Instead, Watch ‘Masters of the Universe’ (1987)

If you’re hankering to watch a live-action movie based on a Mattel toy franchise, in which the characters make an ill-advised trip to the “real world” that disappoints long-time fans, let me suggest an alternative to the film that opened this weekend. I recommend the 1987 box-office disaster Masters of the Universe, which is based on the hugely popular sword-and-planet toy line of the same name. It stars an oiled-up Dolph Lundgren, fresh off his performance in Rocky IV, as He-Man. The movie was panned by critics and shunned by audiences when it came out, and it is even credited with dethroning the Masters of the Universe line of action figures from its dominance of the toy aisle and helping to shut down its studio, Cannon Films. Nonetheless, I believe it’s past time that this movie gets a re-evaluation. It is undeniably flawed, but it was made with real passion and heart, and it contains some genuinely good performances.

You can stream it for free on Amazon. ( Please ignore it if that link gets crossed out as if it’s dead. WordPress doesn’t like it when I link to streaming services.)

This movie, sad to say, had a minuscule budget and consequently makes some serious mistakes, but let’s face it, it probably really is the best thing to ever come out of the Masters of the Universe franchise, which has never been known for its brilliant writing or high production values. The 1983 cartoon, which is the version of the story that everyone remembers most fondly, is memorable mostly for being surreal, weird, and stiffly animated–and its stiff animation often falls into uncanny-valley territory because much of it is rotoscoped. If you have doubts, I invite you to watch its first broadcast episode, which you can also stream for free, and compare it to the movie linked above. Assuming you can put nostalgia aside and judge both dispassionately, I think you will agree that the film is the superior production.

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Movie Review: ‘Fatman’

Fatman, written and directed by Ian and Eshom Nelms. Mel Gibson, Walton Goggins, and Chance Hurstfield. Saban Films, . 100 minutes. Rated R.

As it develops, every genre slides steadily from idealism to cynicism to nihilism, and the genre of Christmas movies is no exception. Reveling in how mold-breaking it allegedly is, Fatman is, in fact, predictable and formulaic, though that doesn’t prevent some good performances from salvaging what is overall a lackluster film.

Competent but unspectacular direction, silly action sequences, a dull script, and duller set design mortally wound what might have been a quirkily fun movie featuring heartfelt deliveries from Mel Gibson, Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste, and a scenery-chewing Walton Goggins. The movie strains for serious commentary on the implications of Santa Claus’s role as a commercial mascot but fails to make any salient points. I wanted to like this movie because I thought it had a lot of promise, and I laughed several times while watching it, but I still walked away thinking about how much better it might have been.

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Netflix Pisses Off Pretty Much Everybody with ‘Cuties’

As you can see from the meme collage at the head of this post, the streaming service Netflix absolutely loves it some dirty, sexy kids. In the last couple of days, this fact has become apparent not just to the few edgelords talking about it on /pol/, but to everybody, as Netflix has advertised its acquisition of a French movie called Cuties, which made it big at Sundance.

What’s remarkable is that, although Cuties has a handful of defenders, this is one case where almost everyone seems to be pissed off. The left-right divide, over this one film, has evaporated: Everyone is angry. For a brief moment, our fractured nation is united in mutual offendedness and outrage. Maybe now we can begin to heal.

What sparked the controversy is the poster Netflix chose to advertise the film—a poster notably different from the original French version, which Netflix apparently created on the unwise assumption that it would appeal more to American audiences. The poster has so outraged some that I have even seen an individual I admire and respect begging people not to share it, even to criticize. Because I don’t think we can talk about this without depicting, in some fashion, what we are talking about, I’ve decided to share the poster, but only after the break. Consider yourself warned.

This movie, Cuties in English and Mignonnes in French, is about a group of eleven-year-old girls who dance. That brief description sounds inoccuous, even charming, but wait until I tell you that the film achieved an NC-17 rating and will be rated TV-MA when it appears on Netflix next month. As you likely know, NC-17 is the rating that replaced X; this is an X-rated film about eleven-year-olds.

After the break comes the poster, and then I will discuss how Netflix chose to describe the movie, what people are mad about, and so forth.

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Movie Review: ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’

Sonic the Hedgehog, directed by Jeff Fowler. Written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller. Starring Ben Schwartz, James Marsden, and Jim Carrey. Paramount Pictures, 2020. Rated PG.

 Sonic the Hedgehog is probably most memorable not for its content but for its disastrous roll-out, which will be the stuff of movie legend: Early previews delivered a weird design for the famous blue hedgehog, who had creepy, tiny eyes and bizarre proportions. After this received overwhelmingly negative responses from fans, presaging a bomb, the studio hastily redid the character model to bring it in line with Sonic’s appearance in video games and cartoons.

