A Tale of Two Tones

Batman Forever (1995)
Dir. Joel Schumacher
Warner Bros. Pictures
Rating: B- (B+ including deleted scenes)

"Riddle me this, riddle me that...."

    Continuing on the subject of movies I watched a dozen times on VHS as a kid is 1995's Batman Forever. I unapologetically like this movie. I like all of the first four Batman films in their own unique ways. (First five if you count the Adam West one.) Hell, Batman '89 has been my favorite film for the last fifteen years of my life. Batman Forever is the flawed emerald of the series; it's pretty, it's gaudy, and in your mind's eye you love it for what it could be instead of what it is.

- - -

    The film follows Batman / Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) as he ineptly tries to apprehend the villain Two-Face / Harvey Dent (Tommy Lee Jones) who in turn spends the entire runtime ineptly trying to murder Batman for having failed to prevent the incident that turned him into a bifurcated neon pink freak. For some reason the writers chose to forego adapting the exceptional backstory these two share in the comics of being former allies and the deep seated guilt Bruce feels for having failed to prevent Harvey's marring by presenting it as barely touched upon background lore. Two-Face is one of the surprisingly few Batman villains (the others being the Penguin, Black Mask, and post-'Heart of Ice' Mr. Freeze) that actually works as a proper dramatic foil to Bruce Wayne and for some reason we're just not gonna take advantage of that here. Their loss.

Tommy Lee Jones, who'd make a great Two-Face if they were playing the character straight like almost every other adaptation does, somehow still manages to make a great Two-Face while having to play the character like a raving comedic lunatic. Accurate to the source material? Hell no. Entertaining in its own right? Very much so.

    Bruce also has to deal with obsessive Wayne Enterprises employee turned tech startup guru Edward Nygma (Jim Carrey) who moonlights as The Riddler to enact his hyper-fixation on destroying Bruce Wayne after being snubbed by him during a routine factory inspection. Two-Face and The Riddler quickly team up to go on a crime spree to fund Nygma's startup company; a business partnership that turns out to be mutually beneficial when they learn that – shock of shocks – Bruce Wayne and Batman are in fact the same person. I do love it when supervillains pal around with one another like goobers.

Jim Carrey's acting is alright. Tolerable. It's neither as good as The Mask (1994) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) nor is it as painful as The Cable Guy (1996) or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) where you spend half the sit just wanting to smack him across his ridiculously angular canuckistanian head and tell him he should actually try hanging around human beings for a bit if he insists on pretending to be one for a living. There are a handful of moments where he goes too over-the-top but he mostly fits in with the comic book feel of the movie. I'm never gonna bash a comic book film for actually feeling like a comic book – I am a better man than Doug Walker is – but I will criticize Jim Carrey for being a nutjob who needs to tone it down. I dunno what kinda white boy designer drugs he was on during this period but he needed to halve his dosage.

For whatever reason Nygma is presented in this tale as an obsessed Bruce Wayne fanboy. A weird facet of the character that is carried over into The Batman (2022). I suppose it makes more sense for a one-off story than to have him be a rando puzzle / video game designer like in the comics and jump through the narrative hoops of explaining how exactly that ties into Bruce's personal life (Spoiler: it doesn't; not every supervillain needs to have one degree of separation to the hero, only the ones that actually matter).

The Riddler's villain origin in this movie always struck me as being a tamer version of the Mad Hatter's as shown in the exceptional Batman: TAS episode "Mad As A Hatter". Nerdy Wayne Enterprises employee with social issues who specializes in brain manipulation goes off the deep end when he's rejected and dons the costume of an established fictional character to go on a crazy spree. Yes, I said established fictional character. Between the bobble heads, statuettes, and creepy as all hell full sized animatronic that Nygma keeps in his apartment, it's safe to say the Riddler is a preexisting and recognizable character / mascot in this universe that Nygma simply appropriated the look of for his crimes. I actually kinda dig it. In typical fake smart guy fashion he's actually a performative loser who cannot come up with his own original ideas.

"eh-hehe-hehe!"

Special passing mention should go to Nygma's obviously put-upon supervisor, Fred (Ed Begley Jr.), who perfectly sells the shame and embarrassment of having to wrangle Jim Carrey on a daily basis and may well be the best performed role in the movie despite his very small part. The poor man gets thrown out a window during Nygma's villain origin for his efforts.

