Pinocchio | Movie Review

Disney is really into their live action remakes nowadays. The latest one, Pinocchio, was released on Disney+ on September 8. After watching it, I understand why they chose not to release it in theaters.

Geppetto (Tom Hanks) is an old woodcarver in a small Italian village. One night, a cricket named Jiminy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wanders into Geppetto’s house. The insect finds the old man putting the finishing touches on a wooden marionette named Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Before going to sleep that night, Geppetto makes a wish on the evening star. As he slumbers, the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) visits to bring Pinocchio to life. She assigns Jiminy as Pinocchio’s conscience as she leaves. Pinocchio, wanting to be a real boy, tries his best to learn the right way to live his life.

There are a lot of people that didn’t like this movie. This is, after all, almost a beat by beat remake of the 1940 animated version. There are a few new characters. Most notably, Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya) and her puppet Sabina (Jaquita Ta’le), who work at Stromboli’s (Giuseppe Battiston) puppet show, and Sofia (Lorraine Bracco), a seagull who befriends Geppetto. But I’m not sure they were enough to really differentiate the live action from the original.

Personally, I didn’t hate the movie. But I didn’t love it either. There were a lot of scenes where I had trouble hearing what Geppetto was saying because Hanks kept mumbling all of the lines. It was the main reason I ended up watching the movie with subtitles on. In addition, the big scene where the kids are getting scooped up to go to Pleasure Island is so dark that I couldn’t tell who was who. It made it a little difficult to tell the kids apart from each other, except for Lampwick (Lewin Lloyd) because Pinocchio says his name every five seconds.

With that said, there were some very good parts. Fabiana and Sabina were perfect. I loved them so much. Casting Keegan-Michael Key as Honest John was brilliant. He is so good in evil roles. Finally, while I was originally confused about Monstro (thanks original Pinocchio), I loved his design. Instead of just being a giant whale, they actually made him a giant sea monster with tentacles and rows of sharp teeth. It definitely made him a bit more fearsome than the original designs.

Would I recommend watching the live action version over the animated version? Probably not. However, you aren’t going to hate yourself if you decide to watch this one instead. I don’t understand why it seems to get as much hate as it does. There are absolutely worse live action remakes out there. I’m looking at you, Beauty and the Beast.

Elvis | Movie Review

A lot of people know the story of Elvis Presley, right? A small town white boy learns how to sing like the black people around him then he makes it big. With Baz Luhrmann’s new movie, Elvis, we hear the tale from Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

As Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) lies dying in a hospital room in 1997, he thinks back on how he met the King of Rock n’ Roll, Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), and how they effected each other’s lives.

I know that seems like a very short description of the movie but anything beyond that would just be a biography on Elvis’s life. The movie takes us from the time Parker meets Elvis in Louisiana in 1954 (with some flashbacks to Elvis as a child) through to the death of Elvis in 1977 and the death of Parker himself in 1997. Through that time we see the ups and the downs. The highs of Elvis loving performing in front of people to the downs of Elvis buckling under the pressure of everyone depending on him to continue making tons of money. They even include Parker filling Elvis with all sorts of drugs to make sure he could perform every single night. It was a sad, lonely life.

it’s no surprise that most people who have watched Elvis loved it. The movie was both written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, the man who famously brought us such brilliant movies as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (you know, the one with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes), Moulin Rouge!, and The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann is a master of flashy, stylish movies with amazing musical scores. If you have seen any of his previous works, you will see the same themes and styles here. Thankfully, Elvis Presley’s life, once he starts to get famous, is nothing but flashy and stylish. The glitter and gold of Las Vegas, chunky jewelry as far as the eye can see, and so many bedazzled outfits, you won’t be sure where a rhinestone doesn’t belong!

What I appreciate the most in this version of Elvis’s life story is that we get to see the parallels between the songs that Elvis has heard from various black people in his life and the songs that he himself released. A lot of the Elvis songs that we are all familiar with are songs that black people had recorded but weren’t able to get onto the radio due to the color of their skin. Now I’m not sure that Elvis was as accepted by the black community as he was in the movie - it would have been nice to have seen at least a few people be upset that a white boy made millions of dollars off of their songs - but it was nice to see that credit was given in some way. The movie will absolutely show Arthur Crudup (played by Gary Clark Jr. in the movie) singing “That’s All Right” then overlay it with Elvis recording that same exact song and becoming famous with it. And this happens multiple times in the movie with multiple different people.

