10 animated films with the best voices (ever)

I enjoy reading and compiling trivia. They’re a source of amusement. Especially so if they consist of lists of this, that, and the other, which being subjective are open to scrutiny, criticism, and ridicule. Trivia are little titbits that you often find in small boxes and units as part of a larger story in a newspaper or magazine.

My earliest introduction to published trivia was The Book of Lists series compiled by the family troika of bestselling author Irving Wallace, his son, historian David Wallechinsky, and his daughter, writer Amy Wallace. Their people’s almanac covered such unusual and absurd topics as “Breeds of dogs which bite people the most, and the least” and “Famous people who died during sexual intercourse.” I don’t know if the almanac is still around.

British actor Jeremy Irons lent his deep
voice to the evil Scar in The Lion King.

This week, for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom, I decided to introduce an occasional post on trivia in films, starting with some of my favourite animated movies with the best voices (ever). I've selected these from the films I have seen and remember the most off the top of my head. I've left out several pre-1960 classic animated movies like Bambi, Cinderalla, Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and Pinocchio as well as many others made in the 1970s & 1980s for the reason that while I have seen most of these animated films, I don’t remember the voice overs.

But ten is a good number, and here they are in order of release and some of the finest voice overs in the business.

01. The Jungle Book, 1967
Best voice: George Sanders as Shere Khan, the Tiger.

02. Beauty and the Beast, 1991
Best voice: Robby Benson as the spellbound Beast.

03. The Lion King, 1994
Best voice: Jeremy Irons as Scar, Simba’s evil uncle.

04. 101 Dalmatians, 1996
Best voice: Glenn Close as dog-hater Cruella De Vil.

05. Shrek, 2001
Best voice: Eddie Murphy as Donkey, Shrek’s friend.

06. Ice Age, 2002
Best voice: Ray Romano as Manfred, the mammoth.

07. The Polar Express, 2004
Best voice: Tom Hanks as the young boy, conductor, and Santa Claus among other roles.

08. Madagascar, 2005
Best voice: Sacha Baron Cohen as Julien, the lemur and a self-proclaimed king.

09. Ratatouille, 2007
Best voice: Peter O’Toole as the intimidating food critic Anton Ego.

10. Rango, 2011
Best voice: Johnny Depp as Rango, the chameleon who becomes sheriff in Wild West.

If I were to pick any one that I like the most, I'd have no hesitation in choosing Beauty and the Beast followed by The Jungle Book, The Lion King, Ice Age, and Ratatouille as my top five. It's one of the most beautiful films I've seen. It's a story of love, courage, betrayal, compassion, and sacrifice, revolving around the unlikely pair of Beauty (Paige O'Hara as Belle) and the Beast (Robby Benson). One of the things I liked about this film is Belle’s hunger for books, her thirst for knowledge, even if it means reading the same books again from her village library. And then she meets Beast and steps inside his spectacular library. I reviewed this film last year. 

A Gentleman from Mississippi by Thomas A. Wise, 1910

For Friday’s Forgottern Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

“Senator Langdon is picked out by dishonest men in Washington to be used as their tool in the Senate. But the ‘tool’ proves to be sharp at both ends and cuts the men who mean to cheat the people.”

 A Gentleman from Mississippi, a post-Civil War novel by writer-actor Thomas A. Wise, is based on a successful play of the same title produced by Joseph Rhode Grismer and William A. Brady in 1908-09. Grismer and Brady were stage actors and were closely associated with theatre. The play was acted out 407 times at the Bijou Theatre in Tennessee. There is, however, some confusion over the authorship of the book which, aside from Wise, is credited to two other gentlemen named Frederick R. Toombs and Harrison Garfield Rhodes. My edition of the ebook had only Wise’s name.

Colonel William H. Langdon, a wealthy plantation owner from Mississippi, is elected to the United States Senate through the influence of James Stevens, his close friend and senior Senator from the state, Martin Sanders, head of the seven counties, Senator Peabody of Pennsylvania, and Charles Norton, a junior Congressman from Mississippi. They have conspired to send ‘Big Bill’ Langdon to the Upper House of the Congress because of a misplaced conviction that he will serve their vested interests.

