Kenny Ortega
26 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
The Goosebumps screenplay by Darren Lemke (Shrek Forever After, Jack the Giant Slayer) – with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Agent Cody Banks) credited for the screen story – borrows story and character elements from many a previous film, especially 1990s kid adventure movies like Hocus Pocus and Jumanji.
Though this isn’t the first attempt at bringing the YA horror series to the big screen (Tim Burton was attached to produce a film version in 1998 that never came to fruition), it’s a harmless slice of family entertainment that evokes the goofy humor and PG-rated scares of other Halloween classics like “Hocus Pocus.”
"Gremlins," 1993's " Hocus Pocus ," and 1995's "Jumanji"?are…
If anything, Goosebumps will serve as an ideal followup for Hocus Pocus, or Ernest Scared Stupid, or Monster Squad in future Halloween marathons.
However, I’d say it’s more like Hocus Pocus, or a horror story told by the Pitch Perfect Bellas while they sit around the campfire.
An illegal gun trade goes up in smoke to tequila lyrics, while Wright solidifies the single-best usage of Focus’ “Hocus Pocus” in all of cinema.
When Baby turns on the gang, he’s forced into an explosively violent foot-chase scored to the epic 1970 yodel-prog madness of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus, lifting me out of my seat like long-ago, visceral highs such as John Woo’s Face/Off, or Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (I’m thinking of its opening scene, another bank-job gone wrong).
For lovers of the dark, otherworldly and macabre, delighting through the 93-minute "ParaNorman" will be akin to attending a horror-themed amusement park, exploring a desolate and foreboding haunted house, and simultaneously watching 1985's "The Return of the Living Dead" and 1993's " Hocus Pocus " all rolled up into one.
Pfeiffer, playing her second shrew of the season, looks like she's enjoying herself in a part that shows off her severe beauty and her comedic prowess, but the role is a dud that seems borrowed from that Bette Midler Halloween turkey "Hocus Pocus."
Twilight has become a cultural phenomenon akin to the Harry Potter series and with the film’s release, the High School Musical movies.
Her school is even better than the High School Musical school because even though in both schools it’s like a total fantasy that everybody is so nice to each other and everyone is everyone’s best friend, here it’s a serious grownup story and not just a bunch of nice kids singing and dancing, which is okay for little kids but not for more mature kids.
"Twilight" has a few gory plot turns - mostly offscreen - and one near-sex scene that may offend a few Amish people, but the rest is maybe 33 percent less wholesome than "High School Musical."
Even Disney came a-cropper with “Newsies,” which succeeded in a later Broadway incarnation but flopped badly when it was released in 1992, and when Herbert Ross broke the mold in 1981 with a sort of anti-musical musical, “Pennies from Heaven,” the result was a masterful film that was a disaster with the public.
Here we have references to Juno (2007), Enchanted (2007), High School Musical (2006) etc., with requisite appearances by Iron Man, Batman, Hellboy, the Hulk, Beowulf, Alvin and the Chipmunks and, of course, tabloid-trash divas like Amy Winehouse and Jessica Simpson for good measure.
Baz Lurhman deserves all the credit he’s gotten for exploding the movie-musical genre with the messy but heartfelt “Moulin Rouge” ; I love Jacques Rivette’s 1995 “Haut/Bas/Fragile,” a movie too few people have had the chance to see; and I always stand up for Kenny Ortega’s much-maligned 1992 “Newsies,” a purely traditional musical with the right sense of energy and spirit.
To underline the point, screenwriter Peter Barsocchini includes a Romeo and Juliet (er, West Side Story?) balcony scene for "jock" Troy and "Einsteinette" Gabriella.
Ruby is paired with Miles for a special duet which will be performed at the end-of-semester performance, and the sparks begin to fly, with a hint of High School Musical as they sing face-to-face, which I swear is a compliment.
CODA does an excellent job of showcasing her natural abilities without ever feeling like it’s trying to be High School Musical.
It helps, too, that Jones blooms even more when she sings: choir practice alongside her designated duet partner Miles ( Sing Street’ s loveable star Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and her flamboyant tutor Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) resurrect the spirit of High School Musical and Glee while making it all feel – just about – believable.
