Monthly Archives: April 2020

Trolls World Tour

Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and faithful Troll sidekick Branch (Justin Timberlake) are startled to find out that there’s much more to the Troll universe than they’d previously realized. Generations ago, Trolls were able to sing and enjoy all types of music, not just pop music as Poppy has grown up with. But those Trolls fought and decided the only way to go was to split up into 6 tribes, each taking with them the corresponding string. But now the Troll queen of rock n roll, Barb (Rachel Bloom) has decided on a “world tour” in which she’ll steal all 6 strings and use them to play an ultimate power chord on her guitar. Which somehow means that everyone would be living under an oppressive rock regime. I feel like I’ve heard this story before…except the strings were stones and the guitar was a gauntlet.

Anyway. Poppy goes on a world tour of her own, visiting the lands of techno, country, classical and more on a quest to unite them all because they’re all the same, after all – they all love music. But along the way she learns a valuable lesson: denying our differences is like denying the truth of who we really are. Real harmony takes many different voices.

So while the movie fails to recapture the magic of the first, its surplus of recognizable songs gives fans more of the sweet stuff they crave without a lot of plot to get in the way. Watching a Trolls movie is like snorting a pixie stick. Trolls World Tour has hairy wombs, gumdrop ear plugs, centaurs, and hot air balloons, and hardly a pause to consider any of them. The editing is manic, the scenes are technicolour, and there’s literal glitter bombs going off left and right. But you’re back for seconds because you liked the first well enough. And frankly, we’re living in grim times, so this shot of joyous distraction is not unwelcome. It’s not going to change the world or cure racism or even make a dent in the billboard, but it’ll bring a dose of happiness to your living room this weekend, and maybe that’s enough.

For those of you wondering, the medley of the top shelf, best-ever pop songs includes Spice Girls’ Wannabe, Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out, Marky Mark’s Good Vibrations, PSY’s Gangnam Style, and LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem.

The Main Event

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Eleven year old Leo (Seth Carr) is going through a bit of a rough time. His mother left and his father’s too sad to talk about it. Only his grandmother (Tichina Arnold) tries to give him a sense of normalcy, hitting the couch with a bowl of popcorn when it’s time to watch his beloved wrestling.

But two things happen to throttle his life straight into awesome-town: the WWE is coming to his town to find the next NXT superstar, and Leo just happens to find a stinky luchador-style mask that brings the wearer magical wrestling powers. Retaining the body of an 11 year old, he suddenly has the strength and agility of the ring’s greatest fighters. Wrestling under the name Kid Chaos, he’s not just a fearsome fighter, he’s suddenly a smooth operator as well, the mask giving him confidence and prowess in and outside the ring.

Leo/Kid Chaos has not one but three challenges to defeat: the gulf between himself and his father, the ego trip that keeps him from being a dependable friend, and the enormous opponent Samson that he’ll have to meet in the cage.

Of course, the movie is at its best and silliest when it’s thinking up ways a kid might take advantage of his mask’s special powers: putting bullies in their place, cleaning their bedroom, impressing girls. And luckily, Leo has a trio of friends that help him live out his dreams (the talented young cast includes Aryan Simhadri, Momona Tamada, and Glen Gordon.

I can see this being a very popular movie for kids and I predict that mothers of 6-9 year olds are in for a weekend full of even more bumps and bruises than usual. Furniture will be climbed, pillows will be leapt onto, little brothers will be pinned. But as long as there’s no real bloodshed, it’s a harmless enough way to keep the kids entertained and maybe even sequestered in the basement during what is proving to be a very long lockdown.

WWE stars Kofi Kingston, Mike ‘The Miz’ Mizanin,Stephen Farrelly (Sheamus), Corey Graves, Mia Yim, Eric Bugez,Otis Dozovic, Babatunde, Keith Lee, and Backstage host Renee Young all appear.

Love. Wedding. Repeat.

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Haley and Roberto are getting married. Their perfect Roman wedding has one important variable: the table full of English friends. Among them sit Haley’s brother Jack (Sam Claflin), Jack’s ex-girlfriend Amanda (Freida Pinto), Amanda’s insecure current boyfriend Chaz (Allan Mustafa), “maid” of honour Bryan (Joel Fry), the world’s most boring man Sydney (Tim Key), Dina (Olivia Munn), the journalist with whom Jack had a brief encounter but enduring infatuation several years ago, Rebecca (Aisling Bea), the saucy guest who’ll keep oversharing, and of course Marc, the very much uninvited guest who could derail it all.

