2000: The Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Eartha Kitt in "The Emperor's New Groove"

Team Experience is revisiting the movies of 2000 as we approach Thursday's Smackdown

by Nick Taylor

Is it even worth arguing that The Emperor’s New Groove is the last great animated comedy Disney has made? They’ve certainly made funny movies since then, but have they done anything as purely interested in being funny, let alone made a film that finds so many different ways to be that? Especially given the hellish status of its production history and patently lower budget as a result of all that mess, the success of The Emperor's New Groove is legitimately miraculous (I will not be going over that fraught history in any detail here, but please do check out The Sweatbox, the documentary of the production made by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler). Yes, sometimes it can feel a bit cheap if you look too close or stare too long, but the buoyant colors and unabashedly cartoony style give its absurd silliness exactly the right spring in its step. It’s the film the comedic parts of Hercules wishes it could be, or if the Robin Williams parts of were Aladdin stretched into a whole feature, nailing a culture and era-specific setting and form stylized art that’s somehow in sync with a thoroughly modern comedic sensibility. Coming in at a brisk 78 minutes, you get the feeling of a film that’s packed as many jokes into itself as possible while being exactly as long as it needs to be, walking away with an incredible laugh-per-minute ratio.

What feels even surer is that The Emperor’s New Groove has the last great villains to grace a Disney animated film since it debuted... 

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What Other Movies Should Get The Justice League Snyder Cut Treatment?

By: Christopher James

Sequel culture has led to remake culture and now... recut culture?  HBO Max recently released Zack Snyder’s four hour cut of Justice League to subscribers. Snyder left the film in 2017 in the wake of his daughter’s suicide, leaving the project in the hands of Joss Whedon. When the film was released in November, Justice League was savaged by critics and audiences alike. The two hour film had very little character development, laughable dialogue, an unmemorable villain, bad CGI and made very little sense. Sequel culture has led to remake culture and now to recut culture of movies of the recent past.

While we prefer new movies and the classics to reworking old-IP, why not join in on the fun and ponder the alternate realities of what could’ve been had Justice League been 4 hours or had Mrs. Doubtfire been rated R? If streamers have hoards of IP and buckets of money, what other cuts of old movies should they bring to life?

Here are ten suggestions…

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The Emperor's New Link(s)

Heads up! At Movie City News the first "Gurus of Gold" charts are up with yours truly along with several other pundits - apparently I'm the only one nervous about Riz Ahmed's Oscar prospects and the one who is most certain about One Night in Miami's prospects. Extremely grossed out that Aaron Sorkin makes the top five in Best Director. Yes, he's a talented writer but come on now... that's a different skill set.

• Vulture an oral history of the making of The Emperor's New Groove
• Variety 'Actors on Actors' gets Steven Yeun and Riz Ahmed talking
• Digital Spy on WandaVision's use of tv tropes to give away its secrets 

Amazing cast for HBO miniseries, new Kelly Reichardt, and terrifying Pee Wee after the jump...

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Links

Tik Tok "Pull the lever, Kronk" - a genius bit of Emperor's New Groove lipsyncing
Hulu Lady in a Cage - don't forget to watch as we're discussing it on Monday night. And boy is there a lot to discuss!
Matt Reeves pics of the new Batmobile in The Batman (2021)
Coming Soon Superhero Christian Bale will now be a supervillain. He's facing off with Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson in Thor: Love and Thunder (2021)...

More after the jump including Jacob Elordi, SXSW, The Eternals, Twenties, Chris Evans, and more...

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I Have Altered The Auteur, Pray I Do Not Alter It Further

by Salim Garami

What's good? This is opening weekend for Solo: A Star Wars Story, a Disney/Lucasfilm production that saw a bit of behind-the-scenes drama. It's hardly the first production of the space opera franchise to be so contentious: Rogue One had Tony Gilroy take over post-production in lieu of director Gareth Edwards and the still in-production Star Wars Episode IX interrupted its development when Colin Trevorrow stepped down as director to J.J. Abrams, returning from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

After the jump, more on Solo and five films that had survived such a director change to a decent reception after the jump...

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