The original, disturbing design for Sonic the Hedgehog.

The end result was the—so far—highest-grossing movie based on a video game. At least part of that box-office success was driven by the goodwill of fans impressed that a studio had listened to their complaints.

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Cherry 2000!

I am, against my better judgment, presently working my way through the anime adaptation of Chobits in order to write my long-promised essay on the same. In the process, however, I have inadvertently discovered that the campfest Cherry 2000, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, is available free and legal on YouTube.

So I’m going to watch that, and I’ll put up a review when I’m finished. This will be relevant to my discussion of Chobits, since Cherry 2000 is about a man who goes looking for a replacement for his robot sex doll and finds a real woman instead—almost the opposite of Chobits’s plot.

I’m kind of excited in a silly sort of way. The last time I saw this movie, I was a little kid and came across it randomly while flipping channels in a motel room. My reaction was along the lines of, “What the hell is this?”

Comic Book/Movie Review: ‘The Crow’

A rare instance in which the film is (arguably) superior to the book.

The Crow by J. O’Barr. Kitchen Sink Press, 1994. $15.95. ISBN 0-87816-221-6.

The Crow, written by David A. Schow. Directed by Alex Proyas. Starring Brandon Lee, Rochelle Davis, and Ernie Hudson. Lionsgate, 1994. 102 minutes. Rated R.

Recently, I serendipitous stumbled upon a copy of the graphic novel collecting the original series of The Crow, and immediately devoured it. I then followed it up with the film adaptation, which I had not previously seen.

The comic, which began as a short tale but turned into a long-running series, reads like a primal scream. Overwrought, pretentious, and sometimes sloppy, it is the brainchild of one James O’Barr, who created it as a means of dealing with a personal tragedy—the exact nature of which I have not learned and assume is none of my business. Although decidedly undisciplined as art of either the visual or storytelling variety, it is emotionally raw, so it is no surprise that it struck a chord with many readers and found a devoted fan following.

The interest in the graphic novel was enough to lead, in 1994, to a film adaptation. The movie takes a lot of liberty with its source material, turning O’Barr’s visceral cry of pain into a structured story with more character development, higher stakes, and a markedly different tone. Although well received by critics (and I can say it holds up over time), it is a cult classic in large part because of its star: Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, took the titular role as the bird-themed goth-punk antihero but—with only eight days left to the production—died during filming from an improperly cleaned gun. His performance, though lacking the gravitas the role requires, has charisma and suggests a talent that might have developed had his life not been cut short.

Given this morbidly poetic on-set tragedy, to criticize the movie harshly almost seems sacrilegious.

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Movie Review: ‘Krampus’

He sees you when you’re sleeping, etc.

Krampus, directed by Michael Dougherty. Written by Tod Casey and Michael Dougherty. Starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, and David Koechner. Universal Pictures, . Rated PG-13.

The folklore character Krampus, who comes to us from Austria and Bavaria, has enjoyed increased international popularity in the last decade, both because of resurgent interest in his land of origin and because any number of artists have found him useful for creating Christmas horror, usually of an ironic variety that thumbs its nose at what has become a materialistic and commercialized holiday divorced from its religious roots.

A knife thrust through a gingerbread man
The Krampus aesthetic.

Several B movies about Krampus exist, most having received largely negative responses from viewers. Two more positively received middling-high budget films about this monster do exist, however. One is the William Shatner vehicle Christmas Horror Story, and the other is the film before us now, a cult classic out of Hollywood.

Krampus is a movie hard to categorize. Some call it horror and some call it comedy. It’s a bit of both, a movie with a fair amount of goofy humor as well as some genuinely scary parts. I would argue that it fills the same genre niche as that great classic, Poltergeist: a family-centered horror film peppered with equal amounts of laughter and fear, in which children are frequently menaced but, ultimately, no one gets hurt.

Shoppers fighting in a store
Close-combat shopping.

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‘Pretty Cure’ Holds a World Record

This is kind of old, but it escaped my notice at the time. Apparently, the film Hug! Pretty Cure, Futari Wa Pretty Cure the Movie, now holds the Guinness World Record for most magical girl warriors in a single film, as reported on the Guinness site.

They accomplished this by stuffing every single Cure into the movie, a total of fifty-five. To acknowledge the record, Guinness arbitrarily required that each girl had to have dialogue and participate in combat.

This is such an oddball record, it’s unlikely that any other movie will beat it—unless it’s another Pretty Cure Film.

Update

In other news, I have decided I am going to make a more ambitious goal for the completion of the revision phase of Rag & Muffin. I believe it is possible to have it done by the end of this weekend.

I just finished revising chapter ten. There are twenty chapters. From here on, the book will need more work, but that’s still only five chapters a day.

