The Talkies / Fantasies for All Ages

...Both men are remarkably tolerant about the situation (and about each other...

...It is only possible to believe in Scar's evil as a child does: he's a grumpy old thing who is jealous of his nicer and stronger brother...

...Hamlet is not allowed his revenge...

...false and silly as Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin, and it actually had some funny moments...

...The idyll ends in a train station as the woman, Felicie, gives her address in Paris to the man, Charles, who is himself about to leave for America where he will be traveling around and temporarily unreachable...

...but her mother (Christiane Desbois) is naturally fed up with this daughter who is still pining away for a long ago summer fling...

...All the way through the film we are tempted to think Felicie a fool, but we are never quite allowed to think it...

...The violence prudes may insist that "trauma" could result from even knowing that violence and death exist, but to the Disney people the worst horror is guilt—which is ultimately purged by a holy baboon who helps the grown-up Simba put his past behind him...

...She has frankly informed both that they can never be more than second best: Charles, she says, "remains in my heart, so I can't give it to anyone else...

...She shrewdly observes that for him "only what's written is true...

...This stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose sculpted form is the perfect symbol for the adolescent male fantasy...

...It is worth giving Rohmer that implausibility for what he makes of it...

...The potential Hamlet story in which Uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) kills off papa and then becomes the target of Simba's revenge is merely perfunctory...

...True to his word, he is watching over him and makes him take pride in the pride: "Remember who you are," he says...

...It was easier in those days for children to contemplate being eaten by witches than it is today for them to bear a wicked uncle's making the little lion cub, Simba feel responsible for his father's death...

...A few years ago the kid-fantasy pictures were about ninjas and karate and kickboxing...

...It is arguable that pictures like Little Big League and Angels in the Outfield ought not really to count as movies at all but should occupy some intermediate category between films and video games...

...You're not going to kill me...

...Her discovery after ditching Maxence that "I can only live with a man I'm madly in love with" makes her look almost silly, and one night at Lok's she decides to adopt as her own the unmistakable mark of the flake, a belief in reincarnation...

...Thus in the end, when her quixotic constancy to the love she can never stop believing in is rewarded, we realize that Felicie is an unexpected heroine...

...Our cynicism was probably wrong even if her faith (the issue is not determined) was not certainly right...

...He is what James Bond was to boys of the fifties and sixties, only less cultivated, more domesticated—which makes for an interesting commentary on changing times...

...asks one of the Lion King's comic sidekicks...

...We begin to feel the same way when she decides to move to Nevers with Maxence, thenchanges her mind, briefly giving hopes to Lolc before dashing them too...

...Now they are about baseball—and, in Little Big League, the ultimate fantasy: owning a baseball team, being smarter than and finally taking the place of the manager, and being respected and liked by the players...

...It is sure to be a hit of Indiana Jones proportions...

...Look what children were taking in back in the days when their parents were building civilizations and conquering empires: the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault in which far more gruesome ends than anything to be found in The Lion King were routine...

...Right...

...Imagine Jason Robards putting on his résumé that he "acted" in Little Big League...

...Yuck...

...The unmistakable mark of Disney's Dizzily High Mind there...

...Good advice even for non-royalty...

...Hold on a second there, Al...

...This is truly "sadism" (as another critic put it) for our times...

...As is, for a slightly older set, True Lies by James Cameron...

...By inadvertence Felicie had given Charles the wrong address and does not even know his surname so that she can make an attempt to reach him...

...It is five years later at Christmas time...

...An attractive couple (Charlotte Very and Frederic Van Den Driessche) cavort in the surf and make love and take photographs of each other in a series of Kodak moments as untroubled by the shadow of any unhappiness as the summer is by the expectation of winter...

...The big cuddly papa lion, Mufasa—voice by the big cuddly James Earl Jones—promises Simba that "I will always be watching over you," and that's about the least glib and sentimental that you could ever expect Disney to be...

...To be sure, the film is a visually spectacular romp that includes a lot of good explosions (as you might expect from something costing $100 million) as well as some good jokes and the sort of body count that should be satisfying to fans of the "action movie" who like to see swarthy-featured foreigners dancing at the end of a stream of American bullets...

...What about all those other games you helped them win...

...Whether or not he has made any attempt to reach her she of course does not know, but she is convinced that he has and that for both of them it was the love of their lives...

...A guy fired me up once—that's enough...

...says Felicie...

...According to the ultra-caring "Parent and Child" column of the New York Times, two-thirds of parents in an informal survey of movie-goers in the New York area thought that The Lion King—which had the third-highest opening weekend at the box office in history (after Jurassic Park and Batman Returns)—was "too violent, too scary or too loud for their young children...

...Here is masculinity as a posture, an attitude, an image rather than as substance or true accomplishment...

