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Dylan wrote:I'm surprised so many are so disappointed that this doesn't look or seem "serious" enough.

I don't think anyone's disappointed the movie doesn't seem serious enough, more surprised that the marketing makes the film appear less serious than initial reviews and plot synopses seemed to indicate.

Dylan wrote: ...And for the record, I prefer the new poster - the font is ten million times better (albeit, it is the Walt Disney signature font) & there's something perverse about a blood-soaked Mickey Mouse hand. The art for the older poster is very good & reminds me a bit of the old Disney Something Wicked This Way Comes poster, but I think the new art cuts deeper into my own fascination for this project.

I'm okay with the new poster, but the cool thing about the original is that it mimics the style of posters found around the Disney parks that promote rides and theme areas.

For those in Philadelphia, Escape from Tomorrow will screen at the Trocadero on Sunday, October 20. It appears to be the new cut of the film.

How are films at the Troc? Never been for anything other than a GA standing room concert, doesn't seem like it'd be the best place to see a movie... do they just put down folding chairs or something?

They will put out folding chairs downstairs if they expect a large crowd, but for nearly all the screenings I've attended the audience was seated entirely in the balcony. It's a nice space, but sometimes the actual viewing experience is hindered by an overly-boisterous crowd. I had to leave midway through Fantastic Mr. Fox because the audio was drowned out.

Hm, that doesn't sound good. Is this getting an actual release, or just one screening per city?

The Laemmele chain of arthouses in Los Angeles have been advertising this film, so it looks like it's getting an actual release.

mfunk9786 wrote:Hm, that doesn't sound good. Is this getting an actual release, or just one screening per city?

It's getting a regular theatrical run in Denver at the Sie FilmCenter beginning October 11.

Superswede11 wrote:I saw this film at Ebertfest earlier this year and I had similar expectations walking into the film. It starts out with an ingenious idea and is quite spooky until about 45 minutes in. Then it gets silly and starts to drag on and on. The last half hour becomes ridiculous to the point of idiocy. So to answer, it's not a serious film at all. It seems like it started out that way then they abandoned that idea fairly quickly. And yes they do blur out all kinda of logos and other trademarked material but most of the time it's done ironically

Saw this streaming in HD from an iTunes rental via my Apple TV. Have to agree with Superswede. I wanted to like this way more than I did. By the end it was one of the longer 90 minutes I've spent watching a film. The film has all kinds of ideas and audacity. But seemingly no filter or controlling intelligence. The more that's revealed about what's actually going on beneath the surface of things -- even if the consensus reality status of what we see is questionable -- the less interesting the film gets. There are too many repeated beats and images and not enough narrative or emotional progression for any of the characters. Decent performances by most of the cast are undercut by off-the-wall scripting. And the fearless use of Disney theme parks and resorts as surreptitious shooting locations is blunted by a number of shitty looking, poorly matching green-screen sequences intercut with the more raw and real documentary footage. The most compelling part of the viewing experience for me after a while became thinking about exactly how they got this or that shot, precisely how many times they would have needed to ride a given ride to get all the coverage they used in the final cut. The soundtrack is the biggest technical surprise, especially the ease with which Disney standards are successfully substituted with not so much sound-alike tracks as cues that feel like the familiar but copyright-prohibited tunes such as "It's a Small World." The biggest disappointment is the half-formed banality of what little the film ultimately has to say about Disney, about the Disneyfication and theme-parking of the American vacation and dream. It's all so vaguely, facilely subversive: "Look, unhappy people in the happiest place on earth! " In the end, given how difficult any film is to make -- particularly the logistics involved in shooting and cutting this one so secretly -- you wonder why the director went to all that trouble.

The soundtrack is the biggest technical surprise, especially the ease with which Disney standards are successfully substituted with not so much sound-alike tracks as cues that feel like the familiar but copyright-prohibited tunes such as "It's a Small World."

It was a wonderful idea to use old Ferrante and Teicher recordings to replace the Walt Disney source music. It brings to the setting a distinctly 1950s/60s instrumental (and string-laden!) whimsy of the sort popularized by Henry Mancini (and yes, Ferrante and Teicher or Ray Coniff or Nelson Riddle or name your arranger & yes I happen to adore all of this stuff). As I've already pointed out earlier in the thread, the original score is grand & romantic & gorgeous, and actually sounds like it came straight out of a 1980's family movie (except for a - for me - distracting use of a cue from Bernard Herrmann's Fahrenheit 451).

