BEFORE: One week into the Shocktober, horror chain, about three weeks to go because I'm taking time off for NY Comic-Con, so really, I'm looking forward to No-Movie November because I'm going to get something of a break, I can catch up on sleep and maybe think about busting into some TV series, like "Agatha All Along" or the new season of "Only Murders in the Building"', not to mention "Echo" and "Ms. Marvel" and "The Penguin" - all I managed to watch in late August was the final season of "Pennyworth", which I missed when it first aired. So yeah, still have some goals, plus I'm going to have to get into the backyard and cut back all the weeds and ivy that took over this summer, after the rainy season ends and before the cold weather starts, if it comes.
Today I bought Halloween candy, and really, a lot of thought has to go into it now. The last two years I leaned heavily on lollipops, either Tootsie Pops or Dum-Dums, which are very cheap, I can get a bag of 200 for like $10, but last timeI sat on the porch next to a basket of lollies and there just wasn't a big crowd coming around, then I got stuck holding all these stupid lollipops, so I just brought them into work and dumped them in the communal candy jar. This year I'm only buying candy that my wife and I like, so if it's leftover at least we'll enjoy it. So I got a big bag of Kit Kats and fun-sized Hershey's chocolate (for her), two kinds of Reese's peanut butter candy (for me) and Almond Joys (for the trick-or-treaters, if they show up). That seemed like it was mostly for US, not them, so I added a small bag of Butterfingers and another of Nestle Crunch bars, and I'm sure we'll eat those too, if nobody rings the doorbell this year. I probably overpaid but hey, at least I won't have 100 lollipops left over that nobody wants.
Dan Stevens carries over from "The Rental".
THE PLOT: When a young girl stows away on the ship of a legendary sea monster hunter, they launch an epic journey into uncharted waters - and make history to boot.
AFTER: I know, I know, it seems weird that one animated movie about sea monsters ended up in the Halloween chain and one didn't, but that's the way the linking links. "Ruby Gillman" was a little more cartoony anyway, and also was set in a fictional animated high-school setting, so I'm fine with that one ending up in September. And it served a purpose as the lead-in to "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret." so really, all is forgiven. All animated movies will get judged together in their own category at the end of the year, anyway.
Things were different back in my day, I can tell you that for sure. Back then you could tell, especially in animated movies, who the villains were. They looked all ugly like the Wicked Witch of the West, or the evil queen in "Snow White" when she turned into that hag. Or Frankenstein's Monster, or Nosferatu, you just KNEW they were evil because of how they looked. Or maybe they looked good once but got scarred, like the Phantom of the Opera or they just had giant teeth or claws or something. And if they were a giant monster, like a dragon or a giant ape, forget about it, that's clearly the villain of the piece. But something changed with those giant monsters, maybe it was somewhere around the 1977 "King Kong" where people started to see things from the monster's P.O.V., I mean Kong's just a giant ape, it's not his fault that he's enormous and he can't walk down the streets of NYC without crushing a bus or two. It's PEOPLE who were the real villains by taking him off of Skull Island and bringing him to the urban jungle, where he clearly didn't belong and didn't know his way around.
Zombies are brainless, they're destructive, sure, but they're not responsible for their actions because the virus took over. Ghosts, too, they're exempt, but "We Have a Ghost" is kind of what I'm talking about here, the ghost isn't scary at all, though he tried to be - he was just confused, that's all. Ah, but serial killers, there's the real menace, because they could be anybody, anywhere, hiding in plain sight, and once they start killing they'll be compelled to continue.
But with these animated and "New Disney" films, there's been a real attempt to spin these stories the other way, and find reasons why the villain is NOT such a villain. "Maleficent" and "Cruella" are two great examples, I couldn't believe they wanted to justify Cruella's behavior by giving her such a sad back-story and also making another character an even badder bad guy. This was the woman who wanted to make fur coats out of puppies, in case we all forgot. And now the animal rights people have probably affected this film "The Sea Beast", in which the lead character, a trained sea monster hunter, eventually comes to realize that they're just giant animals, they're not evil, they're just trying to defend themselves, put food on their family's underwater tables and in the end, they shouldn't be hunted for their horns or their skeletons or lamp oil or whatever, but we should learn to live in harmony with them, or else leave them alone.
