Less of a movie and more of an elevated YouTube explainer.
Taking place during the final years of Boris Badenov's Soviet Union, a perpetually gray-tinted hellscape where the people yearn for Coca-Cola and Levi's jeans, the central conflict is whether a good, honest businessman gets the publishing rights to a video game versus cartoonishly evil businessmen. The credits reveal the main guy and the creator of Tetris are executive producers, which explains a lot.
Roughly 50% of this is contract…
Blondie Cinematic Universe #16 of 28
After a human-interest story about Daisy goes viral, the Bumstead's beloved pooch becomes a famous advertising model and the family's main breadwinner. Dagwood finds himself threatened both figuratively by his declining status in the household, and literally by a couple of goons who show up at his house trying to take the dog away for their boss's moll. As Daisy's manager, Blondie lets the fame and fortune go to her head, and the kids…
This was fun to look at and I regret not seeing it on the big screen. Every evil monkey design is superb; something I really like about this and the first SpongeBob movie is that it feels like most of the budget went to making as many funny drawings as possible. It's too bad the visuals weren't in service of a stronger story: some of the reviews on here mention that it seems like it's missing an act, and stuff…
It was cute and it had Mario in it, what more could you ask for. The characters were delightful, I respect how it crammed together a bunch of disparate elements from various games into a coherent narrative, and I smiled at the small background references and music cues. It's still an Illumination movie so there's some stuff that annoyed me, namely the licensed pop music and the Luma prisoner that the filmmakers seem overly fond of, yet it actually seemed…