With that said, I do think everyone should watch Elvis. It is a good movie. Butler and Hanks to a superb job as Elvis and Parker. The soundtrack is phenomenal, both the Elvis songs (which is part Butler’s voice and part actual Elvis) and the original songs that were thrown into various scenes. it may not be a completely truthful movie as it is intended to be from the point of view of the person that took the most advantage of the man but, from what I have read, the Presley family all approved of this movie and the way everyone was portrayed. That is good enough for me.

Moonfall | Movie Review

I don’t have an intro for Moonfall. My husband said he remembered wanting to watch it thanks to some trailer we saw before a movie. I don’t remember seeing the trailer or wanting to watch it. I watched it anyway.

During a 2011 mission to repair a satellite in space, the spaceship with astronauts Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry), Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson), and Alan Marcus (Frank Fiola) is attacked by a swarming black mass. Marcus dies and Harper is disgracefully dismissed from NASA when he refuses to be silenced. Since Fowler was knocked unconscious during the attack, she can’t back up Harper’s story and the two are estranged. Ten years later, the moon begins to fall out of orbit. Conspiracy theorist KC Houseman (John Bradley) tries to tell NASA that the moon is an artificial megastructure but no one will listen. Fowler, now the Deputy Director at NASA, is tasked with finding a way to fix the moon’s orbit before it destroys the Earth. She turns to Harper and Houseman to help her save the planet and all of their families.

Yeah, that description doesn’t really do the movie justice. It is more terrible than I could fit into a small(ish) paragraph. Normally, I don’t give spoilers in case someone wants to watch a movie I review. There are going to be spoilers this time around. I don’t know how I could talk about the movie without revealing all of the secrets.

Moonfall is based on the crazy theory that the moon is a structure created by aliens with a white dwarf at the center powering it. And, no, that isn’t the craziest thing about the movie. We have, in no particular order: astronauts would be able to move around when a spaceship is spinning uncontrollably, cell phones that work no matter what else is happening on Earth, gravity randomly getting so weak that things are literally sucked up to the moon when it’s close, thanks to the low gravity cars (and people!) can leap over wide ravines, and Colorado is apparently where everyone goes when the shit hits the fan. Oh, and that there is a white dwarf INSIDE THE MOON. That isn’t all of the insanity, just the stuff I could think of off the top of my head. Honestly, the whole movie is insane.

Needless to say, my husband laughed through most of the film. I spent more time going “What?” or “How the….” or throwing my hands at the screen nonsensically. I can’t, with good conscience, recommend that anyone watch Moonfall. However, if you really and truly want to see how bad it is, make sure you go into the movie with less than zero expectations. Think of the lowest expectations you have ever had for a movie, then go about ten times lower. Then you might be ready to sit through this 2-hour festival of ridiculousness.

Love In The Villa | Movie Review

Kat Graham from The Vampire Diaries and Tom Hopper from The Umbrella Academy are in a Netflix romcom. So Love in the Villa can’t be that bad, can it?

Julie (Kat Graham) is a third grade English teacher from Minneapolis. She books a dream trip to Verona, Italy, setting of her favorite story - Romeo & Juliet, with her boyfriend, Brandon (Raymond Ablack). When Brandon backs out of the trip at the last minute, Julie decides to go alone. After an awful trip, Julie arrives in Verona to find out that her villa has been double booked. With no other option, she has to share the villa with Charlie (Tom Hopper) for the next week.

Love in the Villa is another one of those ‘hate turns into love’ movies. A good portion of the movie consists of Julie and Charlie being absolutely terrible to each other. The argument culminates in a giant food fight where they basically destroy an apartment that neither of them owns. But, for some reason, the two decide to call a truce and spend some time not trying to kill each other.

Of all of the romcoms that I have watched, this one is not the worst. It’s pretty rare to see an amazingly good romcom. This is not one of those. However, it is definitely watchable. Both Graham and Hopper are decent actors and the script is not completely terrible, even though the writer (who is also the director) likes to litter random Italian all over the place. There isn’t a ton of chemistry, just a lot of unexplainable googly eyes when they happen to get their faces too close to each other. We do get a little bit of a third act twist but, honestly, that is probably the worst part of the movie.

