I actually managed to watch a whole movie last weekend, something I hadn’t done since the move. It was one I thought might fit my fantasy road trip pattern, something in the “fantasy cheese” category that I originally saw on a Saturday night on the Sci Fi Channel. It’s currently streaming on most of the ad-supported services, but it’s also on the hoopla library system, without ads.

The movie is George and the Dragon, but it showed on Sci Fi as something like Dragonsword, and it’s a rather odd movie. To paraphrase a line from a book I had as a kid, when it’s good, it’s very, very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrible.

The story is essentially a spin on the St. George and the dragon myth. War-weary Sir George returns home after the Crusades and just wants a plot of land where he can live a quiet life. He goes to the king to ask permission to buy some land and learns that the king’s daughter has disappeared on the eve of her wedding. The king says he’ll give George the land if he can find the princess. But the princess has other plans involving what may be the last dragon egg, and George isn’t a fan of dragons after one maimed his father (though he’s not entirely sure he believes his father about that).

When compared to the other fantasy cheese movies on Sci Fi, this one is a cut above. When compared to “real” movies, it’s on the B-movie end of things. It’s very tongue-in-cheek in a lot of places. I got the feeling the filmmakers were trying to do something along the lines of The Princess Bride, with some self-aware humor. The fact that the closing credits are bloopers and outtakes shows that the movie wasn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, and for the most part the humor works, though there are some odd bits like a skateboard chase scene involving a priest (that I would suspect could be mapped onto the similar scenes in Back to the Future). Yes, a medieval skateboard chase. The priest lands on a little wagon and the sides fall off, turning it into a skateboard. This has very little to do with the overall plot, but it sets the tone.

The casting is mostly better than the usual fantasy cheese movie, in that most of the actors are moderately (even well) known and most of them are quite good. We have James Purefoy and Piper Perabo as the leads, with people like Simon Callow and Joan Plowright in small roles, Val Kilmer in an uncredited cameo, and Michael Clarke Duncan and Patrick Swayze in supporting roles.

Swayze is by far the weakest link and the biggest “why?” in the movie. Not that he’s bad if you take his performance out of context. He does a good job portraying his character and seems to be having a lot of fun. The problem is that the movie is set in medieval England, and Swayze sounds like he’s from Texas. I’m sure it would have been even worse if he’d attempted an English accent, but this is worse than Kevin Costner’s attempt at Robin Hood. True, the people in this time period (and more on that later) would have been speaking either Norman French or Old English and we have to assume that everyone is being translated into modern English, but it would help if everyone who’s from the same place sounds like they’re at least from the same continent. (Duncan and Kilmer also use American accents, but they’re not supposed to be English, so it’s not so grating.) Piper Perabo is American (and also a Texan), but she does a decent English accent (at least, to my American ears).

As for the time period, I’m not sure what was going on with that. George is returning from the Crusades (in an opening that’s basically a copy of Prince of Thieves), which would put this after the Norman Conquest, but we’re dealing with a King Edgar, who’s not on the list of Norman kings, and who has his court in the north of England, where the main threat is from the Picts, which would put this during the Saxon era and before the Saxon kingdoms consolidated — long before the Crusades. This is supposedly England in our world, but at times they treat it like secondary world fantasy. The costumes are generic medieval-ish. Some of the men’s costumes are pretty good, aside from the poor kid who goes through the movie with a bath mat tied around his shoulder. The princess wears a dress that’s obviously polyester stretch velvet. She looks like she’s wearing a princess costume from Spirit Halloween.

But George is a wonderful character, going through all this stuff when he really just wants a quiet life, and Purefoy manages to find a nice balance in making him world-weary without being a downer. The duke the princess is supposed to marry keeps trying to make him jealous about marrying the princess, and George doesn’t care. He just wants his land. He and the princess have good chemistry. She’s very much the modern “spunky princess,” but I think it works here. As long as the film focuses on George, the princess, the royal advisor, and the kid who’s helping them, the film is a lot of fun. There are some excellent fight scenes that are quite inventive, especially one where there are multiple factions and shifting allegiances, with people going from fighting each other to fighting the common enemy and then back to fighting each other. In these parts, Patrick Swayze is even good, probably because he’s not talking.

This is very much a turn-off-your-brain popcorn flick, but it can be fun if you’re looking for a fantasy film you haven’t seen dozens of times (why are there so few good fantasy films?). It’s better than some of the cheaply made movies on the free streaming services and the lead characters are pretty likable. It has a nice ending that leaves you with a smile.

It turned out not to really fit my fantasy road trip pattern because the road trip is a very small part of the movie. It’s the good part, which may be why that was all I remembered of it. It is kind of a fantasy rom-com, though the hero and heroine don’t meet until about halfway through the movie.

Last weekend, I watched the animated movie version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the Terry Pratchett book, and it was delightful. It’s been a long time since I read the book, so I can’t say how precisely the movie sticks to the book, but it felt right. There wasn’t much that jumped out at me that made me say, “Hey, that didn’t happen like that!” I think there were some things missing, but that always happens when translating book to movie.

In case you aren’t familiar with this one, it’s a standalone book set in the Discworld universe, aimed at an older child/young adult audience. I think the main human characters are preteen/very early teens, but the reading level would be pretty advanced for middle-grade readers (though it’s hard for me to judge, since I was reading adult books when I was nine, but I still read children’s books now). It’s a spin on the Pied Piper story. A cat (Maurice) and a group of rats have gained sentience, intelligence, and the ability to talk, thanks to proximity to the magical university. They’ve teamed up, along with an orphan kid, to create a kind of Pied Piper scam. The rats invade a town and make people think there’s an infestation, then the kid shows up with his flute to lead the rats away, for payment. But then they come upon a town that has no local rats and something fishy going on, and they dig into it, with the help of the mayor’s daughter, who’s read way too many books and expects the world to work like a story.

One thing the movie version has going for it is perfect casting. In particular, there’s Hugh Laurie as Maurice the cat, and there’s David Tennant as one of the lead rats, an albino who seems weak but who’s the most clever, and Emilia Clarke plays the spunky, brainy, but still a bit ditzy, mayor’s daughter.

The animation reminds me of the Despicable Me movies in the way the characters are depicted, but the backgrounds remind me of Disney fairy tale movies.

This movie was made and released during the pandemic, so it sort of fell under the radar. I don’t recall seeing anything about it playing around here. At least, it didn’t get a review in the local newspaper. I found it on hoopla, the library streaming service, and was able to check it out. It’s a fun fairytale retelling with a twist/talking animal movie. And it’s an adaptation of a book I liked that doesn’t make me angry. You don’t have to be familiar with Discworld to follow it, but there are a few Easter eggs thrown in that fans of that series will spot.

Last weekend, I ended up rewatching the animated Anastasia (it was the result of a mental rabbit trail that started with a mention of a historical figure in something I saw elsewhere, and that led me to that era in history, so I decided to watch it), and that’s really a weird movie if you think about it. It’s absolutely gorgeous and has great music (though, oddly, has no romantic song in spite of there being a strong romantic plot), with musical numbers that are staged like they’re in a Broadway musical, right down to the characters holding their final poses as though they’re waiting for applause. But the plot is utterly bizarre and the love story has some lovely moments but has no connective tissue.

The plot is theoretically based on history, but they went far afield from what actually happened. I guess Disney did the same thing with Pocahontas, but in this case the events weren’t even a century old when the movie was made. There were people still alive who remembered these events. They were well-documented and even photographed. There were reasonably close relatives to these people who were still alive at that time (Prince Philip in England was a close enough relative that they used his DNA to identify the remains of the Romanovs, since he was related to Nicholas on his father’s side and Alexandra was his great aunt). Anastasia’s presence with the rest of the family when they were in captivity was documented. She wasn’t lost while they fled the palace. I know it would have been way too dark for a kids’ animated movie to have her crawl out from under the bodies of her family after they’d been shot and bayonetted, but they could have had her go missing some other way. Not to mention that she was a teen, not a child, at that time. Rasputin was actually quite friendly with the royal family. They were fond of him. In fact, that was the problem. The nobles didn’t like a commoner having that much influence, and it was other relatives who had him killed. I’ve read some in-depth biographies of him, and he wouldn’t have cursed the family or pursued them to their deaths (he did predict that the dynasty would fall within two years of his death if he was killed, but that wasn’t a curse, it was more of a concerned warning). And while the communist revolution was no picnic, it seems disrespectful to imply that everyone in Russia was happy living under the czar until Rasputin magically influenced them to revolt. Not to mention, the grandmother ended up in London, not Paris, since her sister was the dowager queen of England, and she later went to Copenhagen, since she was Danish (in spite of Angela Lansbury’s Russian accent in this movie).

If they were going to go so far afield from actual events, way beyond ordinary dramatic license, why not do the usual Disney thing and set the story they wanted to tell in some fantasy Fairytalelandia that was Not!Russia (the way Arendelle in Frozen was Not!Norway)? Then they could have gone nuts with it and made up everything. You could tell a story about a princess who was separated from her family and who lost her memory during some crisis and make up a really good villain with really good motives for pursuing her. Heck, if you’re making it all up, you could have a really happy ending in which she gets reunited with her family, who’ve been in exile, thinking she was dead.

