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Cinderelmo (1999)
Nice movie, but who's the Blue Man?
This is our two-year-old daughter's current favorite video, so we've seen it way too many times. Still, it's so well done that it's hard to mind seeing it again.
My real question here: who is the "Blue Man"? (The fellow who interacts with Grover in the opening sequence, and at other times; he appears in many Sesame Street TV skits as well.) With all his lines, he ought to be in the credits -- but he's not. Indeed, I don't even know what his official name is.
Grand Canyon (1991)
A "feel-bad" movie about Los Angeles
Okay, I only saw the thing on TV -- presumably they chopped it up a bit -- and I missed the last few minutes. I found it very engaging, partly because I was amazed to see all these very well known actors (Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, etc.) in a weird little movie which apparently never made it out here to the Midwest. I had never heard of it before. (Admittedly, I didn't see many movies in 1991.)
But I'm astonished to see someone call this a "feel-good" movie. It is filmed and paced as a sort of human interest thriller, a series of dramatic and shocking events with no common element but brutality. Whenever any of the characters is alone, anywhere outside or even in their homes, something bad always happens: they are assaulted, stabbed, shot, robbed, threatened with violence, whatever (you start to wonder why anyone would want to live in Los Angeles). Any delay is only used to raise the tension level.
Pretty soon everything, including the hollowly "happy" scenes, has a sinister, ominous cast to it. Evil and chaos are portrayed as ever-present and ever-threatening. Attempts to do good or be friendly are portrayed as clumsy, selfish or pointless, and resulting in even more unhappiness (and the characters in the movie are, almost without exception, very unhappy people). When a maniac is shown taking over a city bus and machine-gunning the driver and passengers, we take it for granted that it's part of the plot, rather than a scene from an over-the-top movie-within-a-movie.
The canyon of the title is referenced gloomily as a metaphor for how little difference the affairs of humans make in the scheme of things. I'm kind of glad I missed the "happy ending," which must have been really ludicrous, like a big smile painted on the face of a corpse.
I'd call Grand Canyon a "feel-bad" movie.