Tag: depression

Dub’s Take: Better Man (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

2 out of 5

What creative doesn’t love a contract, which includes being a good rep by spending your daylight hours fielding endless interview questions from a bevy of international reporters?

Much like film criticism, there’s a finite number of queries before you end up answering the same ones over-and-over again. But you still have to act like you’re chuffed no one’s asked you that one before, just like singer/songwriter/“Better Man” subject Robbie Williams and director Michael Gracey. Any conversation about Better Man is eventually going to devolve into an opinion on whether the monkey thing actually works or not. And much like questions at a press gala, if you have to ask so many of them to get the answer you want, then maybe it wasn’t so interesting to begin with.

Gracey says in the pre-show, “Whatever kind of movie you think (Better Man) is going to be, it’s not that movie.” But it is, following the same Sisyphean tropes that other biopics of its vein already have. While I can respect Williams’ tenacity of spirit, he hasn’t lived through anything the public hasn’t already seen from the celebrity sphere before. If Williams is this in-your-face in Britain then it’s no wonder his movie is struggling at the box office: the public already knows more than it wants to from the covers of tabloid magazines.

Better Man’s resilience, then, relies on its music & aesthetics which, for the most part, are successful. Despite some lackadaisical CGI (Williams’ avatar isn’t as detailed as those in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), the movie still looks good, including a solid visual metaphor for panic attacks. While I can’t see myself picking up the soundtrack album, the music was pretty good, too. If you go solely off the film’s cuts, you’d think Williams is a balladier like solo George Michael: these needle-drops work for the movie’s somber beats, but I longed for more up-tempo numbers like in the show-stopping Take That & Knebworth sequences.

At the film’s midway point, Robbie goes through a frosted-tip phase, but instead of solely colouring the monkey’s head hair blond, the filmmakers dye his face & neck hair, too. Does that mean his chest hair is blond as well? Where’s the walking on all-fours & clattering? Better Man gets points for trying something different, even if it’s a shallow template for another, more-bonkers film with superior follow-through.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Even if the film didn’t totally work, Williams & Gracey concocted some wild, “Across the Universe”-esque fantasy sequences, such as Williams & Raechelle Banno’s courting montage, when Williams is caught with heroin, or the left-field “Beowulf” climax. Would any of these scenes have played better with a human actor as opposed to a monkey? Should there have been more monkey-isms? Did the movie strike the right balance between monkey & man? Do you even care? Let us know in the comments below!

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the Freshii at the mall closed

or, do we even know what we want

A poem.

they exit the saloon doors
one after another like a
fashion show,
or open functions on an AS400

or ants, out of woodwork
marching vertically along split trenches of bark,
their petite outlines shadowed by the street lights
of the car park.
i don’t know how much time has passed.
i wasn’t keeping track, and
i’m almost hooting ash.


when do i have to go back?
so it looks more like i’m smoking

and less like a jackass?
it’s a great excuse, to be so old-fashioned
you’d rather you lived in an era you were able
than every five minutes having to excuse yourself
from the table.

Continue reading →
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reminiscing about the fence

A poem about the periodicity of
celebrity ogling.

i had a dream about Chappell Roan


full stop.


okay not about her, but one in which
she appeared.

pretty sure it was her.
i feel i should be throwing confetti in the air.
blow a kazoo


and it wasn’t a sex dream,
don’t believe me?

and there wasn’t any reactive,
MS Paint-quality nudity.
calm down –
it was actuated by a photo
i saw of her without
too much makeup on

standing alone in profile on a press go-around
with a wallpaper of watermarks like you’d see
in the background,
no wig, dyed hair luminescent
and wearing what some call a ‘normal’ top
with thong straps,

staring straight ahead like i was the skeez
peering over her property line,
standing at that precipice with my hands on its ledge

when really i’m thousands of miles away
on a screen

*

how, then
to describe my dreams?

in repetitious themes.
always searching for something the most
difficult, illogical way i can

so just like the rest of person
& animal kind.
i had the ‘A’ tattooed on my hand –
the sign for ‘Awake’, to help with lucidity –
but i still close my eyes at the bottom of a hill
looking up –
Kate Bush can run if she wants to, i’m not with her group

or driving through a backwood overhung
so i can get to something parochial and dumb,
like a locker with a combination i can’t remember
at the middle school i went to more than twenty years prior

you following?
because it’s the last day to hand in the essay
worth 80% of my grade?
just like the all-nighters i would pull in university,
and of course there’s no parking
’cause it’s Activity Day
so everyone can see me coming up the roadway
but it isn’t vice-versa with their skinwalker outlays
and the halls are empty;

all these fucking corridors look the same –
Chappell ain’t here, she would’ve just started Primary;
there’s no receptionist, no aids –
a challenging intention
devolves into simple wandering,
and so it goes again and again.

Continue reading →
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Dub’s Take: The Wild Robot (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

“The Wild Robot” was emotionally touching enough to earn my tears: that alone is worth a minimum star rating. But I thought I would be getting a wholesome, feel-good family film for general audiences, without any intercalated adult ‘baggage’ – would you believe producers found a way to sexualize one of the villains here, too? But I don’t have the word count to go over everything.

I cannot stress this enough: Wild Robot contains a vast amount of dialogue about death & dying, played mostly for laughs. Characters commiserate whether or not they’re about to croak on a minute-to-minute basis. A family of possums ask if they’ll be “murdered” before one of them is killed off-screen. For my 36-year-old self, it was extremely noticeable.

Sidebar: back in grade school, I wrote a play for a class Christmas concert. My first draft was rejected because the teacher didn’t like the bad guy telling the good guys he was going to “kill” them. But one of my favourite Xmas movies is “Home Alone”, and they spoke similarly in that movie, didn’t they? Worse, even: Joe Pesci says he’s going to bite Macaulay Culkin’s fingers off, and it was rated PG.

Obviously Home Alone isn’t germane to that teacher’s holiday movie marathon, but the real takeaway was that every parent has a different idea of what’s appropriate for their child and what isn’t – in their experience/opinion. I understand that Wild Robot’s story transpires in the untamed outdoors, and that finding your place in the circle of life – how & while you can – is a theme of the film, but there’s a difference between an effective implication of danger versus the definitiveness of death.

The only reason to keep regurgitating something in scripted lines is to underline to the audience how important it is. Today’s prepubescents can’t be so uneducated that a nice family movie already containing potent scenes of peril should have to push nonexistence to the front of their consciousness, too. Certainly the film’s trailers didn’t foreshadow it.

Wild Robot has one shot where the heroes are looking for survivors of a snowstorm, and silently, it conveys that what they found isn’t good. It’s less than ten whole seconds, but does a better job of communicating grief to an impressionable group, without forcing anything, than the other 90 minutes do. A shame, that.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Imagine this scenario: you have two family movies (not Wild Robot). Both movies have a main character die off-screen, and both will inevitably inspire a difficult conversation between (a) parent(s) & their child(ren). In one movie, the death is constantly referred to non-stop in the dialogue after it happens, reinforcing that this person is no longer around. The other movie implies the other characters’ sorrow & grief through facial expressions & behaviour, though their true, vocalized emotion is ultimately left up to audience interpretation. Which movie would you rather have incited the conversation with your child? Let’s talk in the comments below.

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Dub’s Take: Despicable Me 4 (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

NO STAR RATING

Poppy Prescott gives me impure thoughts.

You’ve heard of Disney animators slipping naughty easter-eggs into their features. These were blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em moments you’d catch on repeat viewings: there was no way anything more than a few milliseconds of indiscretion could make it passed pre-2000 executives; a ratings board; test audiences; and any other stop-gaps preceding a theatrical release.

But Disney doesn’t ride today’s market solo anymore, and – speaking generally – the competition is becoming more shameless for your dollar. This isn’t to say modern family movies are inundated with sex & violence: I’m not that out of touch. But you can crack a specially-worded joke in a diplomatic way and still keep your coveted PG rating.

Case-in-point: “Despicable Me 4″‘s Poppy. As voiced by Joey King (who just headlined Netflix’s “Uglies”), Poppy is a bratty, overprivileged redhead, sporting a skirt; braces; freckles; and a lisp, and who blackmails & uses Gru… for a heist! Poppy’s age isn’t explicitly stated but I trust my ten-second Google search that labelled her 14.

King’s voice work is chipper and snotty: just how it needs to be. But Poppy doesn’t speak until three-scenes-in, after she’s already thrown Gru knowing glances that communicate, as per the plot, that she knows his secret identity. But all I saw in these lingering shots were Alicia Silverstone from “The Crush” or Drew Barrymore from “Poison Ivy”: villains from a special androcentristic subsection of 90’s erotic thrillers that revolved around psychotic, hypersexual adolescent homewreckers.

My post-secondary discipline was live-action film – not animation. The closest my practice ever got was having to re-record dialogue when a covert HVAC system went off in the background of a shot. In that case, the intention of the scene had already been established. We just did the audio again: somewhere quiet, and hopefully to the same level of emotion as the video. What I want to know then is whether DM4’s visual creatives told King about their non-verbal goals for Poppy before she recorded the dialogue, or if King found out what they did at the premiere while everyone around her made the same lewd joke about what they were seeing.

There’s no way an innocent kid in the audience is detecting a sexual undercurrent in their new Minions movie. That’s just for us mature adult credit card holders.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. If you even care at this point, the overall movie was fine: the Minions do their thing; voice-leads Steve Carell & Will Ferrell do their thing; and there’s a madcap energy that keeps the pace moving even when the comedy fell on the ears of the wrong demographic. If I had to give it a proper star rating, I’d throw it a 2 out of 5. Anything to add to the conversation? That’s what the comment box below is for!

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