Everything is Subjective

Birds of Prey is lewd, crude…and one hell of a ride.

Margot Robbie stars as Harley Quinn, the ex-girlfriend of the infamous Joker of Gotham City. When Harley emancipates herself by blowing up ACE Chemicals, it sends a message not only of her emancipation, but the fact she is no longer protected by The Joker. Unfortunately, Harley now discovers how many people in Gotham City want her dead.

Rounding out Harley’s adventure to find herself are Dinah Lance/Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), a woman who works as a driver for Gotham’s Mafia Kingpin Roman Sionis (played brilliantly by Ewan McGregor); Helene Bertinelli/The Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a woman out to seek revenge on the Mafia that killed her family years earlier; Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), a police detective with good instincts who is overshadowed by her boss; and Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a young girl who becomes part of the chaos when she swallows a diamond Harley’s after.

The movie is a refreshing look at the Gotham Universe from a character who, even as an anti-hero, is charismatic, funny, and human. Margot Robbie steals every scene she’s in, whether knocking out baddies with a baseball bat or commenting on life as a villain.

Definitely not a movie for kids. While Harley kicks butt, it’s done with guns, baseball bats and a glitter bazooka. There is also a scene involving Roman torturing three people by hanging them upside down while his assistant peels their faces off. F-bombs are also dropped frequently.

Seriously. The best part of this movie was seeing Fat Amy kick her Dad’s ass and the action movie highjinks on the yacht.

And what was with the real quiet girl? Who said Satan left her body and her name is Esther. Wtf? That was completely out of left field.

Since 1979, back when it was known as the Graphics Group, Pixar has been known for its unique stories and storytelling. Whether big name movies like Toy Story, Brave, Cars, or its early shorts, there is heart and soul in every single movie they put out.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Disney/Pixar’s latest movie, Soul.

Soul tells the story of Joe (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher hoping for his big break. Music is his passion and all he thinks about. When an unexpected audition with jazz performer Dorothea (Angela Bassett) lands him a dream gig, everything appears to fall into place. Until Joe accidentally falls into a manhole…and into the great beyond.

Not about to go into the light, Joe finds a way out and finds himself in The Great Before, a place where souls are sent to find out who they are. Souls are assigned personalities and a mentor to help them get their spark. Once a soul finds its spark, it’s given an earth badge and sent to earth to inhabit a body.

22 (Tiny Fey) is a soul who’s been mentored by several famous people from Abraham Lincoln to Carl Jung and she has no intention of leaving The Great Before. When Joe is assigned her mentor, the two strike up a deal: once 22 finds her spark, she’ll give her earth badge to Joe and he can return to earth. But as so often happens, things go awry, with the two accidentally going back together and ending up in different bodies. As Joe races to his gig, he starts to see the world through 22’s eyes and realizes there’s been something missing in his life the entire time.

Abstract concepts are always hard to describe let alone animate. Luckily Pixar is no stranger to this, having touched on the abstract concept of emotions in the 2015 movie Inside Out. Soul follows this tradition and does it well: The Great Beyond is a black conveyor belt leading into a field of stars; The Great Before a sort of daycare center run by entities named Gerry, who, as one of them explains, are metaphysical concepts illustrated in simplified terms so our human brains can handle it without exploding.

Huntress: It's a crossbow. I'm not fucking twelve!

If you’re not a musical theater lover--or even if you are--the musical CATS can be a hard musical to understand/follow. The stage musical itself is set in a junkyard with a group of cats seeming to dance and sing about nothing.

Translating this famous Andrew Lloyd Weber musical into a movie therefore is no easy task.

I wouldn’t say the movie version of CATS is done well, but for what it is, it’s a fun 1 hour and 50 minutes worth of entertainment (or a 1 hour and 70 minutes worth of entertainment if you count the twenty minutes of previews).

The story begins on a view of what appears to be an average city, but the camera gradually pans down to reveal a back alley. A group of cats slink around the alley, curious as a car pulls up and drops a cloth sack in the middle of the group. Inside the sack is Victoria (Francesa Hayward) a cat with no collar and no home. It’s through Victoria’s eyes that the rest of this tale is told.

Victoria is a stand in for the viewer, a cat new to the world of Jellicle Cats. It’s a big night for the cats as each one auditions in the hopes of being sent to the Heaviside Layer, a feline heaven of sorts where cats are given a chance at another life. Through the musical numbers, we learn about the naming of cats and each of the cats who are hoping to move on to another life:

The Gumby Cat (aka: Jenny Any-Dots), played by Rebel Wilson Bustopher Jones, played by James Cordon The Rum Tug-Tugger, played by Jason Derulo

And a host of other cats, with the dangerous and conniving Macavity (Idris Elba) out to capture the cats and claim the Heaviside Layer for himself.

The sets in this film are what I love the most: everything is from a cats point of view and I had fun trying to figure out if the sets were huge recreations, or normal sized but using a camera trick. The world the cats inhabit is also amusing for it’s play on words. As just one example, there is a Milk Bar.

The music itself is good, though in my opinion it doesn’t hold a candle to the Broadway cast version. It also threw me when I noticed two of the cats were wearing shoes. Though I’m willing to forgive this faux pax in the name of Skimbleshanks the railway cat (Steven McRae) having a tap dance number.

Circle, a Netflix original movie,  starts with an interesting premise: fifty people in a room, all standing on individual circles. If someone steps off their circle, they die; if they don’t, a timer starts and a random person is struck down dead. The question? Who gets to die...and who gets to live?

A coworker recommended this movie to me and I find it a fascinating look at human behavior. The movie touches on themes involving politics, race, religion, sexuality, ethnicity and prejudice in all its ugly forms, whether it’s someone yelling their opinions across the circle, or the question of whether or not a pregnant woman has a right to live.

Abominable tells the story of Yee (Chloe Bennet), a young girl whose Father has recently passed away (though we’re never told the timeframe). Yee copes with the loss by ignoring her family and keeping busy over the summer, earning money doing odd jobs so she can take the trip to China her and her Dad were supposed to take.

Her plans change when a Yeti (voiced by Joseph Izzo) shows up on her roof and leads her on the adventure of a lifetime with friends Peng (Albert Tsai) and Jinn (Tenzing Norgay Trainor). And as Yee travels across China, she just may learn her father is not so far away after all.

While cute with a gorgeous animation style and story that talks about the importance of family and highlights Asian family dynamics, I found Abominable to be incredibly predictable. No surprises, no “holy shit!” revelations, just...predictable.

The Journal goes on to write that one of the main challenges involving the F&Ffranchise at this point is making sure everyone’s ego is lovingly, massively stroked, to the point that they now have to figure out how to end every fight without one character losing to another character, lest all three stars somehow forget that they are Actors in a Goddamned Movie, and that none of this shit is real and nobody cares, you are there getting paid millions for an hour and a half’s worth of mindless entertainment.

Vin Diesel is 52. The Rock is 47. Jason Statham is 52.

Spiderman: Far From Home picks up where Endgame left off. A battle fought and won and now Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is dealing with the aftermath of not only the five year blip that left certain classmates older when they returned, but also his place in the world and how he is going to live up to the great Tony Stark. Luckily, a vacation with his classmates seems the perfect solution. Until Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tracks him down. And as anyone knows, you don’t ghost Nick Fury.

I went into this movie with a bit of skepticism; I never saw Spiderman Home Coming and as far as I was concerned, Endgame was the official ending to Marvel’s Infinity saga. Then I saw the trailer for Homecoming that showed how it aligned with Endgame and knew I needed to see it.