Two Movie Reviews

Last Friday, I took the opportunity of a day off to see Minions & Monsters at the local movie theater. The Universal Pictures/Illumination animated movie stars and is directed by Pierre Coffin, the sole voice of all the minions in it. It's a sort of prequel to the adventures of Despicable Me and its sequels, centering largely on those funny, yellow, gibberish-talking henchmen who live to serve villainous bosses. Right out front I have to admit that I haven't seen any of the movies the minions have been in since the original Despicable Me, except in brief excerpts when I briefly landed on a sequel playing on cable TV. I like the minions all right as supporting characters, but my takeaway from this movie is that too much of a good thing really is a thing. I experienced minions overload.

But it's also true that it's a funny movie that does a sendup of early Hollywood, with callbacks to Singin' in the Rain, Citizen Kane and The Day the Earth Stood Still, among other cinema classics. It's the minions who make their fortune in silent films, only to lose everything when talkies reveal that they can't deliver spoken dialogue. They try to stage a comeback by creating their own monster movie, summoning the creature cast using a book that an ill-fated ex-boss left to them when the Pink Floof of Doom disintegrated him. (How they lose a whole succession of evil masters is worth the price of admission by itself.) While hero minions (?) James, Henry and Ed work on their piece of art, the rest of the tribe, led by the dickish Dick, attempt to serve a robot named Gort, I mean Dort, who was just on the point of invading earth when he fell in love with an anachronistic suffragette named Debbie. And if you think Dort is just a crank, you're in for a delightful surprise, a perfect counterbalance to the nasty surprise the hero trio gets when they unleash GOOMI (a cute mini-Cthulhu with the word "Deceiver" significantly added at the end of his name), and Gary in turn tricks them into unleashing a couple of Lovecraftian horrors.

In addition to Coffin, the voice cast also includes Allison Janney as a museum tour guide who narrates the story for a group of visitors, Christoph Waltz as a film director who gives the minions their break in the moving pictures, Jeff Bridges as a pair of studio fat cats (literally fat, but not literally cats), Zoey Deutch (Nouvelle Vague) as Debbie, Trey Parker (South Park) as GOOMI, Jesse Eisenberg (Now You See Me) as Dort, Phil LaMarr (Mad TV, Samurai Jack) and Bobby Moynihan (Saturday Night Live, Hoppers) as the eldritch gawds, and a voice cameo by George Lucas as a version of himself trapped inside a museum exhibit. I don't feel bad about spoiling that joke because the gags fly thick and fast, the action is relentless and it scales up to a huge climax, featuring Iris, an all-devouring blob filled with eyes. It's just a question of how much Pierre Coffin gibberish you can stand to hear in 90 minutes.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) How the cyclops Big Boss gets knocked off, partly due to the minions' discovery of Lego. (2) The minions meet Dort's battleax landlady and his slacker roommate, Floyd – all part of a flying saucer cleverly disguised as a dingy rooming house. Or is it? (3) The minions accidentally get their start in show business, taking part in an apparent train robbery that they don't realize is being filmed. How spectacularly it goes off the rails (pun intended) is something you'll just have to see for yourself.

Then, I think on Sunday, there was Young Washington, which I had to travel all the way to Detroit Lakes to see. It features a little-known actor named William Franklyn-Miller in the title role of our nation's founding father, charting the start of his rise from a colonial farmer who couldn't break through the British class system to secure a commission as a royal army officer in pre-revolutionary Virginia, to a hotheaded militia major whose mistakes entangled the colony in a war with France and its Native American allies, to a heroic young leader who seems to live a charmed life, surviving a fierce battle with holes in his uniform and hat but none in himself.

