Tag: Jason Isaacs

Scoob!: Like A Weird Caricature of Scooby-Doo

The first animated feature film in the franchise is not quite what I hoped, but it’s not a tragedy.

SUMMARY (Spoiler-Free)

Norville “Shaggy” Rogers (Will Forte/Iain Armitage) adopts a talking dog which he names Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker) as a kid. The two become best friends, and one Halloween night they end up meeting three other children: Fred Jones (Zac Efron/Pierce Gagnon), Daphne Blake (Amanda Seyfried/Mckenna Grace), and Velma Dinkley (Gina Rodriguez/Ariana Greenblatt). The five end up thwarting a fake haunting in a local house and become a team of supernatural sleuths known as “Mystery Incorporated.” 

Scoob | Stream and Watch Full Film Online
A Pup named Scooby-Doo. That’s already a thing.

Ten years later, the group is trying to become an actual business, but Scooby and Shaggy are accused of being dead weight. They go and sulk by bowling, where they are attacked by robots. The team ends up being caught in a scheme by supervillain Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs), resulting in them teaming up with the Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg), his canine robot companion Dynomutt (Ken Jeong), and his pilot Dee Dee Sykes (Kiersey Clemons). It turns out this time the stakes might be the fate of the world.

END SUMMARY

Alright, I’m going to split this review so that I don’t drive people nuts. The first half is going to be me talking about this as a reviewer, the second as a Scooby-Doo fanboy. 

Scoob Review: Scooby-Doo Without the Scooby-Doo – /Film
This movie fears fans more than ghosts.

As a reviewer, this movie has some good points. The animation style really does seem like they just made a CGI model of the original cartoon designs with some era-appropriate updates. There are a number of surprisingly solid jokes for a film like this, including some decent slapstick gags. The film covers both the origin of the team as well as their “greatest challenge,” but it never really feels rushed. I was surprised how much happened in only 90 minutes. The addition of Blue Falcon (or at least his son Brian who takes over for him) allows the movie to put in some creative action sequences, and Jason Isaacs’s interpretation of Dick Dastardly manages to be deeper than the character has ever really been before and yet still a stereotypical villain. Also, there are a ton of cameos from past cartoons and the traditional goofy sound effects that will probably give you some childhood nostalgia. 

Review: 'Scoob' is all we could want in a Scooby-Doo reboot
Nostalgia bomb.

On the negative side, the voice acting is probably going to be divisive. I didn’t think it was really that great, because each of the voices felt more like the actor than the character. The plot is kind of ridiculous even for a kids’ movie, with me frequently going “wait, really?” Fortunately, it’s not too heavy on plot, trying instead for some deeper characterizations between the action and comedy. Unfortunately, it tries them with Blue Falcon and Dick Dastardly more than it does with the actual Scooby team and, honestly, Blue Falcon wasn’t that interesting. He’s the fame-seeking son of the original Blue Falcon, which could be worthwhile as the focus of a movie, but he’s only an ancillary character so most of the scenes feel weird and unnecessary. 

New Scoob! Trailer Introduces Dynomutt and Mark Wahlberg's Blue ...
Admittedly, Mark Wahlberg does play “fame-seeking idiot” pretty well.

Overall, it’s not a bad movie, but it doesn’t ever really come close to the level of Pixar or Into the Spider-Verse or other modern great animated films. If you’ve got kids, it’s probably worth it when this movie comes out on Redbox or rental, but don’t spend the 20 bucks to get it now. 

CheerleaderNinjas - Logo
You could buy Cheerleader Ninjas four times for that amount.

Okay, so, now I’m going to address this as a long-time Scooby-Doo fan. I want you to understand that I have gone out of my way to watch almost every Scooby-Doo property and I am only mildly ashamed of that. Hell, I reviewed Daphne and Velma on here, because I’m that dedicated. So, as a fan, I say the following: It’s amazing that this movie can be so close to getting it right and yet not really get it at all. The film contains a decent reproduction of the original Scooby-Doo, Where are You? theme sequence that I think kind of represents the film as a whole: It’s got the elements, but not the spirit. It’s like the people who made this read all of the Wikipedia entries on Scooby-Doo and the rest of the Hanna-Barbera family, but didn’t watch them. 

Blue Falcon (Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated) | Scoobypedia | Fandom
In contrast to Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, which nailed everything.

