Halloween

40 years ago, John Carpenter and Deborah Hill, for most practical purposes, invented the modern slasher film. Yes, there’d certainly been films about teens being killed by a silent menace with a kitchen knife or other sharp implements before, but “Halloween” made a lot of the clichés of the genre both effective and extremely profitable, leading to an explosion of imitators and sequels that continues up til today. It also had one of the best “final girls” in the business with Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, a relatable, strong, intelligent and capable woman who successfully fought back to survive the slash-a-thon. After seven direct sequels, a remake and a sequel to that remake, this one follows up by … ignoring pretty much everything in the sequels and getting back to basics. After surviving that night, Laurie’s been living in preparation for it to all happen again – a cagey withdrawn figure determined not to be a victim, in ways that have pushed away her daughter and pretty much everyone else around her. But the combination of two crime podcasters who want to interview the still-institutionalised Michael Myers and a transfer to a new prison means Michael is suddenly loose and has access to that white mask and a set of overalls, and he’s coming back to Haddonfield to continue where he left off.

David Gordon Green’s film stripmines the original while adding a modern feel. Michael Myers is a genuinely offputting figure even in repose – practical, lethal and very very dangerous. Curtis matches him in effect – we’re never in any doubt of her determination to protect herself and everyone around her, nor that (despite her age), she’ll do whatever is necessary to get resolution. This is formula done right – running like a freight train where you know the tracks, you know the destination but damned if it isn’t effective at hitting every one of the points along the way

Westwood: Icon, Rebel, Activist

Vivienne Westwood is undoubtedly a major figure in the fashion world, while remaining controversial, contrarian and with a distinctly personal vision. She’s also, in this documentary, not a very co-operative interview, and the film that results tends to lack particular depth or analysis or deeper understanding of the subject. Her activism, when it’s presented, tends to come across more as dilettantism, her rebellion feels minor and inconsequential, and she comes across (inadvertently or not) as someone no longer in control of her own iconography, lost in the middle of the giant corporate machine that trades on her brand name. This was, to put it shortly, not a documentary I warmed to particularly – while it puts its subject at the forefront, her reticence to tell her own story means that by the end of it I didn’t really feel I knew or understood much more about her than I did at the beginning. Which to my mind makes it a bit of a flop.

A Star is Born

It’s a story often told, but rarely as well as this. It’s not a complicated story – man meets woman – he’s successful, she’s not, but as they fall in love she rises in their industry while he falls victim to his own demons, and it ends with his death and her survival. This version strips a lot of the accumulated layers away – it’s highly complicated on him and her and their bond of both music and love –but this only serves to make it all the more powerful. Bradley Cooper as the star-who-falls (and as writer-director) has a great ability to show how besotted he is by Lady Gaga as the star-who-rises – his devoted expression shows his complete admiration for her both as a person and as a talent (it even slightly weakens the film in the second half as his increasingly erratic behaviour technically should manifest as cruelty to her but he’s never quite willing to let the undercurrent of romantic devotion go). This one doesn’t go for the big notes of melodrama – the finest moments are small glances and shared intimacies, whether in a bedroom or in front of a Cochella Crowd. And it’s all the finer for feeling real and heartfelt – it’s weird that a big budget remake of an iconic Hollywood classic should feel so very personal and soulful, but it’s incredibly pleasing that it is. This is a sweet little heartbreaker.

1%

This is a somewhat standard biker flick, concentrating on a Western Australian bikie gang, the Copperheads. Their president, Knuck, is just getting out of prison. His vice president, Paddo, is trying to make a deal with rival gangs to save the life of his damaged drug addicted brother. And behind both their wives and girlfriends are positioning themselves for control. But Knuck’s time in prison has changed him and made him paranoid, and soon the tension between the two men will boil over.

Alas, this suffers from a bit of fatal miscasting, as Ryan Corr, playing Paddo, never really convinces as a hard-core criminal type (even the dialogue eventually agrees, with Knuck calling him “a male model in leathers”). He’s not particularly compelling as a centre for the film – everyone around him seems far more interesting and far better motivated – not just reacting to circumstances but driving them, for good or ill. Matt Nable who wrote the script has given himself the prime role of Knuck and he relishes everything the role offers – a truly toxic figure whose own internally suppressed divisions play out across the whole gang – and the script is aware of the latent homoeroticism of this mostly male environment and uses it to interesting effect. And while the setup is a bit ropey, the payoffs when they come still work pretty strongly (although the final twist seems awfully arbitrary). This isn’t perfect pulp but it has its moments of success.