The beautiful bride Haley implores darling brother Jack to do her a solid: save her wedding day by dosing coked up ex-boyfriend Marc with just a little bit of sleeping tonic. Harmless. Except that little bit of sleeping drought is in the bottom of a glass on a table where the seating cards have all been mixed up. There’s a 1 in 8 chance any of the above people is about to take a non-consensual nap.

It’s not quite Groundhog Day, but we do get to see several alternatives depending on who gets dosed. Sometimes things go hilariously wrong and sometimes they go sadly wrong and sometimes just resoundingly wrong.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Sam Claflin but he doesn’t detract much from the movie, so I’ll give him that. I just think if you can get someone with a personality, why hire this cardboard cutout? He’s overpowered by literally every other guest at the wedding and he’s supposed to be our protagonist. Thankfully Key and Bea do a lot of the heavy lifting, lending levity to the film and a much needed spark of life.

Director Dean Craig takes a tired concept (revisited often by Netflix offerings) and has little to contribute. His butt is saved by a couple of stand-out performances in a movie otherwise as bland as the banquet chicken I’m sure they served.

The Gentlemen

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This gangster movie is both splashy and posh. No low-life thugs here, rather the cardigan-wearing upper crust of the criminal underworld. The gentlemen, indeed. With Guy Ritchie in the director’s chair, this translates to bloodshed over very expensive glasses of scotch and some ruined Louboutin heels.

The story is a bit of a tangle, especially since it’s told to us by blackmailer extraordinaire, Fletcher (Hugh Grant), who’s written a screenplay based on the dirty deeds he’s witnessed. He recounts it to Ray (Charlie Hunnam) with a certain amount of glee, Ray being Mickey’s right hand man, and Mickey (Matthew McConaughey) being the undisputed weed king of London. His drug empire is vast and highly profitable but he’s looking to sell and take early retirement, which means several of London’s rival gangs have been sniffing around his business. This includes Matthew (Jeremy Strong), a multi-millionaire looking to diversify, and Dry Eye (Henry Golding),a young mobster trying to make a name for himself.

If you can keep it all straight, the action’s actually quite a lot of fun, particularly with the addition of Coach (Colin Farrell). I was never 100% clear on who he is in the world, but he’s trained up a bunch of young men who choreograph elaborate fight-dances and them put them on Youtube. Except one time they go behind his back and hold up the wrong marijuana farm. Coach is furious, but he’s smart. He goes to Mickey directly to make amends, offering his services, and you bet they’ll be used.

And I haven’t even mentioned the bestiality, the insanely gorgeous wardrobe, the beautiful chrome-shifting car, the steak of questionable provenance, or the scene that makes “projectile vomiting” an extreme understatement.

While this may not be a Great Film, it is an extremely fun one. McConaughey is self-assured, Hunnam is commanding, and Grant all but steals the show. He does a flawless accent and doesn’t at all sound like himself. He’s a skeevy little rat trying to get a bigger piece of the cheese and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch him stroke his whiskers in greedy anticipation.

Despite some flaws, The Gentlemen is flashy and stylish, with director Ritchie flexing some real zeal.

Dolittle

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I suppose it might entertain very young children.

I have meditated on that single sentence above for minutes and even hours, wondering if I should leave it at that. Explaining the why and the how of this movie’s failure is baffling at best yet won’t even make for entertaining reading.

The story is weak yet convoluted. A physician/veterinarian (we have such a combo in our own family: Sean’s sister), Dr. Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) has sequestered himself behind the doors of his menagerie, gone full hermit since the death of his beloved wife. Luckily he has the unique ability to speak to animals in their native language, so he isn’t entirely alone, but his existence is notably and emphatically human-free. Until, that is, the day when not one but two children come calling.

The first is a boy who has accidentally shot a squirrel who needs immediate medical attention. The second is a girl sent from Queen Victoria’s palate where the Queen lays gravely ill, also requiring immediate medical attention. Dr. Dolittle, unhappy to be disturbed either way, treats the squirrel but needs convincing to attend to the Queen. In the Queen’s bedchambers he learns that she’s been poisoned and the antidote exists only on a faraway island. Dolittle, the boy Stubbins, and a bunch of animals of varying degrees of helpfulness, set sail on an epic adventure to find said cure.

They’re pursued by a villain with questionable motives, they subject us to a minutes-long fart joke (will small children even understand that Dolittle is rooting through a dragon’s anus with a leek, relieving it of all the undigested armor of the valiant knights she’s eaten for breakfast?).

