Beauty Water (2020) - Movie Review

This is a weird-looking movie. The directorial debut of South Korean animator Kyung-hun Cho and his Studio Animal, it really says something when the most bizarre aspect of this whole production is how inconsistent the animation is. Not that it’s even that bad (far from it, it works really damn well); just that it uses a combination of traditional 2D line-drawn animation and 3D cell-shaded animation and… I think the 3D is devoted solely to the main-ish characters (basically whoever affects the plot in a substantial way), but going back and forth between the two styles is quite jarring. Ditto for the moments when the 2D work steps into budget-cut territory and suddenly gets extremely choppy and chicken-scratchy for a few frames.

Like A Boss (2020) - Movie Review

I’m starting to feel bad for Tiffany Haddish. Oh sure, 2019 proved to be a quite fruitful year for her on the voice-acting front, between The Lego Movie 2 and The Angry Birds Movie 2, but on the live-action front, the side of her that got pushed into the mainstream with Girls Trip? Not so much. Night School was ghastly, her teaming-up with Tyler freaking Perry on Nobody’s Fool couldn’t have possibly sounded like a good idea, and while she managed to pull through okay with The Kitchen, that was largely in spite of everything around her, not because of it. Her current presence as a comedic actress seems to be codified by her being a potential saving throw for a film that needs outside assistance, rather than actually giving her material to work with. And with her latest, it seems like we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel.