BEFORE: I determined that the best path to where I want to be at the end of the month goes through a few animated films - they were ALMOST forming a chain together, which can be quite annoying, to see how something could be just a little bit better, only you can't get there. When this happens I usually find that the best solution is to just add a couple more films to the list - so I thought about whether there was an animated feature or two that I knew about that was NOT already on my list, and once I did that, they all formed a chain together, bingo. Once I've done that, how can I not watch them all in a row? This meant discounting a couple films that would have fit between the other films, but I can just remove them, put them on hold for a while, the more important thing is to have a solid chain of like eight films that works together on a format or a theme and feels coherent - animated characters is a fine theme, and it's going to basically clear that category. I kind of feel like if I don't watch this film right here, then I'm just never going to watch it...
Ah, but we've got the 9/11 anniversary coming up tomorrow, I really didn't factor that in - it's important, however my chain is good and it's going to get me to the end of the month in the right number of steps, that's not nothing and I don't want to mess with it. And the closest thing I have to a film about NYC is THIS one, which concerns an animated crocodile character, and that has NOTHING to do with the solemness of the 9/11 anniversary. OK, so maybe I'll double up today and skip tomorrow's date, out of respect. I can't think of any other way out of this situation, as there just aren't a lot of animated kids movies made about terrorist attacks.
Brett Gelman carries over again from "Boy Kills World" and that's three appearances, so he's going to make the year-end countdown, which is coming up sooner than you might think, it's just 73 movies away! So Brett Gelman played a plastic surgeon who was the disgruntled father of a teenager who formed a heavy metal band, then a rich autocrat whose family killed people for sport and TV ratings, and now tonight he's an unhappy downstairs neighbor and cat owner who runs a neighborhood watch group and frequently sues people. The guy has range, that's what I'm saying...
THE PLOT: Film based on a children's book about a crocodile that lives in New York City.
AFTER: I apologize for the thematic whiplash here - one day I'm on dystopian murder porn and the next day, it's a family-friendly singing crocodile. I remember putting this on a DVD with "The Friend", because they're both films about dealing with large animals and they both have Constance Wu in them. That's what my mind does, it looks for connections between films in hopes of making some sense out of everything - but sometimes it's impossible to make any sense out of what I'm given to work with. Look, I could totally tear this film apart (and I probably will) for being silly and stupid and not making any sense, but bear in mind that it's made for KIDS, it's based on a children's book and kids aren't that nitpicky when it comes to movies, they just want to watch something that's colorful and fast-moving and maybe has a few funny songs in it. Like my generation had "Mary Poppins" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", and for a few hours maybe I wanted to believe that a car or a nanny could fly, it's a form of escapism that helped me forget how tough it is to live in this world.
So if a movie about a singing crocodile can help kids deal with terrorism, or bullies or life in the big city, I guess it's fine, it doesn't have to make a lot of sense, it can be a bunch of silly nonsense. Still, you just know I have to go there - thanks to the power of animation and visual effects, you too can believe for 105 minutes that maybe a crocodile can sing - except it can't talk. Wait, what? Doesn't singing include talking? How can somebody sing if they can't talk, isn't that like running without being able to walk? They both imply understanding of language, which means having a certain mental capacity that we don't normally associate with crocodiles. (Or alligators, and many people have already pointed out that the animators obviously don't know the difference. More on that in a bit.) Lyle also ends up in something of an advisory role to the Primm family, despite not having any professional training in family therapy, career counseling, cooking or high-school wrestling. He's a magic reptile, apparently, and he knows everything he needs to know to improve the lives of others. Again, fantasy film.
I think he's only a crocodile because that rhymes with "Lyle", that worked in the title of the children's book, and that carried over. But in terms of animation, based on the shape of his snout and how many teeth are showing, Lyle is an alligator. There are also a couple visual jokes with him ducking into the NYC sewer, and the famous urban legend is about ALLIGATORS in the sewers, not crocodiles. Just saying. Another NITPICK POINT: the Central Park Zoo does not have either alligators OR crocodiles in any of their exhibits, it's the BRONX ZOO that has American alligators, Chinese alligators, and Nile, Nile crocodiles. Again, fantasy film, but if you are a zookeeper in NYC maybe it's best if you avoid this film altogether.
Further NITPICK POINTS, and I don't know how much of the famous book's story carries over into the movie, but Josh is depicted as a weird, nerdy kid whose family moves to the city (it's OK, we have nerds in NYC, he just has to find his tribe) but also he's got some kind of food issues, they don't say if it's ARFID or an allergy or something else, but if there are kids out there who can see their problems reflected on the screen, maybe the healing can begin. His stepmom is a cookbook author having a bit of writer's block, so maybe we can infer that her stepson's food issues are throwing her for a loop, she just doesn't know what to feed Josh and that's putting her in crisis. Don't worry, the magic crocodile who lives upstairs has the solution to both problems!