Fans of Graham and Hopper will most likely love Villa. Everyone else that wants to watch it should do so with a glass of wine or their phone in hand. Something that will distract them from the bad parts but let them enjoy the good parts.

Jurassic World Dominion | Movie Review

I am not a giant fan of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World series. Sure, I was amazed in 1993 when Jurassic Park came out and the graphics were stunning. But I didn’t particularly care about any of the movies that came after it. But you can watch all of the movies on Amazon Prime and my husband and I were bored…so we watched Jurassic World Dominion over the weekend.

Four years after the events in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs are now living in the world alongside humans. Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) finds out about giant locusts that are destroying crops around the United States. She turns to her old friend, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), for help. Together, they travel to Biosyn, a genetics company that set up a dinosaur preserve in Italy. Meanwhile, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) are raising Maise Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). When Maise gets kidnapped by Biosyn operatives, they must travel to Italy to get her back.

This movie felt so much longer than it actually was. The runtime clocks in around 2 hours 27 minutes. And that felt about an hour too long. Adding to that, the science didn’t feel legit. Granted, I’m not a geneticist so I am completely out of my realm. The explanations they gave for Beta, Blue’s baby, and Maise both felt wrong. Not that the science has to be perfect to make a movie enjoyable. It just didn’t make this movie enjoyable.

Other things that seemed wrong in the movie: Why was Ellie, a paleobotanist, investigating the destruction of current day crops? Why did she turn to Alan, a paleontologist, when she found out about the giant insects? While you can squint your eyes a bit and maybe think that the insects could possibly be in Alan’s wheelhouse, the crops are definitely not in Ellie’s. I know they were brought in for nostalgia’s sake but at least give them an actual real reason to be there.

As for the Maise/Owen/Claire storyline, they all felt very wrong. We know they have lived together for four years but we don’t really see them interacting a whole lot before Maise gets kidnapped. I would have liked for the plot to focus more on setting them up as a family instead of pulling in Ellie/Alan/Ian as a throwback to Jurassic Park.

If you like the Jurassic World series, you might enjoy Dominion. While I didn’t enjoy the movie a lot, it doesn’t leave the series open for another movie. I appreciate that. I just wish the series could have ended with a bigger bang.

The King's Daughter | Movie Review

A movie made in 2014 but not released until 2022. Supposedly, it was delayed to work on the special effects. This means that I absolutely had to watch it. Even if it was only released in movie theaters during a pandemic. But I was confident that there wouldn’t be a lot of people in the audience. And I was right. We were the ONLY people in the audience.

The King’s Daughter is very loosely based on the 1997 book, The Moon and The Sun. King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan), the Sun King of France, wants to be immortal. He sends Captain Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker) to the high seas to bring back a mermaid. Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) believe that if the king consumes the mermaid’s heart, he will be granted immortality. Meanwhile, the king has sent his priest and advisor, Père La Chaise (William Hurt), to retrieve his daughter, Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario), from the convent where she has lived her entire life under the guise that the king needs a new composer. Marie-Josèphe befriends the captured mermaid and tries to free the creature when she learns of her father’s plan.

Let me start off with : This is not a good movie. The best thing about this movie is Julie Andrew’s narration in the very beginning. Unfortunately, she does not narrate the entire movie. Only about the first half hour. I’m pretty sure her narration is one of the reasons the movie got delayed. Without her telling me what the hell was going on, I would have been completely lost.

I went into this movie knowing it was going to be bad. The question was “how bad?” Before word is even spoken, you can tell you are in for a ride based on how awful the characters look. Pierce Brosnan was given a Party City wig for his role as King Louis XIV. At no point in this movie does he ever look good. He looks like someone else was cast in the role, filmed the whole movie, then someone decided to CGI his face onto that actor’s body.

In addition, all of the costume decisions were strange. The movie is supposed to take place sometime in the 17th-century. Yet all of the women are literally wearing prom dresses from 2014. There isn’t a single dress that is historically accurate. The men’s clothes are only slightly better. Most of the men’s clothes that I saw were tailored in a way to make them look slightly accurate. Like, if you only saw them in silhouette, you might think “Yeah, that looks about right.”

