Posts Tagged ‘Keegan-Michael Key’
Monday, January 8th, 2024
I really wasn’t in the market for a Willy Wonka prequel, I did not think it sounded like a worthwhile idea, or that this new movie WONKA looked good, as much as I enjoyed director Paul King’s two PADDINGTON movies. So I wasn’t even planning to see it until it turned out to be the first thing showing at the SIFF Cinema Downtown, formerly Cinerama (1963-2020). It has been my theater of record for decades, but after owner Paul Allen died the people running his company wondered “What is there to gain from maintaining a beloved city institution?” and closed it shortly before the pandemic. We all assumed the worst for a couple years, but thankfully the Seattle International Film Festival organization acquired the theater (just not the name) and fuck it, if they were showing WONKA I was gonna see WONKA. I’ve seen so many Star Warses and Batmen and Tarantinos and 70mm retrospectives in there over the past 25 years, waiting in long lines, feeling the excitement of the crowded lobby as they take my ticket, but this is the first time the excitement was only about being in the building.
So I had no expectations for WONKA, but if I had, it would’ve exceeded them. It’s a sweet and funny old fashioned movie musical with a surprising amount of the Roald Dahl spirit. That includes not just inventing new whimsical confectionary innovations that make people hover, sprout green fur or grow the confidence to improve their relationships, not just colorful names and word play, but also a preference for the Dickensian poor over the arrogant rich, and a morbid fascination with ugly awful jerks worthy of the Twits, the Trunchbull, Aunts Sponge and Spiker, etc. When Bleacher (Tom Davis, PREVENGE), the lovelorn henchman of exploitative boarding house owner Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman, LOCKE), first smiled I realized that his craggy rows of teeth really looked like a scribbly Quentin Blake drawing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Calah Lane, Hugh Grant, Jim Carter, Keegan-Michael Key, Mathew Baynton, Matt Lucas, Natasha Rothwell, Olivia Colman, Paterson Joseph, Paul King, Rakhee Thakrar, Rich Fulcher, Roald Dahl, Rowan Atkinson, Timothee Chalamet, Tom Davis
Posted in Reviews, Family, Musical | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, November 30th, 2022
Henry Selick, the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, just made his first movie in thirteen years. Stop motion animation takes a long time, of course, but not usually that long. (With the exception of MAD GOD.)
It’s not like he took a vacation. Only a year after CORALINE Selick moved from Laika to Pixar to start a new stop motion division called Cinderbiter. They actually animated much of a movie called THE SHADOW KING – $50 million worth – and then cancelled it. And then he developed a bunch of other movies with a bunch of other people that didn’t even get that far.
But now, finally, he has a new, completed and released one called WENDELL & WILD. He wrote it with Academy Award winning screenwriter Jordan Peele, it stars the voices of Key and Peele, it’s about demons and zombie skeletons and shit, and it has Selick’s eye for design and increasingly sophisticated stop motion, so it’s the kind of thing some people ought to be interested in, in my opinion. Only trouble is it was produced by Netflix, so they just squirted it out in a little glob exactly like Wendell & Wild squirt the cream that grows their father’s nose hairs (more on that later), so most of the people I’ve mentioned it to never heard of the fuckin thing. I read that it didn’t even make it into Netflix’s top ten when it came out, but the computer animated movie THE BAD GUYS did a couple days later when they picked it up after it had already been on DVD, blu-ray and Peacock for five months.
That doesn’t seem fair. I figured I should write a review just so it’s on record somewhere that WENDELL & WILD is a real, existent movie that was made and released and can be viewed with your eyes and everything. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela Bassett, David Harewood, Fishbone, Henry Selick, Igal Naor, James Hong, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Lyric Ross, Maxine Peake, Phoebe Lamour, stop motion animation, Tamara Smart, Tantoo Cardinal, Ving Rhames
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Comedy/Laffs | 20 Comments »
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022
Well, I’m afraid it seems my fellow people who write about movies were not open to a giant corporation treating an 80+ year old animation masterpiece as i.p. to remake in a modern style, especially coming from a once A-list director they’ve turned on in his later, weirder years. So they engaged in a hyperbole measuring contest to find out who could hate Robert Zemeckis’s PINOCCHIO (2022) most outlandishly.
I get it, I guess, but I don’t relate. I can see refusing to give in to the existence of these remakes, I can see not wanting them to do it to PINOCCHIO specifically (it’s my personal favorite Disney movie), I can see not liking the finished product. But I can’t see thinking it’s terrible, let alone the worst thing you’ve seen lately/in years/ever. That’s just silly talk.
