The Disney Parks Live-Entertainment Bracket -- Round One, Day Five

I hope the Force is strong with you all today.

Hello, friends, and welcome to Friday. I don’t know about you, but it has been an exceedingly long and packed week for me. Though the brackets never sleep, I cannot wait for the weekend. The week’s length has been such that I barely had time to enjoy or even argue too deeply about the big announcement yesterday of the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, or think too much about the trailer for a fifth Indiana Jones movie, which seemed like an impossibility just a few years ago.

So you get to read those thoughts first! (Very brief ones, I promise.) First, the S&S poll. I would be lying if I said I agreed with the top 10 — while the invite to vote in the poll was not extended my way, my personal choices would have been different. And my dirty secret is that I have not yet seen Jeanne Dielman, a film I’ve known for a while I needed to make time for but simply hadn’t. Something to rectify!

I guess that’s the attitude I have overall: like most lists that I myself did not create, I don’t agree with it in full, but I think there are many excellent films selected, and some others that I want to visit for the first time. (While I get the wariness of anything super-recent being on the list, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of the best films of the 21st century, and absolutely deserves to be among the top 100 of all time. I don’t get why that film is being taken down a peg or two by some ninnies on Twitter. Great movie. If you haven’t seen it, you should.)

Shorter thoughts on the Indiana Jones trailer: silly subtitle, and I am so goddamn exhausted with movie trailers slowing down classic themes for no good reason. (The Super Mario trailer is dumb enough without then slowing down the game theme. But it does!) Just stop it! No one likes that! The trailer itself looks OK enough, but while I am no great fan of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I am less inclined to get stoked for an Indiana Jones movie without Steven Spielberg as director. But we’ll see.

Anyway. Brackets! Polls! I have four of them today, and they’re right after this button that you should click if you have yet to subscribe to the newsletter!

(1) Fantasmic (WDW) vs. (16) Guardians of the Galaxy: Dance Off: Listen, there’s no world in which I would vote for the Dance Off live “show”. (I love the original Guardians of the Galaxy as much as I love any MCU movie — which is to say, “I mostly like it a lot” — but the show, such as it is, is very silly to me.) So the obvious answer will be my choice.

(8) Magical vs. (9) Up! A Great Bird Adventure: I’m voting here for Up! A Great Bird Adventure, and it’s largely for shaky nostalgic reasons. A long time ago, roughly a decade-plus, this Animal Kingdom show was called Flights of Wonder. (Or, rather, there was a similar bird-themed show called Flights of Wonder in which Cast Members showed off various avian creatures.) I miss that show a lot — it was a lot of fun to watch amidst the rest of the genuinely impressive menagerie of animals in the Orlando park. I haven’t seen Up! A Great Bird Adventure, but I remember its predecessor well enough to side with it here. (Like I said: shaky nostalgic reasons.)

(4) Paint the Night vs. (13) Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple: Sometimes, you have to stick with the reliable as opposed to the risky. Here’s what I mean: I’ve seen both the Paint the Night parade and the performances, such as they are, of Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple (at Disneyland only). Paint the Night, being a nighttime parade, is something where you know what you’re going to get. Notwithstanding some kind of flub or mess-up with a parade float, the show is the show is the show.

Jedi Training was always very much reliant on the unexpected: would one of the selected kids perform surprisingly well in the climactic lightsaber battle against either Kylo Ren or Darth Vader? (Ignore the wonky timelines.) Or would they understandably freak out, especially since they had become part of a live show? Jedi Training could be charming and funny in its way, but it was never a guarantee. So I vote for Paint the Night.

(5) Believe in Holiday Magic vs. (12) Pixar Philharmonic: Holiday fireworks are a special thing, friends. It’s that time of year anyway, so how could I not vote for holiday magic? I believe in it! I do!

Just One More Thing…

Compared to last week, my work has been a lot less omnipresent this week! (That’s the life of the freelancer.) Just one thing, truly, up this week: my review of Willow, a TV show that is guaranteed to pleased my old friend Gabe Bucsko, who is legitimately the only person I know who loves the 1988 film directed by Ron Howard.

I’ve seen the movie, and it’s…y’know, OK. I’ve also seen the first seven of eight episodes of the Disney+ sequel series, and it’s…uh…less than OK. It’s got some decent performances, it’s well-shot, its story is uncomplicated enough to follow, and it also is mired with baffling modern choices that are still making me scratch my head. Buyer beware.