10 for 10 (+1): lively and animated

 [10 for 10... that's 10 movies (or tv shows) which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie (or TV show) we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]

In this edition: some all-ages fare, some of which has been sitting on my "to review" list for a looong time:

Happy Feet Two (DVD) - 2011, d. George Miller (Mad Max)

Pinocchio (D+) - 1940, d. various

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (D+) - 2019, d. Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean 5)

The Sleepover (netflix) - 2020, d. Trish Sie

Enola Holmes (netflix) - 2020, d. Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Killing Eve)

Bumblebee (netflix) - 2019, d. Travis Night (Kubo and the Two Strings)

Ponyo (Blu-ray) - 2008, d. Hayao Miyazaki

Mulan ('95) (D+)- 1998, d. Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook

Soul (D+) - 2020, d. Pete Docter, Kemp Powers
The Great Mouse Detective (D+) - 1986, Ron Clements, Burny Mattinson, David Michener, John Musker

Bonus: Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (on demand) - 2018,  d. Jake Castorena 

And...go:

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Have I seen Happy Feet? I have no recollection of such events.  Happy Feet Two came into my life years ago as a gift to my daughter from a family member who sung its praises.  I love this family member, but I know their standards for movies is...well...not the same as my own. 

It was YEARS later when I learned that the Happy Feet series was directed by George Miller, creator and sole proprietor of the Mad Max series of films.  I mean, what?  But, then, you have to remember that Miller also directed Babe: Pig In The City, so the man is clearly a genius.  Happy Feet must be something special, right?

...Right?...

Honestly, it's fine.  It's fine to watch, it has some cuteness to it, there's a global warming message, a few little chuckles, a couple of neat, wholly out-of-place moments, even a couple of cool visual moments, but it's still a middle-of-the road children's movie.  

 

Where the best Pixar or Disney film kind of roots down inside you and makes a home, Happy Feet Two is a sorta pleasant mild breeze that feels kinda nice for a few seconds then goes away.  It's something you barely notice, and you're certainly not stopping for it and hoping for more.

Good for the young ones.  Fine to watch with them.  Maybe something that reveals some layers (though unlikely) on repeat viewings.  Robin Williams doing yet another suspect accent.  Sigh.

Moving on.

[8:47]

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I don't have any great love for Pinocchio.  In general most of the classic Disney movies left no impression on me as a child.  I was a superhero kid and these quaint fables and morality plays didn't really have a place in my brainspace.

I'm certain I saw Pinocchio when I was a child, but it wasn't something I ever went back to, so watching as an adult I was surprised, both by how weird it was, and also by how bored I was of it.  It's a story that, even with maybe only seeing it once or twice as a child, I was still pretty familiar with, and yet, the things I didn't know seemed so freaking out-there.  I should have been impressed, but Pinocchio the character is such a shitty little wooden boy I was annoyed along with my boredom.

 

Pinocchio as a movie feels like it takes forever to get going, and when it does, it's baffling.  There's a whole pedophilia subtext of kidnapping children to take them to "Pleasure Island" that is just...no thanks.

I know a film from 1940 can't be blamed for the impact it's had on popular culture.  Not that the impact is a bad thing, but the overarching fable and the parts of the story that have permeated the culture are far more resonant outside the film than within.  The good things from Disney's Pinocchio has actually outgrown the film they came from.

 

[20:21]

 

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Another Maleficent film. 
Ok.

The first one wasn't the best, but I like Jolie in the role and hoped that the second one, maybe, could do something a little better?  I honestly don't remember... 

 

(breaktime for a quick wikipedia refresh)

 

Oh, right.

 

This second entry in the evil-Disney-witch-prequel genre goes a lot bigger the second time around, with more political machinations as the parents of the prince to which Aurora (Elle Fanning) has fallen in love with are just bad people who want to start a war with the more magical realm on their doorstep.

It has not stuck with me, but I remember being more impressed with this second entry, particularly in how big it tried to get, and actually going full bore into war.

