Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, we have such diverse works as The Creator, Dumb Money, Passages, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hitting shelves. This week represents a solid opportunity to do some holiday shopping for the cinephile in your life. We also have Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio joining the Criterion Collection, so there’s lots to choose from. Read on for more…
Dumb Money
Smart movies that are also crowdpleasers don’t come along evert day. So, there was some very notable value in Dumb Money. Beyond its entertainment value, it also distilled a complex issue down to something more manageable. I was fairly taken by it, so if you missed it in theaters, give it a shot now. My review here out of the Toronto International Film Festival began like so:
I’m a reasonably intelligent person, but I freely admit that I barely understood the whole GameStop stock situation (full disclosure: I was once an employee of that company, working at EB Games while in college). So, while I knew the broad strokes, the how and the why escaped me. In a way, that’s almost the ideal way to go into Dumb Money, because it does such an effective job of explaining the affair, not just to make it digestible to an audience, but to also invest you (no pun intended) in the events. It’s a very mainstream effort, but it’s the sort of crowdpleaser that the Toronto International Film Festival tends to love.
Dumb Money succeeds because it has an ability to make you care about the characters within. If it was all jargon and financial babble, you’d check out before long. While it’s clearly indebted to work like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Social Network, it does forge its own path, which has more comedy and doubles down on the rebel spirit. The result is deeply enjoyable work.
The Creator
The ambition on display in The Creator is something you really can’t discount. Science fiction on this scale, not based on anything pre-existing? That’s rare. So credit where credit is due for this compelling sci-fi epic. You can see my conversations with filmmaker Gareth Edwards here, as well as with cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer here for more on crafting the flick. My review here included the following:
So much of science fiction is allowing an audience to inhabit a world. If a storyteller can suck you in, that’s more than half the battle. Sci-fi in particular offers the right creative force ample avenues with which to do this. In the case of The Creator, Gareth Edwards has not just managed to do this with his high concept premise, but also with some distinct visuals. The end result is an incredibly ambitious yet almost always highly entertaining event film. You’ve never seen anything quite like this movie, which is a saying that gets bandied about a lot, but is pretty apt here.
The Creator is a vivid new sci-fi world to play in. Edwards makes it feel epic and intimate in the same frame, which is no small achievement. There’s a weirdness inherent to it, but also a familiarity. In some ways, this is almost like what a movie made by Hideo Kojima would be like (if you know what I’m getting at, that should be very exciting). Mostly, the big charm here is how much this is like the most expensive indie flick ever, as opposed to a moderately budgeted blockbuster. The difference is in the painstaking efforts to make it all feel lived in and different. It shows in the results, too.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
They finally got them right! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a property that almost always gets another crack, but it was this time around that it actually felt like TMNT, with a distinct visual style, to boot. My review with filmmaker Jeff Rowe is here, while some of my review (found in full here) is below:
I grew up loving the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The animated series was a hallmark of my childhood, as were the action figures. I remember the quests my parents had to go on to acquire the toys, especially the April O’Neil figure, oddly enough. So, I have a soft spot in my heart for the turtles. I haven’t disliked the big screen efforts previously, but nothing has really captured my imagination yet. Too often, you just are getting something else, as opposed to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All of this is to say what a nice little surprise Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is. What could have been just another summer IP hitting cinemas instead harkens back to why so many of us loved TMNT as kids.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem gets the characters and the property right, at long last. I don’t think any of the prior efforts have been bad, necessarily, but they all felt like compromised visions, in a way. Here, it’s TMNT, while still being filtered through a new style and a modern lens. The end result is a lot of fun, both for younger audiences and for those of us who grew up with the turtles.
The Mandalorian: The Complete First Season (TV)
PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
Shaun the Sheep: The Complete Series (TV)
Criterion Corner
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
From The Criterion Collection: “A classic tale is reborn through the inspired imagination of cinematic dream-weaver Guillermo del Toro, directing alongside Mark Gustafson. Realized through boundary-pushing, breathtakingly intricate stop-motion animation, this dark rendering of the fable of the puppet boy and his maker—which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature—daringly transfers the story to Fascist Italy, where the irrepressible Pinocchio gradually learns what it means to be human through his experiences of war, death, and sacrifice. Featuring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and Christoph Waltz, this Pinocchio imbues the oft-told tale with a bold new resonance about living with courage and compassion.”
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The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse
From The Criterion Collection: “Everyday life becomes an adventure in the wide-eyed fables and fantasies of Albert Lamorisse. Balancing imaginative whimsy with documentary-like authenticity, his beloved short films Bim, the Little Donkey; White Mane; and the Academy Award–winning The Red Balloon find unforgettable emotional, spiritual, and moral resonance in the realms of children and animals, while his captivating but now rarely seen features Stowaway in the Sky and Circus Angel exult in the glories of two of his greatest loves: nature and flight. With their astonishing cinematography and purity of spirit, these five enchanting works invite viewers of all ages to experience the wonder, mystery, and poignancy of the world anew.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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