I won't belabor the plot because, allowing for some creative liberties to amp up the entertainment value of the movie, it's pretty well known stuff if you've seen, for instance, the lightly dramatized History Channel documentary Washington (2020) starring Nicholas Rowe in the title role and narrated by Jeff Daniels. The present movie gives the historians and biographers the heave-ho and lets the story (with some embellishment) speak for itself. And it seems to be doing it pretty successfully. An Angel Project production, it's directed by Jon Erwin of inspirational movie fame, and also stars Mary-Louise Parker as George's mother Mary, Kelsey Grammer as the rich landowner who hires him to survey his land claims in the Ohio Country, Ben Kingsley as the royal governor of Virginia, Andy Serkis as the ill-fated General Braddock, Clement Toyon in the gleefully vicious role of the French general whose assassination Washington is tricked into taking responsibility for in his letter of surrender, and a bunch of other interesting-to-look-at people who according to IMDB are now best known for being in this movie.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) George's consumptive, older half-brother urges him to take be realistic and give up on changing the way things are in colonial America, and George answers with the heartbroken reproach, "I wish you would believe in me." (2) George learns that the girl he loves (and let's be fair, she's way out of his class) has become engaged to the most loathesome exemplar of the British nobility and as the news goes through him, he hardens his resolve to return to the war and take his chances against French muskets and Indian tomahawks. (3) Washington gets up off his sickbed and disregards the advice of a friendly (but none too brave) British officer, who wants to save his life, to go rescue his men who have gotten trapped behind enemy lines. Just like that he goes from being an advisor/scout with no military rank to being a real leader, a soldier's soldier, whose battlefield antics will cause eyes to stand out from heads. "Land where my fathers died," and what have you, but happily for our land, this particular father didn't die that day. And perhaps the success of this movie will mean a sequel, or perhaps two, will come along, restoring some good feeling about our nation's history.

Mistletoe in Texas

Mistletoe in Texas
by Kari Lynn Dell
Recommended Ages: 15+

I picked up this unusually thick romance novel a while ago, for what reason I can't recall now. Maybe it was the fact, which I picked up somewhere, that the author was a genuine athletic trainer like the book's lead female character, and that she was just as genuinely involved in the rodeo scene amidst which the novel is set. Or maybe it's because she was from Montana, where my parents recently moved and where I have yet to visit. It appealed to me for some reason, so I picked it up and, in fits and starts over a couple of months, I actually read it. And despite the fact that it totally demands an Adult Content Advisory, I'm not mad at it or anything. My attention has just been scattered and I'm not blaming the book for that.

In the book, Hank and Grace grew up together in a small town in the Texas panhandle. She was his best friend whose brains helped him make it through school. He was a handsome jock, an up and coming rodeo bullfighter, and her hopeless crush ... until he rebounded into her arms after another girl broke his heart. She had just found out she was pregnant with his baby and was about to tell him the news when she caught him on a really bad day, and he embarrassed her in public with a romantic brush-off that left her devastated. But he went on to have his own rodeo-career-ending psychiatric meltdown, and disappeared from the neighborhood for a while. Grace kept her pregnancy quiet (particularly from her strictly religious family), gave the baby up for adoption and came back to Texas to work as a high school athletic trainer and moonlight as a team roper with the same rodeo family that had given Hank his first step. And now Hank has returned after a period of healing in Montana, with his sights set on rebuilding the bridges he burned with family, community and especially Grace.

Which is all prologue to a story about a guy who hurt a girl in the deepest possible way proving to her that he has really loved her all along and is worthy of being loved back. Meanwhile he also picks up the pieces of his broken relationship with his father while also repairing the run-down ranch and dreaming of a fresh start in a business they both love – one focusing not on cows but on horses. There's a lot of drama about reconciliation and self-therapy and, of course, a steamy romance. Its horsey, rodeo bits have a great authenticity to them, if I'm any judge (but I've only covered a few rodeos as a local newspaper reporter). It's not badly written. Overall, I'd say it's OK. My only quibble would be, as I said, that it's longer than you'd expect of a Harlequin-type romance and you can, I've found, spend months reading it without ever getting that "I just can't put it down" feeling.

Kari Lynn Dell died in 2020. She was the author of six "Texas Rodeo" novels, of which this seems to be the fifth; the first was Reckless in Texas, and the sixth was Relentless in Texas. She also wrote Last Chance Rodeo, a.k.a. The Long Ride Home, which was apparently supposed to be part of the "Blackfeet Nation" series but ended up being the only installment. Given her deft delivery of convincing rodeo details, her early death is a loss that I feel.

595. 'Mother-Water' Hymn

It's about baptism, don'tcha know. And its connection to the creation of the world and the conception and birth of Jesus. I took inspiration for this hymn from a sermon I heard quite a while ago; it cooked a long time before it was, um, ready to come out of the oven. Art: Creation of the World (detail) by Michael Willmann, 1668, public domain. Tune: DANKET DEM HERRN by Heinrich Schütz, 1628; I previously used it with this hymn.

