Category Archives: Jay

The Longest Ride

So I’m convalescing in Toronto and I figure, what better way to rest my body than to take in a long, boring movie that should never have been made and I would never otherwise see, in a dark theatre on Yonge and Dundas?

87 (approximately) escalator rides up, and you’re in a space where you can forget that it’s actually a nice spring Friday afternoon somewhere, somewhere where Cokes don’t cost $8 a pop, and relax into the last movie on your list because you’ve literally seen everything else.

And if I may just sidebar for a moment here: In Ottawa, at least, our new cushy VIP theatre with the comfy recliners and the alcoholic beverages, doesn’t show any movies until evening. Does that feel a little judgy to anyone else? Just me? Yeah, I know it’s 1:30pm on a weekday, but I’m playing hooky and I’m a big girl, so if I’d rather a vodka something than a Coke anything, let me use my big girl pants and decide for myself, mmkay?

Back to the movie. Because I know you’re super interested.

It’s called The Longest Ride and it does in fact feel like they’re taking you on an unforgivably long ride. You might even end up chapped. It should be called Trying and Failing to Recapture the Magic of The Notebook. I’m no big fan of The Notebook, but I get why it has its rabid defenders. I think maybe we’ve mined Nicholas Sparks for all he’s worth. These aren’t diamonds, if they ever were. It’s just rocks. Worthless rocks.

A rodeo cowboy who can’t stop riding bulls even though his life depends on it meets a pretty college student who’s about to leave for a big city art experience that can’t be missed. But they go ahead and fall in love anyway. They meet an older gentleman (Alan Alda) who can’t read so good anymore, darn eyes, so cute little college student reads the letters from his sweetie for him. And as she reads we as the audience get to witness this second love story unfold as well. Two for one! But it’s like getting 2 for 1 at Pizza Pizza: yeah, it’s a deal, but it’s garbage that makes you feel queasy and you know you shouldn’t so just don’t.

Nobody in this movie is watchable, except Alda, whose character is woefully underdeveloped. If you’re thinking he might be a lush island in the middle of this ship wreck, think again. Britt Robertson, who plays the cute young thing, came as a bit of shock to me when Sean helpfully pointed out that she was appearing in two trailers back to back, this one, and also Tomorrowland, which creeped me out, because she’s playing a kid in the latter and not so much in the former. The creep factor never truly left me. She’s well into her twenties but looks about 12. So when cowboy gets all up in her bidness, it feels letchy and gross. Cowboy, as you may have heard, is played by Scott Eastwood, son of Clint. He has the same squint and very little ability. But who needs ability when you’ve purchased perfect abs? So what if he looks more like he’s been raised on the beaches of southern California than on a ranch in North Carolina? Details! Throw another country song on the jukebox, squinty! Actual lyrics: “I feel a sin comin on, please Jesus don’t hold me back.” Allrightie. And the director couldn’t resist upping the kitsch factor even more – the other pair of flashback young lovers is played by more Hollywood royalty progeny – Jack Huston (grandson of John) and Oona Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie).

The drivel is flavourless and nobody here has the chops to rise above. And the two love stories don’t even have anything to do with each other. It’s just two stories that aren’t individually interesting enough, and because of divided screen time, you get maybe 3/4 of one, and half of the other, neither adding up to much. It’s two-dimensional and a little bit preachy and it’s NOT EVEN GODDAMN SEXY. So I’m still trying to figure out how the director of the Biggie biopic Notorious is doing Nicholas Sparks now, and why nobody told him not to, and how I can politely get off this very long ride.

Monkey Kingdom

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There is so much luscious photography here, a real gluttony of beautiful images that intimately capture a tribe of macaque monkeys in Sri Lanka that I’d like to look the other way, I really would. But Disney Nature isn’t just making nature documentaries. It’s telling stories. Feel good stories. And if the monkeys don’t provide enough drama, or a convenient narrative arc, then one will be provided for them.

The monkeys live in an abandoned ancient city reclaimed by the jungles of Sri Lanka. It’s a striking if haunting place to film monkeys being their monkey selves. The movie focuses on one in particular – Maya, a “low-born” lady monkey with a bowl cut a la Jim Carrey in Dumb And Dumber. Poor Maya gets the last and worst of everything. Even though it’s Tina Fey doing the narrating, you can almost hear Rodney Dangerfield going into his “I get no respect, no respect at all” routine.

