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.