Wow. Who... who are you, my... knights in... shining denim?

Minions

(2015)

It doesn’t take a genius to see why the Minions are such a phenomenon, surpassing the Despicable Me franchise that spawned them (or rather, they’re now enshrined as the underpinning for its massive success). That doesn’t make Minions a great movie, though. It’s as agreeably slipshod and pasted together as you’d expect from an attempt to beat supporting characters into the position of leads, but it nevertheless represents something of a pinnacle as a spin-off and prequel that’s successful in its own right. Usually they stink.

Penguins of Madagascar dealt with the prequel bit in its opening scene, which was also the best scene in a rather sorry affair that, like Minions, struggled to find a tale worth telling. Minions is more transparent in its deficiencies there. It doesn’t even bother trying to explain why such cute, imitable and well-meaning ba-nana-loving fellows are obsessed with serving evil masterminds. They just are. So we get the lowdown on what they did before joining Gru, at its best during a highly inventive (yes) prologue in which they join, and unwittingly undermine, various bosses throughout history, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs, the demise of ancient Egypt, a brief spell with Count Dracula and an alliance with the always-good-for-a-height-gag Napoleon.

And fetching up in the ‘60s is a massively advantageous decision, since it means the rest of the plot can be strung together with pop hits from the era (with additional help from Geoffrey Rush’s engaging narrator). Not since the early days of DreamWorks Animation has a cartoon feature so shrewdly employed pop songs. Did you ever expect to hear The Doors in a kids’ movie? Should they have? I have no idea. This is a feature featuring a humorous interlude in which a giant Kevin appears to take a whizz.

Kevin, Stuart and Bob find themselves a new despicable boss in the form of Sandra Bullock’s Scarlet Overkill, before embarking for Swinging London. She’s a reasonable but unremarkable villain, much as the ‘60s England setting starts off well (police drinking tea during a high-speed pursuit) but descends into rather desperate spitballing that finds Bob crowned king and Kevin inflated to the aforementioned enormous size. You’re never far from something engaging, though, be it Bob’s friendship with a rat, Scarlet Overkill reading The Three Little Pigs to the three little Minions, the hypno-hat (great use of Hair, with guards reduced to their underwear) or irreverent asides (“Do you think its funny, to mock the elderly?” asks the Keeper of the Crown; “Yeah” comes the reply).

I guess returning Despicable Me (co-)director Pierre Coffin could hardly have passed on duties seeing as how he also voices the trio of Minions. It’s a terrifically inventive, catchy performance(s), but has limited scope for variation, which definitely means the entire movie consists of casting around for things to do. It’s only a surprise Minions is as sustained as it is, that it even got far enough to run out of interesting things to do in the last third. As such, it seems churlish to complain that it might have been better, since I’m not sure it could have been. It exists purely for the cash/merchandising wee ones will get their parents to put down, which means there’s sure be a Minions 2 after Despicable Me 3. A billon dollars worldwide guarantees it.

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Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

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American Beauty (1999)
(SPOILERS) As is often the case with the Best Picture Oscar, a backlash against a deemed undeserved reward has grown steadily in the years since American Beauty’s win. The film is now often identified as symptomatic of a strain of cinematic indulgence focussing on the affluent middle classes’ first world problems. Worse, it showcases a problematic protagonist with a Lolita-fixation towards his daughter’s best friend (imagine its chances of getting made, let alone getting near the podium in the #MeToo era). Some have even suggested it “mercifully” represents a world that no longer exists (as a pre-9/11 movie), as if such hyperbole has any bearing other than as gormless clickbait; you’d have to believe its world of carefully manicured caricatures existed in the first place to swallow such a notion. American Beauty must own up to some of these charges, but they don’t prevent it from retaining a flawed allure. It’s a satirical take on Americana that, if it pulls its p…

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Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You're waterboarding me.