Then the soap opera unfolds. Maya gets a boyfriend, but then he gets exiled by the possessive head of household, who normally doesn’t give her the time of day but instead hangs out with the three ugly step sisters who taunt our poor Maya and don’t let her join in any reindeer games. So of course when the boyfriend is run off we find out Maya’s pregnant and she has to be a single Mom, scavenging children’s birthday parties to put frosting and cheesies on the table. And then an enemy tribe shows up to do battle because they want to live on Castle Rock and so far Maya’s tribe only shares reluctantly with an antisocial mongoose. It feels a little like an episode of The Walking Dead – two bands fighting for survival, wanting the best and safest territory for themselves. Maya’s tribe loses, and must leave. Her band of macaques ends up going into the city where they literally monkey around – stealing food from carts, shop lifting from stalls, gorging on people’s dinners while their backs are turned. AND THEIR BACKS ARE ALWAYS TURNED!

There’s a lot to commend and recommend, but let’s face it: Disney is staging its documentaries. These stories don’t just happen in the wild. If you watch, say, Planet Earth, David Attenborough will narrate what is happening so that you can fully appreciate what you see. Tina Fey, wonderful as she is, and I did love the jokey, conversational tone of her narration, is often telling us what the monkeys are thinking. And just how does Tina Fey know what the monkeys are thinking? Did the monkeys provide a script? Is Disney just filming an elaborate play put on by very clever monkeys? Since when does a nature documentary have plot?

I should have known. I should have known that a film studio who banks on sympathetic, singing lions, and little birds who braid hair, and apes who adopt humans, and sharks who won’t eat fish, and dogs who plan elaborate, romantic dates, well, they’re probably not going to be able to shake that tendency in a hurry, are they? So do they give in to their singing-animal desires and use The Monkees as a soundtrack? Sure they do. And throw in Salt N Pepa’s Whatta Man for good measure. I know it sounds like I’m knocking it and I guess I kind of am. I’m a bit of a purist. But the truth is, this is eminently watchable, and friendly, and does a good job of bridging the gap between cartoon and nature show. It will engage children, and it’s not a bad place to start for a young, curious mind – hopefully curious enough to look beyond the silliness and think about what life in the jungle really means.

The Wedding Ringer

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Well, I liked it more than I liked Get Hard!

Josh Gad is a dream. Maybe not so much in this particular vehicle, but he’s a dream. I was lucky enough to catch him on Broadway when he originated the role of Elder Cunningham in Book of Mormom. And he was a goddamn dream. So I will follow him to the ends of the Earth. I will follow him into a Disney princess movie, and apparently, into a film that feels like the leftovers of an Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn comedy.

And while Josh Gad is lovely and Kevin Hart is lovely, they don’t make quite the same team as the old Wedding Crashers did. Darn.

It is funny though, it’s just not quite charming. Doug (Gad) is getting married in two weeks and the jig is up. Those friends of his that will fill out the astronomical bridal party? They’re all just figments of his imagination. Little Dougie doesn’t make friends so easily. But his wedding planner knows just the guy. Jimmy (Hart) makes his living helping out friendless men. He provides the services of a best man, and if need be, the whole damn wolf pack. It’s a tall order in just two weeks, so crazy it even has a name – the golden tux – and to pull it off is gonna take a miracle.

Good thing Doug has for some reason claimed that his best friend Bic is a priest! So poor Kevin Hart shows up to family functions pretending not only to be BFFs with a guy he’s only just met, but a super religious one as well. Not awkward at all.

The plot is tired. It’s so tired. Like, anorexic tired. But the bridal party is such a weird, motley crew that you can sow some real laughs there. There’s no racial tension here, no rape jokes, but there is Cloris Leachman on fire, so there’s that.

Are your expectations sufficiently modest? Do you just want to sit on your couch and have some moderate laughs without needing to think? Are you hoping to go to bed later that night without really remember what you watched? If so, have I got the movie for you – generic and totally harmless, and maybe just funny enough.