While Langdon is ecstatic on his election to the Senate and dreams of serving his countrymen with honesty and sincerity, he is no puppet. He refuses to fall prey to the political intrigues and machinations in Washington, spearheaded by corrupt and unscrupulous politicians and lobbyists like Peabody, the powerful Boss of the Senate.

The story revolves around the siting of a new hundred-million dollar naval base in the South. Peabody and his cronies nominate Langdon on the powerful Committee on Naval Affairs in the hope that he will vote as they dictate, in favour of Altacoola instead of Gulf City. They have bought acres of land in Altacoola and stand to make a killing on their investment. But Langdon is no pushover. The proud and feisty Southern planter takes the ‘crooks’ head-on with help from an unlikely quarter, Bud Haines, an intrepid New York journalist whose cynicism of Washington politics and its politicians is overturned by this simple and sincere man from Mississippi. Together, Langdon and his faithful ally turn the tables on Peabody and company.

There are some interesting elements in this story. For instance, Langdon is crestfallen when he finds out that his son, Randolph, and daughter, Carolina, have conspired against him by investing his money in Altacoola. His daughter is engaged to the scheming Charles Norton who has convinced the two impressionable youngsters to cast their lot with him and work towards getting the Colonel and Haines separated. Another daughter, Hope Georgia, realises Haines is a good man and falls in love with him. Langdon is distraught over his children’s behaviour and shows them the error of their ways with an impassioned talk on the importance of righteousness above all things.

Final word

A Gentleman from Mississippi is the delightful story of a kind and genial old man who puts his moral principles—right against wrong, honesty against corruption—above power and pelf and any gains through ill-gotten means. Colonel William H. Langdon is a proud and an honourable man who still believes that politics is a career for gentlemen, a necessity for the service of his state or his country, in spite of his initial brush with unprincipled men like Peabody. In some ways Thomas A. Wise has painted the planter as a naïve and an innocent man but by no means foolish. As Langdon says, “No doubt, it won't be all plain sailing in Washington for an old-fashioned man like me, but I believe in the American people and the men they send to Congress.” He aims to be one of those men.

Colonel Langdon is an excellent byproduct of the South, honest, hardworking, and conscientious, an aspect that the author repeatedly weaves into his narrative. Langdon, the current patriarch of a long line of wealthy Langdons, is proud of being a Southerner and now that the war is over, he wants to enter public life for the benefit of the South, his own state of Mississippi, and the country as a whole.  

Thomas A. Wise has written a powerful character-driven novel that is as relevant to politicians and the people who elect them into office today as it was over a hundred years ago.

The author

Interestingly, Thomas A. Wise was an English-born American stage actor who starred in some half-a-dozen films including A Gentleman from Mississippi, 1914, in which he played the role of William H. Langdon. He had a successful stage career, including on Broadway, spanning over forty years.

Bud Spencer and Terence Hill

A look at the largely forgotten comedy pair of Italian actors and filmmakers for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

Bud Spencer and Terence Hill

If anyone took over the legacy of slapstick comedy from the innocent pair of Laurel and Hardy, it was the boisterous duo of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill—Italian actors Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti.

Although their films were different, their characters were similar in many ways. Bud Spencer was to Terence Hill what Oliver Hardy was to Stan Laurel—dominating yet protective. The two big men considered their thinnish equivalents a pain in the neck. While Laurel and Hill didn’t mind playing second fiddle to their heavyweight partners, they often pulled a trick or two on their unsuspecting pals, especially Hill, who often had to think for himself and the brawny Spencer and come out with ingenious ways to involve the big man in some caper or the other, prank or crime. Spencer talked with his fists. Together, they played various roles including cops, cowboys, and missionaries, thumping their way in and out of situations with hilarious results.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

I grew up watching the nearly hundred Laurel and Hardy films and some twenty Bud Spencer-Terence Hill movies neither of which have aged since they were made. I still watch them and they hold up well.

