Solo Deviling

Navigating the vast sea of content is an adventure that I sometimes like to call Streaming in Rebootland and it makes it easy to miss things.  And with the fractured marketing avenues now—I mean, how many people are watching live TV and sitting through commercials or going to the movies and watching trailers?—it’s gotten harder and harder to even know what’s out there.  So while there’s so much content available, we end up streaming Brooklyn Nine Nine or Parks and Recreation again and wondering why there’s nothing to watch.  So I’m here to tell you about a show that I missed when it came around and just concluded its fourth and final season, Evil.

Evil follows a team of assessors, who are basically investigators who analyze unexplained events for the Catholic Church.  But it’s not what you think—the head of the team is David Acosta, played by Mike Colter (Luke Cage, Plane), an aspiring priest with a past, but his team is rounded out by tech expert and skeptic former Muslim Ben Shakir, played by Aasif Mandvhi (The Daily Show) and their tether to the real world of psychology, atheist/lapsed Catholic Dr. Kristen Bouchard, played by Katja Herbers (Westworld, Manhattan), who often acts as a psychological expert witness for the New York DA.  Not only is she the linchpin of the team, she’s arguably the star of the show.  She and her four daughters, anyway.  Now, a lot of these unexplained events take the shape of some sort of demonic possession they need to come in, figure out, and then resolve.  It has that monster-of-the-week structure with an overarching story that strings them all together, where they deal with a new problem just about each episode, but there are connections being made all the time.  Working the other side of the aisle is Leland Townsend, played by Michael Emerson (Lost, Person of Interest), who works against Kristen both in the courtroom and out of it.  Aptly described as a psychopath, Townsend is, at least for the first season, which is what I’ve seen thus far, the primary antagonist of the show.

I admit to having a hard time with shows like this and that comes down to my own biases.  Media is so entrenched in Christian iconography that it feels inescapable.  Take vampires, for example.  Why do they respond to some religious symbols and not to others?  The mythology there is inherently implying that one religion is right.  The Bible shows up in Jeopardy! categories all the time and unlike my resistance to learning where rivers are (come on, they all end up in oceans anyway, what’s the point of learning the rivers?), I grew up with a big handicap on learning Bible stuff.  It can be othering.  I resisted watching Father Brown for the longest time for the same reason, but I’m glad I caved because that is a wonderfully uplifting cozy mystery show that has no interest in proselytizing.  And so far, neither does Evil.  By composing the team the way they have, the show focuses heavily on real world explanations for claims of demonic possession and hauntings and the like and continues to keep not just the characters, but the audience, guessing as to what is happening and what isn’t.  Through the first season, it’s kept ambiguous—after all, a lot what might have once been called demonic possession has been explained by advances in science and mental health, and the show is quick to point that out.  So you’re often kept from knowing exactly what is going on—is a killer’s case one of a desperate legal play at insanity or lesser sentencing, is it is a case of psychosis manifesting as demonic possession due to the pervasiveness of religious iconography or their upbringing, or is it real demons puppeteering the actions of ordinary people in the real world who otherwise wouldn’t have done anything as sinful as shoplifting a pack of gum?  Perhaps the answer to that will come, but so far, I’ve been enjoying not knowing the show’s stances.

What follows is a show that feels much more like the spiritual successor, excuse the pun, to The X-Files, more so than the mystery box in a mystery box (in another mystery box made out of mystery boxes) that was Fringe and even more so than the actual X-Files reboot attempt.  Except, instead of unwavering belief in the extraterrestrial and paranormal, it’s a belief in the religious supernatural that frames the conflicts.  And the skeptics are put at the forefront of the storytelling.  Kristen’s job is to find the scientific explanation for what’s going on.  Ben’s job is to analyze any sort of evidence that may be obscuring the truth.  There are times that Ben feels like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, where he is able to just take care of the things or fills in knowledge of things that don’t fall anywhere on the Kristen/David Venn diagram.  So not only can he analyze digital footage for evidence of tampering, he can also trace hacks and test kitchen and bathroom fixtures for contaminants that may be causing heavy metal poisoning, and he knows his way around pharmaceuticals and is very observant.  Someone has to do it, but he’s more than a perfunctory character.  He often seems to get the short straw of the work here and his character has thus far been less of a focus than Kristen or David, but he still has an important role to play and Mandvi does a good job with it, playing against type.  While he may provide the majority of the comic relief here, his role is a serious one and he’s not just playing a jokester—in fact, some of the claimed demons offer more laughs, especially with their mundane names like George and Roy (I mean, would you be worried about taking on George in Diablo IV the same way you’re worried about fighting characters named Mephisto and The Wandering Death?).  He’s self assured and competent in a way you don’t usually see comedians play and to see representation of a Muslim-born atheist who is just a normal guy goes a long way to making someone like me feel seen in a television landscape where that doesn’t usually exist.  I hope to see his character deepen in later seasons, because I think there’s a lot there that we just haven’t seen yet.  Emerson, on the other hand, after his socially awkward hero turn in Person of Interest, returns to playing type as the creepy and, well, evil guy who aims to sow chaos and despair at every chance he gets.  His venom drips from the screen when he wants it to and turns it off when the situation calls for it.

If we continue with the X-Files analogy, David is the Mulder of the team.  The true believer. Though he’s had his troubles in the past, he found his path through the world in the form of training to be a priest and somehow fell into this line of work where he’s putting himself in the line of fire constantly and more than occasionally getting himself into exorcisms, which seem much more intense than the ones Bob Larson teaches people to do.  But despite his faith, it’s not blind—he’s a nuanced character with doubts and feelings just like any other person would have.  Even though he truly believes in the power of his religion and his god, he doesn’t let it blind him to secular causes for unexplained happenings.  I was very impressed with the way Mike Colter plays David, not just with his Luke Cage intensity, but also with humility and devotion to the truth, not just to his religion.  But the real star of the show here is the Scully, newcomer to the team Kristen.  A self-professed atheist and lapsed Catholic, she joins Ben in his skepticism and comes at it from a psychological perspective.  It’s not like I’ve calculated screen time, but we spend a lot of time with Kristen and her four daughters, whom she raises with the help of her mother while her husband is away climbing mountains in Nepal.  Her kids are endearingly cacophonous in a way that’s properly kid-like.  They talk a lot and talk over each other—I mean constantly, they all talk at the same time almost all the time—but Kristen’s parent ear is far more trained than mine and she’s able to tell what they’re saying even if I get lost in the chatter.  Played the wrong way, they could have been annoying, but more than anything, you just see some adorable kids who are, unfortunately, being put in danger and you just want to see them protected.  Annoying kids can ruin a show, but these little buggers enhance it and really make you care about their wellbeing.  Kristen, much like David, is a complicated and fully realized character; she used to be a mountain climber herself, but now focuses on her work and raising her kids while her husband does the climbing (whether it’s a second source of income or he’s just an absentee father isn’t really clear to me, but either way, he’s not around).  Her scientific beliefs are often at odds with her religious upbringing and she’s clearly conflicted by what she’s doing, but deems it both important and practical.  After all, with four children and a husband off re-enacting that scene from Mission: Impossible 2, a steady income is pretty important, especially when she’s still paying off student loans.

And one of the more surprising things about this show—even though it’s this thing about devils and demons—is that there are real world, practical concerns that are in touch with our reality as well.  It’s not hard to imagine the state of the world in the grips of some sort of evil—whether it be supernatural, too common run-of-the-mill depravity, or something else entirely, we are surrounded by evil acts everyday.  The reason behind them may be debated and has been for centuries, so I’m hardly going to solve it in the span of one blog post, but when you see the world of Evil, it’s very easy to see ours in it.  And the show is keen to remind us that it’s meant to exist in our world, bringing up big topics like generational trauma, the echoes of slavery, and more.  But perhaps the most surprising thing about Evil is how much it doesn’t feel like an exclusionary show.  I’m sure there is quite a bit of religious symbolism I’m missing, but there’s some I’ve caught and the series has a definite color theory and so much of the way the show is presented feels very considered and intentional.  While there’s a lot of Catholicism here, it’s not so mired in ritual and tradition that I need a Catholic-to-nonbeliever dictionary like I did with Conclave (which is an excellent movie, by the way; definitely see it if you haven’t yet), and in the first season, it never takes a side fully.  In The X-Files, we the viewer know that there are aliens and the ghosts and the like the Scully is always just too late to see that they are real, but in Evil we can never be sure of what we’re seeing.  Dream sequences, psychoses, lies—the show itself acts as an unreliable narrator and keeps you seeing, in some ways, what you want to see, and also keeps you veiled in the mystery of the overarching story.  Did the team cure a demonic possession through exorcism?  Or did the act of the ritualistic exorcism free a person of a genuinely held belief in their own possession? 

It’s far from the cozy mystery of Father Brown’s quaint English countryside, but it’s nonetheless a show somehow brings comfort.  After all, no matter the root cause of evil, whether it’s supernatural, paranormal, or just sadly normal, there is comfort in knowing that there are good people willing to stand up and do something about it.  I’ve said many times that I love to see shows and movies about good people doing good things, especially as the real world becomes increasingly chaotic, divided, and violent, and Evil delivers that in a way I really didn’t expect.  Each episode ends with a kinetic cliffhanger that leaves you wanting more—I generally try to space TV shows out so I don’t burn through them and then have to wait years for the next season like I’m doing with Stranger Things, but I can’t stop myself from watching episode after episode, going through the entire first season in just two days.