Part of why I feel that way is the sort of “sampler platter” this film presents of the Scooby-Doo franchise. We start off with the gang as kids, like A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, then we see the Scooby-Doo, Where are You? Opening play out, then we see the gang meeting up with Simon Cowell, as they would in The New Scooby-Doo Movies, then we see them dealing with robots and superheroes rather than supernatural entities (although we end up seeing an actual supernatural element in the film), which is reminiscent of the later Scooby-Doo shows. This should have given me a nostalgia overload, but instead it ended up feeling like a jumbled mess, because while Scooby-Doo and the gang may have done things as diverse as rebooting the universe by defeating an eldritch abomination, helping KISS stop a witch, participating in the Laugh-a-lympics, or helping Batman fight crime, they never did them all at once. This film starts out with the traditional “meddling kids” model, but then abandons it when the plot actually begins, instead becoming more of an action comedy focused on Dick Dastardly and the Blue Falcon. That means that the characters we see in the first act should be completely out of their element throughout the rest of the movie, but instead they pretty much immediately just shift into the new paradigm without any issues. It just feels off.

SCOOB! Spoiler-Free Review; "A Better Dick Dastardly Story Than A ...
Also, THERE’S NO MYSTERY. It’s Dick Dastardly. He tells you that 10 minutes in.

It also doesn’t help that none of the characters really feel right either, from the characterizations and design updates to the voice actors. I love Will Forte, but he doesn’t really try to deliver Shaggy’s lines like he was Shaggy. Instead, it just comes off as Will Forte trying to act like himself in the 60s. He just doesn’t come off as a “scared hippie.” The same is true for most of the voice actors, aside from Amanda Seyfried and, of course, Frank Welker. It’s weird for me that they decided they had to have four celebrity voices when there already are already four semi-famous actors who voice the current version on television: Grey Griffin, Kate Micucci, Matthew Lillard, and Frank Welker, who has been voicing Fred for 50 freaking years. None of them really feel like the characters they’re supposed to be, from the voices to the appearances to the things they say and do. That extends to most of the other characters as well, with the usually goofy Dynomutt being a snarky jerk, the usually Batman-esque Blue Falcon being kind of an idiot, Captain Caveman (Tracy Morgan) speaking normally and being sarcastic, and Dick Dastardly being an actual genius supervillain as opposed to just a comic badguy. It’s like they’re all drawings of the characters made by someone who had the originals described to them, rather than seeing the real thing.

Scoob!' Review: Once More Into the Mystery Machine - The New York ...
I didn’t want a serious Dynomutt. There’s even an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory about that.

Honestly, I still enjoyed parts of the movie, and I could overlook almost any of this if it were just a better film in general, but it still took it down a bit for me. 

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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Netflix Review – The Death of Stalin: A Dark Comedy About a Darker Time

An amazing cast manages to make light of one of the most monstrous periods in world history.

SUMMARY (Spoiler-Free because it’s history)

It’s 1953, the Cold War is on, and the USSR is run by Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin). Everyone is afraid for their lives, and for good reason, as Stalin’s Interior Ministry Head Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) constantly has hundreds or thousands of people abducted or brutally executed for crimes both real and imagined. When Stalin suddenly passes away from a stroke, Beria starts to scheme to seize control, as does Nikita Khruschev (Steve Buscemi). They both try to gain support from the various members of the Council of Ministers, including the incompetent Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and the Party loyalist Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), the head of the military Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), as well as Stalin’s children Vasily (Rupert Friend) and Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough). If you’ve paid attention in history class, you can probably guess who won. If you didn’t, then this movie counts towards college credit.*

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He’s not delayin’, he’s just Stalin.

END SUMMARY

Comedy is tragedy plus time, supposedly. This film mostly relies on the theory that a massive tragedy, with enough time, will inherently become somewhat funny. Surprisingly, it actually seems to work. The movie doesn’t have traditional jokes or gags, instead just relying on the absurd performances of the cast and the crazy (and probably real) things that the characters do in the name of trying to fill the power vacuum left by Stalin. Part of why it works is that life in the USSR was kind of inherently insane, with everyone doing literally everything that Stalin or his close allies want, regardless of the feasibility. One (true) thing depicted during the film, for example, was the time that Stalin asked for a recording of a concert which had not been recorded, leading to a replaying of the concert.

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I mean, it’s also pretty funny when monsters die. 

