Kidz Bop (concert review)

The Movie Snob expands his horizons.

Kidz Bop: Never Stop Tour.  Well, having a daughter will bring things to your attention that you never even knew existed—like Kidz Bop, which is an outfit that takes popular songs, changes the lyrics as necessary to be suitable for pre-teens, and has a stable of fresh-faced kids re-record the songs for consumption by said pre-teens.  My daughter has a few Kidz Bop CDs, and although the songs are mostly bland, down-the-middle pop, a few are decently catchy.  Anyhoo, the Borg Queen and I recently took the daughter to a Kidz Bop concert, and I must say that I was underwhelmed.  For one, I was expecting to see lots of Kidz Boppers on stage, but only four of them performed in the concert—two boys and two girls.  The whole show was the four of them singing and dancing around for 90 minutes.  No instrumentalists were on stage, so I suppose all the music tracks were pre-recorded.  The dancing was not particularly impressive.  The Borg Queen caught at least one of the performers lip-syncing (or, rather, not bothering to lip-sync).  Anyway, I thought it was not a particularly exciting show, but the numerous pre-teens in attendance (and some of their mothers) seemed to have a good time.

A Pure Clear Light (book review)

A new review from The Movie Snob

A Pure Clear Light, by Madeleine St John (1996). So, Madeleine St John was an Australian author who moved to England and then wrote some novels back in the 1990s. I read three of them back in the early 2000s, and because I remembered liking them I never threw them out in my occasional book-weeding spree. I always wondered why she stopped writing. (Turns out that she died in 2006, age 64, while working on a new novel.) Anyway, I decided to revisit these old friends, and I enjoyed this one. It’s a domestic drama, somewhat in the vein of Jane Austen, about a 15-years-married-with-three-kids couple named Simon and Flora. In the first chapter, we find out that Simon, a TV director, is cheating on Flora, and the novel then rewinds to tell the story of how things came to that pass. I enjoy St John’s style; her chapters are generally very short and dialogue-heavy, and everyone just sounds very British—polite, ironic, and averse to strong statements about emotions (or much of anything else). A subplot concerns Flora’s vague religious yearnings. A lapsed Catholic, she scandalizes thoroughly secular Simon by starting to attend an Anglican church every once in a while, and he is horrified at the prospect that she might revert to Rome. If you like Austen, I think you’d probably like this novel.

Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie

New streaming review from The Movie Snob.

Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie (C-).  This is a new Netflix movie based on an animated TV show that my seven-year-old girl has liked and sometimes loved for a few years now.  The TV show is comfortably formulaic: Ladybug and Cat Noir are superheroes in Paris (France, not Texas).  But they are also ordinary high-school students who must keep their superhero identities secret, even from each other.  In every TV episode, the supervillain Hawkmoth turns an ordinary citizen of Paris into a lesser supervillain that Ladybug and Cat Noir must defeat with their quick wits and super powers. The heroes win, Hawkmoth grouses that next time he will surely defeat Ladybug and Cat Noir, and the credits roll. Personally, I kind of like the TV show.  This movie, however, falls short. It assumes that the viewer has no familiarity with the TV show, which I guess is OK. But it seems to change a few details about how the heroes’ powers work, which will annoy the many viewers who ARE familiar with the TV show. And the movie makers also make the film a musical by dropping in a few instantly forgettable songs for the characters to sing.  So I didn’t really care for it, nor did my daughter.  Stick with the TV show instead.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion (1968). According to Wikipedia this collection of magazine pieces was Didion’s first nonfiction book. Highlights include a piece about the prosecution of some ordinary California woman for allegedly murdering her husband, articles recounting Didion’s encounters with an aging John Wayne and a youthful Joan Baez, and the title piece about the hippies of San Francisco in the spring-summer of 1967. Didion was 33 when she researched that last piece, and her detached way of looking at her subjects’ antics (most of which involved acquiring or using illegal drugs) is somehow very engaging. Some of the other pieces, like one called “On Morality,” left me cold, but on the whole I enjoyed reading this collection (contained in The Library of America’s recent volume of Didion’s writing from the 1960s and 1970s).

Barbie

Mom Under Cover checks in with her first review in a while!

Barbie. Can Greta Gerwig (Little Women) write and direct a compelling Barbie movie? Yes, she Ken! Casting her college dorm-mate Kate McKinnon (Bombshell) as Weird Barbie is a stroke of genius. You’d have to be hiding under a rock (without access to HGTV) to avoid the marketing onslaught of Barbie pink everything. Just go see it already! The movie is a thoughtful and humorous comparison of a matriarchy (or Barbi-archy) as compared to the good old modern-day USA in all its patriarchal glory.  It’s cute; it’s funny; it has commentary about women and their place in our society; and there are some fun cameos. Margot Robbie (The Legend of Tarzan) IS Barbie. Ryan Gosling (Blade Runner 2049)—meh (is he too old for this part?). Will Ferrell phoned it in, recycling his Elf character as Mattel’s CEO. This movie is worth the price of admission—two 👍🏻👍🏻.