I wish I had found this show while it was still airing, but I’ve read that even though it was cancelled after just four seasons, it was given an extended final arc in order for the series to have a satisfying ending.  And while I am dreading getting to the end and no longer having this genuinely enjoyable show to watch anymore, I’m excited to see how it concludes.  And luckily, Evil is available for streaming on both Netflix and Paramount+, though Netflix doesn’t have the fourth season yet.  If you were a fan of The X-Files or want some spooky mysteries to solve along with some properly good characters, I highly recommend giving Evil a try.  The show, not the concept.

Close Encounters of the Bird Kind

Last week, I gave Jack Black quite a bit of stick, and while that was definitely warranted, I inadvertently stumbled across a movie that unexpectedly brought him back into my good graces.  Surprisingly, with a movie I watched years ago and didn’t like.  And the critics—and audiences—didn’t like it either, with the film garnering only a 41% RT score and a matching 41% audience score.  But, while mindlessly scrolling Max (I still hate calling it that) and looking for a time waster to do chores by, and with birding fresh in my mind having recently watched Netflix’s flawed, but watchable quirky whodunnit The Residence, I decided to give The Big Year another gander.

A big year, in birding (which still sounds silly to me, but apparently is the correct term over bird watching; though, truth be told, it seems like it’s the birds who do the birding and the humans who do the watching, I’m not going to argue with how birders want to be referred to and end up like Tippi Hedren) terms, is when a birder decides to see as many species of birds as they possibly can.  It’s a personal challenge that can turn into an informal competition amongst the birding community.  In The Big Year, it’s presented as a dream by Brad Harris, played by Jack Black (that one episode of Community), Stu Preissler, played by comedic legend Steve Martin (Only Murders in the Building, Father of the Bride), and reigning champ, with 732 species of birds spotted as evidenced by his vanity license plate, Kenny Bostick, played by the man who wowed his way into America’s hearts, Owen Wilson (that same episode of Community that Jack Black was in, Loki).  Brad has a full time programming job, an ex-wife, and not much else, Stu has a career he’s trying to retire from and a grandchild on the way, and Kenny has a wife who wants to start a family and is frustrated with her husband’s one track mind.  Rounding out the cast are talented names like Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation, Our Idiot Brother), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), Dianne Wiest (Bullets over Broadway, The Birdcage), Kevin Pollack (The Usual Suspects, The Whole Nine Yards), Joel McHale (Community, Animal Control), Brian Dennehy (who was in perhaps my favorite duel ever from the western Silverado, First Blood), Anthony Anderson (Romeo Must Die, Black-ish) and more.  Oh, and did I mention it’s narrated by John Cleese (Silverado, Fawlty Towers) in the manner of a nature documentary?  This is such a talented cast with so much comedy pedigree, you can expect some big laughs.

But you’d be disappointed.  The Big Year presents itself as a comedy; this informal personal challenge has the look of a massive, all-consuming competition with an economy that rivals the ridiculousness of the competitive tornado-chasers in Twisters, but it’s not particularly funny.  I can tell the scenes which are supposed to make me laugh, like when an announcement that a specific species of bird has been spotted and two dozen grown adults rush Black Friday style to bicycles to race each other to see it before it flies away or when Kenny figures out how to make Stu seasick on a birding tour boat.  But they don’t land comically—they’re quirky, but not funny.  The idea of all this, it’s supposed to be completely ridiculous and hilarious and it just isn’t.  In fact, Jack Black’s Brad here is almost understated—and very understated by Jack Black standards—playing a lonely computer programmer who wants to have his big year and has little else on his mind other than that, isolated from just about anything but birds and his job.  Normally when a comedy fails at being comedic, that’s the end of it.  And this was largely my memory of it from watching it the first time.  It was a comedy that didn’t make me laugh, which is why I haven’t revisited it in over a decade.  Watching through the whole movie again, I still can’t remember a moment where I got more than a chuckle, though admittedly, I did get a few and handful of smirks as well.  So, at this point, you’re probably wondering why I’m taking the time to tell you about this forgotten birding movie from 2011.  And I don’t blame you.

But the thing that makes this movie good are the moments that weren’t meant to be funny.  It paints a picture of three very different men, all at very different stages of life.  Kenny is a successful business owner on the verge of starting a family with a frustrated wife who doesn’t want to play second fiddle to his winged first love.  Stu is an extremely successful entrepreneur who is so afraid of the stage that comes after the stage after retirement that he retired once and it didn’t take, so he’s now trying to retire again, as much as his employees don’t want him to go.  His wife supports his passion, but his son and daughter-in-law are expecting their first child as he takes this opportunity to have his big year.  And Brad…well, Brad is a little lost.  His ex-wife is getting remarried, his father doesn’t understand his bird obsession, and his mother is trying her best to support him, and he’s working a full time job while trying to have his big year (yes, all the main characters here are white men, those were the times, with a few gender stereotypes thrown in along the way, but nothing that offends the ears too much).

They compete with each other—Kenny is the leader of the flock, the holder of the record, the king atop the hill that everyone wants to overthrow, but along the way, they find ways to connect with each other.  One of the most quaint things about this big year concept, something that to me still sounds ridiculous, but perhaps I’m too jaded by this modern world in which we live, is that it goes by the honor system.  People fill out their journals with the birds they’ve seen—or even just heard, as long as they’re sure they can identify the birdsong—and that’s taken at their word.  When a dubious opportunity to cross off a rare bird arises, it’s rejected until there’s real confirmation that the birder heard what he thought he heard.

Kenny is positioned as an antagonist here, and yet he’s not really a bad guy.  He’s certainly his own worst enemy and a pretty bad husband, and he has a few tricks up his sleeve to deal with the competition, but he’s never so underhanded that you hate him.  Stu and Brad are underdogs, despite Stu coming from a place of serious privilege, and they form a friendship out of their shared love of birds and birding that was actually heartwarming in a time where so much of the world’s aim is to divide us from each other and we gatekeep hobbies to shame those who are newer or more casual at it.  And yet, Stu and Brad, competitors at the opposite ends of life—chronologically and financially, as Brad is spending basically all his life savings and then some on this quest and Stu can afford the finest things in life (though he refuses to fly in private planes or hire guides, because he feels that’s not in line with the spirit of the big year; to him, that’s the equivalent of big game hunting from a helicopter)—find real friendship with each other.  They share this passion, they share their lives, their fears, their concerns.  They’re there for each other and that touched me in a way I didn’t expect from this unfunny comedy.  It showed that there’s more to this movie than a lack of laughs.  In a moment where Brad is explaining to his father about his favorite bird, a rather plain looking grayish brown feathery fellow (I think that’s the scientific name) and why it’s his favorite, well, readers, I fully admit to some water spraying into my eyes, forcing me to wipe it away. Complete freak occurrence, I wasn’t tearing up at all.

We don’t just get to see plenty of birds and absurd scenarios in this film, but we also get to see a year in these men’s lives and everything that entails.  We get to see the parts of their lives that happen around birding, the things they miss, the things that make them feel alone, the things that make them feel a part of something.  We see the cost of their passion, the toll it takes on them and the people around them.  The moments where The Big Year isn’t trying to be funny are the moments where the movie truly, truly shines.  It’s in those moments where the movie pecked its way into my heart and went from a failed comedy to a mildly comedic slice-of-life film, the kind I really enjoy.  So often in media and society, we praise the sacrifice; we praise those who eschew all of life’s normalcies in order to achieve their one thing, the one thing that makes the quiet nights and lonely holidays worth it.  We deify those who give up everything to achieve something, we give Oscars to movies about assholes whose great accomplishments outweigh the dirt on their souls.  But The Big Year isn’t about that.  It’s not about the relentless pursuit of perfection, it isn’t about the need to give everything up to attain your goal at any cost.  It’s about the costs, it’s about the need to balance our lives, our passions, our relationships.  The Big Year is a movie about remembering that there’s more to life than that one thing.  That there’s so much that’s important in life and that it’s important to be present for that too—to be there for the big moments, to be there for the people you care about, to be there for yourself, to make connections with people.  It’s a movie that on its surface is about the destination, but in the end, is about the journey.  And whether that journey is one that should even be taken.

It wasn’t that long ago that I lamented the state of the adventure film and wondered how adventure films are supposed to move forward without leaving that uncomfortable, culture-pillaging, colonizing taste in your mouth.   Yes, the movies has its flaws.  Much of the supporting cast, while stacked with talent, is fairly one-dimensional and under-utilized.  Rosamund Pike’s character in particular is reduced to a stock wife who just wants a baby, even though she plays the hell out of it. But maybe this is it, as imperfect as it is.  Small stories about regular people having low stakes adventures as part of their daily lives.  Maybe critics and audiences alike missed a trick here 14 years ago when this movie first came around.  Yes, it could have been done better, it could have had more depth to it, more time spent fleshing out the supporting cast.  But maybe The Big Year isn’t a comedy after all—maybe it’s an introspective adventure movie that serves to remind us of the things that are really important in life and celebrates the things that surround our adventures more than the adventures themselves.  When I put on this 1 hour, 44 minute (4 minutes longer than the theatrical release, both of which are on Max) film I didn’t like, I was looking for something that was meaningless and filled up the empty space while I did some chores.  What I got was much, much more than that and much, much more than I bargained for.  I didn’t plan on writing about this.  I didn’t think of it as a hidden gem I needed to bring to you or some important film that made me feel something.  But I do now.  And I do hope you give it a chance with an open heart.  Because it helped open mine up a little.

