Hello! It’s Thursday and it’s time for the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup – running you through the week’s biggest and best new cinema releases. This week we have singing princesses, sailing cats and a scary new(ish) millennium…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Snow White
The original Snow White is one of the all-time great animated classics. The first ever feature-length animated film wasn’t perfect by any means – Snow White herself is a very passive character who just kind of has stuff happen to her (mostly because she’s pretty) until her prince comes to save her. But its songs and imagery have become imprinted on the collective consciousness of pop culture, and it cemented Disney’s status as an animation powerhouse that has continued to this day. So it’s no wonder that it has become the latest entry in the Disney back-catalogue to get a live action remake.
If you somehow don’t know the plot – Snow White is a beautiful princess living in the care of her wicked stepmother the Queen, after her parents died. As she gets older, the Queen, jealous of her beauty, orders a hunter to take her into the forest and murder her, but the hunter decides at the last minute not to go through with it and tells her to run away. Stumbling through the forest, she comes across the home of seven dwarves working as diamond miners, who take her in and look after her. But when the Queen learns Snow White is still alive, she takes matters into her own hands.
Despite most reviewers clambering over each other to come up with the most entertaining ways to slag this adaptation off, there are some positives here. Rachel Zegler is an inspired piece of casting. She’s a great singer, which she showcased as Maria in West Side Story and as the titular songbird in The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. She’s young and peppy enough to convince as the sort of princess who can melt the hearts of hunters and miners as needed, and pretty enough to believably threaten Gal Gadot’s evil Queen. A lot of the reviews concede that she plays her part incredibly well. Her character appears to have also been given a lot more agency than she had in the original, directly standing up to the Queen in the trailer when her cartoon counterpart would have screamed and fainted at the mere thought of talking back. Gal Gadot looks like she’s having lots of fun vamping it up as a pantomime villain motivated entirely by vanity.
The main problem this film has is the same one that will inevitably befall any attempt at a live action Snow White, and that is the dwarves. In animation, they work perfectly well – their appearance is visually distinct from the other characters but it’s easy to imbue each one with his own personality and it doesn’t matter who’s voicing them. In live action they become a lot more complicated. Casting dwarf actors carries the risk of coming across as exploitative (see: The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka). Not casting dwarf actors can attract criticism that dwarf roles are being taken away from them (see: Snow White and the Huntsman). This film has resolved that dilemma by making the dwarves CGI, which is somehow worse. There is a definite uncanny valley feel to them, especially given that, having decided to animate them, Disney seems to have chosen to give them a similarly cartoony appearance to their original animated counterparts. In what is meant to be a live-action world, they stand out like a sore thumb.
If the early reviews are anything to go by then this doesn’t sound like it will do very well, but if you have small children who haven’t seen the original movie, this might be something they’ll enjoy. That said, it’s not the best kids’ film out this week (more on that below), and you’ll probably be better off taking the excuse to rewatch the 1930s classic.
- Snow White on IMDB
- Snow White on Rotten Tomatoes
Flow
From the first feature-length animated film to the latest film to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. Flow follows an adorable cat as it makes its way through a flooded post-apocalyptic landscape where mankind has been wiped out by an unseen event. It finds its way onto a boat along with a dog, a capybara, a lemur and a bird, and together they need to learn to make the best of their differences in order to survive.
One of the things that makes this film stand out from the many animal-focused animations is that there is no attempt to anthropomorphise the characters. None of the animals speak, and they don’t behave as humans would (other than perhaps some basic boat handling). All of the characterisation comes from the way they move and interact. One great example from the trailer is when the dog mimics the cat stretching before giving it a playful look as if seeking approval, and as the cat walks off you can almost see it rolling its eyes. It feels like watching two real animals interact.
The animation looks beautiful – there’s a ton of detail in the way the world has been thought through, telling stories about the human civilisation that was. This was produced by a small animation studio in Latvia, and although you can tell in places that it doesn’t have the budget of a Pixar or Dreamworks movie, it’s still a stunning example of indie filmmaking that will hopefully lead to more original animated films in future.
It’s hard to say much more than that without knowing how the plot pans out, except to say that I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. It came out in America a while ago and I’ve yet to find anyone with a bad word to say about it. It not only won the Oscar for Best Animation, but it was even nominated for International Feature Film. It currently has a 97% critics’ rating and 98% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I cannot stress this enough: see this film on a big screen while you can.
- Flow on IMDB
- Flow on Rotten Tomatoes
The Alto Knights
Directed by Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, Bugsy), The Alto Knights tells the real life story of rival mob bosses Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) and Vito Genevese (also De Niro, for some reason) as they vie for control of the streets of New York.
Robert De Niro is famously one of the best gangster movie actors of all time. If you’re making a film about a mob boss on the verge of retirement, he is exactly the man you want to cast. The logic here seems to be that, if that character needs a sparring partner, you’re not going to get anyone who can go toe-to-toe with De Niro so you might as well hire him again. I’m not sure whether this is lazy or stunt casting, but it feels like an odd choice. It seems to work though – as Genevese, De Niro has enough prosthetics on to make him look visually distinct from his enemy, and apparently the surprisingly few scenes that the two characters share work seamlessly.
I haven’t seen all that much about this. It feels like it’s aiming for a Martin Scorsese vibe, and there are plenty of people both in front of and behind the camera who are capable of achieving that. Writer Nicholas Pileggi also wrote Goodfellas and Casino, and was a producer on The Irishman and American Gangster. Aside from De Niro and De Niro, the cast includes Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun), Kathrine Narducci (Sopranos) and Debra Messing (um… Will and Grace).
The reviews don’t generally seem to be great, but if you like a classic gangster film then you can’t go too wrong with Big Bobby D.
- The Alto Knights on IMDB
- The Alto Knights on Rotten Tomatoes
Y2K
The second Rachel Zegler movie released this week is comedy horror Y2K. There was a lot of panic about the so-called Y2K Bug in 1999, based on the idea that technology would break down when the new millennium made everything with a clock have to change all four digits of the year for the first time. Obviously it turned out to be for nothing, but this film from director Kyle Mooney (the man behind the brilliant Brigsby Bear) reimagines how the world might have fallen apart if it had all been for real.
There is no shortage of horror films about technology turning on its creators. Almost all of those films are (or were, at the time of release) set in a shiny sci-fi future where the offending technology is sleek robots with advanced AI – see Terminator, The Matrix, M3GAN, I Robot, and so on. So there is a lot of nostalgic fun here in seeing a film that goes the other way, taking us back to the ’90s with Game Boys and dial-up modems being the architects of our destruction. I’m not sure who the target audience is supposed to be – the horror tone and young cast (alongside Zegler there’s Julian Dennison (Deadpool 2) and Jaeden Martell (It)) would suggest it’s aiming for teens, but if so I suspect most of them will have no idea what Zegler’s on about when she picks up the phone, hears a clanging tone, and declares that “someone’s on the net”. Whereas the nostalgia element feels more targeted at my generation and slightly older (Fred Durst is also in the cast), who are less likely to head out to a blood-soaked horror comedy.
Again, the reviews aren’t amazing, but this looks like a good bit of silly fun and I have a lot of faith in Kyle Mooney. Plus, it would make for a magnificently jarring Rachel Zegler double-bill, if you were that way inclined.
- Y2K on IMDB
- Y2K on Rotten Tomatoes
Ne Zha 2
I’ve never heard of this before, I don’t remember the first Ne Zha coming out in 2019, and even after watching the trailer and reading the synopsis I have almost no idea what’s going on, but I have to admit this looks kind of awesome. As far as I can tell, the first film (which is based on Chinese folklore) saw the gods create a spirit bead and a demon bead. Nezha was destined to be born as the reincarnation of the spirit bead and help mankind, but the beads were switched and instead he is born as a demon. Shunned by society as a monster, he fights demons and his own fate to prove that he can still be a force for good. The sequel sees him trying to defeat the Dragon Clan, who are out for revenge.
This feels like it captures the colourful martial arts and Chinese spirituality of Kung Fu Panda or Avatar: The Last Airbender and blends it with the rebellious angst of Nimona. Nezha himself is a nicely designed character – his sharp teeth and dark eyes mark him as other without taking too much from the fact that he’s just a kid, with moments of goofiness in among the high stakes destiny stuff. All of the artwork and animation is visually impressive (it’s worth looking up the gorgeous poster art as well), and the fight scenes are suitably epic and well choreographed. The first film has a very commendable 88% critic rating and 98% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the sequel is currently sitting even higher at 93% and 99% respectively, so the series clearly has some big fans. Oh, and it’s done so well in China that it is now the fifth highest grossing movie ever in global box office takings. It’s taken over $2 billion and has overtaken last year’s Inside Out 2 as the highest grossing animated film of all time. Only Titanic, Avengers: Endgame and the two Avatar films have made more money.
If you have kids who enjoy exciting Saturday morning cartoons and don’t mind reading subtitles, this is absolutely the film for them. And if you have kids who aren’t into that, then frankly you need to raise them better…
- Ne Zha 2 on IMDB
- Ne Zha 2 on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
You’ve got to go with the Flow.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- Mickey 17 – All the cast are clearly having a great time in this sci-fi romp with heart, but Robert Pattinson in particular manages to make multiple Mickeys feel distinct, sympathetic and relatable. Mark Ruffalo’s character is definitely legally distinct from Donald Trump and makes for a great baddie, while the maggot-like aliens dubbed Creepers are weirdly adorable. Very light and silly for a film about death.
- Black Bag – Michael Fassbender’s odds for being the next Bond should have had a big shot in the arm with this hugely enjoyable film, where his smartly-dressed spy tries to find a mole in the agency. It plays out more like an Agatha Christie story than a spy drama, but it’s no less satisfying for it.
- One of Them Days
Trailer of the Week
It’s rare that a trailer does this well at telling you what to expect from a film without telling you anything about the plot. The Trailer of the Week this week is Together, which stars husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie as husband and wife Tim and Millie. According to the official synopsis, their relationship is fracturing so they decide to abandon their old lives for a fresh start in the country. But they encounter something evil, and it all goes downhill from there. This looks incredibly creepy.
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