Movie Round-up: Dec 23, Jan 24
Role Play (2023)
★★★
- Role: A dramatic performance.
- Play: A bit of fun.
In many ways, the film, and its well-worn plot of a family-woman who is also a secret international assassin, is an odd blend.
Kaley Cuoco, like Daniel Radcliffe with Harry Potter, is putting good distance away from her Big Bang beginnings with solid wee dramatic performances. But it’s when acting alongside her fictional husband (played by David Oyelowo) when tones clash. She plays it straight-faced, rather serious, the stakes are high. He plays it cornier, funnier, more in tune with the inherently silly premise. They aren’t a million miles apart but there are some scenes where the distance is felt. The direction and soundtrack felt similarly confused.
Tonally, Role Play could either have been 30% funnier or 30% grittier. As it stands it’s an odd, but still perfectly enjoyable, cocktail. Stirring, if a bit shaken.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
★★★
This was funnier the second time I watched it with my wife, after the first time I watched it alone because I thought my wife would make fun of me.
This makes 90s pop culture references in the opening monologue, which is fine, because this is for grown man children like me. I’m sure kids would enjoy it too.
Jim Carrey is unbeatable.
Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)
★★
Scientists could use this as the definition of “average animated kid’s movie”. Watched this with my 3-year old daughter. She watched it but outside of getting sad when Juliet is sad, she didn’t seem to react much.
This is one of those animated kid’s films where almost all the jokes are references to pop culture or, in this case, to the traditional telling of Romeo and Juliet. Outside of the occasional prat fall, there is little on show for the kids. It’s really a children’s movie that benefits from the required reading.
Best bit was Patrick Stewart voicing a statue of Shakespeare taking great delight in telling Gnomeo how Romeo and Juliet both die in the proper version:
Gnomeo: “Come on, boys. I’ve got to get back to Juliet and save her!”
Shakespeare: “That’s what he said, but she was dead before he got home!”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
★★
I watched this to see more of the next big baddie, Kang, in the Marvel movies. This was post-Jonathon Majors’ being found guilty of abuse and fired from Marvel. So I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t enjoy it?
They show you Kang in the opening and then spend a third of the movie teasing him with the whole “Who’s coming?”, “He is”, “Who is he?”, “Oh, he is someone…”. Quantumania only had a little bit of story shampoo left in the bottle and filled the rest up with water to stretch it out. It just doesn’t wash.
If there was a tale to be told in the original script, it did not survive.
A Quiet Place Part II (2020)
★★★★
The first Quiet Place got some flack for being a movie built on a silly concept. But it did it well. It told a story about aliens with no vision who hunt by sound and how the world and one family in particular adapt to it. It got in, did a scare, then got out. Nice and quick.
So going back for more was fraught. But I think the sequel is as good as the first with a few more surprises to share. The world is not deepened and the threat isn’t extinguished entirely, so it is starting to sit more in tone to the Romero zombie films in that way. This should be it though. There’s surely no more whisper scares to be had.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
★★★★
If Guillermo del Toro did one of those “Whose your ancestor?” shows I hope it would put DNA to him being a spiritual successor to the Brothers Grimm.
Yes, being based on the original book gives this telling a darker edge. But, and maybe this is the stop-frame animated beer talking, he really brought something special to a story i thought I couldn’t care for.
Also, it took this many movies for someone to explain to me why his nose grows bigger when he tells a lie.
The Brothers Grimm (2005)
★★★
I told my wife that Terry Gilliam loves to slop wet mud all over the ground and then when I watched Matt Damon slip and catch himself as real chickens were tossed at him from behind camera, I said to her, “yeah, this is real fucking movie-making, right here”.
Think the setting and costumes from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail meets the premise and humour of Ghostbusters.
The Brothers Grimm will probably be lost in the middle ranks of his films, but I was craving an easy watch with mild peril and hijinks, and that’s what I got. Though I’ll remember the switch in direction from convincing cinematic visual effects to candid puppet-on-a-string when the brothers supernatural feats are first revealed as shams.
