Let me get this out of the way up front: Minions is adorable. We all knew that it was going to be. These weird looking yellow rascals who just love their buddies (be those buddies fellow minions, Tim the teddy bear, or a pet rat found in the sewers of London) have a newborn puppy-like appeal.
Minions features the adventures of Kevin, Stuart, and Bob. Three minions off to find a new "boss." A voice-over at the films' outset (performed by Geoffrey Rush, which is kind of a brilliant casting choice) informs us that the minions have specifically evolved in order to serve the biggest, baddest master that they can find. This adventure takes them all around the world, until they wind up in the company of Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) and her husband Herb (Jon Hamm). They are tasked with stealing the crown of St. Edward from the Tower of London. Adorable hijinks ensue.
I would have expected this film to have the tone of the two Despicable Me movies that preceded it. However, as I was watching I was thinking less of Gru and the girls than I was about last year's Lego Movie. Both films mine their humor out of the interaction between a holy innocent (Emmet in Lego and the minions here) and popular culture high and low. We laugh when the minions stick their head out of a manhole cover in the middle of The Beatles shooting the cover for Abbey Road not because the image is funny, but because we recognize something important is happening that they miss. This joke appears literally dozens of times throughout the film in slight variation. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it isn't. The film seems to be saying something about the way that culture is built by the accrual of cultural material over time, that all culture is, to some degree, a pastiche, but I couldn't quite figure out what because the signal was coming through a bit garbled. It is also not much of a message, too meta (and too obvious) to have much staying power. In this it falls well short of the standard set by Despicable Me 2 (or even of the original Despicable Me). The best animated films address themes every bit as deep and profound as "high" cinema. Inside Out, Up, and even the Despicable Me movies deal with issues of love, loss, home, and family. Ideas that are core to the makeup of human beings. The best that Minions can offer in that register is to highlight the importance of "buddies," with the expected dividend being paid out being commensurate with the choice of emotional thematic.
That being said, this film is going to make something like $500 million at the box office, extending Universal's summer of gluttonous market share consumption. Seriously, when was the last time a studio rolled out a summer like this one? The showing I went to was packed, and the kids seemed to love it. That's an accomplishment that deserves better than the critical savaging the movie has endured at the hands of an angry minority of critics. It is definitely worth a watch.
Rating: 3 / 4
I also had a chance last night to watch Ballet 422 a documentary by Jody Lee Lipes that follows ballet choreographer Justin Peck (who at the time of the filming is preparing his third choreographed piece, and first major performance) for the New York City Ballet.
Observational in its mode, Ballet 422 offers no commentary and very little by way of explanation (what little there explanation we get comes by way of a few title cards), as we watch Peck meticulously prepare for opening night. We watch him in rehearsal, intensely focused and pushing his dancers (among the best in the world) towards perfection. He stops action in one rehearsal on the main stage because a tertiary dancer has not splayed his fingers far enough when his hands are on the stage itself, and when he finds that the dancers fingers don't really stretch as far as he would like he encourages the young man to "work on your finger flexibility." This is a totalized vision.
Peck is a rising star. In Creases, his debut piece traveled with the NYC Ballet in Saratoga Springs, and Year of the Rabbit both debuted to rapturous reviews. In the time since his works have been in high demand, and he has quickly entered into the rarefied air shared by stars like Benjamin Millipied and Christopher Wheeldon. Ballet 422's principal achievement is that it allows us to understand the kind of relentlessly churning perfectionism that could produce such a young, but commanding creative voice.
In another sense, this film is the emotional descendent of something like Yiro Dreams of Sushi, another entry into the burgeoning catalog of documentary films that are fascinated with questions of craft and creative process. This is a natural subject for filmmakers to find fascinating, and I could probably watch docs of this sort indefinitely. The few shots we see of craft off the stage or out of the studio he seems restless, pre-occupied, and distant. There is no indication, in the film, that his life is anything but solitary--and the implication is the common one that the quest for greatness belies the possibility of many personal connections. Distractions, and whathaveyou.
Available on Netflix, Ballet 422 is definitely a worthy choice for fans of dance, or those who enjoy the documentary form.
Rating: 3 / 4
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