Review - The Lion King 3D

It's become all too fashionable these days to hate on 3D movies. And not completely without good reason. Many films use the technology merely as a vacuous gimmick to jack up ticket prices, and just as many more employ a relatively inexpensive post-production conversion process that can result in an image that's dim and/or distractingly cluttered. I don't consider myself an advocate of 3D movies, BUT I do make a point of championing those of them that use their medium effectively. To that end, if you must pay the extra three bucks to wear those silly glasses to any movie this year, make sure it's for The Lion King 3D, a magnificent exemplar of the potential effectivity of the post-conversion process, and indeed, for 3D in general.

Sunday Top Ten: Alan Menken songs

This past Friday marked the 62nd birthday of a man whose legacy has left a lasting impression on anyone who grew up with the Disney renaissance of the 1990s. I refer, of course, to the awesome Alan Menken, the master of melody whose tuneful compositions earned him a whopping fifteen Oscar nominations and eight wins between 1987 and 1998.

I can't tell you how tricky and frustrating it was for me to try and pare down his accomplished repertoire of songs to just ten for this list. Ask me again tomorrow and as many as five of them could be replaced by songs that don't appear on it today! I also tried to be as equitable as possible to the many projects to which Menken has contributed his music, but still wound up giving a couple of titles multiple spots on the list while many others got shut out completely. Sigh. Such is the bind of a top ten list: you can only pick ten. So I'll start things off by giving a shout out to the likes of Newsies, A Christmas Carol, Enchanted, and Tangled, all of whom came close to finding representation alongside these ten unforgettable ditties: