BEFORE: I don't often mention this, but to help chip away at my Netflix list (still close to 100 titles) whenever I'm there to watch a feature, I also try to knock off one of the many comedy specials on my list. I think I've watched the last two Marc Maron specials twice each, because after watching them, I removed them from my list, then found them again when searching for more things to watch, and re-added them. Hey, Netflix, how about a pop-up alert that tells me when I'm adding something to my list that I've already seen, so I can avoid watching it a second time? While I'm at it, why not add a feature to your software that allows me to opt out of being interrupted during the credits for one movie with a preview of another one? Like, can I finish what I'm doing here, pay my respect to the people who worked so hard making this movie before you shove another one in my face? You can run the promos for your other movies, sure, just give me the option to watch them AFTER the credits are OVER. Really, totally, completely OVER. I promise to watch your promos then, only not really.
If possible, I try to stay on theme so the comedy special (or other short film) connects in some way to the main feature. In my fantasy, I'm a film festival programmer choosing the appropriate short to precede the main attraction. So tonight it's the new Patton Oswalt special, "I Love Everything" - that's bound to be good, his stuff is always good. I may watch it after this animated feature that includes his voice-over work, but I'll mention it before, so it will be like the introduction to the main film.
Tara Strong carries over again from "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay", and I've got that Frank Welker-like dilemma again today, IMDB only lists her as "additional voices", without specifying a character, and by my rules, that's something of a no-no. Because these animation companies use the same people over and over for minor roles, I guess maybe they pay them at a lower rate if no specific character is mentioned in the credits? Hey, save your money where you can, I guess - only if I listed all the voice artists in my blog who are credited with "additional voices", my entry below would be longer than my review. It would be like listing all the actors who are credited as "pedestrian on street" during a big crowd scene in a live-action movie. So to decrease the length of my year-end countdown, I had to make a cut-off somewhere, so I usually discount voice-work if an actor is not credited with a named role in an animated film. However, that would leave me with no connection to yesterday's movie.
But it's Wikipedia to the rescue again, because somebody posted the names of the minor characters performed by some of the voice actors who were uncredited for their work on today's film. So that confirms that Tara Strong performed the voices of two characters, a parakeet named Sweetpea, and an English bulldog puppy named Pickles. Problem solved, link fixed and order is restored. I don't know why IMDB has a bug up their butt when it comes to some credits, but whoever updated the Wiki page is my hero. I'll try to pay it forward with all the archive footage appearances I add to the listings for documentaries on the IMDB.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Secret Life of Pets" (Movie #2,690)
THE PLOT: Continuing the story of Max and his pet friends, following their secret lives after their owners leave them for work or school each day.
AFTER: The first "Secret Life of Pets" film was about a single woman who adopts a new dog, and the dog she already lives with (you apparently can't say "owns" any more when it comes to pets) has trouble accepting the new dog. We've got a similar sort of situation in our house now, only with cats. W brought our new cat, Dax, indoors from our porch in November, and she's been living in the basement ever since, because we didn't think that Heidi, another former stray cat, would be very accepting of her. Cats are very territorial, after all, so we kept them separate while we figured this out. I've integrated cats before, with different levels of success, but since the loss of our older cat, Data, my heart just wasn't really in starting another training program. However, being home during the pandemic gave me plenty of time, so in mid-March I started some kind of process. At first I'd just go down the basement with some treats, and try to get Dax to approach me - I'd bring a book to read or play a game on my phone, because the progress was glacially slow. But eventually she'd approach me - for the treats, at first - but in a couple weeks I was petting her regularly and even rubbing her belly.