If you’ve made it this far, I should give you a bit of a programming note.  I’m in the middle of a move and may not be able to stick a weekly schedule in July, but I will do my level best to keep this coming to you.  I love sharing movies and TV shows with you, dear readers, and I appreciate every single one of you.  As Pride Month comes to a close, I want to tell you all that I appreciate you and who you are.  Thank you for being here.

Block Pilgrim vs. The Overworld

Okay, it’s time to get into A Minecraft Movie (2025), now streaming on Max.  There’s a lot here to say and, unfortunately, not a lot of it is very good.  In case you didn’t know, A Minecraft Movie is based on the video game Minecraft, a sort of blocky sandbox creation game that is popular with gamers of all ages, from kids aged four or five and up, to full on adults with jobs and existential dread and everything that comes with that.  Starring Jack Black (one episode of Community, Be Kind Rewind), Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones, Dune), Danielle Brooks (Peacemaker), Emma Myers (Wednesday), and relative newcomer Sebastian Hansen, who plays her little brother.  The characters have names, but they’re not really important, other than Steve, Jack Black’s character.  The rest are just there to take up space on screen and for things to happen around them as the story, such that it is, unfolds.

Steve, if you know the game, should mean something to you, but at this point, I should mention that I’ve never played Minecraft and I have no plans to, nor any interest in it as a game.  I should also admit to going into Minecraft hoping to dislike it.  I can’t help it, I’m human, and I have biases and the best I can do is admit them to you.  Luckily, I wasn’t disappointed; I’m not going to play hide the ball here, Minecraft is a bad movie.  It’s really bad.  But it serves its purpose.

As long as you view that purpose as distracting children for just about two hours by bombarding them with bright colors, memes even I understood (the children, they yearn for the mines), Jack Black randomly yelling every 90 seconds, doing his own Foley, and breaking out into song every 10 minutes, and other children on screen so they can relate.  There’s almost a story here—mostly things just happen from one scene to another—but it’s about as important as the characters’ names, and Jack Black’s Steve will painfully explain everything to you like a five-year-old who has you cornered at a family gathering and is educating you on their newest obsession.  Which is cute when it’s a kid telling you about dinosaurs, but when it’s a man in his mid-50s screaming at you about gorgonzola, it’s less endearing.  To be fair, I appreciated some of the exposition, because I don’t know anything about Minecraft.  That seems to be Steve’s biggest function in the movie, telling the characters and audience how everything works, which is practical, but I think it could have been masked a bit better so it didn’t feel so much like a game tutorial instead of a film.  There’s nothing new or original in this movie—if you’ve seen the Jumanji reboots, you’ve already seen A Minecraft Movie, just done much better (not to mention that it also stars Jack Black in the role he was meant to play—a popular teenage girl).  Kids get sucked into the magical world of Jumanji—oops, I mean the Minecraft Overworld—they complete a quest for the MacGuffin, and then they get to go home.  Along the way, they learn some lessons about how it’s important to be who you are, and they take those lessons back to the real world. 

That’s not a knock—that’s the point of children’s adventure movies and I suppose A Minecraft Movie serves that purpose (as long as you can ignore that Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks basically just exist to do reaction videos about what’s going on in the Overworld; they don’t have a whole lot here to work with, which is disappointing because I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Emma Myers and her possible casting in the MCU and I hoped there’d be a little more meat to her role, but I suppose that was misplaced), but execution matters and Minecraft manages to just stumble over the low bar we set for children’s entertainment and I suppose that’s okay if that’s all you’re looking for out of a kids’ movie.  To be fair, I got a few chuckles here and there—especially in the scenes between minutes 5 and 26 where Jack Black wasn’t in it—and it’s pretty much the best way to use Jason Momoa.  He’s really leaning into his big, imposing silly guy period, with that real John Cena feel to it.  And it works.  He drops some one-liners that get the job done—I laughed when he says to Emma Myers that he’s been more of a sister to her brother than she has, all while wearing a fringed pink leather jacket with aplomb.  And it actually delivered one of the scant few genuine moments in the film.  He slays the look and the juxtaposition from his intimidating physical appearance to his childish behavior pretty much works.  In fact, even with Jack Black’s in-your-face performance (even by Jack Black standards), it’s Jason Momoa who is the standout in this movie and steals the show rather thoroughly.

