I got about 25 minutes in and, though I was enjoying myself, had to stop. As yet I have not found any source for this documentary that includes subtitles for the non-English portions of the audio. There are several interviews and archival clips with dialogue in foreign languages, and I feel it would be unfair to myself and to the film to watch it without understanding these parts.
So, for now, I'll keep this on my watchlist knowing that as soon as I find complete subtitles, I will finish it.
The movie might be showing its age, or maybe I'm showing mine. The structure just felt off. The pacing was much too slow until the last quarter. There's something grating about Maverick's character—there's supposed to be, but I couldn't really find anything to like about him. And of course the romance is entirely unnecessary, but that's been a Hollywood problem since long before this movie (and still is).
Apparently this had already been on my watchlist for a while, but today something put it back on my radar and I decided to just watch the thing. It's only been about 12 hours since whatever it was, and yet I've already forgotten what brought it up again.
Since I'm a sucker for good stories with interesting characters, this didn't work. No one really has any personality (except Sayoko, inappropriate as she is around her kid cousin), and every single plot had me asking, "What point are you trying to make?"
Short stories never get a lot of time to develop their characters, though, and this was adapting selections from an omnibus manga published almost two decades ago. Maybe that's why the tone felt odd for a 2020 release?
Anyway, yeah. Big meh. My advice would be to watch the first "episode" and stop. That was the best part.
Is this a fun movie? Yes.
Does the script make sense? Kind of… not really.
Do the visual effects hold up in 2021? Not even close.
But the premise is interesting enough that I can see how it became a television franchise. That'll be next on my watchlist.
It's a real trip seeing James Spader in this goofy role.
Saw most of the twist coming from 20-30 minutes in, but not the very last bit.
Worth watching for F. Murray Abraham, though the material he has to work with is disappointingly one-note. Still a cute enough story.
Not a remotely original (or deep) plot, but I laughed so hard, so many times. So what if it was usually at the movie, rather than with it?
The nicest surprise in all this, as a long-time Trek fan, was seeing Dominic Keating. Throwing in David Ogden Stiers didn't hurt; besides his long-running role on M*A*S*H, he too had a (guest) role in the Trek canon, as well as the Stargate one.
It's too bad that the characterization is so flat. Yes, the movie is really about Mike, but what a shame that the other characters around him are so one-dimensional. The final edit was also at least 15 minutes too long, probably more; it easily could have been tightened to help the story's pacing.
Supposedly this is more faithful to the original cartoon series that I've not seen yet… It's better than the first movie, at least. Recasting almost everyone and pretending John didn't start dating Dr. Bradford (she doesn't appear at all) were pretty jarring changes, though.
Being produced a few years later probably gave the visual effects an edge, but that doesn't explain the whole feel of the movie blending together so much better. Claw seems like a proper kids' movie villain now, and Penny (the only kid in the cast) actually has real involvement in the plot.
I wouldn't call it perfect, but in my book this sequel fixed a lot of the shortcomings that held back its predecessor. Happy am I to contribute to the rating split… Love it or hate it, I think the improvement is objectively obvious.
Seems to want to be a Robocop parody for kids, or put another way: "What if Robocop was a slapstick physical comedy?"
I can't help but wonder if one of the other potential actors considered to play John would have helped the film… Jim Carrey or Robin Williams in particular. It would have been tough, though. No role had much to work with in the character department.
If one of the few things that got a laugh out of me now was seeing Igor from Young Frankenstein in the minion recovery meeting, that's not a great batting average. This script is objectively a mess. I'm not even judging it in comparison to the cartoon series, as I've never seen that.
As a young kid, I remember seeing this because I spent the whole feature plugging my ears; the theater had their sound system set waaaaaaay too loud. Between that and my age, I didn't catch any of the subtler gags and references that kept me going during this viewing. Star Trek fan that I became later in life, now I'm disappointed that Rene Auberjonois had such a brief role in this movie.
Funny moments spread throughout, but the fabric joining them just doesn't hang together as anything one could reasonably call "cohesive". Characters are, um… Well, they show up on screen and say stuff that moves the story ahead, I guess.
That said, I'm certainly going to take and remember the gags that worked. ("Now comes the part where we throw our heads back and laugh." "Were you fighting with the narrator?" etc.)
"So Guinan and Professor McGonagall walk into a casino…"
But man, I missed Max Grodénchik. Not used to looking for him without the big Ferengi lobes…
Every time Blaze appears, I do a double take. (It's Darlene from Mr. Robot.)
It's fine. The romance, what's happening with the parents, everything is pretty paint-by-numbers and feels like the story goes down a list of clichés checking them off one after the other.
I thought the story could have moved along a bit faster, or kept the same runtime but added in some more background on other characters—Will's family, in particular. The most frustrating gap in the script, for me, was never even mentioning what happened with Marcus at the wedding again. I would have accepted even a passing reference, but I thought that particular event deserved a little more post hoc screen time.
The other thing bugging me is how Will's refusal to leave Ronnie alone when she repeatedly shuts him down on multiple occasions gets portrayed as this grand romantic arc, when in reality that's harassment. For that reason I low-key hate that they end up together at the end. That boy needs to listen when he's told no!
As of this writing, not available on any "normal" streaming services, but is available from the PlayStation channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5MgEbBOps
Maxwell Sheffield is in this! Didn't see that coming.
Almost three hours of movie between the two films, and we still don't know why Thantos wanted his brother dead.
Presented cropped to 16:9 on Disney+, sadly. This '90s production obviously wasn't shot to be widescreen-safe. I'm thankful that I found the original aspect ratio still available on DisneyNOW, for the time being.
