Zootopia 2 (2025)

 

I barely remembered the original "Zootopia" film from 2016. That is nine years ago, a long time for a sequel, and for a group of kids, forever. Imagine you saw this when you were eight, and loved it. Now imagine you are seventeen and a new edition is coming out. Do you think kids in their late teens are going to relate to the movie the same way they did nearly a decade earlier? I doubt it. So how is this going to work? It's simple, Make the film completely independent of what happened in the first movie, and that's what Disney has done. 

The original film had pretentions of social relevance, using animals as allegories for human prejudice. If there were a Disney film that you could point to with a social justice agenda, "Zootopia" would be it.  In "Zootopia 2" however, almost all of that intersectional thought has been put into one minor basket, and the film is now replete with animal puns, takeoffs on memes and references to other movies, almost all of which provoke a chuckle without an inkling of Social Justice. This is a buddy cop movie with fur.

The original characters of Judy the rabbit and Nick the fox, are back, and now they are partners in the police department of Zootopia. They are treated as rookies and the accomplishments they made in the first film are memory holed by the other cops so that the new partners can be belittled, and shunted to the side on important police actions. Judy of course is never going to be side lined and Nick is never going to be perturbed by anything. They are the usual mis match of Type A and Gen Z. A new plot crops up and of course, the duo are destined to get involved. It feels surprisingly like a Lethal Weapon film, only without the bloody violence. A ton of secondary characters weave in and out of the story, providing comic relief and plot points along the way. The fact that the new Mayor is the opposite of  a mare, is a joke that will probably be missed, but with Patrick Warburton supplying the voice of the equine executive, who cares? he almost steals every scene he is in with his mane. 

The convoluted plot is really just an excuse to run our heroes through a series of fun chases through the different parts of Zootopia, so that we can get in jokes about as many species as possible. The aversion to reptiles is as close as the movie comes to making any social comment, and the snake images are fun when we get to the climate control McGuffin that powers the plot. Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman are holding onto the original character voices and doing as much as a voice actor can to bring life to the animated critters. 

The movie is good looking, and the music is fun, but if does feel long for a film directed at kids. There is actually more stuff that the adults will appreciate. My very young grand niece and nephew were a little antsy halfway through the film, but their Mom and Dad seemed to be engaged. It is a solid film, but I don't expect to remember it any better tahn the first film, regardless of how much money it makes.

Air (2023)

 

Well you know that you have something solid, when your immediate thought is, "This is the movie I will be comparing everything else to for the rest of the year". It's already April and we have a contender for the best film of 2023. It stars Matt Damon and was directed by Ben Affleck, yea, those guys. They did not write the movie but their presence certainly gives it the vibe of their collaboration from twenty-five years ago. This is a drama, set in 1984 and it focuses on the greatest basketball player of all time with him being a practically invisible character for the story. The plot focuses on a business deal and that hardly sounds like the subject that would make a movie compelling. Also, we know the outcome before the film even starts. So how does this end up working?

First of all, you have intrigue that most of us were unaware of. Getting Michael Jordon to commit to a shoe company that had negligible impact on basketball in the time was an arduous task. The competitors were better prepared and financially able to fulfill the athletes wishes, his agent was aggressively dismissive of Nike's attempt to set up a meeting, and Michaels parents were naturally suspicious of everyone as he is making the leap to the pros. Phil Knight to founder of Nike was a successful shoe innovator but his athletic apparel di not have any cache with the basketball community at the time. What Nike did have was Sonny Vaccaro, a basketball scout for talent in the endorsement industry, who had a deeper understanding of the game than his rivals, and a better instinct about Jordan than anybody outside of his family. 

Damon plays Sonny as a driven gambler with good instincts and a dogged personality.  He is also not an athlete or user of Nike products. He is a middle aged guy working in a rapidly changing environment, but he is never put off by the obstacles in front of him. Damon gives him the conflicting auras of passion and hopelessness.  Fortunately, he is also better able to articulate his vision than any one else. There are two great spots where he has to be persuasive, primarily on the spot. In a sequence where Sonny talks with his friend Basketball coach George Raveling, he learns that Martin Luther King Jr. extemporized the second half of the "I have a Dream Speech", and learned the lessons that you have to read the audience. When we get to the pitch that he makes to the Jordans, he does basically what King did, listen to his audience and speak to their inspirations and aspirations. 