Voice from the formless void, You spoke
Word strong as act, both vow and Son.
The uncreated stillness broke:
The cosmos stood, its tale begun.
Your living Breath, as time awoke,
Already soared: God, Three in One.

The chaos of creation's birth
Remained as yet in dreamless sleep,
Until the heavens and the earth
You summoned from her vasty deep,
And sudden light engirt her girth:
Who but her waves were there to leap?

When Adam took the fatal fruit,
And sin infected all our breed,
You pledged a Hero to recruit
From woman's womb, without man's seed—
A cure for sinners, His pursuit,
Through broken water to proceed.

The mother-water breaks anew,
And as from Mary's virgin womb
A newborn saint now passes through
To life from death, to light from gloom:
Bespoke, our Father, unto You,
In Word and Spirit (s)he will bloom.

We praise You, Christ! For in this font,
You give us life; You purge our shame;
You prove that of all things You want
To name us with a holy name.
From stormy void, from tempter's taunt,
Your new creation call and claim!

594. A Paraphrase of Psalm 150

Alleluia! Praise we God:
In His temple let us laud
Him, and in His might on high,
Waft His worship to the sky!

Praise Him for His wondrous deeds,
Him whose greatness all exceeds;
Let the trumpet's blithesome bell
His unmatched perfection swell.

Let the dulcimer and lute
Meld with violin and flute;
Tambor join, with dancing foot,
Rumor of His grace to bruit.

Let the cymbal and the gong
Shed their sheen upon the song;
All that breathes, take up with awe
This our theme: Alleluia!

The Difference Between Birdcalls and Birdsong

Enjoy the goldilocks, just-right warmth of this spring afternoon,
Sun gentle, breeze scented with something grassy and fresh,
And take note of what the birds call among themselves, close by:
"Look out, comrades! Here comes one of those monsters
That stomp about on two legs. Alas for the blood memory
Of an age when they were fewer, smaller, earthier to smell,
And franker in their aim to kill just what they needed!"

But strain your ears a bit to the farther bird songs,
Which say: "Come to me, my pretty, my beloved!
It is I, thy heart's desire."

Masters of the Universe

It's a He-Man movie, right? And I was at the exact target age of the original, animated TV series that existed primarily to sell action figures. I don't remember whether I or my brother ever had any of the action figures. It was the kind of thing a pastor's family never had money for. But it didn't cost us anything to watch the TV show (rabbit-ears TV and whatnot). It was the kind of mindless fun that went down easily between getting home from school and dinnertime, or maybe it was Saturday mornings. I don't recall. But we dug it, and we also enjoyed the 1980s cult film featuring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and the great Frank Langella as Skeletor. The whole family had a ball with that. Langella's makeup reminded my dad of someone powerful (at the time) but not particularly nice, and the nickname "Skeletor" became our little family joke whenever that person came up in conversation. Money can't buy that kind of fun, which is a good thing because we didn't have any.

But enough about the 1980s. Well, almost enough. Did you know that the earth teens who served as point-of-view characters in the 1987 movie were played by Courteney Cox, a.k.a. Monica on Friends, and Robert Duncan McNeill, a.k.a. Tom Paris on Star Trek: Voyager? Could anyone be a better Evil-Lyn than Meg Foster, she of the almost see-through blue eyes? Or did you know Man-At-Arms was played by the police chief from Hill Street Blues and the Sorceress by the head nurse from St. Elsewhere? Or how about the principal from Back to the Future playing a detective? Voyager's Maje Culluh played the one-eyed villain Blade, and the movie also featured widely credited "little person" actor Billy Barty and My Three Sons alum Barry Livingston. The movie was crazy with people you'd remember from back in the day, and you don't even remember it, do you? Well, do you?

So the 2026 reboot was meant to be another terrible franchise movie, and I'm afraid the box office will probably suffer from that perception. But the movie isn't terrible at all, and the people spreading the rumor that it sucks, sight unseen, are the ones who suck. There, I've said it.

