Depending on what generation you belong to, Leonard Bernstein is either a name from the distant past, a prodigiously talented musician who wrote the music for “West Side Story,” or the subject of a well-loved name drop in the 1987 R.E.M. song “It’s The End of The World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” “Maestro,” a new film written, directed, produced and starring Bradley Cooper, aims to remind audiences of the complicated man who said, “music, it keeps me glued to life.”
The story of gender roles and genius begins in 1943 with Bernstein’s (Cooper) career making debut as a conductor at Carnegie Hall, filling in for an ailing colleague with only an hour’s notice and no rehearsal. The day before he was a talented but struggling musician, living in a cramped apartment with boyfriend David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). The next day a star is born. He is the toast of New York, lauded on the front page of the New York Times.
At a party he meets Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean actress with dreams of starring on Broadway. It’s love at first sight and Cooper stages their first night together as a romantic fantasy, a ballet in a theatre that is both beautiful and surreal as it morphs from stage bound to involving Lenny and Felicia.
The couple marry, and have three children, Jamie (Maya Hawke), Alexander (Sam Nivola) and Nina (Alexa Swinton), as Felicia turns a blind eye to her husband’s extramarital relationships with men. “One can be as free as one likes without guilt or confession,” she says to him. “Please, I know exactly who you are.”
She is his muse, a catalyst for his best work, who pushes him to perform with passion but his lack of discretion eventually takes its toll. The couple split, but when she is diagnosed with cancer, he returns to care for her in her final days.
“Maestro” is a tenderhearted tragedy, a movie about a complicated marriage and the push and pull between Leonard Bernstein public and private lives. It is not a cradle to grave portrait of the title character. Instead, it’s an ambitious film that disregards most of the usual biopic conventions to delve into Bernstein’s sexuality, creative genius and his marriage to Felicia, brilliantly played by Mulligan.
Bernstein may be the focus, but the contradictions of his life are best viewed through the lens of his relationship with his wife. With a sexual appetite that rivalled his passion for music, Bernstein is a compelling character, and wonderfully played in a career best performance by Cooper.
Any trace of his “Hangover” persona disappears behind an inch of make-up but this isn’t a performance made from cosmetic prosthetics. Cooper digs deep to get into the nooks and crannies of Bernstein’s life, from his playfulness—“I’ve slept with both your parents,” he jokes when he bumps into Oppenheim, wife and baby in Central Park—to his musical passions, to his warmth and self-absorption.
The performance’s pinnacle comes with a vigorous recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in London at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. The nearly six-minute sequence is a powerhouse of performance—Cooper reportedly spent six years learning Bernstein’s moves and conducts a live orchestra on screen—that captures the passion that fuels the character. It is the kind of work that wins awards.
As dynamic as Cooper is, it is Mulligan’s delicate work as Felicia that steals the show. She is a pillar of resilience and gracefulness, as composed as Bernstein is mercurial. Her final moments in the film (NO SPOILERS HERE) are quiet and reserved but devastating. It’s a radiant performance in an already impressive body of work.
When Cooper and Mulligan share the screen their effortless chemistry and the way they look at one another tells us as much about their lives and how they moved through the world as the script. Their dynamics and wonderful performances are invigorating in their portrayal of a creative life, marred and fuelled in equal measure by self-destructive behaviour and fervidness.
“Maestro” avoids most, but not all, of the usual biopic cliches.
It occasionally goes too heavy on expository dialogue to move the story along, is linear in its construction and a scene in which Felicia plunges into a pool, sitting on the bottom to escape trouble at home, is a film staple, but Mulligan, to her credit, makes it work. And while the film doesn’t shy away from Bernstein’s same sex liaisons, it is fairly chaste in the depiction of that aspect of his life.
Still, this is a stylish, passionate movie with just enough depth to both warm and break the heart.
“May December,” a new melodrama starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and now streaming on Netflix, is a sorta-kinda retelling of the tabloid story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle school teacher sent to jail for having a sexual relationship with a sixth-grade student.
In the film, Portman is Elizabeth Berry, a television actress best known for playing a veterinarian on a show called “Nora’s Ark,” who travels to Savannah, Georgia to do research for what she hopes will be a breakout role in a gritty true crime drama.