Of course the characters in the film have to be interesting to hold our attention. Vaccaro is a gas, flippantly joking about Nike's dismal reputation in the basketball field, while simultaneously projecting the conviction of his visions. Jason Bateman plays Rob Strasser, the marketing executive at Nike who wants Vaccaro to succeed but doubts his gambler's instincts. His realization that Springsteen's  "Born in the U.S.A." is not quite the world affirming anthem he thought it was is very amusing. The two of them are great exchanging criticism, life lessons and gallows humor. Affleck plays The founder, Phil Knight, who has delusions of eastern insight, moderating his business sense.  Chris Tucker is another executive with a story to tell and a personality to match Sonny when it comes to speaking enthusiastically. Once again, Viola Davis shows off her thespian chops as the gracious but steel minded mother of Michael Jordon. The phone call she has with Sonny, trying to close the deal with a set of unprecedented demands, is another standout sequence in the film.

Those of us who remember those days will recognize the production design and soundtrack of the era. There is great fidelity to the times and the sense of the world. The story is a salute to the vibrancy of an entrepreneurial attitude and the power of capitalism, combined with the right vision and direction. Everting ultimately depended on Vaccaro being right about Jordon, and we know how that turned out. This movie almost does the same thing, we'll see how it all comes out eventually.    

This is Where I Leave You

I have no objections to this movie, it is frequently amusing, there are some interesting characters and the performers all do what is asked of them. I just can't say I liked it as well as I'd hoped I would. With a cast of professionals tossing around cleverly written lines, I should have been more entranced. What I was doing instaed of enjoying the film, was counting all the complications that came up in this single short period in this families life. I know life is complicated, but this was overstuffed.

Every character in the story brings baggage with them to the Shiva sitting that the family goes through at the passing of their patriarch. The widow is a well known therapist who wrote a book about raising kids, using her own children's experience as the basis of most of it. The family has to adjust to the boob job that she has recently had as well. The oldest son and his wife are having difficulty conceiving and the family business, which he runs has been left to he and his siblings so there is that. The daughter has two children, one of whom is potty training anywhere it suits him, and her husband is disconnected from the family and wrapped up in his own business dealings. She also still has feelings for the man she left, who lives across the street and had an accident that left him brain damaged. The youngest son is a screw up who is nearly engaged to his former therapist who is many years older than he is. The other son is going through a divorce after discovering the radio show host that he produces for is sleeping with his wife. That's more than a dozen complications for the story to deal with, but it does not stop there.

Every few minutes another curve-ball is served up for us to digest. Additional characters and complications appear every five minutes and it feels like there was no confidence in the stories that we have, so some more get tossed in. Oh, and the Mom is not Jewish and their dead Father, who was a Jew was an atheist, so all of the trapping of the Shiva are an artificial way to force the family together. Old jealousies and slights get magnified, bonding though drugs and alcohol ensues, and in the end the whole enterprise feels a bit manipulative.

Jane Fonda started working again ten years ago, after a fifteen year layoff from movies but i have not seen any of that work. The last movie I saw her in was "The Morning After", in 1986. She looks great and sounds exactly like I remember her, which means that there was not much to her being in this film except that she meets the age requirement and she loos fine. Jason Bateman is always reliably shlepishly amusing, and he can act a dramatic scene pretty well. There are just too many places where long looks of silence are supposed to fill in the gaps with drama between the quips. "Death at a Funeral", (The British Version) kept the focus on comedy with only occassional moments meant to touch our hearts. This movie seemed to have it down to a science; "joke", "quip", "touching glance" and then repeat.

Tina Fey is underused and then when she is used, it is too often for heart instead of laughs. Timothy Oliphant is a good actor but he is a image from the past that simply represents regret and there is really nothing happening with that storyline. I think Adam Driver will be the next Seth Rogan, the Stoner actor for the new generation. This is the second movie I've seen him in and he is basically repeating that performance. This film feels so familiar even though some of the scenerios are new, that's because it does nothing different with the setting and instead just ambles about. I was an OK amble, just not something you have to see.