    In addition to all that, Batman meets up with abnormal psychologist Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), who is horny on main for Bats and makes sure he knows it. This leads to a rather funny scene in which she tries to seduce Batman and Val Kilmer fails miserably trying to sell disinterest at Nicole Kidman circa 1994 feeling him up while wearing black negligee. It's like one of those softcore Twokinds Patreon exclusive scenes that Tom Fischbach posts to make his fans edge.

...not that I'd know anything about that.

Chase eventually enters the ol' superhero love triangle with Bruce Wayne and Batman. It gets to the point where Bats is fully willing to go to town on her while wearing the full rubber batsuit... only for her to ruin it by saying she's developed the feels for Bruce Wayne instead. Women. Getting cock blocked by yourself is a plot point that occurs surprisingly often in superhero media. Mary Jane Watson is the best love interest because she avoided this trope altogether by discovering Peter Parker's secret identity way back around, like, Amazing Spider-Man #6 and then couching that information for twenty years, including shooting down a marriage proposal from him in the seventies because dumbass Peter still hadn't told her he was Spider-Man yet.

I don't care if that was a retcon – it still counts.

    I rather like how they use Dr. Chase Meridian in this movie even if she's not so much a character as a prop for Bruce's personal drama to play off of. Her surname is not incidental as she symbolically acts as the dividing line in the tug-of-war between the Bruce Wayne and Batman sides of Bruce's life: a totem that both parts of him covet but neither can have unless he can find a compromise between them. It's never stated outright in the series but the inability for him to be either Bruce Wayne or Batman to an adequate extent is implied to be why his relationships with Vicki Vale and Selina Kyle fell through in the gaps following the previous two movies. Chase even gifts Bruce a dream fetish doll – which of course is split right down the middle like Two-Face – sensing he might need a little smack on the ass to work through his mental issues. The doll doesn't play a direct role in the plot, but he does give it back to her at the end and states he won't need it going forwards.

She also keeps this around her room and is surprised when Bruce sees a bat in it.

    Caught in the crossfire of this typical Gotham nonsense is young-ish traveling circus trapeze artist Dick Grayson (Chris O'Donnell), who moves in with Bruce and his butler Alfred (Michael Gough) after Two-Face murders his family during a performance. Dick is a rather likable character despite the writing snarl of his ambiguous age – the character is written to be somewhere between fifteen and nineteen years old despite O'Donnell visibly being a grown-ass adult with sideburns and piercings in his mid-twenties, and that's not even getting into Grayson being twelve in the comics when his parents get aced.

Dick Grayson bonds with Alfred and Bruce pretty quickly but his pesky teenage(?) compulsions lead to him discovering the Batcave and joyriding the Batmobile, after which he demands that Bruce let him become his partner so he can wreak bloody vengeance upon Two-Face. They have a conversation about the cycle of vengeance; specifically how hollow it leaves you to kill a person who's killed your parents. This is obviously a holdover from when Keaton was supposed to reprise the role as this lacks any real dramatic punch if he hasn't deep-sixed Jack Napier already.

Dick Grayson's situation causes Bruce to flash back to the death of his parents at the hands of a young Jack Napier, pearls and all. The reminiscing carries along to his parents' wake where he comes across a red book and his eight year-old self reads it... and that's all the explanation we're ever gonna get for that. Even though it gets mentioned again when Bruce briefs Dr. Meridian on his parents being murdered in front of him. Almost like it's a very important element of the story that does not get resolved. In the theatrical cut, anyway.

    Eventually everything comes to a head when Wayne Manor is assaulted, the Riddler destroys the Batcave, Chase is kidnapped (right after realizing Bruce is Batman) and Bruce Wayne gets SHOT IN THE FUCKING HEAD. In the theatrical cut this doesn't mean a damn thing as he kips up in the next scene totally fine but in the deleted scenes it's a totally different animal. In the proper version of the tale, this results in Bruce getting a temporary case of amnesia and Alfred jogging his memory by sending him into the caves underneath Wayne Manor. ONE OF THE BEST MOMENTS IN THE ENTIRE BATMAN FRANCHISE then occurs as therein he finds the red book he keeps seeing in his flashbacks – his father's journal – and reads it to discover he's been repressing the memory of having been the one to badger his parents to go see a movie the night of their murder, setting in motion the entire event. Bruce's memory comes flooding back to him as a metaphorical giant fucking animatronic bat arrives and stands face-to-face with him. Bruce mirrors its pose and symbolically merges the two sides of his personality – Bruce Wayne and Batman; not two separate entities sharing the same body but in fact one man with one goal. He then emerges from the cave and confidently tells Alfred that he knows who he is: he's Batman.