Venom

Yes, there are probably too many superhero films. There used to be too many westerns, and too many teen apocalypse films, and so on. But this is Hollywood and they follow trends until the trend has been bled dry, and there certainly still seems to be a fair bit of blood in this particular stone. “Venom” combines a lot of fairly generic plot elements (Evil Scientist! Bland-quasi-love-interest! Overuse of CGI in the finale so you can’t tell what’s going on!) with a few bits of oddity in bringing a standalone film for one of Marvel’s more villainous characters, the symbiotic creature with big nasty teeth known as Venom, who in this case is domesticated a bit by having him largely kill bad people and fight against worse versions of his own kind. 

In all honesty, this is a bit of a mess when it’s not mindbogglingly predictable, and the action scenes vary between generic and incoherent, but it’s remarkably good at making Venom the standout character in the entire film, despite being either CGI or voiceover for the entire film. Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, the human host of Venom, is your standard dickhead slob protagonist whose apparent crusading activism never really seems to involve having any other allies around him (does he have too much integrity, or is it more that he’s an inconsiderate dickhead? I know they probably want me to think the first, but it’s more likely to be the second), but his Venom voice has a delightful Cookie Monster quality, pure simple enthusiastic hunger, which feeds a very odd mismatched-couple action movie (one’s a knobhead reporter! One’s an intergalactic scavenger! Together they fight crime). Michelle Williams has almost nothing to do in the most generic of crappy girlfriend roles, although there is about thirty seconds when they suggest ways in which she could have been more interesting. 

I did kinda enjoy this despite the very flawed nature of the whole exercise, and the threat that we may be in line for a sequel that probably won’t use the promising elements of this film nearly as much as it will just be a more stupidly bloated version of the worst elements.

First Man

This is simultaneously the story of the process leading up to the moon landings and a very personal portrait of a man who’s extremely cut off from his own emotions. Neil Armstrong was never the most demonstrative or funloving of astronauts (although, fun fact that is dropped in this movie, he apparently wrote a musical! They don’t let us hear any of the songs, though), and this is reflected in Ryan Gosling’s super-detached, stoic performance - through multiple years and multiple missions filled with setbacks and life-threatening danger. 

While this is a story that has been told a few times, it’s not been told from quite this personal a viewpoint before. This has its pluses and its minuses – this is very much not the “rah rah USA” approach to the space program that we’ve frequently seen before, with the result that it never quite has the same pleasures people come to expect from these kinda movies. There’s a lot of tension every time anybody goes into space in this film – despite us knowing that Neil Armstrong lives through this, the feeling of the peril of spacetravel is palpable. It’s a distinctly non-joyful and non-triumphal film, which is, I suspect, not entirely what people are looking for in a film about the space program – but for all that, it achieves what it sets out to do remarkably well.

Shadow

Zhang Yimou has been having a rough couple of years. Not necessarily financially (he’s still producing big scale Chinese epics with a strong design sense, and he got to do the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics) but certainly script-wise “The Great Wall”, for example, suffered from over-enthusiastic catering to the Western market (no, it wasn’t a “white saviour” narrative, but it was a “white people shoehorned into a central role when they’re essentially irrelevant” movie, or more specifically a “why is this guy the protagonist when this woman is a whole heap more interesting” movie), and he hasn’t really had a breakout hit since “Curse of the Golden Flower” over a decade ago.

Due to the vagaries of distribution, this may not break the pattern (it’s only showing twice a day at Hoyts Belconnen at the moment) but it certainly deserves a bit more attention than it might be getting. The setup is familiar – two rival kings fight over a city, and the injured warlord of the city currently-out-of-power finds an impersonator to cover for him and fight his battle for him. And the setup takes a while – there’s a lot of training and backroom politicking to get through for the first 50 minutes or so, and while Yimou’s design sense still shines (in this case, using settings and costumes largely on a black-white-grey palette), there’s a deliberate pacing that can feel a little sluggish. But it all pays off in a slightly bonkers final third when battle breaks out in a frenzy of extraordinary moments that simply have to be seen to be believed. Recommended for anybody who’s been missing the grand Chinese epic battle film.

