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Reviews
Finding Dory (2016)
A big, hectic chunk of cinematic nonsense
Finding Dory wins just one miserable star, for one reason: The animation throughout is astonishingly realistic.
However, almost everything else about the film is a train wreck of ocean-sized proportions. Take no notice of the reviews of the critics, who seem to be doing everything to try and defend this horribly misguided mess.
But how is it a mess? Here's why. The whole film just fails to give you a reason to want to sit through all of it again. It doesn't feel like a proper story, instead more like a series of antics and ideas thrown into an overflowing, ugly mix. It's chaotic, too long and so stupid at times that it has to be seen to be believed. This is easily one of Pixar's worst.
Finding Dory's most egregious flaw as its shockingly incompetent pacing. The film is frantic, mindless and over-concerned with shoving in jokes and sight gags. Scenes are so rushed and so needlessly silly that they just aren't believable. Introduced characters get little development and are just forgettable. Will anyone really remember or care about Hank the octopus, Destiny the whale shark or those argumentative sea-lions in the future?
The film's strict adherence to sequel clichés also seriously crosses the line. Returning plot elements, rehashed scenarios, character cameos and overblown action scenes are all here and are never justified. In fact, by the end of it, the entire film hasn't even justified its existence. Furthermore, the characters suffer so much bad luck that it eventually turns into "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" with fish. Everything starts going wrong. Detours are constantly taken. Death is cheated over and over. And yet, the characters constantly escape via methods so contrived and convenient that it's impossible to take seriously. Admittedly, it's kind of creative in places, but it's also as predictable as you can imagine.
The climax, however, is where the film finally crashes into the ground. It's astoundingly awful. Picture this - an octopus driving a lorry extremely poorly and not crashing into any oncoming cars. A large group of otters hugging each other in the middle of the road in order to stop these cars. And finally, the same lorry being driven over a hill and into the sea. This is the climax simplified - except that it's way, way worse than that. It can't even describe how bad it is. It's a horribly written climax and is jaw-droppingly nonsensical.
Why stop there? The film fails in so many other ways that you can play bingo with its flaws. There are way too many flashbacks to Dory's cutesy childhood. "Emotional" scenes are dull and stretched thin. Marlin and Nemo are in it, but mean little to the plot. A scene where a bunch of kids are touching some sea life, who are shown feeling the constant pain, is not at all funny but uncomfortable. Several scenes, like one with a talking clam, just feel shoved in for no reason. Many jokes fall flat. The dialogue is stale and charmless. I could go on and on.
The whole thing is an embarrassing atrocity. As much as I'd love to give more stars to this movie, I feel it deserves just one. Because the bad aspects of this movie are so bad, they essentially undo the good ones. Yes, it's well-animated. Yes, it has some very minor charming parts. Yes, it can be creative at times. But everything else about the film is brainless to a damning extreme. Finding Nemo worked because it was melancholic, tear-jerking and uplifting. It resonated with everyone. Its sequel has almost none of what made the original a masterpiece.
Toy Story 3 (2010)
A huge disappointment - a very overrated movie
The first Toy Story left me totally delighted, and Toy Story 2 is, in my opinion, the greatest film possible, so flawless that nothing can be done to improve it. And that is why Toy Story 3 is, for me, such a huge disappointment. I cannot understand how so many people can praise this movie to such extreme levels. To me, this movie gets a very large number of things wrong, to the point where I can't even watch it anymore. I've tried to let it grow on me, but each viewing only makes me hate it even more.
First of all, let's look at the positives. The animation is great, the voice acting works fine, a couple of early scenes are fun and enjoyable, Lotso's a rather good villain, and the other main characters are also witty in short bursts. However, this is all faint praise, and none of it makes up for the movie's many immense failings. The bad aspects of the movie, unfortunately, are so glaring that they are simply unforgivable. The film's most prominent flaw is this: it's way too dark for its own good. Whereas the first two Toy Story films were able to balance the dark and the light satisfactorily, Toy Story 3 is a depressing, maddening, constantly gloomy bore.
Instead of being a varied and joyful movie, Toy Story 3 frequently shoves ugly and often painful images - such as destructive, screaming toddlers, a very creepy baby doll, a depressed clown doll and an extremely obnoxious, sociopathic cymbal-banging monkey toy - right into your face. The movie seems to have just two colour schemes - saccharine rainbow colours during the daytime scenes and cold, shadowy blues and blacks during night-time ones. As you watch the film, you too fill trapped in Sunnyside, the film's tedious and ugly central location which I wanted to leave almost as soon as its inner hellishness is revealed. It's a prison escape movie with toys, and it just doesn't work in my book. And when it tries to not be a prison escape movie, it comes across as dishonest and inconsistent.
Indeed, the movie frequently tries - and fails - to lighten up the proceedings with a few sporadic jokes. However, almost every joke in this movie hits a brick wall. Watching the toys get battered by Sunnyside's manic toddlers was not like a circus of slapstick comedy, but an excruciating experience that resembles an uncomfortable mixture of child abuse and sexual fetishes. Any wisecracks from the toys as they discuss what they can do to escape feel half-baked and completely out-of-place. Even "Spanish Buzz", one of the funnier aspects of the movie, does very little to make the movie any more charming. The film also suffers from disconcerting jumps in tone; one minute, we are at Bonnie's house where the film is sickly-sweet and syrupy, the next, we're once again drowned in Sunnyside's morose atmosphere and have to look at more scenes of toys being treated like prison inmates.
And when the movie isn't overwhelming the audience with images like these, it recycles previous Toy Story quotes and themes ad nauseum. Hearing a few lines from the first two movies is amusing it first, but it starts to come off as condescending and frivolous, inserted into the movie merely to remind the audience that they are indeed watching a Toy Story movie. And as for the themes in Toy Story 3? They were already explored 100% better in Toy Story 1 and of course the solid-gold opus Toy Story 2. For example, I found Lotso's miserable back-story far less affecting than Jessie's enchantingly poignant one. Toy Story 1 and 2 were constantly intriguing and involving and had plenty of lessons to teach without whacking you over the head with them. Toy Story 3 reuses these lessons and shoves them down your throat like a strict old schoolteacher setting her class an excessive amount of homework. The many side-characters, such as Lotso's goons and Bonnie's toys, are also totally forgettable, with little personality or interesting lines; it's very hard to care about any of them. There's just so little to take away from this movie. It's so overly pretentious and self-serious that it comes off as impassive and reluctant to take the audience on an actual adventure.
And just when the film can't get any more shamelessly pompous, we get treated to a spectacularly overblown climax, one which many fans adore, but I personally detest. It's a scene where the toys are nearly melted in an incinerator, but the film milks it for all it is worth despite the fact that it's utterly self-evident that they are going to survive their supposed doom. It's a repulsively manipulative scene that tests the audience's connection to these characters. And yes, the scene shortly afterwards where the toys are given to Bonnie? I'll admit it's kind of sweet and nice. But it's also cheesy and, much like the incinerator scene, only put in the movie to manipulate the emotions of nostalgic adults who miss their childhood toys and regret throwing or giving them away.
I'm sorry guys, but I just cannot enjoy this movie. It's dark, hideous, icy, limited in its goals, constantly pretentious and just not fun. It's a dull, slow-paced movie about toys trapped and tortured in a dystopian daycare centre. Toy Story 1 and 2 were imbued with copious amounts of joy, wit, intelligence, humour, charm, innovation, messages and memorable scenes. Toy Story 3 makes a few weak attempts at being like its predecessors, and at least in my opinion, doesn't get at all close to being even half as good as them. Toy Story 3 may be considered a masterpiece to some, but to me, it's a largely heartless, lazy, slipshod product with hardly anything captivating, inventive or original in it.
Frozen (2013)
A monumentally incompetent movie
I think it's safe to say that Frozen has steadily become an excellent example of a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Many people worship it as though its existence will lead to world peace, while others, like me, love to tear it to shreds. At first I was reluctant to watch the film despite finding out about the world's adoration for it, but after my Mum bought the DVD, I decided to give it a go. My family and I sat down one day after Easter Sunday to watch the film – and honestly, I've never been more disappointed in my life. I didn't just dislike Frozen. I outright hated it. It didn't delight or move me in any way.
There were so many reasons to dislike Frozen that at the time, I couldn't keep count of them. Watching it, I was so flabbergasted at the sheer ineptitude of it that I eventually gave up hope that it would improve and just sat there, knowing that at some point I'd be writing this review. Granted, I found one, maybe two things that are good about the film – but the negative aspects of the film absolutely demolish the positives here. It fails in almost every department. The story is weak. The characters are one-dimensional. The settings are bland. The pacing is awful. The film doesn't open with a bang, but with a boring musical number that serves no purpose; this is followed up by perhaps the most depressing first few scenes in the history of animation, and the film goes downhill from there. Any scenes of action are tacked on. The troll scene is an abomination. The adventure is clichéd and never truly takes off. The supporting characters are useless and unfunny. The dialogue is forgettable. The climax is predictable. There's hardly any sense of joy because it takes itself too seriously. No scenes really stand out because of how rushed everything is, and loads of questions are left unanswered.
However, in my honest opinion, the film's most grievous hindrance of all is the main character, Elsa. She is so thoroughly unlikable that if I were to make a list of my most hated film characters, she'd easily rank somewhere in the top five. Elsa is a smug, entitled, bitter hypocrite, no better a role model for little girls than Taylor Swift. She believes throughout most of the movie that it's better to hate yourself than have any human interaction, making Anna's childhood miserable in the process and showing little to no shame for it. She then claims through her infuriatingly overplayed song that her ability to "let it go" suddenly places her on a pedestal above everyone else; thus, she's now able to love who she is, but then proceeds to do absolutely nothing to actually improve herself until the plot forces her to like a selfish wimp. She's a useless, cowardly, self-important whiner, and it's this aspect, along with the movie's convoluted snoozefest of a plot and mediocre supporting characters, that makes the movie fall flat.
In my honest opinion, despite all of the praise it has received and the money it has made, "Frozen" is a catastrophic failure and easily the most disappointing animated films I have ever watched. My expectations were massive and weren't met at all. Not counting the pretty decent computer animation – the sole thing about the film that's actually good – It doesn't get anything right (though it still manages to entertain undemanding, princess-obsessed little girls, so there's another positive). It's so broken in so many ways that it's beyond repair; that is, unless one was to re-write the entire thing from scratch. What should have been a magical, optimistic winter fantasia full of lively, comedic adventure and heart is actually a miserable, pretentious, aimless bore, and in my honest opinion, the most overrated movie in the history of cinema.
Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony (2012)
A documentary about bronies, by bronies, for bronies
Bronies are, inarguably, the most hated fandom of all time. Almost two and half years have passed since the airing of the once ordinary and innocent cartoon that they are so hopelessly obsessed with, having now been transformed into an unavoidable, interminable Internet plague, and over this relatively short period of time, bronies have managed to, through a huge number of ways, establish themselves as the definitive example of what a truly disastrous fandom looks like. And indeed, it is an absolutely disastrous cult following. From the very day they crawled out of their filthy 4chan nest it was inevitable that bronies would become what they have become: a ridiculous, asinine and highly disturbing religious movement and a massive laughing stock that only the ignorant can take seriously.
And so in a pathetic and futile attempt to force people to understand them, bronies decided to create a documentary all about their special little fandom. And in doing so, bronies have only proved, via footage, just how bizarrely arrogant and insultingly immature they are when it comes to explaining themselves. This is a documentary aimed at bronies and bronies only; it's nothing more than a notorious piece of shameless propaganda, a silly celebration of the fandom that they adore so much, intending to make bronies look like prominent world-revolutionising heroes when, in reality, bronies are just a big, dumb, Internet fandom built around a television show aimed at primary school children. Now, I haven't watched this documentary all the way through and I certainly don't plan to, but based upon the documentary trailer and various clips of it that I tortured myself viewing (and not to mention the various other negative reviews that this documentary has earned), I can safely conclude that the whole thing stands as another fantastic example of why the MLP:FIM fandom is the worst to have ever arisen in history.
But why exactly is the documentary so bad? Mainly because this documentary is a biased joke that has brought the fandom to an even lower level than it was already at before. Not only does it joyously skip over all of hundreds of bad aspects to the brony fandom (namely the immense amount of diabolical adult content that the fandom gratuitously puts into the fandom experience every single day), but it also (in one of the various clips that I sat through) deliberately bashes the original My Little Pony toys and television shows, and in doing so, bashes franchise creator Bonnie Zacherle. I mean, you couldn't make this up. The documentary literally bashes the very person who brought this now ruined children's franchise into fruition in the first place. The song doesn't explicitly say anything against Zacherle, but by harshly criticising the roots of their stupid little horsey cartoon, bronies have confirmed true the notion that they're a big bunch of egotistical, uncaring hyper-nerds who believe that only their opinion is valid.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. On top of all the laughable arrogance, the documentary features plenty of sexism, sob-stories and selfishness to make the experience like watching something you would see on TLC. It tries to justify the hypocrisy of bronies treating a cartoon as a way of life, and fails miserably because it's just too obnoxiously immature to accept. There is really no point in watching such a stupid, creepy film, especially since it's about a fandom that has become so despised throughout the world, as it can only increase such an intense hatred for them. None of the various parts of this film I viewed inspired me; they only infuriated me. It's a documentary created simply to boost the colossal brony ego whilst alienating everyone else in the process, and in no way welcomes the attention of anybody who isn't mentally dependant on multi-coloured ponies to progress through life. Its very existence is evidence that the fandom is so desperate for outside attention and so endlessly hungry for praise and acceptance that it will inexorably march onward to its doom.