Pixar Playlist #7 - Cars

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar playlist.

 We come to the 7^th entry of the list and the final film to be produced under the original Disney/Pixar arrangements, Cars. Cars was not as successful as you might think at the box office, making $462m on it’s $120m budget, the first 9-figure Pixar budget, but it more than made up for in another lucrative area, merchandise.

There’s a reason Cars and Toy Story got their sequels first; their concepts make them exceptionally marketable and the toys sold. It’s the only Pixar movie that got Disneytoon spin-offs, that’s how marketable it was.

But let’s take a look at the film on its own, and see how it holds up.

RageLite review - Deadpool 2

Deadpool was a massive success for Fox so naturally a sequel was greenlit, and given how successful it was, the sequel was gifted a larger budget of $110m. But does bigger equal better?

Well, critically it managed an impressive 83% Rotten Tomatoes rating with an average 7.05/10 and an audience score of 85% with an average 4.08/5. Including its re-releases, it managed to make $785m at the box office. I am only talking about the original theatrical version for this review. Once Upon a Deadpool never interested me and it didn’t get a 12A (the PG-13 equivalent) rating in the UK anyway.

RageLite review - Wonder Woman

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about any DC films and it seems like they’re starting to get back on track by basically ditching the extended universe and focusing on standalone films. Justice League being a critical and financial disaster clearly forced a rethink on they’ll handle their properties, but that doesn’t mean no good came out of it. Wonder Woman’s minimal role in Batman v Superman was among the better aspects of it. It didn’t stop that film being utter garbage but it did give me optimism going into her solo movie.

Female solo superhero movies have in general been pretty bad up to this point, with Catwoman obviously being the worst. But then you look at the writing talent, and worries start to crop up again, we have Zack Snyder, who I have had issue with in the past, Allen Heinberg, if I’m not mistaken he wrote the awful Wonder Woman run post Infinite Crisis (the one where she couldn’t pump gas) and Jason Fuchs, who… co-wrote an ice age film. Notice how there are no women on the writing team, either.

Of course, Patty Jenkins is the one directing so at least there’s representation there, but her experience is mostly in television. Does this hold the film back? Well it certainly didn’t seem to, as the film made $821m on its $150m budget, more than Man of Steel or Justice League and managed an impressive 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating and an 88% audience rating. So what helped here? Let’s take a look.

#75 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Note: This review was written and scheduled prior to JK Rowling endorsing transphobia on twitter. I think this is pretty scummy but this is a negative review of her work anyway so... This was written prior to revelations that the allegations against Johnny Depp were revealed to be falsified, whilst I only barely touch upon the subject, it seems they made the correct decision keeping him on. 

I love the Harry Potter films and I was pleasantly surprised by the first Fantastic Beasts film. The same cannot be said for its sequel

It was difficult to remain excited with as the build-up came around. The accusations around Johnny Depp and their defence of him, even giving him a much larger role this time around, the uncomfortableness around their decisions with Nagini (more on that later). With the inclusion of Dumbledore this time around, hearing that his sexuality wouldn’t be addressed was kinda disappointing too. (We will get to specifics in the review portion)

JK Rowling is writing the script, like she did with the first one, JK is a talented writer, the 7 Harry Potter Books are some of the best stories I've ever read, but there are differences between writing a book and a film, and I suspect JK Rowling’s talents are more in the book department. After the success of the first Fantastic Beasts, it was announced this would be a 5-movie series, this is important for a lot of reasons we’ll get into.

The end result is the worst ranked Harry Potter movie to date with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes Rating (avg 5.8/10) and a 55% audience score (3.32/5) and that shows with their box office, whilst it didn’t flop, making $653m on its $200m budget, that pales in comparison to the $814m its predecessor made and led to the studio upping the turnaround times from 2 to 3 years. So, what happened? Let’s take a look.

Praise4Media #61 - Doctor Who - Resolution

It’s January 2020 and you know what that means, I’m talking about Doctor Who again! And it’s my first Jodie Whitaker review. Series 11 of Doctor Who was solid. There were a number of mediocre episodes, a couple of real standouts (You know the two I’m talking about) and none that I consider outright bad.

That being said, mediocrity can often be less interesting to talk about than outright bad episodes, so let’s look at one that toes the line a bit, their New Year’s special, Resolution. Making the special a New Year’s special rather than a Christmas special was a smart move, New Year’s Day doesn’t have as much associated imagery so it allows for more creative freedom, and I think choice of having a Dalek as the villain isn’t a bad one because it the Daleks present a unique challenge to this particular Doctor. Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor has a very stern attitude towards violence and particularly guns, and here we have an enemy here who cannot be reasoned with and can only be defeated by violence, a challenge to her ideology in theory.  How did it work out? Let’s take a look.