Bad Times at the El Royale

This is a gorgeously pulpy story of four strangers all spending the night at the El Royale, a hotel right on the border between California and Nevada, a former getaway for gangsters and celebrities alike that has fallen on poorer times as the 1960s draw to a close. Everybody has their secrets, including the hotel, and over the course of one night all of them will spill out in ways most dangerous and bloody.

There’s a whole lot of entertainment here, with a collection of great performances – Cynthia Errivo as a nightclub singer gets to also deliver a great range of soul classics in a voice that shows why she’s won Tony awards, and Jeff Bridges relishes the opportunities in the best role he’s had in years, but there’s not a weak link anywhere else. The narrative twists and turns as the stakes escalate, and how I wish I could tell you of the highlights, which include something with a bottle and something with a number. Writer-Director Drew Goddard shows a sure hand for mood and style in this thrilling little film that hit my delight buttons repeatedly.

American Animals

This is in some ways a fairly familiar heist story, with a couple of interesting details. First of all, the two lead actors, Barry Keoghan and Evan Peters, are distinctly unusual young actors who pair interestingly - KEoghan's slightly nerdy attitude and Peters' youthful fearlessness play well against each other in the early stages. Also there's a clever framing device as this based-on-a-true-story brings in interviews with the real participants, including ones that indicate that the participants don't always agree on the details (which then gets introduced into the re-enactments, as, for example, a disagreement about the location of a conversation means that the re-enactment swaps location from shot-to-shot). But these embelishments tend to drip away as the film continues (yes, we still get the interviews, but they stop interacting with how the main story goes, and KEoghan in particular tends to get sidelined when the heist actually takes place). And the payoff just isn't quite worth the setup - it's ultimately a very conventional heist in most respects, and while there's notes of concern for the victims, it's not enough to elevate this beyond the middling.

Custody

This french film is a tight look at a divorce, as the unreconciled father and mother share custody arrangements with the son of the marriage (the daughter is already old enough to make her own decisions, and has decided she wants nothing to do with dad). The tension underlying the meetings between father and son builds with the small and bigger lies that generate between them as the boy, too young to really be doing this, tries to keep peace between his parents. And there's an enthralling last 15 minutes as everything boils over in a sequence that had me utterly engrossed. It's done in a way that feels unembelished (no background music beyond where music has a source within the scene, no flashy camera work), and draws us into a story that proves as stark as it is intriguing. Definitely something to catch.

The Seagull

This film version of Chekov's plays is one of those points where this and the other blog cross over a bit. Of the big four Chekov plays, "The Seagull" is probably the one I'm least fond of (the two-years-later jump between act three and four contains a pretty messy exposition dump, the titular Seagull kinda feels like it's bashing you over the head with its obvious symbolism, and it's possibly the most navel-gazing in his canon, given of the main four characters, two are writers - there's no other writers appearing in "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters" or "The Cherry Orchard"), but it still has a lot of stuff that works for me. This version suffers additionally from some clunky translations and some condensing that means Chekov's subtext, where a lot of his strengths lie, ends up not getting room to breathe. You need the sense of a languid summer where people's lives are wasting away, and if you're rushing from plotpoint-to-plotpoint, all that goes way.

Still, there's some strengths in the performancea. Masha's not necessarily the most significant character in the play but Elizabeth Moss nails every moment she has - catching that essential balance between comedy and misery that is so damn Russian. Saroise Ronan, usually so good, is a bit sabotaged by overenthusiatic editing meaning that Nina's less a girl whose uncertainty is going to lead her astray than an over-naive girl who gets more and more bipolar - her final scene, in particular, is a bit of a mess. Annette Bening and Corey Stoll are served better by the edit and hit more of Chekov's essential notes. Billy Howle as the fourth main character, Konstantin, also feels overly simplified by the edit, although Konstantin is a very tough role to get (he's a young writer who's not entirely successful and is the one who has to do a lot of waving that symbolic Seagull around). And the choice to cut the final few lines and just focus on Bening's face means the final story point is a little lost.

I don't know whether Chekov really lives comfortably in film form without major reconception, and I kinda dread this may be used as a simple cliffs-notes to a more complex play, but if this is going to be the only chance we get to see some of these people play these roles.... well, that's not all bad.