She will portray on Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), a thirty-six-year-old woman who had a sexual affair with a seventh grader. Caught having relations with the middle schooler in the stock room of the pet store where they both worked, Gracie did jail time, gave birth to the couple’s twins while behind bars, and now, twenty-four years later, lives with the grown-up Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), who is approximately the same age as her eldest son from her first marriage.
Notebook in hand, Elizabeth is a fly on the wall, logging the action like a student at a lecture as she learns about what makes Gracie and Joe tick. But as the couple prepares to become empty nesters as the twins depart for college, Elizabeth’s presence stirs up old ghosts that cause Gracie and Joe to relive the more sensational and troubled aspects of their lives. “She’s getting on my last nerve,” says Gracie. “She’s just everywhere I look.”
A mix of the dramatic and the mundane, “May December” is brought to life by the psychological interplay between Portman and Moore. For example, a make-up tutorial between Gracie and Elizabeth is a stunner. What could have been a TikTok style guide to applying lipstick and foundation becomes a tense transformation as Elizabeth comes one step closer to literally getting under Gracie’s skin. Elizabeth isn’t content with just taking notes, or wearing Gracie’s make-up, she wants to become Gracie.
It is method acting on a Talented Mr. Ripley level as the actress surrenders herself to the role. Portman is terrific, mimicking Moore in interesting, small ways, like adopting her lisp and during the make-up scene, physically resembling her in a truly uncanny way.
Moore has the showier role, playing a complicated woman who is confident in public, but prone to crying jags in private. Moore plays her with a combination of steeliness and vulnerability that can imbue a line like, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” when accompanied by a dramatic music sting, with a deeper meaning that displays the A-type personality that lies at the core of the character.
Both hand in Oscar caliber performances, the kind of above the title work that gets attention, but it is Melton, as a man essentially tethered to Gracie for his entire life, who is most emotionally affecting. Elizabeth’s visit has forced him, reluctantly, to reassess his life and choices, and Melton’s understated, melancholic performance catches his quest for understanding. “This isn’t a story,” he says to Elizabeth. “It’s my life.”
“May December” is, I suppose, a satire of true crime and our fascination with tabloid criminality, of how the worst of human behavior can be exploited as entertainment, but mostly, it is a chance to watch a trio of great performances that draw us into this uneasy story.
The title “Silent Night,” action icon John Woo’s first American film in twenty years, is a double entendre. On one hand it refers to the holiday season in which most of the action takes place, but it’s also a nod to the film’s construction. With no dialogue, it’s a quiet movie about a guy who makes a lot of noise.
The movie begins with a bang as Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), dressed in a Rudolph Christmas sweater and sleigh bell necklace, attempts to outrun two cars filled with gun toting bad guys. The odds are not tilted in his favor, and soon he is in hospital with a bullet-sized hole in his throat. Alive but unable to speak through shredded vocal cords, he’s lucky to be alive but doesn’t seem too happy about it.
Returning home with wife Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno) it’s revealed he is not the only victim. Turns out, on the previous Christmas Eve a stray bullet killed their young son Taylor in the front yard of their Texas home.
Haunted by the loss of his son, Brian hits the bottle, spending his days drunk and disengaged, waiting for the police to get on the case. At an appointment with Detective Dennis Vassel (Scott Mescudi), Brian spots the Most Wanted posters for the men responsible for murdering his son.
It triggers something in him; a fierce need for revenge. He becomes a one-man army, builds up an arsenal, trains in self-defense, does surveillance on the baddies and writes “Kill Them All” on the calendar on Christmas Eve.
Those looking to “Silent Night” for the patented John Woo full-on assault action will be disappointed. After the pulse-racing opening sequence the movie becomes ninety percent set-up, leading to a generic shoot-out so dull it makes “My Dinner with Andre” seem exciting by comparison. A fight scene between Brian and a gang member is promising, but ultimately leads nowhere.
The gimmick, cutting all dialogue save for the odd police scanner buzz, radio news report or the self-defense videos Brian watches, works against the effectiveness of the storytelling. Woo’s poetic visuals are evident, although a tear that turns into a bullet feels a little heavy handed, but the lack of dialogue reduces the characters to one dimension.
