BEFORE: I know, this seems like an odd choice, to go from a gripping drama about a police shooting to an animated comedy about yetis - but there is a common factor, and that's the actor/singer named Common, who carries over from "The Hate U Give". The linking's made for some strange neighboring films this week, and I assure you, there are many more strange connections ahead. I've glimpsed the future of Movie Year 11, and it goes down some pretty weird paths, and uses some fairly odd and obscure people as links.
The reason for including this film (currently airing on HBO) is that I watched "Missing Link" a few weeks ago, before it vanished from theaters, and I talked about the weird rise in Bigfoot/Yeti films in the last year, so I wanted to get this one in here, for comparison purposes. Now, based on the cast list this COULD have fit into the chain in several places, it could have gone between "Logan Lucky" and "Ocean's Eight" (connecting to Channing Tatum and James Corden) BUT that would have broken up the heist theme. It could also have fit in July, right after "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (connecting via Zendaya) BUT I now have other plans for that time, and so those slots are spoken for. So I'm sneaking it in here, and with another Bigfoot film in just 2 days, right here makes the most sense to me.
Before I get to "Smallfoot", here are my viewing stats for May, based on screening method:
9 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): White Boy Rick, Eastern Promises, Captain Fantastic, Lucky You, Hanna, Notes on a Scandal, The Gift, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Girls Trip
6 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): Tag, Tully, Ocean's 8, Crazy Rich Asians, Night School, Smallfoot
7 Watched on Netflix: Sea of Trees, The End of the Tour, Shimmer Lake, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Movie 43, Special Correspondents, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
4 Watched on Academy screeners: Boy Erased, Green Book, The Front Runner, The Hate U Give
3 watched on iTunes: The Paperboy, Drinking Buddies, I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Logan Lucky
1 Watched in Theaters: Missing Link
0 Watched on Commercial DVD:
31 Total in May
I've been monitoring my slow transition to streaming from cable, but this is the first month in 2019 where the number of films I watched via cable (or OnDemand) went UP, to 15 from last month's 11. Maybe cable's making a comeback - or maybe I just happened to schedule more films that I burned to DVD a year or two ago. Maybe it's just random chance, because I did flip around a good-sized section of my chain, and maybe the numbers would have been different if I hadn't done that. Anyway, if cable is still supplying me with half of my material, I'm not about to cut the cord just yet.
THE PLOT: A Yeti is convinced that the elusive creatures known as "humans" really do exist.
AFTER: I shouldn't have worried about genre whiplash, because at this point I can find common ground in just about any set of movies - a loose theme ends up developing most weeks, whether I like it or not. I'm not sure if I'm finding connections that just aren't really there, or most movies have such simple, universal themes that's it's easy to spot them. Or maybe I'm just the only person in the world who would watch "Girls Trip", "The Hate U Give" and "Smallfoot" on consecutive nights.
Obviously there's a connection to "Missing Link" (my May 15 movie) here, both films featured a hidden society of yetis high up on a mountain in the Himalayas - though the two societies depicted were very different, it's still an amazing coincidence (or...is it?) that two animation studios would use this as a story element within a 12-month period, with all the possible story settings to choose from. For that matter, there's a connection to "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle", since both films feature one human living among a society full of beasts, having to learn how to communicate with them and follow their rules, meanwhile the beasts have trouble understanding the weird ways of humans.
Storywise, there's a bit of a connection to "The Hate U Give", also, even though this seems like a bit of a stretch - but in the longview, both films are about the rules of society, how the government says that things have to be a certain way, and order is imposed on the populace, who are expected to not question why things are the way they are, and just quietly go about their day and be part of the machine without subverting authority. And while it might be better for their own protection to remain silent, a small group may still rise up and not be satisfied with the way things are, and only through protest and conflict can they change society. (Yeah, I know, it's a reach...)
Then there's the struggling documentary filmmaker, Percy, who's having trouble making a splash with his social media, and this calls to mind Queen Latifah's gossip-blogger from "Girls Trip" who was struggling with similar problems.
Also, I couldn't help but notice that the opening song, with Migo walking through his village, singing about how everything is "Perfection" had a very similar feel to "Everything is Awesome", the opening song from the first "Lego Movie". But then, this film shares a couple producers with that film, and both come from Warner Bros. Animation, so I suppose that makes some kind of sense.
Obviously there's a spin on the typical "Bigfoot" story you might expect - this film turns it around and has yetis venturing off their mountain and into human territory in order to prove the existence of "Smallfoot", aka humans. Conventional wisdom (from the stonekeeper) says that Smallfoots (Smallfeet?) don't exist, and also the sun only rises every morning because one yeti bangs a gong with his head, and also there's nothing beyond their mountain realm, the mountain just floats on clouds or is supported on the backs of giant yaks, so there's no reason to venture beyond the clouds, and people instead should just stay in the village and do their jobs and if any questions about all this come up, just push them down and not think too much about them.
I saw this as a major slam against organized religion, but if you want to see it as a takedown of government, politics or "fake news" those answers are also possible. For me so many things about religion don't make any sense, from Zombie Jesus to Noah's Ark to the parting of the Red Sea - and any story that can't be supported or explained is probably just that, a story. How do we know God exists? "Because it says so in the Bible." Well, who wrote the Bible? "God did." Umm, OK, no he didn't, and anyway your proof is sort of a circular argument - how am I supposed to know the difference between a book with the word of God and a book written by random men that SAYS it's the word of God? Because those two things would probably look a lot alike. Then there's the theory that God so loved the world that he filled it with all kinds of misery, disease, starvation and natural disasters, plus he's going to throw us into the lake of fire when we die unless we repent and accept him as our savior. God's got a very strange way of showing us that he loves us, it's kind of conditional and I don't appreciate that. But don't ask too many questions about where the universe came from or whether he really created all the animals that want to eat us, because God's representatives on Earth don't like that kind of talk very much.
In the same way that it's easy to understand that there IS something beyond the mountain, the world is really full of Smallfoots who want to hunt down the yetis and (probably) eat their meat and wear their fur, the simpler explanation is that nobody "created" the universe, it just is, and human life on Earth developed due to a very random set of circumstances, ranging from the distance from the sun to the chemical carbon bonds forming in the primordial soup, to the asteroid taking out the dinosaurs and ushering in the age of mammals (eventually). So that's the one thing I love about this movie, it could teach kids to question what they're taught and (maybe) think for themselves about who we are and where we came from. Honestly, if we consider ourselves flukes of the universe, who have no right to be here other than random chance, would that really be such a bad thing? We might even get around to treating our home a little better, if we knew that there's no big master plan for Earth, no meaning to life other than that which we impose on it, so it's up to us. God's not going to fix the planet, is he? And he's also not going to give us another one if we break this one, because he didn't give us the first one, also because he doesn't exist. QED.
I also liked how Migo and Percy couldn't understand each other when they met - naturally, they wouldn't speak the same language. Too many times in movies (not just animated ones) two people from different cultures meet, and for the sake of the viewing audience, they can just somehow sort of understand each other with no effort. Here we get to see that Percy only hears Migo's language as a series of growls, and Migo only hears Percy talking as a series of high-pitched squeaks. It's a spin on the Han Solo/Chewbacca relationship, in which Han and Chewie somehow magically always understood each other, because of some lame plot device. Perhaps in "Solo" they should have used subtitles for a while, but even without the lame explanation (Han had a Wookkie nanny, or some BS) you don't even need them, because you can always figure out what Chewie is saying from the context of Han's dialogue.
But there are many more ways in which this film is completely ridiculous, from the weird-ass character designs (orange and purple yetis? Ugh, how gauche.) to the mostly non-sensical plot to the weird marketing campaigns - let's not forget the unexplainable "Zendaya is Meechee" memes.
Also starring the voices of Channing Tatum (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), James Corden (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Zendaya (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), LeBron James (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Gina Rodriguez (last seen in "Annihilation"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story"), Yara Shahidi (last seen in "Butter"), Ely Henry, Jimmy Tatro (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Patricia Heaton, Justin Roiland, Jack Quaid (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Sarah Baker (last seen in "The Meddler")
RATING: 4 out of 10 screaming goats
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