YEAH, I DUNNO WHY YOU'D CUT THAT OUT EITHER.

There is absolutely no excuse for them leaving the entire dramatic climax of the film on the cutting room floor despite keeping in all the buildup and post-script to it. That'd be like if someone made a Lord of the Rings film adaptation and left in all the foreshadowing to the Scouring of the Shire but then completely cut out the ending of the story because they spent too much time on the Battle of Helm's Deep instead, didn't even do it correctly, and only succeeded in fucking up the pacing in the process.

That's right – I'm calling you out, Ralph Bakshi.

    Bruce, having settled his personal troubles, then willingly takes on Dick Grayson as his partner. Grayson adopts the nom de guerre Robin in reference to a touching story he tells Alfred about his parents. They then lay siege to Nygma's enormous laser powered blender looking fortress to save the day.

Despite spending the whole movie telling Dick that revenge is a fool's game, Batman reminds us all that this is supposed to be canon with the Tim Burton flicks when he outright murders Two-Face by throwing a handful of quarters at him while he's standing on a wet girder (that he's somehow managed to teleport eighty feet down a sheer metal elevator shaft within eight seconds to be on), causing him to fall screaming to his death on a pile of jagged rusted metal spikes eighty feet below. Robin initially reacts with shock at seeing Bruce blatantly go back on his word... but then he smiles. He's tasted blood for the first time. Homicides, as we all know, are like McNuggets – you'd kill to have more than just one.

"Oh yeah, I could totally get into this."

There's a very nice narrative three beat – literally one of the oldest storytelling tricks out there – of dramatic handgrab saves; the first being Dick's father catching him during a trick at the circus, the second being Robin saving Batman from being buried alive (which doubles as an homage to Tim Drake's introduction story from the comics, “A Lonely Place of Dying”), and the third being Batman saving Robin from the deathtrap at the end of the film and symbolically taking the place of his father in the process. Planting. Reminder. Payoff. It sucks that I live in a day and age where this kinda basic narrative structure is impressive to see done correctly in a film, but oh well.

Nygma gets overdosed with brainwave energies as his giant Box explodes (giggity). As Batman approaches him he hallucinates the giant bat from Bruce's dreams swooping towards him. Completely bereft of proper context for this, Nygma shrieks like a bitch and has a total mental breakdown. Now that's how you pay off a motif, kids. The Riddler spends the rest of his days rotting in Arkham Asylum, Bruce gets a goodbye kiss from Chase, and we cut to credits on a nice little homage to the '60s Batman intro with Batman and Robin running towards the camera in silhouette.

FIN

- - - 

    Gotham City in this story is a hellish cocktail of neon, dutch angles, art deco, and German expressionism in which the lightning is always inexplicable and even the lowliest of street toughs can afford top shelf leather drip and 2002 Jeff Hardy glowstick bodypaint. I love it. The titanic art deco inspired buildings and beautiful internal decors of the upper class business districts being offset with the '80s neon hellholes beneath them creates a beautiful styles clash that makes for great visual shorthand of this proud, powerful city decaying from the bottom up. In a move that I'm gonna chose to interpret as intentional, Nygma's nouveau riche status is communicated in a scene where he hosts an upper class fundraising shindig in the penthouse suite of one of these skyscrapers but gaudily chooses to adorn the room with the same kinda neon naff he lived in just a couple weeks prior while wearing a suit that's obviously the poor person's idea of what rich people dress like.

I know I'm in the minority when I say this is my favorite take on the setting in any medium.

In addition to that we've got some truly outlandish set and costume designs. They... mostly work. Special mention goes to the street gang of bodypaint enthusiasts, the silver action figure look of the second batsuit, and the goofy as hell Batmobile design which I know has its fans but to me, in the words of the prophet Chad Warden, it looks like a dildo.

    Elliot Goldenthal produces a very good original score, which I associate with Batman almost as much as Danny Elfman's music. A perfect blend of campy big band nonsense and brooding atmosphere. While the score is great the soundtrack is gloriously schizophrenic and deserving of a future review in its own right. You've got Method Man and Nick Cave on the same album. Even I'm not crazy enough to square that circle. This is truly a snapshot of that bygone golden age where we Americans were culturally untouchable and knew neither fear nor shame.

    I love this film more for what it could have been than what it was. Mix in the deleted scenes and give this script one more pass in the writing room to square up all the themes and tone and you'd be looking at a possible A-tier Batman movie. As it stands it's a victim of a bipolar desire to be both a deep dive into Bruce's psychosis and a campy, colorful popcorn flick. It almost makes it work. In fact, it's just this side of being unintentionally genius since duality's a major theme of the story itself, from the choice of villain down to the struggle the protagonist is going through trying to make sense of his two divergent careers. A happy accident. Sadly, the whole is more than the sum of its parts and the finished product doesn't quite stick the landing. It remains a flawed, if pretty gem.

- - -

FAVORITE QUOTES

TWO-FACE: Fortune smiles. Another day of wine and roses – or in your case, beer and pizza!

CHASE: Let's just say I could write a hell of a paper on a grown man who dresses like a flying rodent.
BATMAN: [mildly offended] Bats aren't rodents, Dr. Meridian.

NYGMA: [after dropping Fred out the window into the comically oversized and improbably placed civic waterfall on the side of the Wayne Enterprises building] Ooh! Nice form but a little rough on the landing. He may have to settle for the bronze.

 
RIDDLER: [to Two-Face] Very few people are both a summer and a winter, but you pull it off nicely.

[Batman dramatically rises out of a deathtrap]

TWO-FACE: [exasperated] WHY CAN'T YOU JUST DIE?! [shoots at him with a grenade launcher; repeatedly]

[deleted scene]
BRUCE: The night of my parents' wake, Alfred, I remember running... falling... the bat. There was something else... or was it just the bat? What was I running from? Is that all this is - a little boy being afraid of a monster in the dark?

BATMAN: [to Riddler] Release Chase. This is between you and me.
TWO-FACE: And me. [turns cheek] AND ME!

My Name is Ozymandias: Chief of Chiefs

 

The Indian in the Cupboard (1995)

Dir. Frank Oz
Paramount Pictures & Columbia TriStar
Rating: C+

No thoughts. Brain scampled egg.

    Ah, that span of time from the late eighties to the early aughts when the noble savage trope became the default media portrayal for an entire race of human beings. This was thanks in no small part to Gen X rebelling against the honestly more grounded portrayal of natives by the previous generation's films such as The Searchers (1956) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). You couldn't swing a dead cat between the years of 1986 and 1998 without hitting the Obligatory Native American Token Character. They were everywhere. Didn't matter if it was X-Men, Power Rangers, or that one Star Trek show I still haven't watched – the red man cometh. It wasn't malicious. In fact, quite the opposite.

If you went through the U.S. public educational system during the latter half of the 20th century you were programmed to see Native Americans as this one congealed, homogenized mass of folks who were so peaceful and pure their culture was neither morally nor technologically changed for thousands of years until the white man arrived and stole their land through trickery. Native Americans were framed as the anti-heroes of history; fighting the good, politically correct fight against the (conveniently enough) current societal boogeymen of pollution, colonialism, and that damn evil United States Army who are always implied to be stodgy conservative types motivated by sheer materialistic greed, never left-leaning nanny statists who want everything on earth regulated and think they know better than everyone else. White folks of all stripes adored them and wanted to be like them. We used to trace our ancestry so we could brag at dinner parties about being one eighteenth Apache despite not knowing the first thing about that tribe or its history. Everybody working a nine-to-five wanted to be a working class anti-hero in the '90s and the less of your skin you had to risk to achieve that title, the better.

Sure, Geronimo straight up admits in his autobiography that his band murdered and robbed scores of innocent Mexican peasants and he has no regrets about it 'cause he doesn't view them as people, but I guess you can't be an anti-hero without the anti part.

