Grab Your Catnip For The Musical Madness of Cats

Musicals are inherently absurd creations. People don't sing their feelings in real life, after all. Because they work as the antithesis to reality, the best musicals can create sights & sounds you'd never see in another medium of creative expression. Avenue Q, for example, where else could you see a puppet show that doesn't even try to conceal that the puppets are being operated by people? Or how about Little Shop of Horrors or The SpongeBob SquarePants Musical? Both thrive on unabashed weirdness! Such strange yet enjoyably bold creativity is why I love musicals. When people think of musical oddness, though, one go-to reference point might be Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1981 musical Cats.

Smallfoot Is A Solid Animated Musical Whose Best Traits Are Also Its Most Unique Ones

Smallfoot is a new animated family movie hailing from director Karey Kirkpatrick (director of the underappreciated Over the Hedge and the widely forgotten 2009 Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That) whose best qualities are the ways it tries to be unique and whose weaker aspects come from when it tries too hard to adhere to what it believes conventional American animated family fare has to be. The majority of our lead characters in Smallfoot are Yeti's who reside in a village located on the very top of a mountain. In this village, we find our lead character, Migo (Channing Tatum), who loves his simple life which is primarily spent preparing to take over the duties of his father, Dorgle (Danny DeVito), and adhering to ancient rules written on stones that nobody is supposed to question.

Peter Rabbit The Movie Is Decent, Though The Titular Character Is A More Flawed Creation

The marketing for Will Gluck's live-action/CGI Peter Rabbit movie made the feature it was advertising look like a nightmare. Loads of pop songs, rampant slapstick and Peter Rabbit tossing out lettuce like it was dollar bills at a strip club, this looked like a parody of DreamWorks Animation movies from 2004-2007, not an actual motion picture coming out in 2018. Thankfully, Peter Rabbit is nowhere near as bad as its trailers would suggest, which is a good thing because 90 minutes of just that initial teaser trailer would likely be classified as a form of torture. The actual movie isn't anywhere close to a Paddington level success but it does register as a decent family movie that works way better at comedy than one would expect.

And Now I Become The Emoji Movie, Destroyer of Worlds

I go into every movie I watch hoping it's awesome. Why would I want to spend over ninety minutes of my life watching something that's bad when I can spend that time watching something that's enjoyable and stimulating? Sure, many times I end up watching a movie that strikes me as mediocre, lackluster or even outright bad but it's always good to give every single movie you see a fair shake and hope for the best. That's what I did for The Emoji Movie, a feature film that's received plenty of derision leading up to its release, and while the trailers looked, well, awful to me, I still went in here hoping for the best.

I came out very tired and very aghast at what I just witnessed.

Into The Woods Review

Come, Read This Review For A Spell

If you've been around me for more than five seconds, you're bound to know I'm a big fan of musical theater. Aside from appearing in small parts of performances of Annie and Little Shop of Horrors (I played the first customer who buys Audrey II, thus dooming humanity), I'm seen countless musicals on stage and in cinemas. Into The Woods is one I wasn't a huge fan of, though that was more due to me having only seen the first act of the show than a statement on the quality of the production itself.