A few weeks after that, I stopped bringing her food down to the basement, and placing her bowl instead just outside the basement door, meaning she would have to come upstairs to eat. Then she barely noticed that every day her bowl got a few inches further away from the door, and she'd have to spend more time upstairs in the danger zone to get to the bowl, and eventually, when she learned that nothing on the main floor would harm her, she got more comfortable with traveling a little further to get her lunch and thus spending more time away from her safe space in the basement. This went on for six weeks, and now the two cats eat about two feet away from each other, and then after lunch, Dax gets to spend time with my wife (her favorite person) and now that we're leaving the basement door open for longer and longer periods each day, she can wander up whenever she feels like it, at least whenever we're there to supervise her interactions with the other cat. Heidi's been (mostly) great, so I wonder if she remembers when she was the new cat and had to be introduced to the older cat very gradually. But Dax will still hiss at her if they get too close, though thankfully there hasn't been a big fight between them, since they can just retreat to their safe spaces upstairs or downstairs if they're not in the mood to spend time with each other.
We joke that it's a lot like social distancing rules being slowly relaxed, Dax is perfectly safe if she stays in the basement, but she can't stay down there forever, at some point she's got to come out and interact with others and learn to be sociable, just as at some point I'm going to need to go back to work, though there's still no concrete timetable. We're in like Phase 2 of socializing the cats, and though we're making progress, I can't predict when we'll reach Phase 3, which involves leaving them alone together during a workday or while we're away for the weekend. Well, there are no weekend trips planned right now either, so we may get them interacting before the need arises to get a cat-sitter to feed them while we're away. I don't think we could have made this much progress in 8 weeks without me being mostly housebound, so maybe something small but good comes out of all of this.
But anyway, back to those dogs from the first film. A lot has changed in Max's life since we saw him in two or three years ago (I watched the first film in 2017, not sure when you did...). He's become best friends with the other dog, Duke, plus his person Katie got married to a swell guy, and then had a baby (NITPICK POINT: and they're still in the same not-so-spacious NYC apartment? Not likely...how can there be enough room for three people and two dogs?). But the biggest change of all for Max is that he now sounds like a different famous stand-up comedian, because the last one who provided his voice got caught up in a bit of a scandal, you might have heard about it...
Snowball the rabbit is living in the same building, he's the pet of a young girl who likes to dress him up as a superhero, to the point where he now believes that he IS one, and other pets who need his help are starting to seek out the infamous "Captain Snowball". A dog named Daisy comes to him for help rescuing an abused animal from a circus. Meanwhile, neurotic Max and overly-naive Duke find out they're about to go on vacation with their family to a farm (not one upstate, I hope...) so Max asks another dog, Gidget, to look after his favorite toy, which she promptly loses in an apartment full of cats (oh, great, here come the "crazy old cat lady" stereotypes...). Second NITPICK POINT - if a dog is scratching himself too much, it's unlikely that a vet would put a cone around his neck. That might be appropriate if he were biting himself, but it would do nothing to stop him from scratching himself, unless he was scratching his face, which was not the case. The cone would also be used if a dog had a wound or stitches after surgery, to keep him from biting out the stitches, but for general itching and scratching, it would essentially be useless.
Splitting the narrative (and the cast) into three separate storylines in three different locations seemed like a huge mistake for most of the film, because the best things about the first film were the scenes where all the pets in the same building got together during the workday and had huge blow-out parties. When a film has to toggle between three disparate storylines, there's such a great risk that something will go wrong, it's very easy for the pacing to feel weird, or for an editor to give in to the temptation to switch to another storyline just when something was about to happen in the current one. BUT they juggled all three pretty well here, and after Max and Duke get back from the farm, they somehow managed to bring all three storylines together in a meaningful way. And very correctly for proper story structure, Max was transformed by his experiences on the farm and his newfound hero-like confidence came in handy when he teamed up with Snowball and Gidget to defeat the evil circus tiger trainer.
However, I've got another NITPICK POINT where the circus was concerned, not with the portrayal of the circus trainer as evil, because popular opinion is now on the right side of this issue, and accordingly, trained animal acts are no longer in vogue in the few circuses that are left since Ringling Brothers folded. BUT, there's a big difference between a circus, an amusement park and a county fair. Since this circus had a prominent Ferris wheel in the background, my guess is that the French director and French production company don't understand the distinction. It's not likely that you'll see rides at a circus, that's more of an amusement park thing (if the rides are permanent) or maybe a county fair (if they're temporary) but at a circus? No way, not an American one, anyway. A circus is clowns and wild animal acts and maybe a sideshow, but a county fair is more likely to have pigs and horses, but not tigers and elephants. Are we clear?