Of course, analyzing this movie as a grown adult who doesn’t play the game and doesn’t have children to distract, it makes me wonder some things about why we set the bar so low for kids’ stuff.  Because it doesn’t have to be this way—a cross between an Illumination animated movie and CoComelon with about as much nutritional value as the tub your popcorn comes in—it can be better.  I don’t think this movie’s biggest failure is its inability to entertain me because I fully expected that.  I’m not the target audience and it’s okay that not every movie is made specifically for me.  I think the biggest failure is that it failed at conveying the appeal of Minecraft in the first place.  I spoke with a group of Minecraft players, all adults, some with children and some without, asking them what appealed to them about the game, because I just don’t get it and that’s, again, also okay.  But the overwhelming response that I got was that Minecraft is fun for them because it allows them to do just about whatever they want.  The word “freedom” came up in almost every response, creativity was another buzzword, relaxation was another thing they mentioned, because you can play Minecraft in a way where you don’t face enemies and don’t seem to have missions to accomplish.  It’s a big virtual sandbox where you can play with Legos without playing with Legos (and as a huge Lego nerd myself, I can appreciate that) and leave a confining world behind in the endless Overworld of Minecraft where the limits don’t apply.  And none of this comes across in the movie.  There is no feeling of freedom, there is no sense of relaxation or creativity; framing this story as an accidental quest to return home doesn’t give you any time to live in the Overworld or experience it the way a kid or any Minecraft player would.  Sure, there are a few scenes where characters point at the ground and blocks appear, but when something actually interesting is built, it’s done offscreen and only you see the results.  No one ever gets to indulge in the freedom the game gives its players.  Instead, the narrative structure puts a ticking clock and a sense of urgency on the film, which are things Minecraft the game doesn’t have.  Of course there has to be an impetus for the plot, but it doesn’t give the audience any time to appreciate the Overworld because everyone’s running for their lives all the time (even though it never really seems like anyone is in danger).  And I really think that’s the biggest issue with the film and why it feels like a failure of a narrative to me.  The Super Mario Bros. Movie may not have been good, in many ways the same sort of complaints I’ve lodged here could be lodged at that movie, but at least it felt mostly like Mario.  This was just Jumanji with a DLC skin on it that felt like the Canal Street version that you’d buy off a folding table on the sidewalk next to a $20 “Louis Vuitton” handbag.

You can use A Minecraft Movie to occupy your kids, but you don’t have to give them something with so little redeeming value.  It’s the empty calories of kids’ movies and studios have proven that they can do better than aiming to just graze that low bar we’ve set for children’s entertainment.  There are better options out there and we don’t have to lower our standards for storytelling just because it’s aimed at a younger audience.  Bluey has proven that, Hilda has proven that, and for many years now, Pixar and Dreamworks have been proving it as well.

How to Train Your Dragon, for example, is a better way to spend your time with or without your kids.  With the hollow-feeling live action remake in theaters now, it’s the perfect time to go back and watch the original animated trilogy and even watch the Dragons: Race to the Edge series on Netflix to supplement it.  Smarter, better storytelling in a fantastical adventure setting that really sells the beauty of the world in which the characters live, it’s a great series.  The aforementioned Jumanji films do everything Minecraft does better, and the original Robin Williams classic is also out there to watch and is much, much better than A Minecraft Movie (if a bit darker when you’re paying attention).  And let’s not forget Pixar in this conversation, the studio that revolutionized children’s entertainment and continues to deliver time and time again.  One film of theirs that I want to highlight here is another movie about a kid who experiences a magical and foreign world to him, but with a twist—overshadowed by the excellent Encanto, Luca tells the story of a sea monster who ventures to the surface world and goes on a beautiful, heartwarming adventure.  If you spent 2021 not talking about Bruno, it was easy to miss Luca, but it is well worth your time to go back and watch it because it’s really a great movie for kids and adults alike.  Even Disney returned Star Wars to its kid-friendly roots with the excellent Skeleton Crew, which draws heavy inspiration from classic kids’ adventure movies from the 1980s.  And of course, I can’t talk about kid-friendly movies that make an adult’s heart melt without mentioning Paddington, movies that were so good I can still hardly believe it.  I’ve had it in my head to do a big compare and contrast between the character of Paddington and the MCU portrayal of Captain America and how they both embody the ideals of a society without the rather horrifying trappings of the past (and now that the Paddington trilogy is complete, it might be time to revisit that idea).  Children’s entertainment doesn’t have to be mindless, it doesn’t have to yell “Sneak attack!” every twenty minutes (when only one was actually a sneak attack, though yelling that seems to defeat the purpose), it doesn’t have to references meme after meme, it doesn’t have to leave you walking away from it feeling like you should have just been folding your laundry in silence instead.  It can be wonderful, it can be beautiful, it can tell meaningful stories that don’t talk down to kids, but that teach them something while entertaining them.

