Fish and Cherries Productions

Welp, time to finish up the last bits of grunt work for those year end lists. Unfortunately, this is not a day where I’m looking at good movies. Still, I hope you’ll bear with me, even if you disagree, as I look at two films that I meant to catch last year.

Alice Through The Looking Glass
Warcraft

Talk about a man I would never want over for dinner and drinks. Today’s special guest: Johnny Depp as The Scariest Son of a Bitch Who Ever Lived.

Black Mass

21 Jump Street was a damn funny movie, even if it became tripped up by the tropes it was trying to parody. It’s odd because you wouldn’t think that a remake of such an old and obscure property would warrant such high praise. But with the writers of The LEGO Movie on board, we get a really clever and really funny send-up to buddy cop and high school coming-of-age movies. True, they unfortunately have to go through the clichés of the third-act break-up between multiple parties and the hero’s reward kiss, but the film plays with them enough to not make them too insufferable. I’m not sure what else to say other than it was a really funny movie worth a watch and I’d be happy to check out the sequel.

Wait, there is one other thing. A criminal is not released from custody just because they weren’t read their Miranda Rights! That is complete crap invented by Hollywood for tension just like the one phone call rule! The event that kicked off the entire plot is complete bullshit! There, I’m done now.

Into the Woods was… okay. I think my biggest issue was that the pacing felt so rushed and there wasn’t really enough time to get to know these characters. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the performers blew me away with their acting and their singing, and while they weren’t bad, they weren’t spectacular either. Similarly lackluster was the cinematography and the set design. On stage, it’s different because the sets in the woods can go for a lot of artistic license. But in the film, it’s just a bunch of gnarled trees that look all the same and it simply get exhausting to look at. I know the woods are an odd thing to complain about in Into the Woods, but I’m sorry, by the end of it, I was so sick of those fucking woods.

The frustrating thing is that none of it’s bad, it’s just not spectacular. for an adaptation of a Stephen Sondheim work, that’s a huge step down. And what really hurts it is the stuff from the play that doesn’t translate to screen, like the several strips of nonstop songs (which is puzzling considering that quite a few were cut). There’s some nice original stuff like Cinderella’s song where time stops for her and Little Red Riding Hood’s journey into the wolf’s stomach, but they’re few and far between. Moreover, it feels grim where it should be colorful, colorful where it should be grim, and a lot of the bite and the serious bits were left by the wayside (including my favorite part which concerned the narrator… you all know the one). Overall, I feel like this worked way better on the stage than it does on the screen. I can’t say I regretted seeing it, but I’m not exactly sure I took that much away from it either. If you need to see it, do so as a way to tide yourself over before the play comes to your town.