Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [22]
Teacher’s Pet doesn’t look, sound, or feel like a Disney movie. The look was created by Baseman, an award-winning artist and designer whose work resembles a postmodern version of children’s drawings. The sound track includes hilariously over-the-top voice work by a sterling cast including Lane, Kelsey Grammer (as Ivan Krank), David Ogden Stiers, Paul Reubens, Jerry Stiller, Megan Mullally, Wallace Shawn, Jay Thomas, Rob Paulsen, Shaun Fleming (as Leonard), and Debra Jo Rupp, who’s wonderfully ditsy and endearing as Mrs. Helperman. What’s more, many of these players get to sing, as Teacher’s Pet is a full-scale musical, filled with silly and clever songs—including a memorable paean to the United States sung as the Helperman trailer makes its way across the country.
As for the feel of the film, it’s hip, funny, strange, and totally disarming. There are a handful of Disney in-jokes that kids will enjoy spotting, but I suspect this film may be of greater interest to adults with childlike minds (like me) than actual children.
29. THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR
(2004)
Directed by Tod Williams
Screenplay by Tod Williams
Based on A Widow for One Year by John Irving
Actors:
JEFF BRIDGES
KIM BASINGER
JON FOSTER
ELLE FANNING
BIJOU PHILLIPS
MIMI ROGERS
ROBERT LUPONE
DONNA MURPHY
LOUIS ARCELLA
In the annual media circus that Oscar season has become, would-be pundits attempt to ascribe all sorts of motivations and agendas to the academy voters. Many of them express outrage over Oscar history. How, they wonder, could the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have failed to give Alfred Hitchcock (or Cary Grant) an Academy Award?
With a little thought, the answer becomes clear: in the years they did great work, academy voters thought someone else did even better. No one has the benefit of hindsight when it’s time to fill out a ballot: if voters had thought it might be their best (or last) opportunity to honor one of the industry giants, they surely would have done so.
I don’t do a lot of second-guessing about Oscars past, but I do feel strongly about at least one overlooked performance. Jeff Bridges should have been nominated for his incredible work in The Door in the Floor. The film is good, but he is unforgettable.
Bridges plays an unsuccessful novelist who has settled for a lesser form of literary success as the author and illustrator of children’s books. One summer he hires a naive sixteen-year-old prep-school boy, who aspires to become a writer himself, to work as his assistant. But the boy (Jon Foster) has no idea what lies in store for him when he arrives at Bridges’s beautiful home in fashionable East Hampton, New York.
Bridges and his wife, well played by Kim Basinger, are waging a kind of war against each other, brought on by their inability to grieve together for the tragic loss of their twin teenage sons. She has become one of the walking dead, and even her seduction of the “new boy” is accomplished without real passion. Bridges, on the other hand, is acting out in the worst way, recklessly womanizing and causing no little embarrassment in their community. Caught in the middle is their loving four-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), who doesn’t understand what’s going on but clings to the secondhand memories of her brothers, as told to her in storybook fashion when she gazes at their framed photos on the wall.
The Door in the Floor is taken from the first section of John Irving’s sprawling novel A Widow for One Year. His characters have multiple layers, and in filmmaker Tod Williams’s adaptation the actors manage to convey the many facets of their splintered personalities. Basinger almost wordlessly expresses the heartbreak that has rendered her lifeless.
But