where did she goooo?
…
mah luuuv-ly?
ah wanna nooooo…
wh-r do u whar do u goooo?
“what?”
i’m talkin’ ‘boute that one renter,
you know,
with the smokin’ hot bod
and the mini pincher dog,
who we only ever saw
when they’d test the fire alarm?
the babe, not the dog.
h-h-h-ho-ho-way
h-h-h-ho-ho-way
“who’re you
yammering about now,
hm?
i told you the girl at Jasper’s funeral was
probably twelve.
it’s the GMOs in the food:
that’s why rule of sevens, dude.”
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!
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
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.
theory of a daskeman 