I think the journey’s purpose is that Dolittle must learn he can grieve his wife without shutting himself off from the rest of humanity. They don’t exactly earn this, nor do they try very hard to express it.

The best and maybe only good part is an anxious ostrich voiced by Kumail Nanjiani. The worst part is, sadly, RDJ himself. He’s doing an indiscernible accent through which most of his dialogue is lost. He goes full nut when perhaps only half nut would have sufficed. His tone rarely matches that of the story. The poor guy has spent too many years acting in front of a green screen. I think for his first post-Ironman role he needed something a little more grounded but instead he went full fanciful and feels lost forever. Who can rescue his career now?

But Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t the only high-profile actor duped into signing on: Jim Broadbent, Michael Sheen, and Antonio Banderas all appear. Plus Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Tom Holland, John Cena, Octavia Spencer, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Marion Cotillard, and Jason Mantzoukas all lend their voice. And yet even standing on all these famous and famously talented shoulders, the film still cannot keep its head above water. Like an ostrich learning the hard way that he can neither fly nor swim, the movie simply adopts a dead man’s float and hopes a film goer or two might take a poke at its bloated corpse.

Vivarium

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Vivarium is the Humpty Dumpty of movies. It sits straddling a wall between sci-fi and horror. Every time Humpty leans toward one side or the other, our breath catches, waiting to see if he’ll finally take a definitive dumpty. But in all honesty, Vivarium also teeters on an even bigger, much more important wall between good movie and bad movie. The direction in which it ultimately falls will be entirely up to you, and you won’t be wrong either way. If you are willing to proceed, suspend your disbelief now and leave it here: ______________________. You won’t be needing it.

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple in search of a perfect home. One day they follow a real estate agent out to the suburbs to check out a new development. The house in question, #9, is indistinguishable in a row of identical little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes all the same. Welcome to Yonder, the sign beckons. Both the agent and the model home feel a little off; something in the back of your head niggles. Even Gemma and Tom are aware that something’s not quite right, but it’s Gemma’s politeness that have gotten them into this mess, and she’s determined to see it through. Neither are prepared for the agent to suddenly disappear, and both are stressed to previously unimaginable levels when they find that they cannot escape the labyrinth of infinitely repeating suburban homes. No matter how long they drive or how many turns they make, they always wind up back at #9.

Over the next few days, despair and desperation mount as the development proves itself to be a prison. Provisions appear, seemingly out of nowhere, and one day, one of the crates contains a baby, with simple instructions: raise him and you will be released. Within 90 days the baby is a walking, talking boy, but that’s the least alarming thing about him. This kid will shoot automatically to whatever list of top 10 creepiest movie kids you’ve been keeping in your head.

Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley have cooked up a scathing indictment of the myth of suburbia, indeed the myth of parenthood. There is a not very subtle allegory here indicating that the monotony of suburbia is meant to lull us into placidity so we fail to notice that parenthood is literally sucking the life out of us. Children are a black hole of needs and wants that parents fill, fill, fill and the kid just takes, takes, takes, until there’s nothing left to give and the parent is just an empty shell of its former self.

Vivarium is not scary in the traditional sense of horror. It means to cultivate a current of fear in the circuitry of your own life. Does the pursuit of happiness betray us? Is the American dream a lie? Is domesticity a trap?

Welcome to Yonder.

Dolphin Reef

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Last week we were discussing Elephant, a brand new nature documentary released on Disney+. Disneynature films are perhaps not the most scientific among documentaries but they are beautifully photographed and extremely family-friendly. During these difficult days of self-quarantine, parents struggling to home-school their children or even just provide for some less junky screen time may want to turn to Disney+ for this not inconsiderable benefit. In fact, Disney+ is also home to National Geographic programs as well, perhaps better suited to older students. In any case, you can get a free one month trial from the streaming service and it’s hard to imagine a better time than now to use in.

Dolphin Reef is another incredible offering from Disneynature. This one dives under the waves near the Polynesian Islands in the Pacific Ocean to explore a colourful and diverse environment on the ocean’s floor. Dolphins have long been fascinating to we bipedal, air-breathing, earth-walkers. They are smart and engaging. They communicate and express emotion. They are playful and have close family bonds.

Echo is a young bottlenose dolphin who, at the age of 3, is struggling with the notion of growing up. His mom is devotedly and determinedly trying to teach him the ways of the reef but Echo keeps giving in to his silly side. But despite his playfulness, dolphin society is tricky, and survival depends on skill and preparedness.