It's a really fun movie that doesn't take itself one whit more seriously than it ought to. It allows its hero to be heroic without going overboard with "He-Man" machismo. And let's be honest, Nicholas Galitzine looks great in that loincloth. Joining him in the cast are Camila Mendes (Riverdale) as Teela, not so much a girl-boss as a tough cookie who gives young Adam (as He-Man is known at home) just the push he needs to become the hero Eternia needs. Idris Elba plays her dad, Duncan a.k.a. Man-At-Arms. A mercifully unrecognizable Jared Leto plays Skeletor, and choose whichever of those two modifiers you like, it applies because he doesn't suck, for once. Yes, children, even Jared Leto being in it doesn't ruin this movie. Although at times I had a hard time understanding his lines (about 20% of what he said flew by me, uncomprehended). I guess it's tough to read lips when the person talking at you has a skull for a face. Also featured are James Purefoy (Rome, The Following) as Adam's hard-driving royal father, Morena Baccarin (Firefly) as the Sorceress, and the previous He-Man, Dolph Lundgren, in an important cameo. Also, Kristin Wiig provides the voice of a lovable battle robot.

While it runs a little long, I didn't have a problem with this film's pace. It establishes how Adam ends up on earth, trying to fit into a corporate life that stifles his identity as the lost prince of Eternia, and what it costs him to keep looking for the Sword of Power that went missing when he escaped from Skeletor's clutches as a child. The action goes into near-nonstop gear after he finds the sword in (of all places) a comic book store, and an other-worldly beast comes hunting for him. Of course Teela whisks him back to Eternia and the race is on to save his world from the post-apocalyptic horror Skeletor has been imposing on it. The adventure has bizarre and sometimes just slightly ridiculous heroes and villains, wacky battles that skew haphazardly all over the boundary between sword-and-sorcery fantasy and high-tech spacecraft-and-aircraft science fiction. It has a talking tiger. It has tons of cyborgs with such enhancements as extendable necks and iron fists. It has a magical maguffin that turns out not to be where the magic is really at. And in addition to some knockout battle scenes, it has laughs and high spirits and an undeniable dose of sex appeal.

Lo, the Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Adam almost kisses Teela, but she friend-zones him just in time. Awkward, but sexy and funny at the same time. (2) Adam's "I think I just died" scene, and what he learns from it. (3) The wild aerial chase through the Eternian forest after Teela, Duncan and Adam escape from Skeletor's dungeon. The joy you see on Adam's face during scenes like this (another example is how he laughs as Teela's ship enters hyperspace, earlier in the movie) kind of makes the movie. This isn't a "Don't look for a smile here, I'm too busy to have fun" hero like, for instance, Black Panther, with all due respect to the memory of Chadwick Boseman. This is light entertainment and it doesn't forget it. Honorary Mention: Adam's coaching by the soul-crushing chief of the human resources office where he works, until he doesn't. It would be so much better to find a magic sword and become a generational hero in a world like Eternia, wouldn't it?

593. Hymn of Reproach

This hymn has been cooking on my back burner for a good long while. I thought about turning it into a paraphrase of the Reproaches from the Good Friday liturgy, but that didn't really stir my creative juices much, so nothing materialized until I decided to go back to my initial idea, which arose while listening to a Sunday sermon I know not how many weeks ago. The tune I have in mind is NUN LASST UNS DEN LEIB from Georg Rhau’s Geistliche Gesänge, Wittenberg, 1544, best known in connection with the burial hymn "Now lay we calmly in the grave."

Unholy age, hear my reproach:
Beware the Judge's swift approach!
Do now, ere He convenes His court,
Acts that with penitence comport!

Think you the world t'ward Jesus turns,
Grows and progresses, upward yearns?
Lo, hist'ry proves the flat reverse:
Each epoch wickeder and worse!

Think you the faithful will arise
To better all before God's eyes?
Open your own, and take concern:
Can faith endure till He return?

Think you God's Word somehow complies
With reason? Mark how man denies
The very words He pledges plain:
Repent and hear His Word again!

Think you Christ's suffering and blood
Suffice not for all sinners' good?
Spew out faith's bane, uncertainty:
His sov'reign will declares you free.

Think you His Spirit's calling voice
Completes or answers your free choice?
Let grace assure your doubting heart
Which ere all worlds set you apart.

Think you, in floods of peril dark,
Your quav'ring faith will be your ark?
Would that the water Jesus pours
Float it from sin to safer shores!

Think you the bread and cup we share
Are merely signs of mystic fare?
Think but how Jesus would emboss
Upon our flesh His lively cross!

O people, see the ages' wreck!
Away, heart hardened, stiffened neck!
The incense of repentance burn;
Watch, pray for Jesus' swift return!