BE REEL

(Courtesy IMDb )   TRON (1982)  Visual effects have reached many milestones throughout the history of cinema, dazzling moviegoers for more than a century. One of the most significant steps came in 1982, during a time when computers weren’t a general household item, while many animators feared they would lose their jobs because of it, and only a few artists and technicians saw the potential for how they could be used in filmmaking and in service to the stories they would tell. Writer, director, and animator Steven Lisberger developed and eventually presented the idea of a hacker, video game developer and arcade owner gets zapped into a computer and must escape to stop the head of a technological corporation. That became the premise of the 1982 live-action feature, TRON , a film that is dated by today’s standards but was incredibly groundbreaking at the time—while also being ahead of its time.  After he and two former employees break into their company to shut down the pro...

(Courtesy YouTube )  How to Train Your Dragon (2010)  Author Cressida Cowell’s 2003 children’s book, How to Train Your Dragon , opens with young Vikings-in-the-making sent to an island to snatch dragon eggs to train for a period of months after they hatch. The 2010 film adaptation from DreamWorks Animation takes a significantly different approach than the source material (save for character names and personalities a la Disney’s The Jungle Book  or Sony Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ). From the get-go, writers-directors Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois soar right into action to present a generation-spanning battle between Vikings and dragons, and a search for the latter’s unfound “nest.”  At its heart is an unlikely friendship that develops between a human boy and a non-human creature. It’s a story that’s been told many times before, from E.T. to The Iron Giant and Lilo & Stitch (the latter of which Sanders and DeBlois previously made). So what...

(Courtesy Wikipedia )   Scary Movie (2000)  The late-90s saw a resurgence in the horror genre, thanks to groundbreaking entries like the meta satire Scream , the old-school slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer , the supernatural The Sixth Sense , and the found footage feature The Blair Witch Project . Right at the turn of the century, the Wayans siblings (namely Keenan Ivory, Shawn, and Marlon, from In Living Color and The Wayans Bros ) captured this period in the pop culture zeitgeist with an outrageous sendup of these titles, making fun of the numerous cliches, tropes, convoluted plot points, and reported “stupidity” often seen within the genre. It was advertised as “from the people who had nothing to do with Scream, ” despite being released by the same distributor (the former Miramax label, Dimension Films).  Scary Movie  (which, ironically, was once the original title for Scream ) mostly lampoons the plots of Wes Craven’s 1996 flick and its first sequel (the...

WRITER’S NOTE: The following was originally posted on my Facebook page on August 29, 2025.   In recent years, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos from Letterboxd, in which numerous filmmakers, actors, and artists are asked, right off the cuff, to name their “Four Favorite Films.” So, in that same spirit, here are the four current films that stick with me the most, as well as six more to round out a “Top 10.”  (Courtesy Disney Movies )  1. Fantasia (1940, prod. Walt Disney)  A film that continues to influence my own work, in terms of embracing and understanding various genres, styles, and stories. A definitive combination of classical music and a Mount Everest of classic Disney animation.  (Courtesy Bedford Playhouse )   2. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, dir. Frank Capra)  Like a gift that keeps on giving every holiday season, Jimmy Stewart’s everyman journey as George Bailey may be the most life-affirming arc in any film ever made.  (Courte...