As if Echo isn’t enough, we’ll also meet a mother-daughter humpback whale duo and learn some of the parallel trials and tribulations of growing up whale. In fact, there’s an entire ocean filled with orcas, sea turtles, and cuttlefish, and we’ll get the most amazing front row seats to it all.

What distinguishes a Disney nature documentary from others is that they write a narrative to go along with the pictures so kids get to know the animals personally. Each one becomes a character we can not only learn about, but root for. A few liberties are taken but on the whole the story fits accurately within the animal kingdom and the result is an exciting and engaging watch.

For me, even besides the dolphin and whale families we’ll get to know intimately, I just love trolling along the sandy bottom and discovering the bright and beautiful life that lives there. Lots of people look to the stars and imagine what alien life might exist, but I’ve always preferred plunging below the sea and exploring those unfathomable depths. There are creatures living on our own planet that defy our understanding. This documentary explores fairly shallow waters and still encounters fascinating species to capture the imagination.

Narrated by a very excited Natalie Portman, Dolphin Reef is an adventure worth taking.

Queen & Slim

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When I get pulled over by the cops, I don’t ever worry about getting shot. And that’s not because I am polite or non-threatening or have no criminal record. It’s because of the colour of my skin. It is a privileged position to occupy and I didn’t earn it, I just have it.

Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) don’t have that same privilege, because their skin is darker than mine. When they get pulled over driving home after their first date, the cop is immediately suspicious, belligerent and demanding. Slim is ordered out of the car, required to pop his trunk, and when he asks the cop to hurry it along, has a gun pulled on him as he is told to get on the ground. Worse, when Queen jumps out of the passenger side and slowly and loudly announces she is going to record this confrontation with her cell phone, the cop shoots her. Slim goes for the gun and in the ensuing struggle, the cop is accidentally killed, instantly turning Queen and Slim into two of America’s most wanted.

Could Queen and Slim have done things differently? Sure they could have. There probably was a scenario where their lives and the cop’s life went on as normal. But this isn’t that story. Queen & Slim is about the repercussions of the traffic stop gone wrong, and its greatest strength is making the chase relatable to someone who wouldn’t necessarily make better choices but by reason of his skin colour would likely face very different consequences for any mistakes he made (and probably no consequences at all).

Screenwriter Lena Waithe delivers a believable situation and sympathetic characters. She also does well to detach the public portrayal of Queen and Slim from their actual personas. They did not ask to be outlaws and they did not choose to become fugitives. Those were the only choices they were left with after a cop accidentally got shot. It helps immensely that we get to know Queen and Slim, ever so briefly, before their fateful confrontation with an overly aggressive cop. We get to see how the chase is framed from the outside while also seeing that there are not two sides to this story, that the lazy media narrative framing these two as cop-killers is more than just wrong, it is dangerous.

Left unsaid, but hanging in the air to digest afterward, is the question of how many more times does this sort of thing have to happen in real life before our society stops arguing over whether there is a problem and starts working together to fix it. The biggest strength of Queen & Slim is that Waithe doesn’t shy away at all from the underlying social issues but manages, above all else, to be a compelling love story about two people who just wanted a chance at a second date.

The Honor List

Elephant

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Elephant is a brand new nature documentary streaming on Disney+; here are 10 reasons you should watch.

10. It’s family friendly viewing.

9. It’s a documentary so it practically counts as home schooling where you don’t have to do any of the work. Don’t worry, teachers do it ALL THE TIME.

8. Disney does a good job of making the story engaging. It’s not just passive viewing. They give us characters to root for and a narrative to follow.

7. The herd of African elephants we follow is led by a matriarch Gaia and her sister Shani, so there are strong female characters aplenty.

6. Shani has a playful young son called Joao, and honestly, he’s exactly the kind of happy, carefree vibes we need right now.

5. The photography is top-notch, the crew follows (in fact, gets ahead of) the herd for an entire year’s journey, and they cover a lot of ground.

4. Though this isn’t exactly full of facts and figures, it does give a great overview of African elephants, as well as a wonderful sense of the environment.

3. It’s wonderful to see elephants in their natural habitat – it’s sometimes perilous of course, but it’s also amazing to see them at work, at play, at rest, and at work.

2. Elephants have a strong family bond that’s inspiring and fascinating to witness.

1. It’s narrated by real-life princess Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex in her first role since marrying into the royal family (and likely the last under this title; she and Harry give them up at the end of this month).