Having spent so much time together it is no surprise that both “couples” were the best of friends. Bud Spencer, 84, and Terence Hill, 74, still are, as were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their time.

Asterix and Obelix

The Laurel-Hardy and Spencer-Hill double act reminds me of the most famous comedy duo in comic-books, Asterix and Obelix, the two pigtailed Gaulish warriors whose village has been holding out against Julius Caesar's empire. Asterix and Obelix have simple goals in life: bash up Romans and hunt wild boar though they often set out on "dangerous" adventures (dangerous for the Romans, that is).  Asterix was created by the Franco-Belgian pair of René Goscinny who wrote the comics and Albert Uderzo who illustrated them.

My idea of spending a few holidays would be to sit with all their films and comics—good, clean, wholesome comedies.

Captain Phillips and Thor: The Dark World, 2013

Last week, I saw these two new films over two evenings. They were both worth going to the theatre. While there is no comparison between the real-life story of a merchant navy captain kidnapped by Somali pirates and that of the hammer-wielding Norse god who must protect the universe from annihilation, I preferred Captain Phillips over Thor: The Dark World.

Captain Phillips is not exactly a suspense film but it had me on the edge of my seat from the time Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) of the Maersk Alabama spots, through a pair of binoculars, a small group of armed men pursuing the mighty US freighter in their tiny boats. He has just read an email warning him of pirates in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Somalia and along the Horn of Africa, and so he knows who they are and what they are capable of. 

Over the next gruelling one hour director Paul Greengrass (United 93) yanks you out of your seat and puts you first on the bridge of the Alabama and then inside the cramped lifeboat, in the midst of the weed-chewing skeletal pirates and their hostage, Captain Phillips. There is no escape for captain courageous or you.

The real Captain Phillips and
the book he wrote.

I’d like to think of the film—based on the real Captain Richard Phillips who captained Maersk Alabama in 2009 and was actually taken hostage—as an action-adventure documentary that chronicles the harrowing experience of the captain and his rescue by navy seals. Incidentally, the Alabama was the first US cargo ship to be held hostage by Somali pirates in America’s 200-year old history.

Take Tom Hanks out of the film and you could actually be watching a plain documentary. Towards the end of the film the bearded Hanks, somewhat, reprises the role of Chuck Noland, the screaming and mentally-wrecked survivor in Cast Away (2000), admirably, as he realises the full import of his rescue and gives in to his bottled-up emotions. Until then, the captain is a picture of grace under pressure. 

Muse (Barkhad Abdi) and Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman), as two of the four Somali pirates, are superb if scary as hell. They could give local gangsters a run for their casino money.

Captain Phillips is a different kind of film: just one top-billed actor, a whole lot of minor actors, and a stripped-down script. The enactment of Somali piracy is true to life. It's the most engrossing film I've seen so far in 2013.

I also liked Thor: The Dark World, directed by Alan Taylor (The Sopranos, and Terminator, 2015) on three main counts: the special effects-induced Asgard, the abode of the Norse gods and the illuminated journey through intergalactic space; Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the animated and adoptive brother who envies and hates Thor, and is set to make a comeback in the third installment; and Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), the Spock-like leader of the Dark Elves race who wants to repossess Aether, the ultimate space weapon that will enable him to destroy the universe.

Oh, and Stellan Skarsgård runs naked around Stonehenge with cops in hot pursuit. What was that all about? And before I forget, Chris Helmsworth as the hammer-wielding Thor and Natalie Portman as the Aether-possessed Jane Foster put in a fine performance.

I’d have understood Thor better if an astrophysicist were sitting next to me and explaining all about the forces of gravity that make Thor look like a bouncing ball.

The film that I’m looking forward to seeing is Last Vegas (2013), a comedy about four sixty-plus childhood friends—Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, and Morgan Freeman—who go to Las Vegas on a fun-trip. While Kline is a very good actor, I’d have preferred Jack Nicholson. 

Perjury by Stan Latreille, 1998

Patti Abbot hosts Friday’s Forgotten Books at her blog Pattinase.

