Ferdinand (2017)

  I didn't think this was going to be any good but I was pleasantly surprised.  I remember watching the old Ferdinand short from Disney and I seriously wondered how they were going to stretch 20 minutes of material into two hours.  Turns out, they do it by making the movie about fighting toxic masculinity instead of pacifism.

Ferdinand (John Cena) ran away from bullfighting training as a calf and ended up on a flower farm with Nina (Lily Day), a little girl who loved and cared for him, where he grew up to be the biggest bull for miles.  So big that Nina's dad (Juanes) told Nina that she can no longer bring Ferdinand to the annual flower festival in town.  Ferdinand decides to go anyway and is accidentally stung by a bee.  Maddened, he wrecks the flower festival and is carted off by animal control, who turn around and sell him back to the bullfighting house where he grew up.  He makes some new friends in Lupe (Kate McKinnon), the calming goat, and Una (Gina Rodriguez), Dos (Daveed Diggs), and Cuatro (Gabriel Iglesias), three hedgehogs, but the other bulls are not as welcoming.  Things reach a boiling point when El Primero (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), the most famous matador, arrives to choose a bull for his final fight.

I was really impressed with how the movie handled this subject matter.  It addressed the glorification of violence, the pressure to conform, and the negative stigma of expressing feelings in a thoughtful way that didn't come off as heavy-handed or preachy.  The musical numbers were uninspired and seemed extraneous but Kate McKinnon was hilarious and I love David Tennant in everything.  He plays a Scottish bull and it is completely adorable.  And my three godchildren liked it so it plays well to its target demographic.

Revolting Rhymes (2017)

  I'm still trying to work through all the Oscar nominees that are in my queue from this year (and the four years before that).  This was nominated for Best Animated Short and it is very cute.

A wolf (Dominic West) infiltrates the house of his greatest enemy, Little Red Riding Hood (Rose Leslie), with a plan to eat her two children.  To gain entry, he first lures their regular nanny (Tamsin Grieg) into his confidence by telling her the "true" story of Little Red's origins.  Once inside the house, he finds the oldest child too suspicious so he again lulls them with "true" stories about Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk, all the while preparing a soup base for them to flavor.

I didn't grow up with a lot of Roald Dahl.  I read the two Charlie and the Chocolate Factory books at the public library but I wasn't blown away.  I think I might have liked this better if it had been available.  The animation is all right but it's the story that is really compelling here.  The characters look very plasticized but that's a look we've seen many times from kids movies.  It doesn't have either a hyperrealistic effect or a touchable quality to it which I think worked against it from a judging standpoint.  Still, it's streaming on Netflix in two parts and is perfectly suitable as an alternative to The Bee Movie or Kung Fu Panda for the 800th time.

I, Tonya (2017)

This was going to go up yesterday but I had my godkids this weekend and it is really hard to write with three children watching movies behind you.    I was really looking forward to this movie.  This is one of the few sports controversies that I was aware of as a kid.  I have only been ice skating once in my entire life (surprise, I wasn't good at it) but I always watch figure skating on the Olympics.

Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) grew up with one ambition:  to skate.  Despite being poor and uncultured in a sport that values being rich and feminine, Tonya persisted.  Her mother (Allison Janney) pushed her through a series of psychologically and physically abusive trials, eventually badgering one of the premier figure skating coaches, Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson), to get Tonya ready for competition on a national level.  Around the same time, Tonya met Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and began a tempestuous, violent, co-dependent relationship.  After being spooked by a death threat, Tonya and Jeff get the idea to psych out Tonya's main competition at Nationals, Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver), by mailing her anonymous death threats.  Through a combination of ambition and truly stupendous idiocy, this morphs into the now legendary assault.

This was done in a faux-documentary style that I didn't think really worked for the narrative.  I would have preferred to actually see interviews with Harding and Gillooly if they were going to go that route, rather than have Robbie and Stan act those out.  It was just off-putting for some reason.  Robbie is fantastic here and so is Janney, playing the acerbic LaVona.  I don't know if this film will make you have any more sympathy for Tonya Harding, but it's a decent enough watch for the people in it.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

  This is a much more well-known sci-fi film, though I wonder now how many of the 90s and later kids will have seen it.  The visuals still hold up even if the plot is terribly dated.

Grant (Stephen Boyd) safely shepherds an important government VIP through an assassination attempt but learns that the scientist is gravely injured with a clot in his brain.  Grant is tasked to join an incredibly secret mission and provide security to a team of doctors who will be shrunk and inserted into the comatose scientist's bloodstream.  They will have less than an hour before the procedure wears off and they begin growing back to their original sizes.  Grant is also warned that the lead scientist, Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), is arrogant and headstrong and may in fact be a double agent intent on sabotaging the mission.  Sure enough, things start to go wrong almost as soon as the journey begins and Grant must ferret out the identity of the saboteur, and ensure the safety of the crew as well as the success of the mission if the U.S. is to retain exclusive knowledge of the shrinking procedure.

This is a great little Cold War gem that highlights the extreme paranoia so prevalent at the time.  I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's the primary function of the film.  Zero attention is paid to any background on the program, the scientist himself, or the aftermath of the mission.  It is strictly focused on the voyage and the possible saboteur.

