Weekend Mullings - Supergirl

Supergirl is like a blend of Star Wars movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, and 2025's Superman, but the proportions are all off. It's not a bad movie, but it's also not very fun.

Milly Alcock is Kara Zor-El, cousin to Kal-El, AKA Clark Kent, AKA Superman. She's surly, disillusioned, turning 21, and celebrating by making a pub crawl across the universe, preferably on planets with red suns, since she can't actually get drunk on planets with yellow suns, like Earth. Her sole companion is her rambunctious dog, Krypto. After space pirate Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) shoots Krypto with a slow acting poison dart, Kara joins forces with the orphaned Ruthye (Eve Ridley) to find this common enemy. Ruthye wants to kill Krem, and Kara needs the poison antidote he carries.

In flashbacks we learn how Kara made it to Earth years after her cousin, and Superman (David Corenswet) does make a brief appearance. The band of space pirates Krem leads are also human traffickers, kidnapping young girls to be breeders for their all male society, but unlike in Fury Road, these girls are never anything but background players in need of saving. And the pubs Kara crawls are filled with all the creative alien scum and villainy you'd expect to find in the likes of Mos Eisley.

Craig Gillespie directs, but it seems producer James Gunn can't resist his usual urge to include Earthly pop songs in a story that only briefly includes stops on Earth. That Kara's record collection and iPod (!) would be filled with the hits of Earth makes sense, but I am not convinced The Girl From Ipanema is a tune that would have reached the song list of an alien lounge singer on some distant planet.

Milly Alcock is really winning as Kara, but she's stuck in a gloomy and repetitive movie that feels like it has been overstuffed with violent dudes - including Jason Mamoa as Lobo, for some reason - as a way of overcompensating for the fact that the two leads are girls. (Well, one is a girl. Supergirl is a woman, and why she's called "Supergirl" and not "Superwoman" does not go unnoticed.) I fear if this movie doesn't do well, this may be the last we see of this Supergirl, which is a shame because I really would like to see what she could accomplish back on Earth with her old cousin Kal-El.

Weekend Mullings - Toy Story 5

After seeing Toy Story 5, I decided to re-watch the previous films (except for the first film, because I've seen it more than any of the sequels, and also the primitive state of the animation just kind of depresses me at this point), and I'll stand by my probably overly simple take that after Toy Story 3, the films should have been re-titled. The first three films are about the toys living in the Andy's world, with a very clear ending to that arc in Toy Story 3. Toy Story 4 and 5 are in Bonnie's world, and despite still containing the core characters (to varying degrees) that have defined the series, they are in a new story era. I wish the titles of the films acknowledged this.

Taken with this mindset I also feel it's easier to forgive some of last two films' shortcomings. It would be impossible to omit Woody and Buzz from the franchise entirely, but the gradual reduction of their screen time together feels less like a loss, and makes more sense in the context of this new era, especially because we've got a little girl as the toys' kid now; of course Jessie should take center stage. 

Bonnie was a pretty shy kid in Toy Story 4, and as Toy Story 5 begins, that hasn't changed. She's still happy to play alone with her toys, but she is also beginning to long for the companionship of other kids, but finds it hard to connect. Knowing so many kids these days are "connecting" (scare quotes very much intentional) via screens nowadays, Bonnie's parents buy her a "Lilypad," thus opening Bonnie up to the world of online gaming, chatting, and cyber bullying. Whoops!

Seeing how miserable the device is making Bonnie, the toys try to intervene, but only manage to make things worse. So they decide to try and connect Bonnie with a real friend, someone who matches Bonnie's level of quirk. This quest also brings Jessie face to face with some traumas from her past.

(Also, there's an army of shipwrecked Buzz Lightyears making their way to Bonnie's town, in a side-story that eventually pays off, but is a bit of a head-scratching distraction until that happens.)