 

Just as I thought I might be tempted to watch this film again, I recalled the lingering  problem from the first film.  It looks ugly, the costuming and makeup the exception.  And this gaudy CGI aesthetic drags the whole franchise down.  It's maybe not as bad as the first one, but for the sheer scale, which must have made this an expensive enterprise, it still looks pretty bad.

[30:57]

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Speaking of films I can't remember, The Sleepover is a hot bit of absolute nothingness.  What is this film, I asked myself, as I could not recall anything beyond the title.  Once I looked it up and saw that Joe Mangianello, Malin Akerman, and Ken Marino were the adults in show, I had the vaguest of recollections.  It's about a sleepover where the kids hosting the sleepover find out their mom is a superspy and has been kidnapped.  They mount a rescue mission, because of course they do.

Was this film any good? It can't have been too good or too bad, because I can't really remember it at all.  It's another of these Nickelodeon-styled middling kid fare.  Not unwatchable by kids or their parents, but also nothing that's really going to get people too excited.

I just asked my 11-year-old what she thought about it.  She thought it was a funny adventure movie that she watched a second time on a weekend group Netflix watch.  She has indicated it is something she would watch again.

I guess when you're 11 and have only watched a few dozen movies, mediocrity like this still stands out.

[38:39]

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It should come as no surprise that the director of Enola Holmes had also directed Fleabag, as this film employs the talk-directly-to-the-camera asides that Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sensational comedy did.  Not that it's an exclusive thing, but to do it well requires good direction. 

The Letterboxd audience seemed mixed on this idea, that it's somehow the lesser for even deigning to employ such a trope, that it's been overplayed or that it cheapens Fleabag.  But I thought the picture employed it very well, and Millie Bobbie Brown is exceptionally good at the knowing glances or emphatic asides.  Brown is obviously the lead of the film, and it's really a breakout role for her.  Eleven on Stranger Things is kind of a thankless role, one that doesn't give her nearly as much to do, or showcase much depth or range.  Here, she gets to be intelligent, impetuous, clever, charming, feisty, fragile, focused and funny, and Brown excels at them all.  (When people pitch her as a young Princess Leia, it was in this film that I finally saw it.  And agree.  I don't want young Princess Leia adventures, but if they're going to do it, Brown is the right choice.)

 

I won't say she carries the film on her own, as there are so many great supporting players, from Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, Helena Bonham Carter as their mother, and Fiona Shaw as the headmistress of a finishing school the abandoned Enola is forced to go to.

 

Cavill's Holmes stands out particularly because he breaks from the tradition of making him cold, cunning, calculated, and a little heartless.  Cavill brings warmth to the role (not to mention some serious handsomeness) and the elder-sibling/younger-sibling rapport between him and Brown catches on quick.

 

The main drag of the movie is it's primary mystery however, which deals with some weird political lordship at the turn-of-the-20th-century.  It's not that it's ill handled, but it's not the most gripping adventure.  The far more interesting facet of the movie is Enola coming to terms with her mother abandoning her, and the family that doesn't seem to want her.  But she's a determined and capable young woman, as the film proves, which makes her a pretty stellar role model to watch with young women of any age.

 

I liked this tremendously and hope there are more in the series promply in the works.

[56:38]

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Oh, Transformers.  A property I've given more than a fair chance to, but just never caught on for me.  I spent some time with it in the 80's and it wasn't my thing.  I watched quite a bit of Beast Wars in the 90's, for reasons I still don't fully understand.  I actually liked the first Bay film, and gave up on the franchise after the second (I would watch the third in part years later).  The toys were never really my thing.

And then there's Bumblebee.  Why should this one be any different.  Why should I care about this one any more than anything that came before it.  Why should this Transformers entry/ quasi-prequel inspire anything other that an eyeroll?

Because it's pretty damn good, that's why.

It opens with a big sequence on the Transformers planet where there's some kind of conflict between the two factions of 'formers.  What makes someone an Autobot or Decepticon is not something explored in this or any of the other stories I have seen, it's just accepted that there's a good side and bad side.  Likewise, how do these robot-people come into existence?  That's just another conceit you have to give into with these things.  These stories do take time to explain why they transform into other things though, so there's that.  But anyway, this film opens with a big, expensive, and, most notably, CLEAN-looking sequence of Transformers in conflict on an alien terrain, and even though I don't have any nostalgia for the property, it's pretty damn awesome.