Kinnaman’s vacillates between ennui and bloodthirsty, but not much in between. We don’t know anything about him and because he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t even get a cool, “what I do have are a very particular set of skills” speech.
But at least he has some range. The gang members are meat puppets, snarling bullet catchers with targets on their backs and nothing more. This is a basic good vs. evil bullet ballet, but some kind of character work might have gone a long way toward making us care about the people on screen and their stories.
“Silent Night” takes a long time to get where it is going, and once it gets there, isn’t worth the wait.
“Saltburn,” a dark comedy of manners starring “Priscilla’s” Jacob Elordi and Academy Award nominee Barry Keoghan and now playing in theatres, is a titillating “Talented Mr. Ripley” style tale of class, position and desire that is not afraid to get weird.
Keoghan is Oliver Quick, a shy “scholarship kid” at Oxford University who doesn’t quite fit in with his classmates. His jackets aren’t from Saville Row, he lacks their social graces and most notably, doesn’t come from oodles of cash.
When the handsome, gregarious and monied Felix Catton’s (Elordi) bicycle get s flat tire on the way to a tutorial, Oliver comes to the rescue and the odd couple become fast friends. Ollie isn’t exactly embraced by Felix’s well-heeled inner circle, who find him coarse, but they become tight, hanging out at the pub when they aren’t studying.
At the end of the term Felix asks if Oliver will go home for the summer.
“Honestly, home doesn’t mean the same thing for me as it does for you Felix,” Oliver says. “I don’t think I’ll ever go home again.“
His tale of woe, of growing up as the only child to a drunken father, moves Felix who invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s palatial estate.
“Just be yourself,” Felix says. “They’ll love you. It’s relaxed. I promise.”
Except it’s not. It’s the kind of English country home that makes Downton Abbey look like a shack. Priceless art lines the walls, there are butlers and footmen, mandatory jackets at dinner and an oddball collection of aristocratic family members including Felix’s eccentric, self-absorbed father Sir James (Richard E. Grant), casually cruel mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and troubled sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), who tells the newcomer, “You’re just another one of his toys.”
He may be a novelty, out of his depth, but Oliver is drawn to shiny things, the lives of the rich and famous, and will do anything to stay in that privileged world.
“Saltburn” isn’t just a study of the haves and the have nots, it’s a tale of the haves and unchained aspiration. Obsessed with the good life, Oliver will do bad things to get a taste of it.
Keoghan takes risks as the chameleonic Oliver. Whether he is vulnerable, hapless, or a menacing manipulator, the “The Banshees of Inisherin” actor chooses interesting ways to manifest Oliver’s state of mind. There may not be much beneath the surface, other than danger and avarice, but Keoghan, whether he is dancing naked through the grand home or lapping up bath water, keeps the performance and the audience off kilter.
Elordi allows just enough of Felix’s heart of gold to shine through his charming veneer to make the filthy rich character feel a little less dirty and Grant is perfection as the repressed upper-class twit at the head of the family, but it is Pike who steals every scene she’s in. Blessed with the film’s best lines, Elspeth has an off-hand, casual way with a barb that cuts like a knife. When she hears about a friend who has taken her own life, she snorts, “She’d do anything for attention.” These lines are often asides, not central to the action, but Pike makes them memorable.
Unfortunately, director Emerald Fennell, who also wrote the script, doesn’t mine the class satire for answers. She’s content with the black comedy, Oliver’s coldhearted desire and little else. The result is an entertaining film, but a mixed bag. It’s diverting, filled with over-the-top moments and plot twists, but at the end it feels less than the sum of its parts.
On the Saturday November 25, 2023 edition of the Richard Crouse Show we meet two Canadian legends.
First up is stand-up comedian Brent Butt, the star, writer and/or producer of TV shows such as “Corner Gas,” “Hiccups” and “Corner Gas Animated.” He recently added a new line to his resume, thriller author. His debut novel is “Huge,” and it is indeed a huge bestseller.
