Monday at the Movies - September 1, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Now that we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, I can admit that I was in Disney World the past two weeks... so in recognition of that fact, let’s look at a movie covertly filmed in The Cinema King’s favorite vacation destination!

Escape from Tomorrow (2013) – More an experience than a movie, Escape from Tomorrow is on the one hand a David Lynch-esque narrative about family man Jim White (Roy Abramsohn) and his slow descent into madness after losing his job while on vacation with his family at Disney World.  This film is oddly compelling, a surreal journey through the Happiest Place on Earth as seen by a man with a detaching grasp on sanity.  It’s weird, in a puzzle-box kind of way, but the audience’s attempts to put the pieces together never really come to fruition; the more memorable miscellaneous pieces – like the mysterious cat flu, the shady scientist operating beneath Spaceship Earth, and the deranged princess-turned-abductor – never really coalesce into a unified statement.  Eraserhead it isn’t, though it’s trying very hard to be.  For me, the more interesting element of Escape from Tomorrow is not the bizarre (and often unintentionally funny) plot of the film; I’d recommend seeing the film more on the grounds of director Randy Moore’s somewhat remarkable achievement of surreptitious filming on Disney grounds.  Indeed, it’s more engaging to watch the film as a frequent tourist, pinpointing where shots were filmed (especially when the shooting location changes between Disneyland in Anaheim and Disney World in Orlando, while the narrative setting remains consistent).  It’s more fun to think about how Moore accomplished certain shots, where and when he had to assemble a clandestine cast and (I’m guessing minimal) crew, and where he had to cheat using mock-ups, both practical and computer-generated.  There are intriguingly strange setpieces, as when the family rides it’s a small world amid an array of demonic dolls and possessed children, but the film is ultimately more a technical curiosity than a narrative success, one of those films that is more fun to ponder and discuss than actually to watch.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, and don’t forget that this Sunday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month, Brosnan’s final Bond!