The Amazing Maurice is a computer-animated movie based on the Terry Pratchett novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. It's about a young man named Keith (see if you catch the other Partridge Family reference in the movie), and his trained cat Maurice and the assorted trained rats. The rats invade a town, then Keith comes in with his fife and lures the rats away, for a fee. Then they meet the real Pied Piper....
The CGI is wonderful, and this is most definitely not a Disney movie. I would not take very small children to this because it's a little tense in places and the plot is more complicated than you think it might be. I really liked the movie, but then I really like cat movies anyway.
Many newer Disney movies are no longer suitable for children.
It's so nice to be able to see a movie in a theater months after its release, like in the old days.
I went to see Puss in Boots--The Last Wish. I know this is a sequel but I've never seen the original Puss movies. For some reason, the previews caught my attention.
It's a very cute little computer animated movie about a cat living the last of its nine lives. It gets a little slow toward the end, though, and it probably could have had a few minutes edited out. There are a variety of characters to keep track of, and as soon as you forget about one, he or she reappears. Puss was released on Dec. 21, 2022, and I saw it April 2, 2023, 3 1/2 months after it opened.
The minor characters/family of the major characters in the movie Somewhere in Queens are overbearing but basically likeable. However, the three main characters, played by Ray Romano, Laurie Metcalf and Jacob Ward, are not likable.
This is the tale of a high school senior who is a talented basketball player but also very introverted. He has never told the family that he has a girlfriend. A third of the way into the movie the couple breaks up, and he stops doing his school work and is just moping in his room.
His working class family never even thought about him going to college to get a degree and play basketball. When the father realizes that this is a possibility, he persuades the girl to get back together with his son, just to motivate him.
That's all I will write about the plot. The parents were very self-centered at times, although they do reform in the end. The extended family--don't even think about keeping everyone straight--are not only the comic relief but they are very loyal and supportive.
The only good thing about Padre Pio is that when I went to the local theater to see it, one of the nearby Catholic churches had provided St. Pio medals to give to folks who attend the movie.
Padre Pio takes place in a small mountainous Italian village after World War I. There are two separate plots that have little in common except that they take place in the same town at the same time.
The first plot makes more sense. It's about the serfs who are paid very little and are basically slaves to the rich people who own the land. I'm not sure what the peasants "do." In one scene they try to steal fruit off the trees in an orchard; in another, they are moving rocks from one part of the field to another (building a wall?). A group of young men want to form a Socialist party branch and take over the land. There is an election in which all the men in town vote for the mayor. The Socialist candidate wins, but the rich people say the vote is incorrect and when the peasants start yelling and protesting, the local police shoot them down.
The second plot is about a monk who has visions and flashbacks.
After I saw the movie I researched it via Google. I found lots of information about Padre Pio, who is now a saint and lived until the 1960s, and almost nothing about the town's Socialist revolt.
What the point of this movie is beyond me.
Everything in Elemental looks like marshmallows. Everything is round and squishy. It's also a beautiful animated movie which I enjoyed very much.
There are four groups of people who live in Element City--earth, air, fire and water. Earth people look like trees. Air people are clouds, and they have a Quidditch-like championship game during the movie. The main characters of the movie are fire people--Burner and Cinder and their daughter Ember--and a city inspector named Wade Ripple, who is water and has a large family.
What you think will be the main plot--that there is a city-wide conspiracy to eliminate the fire people via water leakage--isn't what happens. The plot is how Ember and Wade can get together.
I very much enjoyed this movie!
I was never a fan of the 1989 animated movie The Little Mermaid. There were other Disney animated films that I like much more.
But the new version of The Little Mermaid really impressed me! The past few Disney movies I've seen have had such vivid colors and were just beautiful. TLM 2023 is also that way.
The plot was a little slow in the first half hour but the rest of it moves quickly.
As for the umpteen complaints about this movie:
1. I had no trouble seeing what was going on under water. It wasn't nearly as dark as I expected.
2. The movie is more than 2 hours long, but it didn't seem like it to me. I suspect that at least 10 minutes of it were the miles-long closing credits, which I didn't stay to watch.
3. The colors of the characters' skins, both human and mer-people, were not a problem. I thought the closing scene with the mermaids from all over the world was stunning, and it made me cry.
Now if I could only get "Under the Sea" out of my head....
This is what I THINK Asteroid City is about.
A TV network in the 1950s is telecasting a live play called "Asteroid City." The segments about the writing and production of the play, including behind the scenes of the sets, are in black and white. Presumably the play is broadcast in black and white as well, but we the audience see it in color.
The color part is stunning, set in the California desert with all the people and the set pieces in 1950s pastels.
The first two acts have been written, but I got the impression the third act was supposed to be improvised, because the playwright had not finished it. The play is about a tiny town that grew up around a crater where an asteroid had landed 6,000 years ago. Every year a local foundation sponsors a science contest and gives the winner a scholarship. The contestants and their families are in town, staying in the motor court, as well as a traveling C&W band, a photographer and his four children, and various others. During the play an alien comes and takes the asteroid with him as everyone watches. The third act is very confusing because I think it is being made up as the actors go along.
For National Cinema Day, Aug. 27, ($4 movies all day) I went to see The Miracle Club, a sweet and surprisingly short little movie set in Ireland in 1967. It's about a group of women and a little boy, all of them with various emotional and physical health problems, who take a trip to Lourdes, France, to rest in its healing waters.
Of course, the emotional problems and the women's dislike for each other overshadow any physical ills they might have. The film also has a subplot about their families coping at home, especially their rather sexist husbands.
The film is not as funny and is more sad than the trailers make it out to be, but don't let that deter you. It stars Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates, and there are four generations of a family you have to keep track of.
I think that A Haunting in Venice is the best of the three Agatha Christie/Hercule Poirot movies that Kenneth Branagh has made. It was a little slow at times but there were some scary scenes that made you jump. The plot takes place on Halloween after a seance, when Poirot tries to solve why some of the people at the seance died soon after.
This is also the saddest of Branagh's Poirot movies. It does not have a happy ending.
It's a shame that such a beautiful and unusual science fiction movie such as The Creator is doing so poorly at the box office. I thought it was wonderful.
I'm not going to go into the complicated plot that takes place in the future between 2065 and 2075, but it's mainly about a little girl and the main character's attempts to protect her. It's about humans, robots and semi-humans called simulants that look human but operate through artificial intelligence.
The plot jumps back and forth between North America and Asia, and filming took place in the United States, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Each of the Asian countries has a different look. The outdoor scenery is breathtaking, and will remind you of Lost Horizon (both movies and whatever your imagination envisions while reading the book).
I hope that the cinematography gets nominated for an Academy Award.
Part of the reason I liked the movie so much is that it is a completely new story, not a sequel, not part of a series, definitely not a comic book. (I suspect that is why the movie isn't doing well.)
The only actor in the movie I recognized was Allison Janney, who has become very good at playing annoying, sometimes villainous characters.
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