Pinocchio (09.23.22)

 

Why? That’s the one and only question that goes through my head whenever I sit down to watch the latest live-action Disney remake. Is it yet another cynical and calculated attempt to turn nostalgia into cold hard cash? Is it merely an expensive ploy to renew the copyright for the original animated film somehow? Or is it a genuine reimagining that actually has some artistic merit and something meaningful to say? Well, I don’t know what Pinocchio (2022) was, but it certainly wasn’t this last one.  

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto, there’s really no reason for Pinocchio to be as bland as it is. I won’t lie and say that the 1940 original is anywhere near my top 10 list of Disney animated features, but I will admit that it at least has its charms. The 2022 version, on the other hand, mostly involves watching Hanks mumble unintelligibly in a bad Italian accent at pockets of thin air that eventually had a puppet or a kitten painted over them in post-production. None of the new material feels necessary, and all of the familiar stuff simply makes you want to go watch the superior original instead. It’s a boring, overlong slog where stuff just kinda happens at a glacial pace that no child could possibly enjoy. Jiminy Cricket is mostly unnecessary, and Monstro is now a tentacled sea monster for some reason. The moral at the end is also completely different than in the original, opting for a lazy cliché about being yourself that doesn’t really fit with what we just watched.  

The only good things about this reimagining is the admirable job Joseph Gordon-Levitt does at voicing the iconic Jiminy Cricket (and Keegan-Michael Key as Honest John is pretty good, although he’s not around for long), and the fact that Pinocchio himself could have been infinitely more terrifying than he ended up being. This is accomplished by making him a bit more cartoony than his surroundings, which makes him less creepy but also makes him seem more… not really there. Not once could I trick myself into believing that Pinocchio was an actual denizen of the world that he was supposed to inhabit. Instead, all I constantly saw was a humanoid CGI creation that was superimposed onto a background. Better that than a semi-realistic Chucky-esque nightmare, I suppose. But just like the “live action” Lion King before it, any flimsy reasoning behind this film’s existence goes out the window when a scene rolls around that has the CGI characters and no one else. We’ve seen this movie already. It came out over eighty years ago. Another admittedly good thing about the film is that it made me chuckle a couple of times, but jokes that land are still pretty sparse.    

So let me ask again… Why? Why fix what ain't broken? At least this time the soulless rehash is free with a Disney+ subscription. But do you know what else is? The original. Skip this one and go watch that one again instead (or wait a few weeks for Guillermo del Toro's infinitely more interesting-looking reimagining of Pinocchio on Netflix). You won’t be missing much.  

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on September 23rd, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/ 

Not Okay (09.16.22)

  This film contains flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist. Viewer discretion advised.”   

This is the disclaimer that appears at the very beginning of Not Okay, and it is one that turned out to be more literal than I originally anticipated. Surely this is a dig at those misogynistic souls out there that dislike female protagonists when they are “too strong” or “too independent,” right? Nope. As it turns out, the main character of Not Okay, Danni, is actually pretty dang unlikeable. This warning also turns out to be a good indicator of the film’s mixture of comedy and heavy themes, a concoction that often works quite well but occasionally left me wishing that some of the commentary offered was more than skin-deep.    

When our protagonist devises a relatively benign lie in order to score some easy internet points and be seen for once, things quickly spiral out of her control when that lie leads everyone to believe that she is a survivor of a terrorist attack. Happy with the attention that she receives from a social media-obsessed society, Danni goes along with it and plays the victim. Things turn out about as well as you’d expect. It’s an uncomfortably salient premise and one that is often hard to watch, although writer/director Quinn Shephard and star Zoey Deutch do an admirable job at making things bearable, if rarely pleasant. There are very few likeable people in Not Okay, but just enough humanity and humor pokes through to make the viewer at least invested in what happens to Danni, if not cause them to actually root for her at times before the reality of the horrible thing she is doing comes crashing down.   

And come crashing down it does. Not Okay pulls no punches when the truth inevitably comes out, and any comedy that has existed before then is quickly shooed out the door in favor of some hard-hitting and downright depressing consequences for everyone involved. There is a glimmer of hope at the end as Danni decides to do something solely for someone else’s benefit for a change, but ultimately Not Okay is a downer of massive proportions.    

The biggest issue I had with the film was that it didn’t commit to or explore some themes as much as it could have. We find out early on that Danni has some underlying mental health issues that help lead her to make the poor decisions that she does, but the film never really explores this. Similarly pushed to the side is Danni's friend and actual tragedy survivor, Rowan (played my Mia Isaac), who I wish we would have spent more time getting to know. And while Not Okay does a pretty good job of juggling the ideas of Danni as a victim and Danni as a villain who willingly does her part to perpetuate the toxicity of social media, it occasionally drops the ball and asks us to empathize too much or too little.    

Ultimately Not Okay does an admirable job at saying something important, even if the journey to get there is ultimately unpleasant. When it comes to snapshots of where we are as a society and where we need to go, you can do much worse.    

Not Okay is now available on Hulu.    

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on September 16th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/