Category: Reviews

Box Office Democracy: “Sully”

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Maybe every significant historical event doesn’t need to be a feature film.

It’s clear from the glut of remakes and sequels that Hollywood is running out of ideas, and while we’ve mined World War II as thoroughly as I think is possible, some things still don’t qualify as feature films. Sully has an amazing story to tell but it doesn’t have 90 minutes of story to tell. You could get all of the essential bits of narrative into an hour of TV with commercials and it might still feel padded. There’s an extreme amount of flat out useless content in here; some of it is trying to create conflict, some of it is trying to link the landing on the Hudson to 9/11 in some appallingly exploitative filmmaking, and some of it is just there to pad the anemic running time.

Clint Eastwood is a fantastic director and the in-air scenes are masterfully done. Everyone who sees this movie contemporarily is going to know exactly what happens, that the plane is going to land safely in the Hudson River and that everyone on board is going to live, but those scenes in the air are amazingly intense. The way Eastwood tells the story from, the inside of the cockpit, to the passenger cabin, to the air traffic controller, to the first responders, and even the incidental New Yorkers is masterful. The sequence, the way they run it the first time through, is worth the price of admission by itself.

I say “the first time they run through it” because at the end of the film they run the whole sequence back again, this time with the contrivance of everyone listening to the flight data recorder. This time we get just Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart doing the least interesting parts of their performances going through a sequence we’ve already seen in a more interesting way earlier in this 90-minute film. There simply isn’t enough stuff in this movie once we move away from the thing we all came here to see, so they have to keep filling.

There’s a frame story about a National Transit Safety Board investigation trying to put fault at the feet of Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles that felt inauthentic in the theater, remembering the universal adulation these men got— and upon research, was inaccurate enough that the real-life Sullenberger asked for the names of the investigators to be changed. There’s a family plot that feels like it’s missing a key detail or some additional context to explain why the scenes are all so stilted, it’s like they filed for divorce the day before and no one decided to mention it. There are also two flashbacks: one showing Sully at flight school for the briefest moment and one showing a tricky landing from his Air Force days, and while they’re effective in what they do and mercifully brief it’s very strange to have this gesture towards being a biopic before backing away.

I didn’t appreciate all of the gestures to 9/11 imagery they used in Sully. I don’t know if they put them in and then decided it was perfect to release on the weekend of the 15th anniversary, or if they saw they had that opportunity and added them in, but I hated them. The movie opens with Sully having a nightmare about turning back towards LaGuardia and crashing in to a building in Manhattan, and then later in the movie he’s standing by a window looking over Times Square and sees a plane crash into a building. These scenes did not feel to me like they were the ideal way to show the trauma of living through the experience (although for all I know it’s what really happened) but seemed, to me, to be an attempt to get some 9/11-style imagery in the movie to get some jingoism in. As a honest-to-goodness 9/11 victim, I hated it. It’s shot very realistically, brought me back to some times I would prefer to keep in my past, and I didn’t care for it at all.

I don’t know who has the authority to tell Clint Eastwood he can’t make a movie these days, but they should have sat him down with this one. Not every significant American moment needs to be a movie, even if at the end we can have a feel good moment about first responders. Sully is a movie with one fantastic sequence and a bunch of filler because no one would pay $15 to see a 45-minute movie in a theater. Sully is a bunch of talented people doing good work, in the service of a movie that feels empty at best and exploitative at worst. I want better from all involved.

REVIEW: The Iron Giant

10005871763diron_giant_bd3d-e1459297577774-6483602It used to be, movies surprised us when we took our seats. We didn’t have so many sources for news and trailers a decade or so back. On Tuesdays, Warner Bros screened new films after hours and one night, the DC Comics crew filed in to see an animated feature called The Iron Giant. We didn’t know much about it or Brad Bird, the man behind it.

We were utterly charmed. None of us knew Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man book it was based on but found the 1950s setting perfect, and the old style animation well-done. Best, it had heart and soul and humor and a robot who wants to be Superman. What’s not to love?

Warner moved the release date so late in the process that tie-ins missed the opening and the marketing wasn’t what it should have been. As a result, this modern day classic withered and vanished. Bird, of course, went on to make The Incredibles for Pixar and then direct a Mission: Impossible film so he did pretty well.