Then we get to Earth, which reminds me of so many of the sci-fi movies and TV shows I grew up with that promised big things only to put those big things on screen briefly and then trudge around mundane terrain of planet Earth. 

But this film is set in the 80's, which kind of puts it on-point when it follows this kind of storytelling trope.  Though I have no nostalgia for the property (I keep saying) this film is laden with nostagia for the 80's through and through, which makes it transformative in its own right.

It winds up being a-girl-and-her-robot tale, the kind we've seen a thousand times, (except it's usually a-boy-and-his-whatever) only this really understands all of the usual paces of such a story and it stays truthful, yet updates it to something that's still pleasing as a modern audience.  I love Iron Giant, and this is basically that, but live action, and with Transformers, and I kind of...maybe not love...but like it a damn lot.  And Hailee Steinfeld is great, just great.  She's proves herself capable of being a leading actor.

[1:10:41]

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 I have been neglecting Studio Ghibli films for too long.  I seem to watch one or two and then none for years on end.  I keep meaning to just sit and binge them, but I just never get there.  Ponyo, though, is a good reminder of why I want to invest in the Ghibli films, more specifically the works of Miyazaki.  They're weird but they're great.

Here we have the story of a guy who lives undersea, who mated with some form of sea god, and has a school of fish children.  One of these little fishlings gets lost from his undersea cruiser (the design of which is just a beautifully clunky animated marvel) and gets trapped in a jar. She washes ashore where she's rescued by Sōsuke, a five year old who's having a hard time with his dad being away a lot.   

The most unreal friendship is forged between this girl-faced-fish and this playful boy, but in trying to keep Ponyo both secret and safe Sōsuke winds up in misadventure, including a pretty terrific looking tsunami.

It's a bizarre movie through and through, but it knows it and embraces it, finding emotional connections in many places along the way.  That's kind of Miyazaki's thing.

It's a pretty majestic movie and reminds me I need to get back on that Ghibli wagon.

[1:18:43]

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Just like the 40's and 50's classics, I'm also not well versed in the 90's classics of Disney.  Look, I was a teenage boy when the Disney renaissance hit, and, well, let's just say none of these films were targeted at me.

I haven't had a tremendous desire to catch up on them either.  But I'm slowly picking them off when I have an inclination to.  Like, Tarzan was just a "lets see what Disney did with the property" whim a little while ago, and both Aladdin and Mulan were about seeing the "original" (Disney adaptation) before seeing the live action version.

I recall nominally liking Mulan but also being frustrated with it, in large part to how passive Mulan feels in the film.  At this stage, the film hasn't stuck much with me, save for a weird feeling of appropriation, that the wrong people were telling the story.  And that some actors, who were not Chinese, were voicing Chinese characters because Asian representation in 90's cinema was poor, and I'm sure casting were pretty narrow minded in their selections.

Eddie Murphy as Mushu the dragon wasn't nearly as annoying as I was anticipating, certainly much less a nuisance than he was as Donkey in Shreck, or other comic relief sidekicks (of the Robin Williams sort, see Happy Feet Two or Aladdin), but still, Eddie Murphy for a Chinese dragon named Mushu?

I still have yet to find that Disney renaissance movie that really resonates with me.

 [1:31:02]

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I should probably write more about Soul ...and THINK more about Soul than I ultimately will in 10 minutes here.  But I really, really loved the film.

I acknowledge the criticisms of the movie (this New Yorker article lays them out pretty well), that we have a film that implies representing the Black experience, but upends it with a body switch comedy that undermines said experience.  And looking at the film through the lens of larger cultural representation in film, specifically family-centered animation, there's a shocking lack of Black voices and black stories available, and none certainly made on the scale of Soul.  In that regard, Soul is disappointing in its failure to go further, deeper, and more specific. You can almost feel the "correction" to make the film broader culturally, so that it was less specific to one type of culture.  It's an old mentality when it come to filmmaking, making a story for as broad an audience as possible, that the more specific you get, the more alienating it is.  I don't think that's correct thinking, but it's the way it's been for a long time.

