reviews

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just shouldn’t be allowed near CGI animated dinosaur films. I don’t know why this particular mircogenre of movies manages to so consistently stick in my damn craw. I, of course, have Dinosaur sitting proudly at the very bottom of my rankings of the Disney canon and I have every hope that it will remain that way for a long time.

And I would still gladly watch Dinosaur over The Good Dinosaur. Mainly because, I can at least watch Dinosaur from beginning to end. The Good Dinosaur is the second last movie on my requested reviews because I have put it off over and over and over again. I cannot finish this thing. It bores the piss out of me.

But, before we crack on, I want to explain why I’m not doing a full plot recap for this one.

I was feeling ever so poorly.
I actually had a lot on this month. Um…I don’t know if you heard but some stuff happened.

Still not entirely sure this isn’t my wife pulling off an amazingly ambitious prank.

3. This movie has practically no plot to recap.

4. Disney Plus was dicking me around something fierce, constantly crashing and freezing and making the experience of watching this movie even more interminable than normal. This, by the way, was also during Kimmelnacht so you can understand why I was eyeing my Disney Plus subscription with a steely eye and whispering…

So, not a recap, more a series of observations about why this fucking movie annoys me so much.

Or, y’know, a rant.

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Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)

I had a good cringe not so long ago when I stumbled on my old list of Top Ten Non Disney Animated Movies.

Some of the choices I stand by but jeez, I’ll probably have to re-do that list entirely. Or will I? Are listicles even a thing anymore? Are blogs? Is anyone out there reading this who’s not a bot? Hello? Hellooo?

Anyway, existential dread aside, one of the big surprises for me was that 2014 Mouse apparently put 2008’s Kung Fu Panda on the list, a movie I think I have seen maybe once and have never had the urge to watch again. I have no idea why I did that. I feel like the years must have Ship of Theseus’d me into a completely different person because I cannot imagine that movie provoking that strong a reaction in me, either positive or negative. And I know that this is definitely a “me” problem. These movies are, structurally, very very good. Like, just put together magnificently well. I get the praise for them. Mostly. Some of the more rhapsodic critical responses to this movie I find a little baffling. Particularly the praise for the visuals. Again, they’re very good. But I came across one review (from a critic who’s opinion I rate very highly) who actually claimed that Kung Fu Panda 2 was the most visually beautiful film Dreamworks had made up to this point in their history.

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“Please. Don’t be boring.”

It’s not a job I’d want as a writer, I’ll tell you that much.

Trying to write the first movie about a black Captain America in such a viciously polarised time is a hell of a poisoned chalice and I don’t envy the approximately eighteen thousand screenwriters who worked on Captain America: Brave New World. What does it mean for a black man to represent America given, y’know, the whole business? That has to be delved into right?

Or does it? Is it fair to insist that Sam Wilson has to make some great serious statement on The Issue of Race, when you would never ask that of Steve Rogers? Shouldn’t Sam Wilson just be able to be Captain America without it being a whole thing?

Personally, and this is just my instinct as a writer, I would have focused on winning the crowd over in the first movie with a really kickass Captain America movie and keep the heavy stuff for further movies down the line once Wilson/Mackie had been accepted by a critical mass of the fanbase as the new Cap.

I don’t know how I would have done that exactly.

I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have done this.

This being a stealth sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk where Captain America feels like a supporting character in his own damn movie.

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Pan (2015)

Old lags on this blog know, from my review of Disney’s Peter Pan written way back in the Hadean Epoch, that JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy is one of my favourite books of all time. By a strange coincidence, I recently finished reading it to Mini-Mouse (my first full read-through in around fifteen years) and I was once more struck by how achingly beautiful it is purely as a piece of writing.

Look at this passage describing Hook’s ship:

One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek, which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger, lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name.

Now, I’m not normally one to gush about editions of books and what not. If it’s a good story, I don’t tend to care about the packaging. But I do make a special exception for my copy of Peter Pan.

The Everyman Children’s Classics edition with illustrations by F.D. Bedford. I got this one Christmas many years ago and it’s always been indescribably special to me.

When I see a bad adaptation of Peter Pan, it feels I leant this book to someone and got it back torn, stained and with obscene notes scribbled on every page.

