DVD REVIEW: ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Available on DVD and Blu-ray July 1
(Image and text courtesy of WDHSE)

To celebrate the release of Alice in Wonderland to Disney DVD and Blu-ray July 1 2010, Australia’s official Alice in Wonderland DVD Ambassador, Donny Galella, a Sydney based designer of clothes and headwear under his self titled fashion label ‘GALELLA’ (launched in mid 2004), has created 10 Top Hat Tips that will make the Mad Hatter proud.

1. A hat is the ultimate accessory to top off your look. Because of its visibility (clearly seen at eye-level), a great hat can really finish off your outfit and make the strongest statement of all the accessory options. Allow your hat to project your personality and sense of style. Most importantly a hat should frame your face.

2. The basic rule for hats over the seasons is: for Autumn/Winter – your hat should be felt or wool based and for Spring/Summer – straw, sinnamay or fabric based hats. Fascinators and headbands can be worn all year round.

3. There are loads of hat styles, the most popular styles are: pillboxes, cloches, berets, trilbys, turbans, floppy brimmed styles and a fusion style called ‘Hatinators’ (a cross between a hat and a fascinator). If you want a style that will last you forever, you can’t go past the classic elegance of a pillbox style hat. Often worn by the eternally chic Jackie O and Audrey Hepburn.

4. Choosing a hat style to suit your face shape. If you have a strong angular face (such as Sarah Jessica Parker), try wear rounded style hats. If you have a rounded face (such a Jennifer Hudson), then choose a hat with angular lines or a broad brim such as a trilby. Heart shaped faces suit most style hats, especially styles that sit high on the head. Narrow faces need a full rounded crown, such as a cloche. Long faces (such as Tori Spelling) need some softness, so something feathery would be ideal.

5.Choose a style to bring out your features or detract others. Shorter people can use tall hats (with a tall brim or high feathers) to make them look taller. If you have blue or green eyes, then choosing a hat with peacock feathers for example will highlight your eyes. If like the ‘Red Queen’ if you have a large forehead, then choose a hat with a large brim.

6. Hat colours – keep your hair colour in mind. If you’re a brunette or have black hair, then a dark coloured hat will blend in with your hair and not stand out. To make more of a visual impact try choosing a coloured hat that will stand out.

7. Look after you hats by investing in hat boxes when you store them away. Try filling the hat with tissue paper, as this will help prevent the crown from crushing. A lint brush is a handy tool, to take off the dust.

8. To find the perfect hat: you can buy one from a good department store, a hat shop, get one made by a milliner, vintage shops or have a ‘hat swap’ party with your friends. It’s a great get together for the girls, and you all go home with a new hat. Accessory shops often have seasonal hats that are very affordable.

9. The great ‘Fascinator debate’ – each year I get asked if the fascinator is in vogue. Fascinators are the “L plate” of headwear; they’re great for your first or second race meet. Once you’ve mastered the fascinator try and progress to a hat. It’s better to wear a fascinator, rather than nothing on your head at all.

10. Don’t over accessorise, let your hat do all the talking. When wearing a statement hat, don’t overdo the jewellery and accessories. Definitely don’t pair a hat with a big pair of earrings, the will be way too over the top.

Original Alice In Wonderland review
http://thelennoxfiles.blogspot.com/2010/03/film-review-alice-in-wonderland.html

FILM REVIEW: TOY STORY 3

Pixar/Walt Disney Studio Films
Now Showing (in 2D and 3D)

Toy Story, the first computer animated film, was released into cinemas in 1995 and who knew that 15 years later Pixar would have become the most successful animation studio in the world, producing not just the best animated features but some of the best features full stop. I certainly would have bought shares in the company had I known then what I know now (their films have accumulated a worldwide box office in excess of $5b).

I was 20 in 1995 and in my second year of university. I had put aside most childish things but Toy Story allowed anyone, regardless of age (gender, religion), to embrace their inner child. Toy Story 3 begins with Andy, the child from the first two films and owner of the gang of toys we have come to know and love over the past decade and a half, preparing to leave for college. His toys, led by Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and 2IC Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), are anxious: he hasn't played with them for years and with Andy preparing to leave their future is either the attic, donation or the dump.

As luck – or misunderstanding – would have it, the toys are donated to Sunnyside, a day care centre where the promise of being played with forever more sounds too good to refuse. And too good to be true: anyone knows that a place with sunny in the title can't be all sunshine, just ask Sunnydale resident Buffy Summers. But I digress.

