Sugar Street (book review)

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Sugar Street, by Naguib Mahfouz (published 1957).  This novel concludes The Cairo Trilogy, and the story of the family of Cairo merchant Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. I think maybe nine years have passed since the events of the previous book, Palace of Desire.  And in this book, time passes quickly, and long intervals sometimes pass unremarked between chapters.  Some characters experience tragedy.  The patriarch himself starts the book at the beginning of old age and poor health, and as the chapters skip by he becomes first homebound and then bedridden.  His children and grandchildren struggle to find their way as Egypt’s political scene evolves and World War II erupts.  I found it a very thought-provoking story, perhaps because I’m not such a young fellow myself.

Twenty years of blogging

How about that? I started this blog (albeit on the blogspot site rather than wordpress) twenty years ago yesterday, with a couple of test posts. Three days later I posted my first movie review. Unfortunately I hated the movie (Talk to Her), but those are the breaks! I originally corralled a few friends into writing reviews for the blog as well, but that eventually fell by the wayside. Production has slowed down in recent years as life changes (and a certain pandemic) radically curtailed my trips to the cinema, but if I’m reading the stats right this is post number 2,043 on the site. I now seem to post almost as many book reviews as movie reviews. But I still enjoy blogging, so I guess I’ll keep it up for a while yet. Thanks for reading!

-The Movie Snob

Palace of Desire (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob.

Palace of Desire, by Naguib Mahfouz (published 1957). This sequel to Palace Walk continues the story of the family of a Cairo merchant, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. Five years have passed since the events of the previous book. The first part of this sequel focuses on the youngest son, Kamal, who has become a dreamy idealist and who infuriates his father by deciding to go to a college for teachers instead of choosing a more prestigious career. Then the focus shifts to Al-Sayyid himself, who has been abstaining from his previous life of nightly debauchery but then decides to revive it. Then the focus shifts again to the eldest son, Yasin, who decides to marry the divorcé next door despite his father’s displeasure and his stepmother’s outrage.  Then it’s back to Kamal, who has a philosophical bent but is tortured by love for a beautiful young woman from a very wealthy family.  The story moves forward more quickly than the first volume of the trilogy, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger.   I look forward to finishing it off.

Palace Walk (book review)

The Movie Snob embarks on a trilogy.

Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz (published 1956). A while back I read a glowing review of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy of novels, of which Palace Walk is the first, and I learned that Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. So I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of the whole Cairo Trilogy, and I slowly read this first part, which clocks in at 533 pages. I both enjoyed it and found it very interesting. It is about a prosperous Egyptian family in Cairo and covers a couple years encompassing the end of World War I. To modern American eyes, family patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad must come across as a tyrant and hypocrite. At home, he rules his wife and five children with an iron fist, enforcing an atmosphere of sober piety. But in public life, he is a genial extrovert with a million friends, and every night he goes out to drink, carouse, and dally in extra-marital affairs. The first half of the novel focuses on the personal side of family life, especially the thoughts of Al-Sayyid’s submissive wife Amina and the hopes of his cloistered daughters Aisha and Khadija.  At the center of the novel, Aisha becomes the first child to marry, and then the focus shifts to the way political turmoil in Cairo (caused by the budding movement for independence from the British) touches the family. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to the family, and whether Al-Sayyid’s domestic rigidity relaxes any, in the rest of the trilogy.

Rifftrax: Suburban Sasquatch

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Suburban Sasquatch  (B).  This is another DVD release from some of the creative forces behind Mystery Science Theater: 3000.  (See, e.g., Missile to the Moon.)  The film being riffed is a 2004 do-it-yourself, straight-to-video project about a homicidal Sasquatch that goes on a murder spree somewhere in “north eastern America.”  At first, I didn’t think the riffing was all that funny, but the ludicrousness of the film (did I mention that this Bigfoot can teleport? or how much terrible CGI “blood” geysers out of his victims?) held my interest.  And eventually the riffing kicked into gear and had me howling with laughter.  One weird thing—the movie does have some profanity, which the Rifftrax folks left in, but when the riffers themselves used profanity they bleeped it out.  Strange.  There’s also a short bonus feature called “Talkin’ Rifftrax” that is best skipped.

