Strange World (2022) - Movie Review

 

It’s getting to the point where Disney’s animated films seem almost perfunctory compared to their titanic dominance over the film market in just about every other area, from their ownership of 20^th Century Fox, to Marvel movies swallowing entire release schedules whole every time they come out. This film is projected to cost Disney somewhere around $147 million, although with the impending release of Avatar: The Way Of Water, I’m sure the profit there will balance things out again. Ain’t it nice to be a corporate monolith?

Yeah, I’m being snarky here, because I wasn’t really expecting much from this. The last couple Disney Animated films were decent, but nothing all that special compared to the studio’s pedigree, and I’ve come to associate director Don Hall with mid-tier Disney, between Raya And The Last Dragon and Big Hero 6. And on top of that, as much as I kinda like the antagonist-less approach Disney has been taking with their stories for the last few years, the reliance on generational trauma to fill in the gaps is starting to wear thin (they hit their peak with that in Frozen 2, for the record). But, thankfully, I can safely say that this film turned out pretty well, in spite of its obstacles. Although it should be said that ‘safely’ is the operative word here.

A Dog's Journey (2019) - Movie Review

Fiction is manipulative by design. It’s a story featuring events and people that, for the most part, don’t exist and yet, in spite of that, it’s meant to make you care about what is happening and who it is happening to. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the general idea: Manipulate a given audience to buy into something that didn’t happen. But even with that in mind, few things in recent memory have strained that necessary evil as much as A Dog’s Purpose, a film that still gets on my nerves a good four years after watching it for just how shameless it was. You can imagine that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to its sequel, even with the kinda-sorta pre-show we got earlier in the year with A Dog’s Way Home, but surprisingly, this film was a lot better than I was expecting.

Kin (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: While searching an abandoned building for scrap metal, Elijah (Myles Truitt) finds a weapon that is clearly not of this earth. As the original owners of the weapon set out to retrieve, his adoptive older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) is on the run from gangster Taylor (James Franco) and he and Elijah hit the road to get away from them all.

I Can Only Imagine (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Christian band MercyMe, lead by singer Bart Millard (J. Michael Finley), have scored a #1 hit with their song I Can Only Imagine. As Bart is interviewed and asked what went into writing the song, he recollects his troubled childhood under his aggressively abusive father (Dennis Quaid), his connection to his faith, and how the latter ended up helping him reconcile with the former.

A Dog's Purpose (2017) - Movie Review

Even though I have a dog at home myself, I’ve never really gotten the “point” of having pets. I see ordinary life for your standard human as complicated enough to get through without needing to simultaneously take care of a living thing that just barely counts in terms of intelligent life. I mean, people seem to take care better of their dogs than they do themselves; they certainly dress their canines better than themselves sometimes, I’ll tell you that for a fact. However, that’s not to say that I’m against it or anything like that; there’s a reason why cute pet videos still dominate the Internet to this day, and some of them are legitimately heart-warming by showing just how much animals mean to their owners. Such a shame that film never really seems able to translate that properly, with the box-office curse that is the talking animal movie still very much in effect.

 

So, as I continue dreading the point where I end up watching last year’s chatty-cat failure Nine Lives (or Mr. Fuzzypants as it was retitled over here, because fuck knows that I’m not embarrassed enough to watch the bloody thing), let’s take a look at this recent shaggy offering.