The Iron Giant, though, faded from memory. That is until 2014 when Bird and Warner agreed to spruce it up and rerelease it. With fresh cash, they went on to complete scenes that couldn’t be done for budgetary reasons and the revised film came out in 2015. Finally, the original version and Signature Edition of the film have made their Blu-ray debut in a nice edition from Warner Home Entertainment.

Bird and screenwriter Tim McCanlies made this a thoroughly American film, shifting the time to the post-Sputnik period of the Cold War and dealing with America’s paranoia. When something crashes in Rockwell, Maine (get it?) and people think they’ve seen a monster, a jaded government agent, Kent Manley (Christopher McDonald), comes to investigate. The something turns out to be an alien construction, a war machine that is human in shape and has suffered system failures. While he self-repairs, he (Vin Diesel) is learning from Hogarth (Eli Marienthal), the young boy who discovered him. He’s lonely since his single mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) works too many hours at the local diner and he’s filled with the era’s pop culture – alien invaders and super-heroes.

The lessons Hogarth iron-giant-superman-1024x500-e1473431387448-3620370imparts are subtly contrasted with the single-minded fear of the unknown represented by Manley, who grows increasingly unhinged as events unfold. The only ally Hogarth has is the town beatnik Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), who runs the scrap yard and makes art with the junk.

There is gentle humor and some thrills and yes, parts can be predictable but overall, it has a gentle way about it that too few modern animated films possess. It has an old fashioned feel, with pacing that lets events unfurl without rushing or smash cuts to jar the senses.

The high def transfers are sharp and clear, the colors popping as they should. The two films co-exist on a single disc. There are two new scenes added to the original: Dean and Annie have a conversation in the diner and the Iron Giant has flashbacks to his life as a soldier in a mechanized army. Additionally, an ad for Maypo was replaced with what Bird originally wanted, one for Tomorrowland (working for the Mouse helps get you clearances). The lossless DTS-HD MA audio is a fine match and makes for fine viewing.

The majority of the special features from the 2004 DVD have been included here (well worth a look) along with The Giant’s Dream (55:47), which covers Bird’s career and how he wound up making The Iron Giant. It’s important to watch to better understand the filmmaking process along with the dues one must pay before being given a chance at something so personal. The Warner marketing errors are also included in conversation, which is rare honesty.  There’s also a Commentary with Bird, Head of Animation Tony Fucile, Story Department Head Jeff Lynch and Animation Supervisor Steven Markowski, which was previously used on the 2004 “Special Edition” DVD.  New, though, are fresh comments from Bird on the Signature Edition during the new sequences.

Box Office Democracy: Morgan

There are a lot of forgivable sins for thrillers. They can have thin characters, they can be completely implausible from premise to execution, and they can even be internally inconsistent if the result is a good amount of tension, but they cannot be boring. Morgan is a boring movie. Not all the way through but overwhelmingly and even in a third act tripping over itself to twist the audience every which way, I never quite got over the fact that the movie had never made me care.

When I first saw the trailer to Morgan, I thought it looked like they were trying to remake Alien but with a much lower budget. There were all these tight corridor shots and a seldom seen monster but instead of a spaceship it was in a house and instead of an elaborate monster it was a pale girl. It’s very possible I was primed to see these similarities because of the “produced by Ridley Scott” credit. I’m happy to report that Morgan is not the Alien remake I thought it was. There’s a dinner scene that sure seems evocative and the way everyone is always talking about directives from a nebulous “corporate” but it more or less ends there. There are some parts heavily borrowed from Blade Runner and those are a little more troubling, but I suppose if I was a first time director and my famous father was paying for my first movie I might do some things I’d know he liked.

I shouldn’t be so hard on these moments of borrowing from old Ridley Scott films, because figuring out why scenes seemed familiar was the most interesting part of the film. Put that aside and you have a lifeless thriller with a mostly muted color palate and there’s just nothing to be entertained by. Paul Giamatti has a small part and it’s a shame, because his big scene is easily the best in the film. He seems willing to pick an emotion and go with it, which is more than the rest of the film can say when every emotional response peaks with a stray tear after a big speech. I also want to give the movie and Rose Leslie credit for having a character react to the kind of intense trauma a supernatural thriller puts a person through by being overwhelmed, shutting down, and kind of leaning in to a Stockholm syndrome kind of response. It’s an interesting response in a movie dying for interesting. Without these flashes of above average we have a movie with predictable scares, obvious twists, and bland visuals. What else is there for a movie to offer?

I struggle to dump on a movie so heavily when it’s the first effort by a director in a low budget film, and then I remembered that I had just seen the directorial debut of Travis Knight. Comparing this movie to Kubo and the Two Strings feels unfair, especially when you compare the budgets ($8 million to $60 million) and maybe it is— but animation is more expensive than two sets and some woods. And you can’t buy storytelling or tension or fun, and one movie had it in spades and the other is picking over scraps. Morgan is a movie I left wanting to talk about the allusions to Ridley Scott films and how intentional they were but secretly thankful that, statistically, I’ll never meet anyone else that’s seen it because I don’t want my family, friends, and acquaintances to have suffered through this movie like I did.

REVIEW: Ghosts

Ghosts
By Raina Telgemeier
Scholastic Graphix, 240 pages, $10.99/$24.99

GhostsRaina Telgemeier has built a fine career for herself as a graphic novelist, she cut her teeth on adapting four of the Babysitter’s Club novels before creating her own original works, beginning with Smile. Now, with her fourth offering, she is an acclaimed New York Times Best Seller and this work is receiving a 500,000 copy first printing.

The secret to her justified success is that her work is accessible and identifiable. She takes the basic elements of teen life, such as receiving braces or dealing with siblings, and turns them into refreshing stories that can ease discomfort or bring simple entertainment. Her fluid, cartoon-style also make the characters fun and easily identifiable, her worlds recognizable, and her pages flow easily from one to the next, never losing the narrative thread.

This time around, she uses inspiration from the time she lived in Northern California and her fascination with the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration to create an original story about, once more, sisters. The family has relocated up the coast to Bahía de la Luna in the hopes the foggy, cooler climate will help Maya, the younger of the two, breathe easier. Born with cystic fibrosis, she has not had an easy time of it, although her unbridled zest for life, has not slowed her down too much. The story, though, is narrated by older sister Catrina, a teenager who loves her sister and still feels weighed down by her.

The relationship between the siblings forms the core of the novel as both are plunged into this new town and its largely Hispanic populace, which honors their ancestors with shrines and happily anticipates seeing them each Halloween at the Day of the Dead party.  This is a world that accepts the supernatural and people interact with ghosts without fear, something the girls both need to learn. Their guide in this is Carlos, their neighbor and Ghost Tour guide, who is friendly to both but definitely finds a spark in Catrina, something she is slow to recognize or embrace.

While Maya readily accepts the spirits, her body weakens and her struggles impact Cat’s outlook on the town and their spectral residents. Her conflicted nature towards Maya feels real and Telgemeier mines this incredibly well.

Interestingly, she includes sketches from 2008 when she first began thinking about this story. There’s recognizable linework but her work has simplified and evolved since then. Her work is strong, aided by colorist Braden Lamb, resulting in a very satisfying and emotionally uplifting story that should entertain readers of all ages.

Giant Days, Vol. 2 by John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin

I will keep telling you to read John Allison’s comics until either you do so or you stop listening to me entirely. So take that part as read — like Scarygoround and Bad Machinery , Giant Days is a lovely mix of smart dialogue and real characters and quirky situations. Though Giant Days, being set away from Tackleford, those quirky situations are less likely to involve dimensional portals and selkies and alien potato creatures. (At least so far….)

Volume Two finishes up the first term at an unnamed British University for our three main characters — Susan and Daisy and Esther — who have a big formal dance, and a big visit back to Susan’s hometown during the break, and the big finals, and then…um…a big new boyfriend for Esther? (Parallelism can only go so far, it seems.)

These four issues also see the big art hand-off, as original artist Lissa Treiman bows out after what was supposed to be the six-issue mini-series and Max Sarin steps in. To my eye, Sarin’s lines are a bit thinner than Treiman’s, and his art seem to have less depth…but, then, when does anyone ever think the new artist on a favorite comic is an improvement? He does a good job, and I’m sure I’ll bitterly resent it if he ever leaves Giant Days and someone else takes over.

So: female-focused writing, with believable people and real-world situations and some of the best dialogue available in comics anywhere. What are you waiting for?

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Box Office Democracy: Don’t Breathe

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It’s hard to describe why Don’t Breathe had me so consistently scared while I was watching it… it almost seems like dream logic at this point a couple days removed from viewing. There’s a very clever sequence where they just quietly show you the house that 85% of the movie is going to take place in, and they do it by just having the camera pass through the house. It goes down one hallway, up through the ceiling and through the second floor in a kind of transparent Chekhov’s single-family home kind of thing, and while I knew it was guaranteed nothing terrible would happen during this sequence I could barely look at the screen. The sense of menace during Don’t Breathe was so powerful and pervasive that even when the movie stumbled with character or an overly long climax I couldn’t look away.

I understand that characters in horror movies often have to be quick sketches to properly get to the action in the allotted runtime, but Don’t Breathe might be skimping on the characters a little too much. It’s hard to root for characters that are criminals, especially when the crime is robbing a blind man, so the film goes way over the top to try and give us characters we can try and root for. Rocky (Jane Levy) has an abusive mother so extreme that Eminem would find it a little far-fetched. She’s just robbing houses to save up enough money to take her little sister and move her to California and a new start. Alex (Dylan Minnette) is a thief but a very practical one with a strict code about what they steal to maximize safety and minimize legal risk. He robs people but he also refuses to consider moving away because he has to take care of his aging father. Money (Daniel Zovatto), Rocky’s boyfriend, is more of a cliché troublemaker and, well, they show him getting murdered in the trailer so he doesn’t last very long. They want us to think these people are ok even though they do bad things, and it didn’t work for me at all. It took so much more for me to view these kids as sympathetic characters.

They had to make the robbery victim so much worse to get me to root for those characters; to turn him from victim to monster, and they do it with relish and gusto. I’m getting in to some spoilers here so this is your opportunity to turn back and not know.

<clicks away to check email while spoilerphobes leave>

We find out early in the second act that our blind homeowner has a woman chained up in his basement— not just any woman but the woman who killed his daughter in a car accident. It flips the equation on us: sure these kids are thieves, but this guy is a kidnapper. Kidnapping is a worse crime than robbery, and so we have our proper good versus evil story restored to us. Much later in the film we discover that he had impregnated the kidnapped woman and plans to do the same to Rocky in a intensely uncomfortable artificial insemination scene. While being one of the grossest scenes I’ve ever seen committed to film, it was nice to see it done without emphasizing the sexual aspects of Rocky’s peril. We see her experience this horror through angles that accentuate that she’s helpless and terrified, but that don’t linger on her being exposed or whatever. (Her cut jeans do seem to magically fix themselves when she escapes and needs to run around more, but I’m willing to let that go for propriety and avoiding an NC-17 rating.)

When I saw the first trailer for Don’t Breathe, the one that focused heavily on the sequence with the lights out in the basement, I thought that someone had decided to make an entire movie out of the night vision sequence at the end of The Silence of the Lambs and how torturous that would be to watch. Instead I got the scariest movie I’ve seen so far this year, a frightening little gem that might not play fair the entire time (every blind person is not Daredevil) but delivers where it counts. We’re coming up on the big horror season (I could see having horror movies in this space for the next month looking at the calendar) and it’s exciting to see the gauntlet thrown down so convincingly ahead of the parade of remakes (Blair Witch) and hastily reskinned versions of Alien (Morgan) coming down the pipe.

Box Office Democracy: Kubo and the Two Strings

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Kubo and the Two Strings fills a void I didn’t realize had grown in the movie landscape until I was watching it— it’s an earnest adventure movie for all ages without a trace of camp. There’s very little winking at the audience, there are no topical references, and the celebrity voice actors even try not to sound like themselves. It is refreshingly straight-laced and serious about the mythology in a way that seems lost sometimes even among supposedly serious films. It’s easy to get lost in the wonder of the story because everything is pushing you to do exactly that. I’ve scarcely been so happy to be lost in a film.

Kubo is like a fairy tale that you forgot. It combines a litany of familiar tropes like evil elders, a bumbling but noble sidekick, and the enduring magical power of parental love and combines it in to something that feels timeless, more a Monet than a paint-by-number. It’s a fairly basic hero’s journey story— Kubo has his life destroyed and must flee with only a few magical artifacts to protect him, and must gather legendary items to defeat the evil moon king. The artifacts in question don’t actually seem super helpful in defeating the villain, but that’s never what these things are really about. If I want to nitpick the metaphor gets a little clunky at times and might completely break down in the film’s climax, but I was consistently entertained and the last shot is killer so the rest is meaningless details.

There’s a level of base discomfort one can get from watching a movie so clearly trying to be Japanese but with no Japanese people in anywhere in the writing or directing credits. This is further compounded when white people voice all of the principal characters. It didn’t feel disrespectful to me, it felt tone consistent with the fables and myths I was familiar with from taking a few East Asian literature classes in college, but it isn’t my place to tell other people what is or is not over their boundaries for a piece of media like this. In a perfect world I would like to see movies like these, love letters to legitimate cultural artifacts, have more people from that culture playing the roles, but I understand that that isn’t where Hollywood is right now. I can’t find any Japanese people criticizing the film on these grounds, so I’m content to enjoy the movie and hope for the time when representation is a little better.

Representation issues aside the cast is uniformly fantastic. Charlize Theron is tiptoeing this line between loving maternal figure and fierce protector and absolutely nails it. Matthew McConaughey gives his strongest performance since winning an Oscar, and it’s probably not even worth looking up what those movies are to figure out how much of a compliment this is. Art Parkinson does most of the heavy lifting in the movie and might finally be moving away from being “that kid who plays Rickon Stark”, if he can keep doing work like this (or any work where he gets actual lines). Ralph Fiennes is such an unexpected delight and is wonderfully understated, but I couldn’t help but think that David Carradine would have 100% gotten that role if he were alive. Rooney Mara is going to be in my nightmares for her exquisitely creepy work. I’ve already mentioned this, but the greatest part of all of this work is the actors are willing to disappear in to the role instead of just sounding like themselves and cashing a big paycheck. I’m especially impressed with McConaughey, who even in his best work sounds an awful lot like himself but manages to fall away in to the part here.

Kubo and the Two Strings was a movie I wasn’t excited to see, it didn’t grab me from the trailer and it was put in a week that just seemed to scream “we’re done putting out the big movies this summer, here’s what’s left over” and I was so pleasantly surprised. Kubo is a strong contender for best animated movie of the year and could probably make a run at best action movie. I loved how it had a childlike sense of adventure built-in, but didn’t feel childish in the way a lot of kids movies can. It seems to be cursed to never find an audience, perhaps because it wasn’t willing to pitch itself as young as possible but it deserves to be a bigger hit. Kubo and the Two Strings is the best movie I’ve ever seen from Laika, and I hope it’s a sign of things to come and that the soft opening numbers don’t scare them back to The Boxtrolls or similar fare.

REVIEW: Gotham: The Complete Second Season

gotham-s2-bd1-e1464214110948-8478981Last year, Gotham debuted on Fox amidst a lot of hoopla and generally positive notices. I, however, found the series woefully inept with ham-fisted dialogue and implausible plotting, while ignoring the source material to the point of being unrecognizable. I apparently was in the minority since the ratings were strong and it got a renewal.

Gotham: The Complete Second Season is out now on Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment and while it is markedly improved, it apparently has decided to embrace bad writing and worse plotting since people seemed to like it.

With the core players established, the second season decided to offer up two long arcs, with the winter hiatus separating them. In the first arc, we have the arrival of Theo Galavan (James Frain) and his sister Tabitha (Jessica Lucas), arrive in Gotham and we learn he’s here to settle old family scores as we learn of the intertwined relationships between the Waynes, Galavans, and Dumas. To accomplish this, Theo orchestrates events so he’s seen as a hero and rides his popularity to become Mayor.

He’s secretly working with the Order of St. Dumas which has arrived in Gotham and activates Theo as their Azrael, wasting Ron Rifkin as the organization’s leader.

James Gordon (Ben McKenzie), on the force, off the force, suspected of criminal mischief, and more, seems to be the only one to see through the nonsense (let alone the series ignoring how one registers to run and runs for an office, totally skipped over). Theo grabs the psychotic Barnaba (Erin Richards) and uses her as a weapon against Gordon. That doesn’t work and Gordon seemingly kills Galavan, ending a threat to the city. Gordon continues to have a prickly relationship with new commissioner Nathaniel Barnes (Michael Chiklis), who can’t seem to make up his mind whether Gordon is straight or crooked or just nuts.

During all this noise, Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) has chosen to live on the streets and allies himself with Selina Kyle (Carmen Bicondova) and they get caught up in the Galvan silliness and Bruce does something fairly cold, worrying Selina his PTSD is getting worse.

The second half of the season brings us to Arkham Asylum and Prof. Hugo Strange (B.D. Wong), who is working for the Court of Owls to make monsters out of humans for reasons unknown. Selina gets trapped in the Asylum as does an undercover Gordon. Bruce, meanwhile, finally figures out who shot his parents (it is not Joe Chill on orders from Lew Moxon) and tracks him down. In theory, by figuring this out at age 11 or 12, he gets the justice he craves and never becomes Batman but that’s entirely ignored.

Meanwhile, poor Oswald Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor) hangs out with Edward Nygma (Cory Michael Smith), no fully schizophrenic and murderous on his own. Then he finds his birth father (Paul Ruebens) and gets a new home only to find it filled with vicious family who do not like to share, once more wrecking Oswald’s fragile psyche.

Back art Arkham, Strange trains Basil Karlo (Brian McManamon) to impersonate Gordon, and does a lousy job, but no one seems to notice because everyone on this series is apparently clueless. The season ends with Strange exposed, the Court ready to take action, Gordon on the run in search of pregnant Lee (Morena Baccarin) and monsters wandering the city.

The writing continues to lack subtlety and none of the character arcs make a lick of sense. And yet, this mess of a show remains compelling viewing and it has its adherents.

All 22 noisy, mindless episodes are contained in the combo pack along with Digital HD. There are a nice assortment of extras to round out the package including the requisite Gotham: 2015 Comic Con Panel; Gotham by Noir Light, a look at the show’s use of light and shadow; Alfred: Batman’s Greatest Ally, regardless of how ill-used Alfred (Sean Pertwee) was used this season; Cold Hearted – The Tale of Victor Fries; and some character featurettes.

REVIEW: The Huntsman: Winter’s War

the-huntsman-e1465935680723-5305642Fairy Tales are also cautionary tales, a way to teach morals and values to children at a time when the majority of the populace couldn’t read or write. It wasn’t until the last four centuries or so when we began writing it all down and solidifying the variations. Even today, people take the classics and reinterpret them for new generations, bringing in modern themes and issues, making them more relevant.

The cautionary tale to take from The Huntsman: Winter’s War is that you have to have something interesting to say. The preceding film, Snow White and the Huntsman, gave us a revisionist Snow White in the form of plucky Kristen Stewart, a modern day action heroine that made her a proactive player in the classic German tale.

Given behind the scenes shenanigans, Stewart was out of the proposed sequel with the emphasis shifting to the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) and giving him a new romantic interest and a cool threat in the Snow Queen, loosely taken from Hans Christian Anderson’s story. By making Freya (Emily Blunt) the wicked Queen Ravenna’s (Charlize Theron) younger sister, we now have an interesting dynamic to play with.

Craig Mazin and Evan Spiliotopoulos’s screenplay gives us a lengthy prologue set before the first film and setting Freya has had an affair with a nobleman and given birth to a love child although Andrew (Colin Morgan) has inexplicably killed the child and something goes eerily cold within Freya. We’re told she leaves the kingdom to go find her own castle and land to rule with an icy heart and matching powers (shades of Elsa). Lacking her own child, she orders the land’s children taken from their loving homes and brought to the castle to be trained.

Her two best grow up to become Eric (Hemsworth) and Sara (Jessica Chastain) and of course they have a forbidden romance, which Freya somehow learns about minutes after they consummate their bond. She uses her powers to make each think the other is gone and goes about conquering other lands.

Pause to insert the first film. Now, Freya wants her sister’s enchanted mirror and sends her army out to find it, which Eric has come to protect, aided by the comic relief duo of dwarf ally Nion (Nick Frost) and his half-brother Gryff (Rob Brydon).  When Sara finds them, misunderstandings and hard feelings take time to, ahem, thaw but they realize keeping Freya from the mirror comes first. Along the way, they collect female dwarves Bromwyn (Sheridan Smith) and Doreena (Alexandra Roach) so the comic relief can have some romance.

Ravenna is resurrected, the sisters bicker and play chess, and the good guys arrive to prevail.

Ho hum. All the potential for interesting characters, interesting dialogue and a riveting story was avoided in the favor of boring action sequences, a phoned in score from James Newton Howard, and perfunctory direction from special effects guru Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, making his debut.

There is literally nothing to recommend this dreary tale, out now from Universal Home Entertainment. The high definition transfer is fine, capturing the crystal blues to the deep shadows and the audio track is its match. The Blu-ray combo set comes with a Digital HD copy and arrives in the theatrical and extended version, the latter containing about six more minutes of tedium.

Bonus features include Two Queens and Two Warriors as the female stars talk about the project’s allure; Meet the Dwarfs; Magic All Around, a making of featurette; Deleted Scenes with Commentary (several of which should have made the final cut); Gag Reel; Dressed To Kill with Academy Award®-winning costumer Colleen Atwood discussing the lush outfits worn; Love Conquers All; and a Feature Commentary by director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan I couldn’t bring myself to endure.

Box Office Democracy: Sausage Party

It’s a shame there’s no outlet in our current media landscape for R-rated sketches written by high profile talent. There’s Funny or Die and its ilk, I suppose, but I can’t imagine the money there is anything like it is for a feature-length film. I’m pretty sure there’s a good eight-minute sketch to be made out of Sausage Party that would be, if not quite to my taste, generally enjoyable but instead it’s this endless rehash of the same five or six jokes that seems to drag on forever and ever but only takes 90 minutes.

Maybe I’m becoming too old and stodgy to enjoy comedy anymore, but I just don’t think the idea of a hot dog and a bun having sex is funny enough to be the anchor for an entire movie. This is the joke of this movie. Not the only joke, there’s a literal douche who is also a figurative douche and the whole thing with food being alive and not knowing it’s going to be eaten, but the hot dog bun sex thing is the big one— we start with it, we end with it, it comes up amazingly often, and it isn’t really that funny. They try to spice it up in the second act by adding a lesbian taco, and let me tell you, what this movie didn’t need was a greater variety of speculative food intimacy (but it’s clearly what the producers thought it needed as the whole film concludes with a massive food orgy).

Sausage Party is, when it isn’t a hastily constructed vehicle for bad jokes, a takedown of religion. The food thinks they’re going to heaven when they’re selected by humans (called “The Gods”) because they have been tricked by a consortium of non-perishable food items that have seen the cycle play out for some time and invented the story to make the food less afraid of their impending horrible deaths. I would say that it’s the screenplay embodiment of the arrogant attitude about other people’s personal beliefs you get from taking one college-level philosophy class, but Ricky Gervais made that movie seven years ago and it was The Invention of Lying— so Sausage Party isn’t even original in being a smarmy ball of quasi-intellectual tripe.

It’s hard to get too bothered by bad representation in a movie that feels as insubstantial as Sausage Party. If a few Jewish writers want the only Jewish character in their movie to be a nebbishy Woody Allen stereotype, I don’t have any specific problem with that as a Jewish man. I’m a little less confident that the right choice was to make an equally stereotypical Arab character and have that character be voiced by David Krumholtz. Having those two characters end up screwing each other senseless in the aforementioned giant food orgy plays in to some ugly stereotypes vis a vis masculinity with regards to both communities, but I doubt this is something that went through the head of literally anyone involved so it’s more a sin of ignorance than malice. I’m slightly less willing to be charitable about the decision to have Bill Hader play both a Native American stereotype and a Mexican one in the same movie, but every moment I spend thinking about that is one less moment I get to spend never thinking about Sausage Party again.

It’s possible I’m simply too old for Sausage Party. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was one of the funniest movies I had ever seen when I was 15 years old and I was an evangelist for it among my friends. Perhaps Sausage Party is sending the same ripples through teenagers today and I’m out of touch or simply heard enough swear words in my life that reciting them as rapidly and randomly as possible doesn’t make my laugh the way it did when I was younger, but I don’t believe it. I firmly believe Sausage Party is a bad and lazy movie, but there were enough laughs in my theater to give me this slight moment of pause.

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