Don't Always Disagree

                This movie is doing a handful of things at once and pulls off most of them.   My biggest criticisms almost all stem from this being part one of a two-part story and the question this raises is kind of philosophical: is it ok to release a movie into theaters that, from a story and character perspective, just isn’t finished?   It’s better to be upfront about it at least, letting people know going in that there’s going to be unresolved business when the credits roll, so props for that, I guess.   That’s not the part that stuck with me the most as I walked to the parking lot, though.               Let’s get some good things and my complaints out of the way first to get to the parts I’m really interested in.   The animation is amazing and apparently very stressful to produce, based on the new stories on the working condit...

                With a movie like this it’s hard to figure out exactly what the filmmakers were trying to do.   There are at least three distinct kinds of story wrapped around each other here attempting to make it seem like one coherent 100-minute narrative is being told.   A lot of this fractured identity is probably down to good old market-tested four-quadrant appeal, stealing as many of the obvious parts from as many of the currently popular genres as feasible and smashing them together.   What I’m really wondering, though, is whether these disparate parts, by working together, are distracting us from the movie’s real intention: a fairly dark goal of rehabbing the image and history of the Catholic Church. Way classier a title card than the movie deserves.               That’s a pretty bold statement to make, so let’s take a step back ...

              I wasn’t around at the time but by all accounts, 1976 was a pretty weird year to live through, culturally.   The highest-selling album was ‘Frampton Comes Alive.’   The second highest-grossing movie was the Barbara Streisand / Kris Kristofferson ‘A Star is Born.’   The book Trinity by Leon Uris, which was about Irish history leading up to The Troubles and I’m sure has aged gracefully, topped the bestseller list.     Ford vs. Carter.   The death of Mao Zedong.   There was an Olympics in there.   There was plenty going on but none of it seems to have exactly lingered in the public consciousness.   The world did get five new episodes of ‘Columbo,’ though.               It was also far enough past the sixties that the hangover had well and truly settled in.   Whatever fuzzy energy had built up t...