This was my most anticipated film of the year but I have to side with the "disappointed" camp. The first half is very good. The footage is amazing. The basic situation is (at times delightfully) hellish and intensely evocative of what is perhaps a universal kind of nightmare. The candid digital photography in itself is pretty wonderful - lots of lovely, stark compositions & even the out of focus DV shots were interesting & contrary to what many are saying (here and elsewhere) I thought some of the rear screen projection was fun too. The pursuit of the French girls is almost Hitchcockian and for a while

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the film sort of pulls off having them represent a kind of longing, but it doesn't go anywhere with that idea and in the end does seem more like middle aged ogling instead. American Beauty and Death in Venice this isn't

There isn't much of a (or any?) script but what is shown of the family at the beginning and through mere behavior/gestures/nuances was enough to get me to care.

Okay, the first half is very interesting and - yes - not really like anything I'd seen before. What it seemed to be building up to was this profound, nightmarish Death in Venice kind of story at Disney World. That's unique, and inspired.

But about halfway through, it starts to lose its way, first by introducing raunchiness and sexual/bathroom humor into the mix - which really just seemed jarring and went against the perfectly longing, spooky & nightmarishly whimsical tone that was already established. And yes, as more scenes play out - some of them interesting - rather than make the film richer and more fascinating/creepy it just becomes unfocused, meandering, and slowly starts to drown into nonsense until it's very clear nothing's adding up. Then we have a "finale" that over-indulges in the aforementioned raunchiness and bathroom humor that already didn't work earlier & we're led into a senseless, "wtf?" conclusion.

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I think this would've been a lot better had the Disney setting just been the first half of the movie, then taking the rest of the situation into another setting, perhaps even back to the family's home. The whole science fiction/robots/the French are evil/the flu/was it all a dream? nonsense should've stayed out and it really should've stuck with the kidnapping "witch" who was actually interesting. But the "witch" has nothing to do with the science fiction or robots, or the flu, or the evil rides. And I can respect and even love just having a lot of random spookies and strangeness come in, but the impression is one of in-your-face randominity and even on that level it doesn't form a cohesive funhouse of terrors. It's just a bunch of stuff happening that doesn't matter, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Then when it's all out of ideas we have our protagonist on the shitter Dumb and Dumber style, which for me just threw [or shat] the previous 85 minutes out of the window [or down the toilet].

Meanwhile, while this movie has been bandied about as being "low budget," other than the guerilla aspect it doesn't really seem like it- the post-production process [which had to have been arduous and complicated with a lot of looping, post-synching, tweaking the digital footage, etc.] was done entirely out of the country & the original music was performed by The Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra, one of the greatest and most expensive orchestras in the country & even a lot of Hollywood movies can't afford to record with them or any other LA orchestra these days due to outstanding fees (most scores are now recorded in places like Prague to save costs). There had to have been more money behind this than what's being talked about. Not that it really matters, I just thought it was interesting. The fact that the production seems a lot more expensive than what the press releases suggest does speak to this entire project being & turning out much more like a big gimmick than anything else, though.

All that said, there was enough here to show that the director really does have something though, and I will certainly watch Randy Moore's next movie. He has guts and imagination, and he's clearly sensitive to more old fashioned film music which is refreshing. For a debut movie it's certainly ambitious and unique if not all that good.

Sadly, much more interesting as a concept than in execution.

In this "Anatomy of a Scene" video from the New York Times website, Moore comments that he wanted the green-screen shots to look more like 50s rear-projection process shots, but the Korean company handling the effects tried to make the composites look too seamless for Moore's liking.

So is that a description of a hiccup in the collaboration process that eventually got ironed out or a lame excuse for the end product he's semi-disavowing? Though it would still look shitty, I'd buy it more if there were some rhyme or reason to exactly when and how he cuts to this footage. Some of the scenes shot this way are obviously meant to be a little heightened or surreal. Yet others just seem like things he couldn't get or wouldn't dare to stage in the parks. A few others like combinations of these motivations. And others still like pick-up shots he wasn't willing to return to the parks for.