Was that a Kazaam (1996) reference? Pretty sure there was a Wizards of Waverly Place reference too (Camryn lives in a neighborhood called Waverly).
Obvious callbacks to Sister, Sister (a previous co-starring role for the Mowry twins) in both how they meet, and in their adoptive families' socioeconomic statuses.
I jumped into this knowing nothing about it, other than having seen the keads' television work growing up. The writing, the villain's motivation, and the visual effects all were severely lacking. One IMDB reviewer called Thantos "zero-dimensional" and yeah, I see it. We have absolutely no idea why the villain did it.
Visual effects were shockingly bad, too, for a $20 million film. I saw individual pixels in some of the animations, but beyond that the effect designs seemed to be pulled from some catalog of five-minute magic VFX. Very disappointing.
Trite and predictable as the story is, it still has a shadow of Disney's Love Conquers All (remember Robin Hood (1973)?) optimism. Don't think Walt would have let this one out the door, honestly.
If not for having the TV release date readily available, I'd suspect this of having its final scene altered in the wake of September 11. Only the (Australian) theatrical release fell after those events, though.
Little overboard on the patriotism, but I understand where the filmmakers were coming from. During production, they were a lot closer to the actual event than I am now, 20 years later (and it still hit me pretty hard, at that).
Felt like this movie couldn't decide whether it wanted to be fast- or slow-paced. Big developments happen off-screen, but little issues get hashed out at snail speed. I'm exaggerating some for effect, true, but that's how it felt.
I thought the film also had trouble choosing a genre. Not enough of the rehearsal and preparation process was shown to make the film about competitive dance, and neither was enough of any character's personal struggle shown to make it an effective character study. It ended up in "sometimes engaging story with a message" territory, and I didn't think it even did that very well, sadly.
It's… fine? Kind of?
The moral's there, in all its glory, impossible to miss because the characters slap you in the face with it repeatedly. Tonally, the script's a bit one-note even as it happily flips between comedy and drama. Romantic subplots feel shoehorned in, another checkbox to appease the target demographic I suppose.
My main specific issue is how the dairy employees—adults—behave toward the two protagonists. Given that many of them are also parents to children of their own, the remarks hurled at Taylor and Courtney were flat-out appalling. They were intended as such, true, but poor Reed Callum if those are the people whose livelihoods he protects as if they're his own family. Some of them just don't deserve it.
I enjoyed the film well enough, but there were too many things that made me go "wait, what?" to call it good. Could have used more Jean Yoon (Umma from Kim's Convenience), and a rewrite to add some amount of intelligence to the dairy's office leadership. (Seriously, no one suggested checking with the bank to see if they could get more details about what happened to the company's funds instead of just assuming it was Reed's doing?)
Good adaptation of the book.
There are some head-scratching plot holes that the movie throws out to set the stage for its story, stuff that seems too convenient, and a few boring bits—but they're all there in the book, too. Not the movie's fault.
We have here a musical film with an overproduced soundtrack, whose story is about *checks notes* Camp Rock's rivalry with an "overproduced ego factory" across the lake.
Ha. Irony. Again.
At least this time the story's better overall. Plenty of "why'd they do that?!" to go around still, in both the musical arrangements and story choices for various characters—especially the method by which Connect 3's bus wound up waterlogged… there were still two intact axles on that side!
Surely there were more musical nods than what I caught, but:
This being a Disney production, it's even odds whether they intentionally cloned popular tracks, and also even odds whether they licensed anything or banked on the Mouse's sheer size to deter litigation.
Could have been moderately enjoyable if the songs were at least good. There's at least some delicious irony in the plot thread about Connect 3's record label only wanting them to perform songs that the management think they can sell, because that very kind of sanitized, empty, soulless pop music comprises the movie's entire soundtrack—which Disney no doubt expected to sell.
This must have been one of the few DCOMs I actually watched back in the day. Most of the story felt familiar.
Part of that's no doubt due to how it retreads familiar territory from Star Trek: Voyager about the holographic doctor, his status as a person vs. a program, and the idea of holographic life. Disney's take on the subject is unsurprisingly focused less on legal and ethical questions, and sticks to the learning angle: what can this artificial life form teach our young protagonists about the human condition?
More so than most of these TV movies, I think the lesson works just fine. Nitpicking opportunities aren't hard to find—Loretta's gymnastics alone open several cans of physics worms—but we can put that all aside. The "realistic" science fiction approach has obviously been softened in the name of story. Sometimes doing that doesn't work, but I say here it does.
I'm starting to think that the older a DCOM is, the better it will be. Less suspension of disbelief required, less heavy-handed with The Moral of the Story… Sure, even the old ones aren't great films, but there's a charm to the earlier stuff that's missing from more recent productions.
Idly curious to know what else happens in the roughly two minutes of this that don't appear on American streaming services (Amazon and Vudu, at time of writing). Official runtime is 90 minutes, but we only get 88.5.
The big surprise was Willie Garson, closely followed by Chris Elliott. Seeing either of them in this movie's universe is a trip on its own, but both? :exploding_head:
I don't have faith in the ending, though. It's entirely too easy for Phil to win over Rita in one day, when up to this point he's been quite the self-centered jerk. "And he got the girl" is a pretty lazy conclusion, to say nothing of how obsessive (read: stalkerish) Phil's behavior actually seems.
Honestly, the songs are pretty forgettable and the last act has a major case of "rest of the f**king owl" as far as getting from the waterfall to LA, but the story has heart even if its script is rather abbreviated.
