Synopsis:  A cute little dog named Max loves and lives for his owner.  He has a network of friends he hangs out with once their owners are gone that includes dogs, cats, birds, and a hamster.  Then – disaster.  She brings home a big dog that takes over his bed and his home.

Max is mad.  He wants to get rid of the dog.  And in the process they both end up lost in New York City and it’s up to their friends to find them and bring them home.

So basically – Toy Story with pets.  Super cute pets.  Max has a female dog in love with him that teams up with a falcon hawk.  Max and ‘dumb oaf’ have adventures, fall into a group of ‘flushed’ and abandoned animals who hate humanity and then run afowl of them, have a nitrate induced trip about singing hot dogs, learn to love each other and make it home in time for dinner.

The Good:  The animation is slick.  It’s made by the company that created the Minions and Despicable Me, so that’s expected.  The voices didn’t distract me with the ‘oh, it’s THAT celebrity’ like some animation does when they go for A-list actors instead of voice artists (even though the film was still mostly populated by actors).  The story was, for the most part, light fluff with a lot of silly laughs.  They also did a good job with characterizing some of the animals, showing a true love for pets.  You could tell who in the theater was a dog or cat owner by when they laughed.

The most laughs were probably garnered by the interactions with Snowball, a homicidal bunny voiced by Kevin Hart.  Snowball leads a group of abandoned pets that includes snakes and alligators and rats on top of cats and dogs and a pig that was used as a tattoo tester/canvas.  All of their actions are wonderfully over the top hilarious and borderline inappropriate to the point that I was chuckling, ‘oh, god,’ quite a bit throughout.

The Bad:  There is one 10-15 minute scene somewhere in the middle that feels tacked on an like the writer was told the film was to short and ‘create backstory for that other dog.’  It’s also a scene of forced pathos.  In it, our hero Max talks to other dog about going back to his home, one he apparently ran away from before getting caught by Animal Control.  We are shown flashbacks of him and his owner, an elderly black man.  The only non-white person I remember in the film.  They go to the house and there is now a cat there who tells our heroes that the old man died and someone else owns the house now.  Other dog gets mad at Max for forcing him to go and runs off, angry, while animal control is called.

It’s bad for a couple reason.  First off, it’s just badly written or placed and feels overly manipulative.  Secondly, this shows the only non-white person in the film AND HE DIES.  Even in a kids animated film the black guy can’t survive.

The Female:  This is about animals, yes.  Neutered animals (it’s mentioned).  Yet there is still the normal gender politics at play.  It would not pass the Bechdel test (two female characters, talking, and about something other than the man).  Here are the female players:

The owner:  She’s a woman who rescues dogs from the pound, or enough to start the story.

Gidget:  She’s a fluffy white powder puff of a pomeranian type dog and is in love with Max.  The joke is that he doesn’t really even notice her and she’s obsessed.  She’s the one who leaves the charge to rescue him.  It isn’t until she Karate chops her way to save them that he sees her as more than the fluffy white thing that always says hello to him.

Chloe: A mackerel/gray tabby cat that’s friends with Max when it suits her, but also knows how to rally the troops to help save him when it’s needed.

Annndddd, that’s it.  IMDB lists one other female named Maria but I don’t remember her.  The female voices get a chance to talk a bit, have their own jokes, but not a life outside of Max.

Overall:  This was fun.  It’s always sad when even in kids films the same racial and gender roles play out, especially one about animals where you have a chance to go elsewhere.  But I still laughed and if you want to not think, it’s not a bad way to go.

Synopsis:  In a fabulist tale of a movie, if you are single you are sent to a hotel by the woods where you have 45 days to meet someone before being turned into an animal of your choosing.  Your days can be extended for each ‘loner’ you bring in – people who live in the woods attempting to escape the choice of relationship or animal.  However, there are rules to being a loner as well – you can’t kiss or sleep with anyone or there are ‘repercussions.’

Rachel Weisz narrates the beginning where we follow David, a recent single man, who goes to the hotel with his dog, Bob, which we learn is his brother who didn’t make it.  When he checks in he is asked his orientation and told he can only choose Hetero or Homosexual, as Bisexual caused too many issues  From there he has one hand chained to his back so he can see how useful two are.  We are taken through the absurd view of being paired – how a lot of it is done on similar ‘defining features’ – such as a man who has a limp (caused when he went to visit his mother, who turned into a wolf after his father ran off, and other wolves at the zoo attacked him) whose wife also had a limp. Her passing is why he is currently there.

