I’ll take Phoning It In for 500, Alex.
We’ve been spoiled by Pixar into thinking that animated films aren’t just for kids anymore but Adam Sandler wants to remind you that, indeed, some of them are.
Hotel Transylvania 2 isn’t offensive, it’s just a throwback to that old style animation where a cartoon is just a babysitter for the kiddos. It’s full of monsters so colourful and appealing they could advertise sugary breakfast cereal. The movie relies on sight gags and corny jokes that just don’t cut it for the over-10 crowd.
Dracula is back, the proprietor of a high-end hotel catering exclusively to monster guests. His daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) has just married her human sweetheart Jonathan (Adam Samberg) and they’ve got a sweet little baby boy, the apple of Dracula’s eye. The only thing is, nobody knows yet whether the baby will turn out to be vampire or human. There’s a slight allegory here, something about “mixed families” but it’s not exactly groundbreaking stuff.
Sandler brings along all his old buddies to flesh-out the awesome voice cast: SNL alums, Chris Parnell, David Spade, Molly Shannon, Dana Carvey, Chris 
Kattan, and Jon Lovitz; Sandler mainstays Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, Nick Swardson, and Allen Covert; and a rather inspired addition – Mel Brooks as Vlad, grumpy great-grandpa who doesn’t approve of vampire-human relations. My favourite of course, are Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly, who together voice Jonathan’s super-square parents who get thrown into a crash-course in monsterdom when their son introduces them to vampiric in-laws and a “half-blood” grandson.
Offerman and Mullaly are a real-life couple who met while doing a play. He was a lowly carpenter, and she was a TV star still in the throes of her Will & Grace fame. Over the course of their relationship, she’s seen his star rise as well due to a similarly iconic role on Parks & Recreation. We Assholes were lucky enough to catch them doing another play toget
her, this time on Broadway, called Annapurna. It was a simple, 2-person play, deeply intense and emotional, and a real joy to watch two master thespians up close and personal. It’s clear that they love working together, even if it’s on a shitty kids’ movie.
Well, I’m saying shitty because I was bored by it. But the producers of Hotel Transylvania don’t care what I think. They didn’t make it for me. And if you 
ask a kid, chances are they loved it. The sequel was a veritable monster at the box office, if you’ll forgive the pun, setting records as the biggest September opening, the biggest Sandler opening, and the biggest for Sony Pictures Animation as well. It grossed $469 million worldwide, and it just beat out Inside Out at the Kids’ Choice Awards this weekend. So hell yes there’s a #3 coming down the pipes.
Bottom line: if you run out of Paw Patrol, this movie will make a nice substitute for your single-digit-aged kids. If you hope for more than just fart jokes in your animated movies, maybe Zootopia is your better choice – though I’m not guaranteeing it’s fart-free….in fact, I distinctly remember a certain “play on words” if you can still call it that when the word in question is duty.
And it doesn’t have much of a plot that I can summarize for you; it’s an unambitious slice of life. It’s about a guy (Nick Kroll) who shows up at his sister’s door in suburbia, looking for a place to live. He’s had some major setbacks and he’s feeling way too old to start his whole life over again. She’s (Rose Byrne) not in a much better place, kind of not sure about her job, her marriage, or even where to be or who to be. They’re listless. But the interesting thing about the movie, to me, is that they’re not painted as losers. They’ve just had some bad luck and some hard times, and that’s life.
thoughtful and mature this movie is – maybe one of the more realistic movies about adult family relationships I’ve seen in a long while. Byrne and her on-screen husband, Bobby Cannavale, are a real-life couple, and they play well together. Throwing funny man Nick Kroll into the mix as a more or less straight-man is a bold and surprisingly effective choice. Everyone is some degree of flawed in this movie but we don’t make monsters out of any of them. They’re very relatable, and there’s a 
quiet generosity in the characterization, a forgiveness I’m not used to see in movies that was really refreshing and kind of a relief.