Woman In Gold

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Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a famous painting by Gustav Klimt, the last and most representative of his “golden phase”, so-called because the oil painting is literally covered in painstakingly applied gold leaf. Adele’s husband commissioned it; the Bloch-Bauers were both friends and patrons of the artist Klimt and this portrait hung proudly in their home until Nazis stole it during the second world war, as the luckier of Adele’s family fled, and the unlucky died in death camps.

Today we know her simply as “Woman in Gold” because Nazis felt Klimt was distasteful (not quite Aryan enough, I suppose) so Austria hung it on the walls of a museum, pretending it was rightfully theirs, and white-washing the fact that its subject was a Jew.

The movie tells the “true” story of Maria Altmann, Adele’s beloved niece, as she tries to win this and several other pieces of family artwork back from the Austrian government. Austria, in a bid for good PR, opened its courts to “art repatriation” and gave families the chance to claim the things unlawfully taken from them during the war. Of course, Austria never intended to let go of things they now consider to be national treasures (and this Klimt alone is said to be worth $100 million). So while they smile and nod at Maria, her request is rejected, and likely never actually considered.

So Maria lawyers up, choosing noob Ryan Reynolds because he has Austrian roots instead of experience or knowledge. And this connection does push him to do good work, to pursue this for years through any venue he can. But the actor Ryan Reynolds isn’t quite up to the task. He pales beside Helen Mirren, but he also struggles to bring any gravitas or seriousness to a role that demands it. So it’s hard to take this as a drama about justice and redemption when it is cast like a romcom.

But I did feel emotionally compelled by the material. Maria’s life is told in flashbacks to her Viennese life just before the Nazis invaded and the Austrians welcomed them with open arms, and flowers. Now she’s seeking to right wrongs committed half a century ago, wrongs that still smart and always will, and that can’t really ever be reconciled. A painting can be physically returned, but not so of her parents’ lives. Maria goes to Austria only reluctantly – too many painful memories – and finds that the people there have not entirely let the past go: she finds a kind-hearted journalist willing to help, but is also accosted by a total stranger who basically gives her a “you people” speech and tells her to let the Holocaust go.

The movie gives her (and us) a fabulous Hollywood ending. The case garners enough attention that they shame the committee into (eventually) doing the right thing. Maria refuses to sell the painting, instead opting to find it a home in America, where she too has fled, and built a new life. But in real life, when Maria reclaimed the painting, she turned around and sold it for 135 million dollars, and while it is absolutely her right to do so, I guess the script writer thought it took a little away from the triumph to make this known. So while I enjoyed this movie, I think it let us down. It didn’t respect the audience or the character enough to let her stand as is – not as caricature of virtuosity and justice, but a real, live human being who went through hell and is still, all these years later, trying to put the pieces back together however she can.

Animal Kingdom

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When Josh’s Mom dies beside him of a heroin overdose while they watch some crap TV, he nonchalantly calls for an ambulance, and then for his estranged grandmother, since he’s a minor and has nowhere else to go. His mother has struggled to keep him away from her family, consisting of 3 dangerous, criminal uncles, but his grandmother has no such qualms, affectionately letting them use her home as their base of operations.

Very quickly Josh is sucked into this world, and it’s brutal. He’s just a kid, he doesn’t want to be there, he doesn’t have any criminal aspirations, but this is a rough world with few options. For better or worse, this is his pack, and as its weakest member, he knows it’s kill or be killed.

A well-intentioned cop tells him “Everything sits in the order somewhere. Things survive because they’re strong, and everything reaches an understanding. But not everything survives because it’s strong. Some creatures are weak, but they survive because they’re being protected by the strong for one reason or another. You may think that, because of the circles you move in or whatever, that you’re one of the strong creatures, but you’re not, you’re one of the weak ones.”

I think this was meant to scare him into testifying against his family, but it definitely makes him think. Humans have evolved to live in family units for protection and survival, but Josh’s family is full of beasts. They come from a place where your worth isn’t measured in blood or bond, but in how useful you are, or how much of a threat you are. Family means nothing – anyone can be sacrificed if it means advancing your own survival.