Afraid of becoming an animal that others eat, the man with a limp pretends to have a nosebleed to match with a woman who gets nosebleeds.  Meanwhile, David pretends to be a sociopath to match with a female sociopath.  After she does something too horrendous for him to pretend anymore, David runs off into the woods to become a loner and there he meets his ‘match’ – a woman nearsighted like him played by Rachel Weisz.  But it’s not allowed out there and they have to develop their attachment in secret, because there are bad things afoot if they’re found.

The Good:  The absurdist nature of this had the theater chuckling throughout.  For example, there is always an unexpected animal in the background in the scenes in the forest.  In one, we learn a woman is turned into a pony and then later see the pony nosing around the background.  At another there is a flamingo or a camel that walks through the scene.

The parts at the hotel in the beginning, while we are learning the rules of the world are also great.  There are ‘plays’ the single people have to go to where they learn the benefits of being a partner.  In one, a man is eating alone chokes and dies.  Then they show how having a partner would lead to them living as they simulate the Heimlich.    If partners are having problems ‘they are given children, as that seems to help.’

This world building continues in the woods where you learn about ‘red lips’- if you are caught kissing you have a razor drawn across your lips and throughout you see people with bandages over their lips.  The narrator says there is also ‘red genitals’ if you are caught doing something else.  Then we are told that you dance alone, so they only allow you to listen to electronica and there is a scene where people are just dancing to their own music.

The actors take to the roles well.  Part of the allure of the film is the flat affect which everyone has.  While there is the sociopathic woman who has no feeling, few others do either, just not as blatantly and it’s shown in all interactions and the acting.  This is not a world where love goes into matching, you just do it if you have a similar ‘defect’ from others and so you don’t become an animal.  Everything is regimented and dictated.  If you aren’t partnered the law will find you – as is shown in a scene in a mall where if you are alone and don’t have a certificate showing you are coupled you get hauled away.  At times you can almost see the glee with which the actors are playing everything so straight.  And great actors, too.  John C. Reilly and Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell are the most prominent names.  There was also an always heart-wrenching character portrayed by Ashley Jensen – I fell in love with her in Extras and she doesn’t disappoint here.

The Bad:  The tone shift is incredibly prominent and you felt it in the theater.  The hotel part is absurdist fun as we are learning the rules – and then (BEWARE OF THIS!)

Bob the dog is kicked to death AND YOU SEE THE AFTERMATH.  Once we see the bloody dog in the bathroom not moving and the blood on the sink and the woman’s leg, yeah, it’s not fun anymore.  Then suddenly we’re out in the forest and you see more of this darkness overtly, instead of just the hints in the absurd.  There’s the red kiss but also the awful thing the leader of the loners does to Rachel Weisz’s character when she finds out she is planning to run away.  This is probably the biggest flaw, how it changes so drastically and is like two different films tacked together.

Also, it feels less like a film and more like a fabulist story put on the screen.  It’s narrated, it’s purposely flat in terms of action, and fits so nicely into the current literary movement of asian fabulism that Clarkesworld, and other magazines, is promoting.  I would have loved to read this as a story and almost feel like I did more than like it was something I saw in the theater.

In the vein of a literary magical realism story, the ending is a non-ending and there was a collective ‘What?’ when the credits began to roll followed by ‘shit’ by more than one person in the audience.  It’s okay to end films and stories, people.  Give us satisfaction.  Although, at the same time I understand that no one in that world was allowed satisfaction and that was part of the themes.  There was the running joke of women getting guys erect and then leaving them like that, with masturbation outlawed.

The Female:  Here’s where it gets tricky.  While the hotel says both homo and heterosexuality is allowed we only see hetero.  And David is the main character, so it’s most about him.  There are other women, but by nature of the film’s set-up they are there to partner up with a man, except for the female leader of the loners in the woods.  There is one scene where two best friends sort of talk to one another, when one is reading a letter about how much she’ll miss her friend (who is to become a horse, having not met anyone). But I don’t really remember them much talking even in that scene.  The maid and the loner leader talk a bit, and not about men, and there are other conversations.