Set in 1994, the darkly comedic psychological thriller follows a trio of comics on a tour put together by a shady Winnipeg-based comedy booker, through small-town Manitoba and Ontario. The situation goes from bad to worse to downright frightening and violent as they try and get off the road in one piece.
Then, we’ll meet Canada’s sharpest and funniest political satirist, Rick Mercer. His latest project is a book titled “The Road Years: A Memoir, Continued…” It’s a look at the his wildly popular show The Mercer Report, it’s beginnings, it’s end and everything in between, including Every living prime minister. Rock and roll royalty from Rush to Randy Bachman. Olympians and Paralympians. A skinny-dipping Bob Rae. And Jann Arden, of course, who gets a chapter to herself.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
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Director Ridley Scott and star Joaquin Phoenix team to present a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte you are unlikely to find in any history book. Both epic and intimate, “Napoleon,” now playing in theatres before moving to Apple TV+, chips away at the character’s historical veneer to reveal an insecure, lovesick, petulant, pompous man with an emperor complex.
Covering roughly twenty years, the film begins in 1789 with the beheading of Marie Antoinette, the queen who lost her head during the French Revolution as the people rose up to abolish the monarchy. In the crowd is Napoleon Bonaparte (Phoenix), a young Corsican soldier with a plan to reclaim the port of Toulon by forcing the Anglo-Spanish fleet to withdraw. It is his first great triumph, revealing his strategic genius and setting him on a path to become the Emperor of France. “I’m not built like other men,” he says.
The small man in his ever-present, big bicorne hat has none of the social graces of French aristocracy, but his power gets him noticed by Josephine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), a widow whose upper-crust husband fell victim to France’s Reign of Terror. For Napoleon, it’s love at first sight, for her, it’s an opportunity that may one day be accompanied by real feelings. “Has the course of my life just changed, Napoleon?” she asks seductively when they first meet.
Despite not being able to produce an heir and very publicly cuckolding her husband, Josephine has a tight grip on Napoleon’s emotions. “You’re just a tiny little brute that is nothing without me. Say it,” she commands as he nods in agreement. Emotionally she is every bit the tactician as her spouse is on the battlefield and Kirby nails both her ruthlessness and her vulnerabilities.
When his dreams of controlling Europe incur massive loss of life on the battlefield, Napoleon finds himself exiled from the country and woman he loves.
It is hard to decipher exactly what Scott and Phoenix had in mind for “Napoleon.” The battle scenes are undeniably epic, shot on a grand scale while retaining the up-close-and-personal horrors of war. The Battle of Austerlitz sequence, in particular, is horrifying in its execution, brilliant in its design. Scott’s camera captures not only the ambush on a frozen lake, but the cunning mind it took to plan and implement a mission of that size. It’s the kind of thing that could reasonably be expected from the director given the subject.
Less expected is the portrayal of Napoleon, which often borders on satire. The obvious cliches are avoided—he is never seen slipping his hand into his coat, for example—but other choices make for choppy viewing. The general who is a strongman in battle, is also played for laughs in several scenes and I can’t figure out whether the humor is intentional or not.
When he flees the French Directory, the staid committee that governed France until November 1799, his physicality and shrieks of, “They’re trying to kill me,” are more Benny Hill than battleground hero. During another kind of battle, a food fight with Josephine, he throws a hunk of meat her way, bellowing, “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop.” Later, he “seduces” his wife with an odd humming sound that is the opposite of sexy.
Those playful, lighter scenes are intermittently entertaining, but feel at odds with the impassive warrior portrayed in the rest of the film. Perhaps the rumored four hour cut, slated to stream on Apple TV+ after the theatrical run, will add more context, but as it is, these scenes give the two-hour-forty-five-minute theatrical cut a choppy, inconsistent feel as its main character flip flops between stoicism, emotional openness and frivolity.
“Napoleon” will not be accused of being a reverent depiction of its subject, but neither will it be regarded as the definitive portrayal.
You don’t expect a healthy dose of existentialism from a family friendly musical, but the new Netflix animated film “Leo” is not your normal family friendly musical.
