A movie review.
Picture this: it’s Tuesday night. Tuesdays in my neck-of-the-woods means Cheap Movie Day at my local multiplexes (both makes). Not only is it Cheap Movie Day, but – quite clearly in a desperate & disparate state – it’s buy-one-get-one, as both brands mid-pandemic have fought long-and-hard over my email Spam folder to see which one has irritated me enough into going there. Let’s look at our options. On one hand, there’s “Landmark”: reasonably-priced food (except the pizza); electronic recliner seats; and reserved seating, clearly-marked with enough light on the row & seat to find your place. On the other, there’s “Cineplex”: outrageously-priced food (especially in the colossal failure that is their VIP lounge); old-school stadium-style rocker seats spaced close-enough together that anyone can use your shoulders as a footrest; and reserved seating – earmarked by Little Jimmy in Grade 11 and his Michael’s-brand label maker – where you can never see any of the row or seat numbers because the theatre lighting hasn’t been adjusted for the change and the seat stickers don’t stay on well to the plastic chairs and are literally peeling off. It’s a frightening state-of-affairs: not only has my local Cineplex all-but-ignored renovating since its VIP & D-BOX upgrades almost 10-years-ago, but 10% of its square-footage sits unused since the start of the pandemic; and its these malnourished arcade machines that formed the backbone of their new horizontally-converged “Rec Room” line they announced last year, and then subsequently forgot about. How do you keep those things clean? You don’t: half the appeal of going into an arcade now is scrutinizing what it was exactly you just touched.
So now they have these big empty buildings on expensive lots that only legacy artists like Scorsese care about preserving, and I’m sure contractors are chomping-at-the-bit to shove some high-rises in there. Listen, Cineplex, I get it: your overhead is through the roof. You don’t have the money or the manpower to go through a lengthy, costly modernization right now; especially when you’re on the fringes of bankruptcy. But how does that entice me as a member of the public, on a limited budget, while studios are just barely reaching with titles that couldn’t make 20-dollars at the January box office, to make your burger-and-fries combo almost 20-BUCKS? Or a small popcorn and drink for 10? At that rate I’m better-off paying the dollar-fifty extra and getting the large! God damnit, they got my money again! Yes, we were planning on going to Landmark, but one “Quiznos” detour later and suddenly it was easier to go to the theatre down the street from our home. Which happens to be a Sin-eplex. Such is life.
“100% Wolf” is 100% confusing. No, seriously. There’s no wall-of-text, no opening voiceover dictating the lore of its weird, mumbo-jumbo mish-mash of urban-fantasy tropes: it is content with throwing you to the wolves, pun intended. From what I can gather (with help from a most-humble wife), the movie takes place in a human world at the turn-of-the-century (we’ll just say it’s Earth); in one of those small, isolated communities you find nestled in the valleys of crooked highlands. In this place, there is a war going on between humans who can turn into werewolves, and dogs. The werewolves can speak English, but the dogs can only speak dog. The heir to the werewolf throne comes of age to undergo his first transformation, but – instead of becoming a 10-foot-tall mountain of fur and teeth like his brethren – comes out undercooked and looking like a dog. His uncle – who wants the throne for himself, a la “Lion King”‘s Scar – uses the commotion to seize control of the pack, while the true heir gets help from the dogs to avenge his birthright (because he is also able to speak dog). Along the way they uncover a conspiracy by the uncle to commit mass-canine-genocide by hacking them up in an automated machine and turning them into wigs, thereby winning the war for the werewolves. Everything is resolved amicably. Man, that first 30-minutes though, let me tell you, maybe it’s because I was high; maybe I wasn’t paying attention (my wife had to remind me that they did, in fact, have one throwaway line about them being werewolves that she heard and I didn’t, and I literally just thought they were regular wolves, but then why did they have this human child they were carrying around, who could communicate with them?); and maybe – most heinously – the filmmakers forgot to put in some sort of stop-gap for us stupid people. You know, the ones who need their hands held through everything? Movies these days love text. The opening cards listing off all the financers was almost as obnoxious here as it was in “Possessor”, but at least they just pumped them out in rapid succession (which is great for the kids, because kids can’t sit through all that bullshit without getting antsy. Do you really want a low “Metacritic” score because parents complained their kids couldn’t even sit through the first three minutes?). How hard would it have been to just have a quick read that said “in a land where werewolves and dogs have fought for centuries, blah blah blah”? Not hard at all.
Sadly, this oversight speaks to the general quality of the rest of the film, from a purely-aesthetic standpoint. The animation is “YTV”-quality and screams “outsourced”. Sound mixing is non-existent: dialogue and music often overlap without volume adjustment, and some lines are so quiet you would be remiss to think it’s just background filler until you realize the scene is just two people talking and it isn’t a montage. The soundtrack is equally something-else, with indecipherable vocals that make it sound like speaking-in-tongues meets corporate sales. All of these problems can be explained by a lack-of-budget. However, from a story point-of-view, yes, I was engaged the whole time: especially during the film’s darker material, which just came across more-unsettling thanks to the aforementioned mumblecore music (including a funeral and an “Up”-style flashback sequence). Bonus points also go to the voice actors, including Samara Weaving as Batty, the interspecies love-interest/comedy-foil; Jai Courtney, using his real accent for-once; and Magda Szubanski as a “Harley”-riding grandma (I would mention Jane Lynch too, were it not for the fact she’s top-credited for a 10-minute cameo). There wasn’t really anything wrong with the film other than my hopeless confusion at the onset, but I’m sure kids won’t give a shit, I think. I didn’t bring any with me, so I don’t know. How are we going to be able to sufficiently grade these movies 10-years from now? They’ve done the wolf-thing before… hell, I can’t even say they should make an animated film about cockroaches because even that’s been done before, too. And they’ve done the “boy living up to his father’s patrimony” nonsense to-death. Really, there probably isn’t a sufficient-enough reason to keep making these movies other than keeping children quiet and keeping animators employed. The plot may have been more interesting if they had rolled with the boy actually being the product of an affair between his now-deceased werewolf mother and a dog, and at the end you find out that he is in fact a dog and not a miniature-wolf, and that his father knew but kept it from the pack because he wanted the boy to define himself as-opposed to letting others define him? But then, not only do you have to explain to your kids why the wolves go around town saving babies from burning buildings like firefighters, but you also have to explain that bestiality is wrong and that it’s OK for a dog to impregnate a woman so long as she’s at-least 51% beast herself. Not a conversation to be having over a night-light.
//jf 10.24.2020
Poster sourced from tribute.ca.
theory of a daskeman 