Dish of the Day
Just some film musings of a more succinct, spontaneous and sometimes seditious nature:
Friday, June 23, 2023
Today’s “Dish of the Day” has a review of Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan adventure fantasy Hook (1991) inspired by a post in one of the film related Facebook chat rooms. This includes the Cinema Cafe group (all readers are encouraged to join here).
Hook (1991)
Hook represents the famous director at his lowest point, showing off all of his worst juvenile indulgences in such a way as to make them more apparent in his other films. He said he made it for kids. Who was he trying to reach, the five and under demographic? Besides, adults buy the tickets. Can’t we relate to even a little of what we’ve paid for? Why is Hook Steven Spielberg's least successful effort of cinematic storytelling? It is mainly because all of the characters, young and old, act like spoiled brats with no identifiable grownup traits between them. It's pitched at such a kiddie level, the poetic fantasy of the story is trashed like food thrown by an infant it doesn’t want. Basic storytelling principles are abandoned such as who's trying to get what from whom and why. If any discernible motives are established, they are sidelined by some little scrape, test, or silly game… all of which are accompanied by a heavy heaping of sentimental slop. Even extreme good and bad character traits become indistinguishable from one another. Hook has a stupefying lack of maturity as it jumps around from one unintelligible goal to another. The intentional infantilism is signalled from the outset when an already self-absorbed adult Peter Pan (hammed up of course by, only here a completely unfunny, Robin Williams) has to somehow further regress in order to save his kids. None of this would matter much but when we see so many of the director's regressions embraced in one film, along with the requisite emotional hand-wringing and pandering at its zenith, the cumulative effect is, at least for myself, like the aftereffect of eating bags of candy: nauseating. Finally, all of this takes place in a mostly set-bound constrictive location (if only “Neverland” had lived up to its namesake) that further broadsides whatever minute remnants of imagination that might have been left. My advice for those 10 years and over: shut your eyes and block out everything except John Williams’ imaginative music.
All responses are not only welcomed but encouraged in the comments section below.
Hope to see you tomorrow.
A.G.