Sing 2

A new review from the keyboard of The Movie Snob.

Sing 2  (B-).  I missed the first installment of this potential series of animated flicks, but I don’t think it hurt my understanding of what goes on in this sequel.  The setting is Zootopian, meaning it’s the real world, but populated entirely by talking animals who are, for all practical purposes, human.  Our protagonist is an ambitious and wildly optimistic koala named Buster Moon (voice of Matthew McConaughey, Bernie), who is the impresario of a successful theater in some small town.  Moon dreams of taking his local success of a musical to a big city that is an obvious stand-in for Las Vegas.  Through a series of improbable events, he persuades Mr. Crystal, a mobbed-up hotel owner who happens to be a wolf (voice of Bobby Cannavale, Annie, doing his best Alex Rocco impersonation), to hire Moon and his ragtag troupe for his hotel’s theater.  Unfortunately, (1) the musical Moon promises to deliver hasn’t been written yet, and (2) Moon lands the deal only by promising he can get reclusive rock star Clay Calloway (voice of Bono, a member of the popular band U2) to appear in the show.  Naturally, Moon has no connections with Calloway whatsoever.  Other notable participants in the movie include Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions) as a maternal pig and Scarlett Johansson (Hail, Caesar!) as a take-no-guff porcupine.  But I think I got most of my laughs from Miss Crawley (voice of the film’s director Garth Jennings, Fantastic Mr. Fox), who is a decrepit old chameleon with a glass eye, and Porsha Crystal (voice of Halsey, A Star Is Born), the hotel owner’s spoiled daughter who elbows her way into the lead role in Buster Moon’s musical.  It’s a little long and a little over-stuffed with subplots, but it’s not bad.

Noelle

A last gasp of holiday cheer from The Movie Snob.

Noelle (B).  I was previously unaware of this 2019 release, but apparently it was the first live-action original movie made for the Disney+ streaming service. (IMDB.com says it got a limited theatrical release in the U.S. too.) Anyhoo, it’s a cute if predictable tale in which Santa Claus’s son Nick Kringle (Bill Hader, Maggie’s Plan) inherits the family business but then abdicates shortly before Christmas.  This prompts his sister Noelle (Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air) to hitch up the sleigh and head to Phoenix, Arizona, where Nick is believed to have gone. Hijinks ensue. A few familiar faces pop up in small parts, like Shirley MacLaine (Bernie) as an elf that Noelle drags along on her adventure, Julie Hagerty (Lost in America) as Mrs. Claus, and Michael Gross (Tremors) as the head of the council of elf elders.  I thought it was an enjoyable-enough exercise, but I read one reviewer who cautioned that one subplot could be triggering for some kids—it involves a boy whose Christmas wish is to spend Christmas with both of his recently divorced parents, one of whom has apparently remarried.

A Royal Corgi Christmas

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

A Royal Corgi Christmas (C-).  My mom was, and my sister is, a big fan of the long-running soap opera The Young and the Restless, and I watched the show for a while myself.  So there was no way I was going miss this new Hallmark Christmas movie starring Y&R’s Hunter King and a bunch of adorable corgis. Alas, the movie is not as good as others in the genre. King (A Girl Like Her) plays a celebrity dog trainer (?) who gets hired to train a corgi that the prince of some small, fictitious, but very British-seeming country has gifted to his mother, the queen. Why did he think this was a good idea, since she already has two corgis? I’m not sure, but the movie is only 84 minutes long, so there’s not much time to waste on explaining stuff. The eleventh-hour complication in the budding romance between prince and King is raised and overcome in about three minutes. At least the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome!

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon  (B-).  This is a DVD from early in the history of Rifftrax, the main successor to Mystery Science Theater: 3000.  It’s not a bad way to spend 77 minutes.  The film being riffed is a cheapie from 1958 in which five Earthlings travel to the Moon (in a missile). There we learn that weird rock monsters stalk the surface and a small society composed entirely of women inhabits some air-filled caves.  It’s a lame film, but the riffing is pretty good. Tommy Cook, who played a young crook in Teen-age Crime Wave, plays a young crook in this film too.  No bonus features, which is a real time-saver!