Fantastic Fest 2018

Back in Austin Texas for another run at Fantastic Fest, the festival dedicated to horror, action, thrillers, and the just plain weird from throughout the world. With several premieres and with cast, directors, writers and producers in attendance, all in the movie palace that is the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, there's not a place I'd rather be for the 8 days and 37 movies I got through. Some truly exceptional film hit the screen this year, and it was a delight to be in the audience for it.

Short writeups for all 37 films follow. I'll write longer ones if/when these show up in Australian cinemas.

Film 1 - Halloween - 40 years later Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield - Laurie Strode is ready - great horror sequel with lotsa good tension and a great final line. 4 stars

Film 2 - The Unthinkable - family drama gets bigger scale as disasters overtake Sweden. I liked the big story here but the lead character becomes increasingly petty and awful and it made it awkward to watch this film through possibly the least attractive angle. 3

Film 3 - In Fabric - new fill from the maker of Duke of Burgundy and Barbarian Sound Studios. Very 70s style thriller about a dress described as "artery red" and the people effected by it. Erotic, hilarious, tense, strange and bizarre. 4

Film 4 - the wolf house - chilean/German animation about colonisation, individuality and creeping everybody out. Found this a little too "wow that's a lot of homemade art" - it clearly took a lot of effort to physically realise this, but as storytelling this came across that little bit too opaquely to make an impact with me. 2.5

Film 5 - Border - a Swedish customs agent is particularly good at drawing out people with contraband but finds herself drawn to a man who crosses her desk. This is a film with huge surprises and depth and emotion and I can't say anything else except 4.

Film 6 - Apostle - brother goes looking for his sister living on a cultist island in 1905 - feels a little overstuffed but has good action moments although less than directors previous (Raid + raid 2). The plot feels a little muddled and there's not exactly a good control of tone - this can get a bit weird for the sake of it. 3.5

Film 7 - One cut of the dead - Japanese zombie one cut story goes beyond delightful in ways that completely surprise. This is absolutely a stay to the very end movie. And you will think I'm insane rating this as highly as I do in the first 15 minutes. 5.

Film 8 - You might be the killer - guy at summer camp starts seeing victims pile up, calls friend who knows their slasher flicks - two likable leads but this doesn't offer much unfamiliar and it's more lightly amusing than wildly hilarious. 2.5

Film 9 - After the screaming stops - Bros, the boyband reform for an O2 arena gig but sibling rivalry continues to play against them - Music Documentaries often contain a fair bit of Spinal Tap, and this is no exception -but it contains enough spinal tap to be both hilarious and sorta moving. Matt Goes in particular is an inspired idiot. 4

Film 10 - Slut in a good way - Quebecois coming of age as a group of girls deal with the complications of teen sex - funny and with incisive ideas on female sexuality and gorgeously black and white. 3.5

Film 11 - Hold the Dark - wolf expert goes to remote Alaska to find an abducted child but more is going on - bigger scale follow up to Green Room is proof bigger sometimes means bloated. It meanders too much and gets too fond of digressions. There's good sequences (particularly one in the middle of the film) but a messy whole. 2.5

Film 12 - Overlord - a ww2 squad is looking to blow up a transmitter but find strange experiments on site - this is big budget pulp action horror and serves up a decent platoon -on-a-mission plus monsters - but after a great opening on board a plane full of parratroopers in the midst of german gunfire, some of the rest feels a bit more rote and by the numbers. 3

Film 13 - the standoff at sparrow creek - a militia has been accused of firing on a police funeral and they gather to find out who's guilty and who can be framed - reasonable small scale thriller (most of the film takes place in one warehouse) and with a good climax but a bit laboured getting to the climax. 3

Film 14 - Shadow - Zhang Yimou directs a story with a commander and his secret double determined to reclaim a city for their king - peak late Yimou (this is up with things like Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower), and while the opening is a little heavy going with all the chinese politics (though a gorgeous black-and-grey design scheme keeps the attention) the final battle when it comes is strange, beautiful and satisfying. 4

Film 15 - Dogman - dog groomer is dominated by local bully until things go too far - strong and intimate with a great supporting dog cast -4

Film 16 - secret screening - suspiria - ballet school in 77 Germany gets a new pupil and things get weird and nasty - beautiful and brutal and strange - it's political and personal and thoughtful and gut grabbing - strong work 4.

Film 17 - the night comes for us - Indonesian action about a triad guy who tries to quit and the large amount of death that follows. So much violence, just enough plot, and thoroughly fun. It's also a Netflix original so should be visible by everyone and should be watched with a collection of your most violence-happy friends. 4.5

Film 18 - Deadwax -vinyl collectors find a record that is able to kill and must find where it comes from - this was fairly plodding with only a few decent moments - both leads in particular were quite dull 2

Film 19 - school's out - French talented and gifted class get a substitute teacher after their current one commits suicide during class - moody and intense and , I presume, a good demonstration of the psychological effects of spending time with a lot of teenage ennui - solid without tipping over to compelling, though results for teaching professionals may vary. 3

Film 20 - ladyworld - after a disaster 8 young women are stuck underground in a house. As the days pass insanity increases. This feels very student film but has its moments of ott insanity along with a wildly disconcerting sound design that had me look at other members of the audience wondering if there was something physically wrong with them. 2.5

Film 21 - Level 16 - girls are held in an orphanage waiting to be adopted but more is going on - it's very Canadian sci-fi but with some nice moments (in particular when the evil conspiracy turns out to be running less than smoothly) - 3.5

Film 22 - Mid 90s - young kid joins a skate crew and experiences growing up moments - great debut for Jonah Hill as writer director - heartbreaking and funny and full of unwise life choices - 4.5

Film 23 - Climax - Welcome to Gaspar Noe land. It's a dance movie. It's a drug movie. It's a sex and violence movie. It's extraordinarily packed with characters and incidents and it's compelling throughout. 5

Film 24 - Modest Heroes - collection of 3 Studio Ponoc anime shorts - last year's Mary and the witches flower suggested Ponoc was a slightly lesser Ghibli and the first short with two underwater child creatures continued that impression (in particular it had a bunch of crying underwater which seemed weird). But the middle short, Life ain't gonna lose, had a remarkable art style and a sweet story about a kid with an allergy to eggs that got my heart engaged. Story 3, Invisible, about an invisible man finding his place in society, was a bit messy with its metaphor but also pretty tight. 3 for the collection, 4.5 for the middle film

Film 25 - Quit your life - 1971 Korean revenge melodrama about a wrongfully executed man, his friend who tries to persuade the perpetrator to kill himself to save the wrongfully accused man's soul, and the widow who has gone blind with grief. Somewhat cheesy and the melodrama is very hefty to a ridiculous extent but enjoyable in its own nutso way. 3

Film 26 - The Perfection - a cellist returns to her tutor after time away looking after her dying mother - but her relationship with her replacement gets very complicated - twisted and a little bit schlocky but effective as it pulls repeated surprises and just how far this will go. 4

Film 27 - Tenacious D's Apocalypto - this has a lot of dick jokes and bad Schwartzanegger impersonations, all in hand drawn images. It also is goddamned hilarious. 4

Film 28 - Between Worlds - truck driver with a dead wife meets a mother whose daughter is near death, when her daughter recovers she starts behaving like the dead wife - this is Nic Cage exploitation in a bad way - it takes the out there line readings and broad performance but doesn't give proper background support to it so this feels like mid level Zalman King (guy who did 80s crap like Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid and similar films that crashed Mickey Rourke's career. At one point Nic Cage's character reads a poem from a volume entitled"Memories by Nicolas Cage". I almost wanted to stick around for the q and a and say "how dare you" to the writer director but sleep seemed wiser. 1

Film 29 - I used to be normal - a boyband fangirls story - Australian documentary tracking four fans of different eras from The Beatles to One Direction and how their lives have been impacted by fandom in surprising ways. Very sweet natured look at fandom and appreciation over a range of women and years. Funny but not in a "laughing at the silly fans" way. 4

Film 30 - Holiday - a Danish group of friends gather on holiday but for one young woman bad things are on the horizon - this is sorta a film of two halves - the events before the bad thing are a bit vague (character relationships in particular are left unclear) - the bad thing itself has some technical issues where a prosthetic is a bit over obvious but after that the relationships crystallise and this becomes more compelling. 3

Film 31 - Donnybrook - various rednecks head to a big fight and along the way have smaller fights - this just felt grim a lot without anything in particular beyond "gee being poor sucks". Won best of the fest but not my thing. 2

