145 - Dumbo (2019)

The latest of Disney's CGI-driven remakes of its classic hand-drawn films, Dumbo features a rather cute elephant with too little screen time and two abysmal child actors with far too much. Tim Burton is on paper the ideal director to mine the circus setting for visual and situational surreality, splendour, and threat, and to a degree he does, but in comparison to the work that gave him his signature - Beetlejuice, the Batman films and Edward Scissorhands - Dumbo is milquetoast to say the least. It's a film of rote sentimentality and far too little humour, clumsily treading that weird Disney line of plagiarising its own classics in the name of reimagining them, and despite a flourish here and there, and the best efforts of Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito to inject their scenes with life - and the considerable cuteness of the cute little cute elephant - its emotional sterility and lack of imagination are summed up in the way it concludes by setting Keaton's mad futuristic circus entirely ablaze, a pointless climax, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the elephant is quite cute. Recorded on 16th April 2019.

Om Podcasten

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo. "I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.