“Poised to join the ranks of Scott Turow and Richard North Patterson, trial judge Stan Latreille has firmly established himself as a master of courtroom suspense. Perjury is his stunning debut, a bold thriller about lies, sex, and the conflict between law and justice…”

My copy of the book.

It has been a while since I purchased any books from the secondhand bookstalls I frequent. I have promised myself that I won’t buy any more new or old novels, at least not until I read a quarter of the 200-odd physical books in my possession. There’s only so much paper you can have around the house. However, I occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon, my comfort levels with an e-reader having gone up considerably.

Sometimes I break my promise, as I did a couple of days ago when I’d no hesitation in picking up Perjury, a 375-page legal thriller by Stan Latreille. The cover and a new author were the motivating factors. Library Journal described it as “a striking debut…in the tradition of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent.”

For over two decades Stan Latreille, 76, was a trial judge in Michigan presiding over murder and rape trials, complex civil cases, and family litigation. Prior to a career in law, he was a newspaper reporter and editor for ten years. The retired Livingston Circuit Court judge is working on his second novel, tentatively titled Absolution, and blogs at The Livingston Post. Latreille also offers his services as a visiting judge and a case mediator and arbitrator.

While I have not read Perjury yet, the synopsis on the back cover has prompted me to move it way up my list of books to read in the immediate future. It promises a sensitive and delicate story, for it says…

“Jack Brenner, a burned-out public defender from Chicago, has left lying clients and political maneuvering behind to take on the more lucrative, predictable routine of civil law in a small Michigan town. But when he is asked to defend a woman accused of perjury for falsely claiming that her husband abused their young daughter, Jack is swept back into the labyrinth of the criminal justice system—and into a dangerous attraction for his seductive client whose case he cannot win and must not lose…”

I also liked the opening lines which read: “Davey Alden turned out to be one of those wild flowers that miraculously spring up from the cracks in the concrete. In this case the concrete was the Laffler Country Jail, on the outskirts of Kirtley, Michigan.”

Frankly, I don’t recall the last time I read a legal thriller; perhaps, it was a novel or two by John Grisham and Erle Stanley Gardner a few years ago. I did a search of writers of legal thrillers on the internet and I wasn’t surprised when I failed to recognise most of the dozen-odd names. The ones I’d read, apart from Grisham and Gardner, included Scott Turow and John Mortimer. The ones whose names were merely familiar to me were Michael Connelly, Steve Martini, Brad Meltzer, and Richard North Patterson.

Legal thrillers, if plotted and written well, are exciting to read.

Note: You can see Stan Latreille's photograph at MLive.

Reading Habits #4: Author, Writer, Novel, Book

Read what you can, when you can, wherever you can.

Are you reading a novel or a book and is it written by an author or a writer? As questions go, this is an unintelligent one, I admit. Do not answer if you think I’m insulting yours. Still, I’m curious. I spent my formative years thinking novels were written by authors and books were penned by writers. One was fiction, the other non-fiction. I read them that way. 

The line between novels and books and authors and writers—assuming there really was one—got blurred around the turn of the century when novels came to be increasingly referred to as books written by people who could be either authors or writers. Over the years the internet, and specifically blogs, has more or less obliterated the line that, I suspect, only I could see. Now I often refer to a work of fiction as a book. It sounds more cerebral. Inversely, non-fiction can never be a novel. It will always remain a book.

Looking back, I used to think that anything that told a fictitious story was a novel. All paperbacks, be it pulp or popular fiction, fell in that category. Everything else was a book, such as a book on history or economics, a book of stamps or coins, a record book or a book of account, the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible, a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, a rule book, a book of recipes, and so on and so forth.

Yet, there were grey areas, like Shakespeare, the Classics, and humour. The Twelve Works of the famous bard was a book, a volume actually. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is more a book than a novel. And P.G. Wodehouse wrote humourous stories and books. Although works of fiction, they are best referred to as books.

My thinking, thus, may have been the result of the disdain with which novels were looked upon, outside of the family. “Oh, you’re reading a novel. Which one?” And when you showed the cover, “You’re reading a Chase, I see. Have you read Nehru’s Discovery of India? You’ll learn much from this brilliantly written book.” You'd think I was reading erotica.

