Songs Of The Wild

Year: 2016
Director: Christophe Lourdelet & Garth Jennings
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

The Illumination Entertainment brand kicked off with Despicable Me and never looked back, to the point that it seemed like the company was incapable of creating a movie (or, at least, a good movie) without the involvement of the Minions, the adorable little yellow buffoons that ignited a pandemic among local retail stores and toy boxes. Sing is probably their heartiest bid at creating a new brand yet, what with its Zootopia-esque world of anthropomorphic animals, and it more or less works.

If you can’t make kids enjoy a movie about cartoon animals, I hear they’re hiring at the 7-Eleven.

In the plot of Sing, which was engineered in a laboratory to appeal to the widest demographic possible, cartoon animals are holding a singing competition, performing covers of pop songs. This is a show put on in the Moon Theatre by its owner, the roguish koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) who just wants to keep the crumbling building (and his dream of owning a theatre) afloat. Due to a typographical error promising $1000,000 in prize money that he doesn’t have, animals throng the theater, excited to participate.

The contestants have all joined for their own reasons: Rosita the Pig (Reese Witherspoon) – who is paired with the shamefully amusing German provocateur Gunter (Nick Kroll) – wants to prove to her lazy husband and 25 kids that she’s more than just a frazzled housewife; Mike the Mouse (Seth MacFarlane) just wants to be rich and spend the money on the closest analogue to drugs this kids’ film can afford; Johnny the Gorilla (Taron Egerton) wants a career path away from his father’s gang and to raise his dad’s bail; Ash the Porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) wants to use the money to build a recording studio for her rocker boyfriend Lance (Beck Bennett); and Meena the elephant (Tori Kelly) – who initially joins as a stagehand – wants to overcome her shyness and share her gift with the world.

They all want the money, but they find that the power of music and dance that unites them is the most precious prize of all.

And I’m uncannily reminded of how great La La Land is in comparison.

Ask yourself one question: Would you enjoy a movie where animals sing songs? There, you have your answer about whether or not you should see Sing. Case closed. It doesn’t hide what it is, and it’s a totally fine bit of disposable entertainment. If you’re looking for a story though, good luck. The contestants are engaging enough, but they’re a rough assemblage of tropes that indicate characters rather than committing to fleshing them out. Look, shortcuts are necessary if you want the last half hour to be a full concert and keep the run time at a length reasonable enough that children’s attention spans don’t explode.

At the very least, there were wacky little quirks tucked into the corners here and there, enough to keep my attention occupied during the story bits. I especially love the score that calls back to 70’s heist movies whenever Buster pulls his Music Man huckster act. And the fact that they dug up the Beatles deep cut “Golden Slumbers” is certainly a boon to getting me on their side. Then Sing goes bananas during the close of the second act, unstoppering a sequence that’s part-Titanic, part-Final Destination, all massively inappropriate for young audiences, but so bizarrely out of place that it’s truly captivating.

Yeah, Sing is survivable if you have kids who want to see it. Those musical numbers are pretty fun. But if you want to watch a world of anthropomorphic animals where they feel truly integrated in with humanoid society, just watch Zootopia. And frankly, the jukebox musical conceit worked much better in last month’s Trolls. But Sing is a solid stab at non-Minion entertainment that gives me more hope than their abortive Secret Life of Pets, and that’s good enough.

It could have used more Minions though.

Of course, Sing is also filled with fart humor and other juvenile attempts at comedy that stomp allover Japanese culture and African-American stereotypes, as well as throwing in a coded gay frog for a joke that blatantly misses the obvious punchline, so it’s double irritating. But whatever, man. We takes what we gets with these guys.

The stars are charming, the pacing never flags, and you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your time when the credits roll. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for, and you don’t need to dread being dragged to this should the opportunity arise over the holidays. You won’t catch me singing Sing’s praises, but I enjoyed myself.

TL;DR: Sing is a mostly enjoyable bit of silly kiddy fluff.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 810

I Can't Bear It

Year: 2015

Director: Seth MacFarlane

Cast: Seth MacFarlane, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The most striking thing about Ted 2 is the fact that it’s actually marginally better than the original Ted. It’s not like that was actually a high bar to clear, and it doesn’t exactly do the film any justice, but it does put the film in the unique and infinitesimally miniscule pantheon of comedy sequels that improve upon their predecessors.

That’s realty not saying much.

Ted 2 opens with perhaps the most unlikely plot twist of all: Seth MacFarlane getting married. Yes, the toked-up, foul-mouthed, magically sentient teddy bear Ted (MacFarlane, who also directs and writes and may or may not have provided some of the sperm) is getting hitched, to his airhead cashier girlfriend Tami-Lyn (Jessica Barth). A year later, when they decide to adopt a kid to save their marriage (a paralyzingly stupid decision that is not once played as a joke, which worries me), it comes to light that Ted is not viewed as a person, but as property by the state of Massachusetts.

