BEFORE: Both Ryan Reynolds AND Catherine Keener carry over from "The Adam Project", that's always nice, and as you can probably tell, this is how I'm going to start the Nicolas Cage chain. This one's been on my list for a while, thank God it's still available on Hulu, and really, using it as a vital link like this sort of validates keeping it on my list for so long. Why hide it between two films with, say, Peter Dinklage in it when it can serve a much nobler purpose? Sure, I COULD have watched it last year in that fashion, but something made me hold back, and I guess this was it, it needed to be my connection to the Nic Cage chain, even if I didn't know it until almost now.
I'm still up in Massachusetts, I successfully turned in my parents' cable box, no problems, and that should save me some money in the long run. I'm still paying for internet service to their house, and I got a free device from the cable company that will allow their Smart TV to connect to more streaming services than just Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. So if and when I visit, I can also watch movies from Peacock, Pluto TV, HBO Max and Disney Plus - theoretically, of course. This weekend I only need to access Hulu to keep my chain alive, but who knows what the future holds?
Now here's TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, Saturday, March 26, featuring films that won for "Best Director", then Oscar winners from the 1980's:
5:30 am "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936)
7:45 am "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)
11:00 am "Casablanca" (1942)
1:00 pm "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962)
5:00 pm "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957)
8:00 pm "A Passage to India" (1984)
11:00 pm "The Last Emperor" (1987)
2:00 am "Dangerous Liaisons" (1988)
4:15 am "The Times of Harvey Milk" (1984)
Whoa, just 9 films tomorrow, because there are some really long ones on the docket. But hurray, for me, because I've seen eight of these, I think - all except the last one. I'm a little unsure about "Dangerous Liaisons", but I'm thinking I MUST have seen that at some point before starting this project, that's the only reason it's unrated by me on IMDB. So another 8 out of 9 brings me to 125 seen out of 285, which is a whopping 43.8% seen, with just 5 days to go.
.png)
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Croods" (Movie #2,444)
THE
PLOT: The prehistoric family the Croods are challenged by a rival
family, the Bettermans, who claim to be better and more evolved.
AFTER: My God, it's been a long time since the first "Croods" film - I barely remember watching it, back in 2016, that was like a hundred years ago, right? So I certainly don't remember any of the plot points, but still, no need to review, I think I can just jump in here tonight and pick up wherever the last movie left off, because the sequel's just going to start from some arbitrary point in the life of this modern stone-age family, and it will have to give me all the exposition I'll need, just in case someone DID NOT see the first film, which I totally did, so I'll probably be O.K.
Guy is the non-Crood pseudo-family member, who's in love (if that word existed back then) with Eep, the daughter in the Crood family. (By the way, this is the second film in a week where Ryan Reynolds plays a guy who's also NAMED Guy.) First we learn a little bit more about Guy's back-story, he left the place where he lived in search of a better tomorrow, because he believed in a mythical place NAMED Tomorrow, or perhaps it was more of a concept, I don't know. He just set out on the road because he thought things would be better someplace else. Here in the second film, he's not only still seeking Tomorrow, he's got the whole Crood family along for the ride, looking for a better place, but still sticking to their primitive methods of sleeping in piles and forming defensive kill-circles and testing out new sources of food, basically by trial and error.
But eventually the family hits a wall in their search - no, literally, they HIT a real WALL, and when they break through it, they find all kinds of new, exotic and wonderful food, which for some reason has grown in perfect rows, all spaced apart, and, oh, God, this is somebody's garden, isn't it? Must belong to whoever built that wall to keep primitive people out. Before long we find out this walled-off garden belongs to the Bettermans, their name is an obvious indication of their place on the evolutionary chart, and hint hint, it's further to the right than the Croods (sounds like "crudes", get it?). But it turns out that the Bettermans (Bettermen?) know Guy from way back, they were friends with his parents, who died tragically, which apparently set Guy off on his crusade for Tomorrow.
The Croods are welcome to stay with the Bettermans, in their forward-thinking enclave where food is abundant, the wall keeps out the predators, everyone has their own room and some privacy, and people don't sleep in piles. They also take showers, something that the Croods don't seem to know much about - and Phil Betterman has invented the world's first man-cave, which is, of course, an actual cave. Much of the humor here comes from the primitives inventing early versions of things we the audience are very familiar with, or somehow they know about very primitive versions of things we know, much like "The Flintstones" did way back when. Fred Flintstone had a television, a car, a bowling ball you know, stuff like that, only they were all made out of rock.
The Croods soon wear out their welcome, though, because they're so, well, primitive - but the Bettermans want them to leave and Guy to stay behind, because he's a perfect match for their daughter, Dawn. Because the Bettermans are not only more evolved, they're also smarter, they manage to trick Grug Crood into thinking he thought of this plan himself. There's a larger truth here within the joke, like we all believe that Homo Sapiens survived and the Neanderthal humans did not, simply because the Homo Sapiens were smarter, but honestly, do we really know that it went down that way? No, we don't. Why one tribe of proto-humans survived and the other didn't is really anybody's guess, but sure, why not mine that for comedy?
There's also a jab at over-protective parents, the Bettermans have never let their daughter go beyond their walls. OK, they've kept her safe, great, but now she has no experience with the outside world, and she's somewhat ignorant and rebellious as a result. Eep, on the other hand, is technically "dumber", as in less-evolved, but she's more street-smart, can handle herself in a fight and she has the scars to prove it. Which is better in the long run, to be safe and socially backward or to be outgoing, successful but also endangered? The movie doesn't seem to have a clear answer, because when she does leave the family compound with Eep, she gets stung by a large prehistoric bee and has a bad reaction to the venom. This is a bit like kids with peanut allergies, I guess, because if their parents keep them safe and away from peanuts, then they'll never build up a tolerance and keep having bad reactions. Or any disease like measles, mumps, or even COVID, if you keep your kid TOO safe, then they can't ever build up any immunities to these diseases, and that could be worse for them in the long run.
After the two families have a falling-out, Grug Crood finally decides to eat a banana, the one thing that Phil Betterman had forbid him to do while a guest on his property. Eating the bananas has an unforeseen consequence that puts the men of both families at risk, forcing the women of the two families (plus Thunk) to revive a sisterhood of warrior "wimmens", aka The Thunder Sisters, to rescue the men. Sure, I'm all for feminism saving the day here, that's a nice twist in the world of typically patriarchal cavemen.
Not all of the jokes land, but so what? I champion the attempts to find humor in the primitive times - we here in the modern times need all the humor we can find these days.
Also
starring the voices of Nicolas Cage (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "You Again"), Clark
Duke (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Leslie Mann (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Peter Dinklage (last seen in "Rememory"), Kelly Marie Tran (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Kailey Crawford,
Chris Sanders (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), James Ryan, Gabriel Jack, Melissa Disney, Joel Crawford,
Januel Mercado, Ryan Naylor.
RATING: 6 out of 10 sharpened sticks
No comments:
Post a Comment