    Based on a book series you've never heard of (by Lynne Reid Banks) and sold for home release in a clamshell VHS you definitely remember, The Indian in the Cupboard is cut from that same safe '90s kids film cloth that most kids films were back when the film industry made movies aimed at more than just the emotionally stunted thirty-something “adult” demographic. Ya see, way back before TikTok or even WiFi our parents would rent out or purchase VHS tapes and sit us in front of the TV for two hours whenever they needed us to shut up long enough to itemize their deductibles on their one afternoon off. Thus there was an entire sub-industry in Hollywood dedicated exclusively to children's entertainment with only a proximal interest in appealing to adults on the grounds somebody's gotta be old enough to drive the rugrats to the cinema. I certainly watched this flick enough times growing up.

This movie, The Swan Princess (1994), Jumanji (1995), Toy Story (1995), Aladdin (1992), The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lost World (1997), Batman Forever (1995), and TV rips of Jurassic Park (1993) and both Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) were in frequent rotation on the family VHS player between the years of 1997 and 2003. I didn't watch the original Star Wars until many years later. My younger brother, for his sins, was a mark for both Monsters, Inc. (2001) and The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly (1998). By then I'd moved on to more intellectually stimulating works of art such as the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy, which I thought were the peak of cinema at age nine despite having access to the Indiana Jones trilogy and the whole filmography of James Cameron at the local library I walked by at least twice a week every week as a teenager.

Enough disjointed stalling. It's been twenty years since I've seen this thing and I've been waiting since high school for the Nostalgia Critic to review this and he still hasn't. If you want something done right....

- - - 

    Our protagonist is the stupidly named Omri (Hal Scardino), who gets a surprise party for his ninth birthday. We get a rare full usage of the 'Happy Birthday' song, which is probably what most of the movie's $45,000,000 budget went to. Omri's two brothers (Vincent Kartheiser & Ryan Olson) gift him an old cupboard they found in the alleyway that they've mercifully cleaned up and their mother (a very underutilized Lindsay Crouse) finds a key to fit it that belonged to her mother. This is apparently the only thing she kept from her mother for whatever reason. So likely the key has some unexplained cosmic significance. You just don't point something like that out without it meaning something. Turns out I'm right. The key is outright stated to be a magical artifact in the book series.

Omri's got friends, is doing well in school, isn't being bullied, is perfectly physically healthy, has a surprisingly well-adjusted and loving middle class nuclear family... hell, his dad (Richard Jenkins) even makes a point to kiss him goodnight every night whenever he's not working on a skylight or calling him out of the room at plot convenient times. The kid's got no real problems aside from living in NYC and having a space between his front teeth large enough it could be mistaken for an impact crater. I cannot decide if it's refreshingly realistic or bad fiction writing. Apparently I'm a bloomer given how all of my reviews thus far have been glowingly positive so I'm gonna side with refreshing.

The next day at school Omri's friend Patrick (Rishi Bhat, whom I remember starring in way more movies than he did; I blame his really expressive eyebrows for this) gifts him an admittedly shitty plastic Indian figurine that he probably filched from the random plastic Indian display they have in the hallway for some reason. Omri puts the figure inside the cupboard overnight and locks it, waking up the next morning to discover it's been transformed into a very much alive (if four inches tall) Iroquois named Little Bear (Litefoot).

Turns out the cupboard is in fact a highly advanced magical device which turns plastic toys into real flesh-and-blood people and their accessories into functioning technological devices, seemingly summoning their real life counterparts from out of history and / or alternate dimensions parallel to our own. How? Why? No explanation given. Nor is one required.

Because Omri is a kid this automatically leads to the most memorable scene in the film in which he experiments to see if it's the cupboard that's magic or specifically just his crappy plastic Indian toy by dumping a bunch of his action figures inside and turning the key. After witnessing Darth Vader throwing down with a t-rex while a Cardassian gets in a firefight with RoboCop, Omri realizes that magic is in fact terrifying and should only be used sensibly. Such as when Little Bear gets pecked by a bird and he uses the cupboard to summon up WWI British combat medic Tommy Atkins (Steve Coogan), whom he easily convinces is dreaming, to patch him up.