Now, the Bechdel test says that two women must talk and not about men, even if it’s a sentence.  If we go by that, then it passes.  Some add that the women must also have a name- if we go by that, it fails.  David and his dogbrother Bob have names.  The friends they meet that are male have names (Jon, the man who limps) but no woman is given a name in this film.   Is this because they are only there to partner with the men, who are the focal point, and thus just another thing do be acquired so should have no name?  Could be.  The loner leader definitely has agency in the film, even if she ends up in a grave at the end at the hands of David.  As does the maid, and the female friend who becomes a horse (because she had fabulous hair).

This is ultimately David’s tale in the world he’s stuck in, but there are more female characters than many films nowadays and even if not the focal point, they speak.

Overall – it’s a film that is being discussed for a reason.  There are good things in here and it does read like a story on screen, as in, it feels more ‘writerly’ than cinematic.  Plus, there are some laughs to be had and things to discuss afterward.

Synopsis:  In the future, the world is black and white and shades of gray only.  Things like color and emotion were seen as threatening to order so were eliminated.  The government has sanitized everything and decides what profession people go into after they graduate schooling.  They receive daily ‘immunizations’ which dull their emotions and make them complacent.  They also hold no memories of the time before their genetically engineered existence.

Three friends, Jonas, Fiona, and Asher are worried about what the future holds for them, or at least mildly concerned as “worried” is not in their vocabulary.  Asher is to be a drone pilot; Fiona a nurturer in the infant ward where they weigh children to see if they will survive or need to be ‘released,’ and it turns out Jonas, surprise surprise, is the chosen one.  Because one person receives the memories of all the past.  He goes off to meet Jeff Bridges, ‘The Giver,’ and learn what humanity was really like and decides, despite the horrors of war and hatred, it should be like that again.

The Good: Jeff Bridges!  I mean, come on, he’s gold and that voice is perfect for so many movies.  He’s had me since Last Unicorn.  And Alex Skarsgaard is in this, as is Meryl Streep.  Those are names people, NAMES.  The use of black and white and color is great.  The story itself, while at this point a bit cliched in film now (to release is to kill and that Soylent Green moment, for example) still kept me engaged.  Cameron Monaghan is always wonderfully creepy even when trying not to be.  And, even though I knew this whole thing was engineered to make me cry from the very moment I learned Jonas would be learning emotions, I still cried.

The Bad:  Maybe not necessarily bad, it depends on your point of view, but remember that magical moment in Pleasantville when the mom feels emotion, that tear streaks down her cheek and washes the gray away to show color?  Well take that moment and turn it into an entire hour and a half movie and you have the Giver.  Without emotion there is no color and as you learn emotion the world gets a greater variation of color.  It’s a movie that wants more complexity but it really just felt like they blew up that part of Pleasantville.  And on some level that’s not bad.  On others it made it an incredibly predictable film and didn’t add much to the genre of ‘teen in utopia discovers it’s dystopia’ filmography.

The Female:  Female as possible romantic partner- check.  Female as mother who doesn’t do much – check.  Female as oppressive bitch who wants control- check.  Not much screen time was given to any woman in the film, the most being the romantic partner (Fiona) he wants to ‘save’ by sharing his gift of emotion.  While they try to pretend this isn’t a woman in the fridge ending or motivation for Jonas ‘going beyond the boundary of memory so everyone gets their memory back’ by having him love an infant about to be ‘released,’ – she is still in mortal danger and he ends up saving her in the knick of time so . . nice try movie, but I got your number.  She doesn’t rise above the crying and confusion of a woman loved thoroughly by a man who is the hero.  The mother, played by Katie Holmes, doesn’t do much but follow orders and then there’s Meryl Streep.  She is an ‘elder’ who wants to maintain control of the society so sends troops after Jonas.  The main troop being his best friend ‘Asher’ to test control.  All she is shown as wanting is control no matter what.

This film would definitely not pass the Bechdel test.

We need a test for non-white people as well, although part of that seems to be built in or half-assedly explained in exposition when Jonas sees ‘people of all skin color’ in the memories he receives.  Apparently part of an orderly society is getting rid of everyone who isn’t white and making sure women speak for like, less than 5% of the time.

I am a sucker for fairy tale stuff, as are a lot of people these days, hence the sheer amount of fairy tale re-envisionings.  If it’s not a superhero movie, it’s a fairy tale modernization nowadays.  This is what led me to The Curse of Sleeping Beauty – that, and hearing that it was a trippy retelling of the tale.