The dilemma hasn't resolved fully when I think of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and Harry Potter by Rowling. Novel or book, author or writer? I think I’ll just sit quietly and read.


Noted author James Reasoner has written an interesting post on his Favourite Reading Spots over at his blog Rough Edges.


For previous Reading Habits, look under ‘Labels’

The Name Is Archer by Ross Macdonald, 1955

The spotlight is on Ross Macdonald for this Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

I SAT in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen.
— Opening line of ‘Find the Woman’ in which Ross Macdonald first introduced Lew Archer

If something doesn’t happen then Lew Archer, the private detective from Southern California, makes something happen, as he does in two out of the three stories I’ve read so far in this collection of seven original stories by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar).

In both the stories, Gone Girl and The Bearded Lady, Archer happens to be around when a crime is about to take place or has already taken place. When he is not hired to solve the case, he hangs around to investigate the crime. Although money is thrust into Archer’s hands, you get the impression that it’s not important in his scheme of things and he'll, matter-of-factly, pocket a fifty-dollar advance.

In Gone Girl, for instance, Archer is outside his room in a motel when he sees a girl with blood on her hands. Before long, he is employed by the girl, the only daughter of the motel owner, to investigate the death of a man. Did she kill him? Archer finds more than he’d bargained for. 

In the second story, Archer is visiting a close friend, a talented but down-on-his-luck artist, who vanishes without a trace, as does an expensive painting from the museum he frequented, putting a family’s reputation under a cloud. Archer to the rescue again.

You don’t know what Lew Archer’s motivation is but he has enough to want to stick his neck out.

In Find the Woman, the first story in this collection, the private detective, as Archer likes to call himself, is actually waiting for something to happen when Millicent Dreen, a publicity director for a production house, walks into his office and hires him to look for Una, her beautiful twenty-two year old daughter who has been missing from their beach house. Dreen, who is no less easy on the eyes, suspects that her daughter, a famous actor, drowned because she wasn’t a strong swimmer. Archer accepts the case and pockets the hundred-dollar advance.

It’s not long before Lew Archer gets to the bottom of the case, literally. Una was married to Jack Rossiter, a handsome and athletic naval officer whose long stretch away from home gave her reason to have sexual affairs with other men and her mother the perfect ruse to engineer her own daughter’s death by drowning. To say why she does it or how she does it would be giving too much away.

Ross Macdonald first introduced Lew Archer in Find the Woman, a short story that was published in the June 1946 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The fictional private eye made his debut in a regular novel with The Moving Target in 1949. This was made into a film called Harper in 1966. It had Paul Newman as Lew Harper instead of Lew Archer. I haven't read the book or seen the film. In fact, The Moving Target is one of four secondhand Lew Archer novels I have. Not to have read even a single book yet is a criminal waste.

What did I like most about the three stories I read in The Name Is Archer? Apart from the writing, which is equivalent to a punch right in the solar plexus, and the not so flattering look at women and the depths to which they can sink, the celebrated author pulls a neat trick on the reader: a detective is hired by people guilty of a crime to investigate a crime that really isn't a crime, at least not in the strict sense. The catch-22 scenario in the stories reminded me of No Comebacks, 1982, a collection of ten stories in which Frederick Forsyth uses a similar ploy, the twist at the end of each tale leaving the reader a tad disappointed though not without acknowledging the writer’s brilliant deception.

While Ross Macdonald has admitted to being influenced by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose works I’m not all that familiar with, his style of writing, if not in its intensity, is reminiscent of that other pillar of hardboiled fiction, Mickey Spillane, and his detective Mike Hammer. Clearly, Macdonald acknowledged his debt to Chandler when he told The Village Voice in 1975: “Chandler was and remains a hard man to follow.”


P.S.: After reading Patti's reviews as well as some other reviews of Ross Macdonald's works at her blog, Pattinase, I wish to mention that The Name Is Archer has been included in The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer edited by his biographer Tom Nolan. It contains stories from The Name Is Archer, Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three stories in Strangers in Town among other material.