Bonnie is such an anxious little kid, having to watch some of things she goes through can be rough, especially for anyone who's either been that anxious and shy kid (hi!) or has been a parent to one. It's not a surprise to say I cried more than once, Pixar movies often reduce me to a sobbing mess. But I feel like it's been a while since one was so overtly heart-tugging, and even painful to watch at times.

Which is not to say the movie is a total downer! There are plenty of laughs. Greta Lee is great as the voice of Lilypad, the perfect benevolent villain. And I love Joan Cusack's Jessie finally getting to be a hero. Of course Woody does show up to lend his help, but he's an aging Woody, and a lot of laughs are milled out of that. I also really loved the pastel animation used to depict Bonnie's playtime scenarios, an approach I'm really surprised hasn't been used sooner in the series.

Toy Story 5 will never be my favorite Toy Story movie, but I think over the years, and perhaps after the release of even more Toy Storys, it may become the one I appreciate the most, for tackling a complicated and often painful aspect of modern childhood.

Weekend Mullings - Disclosure Day

I want to live in the kind of world Steven Spielberg envisions in Disclosure Day. A world where people not only want to believe, but actually would believe if presented with proof of alien life. A world where reaction to proof wouldn't immediately be an exclamation of "That's A.I.!" or "Fake news!" But if the collective shrug that was the response to the release of government UAP files this past May is any indication, I'm not sure people would even bother looking into a revelation long enough to debate its validity. 

This latest alien adventure from Spielberg is more Close Encounters meets Minority Report than it is E.T. the Extraterrestrial, though it's fun to think that Close Encounters and E.T. actually take place in the same universe as Disclosure Day, and were just two more alien events in our history that have been covered up by covert operators. 

Josh O'Connor stars as whistleblower Daniel Kellner, who is determined to release 79 years worth of secret film, video, photos, documents, and alien tech proving that the United States has had contact with aliens since Roswell. And a lot of that contact was not so great for the aliens. On the run from Wardex, a secret branch of the U.S. government, and its head, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Daniel and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), fight to stay two steps ahead of their pursuers. Meanwhile, Kansas City TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) begins to suspect she has a higher calling after she suddenly develops a kind of ESP where she can read people's thoughts, along with a fluency in Russian, Korean, and an alien dialect. Together Margaret and Daniel soon learn they have a history that explains how they've ended up on the same quest.

Disclosure Day is not a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it definitely has a lot in common with it, including this central relationship between two strangers who are drawn together by alien encounters, and a government that is trying to suppress the truth, though this time that suppression feels more nefarious. And this desire to suppress the truth doesn't just involve people in power. Jane, a Catholic who once studied to become a nun, questions Daniel's intentions because she fears the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe could somehow destroy people's religious faith so much that it could bring about societal collapse. 

Spielberg seems more interested in delving into this existential threat than into anything evil the government might be up to, but frankly I think he ignores just how intertwined stubbornness and faith can be. I'm not sure the knowledge of intelligent life outside of our solar system would make that many people give up the belief that we're still smarter. Or stronger. Or better.

Even if I don't really believe the reality of that faith-based concern, I did appreciate its inclusion, as it allows Spielberg to get philosophical while also giving us a some of the action he's historically good at. There are plenty of well executed chases and action sequences, including a banger involving a car and some trains, to keep this two-and-a-half-hour movie from feeling long. 

Not all of it hits. Josh O'Connor is just not that...interesting? At least compared to Emily Blunt, who gets to be weird, and funny, and vulnerable. And Coleman Domingo spends the majority of the film talking on the phone while wandering around what looks like a 1990's sitcom set, and the ultimate reveal of just where he is doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Disclosure Day is almost definitely not Spielberg's final film - he's already started working on a Western - but it does feel like it could at least be the culmination of the one realm of his career. He lands on a hopeful, and yes, somewhat hokey - in the best Spielberg version of hokey! - message about our place in the universe, and the power of empathy. I may not entirely buy it, but I want to believe it.