To underline the point, screenwriter Peter Barsocchini includes a Romeo and Juliet (er, West Side Story?) balcony scene for "jock" Troy and "Einsteinette" Gabriella.
I know some folks think that timing the gunfire to the beats of Focus’s “Hocus Pocus” is a mite bit hokey—a little too cutesy—but I couldn’t disagree more.
If, on the other hand, you are looking for an agreeably silly bit of seasonal entertainment aimed squarely at viewers who are perhaps too old for "Hocus Pocus" and too young for "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "Love and Monsters" should adequately fit the bill.
Oh yeah, and a group of creatures led by Rosie the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) on the prowl, sucking the life out of kids Hocus Pocus style so they can live for centuries.
Aurora’s three color-coded fairy godmothers (renamed Knotgrass, Flittle, and Thistletwit, and played by Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, respectively) are thrown in as badly judged comic relief, but they feel more like the dotty witches of Hocus Pocus than like a reasonable part of this film’s grimmer-than-Grimm world.
Selena Gomez of Disney Channel’s “Wizards of Waverly Place’’ plays Faith, an evangelical good girl dreaming of going bad, while Ashley Benson of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars’’ and Vanessa Hudgens of Disney’s “High School Musical’’ franchise are, respectively, Brit and Candy, the soulless collegiate party rats with whom Faith hooks up.
He corralled three young graduates of well-scrubbed TV shows — Selena Gomez, from the Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, Vanessa Hudgens of Disney’s High School Musical films and Ashley Benson of the ABC Family Channel’s Pretty Little Liars — to dance around in skimpies and, two of them, to mime smoking dope and lesbonic kissing.
The fact that three of its drug-taking, girl-on-girl-action protagonists (Hudgens, Benson and Gomez) hail from squeaky-clean film and TV backgrounds, from High School Musical to the Disney Channel, is no coincidence: Korine has great fun besmirching the teen idols here, and they’re all clearly up for a little besmirchment.
Two former teen princesses on TV, The Wizards of Waverly Place's Selena Gomez and High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens, are teamed with Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine (Harmony's wife) to portray four college kids who make their way to St. Petersburg for the annual sun-sex-and-surf ritual.
So even though watching Vanessa Hudgens take an unwieldy flamethrower to her High School Musical image might be the reason you're going to see this, what you'll actually witness is the drug-warped spectacle of Korine dismantling adolescent systems of receiving and acting on cultural information.
In “Spring Breakers,” ex-Disney commodities Selena Gomez (“Wizards of Waverly Place”) and Vanessa Hudgens (“High School Musical”) star with Ashley Benson (“Pretty Little Liars”) and Korine's wife, Rachel, as college girls who hit the Florida beach seeking pure, intoxicated escape.
All those years of High School Musical goodwill, ruined by this one rotten guy.
On paper, Pitch Perfect sounds like it's one step removed from Glee or two steps removed from High School Musical.
"Pitch Perfect" is a step above flicks like "High School Musical" and the various Disney and Nickelodeon ventures featuring talented kids taking part in some form of show-biz hijinks.
Les Misérables (2012)
Directed by Tom Hooper
influenced by High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008)
Mamma Mia! (2008) took a staggering $609m at the international box-office and not far behind have been the likes of Chicago (2002) with $306m, High School Musical 3 (2008) with $252m, and Hairspray (2007) with $202m.
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Directed by Emile Ardolino
influenced High School Musical (2006), Hocus Pocus (1993)
The songs are a bit on the generic side of the teen pop idol equation, and yet they sizzle, these catchy tunes that are tailor-made to get stuck in your head and keep you humming along; director/choreographer Kenny Ortega (who previously helmed "Newsies" and served as choreographer "Dirty Dancing") makes the music jump with big, bouncy dance numbers that are such a delight to watch; and the cast is filled with youngsters who can do the singing and the dancing, yes, but they're also charming as can be.
Kenny Ortega, the choreographer of "Dirty Dancing" who turned director with "Newsies," doesn't dawdle over the material, but he doesn't manage to unify it either.