And, of course, there are giant plot holes everywhere. I haven’t read the book itself but the synopsis on Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about the king having a daughter. Marie-Josèphe is supposed to be a lady-in-waiting to the king’s niece. Making this drastic change gives the movie a very weird vibe. In the movie, the king knows he has a daughter and knows where she is but doesn’t care anything about her until…the music at his palace begins to suck? I honestly have no idea why he really brings her to the palace. He claims it’s because he needs a composer and she loves music but that makes no sense. And when she is at the palace, he mostly ignores her except in very specific situations where it looks like he wants to have sex with her? Oh, and one of the movie’s conflicts where he tries to marry her off to a lord in his kingdom because he spent all of his money trying to find the mermaid.

I figured that this was going to be a movie that I wouldn’t be able to recommend. However, if you like terrible movies, this would be perfect. As a matter of fact, if you are going to watch this, please come back here and explain it to me. Why did anyone think that this was a good movie to make? Why did anyone actually agree to work on it? But, if you are a normal person with normal interests, stay far away. Even Julie Andrews couldn’t save this one.

Beanie Mania | Movie Review

Since I work from home, I tend to turn on documentaries as background noise. Sometimes they are true crime documentaries but usually I pick something where I’m already familiar with the subject. That way I can easily pick the thread back up if I can’t listen too closely. Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with the Beanie Baby craze.

Beanie Mania is the story of Beanie Babies as told by collectors and former Ty employees. The bean-filled animals went from another plushie in the store to an absolute frenzy where adults would travel to neighboring states just to get a particular doll. Yes, it was as crazy as it sounds.

Like most people in the 1990s, I owned Beanie Babies. I wouldn’t say I was an avid collector but I did have most of the cats before they went out of fashion. Then, toward the end of the craze, I worked at a store that sold them. I never had to deal with adults calling every day looking for certain dolls or people getting too out of hand in the store. So I was definitely interested in seeing what the documentary had to say about how everything went down.

Sadly for me, the movie didn’t reveal any new information. Since the documentarians were unable to get an interview with Ty Warner himself, they had to rely on stories from the more widely known collectors. The people who started websites or wrote books about the dolls. If you lived through that time and were lucky enough to have access to the internet (the internet was still pretty young at the time), you probably knew these people or read all of this material already. That means the target audience must be young adults, right?

Well, my 19-year old daughter watched part of Beanie Mania with me. I think she got bored of it because she left about 2/3 of the way through the movie. She didn’t even stay long enough to see the only person she would know (Colleen Ballinger, also known as Miranda Sings on YouTube). To be honest, my daughter liked the McMillions documentary about the big McDonald Monopoly game scandal. Beanie Mania just didn’t have an oomph to it.

If you are thinking about watching it, do it for the nostalgia factor. Especially if you are already familiar with Beanie Babies. However, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might find it interesting. Just be prepared to turn it off halfway through if get bored. I really wish the documentarians were able to find more interesting people to talk to. Or at least find some more dirt to talk about. The scandals are what makes people stay til the end.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye | Movie Review

I was about 10 years old when Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, has their televangelist empire fall apart. That’s not old enough to know or understand all of the gritty details but I vividly remember the couple on TV outside the courthouse and doing interviews. So I was very interested when I saw there would be a biographical drama that I could stream on HBO Max.

Tammy Faye LaValley meets Jim Bakker at North Central Bible College. The two get married and travel around the United States preaching. After a few years, they moved their preaching to a television network, where they became very popular. Popular enough that they created their own gospel network. However, in 1987, their empire collapsed due to allegations of fraud and rape.

This version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye is based on a 2000 documentary, also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I haven’t watched the original documentary so I’m not sure how close this movie follows it. But this movie is very pro-Bakker. It paints Tammy Faye as a woman who was treated poorly as a child and, as a result, craves attention and admiration from other people. There is also this weird duality where she is portrayed as both the mastermind that got the couple all of the opportunities that led them to be as popular as they were and also a naive woman who was mistreated and ignored by her husband. I’m not sure that the real Tammy Faye was either of those. I think that both Jim and Tammy Faye manipulated their way into the hearts of Christians and that they were terrible to each other. They were both the same level of horribleness.

To be honest, I don’t think this movie was particularly worth watching. There were some interesting visuals but I feel like it misses out on how awful the Bakkers were to their followers. They conned people into donating more money than they were able to afford. While you can tell that the Bakkers are rich, we never really see whether the money was really theirs or if they were spending church money on their luxuries. It would have been better if we got to see more of the results of their “charitable begging.” Maybe, if you have never heard of Jim or Tammy Faye Bakker, this might be an OK introduction to who they are but you would probably do better with something closer to the truth.