    Little Bear initially views the gigantic-ass mouth-breathing preteen as a god of some sort and pals around with him out of a sense of religious awe. This thankfully doesn't last long as Little Bear has more than two brain cells to rub together and he realizes that Omri, despite being two hundred feet tall and magic, is just a kid. Then he starts paling around with him 'cause hey, magic giant kid who's just as scared of all this as I am. This switch occurs when Omri uses the cupboard to summon up an old Mohawk warrior for the sole purpose of yoinking a properly sized bow for Little Bear from him. The shock of seeing the eight foot gap between Omri's front teeth gives the old man a lethal heart attack. Little Bear correctly chews him out for toying with forces he doesn't understand while revealing he was in the process of taking his nephew on a rite of passage camping trip when he was plucked out of his reality into this one. It's the best bit of acting in the whole flick and a solid bit of writing.

    Omri's equally stupidly named older brothers Gillion (Vincent Kartheiser) and Adiel (Ryan Olson, I assume anyway; his name is never spoken in the film and I haven't read the book so I'm having to go off of IMDB for this one) get interested in Omri borrowing random shit from around the house to give to his tiny friend and sneak into his room one day to look for their missing junk.  

Omri responds sensibly and PUNT KICKS HIS BROTHER'S CUTE LITTLE PET RAT LIKE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATHIC ASSHOLE, CAUSING IT TO VIOLENTLY DRIBBLE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE STAIRS IN ITS HAMSTER BALL WHILE SPINNING WITH THE CENTRIFUGAL FORCE OF AN F2 TORNADO. This is played for laughs. Omri's brothers prove to be better men than I when they politely leave the room without throwing him down the stairs after the poor critter which is, mercifully, unharmed. Hell, these are about the chillest older brothers I've seen in fiction. They only seek sibling vengeance upon Omri when he later hides the hamster ball and do so by hiding his magic cupboard in turn... which they then readily give back after the hamster ball is returned to them. The fiends! The perfectly reasonable fiends!

Seriously, there's next to no real conflict in this movie. Unless you hate pet rats for whatever reason. 
You monster.

    Omri eventually tells Patrick about Little Bear and his magic cupboard. Patrick then makes the 1000 IQ play of putting a cowboy figure into the cupboard against Omri's wishes which then comes to life as an emotionally distraught miniman named Boone (David Keith, who I incorrectly remembered as having been played by Owen Wilson thanks to Night at the Museum). Little Bear and Boone eventually bond over their love of children and their shared manlet status after the expected initial conflagration. I mean, over a century of time separates them (Little Bear drops 1761 and the French & Indian War while discussing when he comes from and Boone outright states he's from Texas in the year 1876) so there's really no reason for them to be beefing aside from the pure aesthetic of cowboys versus Indians.

During this sequence Little Bear mentions he's been north to the land of the Mi'kmaq. 
I wonder if he's seen their famous Pet Sematary.

    I should also note each time Omri or Patrick take a plastic Indian from this random plastic Indian school display they replace it with a wildly unfitting action figure that goes unremarked upon by any other character – the first time around an Aracula Skeleton Warriors figure and the second time one of Limburger of Biker Mice From Mars fame. I can guarantee you haven't thought of either of those franchises in a long, long while if at all. Why yes, I did pause this movie midway through to watch the Biker Mice From Mars intro four times on repeat.

I was more of a SWAT Kats kid but damned if this isn't the exact kinda stupid shit I love.

 One night Little Bear gets war wacky and accidentally shoots Boone thought the chest with an arrow while the gang watch a particularly violent western on television. The same thing happened to my buddy Eric once. Little Bear then has to shimmy down between the floorboards to retrieve the fallen key to the cupboard. Therein he faces... the rat! The monstrously evil, confused, chubby, adorable pet rat that somehow escaped from its cage. Thankfully he doesn't kill it. That poor rat has been through enough. They then use the cupboard to resummon Tommy to patch up Boone. This incident is enough to convince the boys that having tiny men with functioning weaponry as glorified pets is in fact a bad idea and resolve to send them back.

But first Omri offers Little Bear a wife in the form of a plastic lady he stole from the school's random plastic Indian display, which is a plot detail getting a lot more mileage than I expected it would. Little Bear refuses on the grounds that he'd be magically kidnapping some random chick who very likely already has a husband and kids. Aside from being a superstitious goof, Little Bear is obviously a very morally upright dude contrasted with Omri and Patrick being dumbass kids dicking around with magic they do not understand. This apparently becomes the major point of conflict in the book's four sequels, in which the kids forget the moral of this story and totally fuck over the timeline in Little Bear's world by trying to play god. In other news, cannot wait for the Dune movie sequels.