Unlike his friends, Woody decides to make his way back to Andy but learns the secrets of Sunnyside from a trio of toys, including a classically trained hedgehog named Mr Prickelpants (delightfully voiced by ex-James Bond Timothy Dalton), belonging to Bonnie, one of the daycare centre's pupils.

So Toy Story 3 becomes a prison escape film, and a little darker in tone than its predecessors. Screenwriter Michael Arndt, an Oscar winner for Little Miss Sunshine, is new to the Pixar fold but the studio's team of directors have ensured that the enterprise has not been compromised; story, and characters with heart, have always been key to the success of Pixar's films and while a sequel to a sequel, and shot in 3D (which I'm assuming has more to do with the bean counters at the House of Mouse than with those at Pixar), Toy Story 3 is a worthy entry in the Pixar canon and an almost perfect end to the trilogy.

There are some people who have never lived in a world without Woody, Buzz, Jessie the cowgirl, Mr and Mrs Potato Head, Rex et al, and saying goodbye won't be easy. Nor will it be for those of us who have known and loved them for 15 years.

It certainly elicited my most emotional response to any of the Toy Story films, and indeed any film this year: I'll admit it, I cried liked a baby for the final 10 or so minutes. For for all its fun and excitement, this third and final installment is about letting go, saying goodbye and, so as not to end on a downer, new beginnings.

DVD REVIEWS: GET ANIMATED

Time magazine named three animated features as the best three films of 2009. Not surprisingly, Pixar's Up, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature as well as landing among the 10 Best Picture nominees, was one of the three. That it wasn't the #1 choice was a surprise.

FANTASTIC MR FOX
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson's idiosyncratic take on the Roald Dahl classic, was Time's #3 choice (and an Animated Feature Oscar nominee) and it's easy to see why. As charming as its eponymous hero (voiced by who else but George Clooney), who takes up the straight life when his wife (Meryl Streep) becomes pregnant but then falls back into old ways just as his son (Jason Schwartzman) discovers teenage angst, Fantastic Mr Fox is a delightful caper film that is as faithful to its source material as need be while being every inch a Wes Anderson film, from character neuroses to wardrobe choices. The old fashioned stop motion makes it even more, dare I say it, charming.
http://thelennoxfiles.blogspot.com/2010/01/film-review-fantastic-mr-fox.html


THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

Time's #1 choice as the best film of the year was even more of a surprise, not that The Princess and the Frog, Disney first 2D (non CG) animated film in seven years, is an unworthy selection. In going back to 2D, Disney seemed to have rediscovered the magic that made their animated features of the early '90s – Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King – such delights. There are musical numbers in keeping with the story's setting – New Orleans – which wouldn't be out of place on Broadway but not necessarily as showtune-y as late '90s Disney efforts (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan). There's also a sense of fun that was missing from those films.
http://thelennoxfiles.blogspot.com/2010/01/film-review-princess-and-frog.html

FILM REVIEW: I AM LOVE

Rialto Distribution
Now Showing

The opening credits of Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love positively scream melodrama: 1950s Hollywood melodrama to be precise. An insistent and lush yet foreboding score, and even the font chosen for the titles all hark back to those women's pictures of old Hollywood, the ones which Todd Haynes paid such perfect homage to in his 2002 film, Far From Heaven.

Guadagnino doesn't succeed quite as well Haynes for while the ingredients are there – wealth, beautiful things, hidden emotions, forbidden love – the drama is sorely lacking, as though in transporting the genre to modern day Milan, something has been lost in the translation.

That's no fault of leading lady Tilda Swinton who's as engaging and enigmatic as ever, playing the young matriarch of a Italian textile family. Emma (Swinton) is originally from Russia which explains her outsider status within the Recchi family as well as her halting Italian (although props to Swinton who learnt to speak Italian with a Russian accent specifically for this role). It's when Emma learns of her daughter's secret love and soon embarks on an affair of her own that the wheels of inevitable tragedy are set in motion.

Sadly, those wheels move at an awfully languid pace making the two hour film feel much longer. Yes it's beautiful to look at and adorned throughout with cinematic references, both of the aforementioned era of Hollywood as well as Italian cinema. But beauty – and enjoyment – is in the eye of the beholder, and this reviewer needs more than pretty things to sustain his interest. Unfortunately, Tilda Swinton alone simply wasn't enough.