Don't Look Up | Movie Review

Released just in time to give 2021 the send-off it deserved, Netflix gave us Don’t Look Up. A movie that was written before the Covid pandemic about the reaction of the United States to climate change but feels very relevant to the current Covid-ridden world.

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is an astronomy Ph.D. candidate who discovered a large comet hurtling through space toward Earth. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), calculates that it will hit Earth in about six months, causing a planet-wide extinction event. They, along with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) from NASA, take the information to the president of the United States. President Jeanie Orlean (Meryl Streep) ignores the warning, choosing to focus on the scandal involving her current Supreme Court nominee instead. Kate, Dr. Mindy, and Dr. Oglethorpe try to warn the country of the impending doom themselves, only to be met with the same apathy they received from government officials. People don’t take the threat seriously until it is too late.

Don’t Look Up hit a little too close to home for me. While I don’t have any Covid-deniers or anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers in my family, there are a few of those in my workplace. And while this movie wasn’t addressing the response to the pandemic itself, it is a fitting metaphor. To be honest, it fits any situation where something awful is happening and the seemingly-majority (who are usually a vocal minority) scream about how it’s not true. (cough gun control conversations after mass shootings in the United States cough) Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure the message of “Take action now before it’s too late and we all die” isn’t going to get through the to necessary people. They will all claim it as some sort of liberal agenda and write it off altogether.

Maybe it’s because I am on the side of “maybe we should save the world?” but I found the movie sadly entertaining. Jonah Hill as President Orlean’s son and Chief of Staff, Jason, was hysterical but also scary. He wrote in a post on his Instagram, “creating this guy was the grossest blast I’ve ever had. I thought, what if Fyre Festival was a person and that person had power in the White House.” I would say that sums his character up well. As terrible as he was as a person, I think he may have been my favorite character in the movie.

While I would love for everyone to watch Don’t Look Up. the people that need to watch it aren’t going to. Nevertheless, everyone else should watch it. Maybe we can figure out how to save our world through the inevitable destruction of theirs. Or maybe, at the very least, we can figure out why a Lieutenant General would charge someone for free snacks.

Encanto | Movie Review

My family put off watching Encanto for way too long. We finally watched it on Disney+ over the New Year’s weekend and I’m a little sad we waited so long.

Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz) is a young girl living in Columbia with her family. All of the people born into the Madrigal family have powers, except for Mirabel. When the candle that supplies their magic begins to lose its flame, Mirabel decides to find out why the candle is dying and how she can save her family.

Ever since Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney Animation Studio has moved away from the romantic-based princesses stories. Yes, there is a romance plot in Frozen and that plot is brought more to the forefront in Frozen 2, but I would argue that they are not integral to the story. The story is about family and sisterhood more than it is about Anna and Kristoff. The same is true for Encanto.

Our main character, Mirabel, is a black sheep of the family. She is the only one without some sort of powers. Even the house has powers! However, she is still a part of the family and does what she can to help them flourish. Much like Frozen, there isn’t a villain character. Sure, Hans is a terrible person but you can’t say he’s really the villain of the story. The same holds true for Abuela Alma in Encanto. Like the Latina grandmothers in most pop culture entertainment, she is overbearing and demanding but that doesn’t make her a villain. And while both Hans and Abuela move the plot forward, they could both be removed from the movie with little change to story. Don’t get me wrong, both characters do fit into their stories well and have good reason for being there but they are also kinda unnecessary.

Before anyone comes at me saying that Abuela was the heart of the family and, as a result, was needed, I would argue that Mirabel was the heart. Even toward the end when Mirabel was finding out the true feelings of her sisters, the conflict could have been resolved there. Abuela’s outburst and resulting destruction of the family home wasn’t entirely necessary. It was more of a metaphor of breaking the family apart only to put it back together. Except that there wasn’t a reason to break them apart. Mirabel was getting them to recognize their true selves and what they really wanted from life. If Abuela had listened instead of screaming, the house would have never been destroyed.

I truly loved Encanto and I will most likely watch it again. (And again and again.) The music is catchy, the characters are interesting, and the story is something I think everyone can relate to. Even on the first watch, you will most likely walk away singing at least one of the songs. And don’t forget - we don’t talk about Bruno.