Adam Sandler voices Leo, a 74-year-old lizard facing his own mortality. He has lived most of his life in a Central Florida fifth-grade classroom terrarium with his best pal, curmudgeonly turtle Squirtle (Bill Burr). It’s a pretty cushy existence. They are fed and looked after as they spend school year after school year observing the student’s behavior.
The action begins at the beginning of a school term. “Another year,” says Squirtle, “another batch of fifth grade head cases.”
The new year brings with it a new substitute teacher, the hard-nosed Miss Malkin (Cecily Strong). She calls the laptops the kids use “toys,” bans them from the classroom and is not averse to whipping a Ninja star at a misbehaving student. “In a classroom,” she says, “sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”
She also implements a new school project. “I hope everyone has met our class pets, Leonardo and Squirtle,” she says. “This year, every student has to take home a class pet.” In an exercise to learn responsibility, the kids must feed and care for Leo and Squirtle, and return them the next day healthy and happy.
When Leo learns the life expectancy for lizards is 75 years, he feels like the clock is ticking. He decides to make the most of the time he has left, break his lifelong rule, and let the children hear him speak. When the kids take him home, he becomes a service reptile and teaches them life lessons. “It’s about sharing my 74 years of wisdom to help these kids with their issues,” he says, “like breaking up with a drone or having hand me down pants.”
He helps the kids and in return, they give him purpose.
“Leo” is a simple, sweet natured film that plays like a mash-up of “Billy Madison” and “Charlotte’s Web.” It is asinine and sublime in equal measure, an entertaining mix of Sandler’s trademark low-brow humor and poignant life lessons for kids and parents.
The songs are spirited, and often quite funny—Sandler does Sondheim lite with “Don’t cry/it’s really annoying”—and while they may not stick in your head after the closing credits roll, the tunes support the film’s themes of listening and learning. The best of the bunch being “Extra Time,” a funny song that convinces a rich, entitled girl that she is not all that.
The voice work is fun. Sandler does Sandler, both silly and sensitive, and finds a good comedic foil in Burr, while the rest of the cast, including Strong, Jason Alexander, Jo Koy, Kevin James and two Sandler family members, daughters Sunny and Sadie, hand in lively performances.
“Leo” presents a kinder, gentler Sandler than the one who got into an on-screen fight with beloved game show host Bob Barker in “Happy Gilmore.” It could sit on the shelf next to the comedian’s last film, “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” in that it’s a movie that understands young people and how they think. Tackling everything from helicopter parents (or, in this updated version, Drone Parents), insecurity, bullying and coping with divorce, it’s an after-school-special style story that encourages kids to talk about their feelings, and teachers and parents to hear them. It could’ve been preachy, but the messages are delivered with a smile on the face, and a song on the lips.
The only thing worse than someone who says, “I had the craziest dream last night,” and then tells you all about it is… well, hardly anything. There are few things worse than suffering through a disjointed story that barely makes sense to the teller and absolutely no sense to you.
But, just imagine if everyone, family, friends, strangers, told you about their dreams, because you were in them. Every single one of them. That’s the nightmarish idea behind “Dream Scenario,” a new “Twilight Zonesque” Nicolas Cage social satire, now playing in theatres.
Cage plays humdrum evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews. He’s an unexceptional, almost invisible man, mocked by his students and colleagues at work and a sad sack at home with possessive wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and two teen daughters.
His unremarkable life is made noteworthy when inexplicably, he begins to appear in the dreams of millions of people.
He’s viral all over the world, except, tellingly, in the nighttime visions of his wife. Why not? “Because you get the real deal,” he says to her. “It wouldn’t be fair to get both.”
“Why me?” he asks. “I don’t know. I’m special I guess.”
Trouble is, he doesn’t do anything special in the dreams. He mostly just appears in the background, watching unresponsively as strange things happen to the dreamer. “He occupies the space like an awkward guest at a party,” says one dreamer.
As his fame grows, it brings with it some unexpected repercussions for the unassuming Paul. “You know,” says Sidney (Marc Coppola), “fame can come with some less desirable side effects. You should be prepared for that.” At first, he almost enjoys the intense glare of the spotlight, but when his presence in the dreams goes from passive to active, and he becomes as repugnant to the public as he was once popular.
“Dream Scenario” does feature some surreal dream sequences, but it’s not really about dreams. It’s about life as a modern, viral celebrity, on display in the unblinking eye of the public, social media and cancel culture.
Cage plays Paul as a man who claims to love his anonymity, but fights a former colleague for credit when she alludes to one of his thirty-year-old theories in an academic paper, and, when fame comes, he’ll pose with anyone who wants a selfie. He’s tired of being invisible, but wants fame on his own terms. But, as the movie ably points out, fame is a three-headed hydra, untamable and uncontrollable.
It’s a perfect role for Cage’s sensibility. As Paul’s life switches from dreamlike to nightmarish, Cage embraces the tragicomic elements of the role—a man who can’t live up to expectations in real life or dream life—and pulls off a great trick by making a forgettable man memorable.
“Dream Scenario” is a clever, timely film that details everything from mid-life crisis and cancel culture to viral fame and social media marketing in a bizarre, funny and thought-provoking way.
In “Wish,” a new musical-comedy featuring the voices of Chris Pine and Ariana DeBose, Disney celebrates 100 years of animated entertainment with a fairy tale featuring Easter Eggs referencing their classic films. There’s a deer named Bambi, snippets of the Pinocchio theme “When You Wish Upon a Star,” a magic mirror, and many other tributes.
Question is, does “Wish” live up to the tradition of the memorable films that came before it?
“Wish” takes place on the island kingdom of Rosas, a magical place where King Magnifico (Chris Pine) stores the wishes from people all over the world. “Imagine a place where wishes come true,” says Magnifico. “Where your heart’s desire can become a reality. What if I told you that place is within reach? All you have to do is give your wish… to me.”
At the age of 18 everyone in Rosas gives the King their deepest desire, which he then seals up in his castle’s observatory. “I grant the wishes I am sure are good for Rosas,” he says. Once a month he announces a winner and grants their dreams come true.
When 17-year-old Asha (Oscar winner Ariana DeBose) meets the king to apply for a job as his assistant, she hopes to convince him to grant her 100-year-old grandfather Sabino’s (Victor Garber) wish. When the king refuses, Asha uncovers a terrible secret. Magnifico not only deletes the memories of those who tell him their wants, he hoards the wishes to keep the citizens of Rosas compliant.
“King Magnifico has wishes in his castle,” Asha says. “He’ll never give them back. We have to free the wishes and return them to the people.”
To aid in her mission, Asha prays to the heavens and is visited by a cosmic force, a glowing, playful yellow star, named, appropriately enough, Star. “Joy, hope and possibilities, the most loving light,” says Asha. But the king sees the glowing star as a threat
As they join forces to stop Magnifico, the king manifest all his dark magic powers to stop them. “There is a traitor amongst us,” he bellows. “Find Asha.”
“Wish” has all the elements of classic Disney, but falls just short of memorable. The built-in nostalgia should appeal to fans as a centurial celebration, and aficionados will get a kick out of spotting the hidden tributes to the older movies, but the film is stuck in looking in the rearview mirror. It feels old fashioned, a celebration of what came before, from its look, to its storytelling. As pleasant as it is, there’s not much new happening here in its themes of the magic of dreams and power of good to defeat evil.
The mix of 2D and 3D animation evokes the look of Disney’s watercolor animation, but there is a dullness to the color palette that doesn’t jump off the screen. But, surreal talking mushrooms,
a carriage that sprouts legs and a sequence with Ziegfeld Follies style dancing chickens are fun, and inject some much-needed oomph to the artwork.
Character wise, its standard stuff, although Valentino (Alan Tudyk), a talking goat with a surprisingly deep voice earns laughs as he announces, “I cannot swim,” like Greek herald Stentor as he dives into the water. Best of all is the Star, a simple character with very expressive face, which is virtually guaranteed to move a bunch of plush toys as Christmas approaches.
Like the animation, the generic songs don’t perk up the ears, save for De Bose’s powerhouse vocals and Pine’s showstopping, villainous anthem.
As a celebration of 100 years of animation, “Wish” isn’t awful, just underwhelming. It feels like a blast from the past, with both eyes on the past, and none on the future.
