A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Martin's script and performance. Schepsi's directing. Nice supporting cast. Cons:  Predictable in spots. Otherwise, none. It's hard to believe that 31 years have passed since Columbia Pictures (now part of Sony's multimedia empire) first released director Fred Schepsi's Roxanne, a gentle and offbeat adaptation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac penned by its leading man, Steve Martin. I've never seen either Rostand's play on stage or the straightforward movie adaptation which starred Jose Ferrer back in the 1950s, but this 1987 romantic comedy takes its basic plot of an intelligent, romantic poet-swordsman who falls in love with a beautiful woman and attempts to court her despite having a longer than normal nose and updates it to 1980s America as a vehicle for Martin ( The Jerk, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid ) and the lovely Darryl Hannah as the titular love interest, Roxanne. In Martin and Schepsi's tale, the guy ...

Pros:  Seven new segments and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, nice mix of music Cons:  Would one host have been better than many? Jury is still out on that one In the late 1930s, Walt Disney and his team of animators decided to revive interest in Mickey Mouse - whose popularity was being eroded by his fellow Disney stable mate Donald Duck - by featuring the beloved rodent in a fully animated version of the Goethe-Dukas fantasy  The Sorcerer's Apprentice . Envisioned originally as a stand-alone "upgrade" of the then-popular "Silly Symphonies" shorts, this project grew in ambition and scale once the eminent conductor Leopold Stokowski got involved (he volunteered his services as conductor for  The Sorcerer's Apprentice ); from one relatively short (nine minutes or so) cartoon to a feature-length animated film featuring eight different visual interpretations of classical music pieces from at least three different eras: Baroque, Romantic and Moder...