The Viking Heart (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World, by Arthur Herman (2021).  I read some good reviews of this book, but I have to say if you want a popular history that really digs into what it was like to be a Viking, this is not it.  There is plenty about the Vikings in the early part of the book, but it feels kind of superficial, then it keeps going and going about what the Scandinavians were up to during the Middle Ages and then up to the present day.  The latter part of the book has a lot of information about Scandinavian immigration to the United States and lots of very short stories about famous descendants of those immigrants, such as Knute Rockne and Charles Lindbergh.  Fine, but not great.  And I thought the author’s constant references to “the Viking heart,” and how said heart evolved over the years, became tiresome. For a better read, check out Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXIII

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXXIII.

Daddy-O  (B).  This episode starts with a lackluster short called “Alphabet Antics,” but the main event is pretty funny. Our hero, who goes by “Daddy-O,” is a young (?) fellow who sings pre-rock-and-roll-style tunes in night clubs and who loses his driver’s license after losing a street race to a sassy bleached-blond gal. Things turn serious (?) after Daddy-O’s best friend dies in a suspicious car crash, and our hero gets mixed up with some drug runners while trying to play detective. Surely the most remarkable thing about this low-budget dud is the fact that it is the first movie scored by composer John Williams of Star Wars fame. Extras include a competent short feature about the company that made Daddy-O and the opening and closing host segments when the episode aired on “The Mystery Science Theater Hour.”

Earth vs. the Spider  (C+). This episode starts with a better-than-average short called “Speech: Using Your Voice,” in which some old geezer lectures us about improving the way we speak. Funny riffing—and probably not entirely bad advice to boot! The main event is a 1958 creature feature in which a giant tarantula terrorizes a small town. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly hilarious either. The making-of bonus feature isn’t bad. Interestingly, the director actually got permission to shoot the movie in Carlsbad Caverns, but they wouldn’t let him bring any extra lighting inside, so he had to shoot some footage of the Caverns and then somehow paste his actors into the scenes.

Teen-Age Crime Wave  (C). This is a so-so episode featuring a 1955 film about juvenile delinquency—not that the “teens” involved in this crime spree look particularly young or anything. Anyhoo, a good girl gets mixed up with trigger-happy hoodlum Mike and his moll Terry, and most of the movie is the three of them hiding out in a farmhouse trying to avoid a police dragnet after Mike shoots a police officer. I actually got sort of curious about how the movie would turn out, which doesn’t often happen with MST3K! Also, the actress who plays Terry (Molly McCart, A Kiss Before Dying) is kind of cute. The disc is packed with three extras: the movie’s original trailer, a short documentary about producer Sam Katzman (who has 239 producer credits on imdb.com!) that was pretty interesting, and a short interview with the movie’s star, Tommy Cook (The Vicious Years), that really wasn’t all that interesting.

Agent for h.a.r.m.  (C).  So, I gather that this was made as a pilot for a hoped-for TV series about spies. And then when it didn’t pan out, Universal bought it and released in 1966 as a movie, hoping to ride the wave of James Bond’s popularity.  Well, no such luck, I guess.  The movie is terrible, and the riffing is only so-so.  The female lead, Barbara Bouchet (Casino Royale (1967)), is a bright spot as the beautiful femme fatale.  Here’s something funny—I watched the whole movie thinking that the actor playing the James Bond wannabe had appeared as a guest star in the original Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth.”  But when I researched it on the internet, I learned that the “Assignment: Earth” guy was someone else—but Barbara Bouchet guest-starred in the original Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name.”  How about that?  The only extra on the disc is a short interview with male lead Peter Mark Richman—who did appear once as a guest star on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  So I wasn’t entirely off base!

The Wine-Dark Sea (book review)

A new review from The Movie Snob.

The Wine-Dark Sea, by Robert Aickman (2014 ed.). I read somewhere that Aickman (1914–1981), a British author, was a master of the creepy ghost story, so I picked this paperback up for $6 at Half-Price Books a while back. It contains eight stories, and while they aren’t bad I wouldn’t say that any of them struck me as particularly great either. Some are set in Great Britain, while others are set in more exotic locales (a Greek island, Venice, rural Sweden). “The Inner Room,” about a creepy old dollhouse, is pretty good. “The Fetch,” about a fellow whose family seems to be haunted by Death personified, is also pretty good. And “Never Visit Venice” is kind of fun to read with Google maps up on your computer; as the protagonist takes a weird gondola ride through nighttime Venice, the author calls out so many landmarks that you can actually trace his progress through the city of canals.

