![]() They're also the sons of "Buffalo" Belzer (Ving Rhames), the overseer of some corner of Hell, and they harbor a longstanding dream of making an elaborate amusement park for the souls of the damned, one that's more fun than Belzer's current torture chamber that's also an amusement park. ![]() They're a pair of demons voiced, respectively, by Keegan-Michael Key and Peele, and the puppets playing them have been conspicuously designed to look like Key and Peele. Note that I have gotten through both the A-plot (Kat coming to terms with her parents' death) and one of the many B-plots of Wendell & Wild without even mentioning Wendell & Wild. So she is simultaneously dealing with the fresh hell of returning to the site of her childhood trauma while also taking up the gauntlet her parents dropped, resisting the Klaxons' corrupt scheme. And they have their newest planned prison set for the exact same town where Kat has just been sent, the exact same town where her parents owned a brewery before their deaths. In fact, the program is a fraud being put up by the Klaxons, Irmgard (Maxine Peake) and Lane (David Harewood), owners of a chain of private prisons, who are hoping to make money on both sides, first by extracting charity dollars and second by making sure those charity cases end up heading straight to prison after school has failed them. And this has resulted in a lot of time spent in juvenile detention, which has made her a candidate for a new social program sending troubled youths to high-performing private schools, allegedly in the hopes that having access to the best teachers and whatnot will help break the cycle of incarceration. This has left her even less receptive to the usual "there, there, these things happen" boilerplate than the average grieving adolescent, and this has manifested in a surly, destructive lashing-out at the world. To give as streamlined a version of the story as I can: Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross) is a tremendously gloomy 13-year-old orphan, whose parents died in a car accident that she was pretty much directly responsible for causing. To be blunt about it, Wendell & Wild is downright exhausting, a movie that had largely worn me into submission before it was even a third of the way through its 105 minutes, a point that I believe corresponds to its third or fourth act break. Just less of it, fewer plotlines and fewer characters anchoring them, not so many different aesthetic impulses and less flagrant capital-D Directing! for the impulses that were left behind. Did I wish for ten movies half as bold? Aye, and that's at least in part because half of Wendell & Wild would be just about the right amount. But it is unmistakably, even objectively, an overstuffed film. It is fearlessly creative in a way that animated features are uniquely bad at being, and I wish we had ten movies half as bold as it every year. Wendell & Wild is certainly not a bad film - far from it, it's overabundant with narrative conceits and stylistic flourishes, and whatever else we can say about it, it is obviously and gloriously the work of somebody with a voracious hunger to do stuff, push the medium every which way, experiment with all of the new toys that have been developed in his absence. To judge from the finished product, those 13 years were full of a great many ideas, and Selick was unwilling to part with any of them. And so it is only now, nearly a decade and a half-later (and almost exactly seven years after the project was announced) that Selick has finally been able to give the world Wendell & Wild, his fifth feature in 29 years, based on an unpublished book he wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman, from a screenplay he wrote with Jordan Peele (whose production company, Monkeypaw Productions, has footed the bill for the project, along with Netflix). Both of those things and a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee, as they say, and after leaving Laika in the same year he helped birth it, Selick has been busily failing to get one project after another off the ground. I'm not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio's history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that's where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features of the 21st Century and still the high-watermark for Laika.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |