Film Round-Up: Turning Red, Dog and The Adam Project
Let’s talk more about film.
Turning Red
Meilin turns 13 and discovers she has inherited the family curse of turning into a red panda anytime she suffers a extreme emotion. Pixar’s latest is a fun one. This is a coming of age story for girls and considering there’s far fewer of this variety than for boys, it’s a good thing. I really like it as well. It is very hyperactive and definitely feels like the first film I’ve seen which is for the TikTok generation, which did irritate me at times, but for the most part it is great. Meilin is very likable and her attempts to control her panda is a fun adventure which in the classic Pixar way, becomes an allegory for both puberty and a heartfelt look at the relationship between mother and daughter. I probably can’t get the most out of being being a white male adult, but it was still very fun and touching like all the great Pixar movies, even if it probably doesn’t make the A-List.
Dog
Channing Tatum is ordered to take a military dog on a cross country trip to her handler’s funeral. This film has no idea what tone it needs to take. At first, it feels a bit like boomer’s Facebook rant. It spends twenty minutes with Channing Tatum in Portland with no intention of furthering the plot. Instead, it wants to rant about young liberals and about how awful and stupid they are. It gets back on track then and it then takes a while to actually work out what it wants to do. Does it want to be a darker attempt to do a guy and dog buddy movie in the style of K9 and Turner and Hooch or does it want to do a film about two beings, one human and one dog, broken by combat trying to recover from it. With a few more goes on the script where it decides on a tone and cuts out that entire Portland bit, this could have been great. Instead, it’s just going to be the Channing Tatum dog movie where girls looking to see the leading man topless might be surprised by something much darker. He is topless in it though, so there’s that.
The Adam Project
Adam is a young boy whose just been suspended from his school but he ends up with a big mission after discovering his future self crash landed in the barn outside. Welcome to another film where Ryan Reynolds plays himself! I think I maybe getting tired of it now as well. The only real issue with this movie is that it never elevates itself above being fairly generic. It’s a sci-fi film that has some action in it but nothing particularly great and Reynolds goes about doing various Ryan Reynolds things. And in this film which really wants to have this big emotional undercurrent of Young Adam missing his recently deceased father, it doesn’t really work. I’m also wondering if the complex time travel plot will be a little too much for kids to understand and that this film falls in the same pit as Lightyear did. The Reynoldsaissence ever since Deadpool has been very fun but it’s time for him to show another side of himself and stop starring in forgettable movies like this.