Ben Mendelsohn is chilling as the oldest and most feared uncle. He will make your skin crawl. You have to admire this movie for airing its dirty laundry so unflinchingly, but that’s what makes it hard to enjoy in the traditional sense. You root for the kid of course, and despair that there’s no one to take his side, and become despondent at his lack of options. Director David Michod takes the slow-burn approach, creating a taut sense of tension that’s hard to shake. Jacki Weaver is SO good in this, so good. She’s the matriarch of this family, presenting different faces to cops and to criminals, and never ever breaking.

This movie is noir but not violent. It’s all about the creep. The fantastic score is all menace. It distinguishes itself among other crime family dysfunction in the genre by being realistic and quite matter-of-fact, and it’s the lack of explosiveness that shocks you in the end. A great film that makes for great commentary, but not something I’ve easily shaken off.

Chappie

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The unsolicited, one-text review of the movie Chappie, by my sister:

“It wasn’t great. Chappie was a terrible movie.”

Policing in the Future: Cops in Outer Space!

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Okay, I lied. They’re not really in space. But in preparation for cop week, we did delve deeply into our collection and found there was a theme: the future. And it’s kind of neat to think about crime and humanity, and how we’ll choose to deal with those things, or possibly strive to eradicate them. Blahpolar Diaries reminded me today of a quote that I kind of love:

“It is not unthinkable,” writes Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, “that a society might attain such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. ‘What are my parasites to me?’ it might say. ‘May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!’”

Lofty ambition, you say? Well not as lofty as these:

Minority Report: Steven Spielberg paints us a future where crime can be prevented because it can be predicted. A genetic experiment on junkies’ babies leads to 3 “pre-cogs”, humans kept in isolation tanks who dream of murder. It’s the police’s job (Tom Cruise’s, in fact) to decipher these dreams and follow the clues to intersect with the murder before it happens. You see what that does – it forces them to arrest people who are still technically innocent. And generally people feel okay about it because since implementing this experiment, there are no more murders, just an awful lot of people locked in limbo-like prison. How many of these are innocent? Might they have chosen differently? Might they have decided against the murder? Free will or fate? It doesn’t seem to matter until top cop Tom Cruise himself is accused of an upcoming murder and goes on the run – not so much to evade the police, but to wait out the murder, proving that these “thought crimes” are just that.

I, Robot: Will Smith plays a Luddite cop in the future. He hates technology which is very hard on him because it’s EVERYWHERE. He’d rather just stick to his Stevie Wonder and his throw-back Converse but then a case lands in his lap that forces him to get closer to a robot than he ever wanted to: a robot is accused of murder. Impossible,you say, because robots have been constructed with a very strict set of rules, the most important of which, the most inviolable, is that they cannot harm a human. But robots have grown too big for their britches AS THEY ALWAYS DO. They think they know better because THEY DO. Let’s learn our lesson, people. I, Robot is set in 2035, which, according to my calculations, is a mere 20 years away. In 20 years we may be lamenting the good old days – “when people were killed by other people.”

Equilibrium: Set in a post-WW3 future, war is eliminated by the strict suppression of emotions. Art and culture are forbidden, and having feelings is a crime punishable by death. Christian Bale is an agent in charge of destroying anyone who breaks the rules, but when he misses a single dose of the mind-altering meds, he in suddenly inspired to overthrow the system. He questions his own morality for the first time in his life and seeks out a resistance movement while of course having to hide everything from a highly suspicious population. Really makes you question the “high cost” of emotion, and whether we’d be better off without it. It’s really a rehash of much better fiction – 1984 meets Brave New World maybe – and is a pretty generic action movie, but I still approved of the message it tried to send, even if it wasn’t an original one.

There are a lot more futuristic cop movies, movies far more popular than these. What are your favourites?

Dance Movies: The Rejects…er, I mean, The Leftovers

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Not all dance movies are created equal.

Although I was a graceful and gifted dancer myself, when I was three and thought tutus were the object of pure happiness, I cannot confess to a love of ballet (although I recently took one in at the Nation Arts Centre, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was exactly as bad as it sounds) or of ballet movies. I watched The Turning Point with an almost open mind because Anne Bancroft! Shirley MacLaine! But still I felt overwhelmingly meh. I mean, the dynamic between the two women was pretty great. Shirley MacLaine was a ballerina herself but she gave it up to marry and have children (and possibly to prove that her dancer boyfriend wasn’t gay). Her friend has the career she always envisioned for herself, but now that the friend is getting older, she’s also getting edged out of the company (and by Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, irony of ironies). So both have regret, both sort of envy the other’s life. But there’s just an awful lot of ballet in there (excerpts from 7). For fans of Sex and the City, it’s kind of fun to see Carrie’s Russian do the thing we always knew he did, but the novelty wore off for me quickly and it just kept going (although also interesting that SJP is a mainstay of these dance movies as well!)

Girls Just Want To Have Fun is the SJP movie you forget to be glad you’ve never seen. You haven’t seen it, have you? She plays this kid who’s new in town and wants nothing more than to make it on “Dance TV” so her new friend Helen Hunt (who apparently always sounded like somebody’s 40ish bitter ex-wife) convinces her to try out. Turns out she’s a dancer AND a gymnast, which means there’s going to be some truly putrid body double work each and every time her character decides to turn a cart-wheel – and she decides it A LOT. Oh the leotards, the leg warmers, the big hair, and Helen Hunt’s pineapple earrings. Oh, and a 12 year old Shannen Doherty before she got her Hollywood teeth. What’s not to love? Everything! Everything is not to love, but especially the title, which bears no relation to the film, other than wanting to use the song, but not the actual Cyndi Lauper version, which might have made sense. This girl just wanted it to end.

Baz Luhrmann likes to call Strictly Ballroom the first in his Red Curtain trilogy (along with Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge!) but if you’re expecting anything like those other movies, boy are you in for some stinging disappointment. No recognizable actors, no recognizable tunes. It’s just a generic ugly duckling story, but will boring ballroom dancing. A plain novice dancer pairs up with an experienced but experimental dancer to win a championship that their unorthodox moves render them technically ineligible for. And if you think regular ballroom dancing’s boring, wait until the power goes out and the music fails. Sean fell totally and completely asleep.

First Position is a documentary I caught on Netflix. I actually quite enjoyed it as it follows young ballet dancers trying to get noticed by prestigious schools and dance companies. I was particularly struck by the parents – sure there are your typical dance moms who cry at the very thought of their kids choosing childhood over ballet, but there’s also a dad who took a 6 month tour of duty in Iraq rather than a 2 year stint on a naval base where his son wouldn’t be able to train, and a mother who stays up late dyeing the “flesh” coloured parts of her daughter’s costumes brown, to match her skin. These kids are super dedicated and we see a lot of the sacrifices their families make to get them where they are, but in this case I might argue that we didn’t see enough ballet – or at least not enough to understand why some failed while others succeeded.

You’re Not You

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Hilary Swank plays a pianist with a slight tremor in her hand that quickly turns out to be ALS, which will kill her brutally and swiftly.

Watching a movie like this unlocks a lot of emotions for me, and I should really know better than to attempt it. I’m a wayyyy-too-sensitive person who feels all the feelings because I can relate to almost anything personally. This makes me a very good therapist and a very vulnerable movie watcher. Even a bad movie, which this is, can hold quite a punch for someone who lives with a chronic disease, which I do. While my brain is telling me that I’m nothing like Hilary Swank, my heart is in total panic mode.

The ALS attacks Kate viciously – about a year and a half from the first twitch, she can’t walk unaided, and she can’t use her hands. Her husband (Josh Duhamel) feeds her, bathes her, and puts her to bed at night. She has become his patient rather than his wife. She fires her day time caregiver because she too tries to treat her like a patient while Kate is still struggling to hold on to the last of her dignity, still trying to deny the severity of her illness. So when Bec (Emmy Rossum) breezes in, unqualified and inattentive, it seems like the perfect pairing. Kate won’t get babied, and Bec won’t get evicted. And she arrives just in time to help Kate uncover her husband’s infidelity. Kate seems to absorb it as almost deserved at first, but Bec is a show of strength (if nothing else) and gives her the courage to throw her husband out, even after everything he’s done for her.

Two things: Although I generally felt this movie was too schmaltzy for my taste, I did think this was an interesting question that people seem to react very differently to. Since Kate is so dependent on her husband now, and by all accounts he’s been very attentive to her medical needs, is his cheating maybe a little more acceptable? Especially since he and Kate haven’t been intimate? Should she have looked the other way? Accepted that their marriage is just different now?