Little Bear does a ritual to become Omri's guardian... stepfather... bloodbrother... tribesmate... something or another before getting put back in the cupboard along with Boone and becoming toys again. Omri fictionalizes the events of this week into a short story his teachers like and the music swells really obnoxiously as if something profound was learned.

FIN

- - - 

    The child acting is average. Rishi is a smidge better than Scardino, who tries his best but is just too reserved and inexperienced to carry a movie. They can't all be Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore. Litefoot likewise gives it the ol' college try and turns in a serviceable performance. He is by far the best part of the ensemble and he does it while freezing his ass off in buckskin chaps with sharpie scribbles all over his body. That said, I'm sure he's better at rapping than acting. After all, his official website does proudly claim he won the “Best Male Artist” and “Artist of the Year” honors from the Native American Music Awards. I should mention that I recently won the “Best Blogger” award at the 54^th Annual Balding White Guys Who Wear Jean Jackets and Live in Upstate Georgia Awards. The BWGWWJJ&LUG association is very prestigious and I'm honored to be recognized by them.

Update: Shit, he's actually got good flow! I apologze, Litefoot. Please don't scalp me. I have a bad enough hairline as is. As far as mid-nineties west coast rap goes it's not bad. Touch underrated, even.

The film score by Randy Edelman is rather good but is kinda rather very extremely overused to the point it becomes grating. I get that you're dealing with child actors and you need to do a lot of heavy lifting to support them, but after a certain point it just becomes blatant you've got no faith at all in the actors to carry the emotion of the scene and are giving them a set of crutches.

The VFX are (on the whole) incredibly good and hold up to this day. Big surprise, Industrial Light & Magic know their shit. Seamless composite shots and the utilization of forced perspective with oversized sets and props will do that. Things tend to look the best if they're actually there. The use of tight close-ups and blurred backgrounds as a cheat in some scenes is noticeable but forgivable.

    This movie ba-bombed at the box office and came up ten million short of meeting its budget, which means it came between fifteen and twenty million shy of turning a profit. Much like its contemporaries Balto (1995) and The Swan Princess (1994) it almost made up for this be having a very good run on VHS and TV. If you were a kid during the nineties there's a strong chance you've seen this flick at least once. Seems this one's really fallen by the wayside in the decades since. I can kinda see why. It's a solid movie with occasionally great VFX but there's really nothing that sticks with you. It's one of those “you had to be there” kinda movies that encapsulates one specific tonal vibe from a bygone era that just comes off as quaint to those reminiscing and outright kitsch to those without context.

    Disney's Pocahontas (1995) was released just a couple weeks before this movie and doubtless ate into its profitability. In addition to the usual expected Disney dirty pool and bastardry with distribution tactics, the films overlap thematically and Pocahontas does everything this flick does but much more aggressively and memorably, delivering a product that's simultaneously better and much worse. Kids nowadays would not understand the deluge of Native American guilt posting from back then. Maybe that's a good thing. It was like if you took blaxploitation but removed all the humor, satire, and badassery that made it work. That and blaxploitation was at least current – all the stereotypes in these Indian flicks were outmoded by at least a century when they were released. It's almost like they were never really about Native Americans at all and there was some other message the people making these products wanted to get across and this whole race of people acted as a politically convenient, easily disposable figurehead for them.

But hey, I could always be wrong.

- - - 

FAVORITE QUOTES

OMRI: [practically tweaking in class waiting to get back home] I love the Indian. He's so great.
PATRICK: ...why?

OMRI: Thank you.
TOMMY: Only doing my duty.
OMRI: Would you like to wake up now?
TOMMY: No, I never wanna wake up. Mud, German shells, awful bloody rats. They eat at wounded men. Ugh. Still, can't desert. Even in a dream.

OMRI: [after getting mugged by some kid with a mohawk] YOU DON'T DESERVE THAT HAIR!

BOONE: [after spending all morning sitting in a fanny pack with Little Bear, bonding while listening to Omri attend school] ...damn.
[Boone and Little Bear both start laughing at the sheer absurdity of their situation]