Wow! What a crazy week! Sincerest apologies for the lack of updates…I guess you could call it burn-out after spending the recent holiday preparing our tour of the Disney Paris art exhibition, and as such things attempt to catch you out, I promptly came down with the flu. In the meantime, I just wanted to make sure we saw the week out with at least one update, if only to let you know that we’ve been spending plenty of time reviewing some new discs and catching up on covering the abundant selection released in the past couple of months.

Randall’s clocked in twice this week, with a nice look – and our first review of the latest wave – at the Walt Disney Treasures: The Mickey Mouse Club Presents The Hardy Boys limited tin set (the further titles will get their respective once-overs very soon), as well as Richard Linklater’s stunning adaptation of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I watched my copy of this the other night and have to agree with Rand’s appraisal that this is perhaps the most “literal” translation of a Dick novel to the screen, and a very satisfying experience for fans of intelligent sci-fi.

Lastly, before the weekend, I just wanted to make a couple of comments on the movie that got caught up in a web phenomenon, Snakes On A Plane, which I finally sat down to watch on DVD last night. I only bring it up here because, as you’ll see on the right, even we at Animated News & Views got caught up in the fuss earlier last year! At that time, the hype was at fever pitch, and everyone thought Snakes would perform strongly at the box office. What was soon apparent though, was that no-one was going. My reasoning back then was that all the online geeks who had created and fed their own online hype machine were pretty much going to hold out and wait to see the thing on the very computers they used to spread the word. Having seen the final result last night, I can only say that Snakes On A Plane didn’t do very well basically because it isn’t very good as a film.

What New Line and director David R Ellis had was an extremely catchy title and enough concept to make a few really fun trailers. As a movie, it plays out with non of the suspense that such fare should have, and isn’t really “so bad it’s good” as just plain bad. It’s a B-movie, of course, but then so was Ellis’ Cellular and his Final Destination sequel, and they played just fine. With SoaP, all directorial sense seems to have vacated him, and the movie becomes a series of scenes rather than an actual story that builds to any sort of climax. As the nominal star, Sam Jackson phones in a tired and somewhat bored performance, and in the last few minutes of the movie, he doesn’t even do anything. Bringing it back to animation (okay, it’s a stretch!), and the CGI snakes of Snakes are poor too, without hardly any screen time given to setting up any of them as potential “villains” (that python looked pretty mean for the 20 seconds we saw of it).

It actually reminded me of a really expensive DTV, something that I wouldn’t have been surprised to come out of Warner’s new Raw Feed unit. With clunky dialog, a might-as-well-not-be-there bad guy, Snakes ultimately disappoints, even accounting for the considerable cheese factor. I wouldn’t say it was as unintentionally hysterical as Irwin Allen’s legendary bee-fest bomb The Swarm, but Snakes On A Plane isn’t as clever – or fun – as it thinks it is, or should be.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll be back with regular updates again from Monday! – Ben.