Lyle sneaks out at night and eats out of dumpsters next to restaurants - this explains how he survived for 18 months after Hector left him in the attic of the brownstone. I thought maybe he just eats the stray cats in the neighborhood, which would maybe solve another problem, but no, you can't have a kids' movie with a crocodile eating people's pets. So he eats garbage from the dumpsters, preventing one NITPICK POINT but creating another one. He turns Josh on to the joy of eating leftover food, but somehow I don't think the on-screen solution for a picky eater (or someone with an allergy or a medical condition) should be to eat out of the trash. Hey, if your kid will only eat Bagel Bites, have you considered feeding him random GARBAGE? That's just not going to work. That garbage would have to taste phenomenal to beat a psychological hang-up, but it's much more likely that some of that old Chinese food is spoiled and not even safe to eat.
Lyle is also something of a food expert, somehow, and when he befriends Mrs. Primm, he sings a song about "tearing up the recipe" and cooking from her heart instead, which might be good advice if it didn't come from a crocodile that eats garbage. Again, just saying. How would a crocodile even KNOW a better way to cook food than the professional chef does? He figured this out just from eating a chocolate-covered cherry? This just makes no sense. He doesn't even talk or know what words are, even though he can sing them, so how does he find the words to explain how to make a recipe better? Was this some random song that was on the iPod that Hector left with him, and if so, how did Lyle even know that singing this song for her would be appropriate? At this point we're all so far down the rabbit hole of "What exactly does this crocodile know" that we might as well just throw our hands up in the air and stop expecting anything to be reasonable or make any kind of sense.
It's a one-joke film in the end, the magical crocodile somehow knows how to sing, dance and make everyone's lives better, except that he has stage fright, he can't perform in front of an audience. So essentially, this is a big-screen version of the Warner Bros. animated short "One Froggy Evening", where a man discovers a singing frog who also dances with a cane and a top hat, so the man goes out and rents a big-time Broadway theater, invests all his money in promoting the great singing frog, and then the second that the curtain goes up, the frog doesn't perform, it just sits there and croaks. The man is financially ruined as his frog will only sing when nobody else but him is in the room. Or, different take, the frog never sang at all and the man is insane and imagined that his frog could sing. That seems MUCH more likely now that I'm an adult.
Unfortunately, that explanation can't work here, unless four people are having the exact same hallucination of a singing crocodile. Umm, alligator. Hector's insane, for sure, but not in that way, really he's just got "artist brain". I can't believe that all three members of the Primm family would imagine the same singing crocodile, so for the purposes of the film I have to concede that somehow this family doesn't completely FREAK OUT when they learn that there's a crocodile in the attic of their Manhattan brownstone. Now I wonder if anybody bought their kid a baby crocodile after seeing this film, was there a wave of this after this film was released, like there was in the 1930's? We tend to discount this as urban legend, but the fact is that some tourists from NYC would purchase baby alligators while in Florida or Louisiana and drive back home with them, and Animal Control in Brooklyn has been known to find a four-foot gator or two in Prospect Park. Remember that whatever animal is shown in an animated film - the dogs in "101 Dalmatians" or the bunnies in "Peter Rabbit" - will become the hot new pet that parents will buy for their kids and then abandon when the kids lose interest.
Hey, if that happens, just let the gator into the attic, where it can live peacefully, sneak out at night to eat garbage, and fix whatever's wrong with your family dynamic. Also, give it an MP3 player so it can learn to sing and eventually win an live TV talent competition. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Directed by Josh Gordon & Will Speck (directors of "Office Christmas Party")
Also starring Javier Bardem (last heard in "Spellbound"), Winslow Fegley, Constance Wu (last seen in "The Friend"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Nightbitch"), Ego Nwodim (last seen in "Lorne"), Lyric Hurd, Jason Kravits (last seen in "Worth"), Ben Palacios, Marc Farley (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Sal Viscuso (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming" (1995)), Adam Murray (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Mary Neely, Don DiPetta (last seen in "Green Book"), Lindsey Moser (last seen in "Jerry & Marge Go Large"), Matthew Risch, Clayton English (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Michael Lawson (last seen in "Rampage"), Jef Holbrook (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Matthew Wilkas (last seen in "Bros"), Lauren Boyd, Christine Moon, Matt Rogers (last seen in "Good Fortune"), Eric Rutherford, Eboni Nichols (last seen in "Bedazzled"), Taylor James (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Rick Pearson, Al Thompson (last seen in "A Walk to Remember"), Bob Leszczak, Joe Messina, with a cameo from Craig "Radioman" Castaldo (last seen in "Caught Stealing") and the voice of Shawn Mendes.
RATING: 5 out of 10 concealed pigeons
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