Come on, you just knew it was going to end this way, right? We're a couple generations removed from the hippie-dippy 1960's, but the influence is still there, our parents or grandparents were the ones who tuned in and dropped out and decided that touring with the Grateful Dead wasn't just a fun thing to do, but it could also become an occupation and/or a community. Reduce, reuse, recycle and treat animals like they're living creatures who deserve to grow up free-range and maybe not eaten. I know, I was raised as a meat-eater so I'm probably never going to change, but sure, save the cats and dogs and sea monsters, and I'll get back to you about the chickens and the pigs later, after breakfast maybe.
Can you imagine reading "Moby Dick" and rooting for the whale? Well, yeah, probably, these days kids are forced to read that book and they approach it TOTALLY different than their grandparents did. Time goes by and things change, and the general consensus now is probably that Moby Dick is the hero and Captain Ahab is the villain, also society is to blame for condoning the slaughtering of an entire species for ambergris and lamp oil. OK, but what about "Jaws" (and by extension, "The Meg")? Do we want to root for the SHARK in that movie? Maybe not now, but give it a few generations and who knows, maybe. Maybe WE'RE the bad guys for putting our tastiest people out in the shallow water near the beach where the sharks come by to snack. It sounds ridiculous, but if you believe in God's plan, God created sharks too, and he gave them several rows of teeth for some reason, so why not go for a nice swim, I'm sure God will protect you, but remember, he also works in "mysterious ways".
"The Sea Beast" also goes a little too far, in my opinion, in showing a "more perfect" version of the 1800's, or whenever this is supposed to take place - or is this set in some fantasy land that never existed? Anyway, back in the 1800's society just wasn't this racially integrated, and also women would NOT have been part of a sailing vessel's crew. Sure, we love to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, and sure, it would have been great if there was more equality back then, however, we all know there wasn't, so this is a fantasy film, in more ways than one. And for a young black girl to join the crew of a ship, well right there are three reasons why it just wouldn't have happened. Why pretend otherwise?
The legendary Captain Crow is still searching for the giant Red Bluster that took his left eye many years ago (shades of Ahab's leg and Captain Hook's hand, I suppose) but after getting nearly killed battling a green sea monster, Crow starts talking about retiring and turning the ship over to Jacob, who he considers his adopted son. Just ONE MORE mission, to catch that Red Bluster and prove that the old monster-hunting ways are still a good idea, what could possibly go wrong? The King and Queen, meanwhile, want to replace the aniquated wooden vessels like "The Inevitable" with a new, top-of-the-line modern naval vessel "The Emperor". Right, because techonological progress doesn't happen gradually, it's a very quick jump in this fantasy world from wooden ships to metal ones, let's just skip a few steps in-between, OK?
But Jacob and the young stowaway Maisie get swallowed up by the Red Bluster, who carries them in its mouth back to its island, where Maisie gets a chance to bond with it and remove all the harpoons sticking out of it, once she's convinced Jacob to stop trying to kill it. Really, one man with a spear is going to take down a sea monster 100 times his size? It's just not logical. Eventually they convince the giant beast (now just called "Red") to take them back to civilization, where they make a speech about not killing the beasts any more, and not funding the monarchy's monster-based industrial complex any more. Wow, it's really a "woke" movie about the futility of hunting sea monsters, isn't it? They really went there...
I hear the next "Jurassic Park" movie is going to be all about dinosaur rights, I mean humans cloned them and brought them back, so we should really give up half of our land and resources because those dinos are large and hungry, plus they never asked to be cloned back into existence. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to find out what happened to that frozen ancient mammoth they found a few years ago in the now-thawing ice. I thought they were going to let a few lucky people find out what mammoth meat might taste like, and well, let's just say I'm interested. A new meat that nobody's tasted for a million years? Yeah, sign me up. Sorry.
The original plan was to have this film link to "Ghost Ship", also starring Karl Urban - however, remember I made a mistake when I first set up this chain, and it turned out that "Ghost Ship" was a dead-end, it didn't link up to anything else on my list. So I had to cut that film and switch around the order of the Dan Stevens films so I could create another path, one that would then link up with another of my horror mini-chains, to form the almost month-long horror-baed programming this time around.
Also starring the voices of Karl Urban (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Zaris-Angel Hator (last seen in "Morbius"), Jared Harris (ditto), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Helen Sadler, Xana Tang (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Brian T. Delaney, Ian Mercer (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Shannon Chan-Kent, Jim Carter (last seen in "Wonka"), Doon Mackichan (last seen in "The Borrowers" (1997)), Rajia Baroudi, Kathy Burke (last seen in "Pan"), Paul Chowdhry (last seen in "Cruella"), David S. Lee (last seen in "Geostorm")
RATING: 5 out of 10 kegs of ale (yeah, there's also quite a bit of drinking in this movie for kids...)
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