a short in “Disney Month 2025.”

The Black Hole

There’s something appealingly human about our way to take the most fascinating ideas and treat them in small stories. Look at the example today with the idea of black holes in outer space and the story of Walt Disney’s 1979 film “The Black Hole.”

Roger Ebert noted in his review, “The concept of black holes has trickled down by now from the ivory towers of Cambridge to the middle ground of Scientific American and finally to the funny pages: There may be special places in the universe where collapsing stars have set up gravity fields so dense that not even light can escape from them.” We have a “hole” in space which we cannot see, as we are told. Since light (which cannot help moving at the speed of light) cannot climb out of the hole…would an object falling into it be sped beyond the speed of light? What would happen then?

The possibilities are tiring to think about. Ebert noted, “One of them, much favored by science-fiction writers, is that black holes are tunnels in space, and that if we fell into one we might emerge (a bit scorched, perhaps) from a “white hole” some. where else in the universe. Because black holes are “singularities” that do not correspond to models of the universe constructed by Einstein or anybody else, they’ve also inspired wonderfully apocalyptic notions. My favorite is that they’re intergalactic bathtub drains, and that we’ll all whirl down them some day and turn up in the sewer system of the universe next door.”

That would be preferable to what happens in Disney’s “The Black Hole,” which takes audiences all the way to the edge of space only to hold us down in a chatty melodrama filled with mad scientists and haunted houses. A space mission to a black hole finds that another ship has arrived earlier: The Cygnus, which disappeared 20 years earlier. The explorers go on board and discover that the entire crew of the Cygnus has disappeared, except for a Dr. Reinhardt, played by Maximilian Schell, who explains that he’s about to try a dangerous dive into the hole. The visitors are not charmed. However, one of them (Anthony Perkins) gets caught up in Reinhardt’s crazy idea, and a journalist (Ernest Borgnine) wanders around the large Cygnus and sees so much that is more than meets the eye. Then Reinhardt goes crazy.

Meanwhile, “The Black Hole” flies into outer space and is looked at from time to time through portholes. Ebert said, “Physics is not my best subject, but I somehow doubt that we could see a black hole actually revolving, and my objection comes in two parts: I don’t think we could see the hole at all, and it would certainly not be revolving at the approximate rate of a ferris wheel.”

No matter. Ebert said, “The movie stays mostly inside the Cygnus, which resembles the spaceships in “Alien” and ‘Star Trek’ in one key feature: Although the cost of launching and maintaining a space vehicle is incredibly expensive and every square foot counts, the Cygnus is as spacious as a country manor, with long hallways, high ceilings and vast command decks.”

Why all the extra, empty inside space? Maybe to give the special effects artists their chance to go crazy on the visuals. Ebert said, ““The Black Hole” was designed by the veteran effects artist Peter Ellenshaw, who avoids the look of most earlier movie spaceships (wall-to-wall computer display screens re- laying meaningless information to non-existent monitors). Instead, his interiors consist of orderly patterns of basic colors, arrayed on control panels.”

Then there is a large porthole looking out into space, just like Captain Nemo’s giant porthole wandered the ocean in Ellenshaw’s designs for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Ebert said, “The Cygnus, indeed, looks more like a fanciful space vehicle for a Nemo than like the fashionable High Tech so beloved in most movie spaceships.” It has a crew that’s taken from dark thrillers and “Star Wars.” There are strange, masked, zombie-like people that wander about all over the place. Then there are robots.

Ebert noted, “The friendly robot looks like C3PO, from “Star Wars,” and chirps out plucky little sayings while revolving its beady little eyes. The taller robots are ripped off from Darth Vader. And when everybody gets in a shootout, we’re left for the umpteenth time with the reflection that gunfights would surely be obsolete in outer space.” (Can you think of a technology that could travel to the edge of a black hold, and yet equip its mission with sidearms that cause only flesh wounds?)

The main problem with “The Black Hole” is that it doesn’t really face the challenge of being a fiction about a black hole. Yes, the black hole is there, and the characters look into it and make sincere statements, and Maximilian Schell looks rightly obsessed with it, but we don’t feel a type of wander. There’s no awe. The hole’s a gimmick that the movie can go to, in between onboard planning and calculating, and at the movie’s end there is a nice visual payoff. Eber said, “But somehow it comes too late: The events leading up to it have been so trivial and cliche-ridden that the movie doesn’t earn its climax. And so whaddaya know?” Black holes keep their reputations: Nothing can escape from them, not even this movie.

Sorry to say, but for one of Disney’s first live-action movies, this was a bad one. Nothing about this movie was good enough for a recommendation, seeing how it was about a topic that so many people like. This is easily one of the forgettable Disney movies and I would suggest that everyone not see it. It doesn’t hold your attention for very long.

Tomorrow I will be looking at another underwhelming movie in “Disney Month 2025.”

The Gnome-Mobile

December is upon us again, and it is time for another month-long Disney movie reviews. Like previous years, there will be no connecting themes, but just a huge grab bag of movie reviews from different entities they own that I have forgotten. Let’s get this month started with the 1967 film, “The Gnome-Mobile.”

Roger Ebert started his review by saying:

A neighborhood theater is the best place to see a new Walt Disney movie, and so whenever one opens I go and stand in line with about 500 kids and get inside for the first matinee on Saturday.”

The kids are my colleagues in this enterprise. Once I made the mistake of seeing a Disney movie the first thing on a Friday morning when all the kids were in school. There were about nine people in the theater. Under conditions like that, what critic can decide if Disney is up to par? Disney films are made to please kids, not critics.”

So now I go on Saturdays. Last Saturday the kids let me know that “The Gnome-Mobile” has some good parts in it. They let me know this because when the good parts came on the screen they stopped still and watched them. The rest of the time they fought, laughed, popped bags, whistled and thundered in wild herds up and down the aisle.

The movie is about the world’s most beloved grandfather (Walter Brennan) and his grandchildren (Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice), who become involved in the issues of gnomes. What we see is that Brennan, one of the wealthiest timbermen in the country, has cut down a lot of forests and made things tough on gnomes.

However, after he meets Jasper the gnome (Tom Lowell) and finds out the gnomes’ dilemma, Brennan goes to reunite Jasper and his grandfather with the rest of the gnomes, including the oldest gnome out there (Ed Wynn).

Ebert noted, “There are a lot of adventures along the way, and Disney seldom lets the story line lag. The kids especially liked the scenes with gnomes in them (the Disney organization has perfected the technical tricks necessary to make the little people look like they’re right there with the big people).”

They also liked the “gnome-mobile,” which is Brennan’s giant 1930 Rolls Royce.

Matthew and Karen, who were also in “Mary Poppins,” are convincingly on the level and not the self-righteous child stars they might have been. Brennan is just fine. The special effects are fascinating. The kids got their viewing pleasure.

If you can find this movie anywhere, I would say give it a watch. I don’t see anything about this movie that people wouldn’t like, but I think people will enjoy it. If you can get over the fact that this is a movie made in the 60s, then chances are, you will like this one a lot. There are some funny scenes in here that you will enjoy. Especially when you want to see the conflict resolved.

Alright everyone, once again we have a very busy month ahead of us, so stay tuned to see what I will review next in “Disney Month 2025.”