Author Archives: Jeff Giles

About Jeff Giles

Jeff Giles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Popdose and Dadnabbit, as well as an entertainment writer whose work can be seen at Rotten Tomatoes, Paste Magazine, and a number of other sites.

DVD Review: “Field Trips with Recess Monkey”

51OFZt9rX7L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Recess Monkey – Field Trips with Recess Monkey (2009, Monkey Mama)
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Our love for Recess Monkey has already been well documented, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t alert you to the imminent release of Field Trips with Recess Monkey, a DVD companion of sorts to the band’s most recent album, the stellar Field Trip.

For those not already in the know, Recess Monkey is a fun-loving, award-winning trio whose previous forays into kids’ music — including the aforementioned Field Trip, 2008’s Tabby Road, and others — have earned them a devoted following, as well as stacks of glowing reviews from outlets like NPR, Real Simple, and the notoriously cranky and difficult-to-please Stefan Shepherd of Zooglobble. (Just kidding. We love Stefan and he’s nothing but charming.) Field Trips with Recess Monkey is the band’s first DVD, and includes videos for four songs (“Marshmallow Farm,” “Haven’t Got a Pet Yet,” “Fort,” and the wickedly catchy “Hot Chocolate”) as well as a handful of vignettes following the Monkeys around Seattle. Continue reading

DVD Review: “Pete’s Dragon — High-Flying Edition”

51vU-U4siCL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Pete’s Dragon (High-Flying Edition) (2009, Walt Disney Studios)
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Released pretty much smack dab in the middle of Disney’s lost years, 1977’s Pete’s Dragon generally isn’t the first movie people tend to think of when they talk about the studio’s classics, and for good reason — though it was noteworthy at the time of its release as one of the few live-action/animation hybrids to grace the silver screen (1964’s Mary Poppins and 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks used similar technology, but not as extensively or seamlessly), it was also the latest example of the distance Disney had drifted from its roots. Still, 1977 represented something of a miniature renaissance for the studio, at least in the context of the relatively barren ’70s; if you count The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, a Frankenstein-style stitching of short features, three of the five features Disney released that year contained animation. Things had been worse (Superdad) and would get worse again (Condorman), and probably as a result, Pete’s Dragon has become a source of rather fond memories for the generation that grew up with it. Continue reading

DVD Review: “The Tigger Movie — Two-Disc 10th Anniversary Edition”

61dp8eucgtL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]The Tigger Movie: Two-Disc 10th Anniversary Edition (2009, Disney)
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Nobody raids the vaults like Disney. Even now, in the era of the DVD’s death spiral, most studios refrain from pathologically reissuing catalog titles — particularly those that were never terribly popular in the first place — but Uncle Walt’s house has always treated everything it’s ever done (or almost everything, anyway) like a timeless classic. Which is why you shouldn’t raise your eyebrows (but probably will anyway, if you’re anything like me) at the double-disc 10th anniversary edition of The Tigger Movie, an enjoyable trifle that Disney sort of half-heartedly shooed into theaters roughly a decade ago. Part of a sort of low-profile renaissance for A.A. Milne’s beloved characters at the studio, The Tigger Movie is a kissing cousin to Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, a more fleshed-out (and less Tigger-centric) adorable lesson in things like acceptance, friendship, and personal identity. Where Tigger Too mainly revolved around Rabbit’s perennial annoyance with Tigger’s brain-damaged antics, The Tigger Movie puts the bouncy-tailed wonder in pursuit of the family he’s certain is out there — despite his famous (and, it must be said, joyous) earlier insistence that he was the only one of his kind. Continue reading