Another NITPICK POINT concerns the dishwasher scene - when Max first visits Gidget, she's seen emerging from a kitchen dishwasher, as if she had been using it like a sauna or steam room. While there were scenes animated for this film that showed animals partying among mixers and blenders, which were in the film's preview trailer but were cut because of possible kitchen appliance violence, why did they leave a scene in with a dog in a dishwasher? Isn't there some potential here that a young child would put their dog in their dishwasher at home because of what they saw in the movie? Very irresponsible, and once again, I await the inevitable scandal. Similarly, there's a shot with Max and Duke riding in the car, when their humans lower the windows in the back seat - Max is such a small dog, he could easily jump out of the window when it's lowered down that much. Not very likely perhaps but still potentially very dangerous.
Once again, I'm very confused by the music choices for a film targeted at kids. "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane? That's a song about drugs (OK, Alice in Wonderland, but really, drugs.) so what's it doing in a kids' movie? Oh, right, there's a white rabbit in the film. Well, then, it's a bit too on the nose, isn't it? "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"? Right, because kids today are really into some 1970's post-Garfunkel Paul Simon music. But the worst was "La Grange" by ZZ Top - it's a great song, and it's clearly there for the great guitar riffs in the intro, but didn't the filmmakers know it's a song about a whorehouse? (The same one that the movie "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" is about, BTW.). Good God, just listen to the lyrics, it's got no place here. (I think they trimmed out any references to prostitutes, but still...)
Wow, it's been a big week for big cats, right? I'm kind of sorry that I finished watching "The Tiger King" earlier during lockdown, because this week would have been a hell of a tie-in. There was Rajah the tiger in "Aladdin", Sabor the leopardess in "Tarzan 2", a couple of panthers in "Tarzan & Jane" and then Bronze Tiger in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay". OK, technically Bronze Tiger was a human, but he had a cool superhero name! Today we had Hu the White Tiger, so it's nearly a clean sweep for the week. But final NITPICK POINT, how's it going to work with Hu living in the apartment building going forward, isn't he going to be a grown-up tiger someday, and isn't he going to have a serious appetite? What's he going to do then, eat house cats? It's also another terrible message to send out to the kiddies, hey, there's nothing wrong with having a tiger in a NYC apartment! No, no, that's VERY wrong, and another solution should definitely have been offered up. Sorry, I take my animated movies very seriously, and I wish that these studios had a bit more of an awareness of their legal liability in such matters. A tiger as a pet is no bueno.
That's going to wrap up my week's worth (OK, 8 days) of animated films, because from here I can't connect to any more on my list, or even some of the Disney live-action/CGI remakes like "Dumbo", "Lady and the Tramp" or "The Lion King", which still could have been on topic. I've got only one animated film scheduled now for late June, but I could include more later in the year, like maybe "Klaus" at Christmas or "The Addams Family" in October, we'll have to wait and see how everything plays out.
Also starring the voices of Patton Oswalt (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Kevin Hart (last seen in "The Upside"), Harrison Ford (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Eric Stonestreet (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Jenny Slate (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Tiffany Haddish (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Lake Bell (last seen in "Home Again"), Nick Kroll (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Dana Carvey (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Bobby Moynihan (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature"), Hannibal Buress (last seen in "Baywatch"), Chris Renaud (also last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Ellie Kemper (last seen in "Laggies"), Pete Holmes (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Henry Lynch, Sean Giambrone (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Meredith Salenger (also last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Michael Beattie (last heard in "The Grinch"), Kiely Renaud, Jessica DiCicco, Garth Jennings (last heard in "Sing"). (The IMDB trivia section says Frank Welker did the vocals for the circus monkey, but so far, I'm unable to confirm...another source says it was John Kassir.)
RATING: 5 out of 10 missing socks
No comments:
Post a Comment