...It is remarkably bold of Rohmer to have allowed himself so blatantly a romantic ending—one that could hardly get by, even in the most maudlin commercial stuff, anywhere else...

...he is admired by men and desired by women, an unrivaled marksman and a linguist, a scuba diver with a tuxedo under his wet suit (surely this is not possible...

...II 58 The American Spectator September 1994...

...No, for him it amounts to a cameo appearance on a cartoon show...

...He's at the top of the food chain") and the belief that "the Great Kings of the past are looking down from the stars" upon the doings of the animals here below...

...H er own justification for her loyalty to Charles includes the wise observation that many women would rather live with another man than those that are available, but for them it is a fantasy, a vision...

...What would otherwise be just another fantasy becomes, briefly, believable...

...In the Washington Post, Richard Leiby wondered if a plot involving treachery, murder, and revenge, even among animals (perhaps especially among animals...

...Young Roger is not real bright...

...They've got to do it on their own...

...The latest in Eric Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons," it concerns a woman who at first appears to be ruining her life with sterile fantasy but who wins our respect and admiration by the end...

...They wouldn't have been in the championship game in the first place if it hadn't been for those, so what's with this pretense that they're doing it on their own...

...She exists...

...There is a kind of nobility in such faithfulness, so long as it does not degenerate into self-deception, a way of avoiding commitment by clinging to fantasy...

...ut mostly what makes me soften B to The Lion King is that it is less depressing than the kiddie fantasies that Hollywood cranks out by the multiplex-load in the summertime...

...could not "psychologically traumatize children by playing on their most primal fear—the loss of a parent...

...But she argues intelligently and, though she is a humble hairdresser herself and not at all bookish like Lc:4c, often says things that he says remind him of Pascal or Plato...

...The hypothetical God isn't a whole lot brighter either, since He sends His angels to earth for no more exalted a purpose than winning a few ball games—and then tells the favored team through Al, the top angel (Christopher Lloyd), that He can't help them in the championship decider because that is against the rules...

...Felicie has not heard from Charles since, though the affair produced a daughter, Elise (Ava Loraschi...

...Nor was the goody-goody ending very satisfactory...

...But I forget: this is fantasy...

...We look back retrospectively on it to validate a whole range of Felicie's romantic opinions from reincarnation to the grave injunction to Loic that he needs to get away from her because, so long as she is around, he will not meet the love of his life...

...You don't deserve to live," says Simba...

...A s an exercise in fantasy itself, the film shows real chutzpah in taking as its subject a fantasist (Jamie Lee Curtis as Harry's wife, Helen) whose fantasies suddenly come true...

...Nothing," answers another...

...a killing machine who also dances a mean tango—in short, a teenaged boy's idea of masculinity...

...So The American Spectator September 1994 57 he prays to God ("if there is a God") not that he will bring his father back but that he will enable the Angels to win the pennant...

...Here, instead of the archaeologist with the charmed life, we have a master spy called Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger) with an even more charmed life...

...The film was not so completely James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Please have mercy," begs Scar, "I am family...

...Then comes winter...

...But I like the filial piety encouraged by Simba's developing sense that his father lives in him...

...He drives fast, flies airplanes, rides a horse, handles all manner of weapons and hi-tech gadgetry with expert knowledge but also, without any other weapons than his hands, knocks guys out or kills them with equal dispatch and alacrity...

...Now she is involved with two men, Maxence (Michel Voletti), a hairdresser, and Lo'lc (Herve Furic), a librarian...

...The same is not true of the Movie of the Month, which is actually two years old and only now finding its way to my neighborhood for a very brief stay...

...Scar's vision of "a new era in which lion and hyena come together in a great and glorious future" is unconnected to anypolitical reality that the children—or anybody else—can understand...

...Called A Tale of Winter, the film begins incongruously with scenes from a summer holiday...

...In Angels in the Outfield, a remake of a film of 1951, ten-year old Roger (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is told by his bum of a father that the family will get back together when the California Angels, at present in last place, win the pennant...

...As for Disney uplift, well, I guess you could do a lot worse than "the circle of life" that applies even to lions ("What's eating him...

...No, I'm not like you...

...Rohmer leaves prettily ambiguous the question of Felicie's mix of nobility and self-deception, but on the whole we are encouraged to believe in the genuineness both of her attachment to Charles and of her belief that she will never see him again...

...For her the vision was a reality, she says, albeit briefly...

...This is because in all essentials it is an Indiana Jones film...

...As Wayne Campbell would say, Tchayah...

...Nevertheless, I was disappointed not to have hated The Lion King more than I did—hatred of the Disney animation people being one of the constants in my life...

...But with so much that is unbelievable surrounding it, this just becomes part of the joke...