So yes, while Minecraft may offer more laughs than the entire series of the truly dismal and unfunny Night Court reboot, you can do much better with your and your kids’ screen time than this.  I can’t tell you whether to skip it or not, because you might enjoy it, you might appreciate the references, you might like being bathed in the nostalgia of a game you played or still play; but, if you haven’t seen the movies or shows I mentioned, I urge you to give them a try as well.  Because they’re really worth the time.

Dr. Heckle and Mr. Blindside

After the disappointment of Fountain of Youth, I thought it was time to brave the waters of streaming originals once again with Amazon Prime’s new R-rated comedy Deep Cover.  Before I tell you what the movie is about, I want to preface this by saying what I’m about to say isn’t a joke.  The London police draft in three improv comics for their ability to think on their feet and roll with the punches to go into a special undercover program.  One of said comedians is Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help, Jurassic World), taking a break from directing some of the best episodes of Star Wars television to play Kat, a directionless comedian teaching an improv class as she waits for her big break, which more and more seems like it’ll never come.  Rounding out her team is Orlando Bloom’s (The Lord of the Rings, The Outpost) Marlon, an out of work advertisement actor with aspirations for serious drama, and Nick Mohammed’s (Ted Lasso) Hugh, coming off a wonderful run on Taskmaster to play a socially awkward and isolated IT guy at a large London financial firm, desperate for a way to relate to people.

Of course, the idea that improv comics are the perfect choices for undercover operations is preposterous on the level of sending a Pontiac Fiero to space or recruiting a group of deep-sea oil drillers to become astronauts instead of having them teach astronauts how to turn on a drill, but since it’s a comedy, you sort of just roll with it the way they’re supposed to and let yourself become caught up in the shred of believability in the plot.  I mean, there is a tiniest bit of something there if you think about it just enough, but not too much.  Comedians can be quite quick thinkers—I mean, look at how well Ike Barinholtz does on quiz shows, for example—so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, but it is mildly insane all the same.  The Armageddon problem still exists; why not put cops through improv classes rather than put improv comics in the field with little more than a briefing before giving them a good luck pep talk and placing them in harm’s way.  If you’re able to suspend your disbelief just enough to accept the premise though, you will be rewarded with a very funny comedy with more than enough heart to keep you invested in the characters.

As you can imagine, there are lots of hiccups along the way, and the impulse to “yes, and” their way through scenarios finds our lot of comedians quickly escalating their way along in a local gang run by a fellow called Fly, played by the always excellent and very versatile Paddy Considine (Hot Fuzz, The Outsider), who quickly takes a liking to them and gets them involved way, way over their heads.  To be honest, though, the lowest rung on a step stool is over their heads because they’re comedians and not trained investigators.  There’s a certain amount of danger that a normal person is subjected to on a daily basis that we sort of shrug off; driving a car, crossing the street, taking a shortcut through an alley, etc., and our plucky protagonists go far, far beyond that.  When faced with real danger, the comics act admirably, but there’s a realness to how they react to things once the scene is called.  They act heroically when the time comes, but it is just acting. But instead of just playing one on TV, these actors are doing it for real, even if they’re just pretending.

Comedy is often hard to write about—I can tell you that the comedic timing in the film is top, top notch, especially coming from two actors with whom I don’t usually associate comedy.  While it is an ensemble cast with three fully realized characters, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kat is probably the star, and when you look back through her credits, you can’t find a lot of comedic roles (though it is fairly laughable just how bad the Jurassic World movies are, but I don’t think that was intended).  But here, she’s as natural as can be.  Kat is funny, she’s evenly toned throughout the film, even though she’s the only one who really has to balance her life outside of being an undercover comic/police consultant, she manages to play it without jarring the audience between undercover Kat and real life Kat.  I’ve always been a big Bryce Dallas Howard fan, perhaps even more as a director than as an actress now, but Deep Cover has me yearning to see her in more comedies.  Orlando Bloom’s washed up ultra-method commercial actor is a far cry from Legolas, and even a completely different kind of character than Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean, where he is kind of the straight man as Johnny Depp Johnny Depps all around him.  But he plays it with such an earnest bent that he sells it and you buy it hook, line, and sinker because he does such a good job.  It’s a feat to pull off this kind of smoldering intensity and over the top commitment for comedy and he just nails it.  Now, I can’t say the same about Nick Mohammed—his role here is quite similar to Nate in Ted Lasso, but I don’t mind that one bit when he does it so well.  Hugh is definitely cut from the Nate mould, but it doesn’t matter when it’s a role he’s born to play.  Not quite as timid or as nervously tight-lipped as Nate, Hugh still struggles to fit in as an IT guy at a high dollar finance firm where not only do the people there not like him, they clearly don’t respect him and barely acknowledge his existence unless they need something from him.  He’s so amazing in this role, it doesn’t matter that he’s not playing against type.  In fact, based on his Taskmaster appearance, I’m not even sure he’s doing that much acting.  But he absolutely kills every frame.

