An unexpected diversion that is all heart and no plot — not the most terrible thing in the world, but far from the year’s best animated movie.

Netflix has a corrupting influence on film makers. Could it be that good art needs constraints?

Witness Don’t Look Up: a two and a half hour movie in which everything is at stake yet nothing happens. As a government farce, it is worse than Burn After Reading; as a disaster movie, it is worse than even Armageddon; and it is much, much worse than Dr. Strangelove by any criteria.

If it was meant to portray our response to Covid it did a terrible job, painting science as all-knowing and the political-buisness cabal as less coherent than your average B-grade movie villain. Spolier alert: (almost) everyone dies at the end, and you (mostly) won’t care.

Good soundtrack, though.

The 1984 version showed that making a good movie out of a 700-page tome is a complex problem that can’t be solved in 2 hours 17 minutes on a $40M budget. It took 20 minutes and $50M more than that for Denis Villeneuve to cover just half of what Lynch attempted, but the end result is so much better. The story is what it is — between the book, the movie, the TV show, and the game I now know it by heart — but the casting, the pace, cinematography, score, the movieness of it, are all pitch perfect. A cross between Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars, noted our perceptive nine-year-old somewhere around the 30-minute mark. Yes, and more like this, please!

Viewing notes: we saw it on a 120" screen with a 5.1 surround system. If you have anything less at home I’d strongly recommend going to a movie theater. Yes, it’s nice that it is available for streaming on day 1, but you would be doing a disservice both to the movie and to yourself seeing it on a postage stamp. </privilege>

A few notches below Little Miss Sunshine, a movie of a similar sensibilities. Some changes might have improved it — e.g. why does Ruby end up at high-school choir practice because of a boy, and not because of her love of singing? — but none of it can correct the one huge flaw, which is that conflict between Ruby’s supporting her family by providing free ASL interpreter services and Ruby’s becoming a strong independent young woman is a zero-sum game which will end up in either financial hardship or broken dreams.

But, you know, the music was nice.

Spider-verse meets Gravity falls, resulting in a completely unexpected delight that really is fun for the whole family. The animation is beautiful, the pace is fast, the humor earnest and often physical, and the story intentionally misses every opportunity for cynicism. The photogenic family next door with the perfect vacation photos really is that high-functioning, fit and smart. ⊕ Some Eastern European cynicism is in order, though: given that these characters are voiced by John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, making them inauthentic frauds was never an option. Friends are there to support you, not tease you. The world doesn’t make fun of weirdness, it embraces it.

So, even though it premiered on Netflix, this is not your ordinary Netflix feature-length animation; it is actually good. It is also a triumph of believable character motivation and well-executed action sequences over a coherent plot. Thankfully, humans put much more weight on the former.

Interstellar is many things: a mediocre sci-fi story, a timely study of sociopathy, a schmaltzy meandering about love conquering space and time, an excellent showcase of near-future space engineering, and, sadly, a big budget Hollywood movie that grossly underestimates its audience. ⊕ I have yet to see Tenet but from what I have heard about its convoluted and unknowable plot, it is Christopher Nolan’s reactive formation to the many comments about oversimplifying and over-explaining that followed Interstellar. For an ever better example of a reactive formation see La La Land as Damien Chazelle’s response to Birdman winning the best movie Oscar over Whiplash and giving the Academy what it wants: more cotton candy navel-gazing. Ironic that the attempt also failed to win, this time to a better opponent.Foreshadowing is one thing, having one astronaut do the punch-a-hole-though-a-folded-piece-of-paper schtick to another while they are in space on their way to a wormhole as part of a billion dollar secret mission… Well, that’s a whole new level of cringe.

Hollywood rears its head in many other places, most of all the needless addition of superficial suspense to things that don’t need added suspense. Because a father communicating with his estranged daughter through spacetime is not emotional enough, let’s also add a hick brother who doesn’t want her at the only place where communication is possible, and may kick her out at any moment. Decades are spent on trying to get humans off Earth, yet the big scientific breakthrough comes at the very last moments, as people are suffocating on the ground. While we are there: if the human civilization is capable of building a county-sized space habitat and the only problem is getting the thing off the ground, why not build it on Earth or under the sea, instead of using a few hundred frozen embryos as humanity’s only backup plan? But let’s not get into plot holes because, um, there are a few.

Which is to say that Interstellar is not an overwhelmingly good movie. The good, however, still outweighs the bad, especially for those willing to forgive all the pandering. The best of humanity is also the worst of it, and the best of American sci-fi in matters of technology also turns out to be some of the worst story-wise. So it goes…

There are too many things here that just don’t work: the acrobatics (cartoonish in a bad way), the believability (live action is less forgiving to cross-dressing, just ask Mrs. Doubtfire), and worst of all, the message, which comes straight from the Big State handbook of propaganda: a woman’s worth is in marriage and — maybe, under extraordinary circumstances — in her service to the country. Self-actualization is allowed, after much hemming and hawing, as long as you are actualizing yourself towards protecting the Empire.

Which is too bad, because the setup provided excellent opportunity for two badass female characters to unite against the common oppressor. Of course, uniting against anything would not have been received with open arms in Mulan’s intended market, said market working diligently towards exterminating threats foreign and domestic even as the movie was made.

One thing that did work was the matchmaker who really should get a show of her own. A Disney+ series of shorts with a match per episode, perhaps, culminating in helping Xianniang the witch find the man/woman/hawk of her life? Disney, you are welcome.

Comparisons with Joker started the moment Cruella was announced, so let’s get that out of the way: Cruella was so much more fun to watch. Granted, it was a low bar to clear, Joker being about as much fun as watching a botched execution, ⊕ I do, however, wish the camera could stay still for more than a milisecond. Just because you can make every shot glide doesn’t mean you should. This is true for every high-budget movie made in the past 10 years at least but particularly for Cruella, which between the costumes and the set design had potential for some iconic shots. I don’t expect the second coming of Barry Lyndon from a Disney franchise, but how about teaching the young audience to slow down and stay still for a moment? but Cruella also has better acting, music, editing, and any technical category you can think of.

What it doesn’t have is much of a message, at least not one that hasn’t been covered already and in more detail by some other Disney or Disney-adjacent product. Killing your firstborn daughter is a bad idea? (Snow White) Villains are people too? (Maleficent) You know you’re in trouble message-wise when you have your titular character saying out loud the movie poster tagline. “Brilliant. Bad. A little bit mad.” looks great on a wall, sounds awkward coming out of a speaker.

Emerald Fennell, who wrote, directed, and co-produced A promising young woman, made many good choices when writing the screenplay. Let’s start with things not shown, like what Carrie Mulligan’s character, ⊕ Carrie Mulligan is, of course, the best Dr. Who companion that never was, and an integral part of the best Dr. Who episode ever made. I wonder sometimes if Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale would really have been Doctor’s companions — or at least had a spinoff series of their own — if Mulligan hadn’t been such a great actress with other opportunities presenting themselves soon after Blink. Cassie, does with all the men picking her up (or does she pick them?) under false pretenses. What is that red streak dripping down her arm walking home the morning after? Are the red, black, and blue notches she jots down with her gunner pen for each man a matter of convenience or a code for their fate? How much of a psycho is she?

Another good choice: the (never-shown!) sexual assault that underpins much of the plot is set in a medical school. Medical education selects for conformity, which is on one hand understandable (why fight windmills and ruin your chance for a secure and often lucrative income?) but on the other leads to willful blindness to many misdeeds. ⊕ During one memorable residency interview I (as the applicant, not the interviewer) was asked a question on (un)professionalism. My impromptu answer was about my own silence to a misdeed witnessed as a medical student in Serbia, with a young inpatient being kept in the dark about her diagnosis of advanced multiple myeloma, and us as students shrugging our collective shoulders as she peppered us with questions about bone health. Not my proudest moment as a med student, doctor, or a human being, but I ended up matching to that very program so, yay? Bad deeds rarely go unrewarded. Some may be surprised by the bad turns some seemingly good characters take by the end of the movie, but to anyone who’s gone to medical school it would have been true to personal experience. Parallels to other nice-guy professionals — lawyers, let’s say — draw themselves.

Yes, the movie is topical, drawing on current events, trending hashtags and rising fears. Thankfully, that doesn’t stop it from being damn good, and well worth a rewatch or two.

It aged better in my mind than it did after a rewatch, the version in my mind being conflated with the book and the game. ⊕ Apparently, David Lynch didn’t have the final cut and had an hour of his movie chopped of by the studio. But since he had also ran out of money I doubt much could have been done to make the final battle decent, or the last third of the movie comprehensible. What it gains on the aesthetics it loses on the incoherent plot, which at the same time has too much exposition and leaves too much unexplained. Also: Sting?!

You could say that this is a classic example of a long book being better suited to a TV show than a movie, but there was a TV show and it wasn’t much better. Maybe the new movie will be it? Or maybe HBO, Amazon, Netflix or Apple need to pour money into a serialized version, three of the four having a track record for funding good sci-fi.