This Week’s Underappreciated Movies

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

core

Windy’s Pick of the Week: The Core

This is my go to “over the top sci fi disaster movie”. You don’t have a whole category full of “over the top sci fi disaster movies”?

How do you LIVE??!

Aaron Eckhart proves that he is so charming and charismatic, you’ll forgive the ridiculous science he is spouting. Alfre Woodard has so much screen presence, it’ll make you start a petition to get her more roles. But best of all – STANLEY TUCCI. And a plot so wrong that it takes three left turns and becomes a RIGHT.

Plot: The earth’s core has stopped spinning and we’re all dead unless our intrepid heroes travel to the center of the earth and jump start the core spinning again.

See? Told you.

the-emperors-new-groove

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: The Emperor’s New Groove

BOOM, BABY. This may be the only Disney feature that I love down to the very core of my being. It baffles me that Disney still has no clue what a gem this thing was.

Emperor’s New Groove scraps nearly all of the Disney tropes and instead serves up something that may have been the result of the creators getting high and watching a bunch of Warner Brothers’ animated shorts and Crosby/Hope road movies. Here we have David Spade in a role that is actually well-crafted to his usually-annoying presence, Patrick Warburton as a dunderheaded henchman, John Goodman being John Goodman, and the ever-amazing EARTHA KITT. Also present: the first pregnant woman ever seen in a Disney animated feature, llamas, and Tom Jones.

I worked many years at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, and during my tenure there, I must have watched this film over fifty times. We kept a tape of it in the back for whenever we couldn’t stand the other movies playing in the store. I can attest that it never, ever gets old.

Why does Disney pretend this film doesn’t exist? By all accounts, it doesn’t make sense.

(By the way, I did an entire podcast about this film over at A Reel Education. If you want to learn more about this oddball film, have a listen!)

1 comment

  1. As a parent of little kids, I learned that there’s a good handful of spin-off property from Emperor’s New Groove, being a sequel (Kronk’s New Groove) and a TV show that ran for two seasons (Emperor’s New School). And while neither of those capture the absolute genius of the original movie, it’s worth noting that almost all the original cast members (except Spade) return to their roles.

    I think you’re right. Disney may not know what to do with that success, but they tried. It was a lightning strike that they can’t wholly replicate. If anything, it’s changed their ideas about plucky humor. I think a lot of the tactile humor in New Groove helped shape later features like Tangled into being a little more loose with the slapstick comedy.

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