School ended on Wednesday last week, and the kids’ summer day camp doesn’t start until tomorrow, so we had four possible Movie Night slots this week, of which we used three (the fourth was The Pip’s last baseball game).
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:
The classic failure mode of MCU movies is to start out with a decent story and engaging characters, only to dissolve into CGI nonsense at the end. This film deftly avoids that problem by being CGI nonsense right from the jump. Aside from a few small Sam Raimi flourishes here and there, I did not particularly enjoy this.
The Bad Guys:
While The Pip does sort of try to act like he’s older, he is still a ten-year-old boy, and thus absolutely the core demographic for this animated movie based on a series of kids books. Which is basically fine; the animation is good, the voice work is solid (Sam Rockwell as the Wolf doing his best George Clooney), the story is moderately clever. But it’s very much a cartoon for ten-year-olds. The Pip loved it, and expressed an interest in going back and re-reading the whole series (he has a few of them, chosen more or less at random).
Everything Everywhere All At Once:
Kate and I wanted to see this, and we showed the trailer to the kids, who agreed to give it a shot. We almost lost SteelyKid, who has no patience for the idea of a redemption arc and nearly bailed because Evelyn is awful at the start (“She’s so terrible!” “Yes, that’s the point. Watch the damn movie.”). There’s enough zany action to carry past that, though, and at the end SteelyKid was saying “I need to get all my friends to watch this…” The Pip said something along the lines of “My brain feels like it’s fizzing after that movie.”
This was, in fact, a terrific movie, with a wholly original story and a lot of inventive filmmaking choices. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan give fantastic performances as the harried couple drawn into various multiversal shenanigans, and the various fight scenes are alternately amazing and deeply silly. I’m glad to see this making significant money, and I hope somebody writes the Daniels a great big check to do whatever they want with for their next project.
So, you know, a 1-3 success rate is pretty decent in baseball, particularly when the one is a home run. If you would like more of this level of film commentary to turn up in your inbox, here’s a button:
And if you want to add anything to this, the comments will be open: