Since we know how important at-home-entertainment is for all of us – every week we do a little “what’s getting released on DVD/on demand/Netflix this week” round up for you, with nice little excerpts of our past reviews and more. You’ll love it. Trust us. This week we scope out weird movies where people turn into animals.
OUT THIS WEEK & PROCEED WITH CAUTION:
- The Incredibles 2. Here’s what we said in our original review:
A lot has happened in the past fourteen years. No one had a smartphone in 2004. Our country was enmeshed in the Iraq War. I still had hair. Fourteen years ago is also when The Incredibles premiered. It was the heyday of Pixar, when they could no wrong. More importantly, the superhero genre did not yet dominate the pop culture landscape. This was before The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cinematic universes. An original superhero film still had novelty, which part of what made The Incredibles such a delight. Now we have Incredibles 2, released months after Avengers: Infinity War. This sequel continues the story as nothing has changed in the past fourteen years. That is to the film’s credit, and also its detriment.
- The Happytime Murders. Here’s what we said in our original review:
Within about the first ten minutes of The Happytime Murders, an octopus jerks off all of a cow’s udders in the backroom of a sleazy puppet-run porn shop. This is the most gracious choice this damned movie makes. The viewer has two options after this one-cow bukkake: realize the rest of The Happytime Murders is going to be this unfunny and leave, or stick around for more of the same fluff. And hey, if you like that joke, there’s plenty more puppet jizz and murder to sate your humorless existence!
OUT THIS WEEK & WORTH YOUR TIME:
- Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Here’s what we said in our original review:
In the last three decades, the Mission: Impossible franchise has become the most consistent action series, and that’s thanks mostly to Tom Cruise. With these six films, Cruise has cemented himself as one of the last true Hollywood stars. Cruise isn’t just content with making a great action franchise, he’s determined to make an everlasting piece of entertainment. Cruise never half-asses a single moment in this franchise, risking life and limb for the sake of keeping the audience in awe, the lengths of which haven’t been seen since the silent films stars like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
INSTANT VIEWING OF THE WEEK (transform into animals edition):
- Sorry to Bother You (now on Hulu). Here’s what we said in our original review:
The writer and director of Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley, has a lot on his mind. His film has all the hallmarks of an ambitious debut: the film is bursting with energy and ideas, as if Riley is worried he will never get a chance to articulate them. His point of view is resoundingly moral: we watch Cash compromise his values, his body slunk in defeat for the opening act, only to improve his posture with economic success. His fiancee Detroit (Tessa Thompson) is a good sounding board, although she is way more than just a love interest. She is an artist with work that is deliberately challenging and subversive. By the time we see her one woman show, complete with animal’s blood, we are basically ready for anything.
- The Lobster (now on Netflix). Here’s what we said in our original review:
After the cold, antiseptic stories writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos presented in his 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth and his follow up Alps, love seems like the last topic the shocking director should ever tackle. In Dogtooth, sexual relationships became mechanical and routine; they were a means to an end, a release where one was needed, a problem that needed solving. To that extent, his latest film The Lobster makes perfect sense for the director’s aesthetic, as we enter a world far more restrictive and a film grander in premise than anything Lanthomos has attempted before.
- When Animals Dream (now on Netflix). Here’s Katie Rife over at The AV Club:
Comparing When Animals Dream to Let The Right One In is both lazy and pertinent—lazy because both films bear the surface similarities of being slow, Scandinavian, and atmospheric, and pertinent because both use their young female protagonists as living metaphors for primal fears. But where Let The Right One In’s terrors were those of childhood, When Animals Dreamdeals with adolescent female sexuality, and the fear of such. This, also, is not unique. But by de-emphasizing the “moon cycle” bit and adding a family narrative, When Animals Dream congeals its influences into something intimate, intelligent, and occasionally quite haunting.
That’s it! Get streaming, kids.
