CindarellaPop

It's very seldom you see a film go out of its way to make so many of its characters visually unappealing and still have them command themselves with an unmistakable air of charisma. Even though the characters lovingly display each little greasy hair or smear of dirt, there are many of them you could stand to hug- even if you can almost smell the cheese on them.

Our story takes place in a town called Cheeseridge, a little dairy-centric town that's full of delicious puns and scary looking monsters called Boxtrolls. The boxtrolls live in a commune underground and come out at night to scavenge for trash and spare parts, which they use to create beautiful inventions of their own. The town is disgusted by them and fears them, despite their harmless, bug-eating nature.

Our main character is a filthy little orphaned child who is raised by the Boxtrolls, and the story follows his quest to clear their reputation before the town's exterminators polish the last of them off.

It's got more than a few succinct criticisms of how politics in general operate, and also more than a few Monty Python references. Although clearly revelling in its own grotesquery, the movie is never really too graphic or gratuitously gross where it doesn't need to be. It's a sort of sophisticated grossness that goes exactly as far as it needs to go. One notable distinction I can give to the movie: It has a running gag about lactose intolerance that doesn't include a SINGLE fart joke. Granted, the characters in the movie already look like they smell bad enough, but I did leave the theater thinking what a marvel it was that despite having characters that live in a sewer, it didn't ever resort to "toilet humor."

Because even though the story is simple and the dark, macabre appeal is there, it's got a good brain and a good heart. Even visually appealing characters like the female lead have their own dark side, and she gleefully talks about rivers of blood and exploded guts in her cute little pink victorian dress.

I liked the film enough that I'm tempted to go watch it twice. It's very Roald Dahl in tone and very 'Stinky Cheese Man' in aesthetic, and very Monty Python in humor- and very, very fun to watch.

Before I saw the movie I was bombarded by people saying how good it was because of apparent "feminist undertones" and something to do with a 'rape analogy' for a fairy losing her wings. Well as it turns out, all the rape in the world, analogy or otherwise, probably couldn't make this movie any more interesting. There are perhaps one or two truly emotional moments but most of the performances (except for the mentally unwell obsessive old king) fell rather flat.

First, we have Maleficent's kingdom full of painfully saccharine CGI monsters and landscapes that the actors have a hard time realistically reacting to (protip, you can't really replace a glowing dragon with a ball on a stick and have your actors still be easily overwhelmed by it) and the magical land is so painfully sugary you almost can't wait for things to go south, which they soon do, and Maleficent becomes a being full of hatred and decides to curse the daughter of the lying king that wronged her.

The only hole in this story is that after Maleficent curses Aurora to spite the king, she then proceeds to meticulously... stalk Aurora and spy on the baby she just put a curse on. For reasons unknown, instead of using her powers to torment the actual king who brutally betrayed her, she spends sixteen years of her time playing pranks on the inept pixie fairies trying to raise this poor cursed infant on their own. Sixteen years of this shit. Is this supposed to be revenge? Playing pranks on a fucking baby? While the king uses that 16 years to build an actual army and get some of his shit together? Time well spent for our evil overlord, apparently, who has literally nothing else to do.

It's also established in the movie that fairy creatures such as Maleficent are burned by iron. Of course, whenever iron touches her she heals instantly after a brief moment of pain because the decision to give Angelina Jolie even one ugly scar was apparently too painful for the producers. Explains why the green skin got the axe.

And of course things play out fairly expectedly. Aurora and Maleficent are reconciled, the prince is useless, the king dies after being spared by Maleficent and then falling to his death after trying to kill her again after the fact, much like Gaston. Because you know.
No one drops like Gaston. No one flies like Gaston. No one falls off a castle and dies like Gaston. He's incredibly good at defenestrating, what a way to die, like Gaston.
NO ONE
TRIPS LIKE GASTON
NO ONE SPILLS LIKE GASTON
NO ONE'S DEATH SHOWS UP IN OTHER FILMS LIKE GASTON
DISNEY'S REUSING ALL THEIR OLD SOURCE MATERIAL
FLY BABY FLY
LIKE GASTOOOOONNNNNNN

..Uh. Yeah. Not a great movie to spend a ton of cash on in my opinion I give it like a C+.

This was a movie I was genuinely interested in seeing. It was also a movie I had no idea what to expect from. I get the feeling that it wanted to be a very formal and stylized, rather subdued action movie but it also wanted a lot of the fun that came with blockbusters like Pacific Rim or Transformers and it didn't quite get the formula mixed exactly how it should have been to take it from "interesting but mostly just ok" movie into the realm of "good film."

The film begins nicely enough with the only white American family on a Japanese island. Well, actually the film begins with this kickass scene of some scientists uncovering a gigantic fossil monster, but that's not important because the scientists are treated like side characters despite probably being the more interesting people the film could have focused on. Anyways, this little American family is devastated by a mysterious seismic surge that decimates a power plant and causes the entire area to be evacuated and placed under quarantine to avoid radiation spillage.

But the father of this conveniently white American family living in the middle of Japan refuses to let the incident go, as he believes the authorities are hiding something at the power plant, and his son, now a grown up bomb-squad guru working for the army, wants him to let it go, but nonetheless accompanies dear old dad into the middle of nuke central looking for the truth.

Well, finally we get a glimpse of our monsters, who spend very little actual time on screen. I understand the want to build up to the action and the artistic challenge involved with keeping something that big HIDDEN and still keeping scenes stealthy and suspenseful. And to the film's credit, the time the monsters are on screen are the most emotionally engaging and visually interesting parts of the film. There just needed to be more of them.

I also understand the desire to focus on the human characters in the film and flesh them out, but it'd work better if they didn't also suffer from tropes like "soulless movie child that only exists to garner sympathy who we could have easily replaced with a dog for better effect" and "Doing really unsafe and stupid shit for no reason other than the plot calls for it."

The main character puts himself and his wife and children at so much unnecessary risk (at one point telling them to stay put in San Francisco and wait for him instead of fucking evacuating because there's no reason for them to stay in that dangerous hell hole like that just to wait for his dumb ass) and yet we're supposed to empathize with him because he's the hero, despite the fact that the day could have pretty easily been saved without him, considering Godzilla fought off the other giant monsters just fine on his own without human help, and the one thing the main character was good for (diffusing bombs) he couldn't even do in time to stop a nuke from going off only a couple miles from shore.

The real stars of the show were the monsters, and as I said before, the only thing that wasn't great about them was that they were so rare to be seen. I do especially like that when Godzilla himself arrives on the scene, things become very quiet, almost meditative, it's actually quite reverent and very fitting for 'the king of monsters' to take up the screen the way he does. He's got undeniable stage presence. And the monsters he fights actually despite their scant screen time manage to display affection and emotion and it's actually kind of sad to see them get their comeuppance. Especially considering that they're way more interesting than the human family that you know is going to unfortunately survive the film,even if they probably would all die of radiation poisoning afterwards. Even so, the main leads deliver mostly solid performances and their main beef is that they're not as interesting as the monsters, though that can't really be helped.

Overall I'd say it's a passable movie. It leaves me in the same kind of weird in between that I felt after watching Prometheus. I feel like I'd like it more if I saw it again but I also have no real desire to watch it again. Mayhaps Godzilla will return to the big screen for a sequel (heavily implied) and we can get more of the monster battles we've hoped and dreamed of with less of the pointless jingoism.

Despite the eloquence of the titular character, the overall message to be taken away from this film remains unclear. Is it a film about a father learning to let go and let his son hack it in the big world? Is it about a young boy who comes to terms with his bizarre adoptive parent? Is it about how familial love trumps time and space and all manner of trials and tribulations? All of the above?

Who knows. After turning its female lead into little more than a background piece after she learns to stop being a bully, and giving her zero lines after the fact, the film takes an abrupt turn away from the theme of learning to overcome differences and veers into the realm of "too many conflicts happening at once for any one to be central."

The plot point you'd think would eat up the most time in the film (i.e. Characters from throughout history suddenly appearing in modern day New York) takes up extremely little screen space and is resolved easily in a few minutes after some jokes were thrown in at history's expense.

However, what the movie lacks in general coherency, it makes up for in one thing: PUNS.

If you hate puns you probably cannot watch this movie. There's a pun a minute. And they're pretty decent puns for the most part. It also did a pretty good job of cobbling together a set of coherent characters (even if Mr. Peabody is the ultimate Gary-Stu) from what was really a shoddy, low budget side affair to the Rocky and Bullwinkle show of yesteryear. (Please somebody stop the trend of bringing back shitty cartoons from yesteryear they're dead for a reason please God please)

Over all, despite my beef with how it handled its female lead and how it had too much happening at once, it was a pretty solid film and I did get quite a few laughs out of it. I'm glad to see animated movies don't suck so far this year.

Hey, how fucking old is Sherman even supposed to be, anyway?!