And this is where the movie really shines.  It’s not just that it’s funny, of course it is, but lots of movies are funny (well, fewer and fewer, it seems) and it’s the characters that elevate this beyond your average action-comedy.  As preposterous as this premise is, as fantastical the plot, the movie is so well grounded in real-life stuff.  Kat had a dream that isn’t working out and at 39, she’s desperately trying to figure out if there’s still time left for her to pursue that dream or whether she needs to drastically reconsider her life choices.  Marlon wants nothing more than to be taken seriously, but, like Hugh Grant’s character from Paddington 2, his iconic role in an ad has taken over his entire career (though unlike Grant’s has-been, Marlon is a never-was).  Hugh is struggling to find a way to exist in a social world where he’s at the bottom of the hierarchy and he wants to do more and be more than he is.  Who can’t relate to that?  I think one of the things that makes this movie work so well is that each of the protagonists is extremely relatable in one way or another and if you don’t see at least part of yourself in one of them, you’re sure to see it in one of the others.   And unlike some of the recent streamer original films, Deep Cover has a star-studded cast and uses them all very well—unfortunately, there’s no Stanley Tucci this time, but Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings, Ronin) doing his best Jackson Lamb impression as the cop who brings them into this program, Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina, Devs), and Ian McShane (John Wick, Deadwood) round out the very talented cast and give the shady underworld our protagonists are jumping into much more real feel than it has any right to be.  And, at just 1 hour and 39 minutes, the movie hovers around that near-perfect 90 minute mark for comedies, returning us back to form from the 2+ hour movies that marked the Judd Apatow comedy era of the mid-to-late 2000s.

What’s even more surprising about Deep Cover is that it focuses very heavily on friendship and the relationships between the characters as human beings and in a very rare move for an R-rated comedy, doesn’t go all-in on raunchy comedy, sex jokes, or otherwise easy comedic mechanics.  There’s barely even a romantic subplot, which again, feels nice after how often we see it shoehorned into movies (not to beat up again on Jurassic World, but it deserves it, it’s a perfect example of “Well, they’re both good looking and the stars of the movie, so they have to get together”). It’s not that it bothers me, but it is an easier route to getting laughs and doing it without that shows off the skill in the writing and acting that bit much more than a comedy like Let’s Be Cops, which I also really enjoyed (despite it dismal reviews, but I do have a fondness for Jake Johnson and not just because he liked one my tweets about an deep cut TV-friendly dubbing of a line in Die Hard 2) or 21 Jump Street.  This movie felt like an elevated version of Let’s Be Cops and 21 Jump Street in some ways, but done in a way that you could almost watch with your family, bar some bloody violence and swearing.  I’m not saying it’s a replacement for Bluey, but you could easily watch this with older kids.  I mean, if the family barbecue gets rained out, this is one you can put on and not worry too much if the kids walk in while the adults are watching.

Deep Cover proves that while dying is easy and comedy is hard, not dying can be pretty hard too.  And also very, very funny and satisfying to watch.  I highly recommend this one.  Great R-rated comedies that are grown-up and mature in the writing are rare in the time of major film franchises replacing both the action movie and the comedy, and this is a movie that deserves to not only be watched, but celebrated.  It’s such a refreshing experience after movies like Fountain of Youth, Electric State, and The Gorge, which did a great deal of damage to the reputation of straight-to-streaming films, nearly undoing the great work of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion.  And in a world that can, at times, feel like it’s crumbling around us, it’s nice to be able to escape that for a just over an hour and a half, laugh for a bit, and remember that even while all this is going on, our smaller struggles are still our struggles and it’s okay if we need to focus on them—and on ourselves—for a little while.  Not every story has to be the biggest story in the world and if you need a break from the world, a movie like Deep Cover is a wonderful way to take that break.