Would Soul have been a much different film had it gone more culturally specific.  Or even something simpler like what if 23 was voiced by Lupita N'yongo instead?  The powers that be could have made these rather simple choices, and it is truly sad they didn't think to do so, and ostensibly they wouldn't have changed the film all that dramatically but the film could have meant much more with that kind of thought behind it.

Yet, that criticism fully understood, and even agreed with, I still loved Soul, the experience it takes us through, the before-life where souls aren't yet defined.  I love an imaginative reality, much like the one in Inside Out or even Monster's Inc. where it takes a non-coporeal concept and creates an imaginative society out of it.  There's also a philosophical component, about what makes us who we are, and what defines us as people.  What is it that we should carry with us to the afterlife?  It's ponderous without belaboring any specific point.

 The tonal score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross crossed with the jazzier score and music from Jon Baptiste is phenomenal. There's two realities in Soul both represented by difference in sound as well as visuals.  

I can watch Soul and see its flaws, but also appreciate its craft.  But I was experiencing the film in my own head as I watched it the first time, I'm curious with the viewpoint of others now resonating in my head if I approach it differently the second or third time around and if I'll like it as much?

[1:54:11]

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Just before the Disney Renaissance there was The Great Mouse Detective, a quick and dirty Disney animated feature that kind of finds the middle ground between the golden age of Disney animation and the 90's era. 

The world of The Great Mouse Detective is one within a world, a sub-culture of mice and rats that live a very human-like existence, where they have all these things in miniature that are akin to our "normal-sized" reality, and then there's the maximized setting of our reality that are just gigantic objects to the rodents of the picture.

Visually, TGMD does not lack for cleverness, but the story is dull.  It's trying to play off of Sherlock Holmes (to be clear, there is a Sherlock Holmes in this reality, but "Basil of Baker Street" is his mouse analog, living in the trenches underneath Holmes' Baker Street residence) but it has no time for really crafting any sort of mystery, and the options for Basil to prove his intellect and keen sense of deduction are sorely limited.

Had this film played through an actual mystery, I think it would have resonated much more, but it's barely a morsel of a movie as is, certainly not a meal, and with no real meat nor potatoes to go along with it.

[2:01:44]

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BONUS!

I've watched many, but not even close to all, of the direct-to-video DC animated features made in the past 15 years.  To be honest, the fact that they've almost exclusively been adaptations of comic book stories with only a few originals scattered in the midst has made them less interesting and less alluring to me.  I tend to only catch them by happenstance, usually on television or promoted on demand, and even then I feel a little reluctant to watch them, knowing that they're rarely satisfying.

The viewing of Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a little more calculated, in that I noticed it was airing on TV and I recorded it, hoping to watch it with my daughter knowing she was both a fan of the many different Batman cartoons and also a lapsed Ninja Turtle fan.

Alas, she seemed disinterested and so my eventual viewing of the recording was one where I was distracted playing a game on my phone through most of it.  What surprised me in taking it in this way was how much fun I had while barely viewing the animation at all.  Though based on a comic book that crossed the two properties over, the voice cast and the script bring it all to life pretty nicely.  

And then I cottoned onto late the fact that they were animating Batman in a classic Jim Aparo style and I started lamenting my distraction.  I was rapt through the last third of the picture as it, in a very gonzo nature, guided the Turtles through Batman's rogues gallery, suddenly mutated thanks to a modified mutagen.  There was some very sharply comedic moments in the picture, which is surprising as these DC Animated pictures are typically such staid fare.  There's a particularly great moment involving Poison Ivy that could have felt at home in the Harley Quinn series.

I caught only a glimpse of Batman fighting Shredder in the opening of the film, but the final fight was actually quite spectacularly orchestrated and executed.  It's not "big screen" animated quality, but for what it's trying to do, it's really nice looking.  It blends the animated worlds of Batman and Ninja Turtles exceptionally well without stepping on any of the animation that came before it, but also kind of giving a nod and a wink their way.

[2:13:28]