Tag: parenting

Dub’s Take: Wolf Man (2025)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

You can blame Film School for my objectively watching movies wondering what I’d do different: “Well, if they had moved the opening flashback to the midpoint, flash-forward to the middle for a bit, then go back, cut the next twenty minutes…” and etcetera.

However, I’m sure the only way to fix “Wolf Man” would be to start over with new hires. To quote “Family Guy,” it “insists upon itself”: it’s innately serious with its body-horror aspirations à la Cronenberg’s “The Fly”, but lacks Jeff Goldblum’s humanizing arc or, plainly, anything else of interest.

What happened? I mentioned TV’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in my negative review for Blake Lively’s “It Ends With Us”, but actress Elisabeth Moss’ time there – particularly the long close-ups of her character’s mental atrophy – made her the perfect actress to quietly communicate the fear of an abusive partner in director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of “The Invisible Man”. A palatable discomfort made that project borderline-unwatchable, but its potency made me excited for what Whannell did next.

Well, next is here, and Wolf Man’s casting sucks: indie-darling Christopher Abbott and “Ozark’s” Julia Garner, as a bickering couple, have zero chemistry. Despite his character’s learned sheepishness, Abbott lacks primality as a father trying to break a cycle of toxic parenting. Garner equally trifles as the shocked city-mom out of her element, emptily channelling Moss’ internal acting successes. Putting Abbott & Garner together at their most unpleasant is like banging two coconut halves together and calling it a horse.

Bad acting can be charming if the story is still engaging, but Wolf Man’s specialty is its disengagement. Abbott’s character history isn’t fleshed out, leaving his father’s notes on hunting the lycan for no one to find and a neighbourly relationship undeveloped & whitewashed, a mother MIA, and a second-act twist without emotional resonance. We spend an inordinate amount of the first act with Abbott & Garner’s marital issues, and the transformation itself doesn’t start until the halfway point, prorating the rest with Abbott barricading only one of the two entrances into the farmhouse where the family is hiding, not including the windows.

Like a puzzle, Wolf Man’s pieces are all there, but there’s no ends tying the loose, disparate bits together, and what’s left doesn’t match the picture on the box: it’s poorly acted, poorly plotted, and goes nowhere fast. Next time, just remake “Van Helsing” instead.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Assuming there are always bits on the cutting room floor, should the filmmakers have swapped out scene-after-scene of Garner & her movie daughter running back & forth between the farmhouse and the barn with some actual backstory about Abbott’s father’s hunt for the lycan? Is it worth hypothesizing about movie scenes not included in the final cut, even if they didn’t exist to begin with? Do you re-edit movies while you’re watching them, too? Leave a comment for us down below!

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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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smells like a dirty sanchez

A poem.

you find yourself, reader,
in wicked spirit
being led by my dangled carrot into a modern family home
that to the modern teen, may as well be a modern garrote –
her room, her bed, her throne –
Mom thinks there must be something going on
cause the smell from the dining room downstairs
reeks like a bong:
“but how do you know that, Miss Antoinette? are you sure?

“it’s because of the parties to which i’ve been lured.
i haven’t actually smoked any. don’t be so perturbed –

“well how would you know it was weed
unless you were standing so close to them you could see?
then wouldn’t it be in the air that you breathe?
hmmm?
do you need me to get you a cup
into which you can pee?

“i didn’t have any, OK? JEEZ.

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susanna

A short story for mature readers.

“Despite nature working against him, a stepfather learns to take responsibility for his new daughter.”

the stepfather didnt assume anything the day his girlfriend told him that she had a two year old daughter. that was fifteen years ago. things were different. he wasnt bombarded by calls to shelter youth the way he is now, by the government and other parents. people are scared. and in many ways the stepfather agrees with them. modern life is a breeding ground for deviants. he wonders if he would have the same opinion if he had walked away, during the date at the restaurant where she told him. he liked lucille. the night of the fifth date they finally had sex after fooling around as far as a young couple could without performing the act itself. he couldnt wait to see her the next night, but sitting down at the table with her already waiting for him felt eagerly pessimistic. she told him about her daughter. who was the father? she told him that too. he could tell she was nervous, the way she held him tight with one hand and collected herself with the napkin she held in the other. when the dinner was over they hugged it out and went to a movie. it was too early to go home. what if he said no? then he would still be in his forties now, still trying to reconcile the missing pieces of his own adolescence. but he would be single. and he wouldnt have susanna. by all accounts he is her stepfather. and try as he may to do the best that he can, she is seventeen now and it is almost too late. evenings spent just the two of them kindling their bond were only embers. he is okay with that. she isnt his kid, as much as he feels like she is. there is still a beacon that goes off inside him any time he wants to question that blossoming independence. maybe he should have been harder on her? more of a disciplinarian? lucy couldnt handle that. no, he decided to leave most of the parenting to her. he just had to. lucy had problems of her own. has. she has to be his primary responsibility, and susanna hers.

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