The other thing that’s weird is the romance. There are some good moments, and it follows the usual romantic adventure pattern of bickering, then dealing with a crisis together, which leads to bonding, which leads to love, but it doesn’t really motivate or explain each step. They start bickering as soon as they’re on the train, and I have no idea why she was suddenly being extremely bitchy to him. She was getting exactly what she wanted, and I didn’t think he was being much of a jerk until she started being bitchy, and then he responded in kind and it escalated. To contrast, consider Tangled, which had a similar pattern of lost princess traveling with a criminal. They had bickering, but there was a reason behind it. She’d been brainwashed to think all outsiders were a threat and were after the power of her magical hair, she’d whacked him on the head repeatedly with an iron skillet, and she was holding his (stolen) belongings hostage to force him to take her to see the floating lights. Meanwhile, he was trying to discourage her from taking the trip by making the outside world seem scary so that he could escape the guards and his former allies. There was a good reason they were at odds with each other and disagreeing. In Anastasia, they’re both getting what they want out of the deal. No one’s being coerced. There’s absolutely no reason for them to be at odds. They didn’t even establish any personality or value differences that would explain it. They were just bickering because that’s what usually happens at this phase of this kind of story.

I think the casting of Meg Ryan doesn’t help here. At that point in her career she’d sort of fallen into a persona that was essentially the worst parts of Sally (“I want that on the side”). Or, as one reviewer said about her in one of her later rom-coms, “she seems to be in a permanent snit.” She spends the whole movie sounding somewhat annoyed and exasperated and very much like Meg Ryan.

They have the crisis when they have to work together to escape the runaway train, but it doesn’t lead to a bonding moment. They’re still bickering. There’s a musical number involving him and his sidekick training her to be a princess as they travel, but there’s no direct interaction between Anya and Dmitri. She’s interacting mostly with Vlad and pointedly snubbing Dmitri, who spends most of the number scowling in the background. There’s no point when they find common ground or talk and get to know each other (like the conversation in Tangled when he confesses his real name and backstory and she confesses that her hair is magical and explains her upbringing). Then he gives her a new dress, which she’s bitchy about, and he’s dancing with her as she’s being taught to waltz, which leads to a moment and an almost-kiss, which comes out of nowhere. Then there’s all his angst when he realizes she really is the princess, which means he can’t be with her, and they’re both willing to give up everything for each other, but they’ve never yet had a civil conversation or any kind of interaction that suggests that they have any connection at all. They’re in love because they’re in this movie together, and that’s it. Maybe that’s why there’s no romantic song. The closest is the one Vlad sings about them when he realizes they’re connecting and this could be trouble, and I guess that’s along the lines of what Disney was doing in that era. Instead of the characters singing to or about each other, they have a third party singing about them (like “Kiss the Girl” or “Beauty and the Beast”).

This is my pet peeve about bad rom-coms and romances. If there’s bickering, there needs to be a reason beyond just personality differences. It needs to be something situational or that can be changed as one or both learn and grow. If it’s just a personality difference, then they don’t have much hope for a relationship. And there needs to be a reason why they fall in love beyond just seeing each other in better clothes. What did they learn about each other that makes them bond and then fall in love?

Of course, now I’m trying to figure out if I could get away with a missing princess story that doesn’t look like Anastasia with the serial numbers rubbed off, but I just realized I have a lurking story fragment that gender flips it, with a prince who escaped. I wasn’t deliberately doing a take on Anastasia. Actually, I was creating a backstory for an undeveloped character in some other story, and it spun out of control to become a whole story that had nothing to do with that, as these things so often do for me.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched The Muppets Treasure Island, and that got me started thinking again about my Muppet Repertory Company theory.

It is possible that I spend far too much time thinking about Muppets, but my brain is a funny place, and I love the Muppets.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I started rewatching the original Muppet Show and then the older Muppet movies, and the continuity bothered me. The origin story we see in the first Muppet Movie couldn’t have been true within that world because we know Kermit was on Sesame Street with Big Bird long before he was on The Muppet Show, and they were TV stars before they got the movie. And then with The Great Muppet Caper, we got yet another origin story of how they all met. And then yet another one in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

And that was when it occurred to me that none of these films were meant to be actual biopics within the Muppet universe. Instead, what we seemed to have was a repertory company made up of the Muppets, and in their first few movies they were playing fictionalized versions of themselves. It was like when they make a movie centered around a musical group or pop singer and it’s sort of supposed to be about them, but it’s not really. They’re playing themselves, though they’re really more characters with the same names who look like them, in a fictional story. That’s how Kermit could have met Piggy for the first time multiple times in different ways in different places. They started branching out and playing other characters with their version of A Christmas Carol.