Could be a lame excuse, but at least he was being forthright about them being "obvious green-screen shots" instead of pretending everything was shot on location (which would better fit the behind-the-scenes story the PR machine has been pushing).

In this "Anatomy of a Scene" video from the New York Times website, Moore comments that he wanted the green-screen shots to look more like 50s rear-projection process shots

Based on Moore's technical direction of the project (like using Ferrante and Teicher recordings) as I was watching the film I did take these shots as having intended to look like rear screen projection rather and being some technical shortcut due to not getting enough footage (or something). And yes, the technique here is very The Birds-looking in a few shots, but in most shots it doesn't retain the artifice of vintage rear screen and does look more a shortcut due to a tech limitation (even though I was certain during the viewing that this wasn't the intended effect).

but the Korean company handling the effects tried to make the composites look too seamless for Moore's liking

I was thinking that it might be something like this. I've heard similar stories about a filmmaker who wanted a particular technique in his/her film to look "vintage" but this direction was misunderstood by the company actually doing the effects, who ended up making the desired "vintage" effect (title sequence, animation, etc.) look slick and contemporary instead.

If one desires a film to have vintage effects technique(s) and you hire a company to carry it out I believe the director really needs to be present during most of its creation. While who you've hired is more-than likely completely capable of achieving the intended effect, what you're asking for is something to be done in a very specific older way that (more or less) nobody is doing (and isn't exactly taught to do) anymore, so this requires a lot more direction/input and perhaps even research. Think of the (wonderful!) "1970's" Dimension logo that opens Grindhouse - in order to get somebody to create something like that you really need to be there to direct the creation or else it will end up looking like a standard After Effects animation. I do realize that the failings of the "rear screen" shots here that don't work may have been more of a language barrier than anything else though.

I don't know what to spoiler-tag, so I'll just do everything since I don't want to ruin anything.

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What a strange movie, that's really all I can think of as a descriptor for this. There are a bunch of half-formed sci-fi/fantasy ideas and it's constantly switching between the protagonist Jim's sexual daydreams and a fantasy-injected exposé of Disney's underbelly. The problem is that lust-filled Jim wanders through this underbelly without ever really engaging in it. There's a lot of hints at something going on, but all of this is thrown in like it's an afterthought. Jim's sexual misadventures occupy most of the film, but they don't amount to anything more than a middle-aged man's fantasies. What's most disappointing is that these fantasies are the most fleshed-out aspect of the film, and they amount to little more than Jim staring mouth agape at teenagers and dragging his kids along so he can stare some more. Everything that could be interesting is tossed aside as soon it appears on screen. Why is there a cyborg? What does he mean about Jim's imagination? Who are these Parisian girls? I feel like I just watched an episode of Lost, a lot of questions with no answers.

Strangeness for strangeness's sake is all well and good, all I'm asking is that these ideas of Disney as this sinister place be fleshed out in some comprehensible fashion. Simply pasting grotesque faces and darkened eyes onto theme park figurines and patrons doesn't make for much of a film. I get a strong feeling that Moore made this just so he could yell "Hey, look! I made Disney World into this crazy nightmare, and did it without their permission!" If the only point of the movie was to make a film without Disney's permission and cast the park in a bad light, mission accomplished I guess. But as warren oates says, it would have been so much better if Moore had used this opportunity to mount some criticism of Disney or America's theme park obsession, or just do something with it. I don't know, maybe the production made it difficult for Moore and company to expand on these ideas because of the filming circumstances so they just pieced together the footage they could use. Still, for the entirety of the film I was waiting to see how everything would come together and it just threw more half-formed craziness my way.

I did like how some of these half-formed concepts contributed to this other, more sinister Disney World. The former princess who crushed a child and now lives as a witch kidnapping children and living out her princess fantasies. The use of the Disney princesses for the pleasure of Japanese businessmen. But these were really just throwaway bits. If these had formed a more cohesive whole, with Jim navigating between the park's cruel and unsavory patrons/employees, then I'd be ready to hand out more praise. But as it is now, all I can do is shrug my shoulders and hope Moore can put out something better next time.