As the winds of war swirled around the White House in early 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a lot on his mind. Not the least of it was his concern about a positive reaction of the people and their leaders in South American countries to the rise of Nazism.
Roosevelt decided to send a cultural ambassador to that continent, and he chose Walt Disney to lead this goodwill mission. At the time, Disney was already a household name and his 1937 animation success, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," had made his company wealthy -- so rich, in fact, that Disney and his team were able to build a huge new movie studio in Burbank, Calif.
However, by the time FDR was asking Walt to help him out, Disney and his studio had overspent and were deep in debt. Because of crisis after crisis in Europe, the overseas market for his movies was drying up. Disney saw the trip to Latin America as both a break from his problems and an opportunity to increase awareness of his product. Regardless of what you think about movies, the bottom line is that they are a product to be sold.
So Disney and a group of 16 of his animators, illustrators, writers and musicians went south to highlight American goodwill and to contravene Hitler. The new movie, "Walt & El Grupo" is a chronicle of that visit. Using some rarely seen footage, but far too many still photographs, the documentary shows a relaxed Disney and a generally happy group of employees as they visit Argentina, Brazil, Chile and other countries in South America.
The documentary touches on some interesting aspects of the trip, but it never quite takes off. The picture is basically a vanity production and it unreels as if it were a corporate publicity film. Although it does touch a little bit on the strike by animators against Disney at the time, it all but whitewashes the facts and gives Walt himself a pass. He comes across as avuncular, when in fact the labor dispute was brutal.
Director Theodore Thomas -- whose father, Frank Thomas, was one of the 16 visitors -- loses his footing by including an overabundance of rambling and uninteresting comments by relatives of some South Americans who met Team Disney. There are also Disney relatives on view who are not going to say anything untoward about Walt. Relatives of some of the animators are also used, and they are just filler.
During their 10 weeks in South America, Walt and the group (the El Grupo of the title) met with political leaders (most of them low-level types) and local artists, and attended numerous social events. Disney saw the trip as an opportunity to discover "new songs, dances, plots and personalities" for his cartoons. He had long wanted to make an animated feature with a Latin accent. The more colorful creative results of the visit were "Saludos Amigos" from 1942, and "The Three Caballeros" from 1945.
Stylistically, the meandering "Walt & El Grupo" lacks pizzazz and quickly bogs down. It's a nice historical artifact -- nothing more. Director Thomas is no Ken Burns. He doesn't know how to highlight what's important and, after a while, all of the still photos and boring interviews begin to look and feel the same. The director's worshipful camera has one point of view -- to make Walt look terrific.
And what about combating Hitler and the Nazis? Did the trip do any good? It's actually hard to tell. The very purpose for Disney's going gets lost in the shuffle. Latin American countries didn't enter World War II against the United States, but let's face it, many of those same nations, especially Argentina, weren't exactly forbidden fruit to the Germans after the conflict ended.
"Good Hair" is a fascinating documentary that is about a subject -- African-American hair -- that is so obvious, it's amazing no one has made a picture about it before.
One of comedian Chris Rock's daughters asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" This led Rock to think about the hair with which he and his race were born and to create a movie that is thoroughly entertaining, if not quite as comfortable as some might wish. Rock is nothing if not provocative. For the uninitiated, his comedy can best be described as edgy, and his humor is rooted in his African-American ancestry.
After Rock asked his daughter how she came to ask her question, he goes on an adventure (sometimes hair-raising) as he talks to black women about their hair, including celebrities like Nia Long, Raven-Symone, Tracie Thomas, Eve and famed iconic writer Maya Angelou.
Forging across the United States a bit like filmmaker Michael Moore (not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination), the comic discovers that the African-American hair industry is worth upwards of $9 billion, that some women will pay thousands of dollars for the right wig, and that many black women have had their hair straightened using sodium hydroxide, also known as "lye." Rock explores the reasoning behind the desire to look less black as far as hair is concerned.
Rock does falter a bit when he tackles Rev. Al Sharpton's hair, which is not Afro-centric. It's here that he should get sociopolitical, but doesn't. This segment is played for humor. Shouldn't the question have been, "Al, why have you chemically treated your hair so that you look like a white guy, at least on top?"
Other than that, "Good Hair" is a wonderful surprise. I enjoyed Rock's energy and scattershot approach to things. Jeff Stilson, who directed the movie, smartly lets Rock be Rock.
For a certain generation of Americans, pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart's name means something, be it adventure, daring or mystery. She represents an era that valued free spirits.
Having already soloed across the Atlantic, Earhart was on an around-the-world flight when the plane she was piloting disappeared on July 2, 1937, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. She became an even greater and more fascinating American legend.
There are innumerable people today who would dearly love to solve the mystery of Earhart's disappearance. Some write that she had to ditch at sea. Others believe that artifacts and a grave found on the Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro indicate she may have survived a crash and lived for many years. Nobody really knows.
The movie is called "Amelia," and it was made to be a celebration of Earhart's life. Her life had a lot more zip than this film. Director Mira Nair seems interested in getting the facts right, even if said facts are boring and mundane. Come on, lady, print the legend.
The movie crosscuts between Earhart's final flight and details about her life, including a dull marriage to New York publisher George Putnam, who supported her desire to be all that she could be. A dull marriage means dull movie going. Earhart's love affair with Gene Vidal (who founded TWA and fathered the rascally writer Gore) isn't all that alluring either. The director seems leery of sex. And it doesn't help that two very talented actors, Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor, play Putnam and Vidal without a shred of enthusiasm. I blame the director here.
As Earhart, Hilary Swank is good, not great. She seems constricted as she concentrates too hard on capturing speech patterns and body language that evoke the 1920s and 1930s, and forgets to breathe some life into her character.
Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan have written a screenplay that is a compendium of cliches about the era, derring-do and the woman in question. "Amelia" is best when it's in the air. Too bad so much time in it was spent on the ground.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 27 2009 |