He quickly loses his job, his money, and even his marriage when it is annulled by the state. Together with his best friend John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) - who is still reeling from his offscreen divorce with Mila Kunis – and their lawyer Sam (Amanda Seyfried), a 26-year-old who is working pro bono because it’s her first case, they must prove Ted’s personhood to the court and save his family.

Unfortunately, the deeply weird and covetous Donny (Giovanni Ribisi) has returned and has teamed up with Hasbro executive Tom Jessup (John Carroll Lynch, AKA freaking Twisty the Clown from American Horror Story: Freak Show) to steal Ted back, vivisect him, and mass produce a new line of living teddy bears.

Could you imagine? A world of cloned MacFarlanes running around? That’s straight outta Lovecraft, right there.

So let’s get down to brass tacks. Is Ted 2 funny? The answer to that is a dissertation-worthy quandary, but I’ll attempt to simplify it here: Yes and no.

When the humor in Ted 2 is Yes, it is spot-on terrific. If you’re open to the sort of vulgar profanities that are MacFarlane’s major export, there’s a lot to like. There are four lines that are eye-poppingly funny no matter how you slice in (delivered – in descending order of brilliance – by Wahlberg, Barth, a featured extra, and MacFarlane), four or five laugh-out-loud funny setpieces, a couple decent running gags, and a solid array of the previous film’s Clerks-type conversational that rounds out the pack.

But when Ted 2’s humor is No, it instantly and incurably derails the production. On top of the excessive Family Guy overspill (useless non sequitur cutaways, inexplicable musical numbers, and regurgitated pop culture references abound, though there’s thankfully not too much of the show’s excessive violence or over-the-top, anti-comedic pacing), the film stages an overabundance of messy slapstick (sometimes quite literally), reheated Ted 1 gags, and – oh – unadulterated bigotry.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Seth MacFarlane from Ted 2, it’s that he thinks gay people are terrifying. And that’s he quite possibly never met a black/Asian/transgender/Portuguese person. And that he might not even be aware that Latinos are real. Also, he thinks domestic abuse is hilarious. 

It’s every kind of racist, transphobic, homophobic, reductive waste that spends an entire two hours discussing the topic of personhood but labors to make sure that the only lines given to a black female are exclusively about her being stereotypically black. It’s hateful, damaging, and ugly. And while it’s not as ubiquitously present as some of his other “edgy” work, the film’s faux-progressive subject matter throws each of these moments into sharp relief.

Also he makes a “fifty shades of bear” joke. That’s not even a pun!

There is exactly one good thing about Ted 2 aside from its occasional spurts of comedy the core performers are pretty uniformly terrific: Jessica Barth is the film’s secret weapon, giving depth to a character so one note that her sheet music could be written on a Post-It, and everybody else fares more or less equally well. Amanda Seyfried brings a necessary moral center to the proceedings, Mark Wahlberg is astoundingly adept at navigating tricky comic timing, and I can even grudgingly admit that Seth MacFarlane can deliver a line when he’s in the mood.

Some of the cameos are weak (and it should come as no surprise that returning actor Sam Jones is wooden as a post, considering his track record), but for the most part, everybody in the film feels like they belong in this universe, for better or for worse, even the bit parts (AKA anybody who isn’t white or pretty). The only disappointment is Giovanni Ribisi, who doesn’t turn in a bad performance so much as one that can’t match the effervescent oddness that rendered him the best part of the original film.

I'm sorry, man. I loved you as Phoebe's brother in Friends. And as That One Guy in Every Movie.

So that just leaves us with the odds and ends (which, frankly, is what most of the plot is composed of). The conflict wraps up too fast and fails to reach the inexplicably high stakes of the first film, the camerawork sometimes resorts to sloppy reality TV-esque handheld that kills the pacing of an otherwise slickly edited movie, and the Seth MacFarlane original song “Mean Old Moon” is surprisingly pretty, but hyperbolically useless and self-indulgent from a narrative perspective.

Once again the CGI used to create Ted is flawless, so much so that you forget that he’s not actually a real thing. So congrats to the visual effects crew for putting together the most effortlessly valuable portion of the movie, for which they will get the lowest amount of credit. Hollywood is weird. Stay in school, kids.

Oh, and Ted 2 attempts to wrap things up in a soppy emotional climax that it in no way earns. So, at the end, what I have to say is this: Ted 2 should be half an hour shorter and Seth MacFarlane needs to take a course in basic human empathy, but other than that (and we can’t underestimate the profound hugeness of that “that”), it’s pretty OK in my book.

TL;DR: Ted 2 is doltish and frequently offensive, but glimmers with occasionally pristine humor.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1076