I’m sorry to have to tell you that Fearless (Fe@rLeSS_) is a not very good animated film on Netflix. It’s not even a very good video game handle, but that’s what we’re dealing with.
Reid is a teenage boy who is definitely “not” going to sit on his couch playing video games all weekend while his parents are away (at least that’s what he tells his mom when she calls to check up on him – he’s not even that convincing). Logged in as Fe@rLeSS_, Reid (Miles Robbins) is on the last impossible level of a very difficult game into which he’s already sunk many, many hours of play. When fat shaming the monster (I guess this is what passes for PG trash talk?) doesn’t work, he realizes that his character, Captain Lightspeed (Jadakiss), doesn’t have the necessary weapon to defeat the ultimate boss, Arcannis (Miguel). As Fe@rLeSS_ and sidekick/teammate Fleech (Tom Kenny) discover, Captain Lightspeed has one weapon in his arsenal they’ve never deployed: babies. Babies? What kind of creepy code name is that? It’s not. They’re actual babies, triplets actually, who all have some sort of super power like their dad, only they’ll have to be deposited into daycare so they can “grow” into them, or something like that. Obviously they should have been cultivating the baby potential a long time ago. But then something really weird happens (bear with me, and don’t shoot the messenger): the babies end up in Reid’s living room. Reid who is a real, human, teenage boy, with science homework due on Monday, and the babies, who are fictional video game characters, just a bunch of 0s and 1s, are now living and breathing and crying and pooping in his living room. As babies do. Real ones, anyway, which these ones aren’t…and yet here they are, adorable, needy little monsters, encouraging the awful screenwriters to commit a multitude of heinous poop puns. Thank goodness for Melanie (Yara Shahidi), Reid’s unsuspecting lab partner, who shows up to do “homework” (I see you, Melanie: don’t go thinking you invented that move yourself) but gets redeployed into babysitting/saving the world. Which is when this movie tries to rip-off The Incredibles but clearly got a pirated version and a bad stenographer.
Which may still satisfy young audiences, who have notoriously bad taste in EVERYTHING (sorry, but: velcro, Lunchables, Caillou, Baby Shark, toys with sirens, etc, etc), but it lacks Pixar’s more universal appeal. In fact, it’s so far out of Pixar’s league it would be unfair to compare them had they not brought it on themselves by making a carbon copy of The Incredibles and delivering the 7th or 8th carbon down and not pressing nearly hard enough. If you got that reference, you’re way too old for this movie. But you will get the one throw-away E.T. reference, which is hard to miss because it’s both lazy and obvious. I can’t seem to keep the contempt out of this review even though the film itself is relatively harmless. It just reminds me of the kind of forgettable movie Dreamworks would have put out 12 years ago, the kind that only ever gets played in the back seats of minivans (a local car dealership once had a “promotion” – buy a car, get some dijon mustard. Incredible, I know. Yet true. I never saw the numbers on the avalanche of deals that were made that day or just how enticing that $4 jar of mustard was on the back end of a $20 000 investment that starts depreciating the minute you sign on the dotted line ((did lines used to be dotted, or is that just a really stupid expression?)), but I’m sure the Grey Poupon ((I hope it was Grey Poupon)) was better bait than not one but TWO copies of Megamind. Two because mini vans come standard with not one but two screens that have better picture quality in a moving vehicle than even the movie theatre itself had when I was a kid, and how dare you ask your glazed-eye children to choose between The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie for the 6 minute drive to Nana’s?) (Whew, someone sure woke up on the ranty side of the bed this morning!)
Anyway, what was I saying?
Oh yeah, Fe@rLeSS_.
More like Dickless.
Heh. Cross that off the old bucketlist: end a children’s movie review with a swear. Peace out, motherfuckers!
Ten years later, a grown-up Rupert (Ben Schnetzer) is releasing a collection of their correspondence as a book, and a skeptical reporter (Thandie Newton) is interviewing him. The truth of their friendship is revealed through flashbacks, as is Donovan’s life, which of course was not all rainbows and lollipops.
her – Charlotte, the mother of another kidnapped journalist who was successful in getting her son returned home. Off the record, Charlotte (Edie Falco) fund-raised the ransom among her wealthy friends and had someone walk it across the border for her in order to evade detection. They’re planning the same for Helen’s son, with a friend and colleague of his, Sam (Matt Bomer) willing to make the actual transaction. Helen can scarcely believe her son might actually come home, and isn’t sure what kind of broken man he’ll be if he does. But her focus remains on getting the work done, all of it underground, away from the unhelpful but watchful eyes of government agencies.
This holiday movie has something for everyone: spirituality, homophobia, reincarnation, crippling depression, dead babies, and more. But in its heart of hearts it’s really just about a bunch of people who don’t want to end up alone – on Christmas, on their deathbeds, in the world just generally. Some of us feel encumbered by all our obligations to friends and family over the holidays but others are completely bankrupt when it comes to people who care, and for them, the holidays can be really, really hard.
again, this movie misses its mark with me. I think it’s pandering and condescending and incredibly obvious that was written and directed by MEN. But I’m not a Bad Mom, I’m a Good Aunt. And the role of Good Aunt is really easy: you buy lots of presents, you let them get away with everything three notches above murder, and you give them 100% of your time and attention once or twice a month. Being a mom, bad or not, is infinitely harder because parenting is about the details. So if carving out 104 minutes to sneak away to one of those fancy movie theatres that serve wine is all you can muster for yourself this holiday season, have at it.
Marnie has a little bit of money and an awful lot of time, so she packs up her New Jersey home and finds herself a condo in L.A. where her daughter Lori writes for television. Marnie’s California awakening is intoxicating. She loves all the things that most of us hate about L.A. But shopping at The Grove and volunteering only fill up so many hours. The rest are spent calling or visiting her daughter. Her daughter is not impressed.
encouraged her to set boundaries with her mother, Marnie sees the therapist herself. And when that doesn’t go as expected, she finds other people to mother, like the ‘genius’ she overuses at the Apple store, and a friend of her daughter’s who’s more receptive to advice and well-intended intrusiveness.
reasons this movie fails is that it tries too hard. The script is just so stupidly earnest. It makes wonderful actresses say such flighty, cliched things. And everyone cries all the time, at the drop of a hat. It made me really wonder why the script writer has so many fucking hats, and why she’s always dropping them. Secure your hat to your head, lady.
want you to watch me abuse it! I’m going to write a trite little movie that wishes it was a pretentious little novel! Script writing 101 says I should put in a conflict here! [Insert conflict]. I wonder if Sharon Stone can do polysyllabics? Either way she’ll be impressed when I whip out this tired metaphor! And I’ll make it super relatable by including a variety of white women with down-to-earth jobs like bra designer, fashion icon, and celebrity photographer. And I wonder if I can work in cancer? Watch out, heart strings!
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 