Disenchanted

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Disenchanted (C-). Fifteen years after the charming and clever Enchanted, we get this disappointing sequel.  In the original, we started with a generic animated fairy-tale sequence, but things got twisted when a wicked stepmother sent the sweet-natured heroine through a magical portal into real-life New York City. Amy Adams was, of course, excellent as the wide-eyed and innocent Gisele.  In this sequel, 15 years have passed, and Gisele has become disenchanted with her life in the real world. So she instigates her family’s move to the suburbs, where her teenaged stepdaughter Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino, Unschooled (TV movie)) is miserable and where Gisele herself quickly but unintentionally antagonizes local queen bee Malvina (Maya Rudolph, Bridesmaids). Frustrated in her quest to find a fairy-tale life in the real world, Gisele turns to magic, with predictably chaotic results.  The musical numbers are not memorable, and the plot is sort of a yawner. Co-stars Idina Menzel, Patrick Dempsey, and James Marsden return from the original but have little more than bit parts.  It is kind of fun watching for little visual homages to past Disney features. Does Disney do this in all its movies, and I just haven’t noticed?

A Christmas Story

The Movie Snob revisits a classic.

A Christmas Story (B+).  I hadn’t seen this 1983 film in a very long time, but we recently dusted off the old DVD and dialed it up for family movie night.  There were a few vulgar words that I might have wished had been excised, and perhaps just a little too much hinting that Santa Claus isn’t real, but, on the whole, it was as enjoyable a holiday treat as I remembered it.  Peter Billingsley (The Break-Up) is simply excellent as young Ralphie, the boy who yearns to get a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas but seems to be doomed to disappointment as adult after adult—including Santa Claus himself—warns him that he’ll shoot his eye out.  I understand that a sequel is due out this year, so I’m beside myself with mild curiosity.

Klara and the Sun (book review)

Another book review from the ol’ Movie Snob.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021).  This is the third of Ishiguro’s novels that I have read, and his Never Let Me Go is one of my all-time favorite books. (The Buried Giant is not in the same league but still worth a read.)  This, his most recent novel, is excellent and thought-provoking. The setting is the near future, and our first-person narrator is Klara, an artificial friend or “AF” as they are generally called. In other words, she’s a life-like robot, and she is programmed to be an appropriate friend for a teenager. The first chapter is about Klara’s “life” in a store where AFs are sold. Then she is bought to be the companion of a sickly teenaged girl named Josie by Josie’s divorced mother, a slightly intimidating figure whom Klara always refers to as “the Mother.” Gradually we learn some other disquieting facts about this alternate reality, always through Klara’s intelligent but naïve point of view. I found myself thinking a lot about the movie A.I. as I read the book, but this take on artificial intelligence struck me as more believable and engrossing. Highly recommended!

Small Things Like These (book review)

New from The Movie Snob.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan (2021).  This novella (114 pages) packs an outsized punch.  The setting is a small town in Ireland in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985.  The main character is Bill Furlong, a steady, hard-working family man who manages the town’s coal business and has a lovely wife and five lovely daughters.  But Bill’s past keeps him from fully enjoying the present—his mother was an unwed teenager who never told him who his father was, and they avoided imprisonment in one of Ireland’s horrific Magdalen laundries only because the wealthy Protestant woman who employed his mother as a housekeeper let them live with her.  Then, while already preoccupied with memories of his childhood, Bill makes a coal delivery to the fortress-like convent in his own town and catches a glimpse of what life is like for the “wayward girls” currently living there.  The question is what he will do with that knowledge.

Bigfoot Family

A new review from the desk of The Movie Snob.