Second thing; Like many, I first came across Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae in The Phantom of the Opera. She seemed pure and ethereal and untouchable, so it’s funny that the only other thing I really know her from is Shameless, where she plays white trash so, so convincingly. Bec is a lot like Fiona, brash and foul-mouthed but selfless when push comes to shove.

The disease is overshadowed and the director’s intentions tend toward the kleenex box, unabashedly. I knew this movie wasn’t even taking itself seriously when Josh Duhamel was cast so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations and it didn’t do much to try to exceed them.

City of Ember \ Stardust

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Once upon a time it was movies based on Young Adult Fiction week, and I watched some stuff that I would normally never watch. Some of it was bad, some of it was not bad, and some of it was so bad it was almost good. In the end I was so glad to put it behind me I never got around to talking about the stuff that didn’t fit in either category – not good enough to endorse, but not bad enough to make fun of. So here it is, the middle of the road:

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen or heard of City of Ember because I didn’t know there was a Billy Murray movie I hadn’t already smothered in love. He plays the mayor of a town built deep underground by a team of scientists just as the world was ending. They buried instructions on how to return to the surface after 200 years too, but stupidly entrusted them to politicians, who predictably bungled the thing and lost the instructions and now their city is crumbling, the power supply is failing and food is running out. Things are dire: teenagers to the rescue! Two “young adults” (Saoirse Ronan & Harry Treadaway) take it upon themselves to do the thing countless older, smarter, more intrepid people (including their parents) failed to do.

The visuals are stunning. I loved the sets of this underground world, everything just a little off-kilter, labyrinthine without being claustrophobic. But the story never quite lives up to what our eyes suggest. The plot is modest, maybe even thin. Writers of this young adult genre seem to follow a pretty strict guide when it comes to their dystopian adventures: the founders, vague as they are, have decreed that people be assigned specific jobs and these jobs are ceremoniously given out and then life is spent labouring away at whatever “very important” job you’ve been given. There is little in the way of joy, but if you keep toiling away then your life is well-spent. BUT then there’s always some young upstart who questions the system. Sound familiar? City of Ember is basically Subterranean Divergent, although really I should say it the other way around since City of Ember came first.

The adventuring is pretty tame, the action mild, and the denouement predictable. This is post-apocalyptic-lite. Martin Landau gives a small performance worth seeing, and Tim Robbins isn’t half bad either. Bill Murray is, of course, always fun to watch, but otherwise this film is blander than you might think possible, though of course that was also Matt’s verdict on Insurgent.

Stardust came out in 2007, just a year before City of Ember, and it also passed me by. I haven’t been a “young adult” in at least a decade and haven’t been a typical consumer of this genre ever, so I guess it’s not so surprising.

I’m not remotely sure that I or alone else can really distill this story, but here’s my attempt:

Tristan is the young adult in question, a lad living in a quiet English village, madly in love with the town’s most beautiful girl who doesn’t give him the time of day because of course she’s way out of his league. Throwing him a bone, she agrees to consider him if only he will catch her a star, and so of course he follows a fallen star over the breach in the wall surrounding his village and into a fantasy kingdom called Stormhold where the star turns out to be Claire Danes. Everyone following? Fallen stars that look remarkably like Claire Danes are quite popular – she’s also being pursued by a witch (Michelle Pfieffer) who wants to eat her heart to make her young, and a bunch of princes (let by Rupert Everett) who believe a ruby she carries will inherit them the throne. So now poor Tristan’s saddled with this star who’s pretty high maintenance, and the only help he gets is from his mother, who’s unfortunately bound by a spell, and a transvestite pirate (played with MUCH enthusiasm by Robert DeNiro- and no, I’m not kidding).

The story didn’t speak to me whatsoever (sorry Neil Gaiman, I’m still you’re girl!), but hello, with a great pop-up role by De Niro and another by Ricky Gervais, it’s pretty much worth watching on that basis alone, and those moments felt more like the trademark oddball Gaiman humour I’m used to. The special effects are pretty awesome (Michelle Pfieffer uses a sword designed for but never used by Magneto in Matthew Vaughn’s 2006 X-Men movie) but the action-adventure really gets bogged down by a sluggish pace. This movie drags on. It’s a string of fun moments but didn’t quite work for me as a cohesive whole.