Summary:  A guy (I forgot his name already, movie ended 10 minutes ago) is having dreams about a beautiful woman he wants to kiss.  Her headpiece is big and annoying for people with OCD because one side has 4 gems dangling from it, the other 5.  Just as he’s about to kiss her the dream becomes a haunted house nightmare.  His psychologist (the third, we find out, in a year) tells him he needs to have friends.  This is the first, and last time we see her.

Then he inherits THE VERY HOUSE FROM HIS DREAMS.  Oh my god, trippy and unexpected, right?  He goes there and it’s run down and creepy.  There’s a letter from a family member he never met apologizing for leaving him ‘this curse. . .and this blessing’ dun dun DUN.  A woman comes to the house looking for her brother who she believes disappeared there.  Apparently a number of people have disappeared and the town thinks the house is haunted.

There’s something about if the guy leaves the house he gets bad stomach cramps.  Then he and the girl, we’re told, are falling for each other.  He finds a book with a spinning wheel on the cover.  They are attacked by mannequins for some reason and flee to her ex-boyfriend’s house (who she only dated twice, she says) and he agrees to take that ancient spinning wheel book, written in a foreign language, and use his many computers to translate it because he’s asian, and therefore a computer whiz.  Also, therefore, will never get the girl.  Go B-movie Hollywood.  Oh yeah, and suddenly there’s this paranormal investigator guy that talks about Islam and the Quran and stuff, and satan.

Before everything is translated, the guy’s cramps set in.  They decide to go back to the house and have him kiss the beautiful woman who suddenly has found that fifth gem that was missing.  This helps my OCD and fixation on the unevenness, but not the movie.  More mannequins attack, a Djinn is chained to a spinning wheel and the girl distracts it while the boy goes to find Sleeping Beauty in some weird steampunk ventilator thing he magically knows how to operate.  He kisses her, then realizes he needs to kiss her with his blood, she awakens and OMG PLOT TWIST the asian guy translates that the sleeping girl is the real demon but too late, dude.  Bitch is up now and she hasn’t had chocolate in AGES and probably really needs to use the bathroom.  But first – the Apocalypse.

The Good:  Uhm.  Some of the visuals are pretty sweet.  The opening ones especially, with Sleeping Beauty in the desert and then the Jacob’s Ladder flashbackiness to things.  And hey, there’s an Asian guy.  I mean, he’s totally still just the smart guy who can’t get the girl but it’s not often that the token non-white person is anything but black right?  Right?  Am I reaching here?  Probably, yeah.  *sigh*

The Bad:  Read that summary again.  It flips all over the place.  It’s predictable.  It’s like a Syfy movie that wants to be taken seriously.  Sharknado without the sharks and wanting to be real cinema, I guess.  Or Sharknado with the sharks wanting legitimacy.  How odd that my spellcheck does not say I have spelled Sharknado wrong.  I use that word enough in my daily typing that it is in the dictionary now.

The acting is also not great.  I get no connection between any of the characters, whatsoever.  Characters are dropped and added randomly.  Special effects are pretty damn weak, too.  The main demon that is NOT sleeping beauty, the mouth movements aren’t even close to what the words are supposed to be coming out of them.  I don’t GET the mannequins.  There’s a scene with the demon at the spindle surrounded by doll body parts but nothing even trying to explain how one spindles plastic body parts.  You don’t know why they are there or where they are coming from and it all changes.  So much is, sadly, clichéd movie making.

The Female:  The Girl is looking for her brother – her quest is led by a missing man and she talks about her brother or the Guy who she falls for, apparently because they kiss.  There isn’t another living female in this world for her to talk to.  She knows how to use an ax, sort of, and gets choked by various demons.

The Sleeping Beauty is Briar Rose and a demon.  She is damsel in distress until she releases the souls of the damned and brings about the apocalypse.  Of course, when you need a man’s help you’re pretty and well-groomed, but when you are mad at the dude and want to kill the world suddenly your hair is all stringy with white streaks and your clothes get dirty and old, IDK.  Fashion isn’t kind to the women with visions of sovereignty, methinks.

The Psychiatrist is a woman, but she has one line maybe before disappearing.

If you were like me as a kid, then when it came to Goosebumps – you couldn’t read them because your mother was in a rotating number of cults that saw various things as satanic.  Disney, Goosebumps, women.  All evil.