The Upside (2017)
(SPOILERS) The list of US remakes of foreign-language films really ought to be considered a hiding to nothing, given the ratio of flops to unqualified successes. There’s always that chance, though, of a proven property (elsewhere) hitting the jackpot, and every exec hopes, in the case of French originals, for another The Birdcage, Three Men and a Baby, True Lies or Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Even a Nine Months, Sommersby or Unfaithful will do. Rather than EdTV. Or Sorcerer. Or Eye of the Beholder. Or Brick Mansions. Or Chloe. Or Intersection (Richard Gere is clearly a Francophile). Or Just Visiting. Or The Man with One Red Shoe. Or Mixed Nuts. Or Original Sin. Or Oscar. Or Point of No Return. Or Quick Change. Or Return to Paradise. Or Under Suspicion. Or Wicker Park. Or Father’s Day.

Is CBS Corporate telling CBS News "Do not air this story"?

The Insider (1999)
(SPOILERS) The Insider was the 1999 Best Picture Oscar nominee that didn’t. Do any business, that is. Which is, more often than not, a major mark against it getting the big prize. It can happen (2009, and there was a string of them from 2014-2016), but aside from brief, self-congratulatory “we care about art first” vibes, it generally does nothing for the ceremony’s profile, or the confidence of the industry that is its bread and butter. The Insider lacked the easy accessibility of the other nominees – supernatural affairs, wafer-thin melodramas or middle-class suburbanite satires. It didn’t even brandish a truly headlines-shattering nail-biter in its conspiracy-related true story, as earlier contenders All the President’s Men and JFK could boast. But none of those black marks prevented The Insider from being the cream of the year’s crop.

I’m what you might call a champagne problem.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
(SPOILERS) The idea of teaming the two most engaging characters from the recent Fast & Furious movies for a spin-off seems like a no-brainer for making something better than Fast & Furious at its best (somewhere around 6 & 7), but there’s a flaw to this thinking (even if the actual genesis of the movie wasn’t Dwayne Johnson swearing off being on the same set as Vin again); the key to F&F succeeding is the ensemble element, and the variety of the pick’n’mix of characters. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw – I can’t help thinking the over-announced title itself stresses an intrinsic lack of confidence somewhere at Universal – duly provides too much of a good thing, ensuring none of the various talents employed are fully on top of their game.

What about the meaningless line of indifference?

The Lion King (2019)
(SPOILERS) And so the Disney “live-action” remake train thunders on regardless (I wonder how long the live-action claim would last if there was a slim hope of a Best Animated Feature Oscar nod?) I know I keep repeating myself, but the early ‘90s Disney animation renaissance didn’t mean very much to me; I found their pictures during that period fine, but none of them blew me away as they did critics and audiences generally. As such, I have scant nostalgia to bring to bear on the prospect of a remake, which I’m sure can work both ways. Aladdin proved to be a lot of fun. Beauty and the Beast entirely tepid. The Lion King, well, it isn’t a badfilm, but it’s wearying its slavish respectfulness towards the original and so diligent in doing it justice, you’d think it was some kind of religious artefact. As a result, it is, ironically, for the most part, dramatically dead in the water.

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... you’re being uncharacteristically non-hyper-verbal.

Movies on My Mind Week Ending 7 May 2016
The Irishman
The Irishman (formerly I Heard You Paint Houses, based on Charles Brandt’s account of mob hitman Frank Sheeran, who was chums with Jimmy Hoffa, whom he professed to have offed) has been gestating for what seems like forever. I’d been wondering about its expiry date, as the names attached throughout have been the ever-longer-in-the-tooth holy trio of De Niro, Pacino and Pesci.
Now it seems there's a tight window (we’ll know by this time next week) for financing coming together. It seems the plan is to using de-aging technology (most recently seen making Downey Jr look less than zero in Civil War) to work its regressing magic on these wise guys. I’m a bit uneasy about that, as no matter how good it is, it’s distracting. Not that I think Scorsese would go there if he didn’t think he could pull it off, but it will still be there in the viewer’s mind.
Hopefully he’ll make going back to the Mob worthwhile; I’d presume so, as if his word…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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