The backstage parts of the original Muppet Show are the “documentary” part. That’s their real selves. The rest, aside from some fourth-wall breaking in the movies, is not meant to be real. One area where this matters is with the relationship between Kermit and Piggy. On the original Muppet Show, she has a huge crush on him, which he finds annoying. He’s somewhat afraid of her (since she physically threatens him when she doesn’t get her way), but he doesn’t show any sign of actually being interested in her, aside maybe from the occasional jealous moment when she drops her interest in him to focus on the guest star. It’s like he’s somewhat flattered by the attention but doesn’t actually return her affections.

But then in the movies they’re always thrown into a romance, possibly either because Piggy had it put into her contract or because the executives knew that might be a selling point. Either way, Kermit was stuck with it, and like a trouper he managed to play along even though he’s usually annoyed with her. There is a moment in The Great Muppet Caper when he breaks character during a romantic scene to go into director mode and critique her performance, like he’s miffed with her about what she’s doing on the set, and then he goes back into character, playing the romantic scene.

Somewhere along the way, though, it seems like the people writing the Muppets stuff have forgotten that this was the joke, that Kermit kept being thrown into romantic scenes with Piggy in spite of him not being interested, and they were treating them like they’d become a real couple. One of the more recent iterations of a Muppet show, the one that had them running Piggy’s late-night talk show and treating it like it was The Office, had them being exes who’d broken up but still had to work together.

Even as a kid, I didn’t like the idea of them being together. Now that I know more about relationships, it’s even worse. It’s not a healthy relationship when one member of the couple always gets her way by karate chopping the other member of the couple if he dares go against her every whim. I was kind of glad that he apparently got away from her, but I hated that they ever put them together in “real life” in the first place.

I’m not sure the current Muppet stuff even fits with the idea of the repertory company. They seem to be treating some of the movie events as canon, even though they all contradict each other. I haven’t watched the more recent movies since they came out, so that may be one of my summer projects, and then finish rewatching the original series and then rewatch the subsequent series.

And that is probably way more thought than this topic deserves. I just had to get it off my chest after groaning when Treasure Island had Kermit and Piggy playing a couple yet again. I’d thought we might avoid it for once, since there wasn’t a romance that I recalled in the book. But, no.

Last weekend I finally got around to watching the live-action The Little Mermaid remake. I hadn’t been particularly opposed to it. I just wasn’t really in the mood for that sort of thing, and it was nearly two and a half hours long, so it seemed daunting when I was in the mood for something light. I mostly didn’t see how it was necessary. I have to say that I found it delightful, but it reinforced the issues I have with the live-action remakes loaded with CGI.

The human cast was great. Any scene involving actors with human faces was lovely. The actress playing Ariel was wonderful, and she brought tears to my eyes several times because she conveyed that sense of longing so well. It was nice that Eric got more of a personality, a song, and even a backstory. I’ve seen some quibbles about the changes they made to fix some perceived plot holes in the original, but I thought they worked. But this is all story stuff that could have happened without changing the medium to live action, other than maybe you get more realism and emotion from human actors than from cartoons.

But the non-human parts didn’t come across so well. The animation to create all the sea creatures was gorgeous and created absolutely real-looking sea creatures. The problem came when these real-looking creatures started talking, dancing, and singing. It was weird. It seems you can either have cartoony creatures who have somewhat human facial features that convey human emotion or you can have realistic creatures who don’t convey human emotions because they don’t have human faces. I think it might have worked better if they’d just let the characters with human faces have the speaking parts and let the sea creatures be sea creatures.

That would have required a rewrite, but then I wouldn’t mind if they’d done more like Cinderella and just made a new version of the same story using some elements from the animated version. I wouldn’t necessarily want to get rid of “Under the Sea” or “Kiss the Girl,” but maybe let Ariel have merpeople friends to talk to who could sing. I don’t know. It’s just weird seeing a realistic-looking crab singing.

I’ve found most of the Disney animated sequels (the direct to video ones they did in the 90s) to be blah, but this movie is just about begging for a sequel, with the characters setting off on an adventure and with a mystery to Eric’s backstory.

And I still want a good live-action version of Sleeping Beauty. Maybe not a musical because the songs weren’t pivotal in that one, and go full-on fantasy movie, given that we get a battle between a prince and a dragon. I’m not sure how to give Aurora a bigger role (I believe I read somewhere that she had 27 lines in the whole movie), considering that her being in a coma is a big part of the story. Maybe beef up what she does earlier in the movie, or else borrow from the ballet, in which the prince dreams of her while she’s asleep. In the ballet, they go with the 100 years asleep thing that they skipped with this one, so the prince had never met her, and he goes to try to wake her because of a dream he had about her (in the ballet, it’s an excuse to get in a big romantic pas de deux before the finale), but Philip could dream about her while Malificent has him locked up.

Oh, and I need Emma Thompson to play one of the fairies. Thanks. Maybe we could get Judi Dench while we’re at it.