The Goods: Film Reviews
There are two kinds of people: Those who love Natalie Morales and those who are not yet familiar with Natalie Morales. I’m in the former group, so it was an easy sell for me to track down Language Lessons.
Let the season of Christmas specials begin!
Filling the tiniest of cracks of Frozen lore: What happened in the time between “Let It Go” and Anna/Kristoff bumping into Olaf in Frozen? What caused him to latch onto the notion of summer and warm hugs? Did he try to get a nose before Anna/Kristoff gave him a carrot?
My kids smiled, but at what cost?
This is among the lowest forms of cross-promotional entertainment, an annoying side character from one Disney movie giving annoying recaps of beloved Disney movies that inch just enough towards parody/deconstruction to act like it’s clever without actually being clever. (It’s a miniseries based on that one unnecessary but mildly amusing segment of Frozen 2 where Olaf reenacts Frozen 1.)
No interesting animation, no stabs at extended storytelling or creativity, just quickly presented and abandoned story points and musical lyrics from five movies you’ve seen.
Do you like Josh Gad singing intentionally badly? I sure hope so because you’ll be getting a heavy dosage of it here.
The only, tiniest saving graces in its favor are that I love seeing my daughters’ smiles, and the Marshmallow monster is charming.
It’s Ray Harryhausen’s last hurrah, featuring one of the coolest looking monsters ever (Medusa) and about a dozen other nifty effects. Big production values, dramatic score, epic adventure. It’s a slam dunk, right?
We recently decided to try and start watching documentaries on Sunday mornings (mostly while Mommy and Daddy take turns catching up on sleep).
Mighty Joe Young is Ray Harryhausen’s first proper movie, and goddamn does the stop motion animation look amazing. Big ol’ Joe the gorilla is expressive and nimble, interacting with props and sets and actors through lots of impressive camera trickery.
While I am not exactly the target audience for this movie, I still dug the hell out of it. John Cameron Mitchell is mind-blowingly incandescent as Hedwig in all her petulance but also strength and beauty.
The second Zombies movie sadly discards the original’s relentless worship of its color palette by bringing in werewolves, whose aesthetic seems to be “cheap Twilight knock-off via low budget Syfy special.” I mean, the colors were half the draw of the first… why abandon that?
Believe it or not, last year was the first time I ever watched Nightmare from start to finish, and I was completely smitten.