In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar for the equivalent of $7.4 billion dollars. It’s becoming more and more clear how good a deal that was for Disney. Every Disney animated movie since has been amazing, from Wreck-It-Ralph to 
Not only is Zootopia another success for Disney, it may be the best of the bunch since John Lasseter and Pixar came on board, and that’s probably the best endorsement I can give.
Disney has picked up the torch from Pixar in that area and is doing it as well as Pixar ever did. Zootopia is literally a movie that all ages will enjoy. So it’s one up on LEGO!
choose someone who wants to 
h no real need for anything to swing from (he swung across the Everglades at one point, above all the trees)! I am humming the theme song right now and hopefully so are you. I truly can’t imagine a better intro to a cartoon or a better gateway drug into the world of comic book consumerism.
a thing for sharp and feisty young women, and the two are a love match and plan to be at Oxford at the same time (unchaperoned, even). But every great love story needs an obstacle and feminism wasn’t enough, so along came The Great War to shake things up.
hool to become a nurse.
epic, called Birdsong (based on the Faulks of the same name). He plays a young man who goes off to war remembering the affair he had with his French (married) sweetheart. Clemence Poesy is beautiful as ever, but this one may leave you feeling faintly unsatisfied.
wife’s) bring him low, low, low, low.
Scottish liked bloody everyone else. But in this adaptation, she’s got this slight sense of foreignness and we begin to think what it might be like if she was just a little outside the community to begin with. Where exactly does her allegiance lie?
while I’d say Kurzel stays 90-95% faithful to the source, 5% is still cheating, isn’t it? The world hardly needed yet another Macbeth adaptation, so if you’re going to the trouble, you’d better have something new to say. But who is brave enough to believe they can best the bard? Justin Kurzel, evidently, a young director of just one prior movie, which I’d never heard of before. And there are three writer’s names in the credits, 3 brazen takers of liberty. Are they right? Can you take liberties with Shakespeare? Will the audience accept it? Forgive it?
thing for bad boys, and he’s trying very hard to live up to her fetish. But it’s clear he isn’t as strong as she is. She is the driving force. Lady Macbeth has always been the one to watch, and Cotillard has always been eminently watchable. But then, having relished playing Dr. Frankenstein, she suddenly feels guilty for having created the monster. They’re a couple of complex characters, perhaps the best ever written, and if there are indeed actors worthy of them, these two come close.
Taylor Schilling), who move their young family to L.A. and find it a challenge for making new friends. A fortuitous meeting in a park leads them to the swanky home of mysterious hipster Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) and his French wife, Charlotte (Judith Godreche).
unraveling. Can it be saved by drugs?
debauchery. You start to get the sense that writer-director Patrick Brice is just trying to shock us, and is relying on an onslaught of unpredictability to do so rather than any true wit or edginess. I guess I’m supposed to think it was cool and naughty but the next day I’m just feeling like I’ve got a bad comedy hangover. Like – did that really just happen? For me this was a great big no thank you, with a side of please, sir, put your pants back on.
I’m fascinated by this immigrant story, an allegory in the vein of Animal Farm, but geared toward children. It was personal for producer Steven Spielberg; some scenes were taken directly from stories of his own grandfather, not coincidentally named Fievel.
for radio by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram at the behest of Spielberg, who knows a good pop tune when he hears one. It went on to win Song of the Year at the Grammy as was nominated for an Oscar (but lost to Take My Breath Away, from Top Gun). We remembered this song in particular when 
gave it two thumbs down, calling it “gloomy”, “downbeat”, and “way too depressing for young audiences.” The numbers proved them wrong, and never had children so gleefully sang about Cossacks and oppression before. The film’s success inspired Steven Spielberg to pursue this cartoon making, eventually developing DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind Shrek, Madagascar, and How To Train Your Dragon. An American Tail has held up pretty well over time, in part because of its deliberate old-fashioned animation style, hearkening the glory days of 1940s Disney, a huge nostalgia factor for baby boomers. Finally this 
was a film they could not only share with their children, but enjoy it as well.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 