Film 32 - Under the silver lake - a modern LA noir with a mysterious blonde, a missing billionaire, a number of mysterious conspiracies and oddness. Intriguing, a bit self indulgent and ultimately a bit silly but I enjoyed much of it anyway. It's playful rather than navel gazing most of the time which makes the difference. 3.5

Film 33 - Cam - Webcam girl Alice is pursuing greater popularity but extreme aftereffects start to mess with her chosen career - an effective black-mirror-ish thriller that aims to not demonise sex work but still demonises the clients a fair bit. It works OK but has a few plot bumps. 3

Film 34 - Chained for Life - on a film set a relationship develops between an actress and an actor that is affected by his deformity - an exploration of genre films use and misuse of disabled/impaired/unconventional performers - frequently funny and a fair bit meta. 3.5

Film 35 - The man who killed Don Quixote - yes I now admit it's really a movie. It's messy and inconsistent but there is magic in there that really works particularly in the relationship between Driver and Pryce. 3.5

Film 36 - Lords of Chaos - the story of the creation of Norwegian black metal , complete with suicide, church burning and generally foolish young men - interesting but it's weirdly un-Norwegian - the leads are Americans, it's in English and there's not a lot of social context or background to where this comes from. 3

Film 37 - Bad times at the El royale - Four strangers check into a hotel. They all have secrets and over one night they will find out secrets about each other and the hotel. I loved this noir flavoured thriller in a late 60s setting - at the centre it has a great launch performance for Cynthia Errivo, one of the best Jeff Bridges performances of recent times, and not a bum note anywhere. 5

The Predator

It's a weird sci fi franchise that's had three sequels (to date) plus two crossovers, none of which even vaguely come close to touching the iconic power of the first one. But "Predator" definitely is a case where there's the original and then there's everything else struggling to keep up. This one probably plays as close to the pulpy 80's origins as it possibly can (with Shane Black, who was in the original, directing and co-writing with a mix of quips and violence that epitomises that era. This still suffers from a somewhat underwhelming lead actor (Boyd Holbrook) and a slightly overstuffed script, plus a little too much cheese. Still, there's a stronger supporting cast (in particular, the gang of misfit marines who help out in stopping the human-hunting Predators), and a reasonably adventurous plot that combines icky horror and a couple of decent ideas. If it doesn't completely satisfy, it at least provides something like a reasonable night's entertainment.

Three Identical Strangers

This documentary tells the unlikely but true story of triplets separated at birth who were reunited in their late teens via coincidence (for two of them) and media coverage (for the third). There's a whole heap of twists and surprises in here (although the fate of one of the brothers is somewhat hinted at by the fact he doesn't appear in interviews), and it's best going into this knowing not-very-much beyond the setup. It turns into a film that's about much more than one bizarre incident, and leaves open big questions about how personalities are constructed, how we form our beliefs and much more. A startling, incisive, clever documentary that does the hard yards of taking a story and crafts it into a narrative. Compelling viewing.

You were Never Really Here

This is a intriguing if slightly too artsy for its own good kinda thriller about a violent man pursuing violent ends in the name of justice in a heavily-overrun-with-criminals New York. It's a familiar setup that Lynne Ramsay breaks up by including almost subliminal flashbacks to the violent past of Joaquin Phoenix's protagonist, and much of the violence is done in a clear-but-allusive manner that means nothing is gratuitously dwelled on. But at the same time, I tend to think this plays more as familiar material with a mildly fresh lick of paint than anything more substantial - Lynne Ramsay's artful noodling doesn't really ever give us much of more depth or more soul than how we've seen it before, and this tends to remove the visceral pleasure of the familiar beats without really replacing them with anythign overly substantial. I left wishing for something more. 

Teen Titans Go! To the movies

A big-screen adaptation of the popular Cartoon Network series, this spoofs superheroes and superhero movies with wild abandon. Five young wannabe-heroes find everybody has a movie but them, and their attempts to get into the movies forms the slim thread tying together a lot of jokes that will appeal to hard core comic book nerds and five year old boys in roughly equal measure. It’s all utterly ridiculous in a way that had me grinning repeatedly – particular during the “I want it to be Oscar nominated” song, “An Upbeat Inspirational Song about Life”, sung by Michael Bolton in the persona of a large white tiger. This is about as meta a self parody as there’s ever been, and if this misses your wavelength I can imagine this being a pretty tedious 80 minutes or so. But otherwise, this is pure fantastic enjoyment.