So I would sneak places to read things and go to a friend’s house to watch the good stuff we couldn’t see at home, like Goosebumps- although I was probably more into the Scary Stories to Read in the Dark books.

So of course I wanted to see the Goosebumps movie, stunted childhood and all that.  I was excited to see what was what.

The set-up is simple:  New kid is in like with his female neighbor who is isolated in the house alone with her father, Jack Black.  He thinks she’s in trouble one day, cops don’t beleive him, so goes to rescue her and finds a bookshelf filled with locked original editions of Goosebumps stories.  He busts one open and . . all teen versions of hell break loose.  They then have to put all these creations back in the book.  Oh, and there’s a spring formal type dance going on.  And the cops are imbeciles because. . .of course.  Our hero can’t be a hero if the cops do their jobs.

The Good:  Special effects were fun.  There was some humour throughout, as well.  The action moved, as did the story, so I wasn’t really bored.  It’s a cross between kind of many movies of the type.  Some Jumanji, that one with Brendan Fraser where the books come to life, monster movies.  It also felt like a continuation of Cabin in the Woods- what happens when all the monsters are released, but those from daycare first.  There is a not nice nod to Stephen King, or a couple jokes at his expense.  An extended sequence involving garden gnomes was well done and way creepy, which was nice.  Jack Black voices Slappy, the Ventriloquist dummy  so close to Mark Hamil’s Joker that I had to look up who the voice was.  So that was wonderfully creepy if confusing.

I think the nods were done well and there were probably tons of ‘easter eggs’ for those who read the books or grew up on them.  It might also be  more a case of jokes being the pointing out of nostaligic things rather than real jokes, but I definitely laughed at spots.

The Bad:  Jack Black as RL Stine.  Someone at work was talking about the movie today and asking what his accent was supposed to be besides annoying and I had no idea.  It’s annoying.  He leads with his chest and you just want to smack him throughout.  Some of the throwbacks end up feeling recycled and thus boring.  Obvious product placement, most notably in a scene where, for some reason, they decide to go to a grocery store on the way to the school.   Oh look at that name of a hipster popcorn they fling into!  look how the camera lingers on the packages of food with incredibly clear and well-lit labels!  How wonderful!  Parts of the story too (and this is a story about a story, ultimately) are so incredibly predictable BUT since this is middle-grade literature, I let that part pass.  Kids and adults who just want background stuff will have a fine time with this (and I did have a fine time with this part of it).

The Female:  This is where it gets troublesome.  There are four women in the film:

The mom.  She is played by Amy Ryan, so great in The Office.  And here she is – the mom. She moves her male child to this little town where she has a job and after the death of her husband.  This is her existence.

The Aunt.  Another wasted talent in Jillian Bell.  Love her!  And she is attacked by a demonic poodle.  But she is defined by her desire for a man.  That’s her ‘character trait.’  She talked about wanting a man, then meet’s Jack Black’s RL Stine and number exchange.  Poof.

Hanna AKA The Love Interest.  I liked Hanna at first.  Yes, she was the flirty neighbor with a secret but she was fighting with the boys.  But, in a troublesome move, she is a creation of RL Stine.  Oh no!  So she loses her corporality a couple times in the film, then sacrifices herself to go back in a book when all creatures have to go.  So, we have a toughish female and she was created by the main adult male.  Who then recreates her because teen boy hero misses her.  She kisses him, he wins the prize, a woman written just for him.  Yeah.

The newbie cop.  She’s a newbie cop.  A male cop is treating her like a child.  She gets frozen.

This made the movie more troublesome for me.  I didn’t think about representation or anything like that as a kid and now don’t wonder as much about all these feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy and not mattering.  Sure, psycho mom had a large part in it but not seeing myself, my gender as anything of value on screen hurts.  Here the three women are all defined only in relationship to men.  There is nothing of them in the characters, no personal thing to make them human.  The closest to a fleshed out character is written to be that teen male fantasy, literally.  What does this say to young girls?  How can they view this?  Who is there to step into and role play if you want to identify not as a male.  *sigh*  I am really becoming more aware about portrayals here, and this wasn’t good.

Oh, and apparently in this entire town besides there only being four females, there is no one who isn’t white. So there’s that too. If there was an extra who wasn’t white, I must have blinked.