The performances are pretty much all amazing, particularly at managing to make their characters seem funnier, and therefore less harmful, than their real-life counterparts. The exception is Beale’s Beria, who is too cruel and threatening to ever seem particularly funny. However, some of the scenes that involve his police force, the NKVD, manage to be darkly comical in a slapstick sort of way. The other characters are all pretty funny if only for their constant disconnects from reality that comes from living in a dictatorship. It helps that at no point during the movie does anyone attempt to use any accent other than their own, regardless of the fact that they’re playing Soviet leaders. Having Steve Buscemi say things like “I’m the peacemaker and I’ll f*ck over anyone who gets in my way” works so much better with his natural Brooklyn accent than a phony Russian one. 

TheDeathOfStalin - 3Hats
Also they have funny hats. 

Honestly, if you didn’t see this movie while it was in theaters, you should really check it out now that it’s on Netflix. I think it’s both funny and perpetually relevant. 

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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*Only at DeVry.

Superman: Red Son – Truth, Justice, and The Soviet Way?

There’s an adaptation of Mark Millar’s famous Elseworld comic and it’s pretty solid, if short. 

SUMMARY (spoiler-free)

In 1934, a rocket landed on Earth from an alien planet… in the middle of the USSR. In the 1950s, the Soviets under Joseph Stalin (William Salyers) reveal that they now have a Superman (Jason Isaacs), which shifts the Cold War arms race from nuclear weapons to superheroes. President Eisenhower tasks Lex Luthor (Diedrich Bader) with stopping the Soviet Superman, which leads to decades long rivalry between the two. As Superman takes control of the Soviet Union, he deals with facing Luthor, interacting with Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall), thwarting the terrorist Batman (Roger Craig Smith), fighting off the alien invader Brainiac (Paul “The Penguin” Williams), and dealing with Lex Luthor’s wife, Lois Lane (Amy Acker). 

Image result for superman red son film
Okay, so, why does he still have the same shape on the logo?

END SUMMARY

If you read the Superman: Red Son comic, then you already know the broad outline of this film, but it does do a good job adapting the story without lifting wholesale. It does cut out a lot of the images and subplots from miniseries, as well as a lot of the Easter eggs and references, but keeps the more prominent ones. Part of the cutting is because it’s short, clocking in at just 84 minutes. I realize that’s the standard length for this kind of story, but it still feels like a sizable subtraction due to the density of the source material. 

Image result for superman red son comic
Millar is verbose. 

The movie does do a good job of shortcutting much of the backstory by assuming that A) you know most of Superman’s origin story and B) you can apply that onto the new origin that this story is positing. I also appreciate how it doesn’t bother to do a lot of exposition on many of the alternate-version characters that the story presents. Batman, for example, is shown to be a child who lost his family due to Stalin’s gulags and blames Superman for not saving them. You don’t need to know how this version acquired all of his skills and armory, just that he has transferred Batman’s typical dedication to the war on crime to a war on Superman. He still has the same flair for the dramatic that the normal Batman has, but with a more chaotic aim. However, it does feel a little less justified in this movie than it did in the original storyline, where Batman’s parents were executed by Superman’s adopted brother, as opposed to blaming Superman for Stalin’s actions. That’s how a lot of the motives feel in this, like they’ve been abbreviated.

Image result for superman red son film batman
Still a cocky son of a gun, though.

The film does a good job of also addressing the core issue of what the “Red Son” version of Superman addresses: What would happen to a Soviet Idealist with unlimited power? Superman in this series is not evil, although he does have fewer qualms with brutality or things that would normally be cruel to the regular Superman. Instead, this Superman is just convinced that capitalism is flawed and that only through Communism can the world be saved. He points out the natural flaws of the capitalist system (slavery, poor people dying from lack of welfare, exploitation of the vulnerable), things that the traditional Superman seems to accept as natural, but instead ignores the flaws of communism (literally forcing people to obey or be neutralized in the name of equality). Even though Superman has noble goals, the means he uses would never be considered by his normal counterpart. 

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Like lobotomizing his enemies.

It’s also interesting to show Lex Luthor as being more heroic than usual. In many modern takes on the character, Lex Luthor views himself as saving the world from Superman, who keeps humans from solving their own problems. This story takes that a step further by making Lex the nominal “good guy,” even though he is still essentially amoral. However, the story does make him a lot more relatable than the comic counterpart by making his relationship with Lois Lane sincere, rather than just nominal. 

Image result for superman red son film luthor
And he starts out with hair.

Overall, it’s a good film, but it just never quite hits the way it should due to trying to cram three issues into less than 90 minutes. 