Bigfoot Family  (D).  Oh, goodness, this animated Netflix offering is a waste of 89 minutes you’ll never get back.  It is the sequel to a 2017 movie called Son of Bigfoot, but we are quickly brought up to speed on what apparently happened therein: a scientific mishap transformed a guy into Bigfoot, and he was separated from his wife and son for several years as he roamed around in the wilderness, but at the end he was reunited with them. In this movie, Bigfoot is casting around for a new purpose in life, and he decides to join some environmentalists who are protesting a new oil-drilling operation in Alaska. His son, Adam, is not happy that his long-last dad is taking off again, but when Bigfoot goes missing Adam and his mom pack up the camper and head off to the Great White North to find him.  Kids will presumably enjoy Adam’s magical powers (super speed, super hearing, the ability to converse with animals, and healing powers a la Rapunzel in Tangled), but why the son of a genetically engineered Bigfoot should have magical powers was lost on me.  So were the charms of the wisecracking raccoon, a much inferior version of the wisecracking chipmunk in Enchanted.  In sum, watch this turkey only if you have no other options.

Turning Red

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Turning Red  (D).  This new animated offering from Disney/Pixar demonstrates that it is unsafe to assume that every new animated offering from Disney/Pixar is appropriate for your six-year-old child.  Parents!  Always always always do your homework before watching! Anyhoo, this is the story of Meilin, an overachieving 13-year-old girl living in Toronto’s Chinatown. Growing up is hard enough, but then Meilin is struck by a family curse—when she gets excited, she suddenly morphs into a very large red panda! (Which is not a panda at all, but a mammal more closely related to weasels, raccoons, and skunks.) Also, she and her three best pals are huge fans of a boy band and are struggling to raise the money for concert tickets without Meilin’s ultra-strict mother finding out about it. Anyhoo, this movie is not for little kids; girls’ puberty issues are prominent, so parental discretion is a must!  Also, the movie looks too kindly on disobedience to one’s parents.  All in all, I didn’t like it.

The Friendly Jane Austen (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

The Friendly Jane Austen: A Well-Mannered Introduction to a Lady of Sense and Sensibility, by Natalie Tyler (2001).  Here’s another book about Jane Austen by a Jane Austen lover. Tyler gives us some biographical information about the great Miss Austen, describes her juvenilia, and then discusses each of her six completed novels in some detail before giving us an interesting glimpse at Austen’s unfinished work “Sanditon.” Tyler presents her knowledge about the works in short, fizzy chunks, broken up with quotations from the novels, interviews with other people who love Jane Austen, quizzes, and much, much more. The result is a breezy, enjoyable read—at least, if you like Jane Austen.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl

The Movie Snob haz sadz.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl  (F). Here’s another one from Robert Rodriguez, director of Spy Kids. Since Spy Kids was not very good, I expected this one to be bad, and my expectations were more than satisfied.  It’s an uninspired story about a lonely boy named Max (Cayden Boyd, X-Men: The Last Stand) who keeps a “dream journal” in lieu of having friends. He dreams up two pint-sized superheroes, the titular Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and then they suddenly show up and whisk him off to their home planet for some singularly unmagical adventures. At least the thing is only 93 minutes long. David Arquette (Scream) and Kristen Davis (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) have tiny parts as Max’s squabbling parents. George Lopez (Henry Poole Is Here) doubles as Max’s teacher and as a villain on Planet Drool, which seemed unfair because he seemed like a decent enough teacher. Oh, and a very young Taylor Lautner (Twilight) stars as Sharkboy.

Tarzan (1999)

A new review from the desk of The Movie Snob.

Tarzan (1999) (C-).  This is the animated Disney version of the oft-told tale of a human boy raised by gorillas in the African jungle.  It’s not terrible, but I can’t say I loved it either.  The plot is pretty simple; Tarzan (voice of Tony Goldwyn, Ghost) struggles to fit in with his gorilla family until one day his world-view is rocked when others who “look like him” suddenly show up in the idyllic wilderness.  One of those others, of course, is the charming Jane (voice of Minnie Driver, Return to Me), who just wants to study the gorillas and is oblivious to the sinister designs of expedition leader Clayton (voice of Brian Blessed, Henry V). Rosie O’Donnell (Beautiful Girls) is unfortunately grating as the voice of Terk, the gorilla who is Tarzan’s best friend.  Phil Collins (Genesis) contributes several songs that function as background music, which lent the movie a strange 1980s sort of quality.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

