Hello I’m the Child Friendly Blog Complainer, I’m like the normal Blog Complainer but I’m…. um……um… less cynical, yeah let’s go with that. Every once in awhile we’ll look at some movies intended for children, old and new, but mostly new. I shall review them and give them a score out of 10 and a recommendation. Today’s movies came out months ago everywhere else but not where I live because the little kiddies need to be able to watch them during the school holidays. Hey, have you ever considered us grown ups who want to stay connected with the rest of the world, huh! Have you!
Anyway, let’s move on. So today we have an indie movie who decided to recreate Winnie The Pooh in Live-Action form and an obscure kid superhero team making their animated debut in the DCEU. Alright, let’s begin so scroll down to continue.
Teen Titans Go! To The Movies
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies was eh. What were you expecting from the guys who made this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPlKVgSjCyU. It’s interesting that even though this movie is aimed primarily at very young children the plot of this movie seems to be more aimed at people like me who hate Teen Titans Go and people who have a good grasp on all the recent superhero movies.
So the plot is Robin wants his own movie because every superhero is getting their own movie these days, which makes more sense for Marvel but not DC because their universe is on the verge of collapse with all the recent news but, whatever, it’s a kid movie. Kristen Bell plays Jade Wilson (don’t spend too long on the name) as a movie director directing all the DC movies and she tells the Titans if they want their own superhero movie they need an arch nemesis like Slade. This version of Slade is not voiced by the menacing Ron Perlman because that might frighten the little kidlets. Instead we have Bojack Horseman, because he’s funny.
It’s very predictable, even most of the jokes like for example Robin has the brilliant idea to eliminate all the other heroes by going back in time and changing their origins so they’re the only heroes left and of course it goes horribly wrong. The problem with most of these jokes is they drag on for way too long to the point that you wish the movie would move along. Oh yeah and The Teen Titans themselves are annoying and I was kind of rooting for them to die at the end.
Let’s move onto some positives like the only great thing about this movie is the animation which looks amazing and I think the increased budget helps a lot. The music for the most part I liked. I hated The Teen Titans rap and it made me wish I was watching it at home like with the TV show. But I liked the Teen Titans theme as score music and Michael Bolton’s Upbeat Inspirational Song About Life was really good. This movie is also kind of like The Lego Batman Movie in that it makes fun of the universe except it’s not as clever as that movie, like they got Nicholas Cage to play Superman because he was supposed to play Superman back in the day. Too bad he wasn’t in it that much to see Cage’s true potential, I guess it’s like with Billy Dee Williams as Two-Face in the Lego Batman Movie. (Take what you can get.)
Back to nitpicks. I feel like this movie has a hard time trying to be a dumb kids movie and a fun parody movie because it can’t tackle both. It expects little kids to get all the references even though they’re only 3 to 5 years old and it expects the grownups to be as dumb as the Titans when the super obvious twist reveals are being played out in front of us. Teen Titans Go writers you can’t have it both ways. Unless you try harder of course but it’s a kids movie so you’re not expected to try.
From here I’m going to spoil the last act of the movie so if you haven’t seen it yet just jump to the last paragraph or maybe leave the review altogether.
Robin figures out what I figured out 10 scenes ago – that Miss Jade Wilson is actually Slade Wilson. Slade has been planning that he wants every Superhero to have their own movie so he mind controls them and then the world so he can have an easier time getting to the airport. Don’t think too hard about superheroes dropping everything to make Cashgrabs movies because it doesn’t make any sense. I was more annoyed that this movie was trying to be more complex and then it became every other bad kids movie. I was expecting something like Slade is a part of The WB Executive board and his plan is to mind control the world into praising the DC movies and abandoning the Marvel movies.
But I’m guessing WB is already getting too much hate and this ending is way more simple to get the message across because it’s a kids movie and their minds aren’t smart enough yet to realize how average our movie is. The last act of the movie reminded me of the final battle of every DC movie in recent memory except this one is less serious. But the real highlight of the movie is in the post credit scene where it’s revealed, after not mentioning this show once in the whole movie, that the 2003 Teen Titans are coming back and I couldn’t give a damn!
Spoiler Free Final Verdict: Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is a movie for everyone but I think does a poor job at finding the middle ground. It’s a boring movie that is sometimes kind of funny and at other times too immature for my liking. 4/10. Parents if you’ve got young kidlets I think they’re better off watching something that is clever and well written like the majority of the old Disney movies. Or it’s a good movie to take the kids to if you need to catch some extra ZZZ’s; I think I should do that when I retire. If anyone is reading this in 2073 I’ll be hosting a Teen Titans Go Sleep-a-thon on my holographic 4D flying space bed, Rules are first one to wake up loses.
Christopher Robin
Getting old sucks! That’s the message I got from Christopher Robin and I should drop everything to go to some fantasy world with my childhood teddies. Following from Toy Story 3, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and every new Star Wars movie, Christopher Robin is like an Nostalgia Strip Club where you sit down and watch some Disney Exec show off all this sweet sweet nostalgia and you people keep begging for more every time. Would you like me to show you how much the Beauty and the Beast remake made.
The plot of this movie has the human child from the Winnie the Pooh books saying goodbye to his teddy bear friends because he’s going away to boarding school. (At least he did better than Andy who didn’t even bother to have a goodbye party.) Years later Chris is all grownup and he is happily ignoring his wife and daughter in favour of business stuff. (You know, business stuff, what grown ups do!) He declines to go on a family holiday, saying he has to work, and from here he is reunited with Winnie the Pooh.
At this point in the story I probably interpret it differently to you but here’s what I think happened next. So the cute clumsy teddy bear crashes at Chris’s house, marking his territory, then the next day he manipulates his old friend into helping him find his way home. Along the way the bear’s evil plan comes together by slowly making the man shift personalities as he increasingly becomes annoying and continuously tells him he’s wrong by saying something that doesn’t make much sense on first hearing. Once they arrive at Pooh’s home he brings his friends into it by making the man lose his grip on reality and eventually going mad altogether and now that he’s home with his teddy bear friends he’ll have no choice but to play with them forever!!! But again it’s all interpretation you know.
How I see it, the only way to enjoy this movie is if you’re in the following categories: A child so that means you don’t need to read this review because you’ve made up your mind before even watching this movie. Or you’re an old fart like me who watched Winnie the Pooh before even being potty trained. Yeah I remember a time when I watched Piglet’s Big Movie every night before going to bed and vaguely playing with Tigger toys until I got conscious enough about what I watched. I bet you’re wondering did I actually enjoy Christopher Robin and if you said no then your kind of right.
Christopher Robin is pretty much what I thought it would be. Bland and forgettable. There isn’t really that much I’ve got to say about it except it’s a big fog of nothing. But I’ll still quickly sum up everything I do have. All the human actors are bad they all look like they desperately want out of this picture, especially Hayley Atwell, and sometimes Ewan McGregor looks like he has just lost the plot. (Don’t blame him.) The more interesting side is Winnie the Pooh and friends and…..they tried. This happened for me with the new Beauty and The Beast movie where they tried so hard to be like the original movie that it made me wish I was watching the original and every new addition is just forgettable. Same here pretty much because all the characters look very wrong when they’re live action. I think the setting has something to do with it because The Hundred Acre Wood looks like it takes place in the middle of a Swamp or in a haunted forest, you know where little kids should play with their teddies.
Since it’s also not animated it’s more limited to the grim real world look. Oh yeah let’s have a look at these characters while we’re at it. Kanga and Roo look the best out the characters because they sort of look like their original cartoon form. Piglet is okay too but one of the worst I think is Tigger who looks like he’s a rejected version of some kid who grew out of their Tigger toy. Then there’s Rabbit and Owl who look terrifying. My last complaint is the plot is very artificial, like nothing happens naturally, everything is forced. For example, Chris meets up with Pooh because he wanted to avoid a conversation with his annoying neighbour, instead of rushing into his house he rushes to the park where Pooh happens to be. Pooh ends up in London just because and I think the most ridiculous thing of all is when Chris’s daughter takes all the teds to London on her own with no money or any adult of any kind just so she can give her dad his important papers. I am shocked that this made it to paper but I’m more shocked that none of these grown men question where this girl’s parents are!!
I probably should stop thinking about this movie because it was obviously made for me and I’m being too critical and I should turn off my brain. So there you go. If you want to enjoy Christopher Robin turn off your brain, if you want your score to be higher than 5 out of 10, if you want to waste a few hours on the most bland safe movie ever then it’s a definite watch.
Hope you like my new look, I wanted look more child friendly in this article, My grumpy old look wasn’t really working for me in this particular article. So this was just an experiment so if you liked it then tell me by liking this blog and I don’t need any comments this time around because the only comments I expect to get is that my little avatar looks like he’s currently staring deep into the bowels of your soul. (Don’t worry it was much worse before and I’m not showing you because I want to spare you from nightmares you’d have for the next fortnight.)
Until Next Time, Child Friendly Blog Complainer, Sleep Tight and Goodnight.