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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Netflix Review – The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance – The Scariest Thing I’ve Seen in Years

Netflix gives us a prequel to Jim Henson’s film The Dark Crystal and it captures the spirit, imagination, and pants-crapping horror of the original.

SUMMARY

The Planet Thra is a living entity which shares its life force with all of its creatures through the Crystal of Truth, a mass of concentrated energy. Of all of the lifeforms on Thra, the most favored are the Gelflings, a race of small humanoids who ruled over most of the planet through their seven kingdoms. A thousand years ago, two new races arrived on Thra, the Uru Mystics and the Bird-like Skeksis, cracking the crystal in the process. The Mystics secluded themselves and studied the mysteries of Thra while the Skeksis took control of the Crystal of Truth and started to drain the energy from it, causing it to become the Dark Crystal. As the custodians of the Crystal, the Skeksis rule over the Gelflings, who believe them to be benevolent and immortal. However, the Skeksis have discovered that they can make themselves nigh-indestructible by consuming the essence, the life and soul, of Gelflings. It’s up to three Gelflings – Rian, the Warrior (Taron Egerton), Brea, the Princess of Knowledge (Anna Taylor-Joy), and Deet, the underground seer (Nathalie Emmanuel) – to stop the Skekis’ plan to devour their world.

DarkCrystalAoR - 1Castle
Let’s assume this has already been airbrushed on a van.

END SUMMARY (Spoilers for the original film The Dark Crystal)

If you haven’t seen the original film The Dark Crystal, I honestly cannot recommend watching it first. As this is a prequel, I think that it might be better to watch this series and then watch the film to see how eventually the whole conflict resolves. If you have, however, seen the film, then you will know from the beginning that this story wasn’t going to be super happy.

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The part where our leads are basically the last of their kind bodes poorly for their parents.

The Dark Crystal was a pretty dark venture for a movie made by the guy who brought us The Muppets. Jim Henson was pretty honest from the beginning that he intended the film to be terrifying to children. He believed that it should be a throwback to the original Grimms’ Fairy Tales, because, much like Secret of Nimh director Don Bluth, he thought children benefited from being scared as long as they got a happy ending. This theory was fully tested in The Dark Crystal, which starts off with a showing of the horrifying Skeksis and only gets worse from there.

DarkCrystalAoR - 3Uru
As opposed to the mystics who are mostly just goofy.

The Skeksis are one of the best villains ever created for a children’s movie/TV Show, because they’re simultaneously horrifying and cartoonish. They’re essentially giant, clumsy vultures with absurd voices that often act so over-the-top in their indulgence of vice that they seem almost harmless, right until they reveal that they are doing things that would make Cobra Commander blush. In the movie, that includes torturing sentient creatures, eating said creatures, genetically creating monstrosities, and, oh yeah, drinking the life-force of Gelflings to stay young. In the film, it’s implied that they’ve killed and devoured most of the Gelflings for this purpose. This show is the beginning of that process and contains some of the most grim and genuinely horrifying implications of it, ranging from forcing Gelflings to betray their own kind for safety to making it clear that they’re not just eating the Gelflings, but sucking their total souls away and condemning them to eternal torment. Some of the scenes genuinely made me feel scared, despite the acts happening to puppets. Seriously, my stomach churned with the screams.

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They are also just dicks most of the time. Like… total dicks. 

The main narrative of the show is the traditional fantasy fare, with all of the characters going on a quest across the various realms of the world of Thra, with a number of side characters undergoing their own arcs. Much like with the film, a lot of the character arcs actually belong to the Skeksis and their internal politics, particularly the rise and fall of the Chamberlain skekSil (Simon Pegg) from his position as the favorite of the Emperor skekSo (Jason Isaacs). We also deal with the conflicts between the seven kingdoms of the Gelflings, particularly of the All-Maudra, the queen of the race (Helena Bonham-Carter). Basically, this is more a story about the world of Thra and its eventual fate than of any of the characters. Despite this, most of the characters are distinct and well-crafted, even though they’re mostly archetypes. 

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The one on the right with the spoon is even a Paladin.

The puppetry is what you would expect from the Jim Henson Company and the set pieces are wonderful. The sheer size of the world they created and all of the creatures that populate it is a worthy expansion from the source.

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Also puppet swordfights.

Overall, I think this was a great prequel to the film, even if, by implication, stuff’s gonna go bad from here. We haven’t quite gotten to the events of the movie, so they could still make more episodes of this, and hopefully will, but whether they do or not this was well made. I enjoyed it. 

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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