I feel angry and appalled and betrayed.

Watching Pan, however, felt like I leant this book to someone and they put it in a shredder and painstakingly re-arranged the shreds into a diorama depicting the Conference of Versailles.

Now we’re waaaaaay past angry. Now I’m just baffled and confused.

Why? Why did you do that?

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“Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point.”

Around the midpoint of Deadpool & Wolverine I had a rather chilling realisation during this exchange of dialogue between Elektra and Deadpool.

ELEKTRA: Every time one of us has gone up against her, they die. The Punisher, Quicksilver, Daredevil.”

DEADPOOL: “Daredevil? I’m so sorry.”

ELEKTRA: (with an indifferent shrug) “It’s fine.”

So let’s unpack this joke. Here is everything you, the viewer, need to know for this gag to land.

This is Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner.
Garner first played this role over twenty years ago, in the critically reviled Daredevil, and then again in the practically unseen spin-off Elektra.
In Daredevil, she was the love interest of the title character.
Daredevil was played by Ben Affleck.
Garner and Affleck married shortly after making that film.
They subsequently underwent an extremely public and acrimonious divorce.
Hence, Elektra is not particularly cut up about Daredevil dying.

And virtually every joke in this thing is that kind of inside baseball uber-specific nerd bullshit that seems positively tailormade to appeal to me, a 40 something male who had comics instead of friends growing up. And yet…this thing made €1.8 billion dollars. This is as mainstream as movies get now.

Super niche nerd culture is no longer niche. The war is over. Everyone is a massive nerd now.

Total domination.

And I now find myself in a very difficult position as a movie critic.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I laughed my ass off from start to finish.

And yet, when I read, say, Donald Clarke howling in sackcloth outside the sinful Gomorrah that is the modern movie industry, I can’t help but nod along.

This movie isn’t a movie. It’s heroin. It’s very good heroin. And I very much enjoyed it.

But…I should probably be ingesting food instead.

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“Okay, I’m getting a lot of negative energy from you and I don’t like it.”

In the past I’ve had plenty of opportunities to extol my favourite film critic, Tim Brayton over at Alternate Ending and now is as good a time as any to re-up. Check him out if you haven’t already. He’s a fantastic critic and an inspiration and so it is with a certain bitter-sweet melancholy that I must report that I have at last surpassed him.

Not in terms of quality of analysis or wit of writing, fuck no, I’m not insane. But you see, Tim actually reviews movies roughly when they come out, like some kind of freak with a work ethic, where as I review movies when I feel like it, maaan.

But today represents the first time I’m aware of where I actually beat him to the punch. My The Marvels review has come out before his The Marvels review, a victory whose sweetness is only slightly mitigated by the fact that I’m not entirely sure he intends to actually review this movie, a fact that is both completely understandable and quite damning.

A major critic not reviewing the latest installment of the MCU? How can this be?

It’s like that moment during the trial of Charles the First where the top fell off his cane and no one bent down to pick it up for him. In that moment, he knew he was king no more and also possibly that he was about to get a pretty aggressive haircut.

And look, I wanted to like this one. I want to like every movie I sit down to review. I love a good comeback story as much as anyone. And I had actually heard positive rumblings that this movie was far better than its paltry box-office and mediocre critical reception would suggest. I was even told it was something of an overlooked gem. Who told me that? In retrospect, fools. The movie is (mostly) trash.

If Ant-Man 3 was the MCU’s Raya, and Guardians 3 was its Encanto then with The Marvels we have our Strange World.

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“There are the hands that made us. And then there are the hands that guide their hands.”

So, how did we get here?

The MCU fell from grace the way Hemingway’s Mike Campbell went bankrupt, slowly and then all at once.

I think we all felt it, didn’t we? At some point this year, probably in the summer when Barbenheimer was in full swing, there was a moment when all of us who had still not disembarked from the hype train took a look at the MCU and said “nah, I’m done”.

And you probably have your own explanation for why that is. Endgame was the peak and it’s all been downhill since then. Superhero fatigue. Bad writing. Too woke. Not woke enough. Too much CGI. Martin Scorsese dropping truth bombs. The pandemic. Whatever.

But ultimately, I think the real reason was just…time. The studio execs currently running around trying to figure out why audiences aren’t flocking to their superhero movies anymore are like surfers wondering why the tidal wave they were riding faded away into the ocean.

Guys. It was a wave. That’s what they do.

Granted, it was a wave like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Depending on when you consider the modern age of superhero movies to have begun (the first X-Men movie maybe?) we’ve been riding this wave for over twenty years with some of the biggest box-office numbers of all time. But, it really was just a bigger version of every other Hollywood trend, be that “make everything like the Matrix” or “make everything like Transformers” or (if you want to go old school) “make everything a Western”. And trends never last. That’s why they’re called “trends”.

And I’ve been burned enough times before to know not to make any big predictions. Maybe these last two years were just a brief blip in an unbroken streak of cinematic dominance that will stretch on to the death of the universe. But, right now, in the waning hours of 2023 it sure feels like the MCU is done. And I’m okay with that. And I don’t regret my time with it as long as I can pretend Thor 4 doesn’t exist.

Because, even if we got nothing else of value from this series of films, James Gunn got to make the Guardians trilogy, and I wouldn’t deny him that for the world.

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Disney(ish) reviews with the Unshaved Mouse: Planes

Well. That was anti-climactic.

I feel like a knight who’s been on a quest to slay a terrible dragon for a decade only to arrive at the top of the mountain and find the dragon’s around the size of a chicken and died several years ago from old age.

In the early days of this blog I built up Planes as a personal bete noir, a movie I would never, ever review because it represented the worst of crass, merchandise driven movie-making for both Disney in particular and animation in general.

Oh my. How innocent I was. How innocent we all were.

But after years of the absolute garbage I have had to sit through for you people (love you all) it is with a heavy heart that I must report that Planes is…fine?

I mean, it is aggressively mediocre, don’t get me wrong. But, given the state of Disney’s output at present, there’s something refreshing about a movie that manages to hit a solid C.

In fact, I would say it was one of the most safely boring movies I’ve seen all year were it not for the fact that it’s set in the Cars universe and therefore is, as all movies in that benighted franchise are, weird as fuck.

WHAT KIND OF LIFE DOES THIS POOR CREATURE HAVE?!

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“I wish that mattered, Janet.”

Alright, firstly I want to discuss a resolution that I’ve made. Like many movie critics (and after eleven years that still feels presumptuous to say, thank you imposter syndrome) I’ve noted that the CGI in Marvel’s recent output has been of inconsistent quality. This inevitably comes across as a criticism of the VFX artists who worked on these films, which is horribly unfair. As has become more and more clear in recent years, the problem is not with the artists but with Disney’s tendency to over-work their artists while micromanaging every visual aspect of their films to the point that the effects teams often have very little time to do their work to the standard they would ideally like. So, I’m no longer going to say “the CGI is shit” in these reviews. Instead I will say “the studio is shit”, just so we all know who’s really at fault here.

Will I have cause to make use of this new paradigm when reviewing Ant-Man 3?

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John Carter (2012)

Hello everyone. Recently I decided to get back into acting and I’m going to be appearing in a production of Comedy of Errors in two weeks time as Dromio of Ephesus aka the best Dromio.

Dromio of Syracuse is trash and you all know it.

Also, Spouse of Mouse is on a business trip leaving me with two orphans crying plaintively for their mother night and day.

Also, I have a really tight writing deadline to meet this week.

Ergo, review short. Soz.

***

Normally, a film like John Carter is exactly the kind of movie that I dread to review.

It aroused no strong feelings in me. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. But honestly, the more I watched it the more I realised…this is kinda good? I mean, the elements are really strong. For being a decade old, the effects hold up a lot better than most of what Disney is putting out today.

The cast is full of actors I love or at least have no ill will towards (I like Taylor Kitsch, y’all are just mean). The script is nothing spectacular but perfectly solid. There was clearly a lot of thought and love and creativity and subtle world-building that went into the design of its fictional Martian setting. And there’s some strikingly beautiful cinematography. Like this scene where John Carter is fleeing on horseback across the Arizona Territory pursued by Union Soldiers: