Tag: english

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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Dub’s Take: Color of Night (1994)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Have you had a conviction so strong that it was a shock to be disproven?

Case-in-point: “Color of Night” (or CON) was declared as having “The Hottest Movie Sex Scene of All-Time” in 2015 by men’s periodical Maxim. Sorry to break it to you: CON has one (1) sex scene in it – or sex ‘chunk’ – totalling less than five minutes of the well-over two-hour runtime of the Director’s Cut I watched.

By last decade’s standards, what is here for sex is hardly pervasive. Maxim’s writer asked, what man wouldn’t love being cooked a steak by a nude Jane March? True, but that’s “sexy”: not “sex”. And if we take sex out of the critique now completely, it still leaves quite a bit of movie behind to try and stand on its own merit.

CON plays comparably to your studio-made, 90’s-produced erotic thriller, with its own twists that will-or-won’t pay off for obsequious viewers. The script by Billy Ray (who later penned Bruce Willis’ 2002 film “Hart’s War”) is about the masks people wear & the moments we catch ourselves in our truth, and he uses group therapy as a story device to bring our oddball group of suspects together & point the finger.

But Willis’ protagonist also interrogates each group member individually, and these scenes grind like similar sequences from detective video games (think “L.A. Noire”), which is only fun for the people actually participating.

Truly, both of Ray’s scripts have the same problem. While Hart’s War lacked thematic focus – jumping incoherently between genres – CON lacks narrative focus: the group therapy scenes are enough to make me suspect each character without the “keyhole” into everyone’s life; the protagonist’s hook of psychosomatic colourblindness isn’t used assertively enough in the plot; and the ending is nihilistic, and problematic when viewed through a modern lens of gender inclusion.

Putting CON on a pedestal like Maxim did imposes certain audience presuppositions, possibly even that it’s some sort of sleazy, forgotten cult-classic. Certainly the cast is full of eclectic performers doing what they do best, the cinematography – heavy on split diopter shots – is intriguing, and late director Richard Rush’s familiarity with complex stories (like his “The Stunt Man” from 1980) meant that I was never unintentionally confused as a viewer.

But overall, Color of Night is too long and fails to fully capitalize on its best ideas.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Even the Wayback Machine couldn’t fix whatever issue Maxim’s website has with the article, so you’ll just have to trust that I’ve read it before. Leave your nomination for “The Hottest Mainstream Movie Sex Scene of All-Time” in the comment section below!

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too much (cheese song)

A short poem to the tune of
Jax’s “Victoria’s Secret”.

i know the “melty cheese” secret
boy, you wouldn’t believe
it’s just fast-food mumbo-jumbo to sell you
on slices sealed in a factory
by staff that’s quicker to rehire
than to teach how to retire –

i know the “melty cheese” secret:
it’s the same mom grilled for me & you.

//wd 10.17.2024

Photo by Nano Erdozain on Pexels.com

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Dub’s Take: The Crow (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4 out of 5

“The Crow 2024” is metal: something I don’t think anyone expected.

Director Rupert Sanders doesn’t have a prolific filmmaking career, but he did helm 2017’s live-action “Ghost in the Shell”, which wasn’t terrible, and his Crow reboot isn’t terrible either, despite taking two years after shooting to show up in theatres.

Delays like that could mean all sorts of things, usually negative: a lack of faith behind-the-scenes from the people with the money. Howbeit this is odd, since Crow – which started out as a comic series in the late-eighties – has bounced back a few times in media from the tragedy of Brandon Lee’s death while filming the first film adaptation.

How much of the property’s enduring popularity, then, can be attributed to the singular act of Lee’s passing, or the straightforward immediacy of the source material? Rewatching the 1994 film, I was taken aback by how out-of-place its comedic relief resonated – particularly in the pawn shop scene – at the expense of thematic consistency. I’ve never read the comic so correct me if I’m wrong, but those one-liners felt more like additions to coalesce with the Lee family idiom * than to move the plot forward in a congruent way.

In complete contrast, 2024’s Crow doesn’t have any tonal brevity: it’s as emo as the tattoos on Bill Skarsgård’s face, and that could be one piece to its ultimate box-office demise. The film is so committed to its core concept that there’s hardly any fun to be had for passive viewers.

If you can roll with that, Crow is as much solid, stand-alone, yet disposable entertainment as “Madame Web” was back in February: I submitted to Skarsgård’s charisma; the reliable Danny Huston as the antagonist; the script’s spiritual leanings; and the central romance with a convincing FKA twigs. Holding it back from first-class territory were a truncated courting montage – which could have been longer to increase my empathy for the heroes – and some lame CGI in the finale that made me long for the classic squib work of someone like Paul Verhoeven.

In the film, twigs calls Skarsgård “brilliantly broken”, and I believed it. It’s a testament, then, to everyone’s craft that The Crow’s sixth outing to the screen (including the TV series) didn’t end up as another wounded bird.

*see my review of Brandon’s “Rapid Fire” for supplementary impressions.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Did you know that you can click on the posters in my recent reviews to link directly to the film’s IMDB page? Wicked Cool, and saves you from typing! Leave your suggestions for other unavailing accessibility options for the site in the comments below!

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Kubrick & cannabis and sex positions

A poem about compulsions,
with allusions to “2001”.

i haven’t seen any
good porn lately
oh baby, oh baby
who cares


i’m Silver-Surfing around Uranus
leaving my traces,
as we zoom out to the vastness of space –

there’s one old account still active:
a beacon;
a still, moldy vessel for public lice
with all the water-under-the-surface secrets of a
dirty-minded twenty-something’s
compulsionary vice,
frozen in time


and nothing’s going off there, either.

it’s not for lack of invocation:
putting on my web goggles;
tightening my gloves
like i’m the Baron, speed-cracking my knuckles,
despite no chance against Snoopy like
Charlie versus Lucy.
that’s a thousand hours of dedication
i could have poured into anything else.

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