Strays (2023) - Movie Review

Hoo boy. It’s been a while since we’ve dealt with some talking animal shit on here, eh? That sub-genre that I keep running into and keep being aghast at just how bad it can get. And on top of that, we’re not dealing with an animated film; instead, we’ve got 2000s-era CGI work meant to make real-life dogs look like they’re talking, as if the non-existence movement above the nose-line doesn’t break the illusion every single time. Yeah, suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the prospect of watching this, but to its credit, it does have some merit to it. Just not in any of the obvious places.

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (2023) - Movie Review

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse changed the modern animation industry to the point where, when looking at the whole thing historically, you could reasonably split the timeline into pre- and post-Spider-Verse. It represented an approach to animation where anything and everything was permitted and encouraged, leading to many others that would take cues from its eclectic and chaotic visual style (The Mitchells Vs. The Machines, Entergalactic, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, just to name a few), and for an IP with many different media iterations already, it still managed to stand as one of if not the best yet.

The Mitchells Vs. The Machines (2021) - Movie Review

When trailers for this film first dropped (back when it was under the far lamer title Connected), I didn’t think much of it. I mean, it looked cool and all those pug licks put a smile on my face every time they showed up, but it didn’t seem like anything all that special. Or, to put it more accurately, it didn’t seem like a film that, once it finally escaped the COVID carousel, would become one of the most popular films of the year. This thing has been getting hyped into the stratosphere for the last few months, and while lockdown brain has kept me from getting as many reviews done as I’d like, this is one I wanted to hold back on for a bit just so I could separate it from the colossal praise this has been getting. And then I watched it… and realised that everyone might have been underselling it.

The LEGO Movie 2 (2019) - Movie Review

After a quite fantastic solo spin-off (and a rather disappointing secondary spin-off), the LEGO movie franchise is back to its main series. Knowing how much fire the first film caught on release, and is still catching on and off five years later, expectations are quite high that this is going to not only match up to what audiences loved about the original, but also a reassurance that the fumble that was Ninjago was just a one-off incident. I once again find myself in a position where I’m not entirely sure what to expect from this film, much like how I went into the first movie. Also once again, having seen the movie, this feels like exactly what this film should be, both on its own and as a continuation to what has become one of the greatest films of the 2010’s.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (2018) - Movie Review

 

This doesn’t look like any other Spider-Man film. Hell, this doesn’t look like any other comic book movie. The reason why, though, is kind of strange: It actually looks like a comic book. Bent around the frame of Sony Animation at its high-energy, thought bubbles, onomatopoeic sound effects, even half-tone dots that show in a lot of older comic strips populate the landscape, giving this a tangible connection to the medium that birthed it.

Wait A Minute!: The LEGO Movie

Time to shake things up a bit around here as I introduce a new segment to the blog: Wait A Minute! So, even though my penchant for listing every film I review may have provided evidence to the contrary, my opinions on films aren’t necessarily set in stone. In fact, the mental background processing that I do for every film I’ve covered here doesn’t stop once I put my thoughts in writing; sometimes, random thoughts concerning some films do crop up from time to time. With this in mind, in the cases of thoughts that are particularly interesting (to me, at least), I figure I’d make it a new feature on here where I re-discuss films I’ve already talked about once before. Only if something particularly noteworthy comes to mind though, so I don’t end up just repeating myself over and over and over again; I do that enough anyway. And so, to kick off this new segment, let’s get into something that I’m sure most of us have heard of before.