The Movie Snob suffers through a sequel.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (D). Apparently I liked Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) decently well, but this 2012 sequel was terrible. This time, angsty teen Sean (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games) is trying to find his eccentric grandfather (Michael Caine, Flawless), who has disappeared while trying to find some mysterious island out in the Pacific Ocean. So, after solving some weird clues that are easier than a Monday crossword puzzle, Sean teams up with his mom’s enormous boyfriend Hank (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, San Andreas), a goofy helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman, Welcome to Collinwood), and the pilot’s lovely daughter (Vanessa Hudgens, High School Musical 3: Senior Year), to find granddad. The “adventure” through the island’s CGI landscape is as dull as dishwater, and absurd coincidences abound.  Mainly I felt bad for Hudgens, who not only has to wear a tiny, tight outfit the whole time (much like Karen Gillan in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) but also has to feign attraction to the not-terribly-charismatic Hutcherson.

Frozen: The Musical

The Movie Snob leaves the house for a touring Broadway show.

Frozen: The Musical.  A week ago I don’t think I was even aware that there was a Broadway musical based on the Disney movie Frozen, but lo, last night I made the trek down to Fair Park’s Music Hall and saw it.  My reaction:  It’s fine. The children in attendance, including my six-year-old, seemed to really enjoy it.  But was it anything special?  I didn’t really think so.  There are lots of new songs, but none of them made much of an impression on me—not even the one written for Oaken, the guy who runs the snowbound shop where Anna and Christof try to shop for supplies.  (And to say that that song isn’t memorable is pretty remarkable, given that it features a bunch of dancers who I think are supposedly in the buff because they just emerged from a sauna. They’re all wielding leafy branches as fig leaves, and it struck me as comical rather than bawdy.)  And they cut one of the better songs from the movie, namely Anna and Elsa’s duet in Elsa’s ice castle during which Elsa learns she has inadvertently frozen the whole world.  On the other hand, the sets and special effects were pretty impressive, and the vocal talent was good.  Sven the reindeer was entertainingly animated.  Olaf was brought to life by making him a large puppet with his puppeteer standing right behind him, but I didn’t think it was too obtrusive.  Anyhoo, I thought the stage version of Beauty and the Beast was quite a bit better, but this one is fine for an evening’s entertainment.

Over the Moon

Another review from The Movie Snob.

Over the Moon (C). Here’s another Netflix production, although this one apparently got a limited theatrical release in the USA back in October 2020. Like Wish Dragon, it is set in modern-day China. A 13-year-old girl named Fei Fei is still trying to come to terms with her mother’s death a few years earlier when her world is rocked by the news that her father is contemplating remarriage. (The new woman seems perfectly nice, but she has an 8-year-old son who’s more than a little annoying.) Fei Fei addresses this crisis in the only logical way: she builds a rocket ship to the Moon, where she plans to find the legendary goddess who lives there pining for her own lost love, get a selfie with her, and thus prove to her dad that he should stay alone forever. The part of the movie set on the Moon is garish and not especially involving. It’s a musical, but the songs aren’t memorable. The omnipresent Ken Jeong (TV’s Masked Singer and I Can See Your Voice) voices an annoying Moon creature who becomes Fei Fei’s sidekick. Anyhoo, it’s an OK way to spend 90 minutes with your kids, as long as they can handle the film’s strong focus on grief.

Wish Dragon

The Movie Review tackles a fairly recent movie.

Wish Dragon (B). I have an experiment for you to try at home. First, make a wish for a remake of the Disney classic Aladdin set in modern-day China. Next, pull up this 2021 direct-to-Netflix movie. Amazing! It’s like your wish came true! This is actually a pretty good little movie, and if you liked Aladdin I’m confident you’ll like this one. A little boy and girl meet in a poor neighborhood and swear eternal friendship. But then the girl moves away to a rich neighborhood, and years later she has become a famous model. The boy is still living in the old neighborhood, but he dreams of reconnecting with the girl. Enter a magic lamp teapot, complete with a wish dragon inside. The characters are likeable, and the story veers away from Aladdin just enough to keep things interesting. The Movie Snob says check it out!