Erin Watches: non-Marathon movie roundup

I’ve seen a range of movies recently-ish that were not part of the Sci-Fi Marathon. Gonna knock out a whole bunch of mini-reviews in one post.

Conclave

Political thriller about the election of a new Pope, based on a book published in 2016 when that was reasonably topical. (Pope Francis was elected in 2013.)

The book was better!

I read it a while ago (well, listened to the audiobook), so the details are fuzzy, but I remember getting a lot more depth and intrigue out of the main character’s POV in the narration than what we see on-screen. I also remember finding it believable/convincing which character gets voted in as Pope in the end, while in the movie it just felt like “he gave one super-generic inspirational speech and suddenly everyone changed their minds.”

The reason I read it in the first place was, it came up in a recs thread for “media with canon [identity] characters.” Happy to say it held up fine, even if you were pre-spoiled for that reveal.

Spellbound

CGI animated movie about a princess who goes on a quest to de-curse her parents.

The opening is really strong. Our heroine starts into what sounds like a typical, stock, Disney-princess I Want song, only to cut to “my parents are monsters, like, actual monsters, for real.”

There was some point in this movie, I don’t even remember what the specific moment was, just that I had the clear thought of “oh, this is a Story About Divorce,” Anything that didn’t really make sense in the context of this specific plot/characters/setup, it was because it was there to be A Lesson for the real kids in the audience dealing with divorced/divorcing parents.

Biggest example: there’s A Lesson about “kids, it’s okay to acknowledge that you have bad feelings, what matters is how you deal with them.” Halfway through the movie, our heroine sets herself up to learn this lesson, when she announces “oh, I don’t have any bad feelings.”

Except…she’s already expressed and recognized a bunch of bad feelings? In a pretty healthy, open way? She sings about being frustrated with her monster-parents’ behavior, and sad that she’s lost the happy, peaceful life they had before. The inciting incident of the quest is when she reaches out to some trusted adults, explains her situation, and asks for help! (The adults in question: two magic forest oracles, who are basically a couple of gay married Jewish grandpas.)

When the oracles come to visit, they’re even surprised to find the parents are literally monsters, and our heroine wasn’t just “being a dramatic teenager” when she said so. Really seems like this should be the setup for A Lesson about “kids, sometimes adults won’t acknowledge that you have legitimate bad feelings about real problems, here’s how to deal with that.” But no.

The movie’s cute, it just felt like was put together from scenes that were developed at different times for different visions of what the final product was supposed to be, and they didn’t mesh well enough.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Adult Lydia gets reunited with Beetlejuice at just the right time to disrupt her famous ghost-hunting TV show…but also to disrupt her impending marriage to a publicity-seeking creep, help rescue her exasperated teen daughter from an attempted ghost-kidnapping, and generally cause a bunch of fun chaos.

I got into Beetlejuice as a kid watching the early-nineties cartoon version, where Lydia is a cute weird goth kid and the title character is her wacky supernatural bestie…

…so the original movie was pretty off-putting to watch in comparison. Had a good time with this one, though? Not sure if the sequel was really more fun and less sleazy, or if my threshold for being bothered by sleaze is just higher these days.

I’m glad they made it. Some of the proposed BJ sequels over the years have just sounded like dumb gimmicks (apparently “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” was on the table at one point), but this story felt worth telling. And they kept the low-tech practical aesthetic of the original, lots of puppets and claymation rather than CGI, which was a good choice.

Inside Out 2

Riley hits puberty, which means she’s unlocked new emotions! Especially Anxiety. One of the emotional morals here is “planning for bad things is useful to a point, but trying to anticipate every possible bad thing will just give you anxiety attacks.”

The other emotional moral is “repressing the experiences you don’t want to think about will stop you from being your authentic self.” One of the new bonus figures we meet in the depths of Riley’s head is her Deep Dark Secret, which ducks back into the shadows rather than revealing itself. She spends most of the movie desperately trying to impress a Cool Older Girl, a high-school hockey star who happens to be extremely attractive.

I’m not surprised that Disney executives kept giving Pixar editorial notes about “this is coming off as too gay, fix it,” but I am disappointed. Cowards.

Belle

Very-loose anime adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Our heroine hasn’t been able to sing IRL since her mother’s death, but when she realizes she can handle singing through her VR avatar in a virtual online community, she accidentally becomes the biggest pop star in the metaverse. Also, makes friends with a monstrous VR avatar (who turns out to be a sad boy with an abusive parent IRL).

The soundtrack in this is amazing. Including the English-dubbed versions of the vocal tracks. Not long after watching, I went and legally purchased the OST, and have not regretted it.

The art is nice, especially in the lovely VR world. And the plot is…a perfectly serviceable excuse to deliver the soundtrack.

There’s a scene where Belle on her virtual stage encourages her audience to sing in chorus, and they do: characters who are spread out in separate physical places all around the world, coming together online. At least some of the production happened during COVID lockdowns, so it turns out the voice actors in that scene also had to record all their parts alone in separate physical places, and the sound editors brought them together. That must’ve felt so fulfilling.

Venom: The Last Dance

Everyone who said “the parts with Eddie and Venom having wacky road-trip adventures were fun, the rest of it was bad” was correct.

I had heard complaints about “the writers did Knull dirty, he’s such a good cool villain in the comics and they wasted him in this movie.” Didn’t have any attachment to the comics version, so I was prepared for Knull to be fine, just not the perfect-adaptation curb-stomping megaboss his fans were hoping for. And…nope! Judging solely by the contents of the film on its own merits, the writers did Knull dirty, he’s wasted in this movie.

Final note:

Other than Conclave, which involves an all-male religious order being sequestered away from the entire rest of the world, all these movies pass the Bechdel test! Most of them easily, you don’t even have to think about it! Venom was the only one that struggled (all the others have girls/women as main characters), and even there it managed to have multiple women as scientists, who exchanged some lines at work that weren’t about Venom/Eddie.

It was so refreshing to look back over the post and realize that.