As time has passed, those motivations seem less dramatic but the ticking countdown does retain a lot of the original tension.  The anxiety of the waiting surgical staff, the sweaty fug of the military leaders responsible for pulling the plug on this project, and the snap decisions made by the tiny argonauts are factors that contribute greatly to this being a sci-fi classic.  The internal visuals of the human body do the rest of the work, as organs become vast Rube Goldberg machines of destruction for our hapless protagonists.

I had seen this as a kid and even been on the ride at EPCOT that was totally based on this movie even though Disney didn't produce it.  It's one of my mom's favorite movies.  I had forgotten how abrupt the ending is until I rewatched it for class, but it's still definitely worth passing on to the next generations.

X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

  Classes officially ended this week but I'm still working off the backlog of movies I saw during the semester.  This was one of my favorites from my Film class and not so coincidentally, I'm also doing my final paper on it.

Dr. Xavier (Ray Milland) is eager to move to human trials of his experimental eye drops that allow the user to see more than just the visible spectrum.  However, The Establishment in the form of his friend, Dr. Brant (Harold J. Stone), and potential honey, Dr. Fairfax (Diana Van der Vils), caution him against continuing after the deaths of all his test subjects.  Undaunted, Dr. Xavier charges ahead and uses himself as a subject, gradually increasing the dosage until he can see through solid objects.  This does not bring him the acclaim he was looking for as a researcher.  Instead, he is ostracized and eventually commits manslaughter while lashing out.  He is forced to go on the run, hiding out in a two-bit carnival as their Mystic.  The carnival barker (Don Rickles) figures out that the doc is hiding something and extorts him into using his "gift" to shill old people out of their money.  That's how Dr. Fairfax finds him again, bringing with her all the bad luck and trouble Xavier thought he had escaped.

This is a Roger Corman movie, so you know it's going to be cheesy, melodramatic, and shot for cheap.  And it is.  But it's also a really fun B-movie that is just ripe for some MST3K-style commentary.  My paper discusses how the punishment of transhumanism (wanting to augment the human body beyond its current capabilities) is tied to the ideological status quo of the 1960s which was very invested in maintaining extant power structures.  I'll be contrasting it with Lucy, which embraces the concept of transhumanism and sees progress as unstoppable.  But you don't care about that.  If you can find this film, give it a shot after you've had a couple of shots.

Vera Cruz (1954)

  This is a dark little Western for all you nihilists out there.

After the American Civil War, a lot of displaced, dispirited, and just plain lawless folk drifted down to Mexico for the promise of gold and fighting in the revolution.  Former Southern gentleman Benjamin Trane (Gary Cooper) falls in with a hired killer named Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) and his bunch of hooligans (including Jack Elam, Ernest Borgnine, and Charles Bronson) on an escort mission from Mexico City to the port of Vera Cruz.  The emperor (George Macready) has made an alliance with the French, and wants his closest advisor's mistress, Countess Duvarre (Denise Darcel), to reach the port unharmed.  He and the advisor (Cesar Romero) have already determined that the Americans are to be killed before payment is issued.  But the double-crosses don't stop.  In the carriage, the Countess is aware there is a fortune in gold under her feet and plans to skim some from the top.  She recruits Trane and Erin to help her get away by promising them a cut, but Erin is a grade-A psychopath who could snap at any moment, and Trane is conflicted by the morals of helping the emperor over the revolutionaries.

This is a big boiling kettle of motivations and divided loyalties and it makes for a very effective plot. Cooper is great as the soul-weary Trane trying to stomach being on the wrong side of a war, while Lancaster is magnetic as the unpredictable but not nearly as crazy as he looks Erin.  I'm surprised this isn't higher on lists of Great Westerns.  It almost feels like a forgotten classic and that's crazy.  You should watch it for Cesar Romero alone.  I grew up with him just as the campy Joker with the painted over mustache in reruns of Batman.  That is so far away from his character and portrayal here I had to check to make sure it was the same guy.  I love those kinds of revelations.

Harlan County USA (1976)

  I just realized I totally forgot to post yesterday.  I have got to figure out how to schedule these things so they post automatically.

That would also mean that I would have to be prepared ahead of time and have completed reviews drafted and ready to go.  I used to do that, when I didn't have school.  Maybe soon we can go back to normal.

This was another depressing-ass documentary for extra credit in my Art class.  We were studying Supreme Court cases that related to anti-union legislation and First Amendment rights so this came up.

Harlan County, Kentucky, coal miners went on strike after rejecting a contract submitted by the mining company.  The strike lasted over a year and was discussed all the way in Wall Street, where protesters tried to influence the company's shareholders.  The United Mine Workers union took up their cause but had its own internal shit to deal with, like a guy who straight up murdered his opponent in the election.  Meanwhile, in Kentucky, the striking miners are harassed, shot at, and strongarmed by the mining company scabs, local heavies, and local law enforcement.  The filmmakers themselves were almost shot by one of the scabs and got the experience on film, which provides the most harrowing moments of the documentary.

Unless you're really interested in the history of mining, unions, or the First Amendment, you'll probably want to skip this.  It's a really good documentary, though, and if you can find it I think you should give it a chance.