Yes, that is correct, I liked it for what it was. I’ll get into it in a minute. Just let me pre-amble a little bit more. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carlo Collodi, Chis Weitz, Cynthia Erivo, Disney remakes, Evan Ainsworth, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Keegan-Michael Key, Lorraine Bracco, Luke Evans, Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Family, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, November 6th, 2019
I honestly wanted to see the LION KING quasi-live-action remake in the theater, but never managed to. Turns out it did okay without my money. But by waiting until now to review it I missed out on timely discussions of related issues about a pioneering studio turned monolithic corporation treating their legacy of hand drawn animation as just a shitty licensing library to be resold (and possibly replaced in the imagination of new generations) with more realistic imagery. I guess I addressed it in my review of the (actually) live action ALADDIN. Basically, I’m open to to enjoying these remakes on their own terms, but the whole idea of them is a bummer.
Now let’s get to a more controversial topic: I have never thought the original LION KING was very good. I know it’s a beloved classic, one of the highest grossing animated movies of all time, etc. I watch it once every 5-10 years hoping to like it better this time, but I always strike out. I liked the dramatic stuff, like everything having to do with Mufasa’s death, but I always thought the musical numbers, in addition to not being really my jam, were more of a distraction than a story. And I was not really into the farting warthog. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfre Woodard, Beyonce, Billy Eichner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Disney, Disney remakes, Donald Glover, J.D. McCrary, James Earl Jones, John Kani, Jon Favreau, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Shahadi Wright Joseph
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Family, Reviews | 67 Comments »
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME is a dream come true – topnotch director, writers and cast making a beautiful, warm, well produced triumph-of-the-underdog epic about Rudy Ray Moore, the small time club singer who reinvented himself by selling dirty comedy records out of the trunk of his car and then strutting his way into independent filmmaking. The script is by kings of the oddball biopic Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, MAN ON THE MOON, The People vs. O.J. Simpson) and it’s got a whole lot in common with their best film, ED WOOD. It’s another story about an L.A. misfit perceived as a failure who, through tenacity and lack of self consciousness, puts together a family of people to will their silly, awesome dreams into reality.
ED WOOD glorifies people whose work was and continues to be made fun of, arguing that the passion and personality behind these works imbues them with an artistic purity and value that they hadn’t previously been given credit for. Moore and friends work with a similar scrappily amateurish zeal, but they in fact made a hit movie that, at least in some parts, was intended to be laughed at. So the happy ending in this one is real! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: biopic, Craig Brewer, Craig Robinson, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Eddie Murphy, Keegan-Michael Key, Kodi Smit-Mcphee, Larry Karaszewski, Mike Epps, Rudy Ray Moore, Ruth E. Carter, Scott Alexander, Tituss Burgess, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, September 26th, 2018
I didn’t get to see THE PREDATOR until after the world had already estimated its coordinates somewhere in the hostile territory between disappointment and disaster. Maybe that prepared me for the sloppy last stretch (it seems like some connective tissue must’ve been lost in editing or reshoots) and a thudding comedy riff or two involving a character with Tourette’s. And I guess a couple subpar quasi-science discussions, sometimes involving “the spectrum.” Also, is it just me or are these people weirdly unsurprised to see aliens?
But everything else in the movie tears its gear off and covers itself in mud to prove it’s a true warrior of entertainment. This is a funnier Predator movie, one full of joyful, gory mayhem, clever dialogue and inventive action beats. Let me give you an example from the opening. Decorated army sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook, JANE GOT A GUN) witnesses the crash of a Predator ship and pulls an extra-terrestrial helmet and gauntlet out of the wreckage before catching a glimpse of the camouflaged alien pilot (6’9 1/2″ parkour artist Brian A. Prince) stringing up another soldier. Panicked, McKenna accidentally fires the wrist weapon, slicing his friend’s corpse in half and dumping intestines and blood onto the cloaked Predator, revealing its location and appearance.
I mean, you love that, right? I love that. We all, in my opinion, love that. That’s what movies are for right there. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boyd Holbrook, Brian A. Prince, Fred Dekker, Jacob Tremblay, Jake Busey, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Shane Black, Sterling K. Brown, T.J. Storm, Thomas Jane, Trevante Rhodes, Yvonne Strahovski
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 64 Comments »
