dMYD DVD
Starring Sting
M
Homoerotically-monikered epic documenting the creature Sting’s early 2000s assault on art and the Disney Corporation: the dreams that were shattered, the lives that were lost and the haircuts that looked inappropriate on a 49 year old tantric-demon. There’s a lot of bad press about the suits at Disney – they love plastic tat, they don’t actually stand for any sort of creativity anymore, they eat the children of ethnic minorities; but none of these alleged crimes has ever come close to the damage the thing calledSting has done to our world, a string of ‘song-cycles’ and woodwind atrocities that have served to destabilise culture as we know it and ruin at least one otherwise great Luc Besson film. Here the bleach-blonde man-twat gets hired by House Mouse to score their new passion-project Kingdom of the Sun and proceeds to dump rubbish songs all over it in much the same way fellow balding-evil-doer Phil Collins did toTarzan a few years earlier, resulting in a curse falling over the whole production that fudges up pacing, story, characterisation and possibly sanity. Disney, realising their mistake, hastily disintegrated the whole thing into a fine mist of paint residue and buddy-comedy, resulting in the departure of the original director and The Emperor’s New Groove, a likeable enough latter-period lightweight that provided some giggles but wouldn’t trouble the oversized costume department of Disneyland Anaheim.
The doc shows some interesting insights into the terrifying world of creation by corporation, with a candid approach that’s missing from everything else Disney have ever stomped upon in court that’ll lead to it being taken down from YouTube in a few minutes. The problem is that, being directed by his wife, Sting dominates the film like a lute-wielding pug-faced mantis, mooning around the Himalayas and Tuscany and whining about how he likes to keep things simple as the artistic aspirations of everyone involved crumble back in California. At one point he even admits that he can’t write songs about things like family and love anymore, preferring to pen something with a more epic scope and a chorus that goes Dooba dooba shebab shebab doopolopopodeeba. He’s an ill-suited monster whose first Disney film was Sleeping Fucking Beauty. He wasn’t even born in the 90s!
All of which makes it heartening to see his contribution dwindle to just a couple of cackholes over the credits. Whilst it’s soul-cauterising to watch the creative types get stomped down by men who seem to run on a diet of money and stupid decisions, it’s notable that Sting only ever seems to see the project as a quirky financial transaction, using the songs as a dislocation of meaning from his own feelings and emotions in the same fashion as the Disney executives view their charges. Without seeing the early mixes of Kingdom of the Sun it’s hard to know who’s really in the right here, if there is a right at all; half of these guys did make The Lion King, so you’d think the project was in safe paws. Alas, alack. Whatever the morality the quick scene at the end where they see their noble ambitions turn into Burger King toys pretty much sums up the moneyland we live in.
Heads up to the wunderbar Ultra Culture for posting a heads up, but how does a guy that points out the Flanderisation of the project neglect to mention Thomas Schumacher, one half of the bad men who derailed the whole thing?
His paedo-collection moustache probably made someone at the studio scream ‘call The Police!’ in the first place, releasing the Sting and dooming everyone to a couple of years of pan pipes and forthright wankery. Make good decisions world, don’t be Sting.
Edit: Whoops. It’s been taken down. New series of ANT Farm coming soon to the Disney Channel, buy your lunchboxes and pre-teen sexualisation culture-fucking kits now!
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