Once I finish this, I can send it out the door to my editor and get to work on the research and outlining phase of Son of Hel, which I’m quite looking forward to.

Rag & Muffin
Phase:Revising
Due:5 years ago
54%

Movie Review: ‘Detective Pikachu’

More like ‘Pokémon Go to the Movies,’ amirite? Guys …?

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, directed by Rob Letterman. Written by Dan Hernandez et al. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, and Kathryn Newton. Legendary Entertainment, The Pokemon Company, and Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2019. 1 hour and 44 minutes. Rated PG.

If I may say so, I think I’m in a good position to review this particular movie: I happen to be something of a weeb, but I also happen to be largely unfamiliar with the Pokémon franchise simply because (with notable exceptions) I gravitate away from the the never-ending mega-cash cows in favor of smaller, more self-contained, more indie stuff. I have nothing against Pokémon; I just don’t know it. So today I intend to address the question, “How accessible is Detective Pikachu to the outsider?”

The answer is, surprisingly … pretty darn accessible.

Oh, sure, there are some concepts that could have been better fleshed out. The notion of “Pokémon evolution” is mentioned and even becomes central to the plot without adequate explanation. (Knowing that this is based on a franchise of video games, I could infer that evolving means “leveling up,” but other viewers might be lost.) The film also acts as if I’m supposed to know who the hell Mewtwo is. But aside from that—and these are ultimately minor—I could pretty much understand what was going on.

Detective Pikachu was originally a video game, and it is an unusual, quirky, stand-out title in the Pokémon canon, featuring as it does a mystery-themed story and a Pikachu who can talk. That makes it a decidedly odd choice for the first-ever big-budget Hollywood Pokémon movie. It would make more sense to start this movie franchise by introducing us to Ash, or a character like him—a bright-eyed young boy who wants to capture and train Pocket Monsters, and who does battle with Team Rocket or similar villains. We might expect the first-ever live-action Pokémon film to be a sports story, or maybe a Pokémon version of How to Train Your Dragon. Instead, Detective Pikachu drops us into the middle of the Pokémon universe and introduces us to a protagonist who’s jaded with Pokémon training and an antagonist who questions its very morality. That’s a bold move for a franchise’s first entry into a new medium.

It mostly works—except when it doesn’t. The film opens with one brief scene in which our hero, Tim Goodman (played gamely if unevenly by an anemic-looking Justice Smith), and a childhood friend we never see again make an ill-fated attempt at capturing a Pokémon with a Pokéball. A little later, an infodump delivered as a snippet from a television documentary introduces us to the concept of Pokémon battles—and that’s all we get as far as world-building goes. After that, the movie lets you sink or swim on your own.

If you’re comfortable with genre movies, you’ll probably swim, as many of the blanks are easy to fill in for someone familiar with fantasy or science fiction generally. It’s clear from the film’s mixed reviews, however, that a lot of critics are sinking: The movie has barely managed to eke out a “fresh” rating on the Tomatometer, and when we look over the comments from the negative reviews, we get the impression that the critics who hate it do so simply because they don’t “get” it. The movie has a straightforward story line, but they’re calling it incomprehensible.

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These Live-Action Adaptations Need to Stop

Seriously, it’s gone too far now. First there was live-action Alita, then a live-action Pokémon, then a live-action Sonic the Hedgehog, then a new live-action Masters of the Universe with some femmy pretty boy standing in for He-Man, and now this, this little slap at my industrial complex.

There it is, a live-action Dora the Explorer movie. You thought before that Hollywood was out of ideas? Brother, you don’t even know what out-of-ideas looks like.

Let’s get the inevitable jokes out of the way first: yes, Dora turned out nice and all that. But much more important is that this trailer is almost identical to a parody that College Humor created some years back with Ariel Winter:

The similarities are so striking, it’s as if someone at Nickelodeon watched this parody sketch and said, “Hey, we could actually do this.” Notice Dora’s reunification with Diego: the real movie’s version is just like the parody’s … except not funny.

The concept in both the parody and the real film is that Dora is like a miniature Lara Croft, though I can’t help but think that the parody version, while obviously lower-budget, is both funnier and closer to the spirit of the original cartoon, featuring the talking backpack, fourth-wall breakage, and bilingualism.

This parody enjoyed a popularity of its own, and in fact they went on to create a three-part miniseries. It’s pretty damn funny, probably funnier than the big-budget movie is going to be, considering that, according to the preview, most of the movie’s jokes consist of people hitting their heads on things.

I can’t claim to be terribly familiar with Dora the Explorer. I attempted to watch it once, but gave up: I like to think my endurance for children’s cartoons is pretty high, but that one was was too annoying even for me. Nonetheless … there’s a good chance I’ll watch this movie.