Tag Archives: 2015

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Paul Tibbitt

FEATURING: Tom Kenny, , Mr. Lawrence

PLOT: The irrepressible Spongebob Squarepants teams up with an old enemy to recover the stolen recipe for Krabby Patties.

Still from The Spongebob Movie: Sponge out of Water (2015)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There’s just enough kiddie surrealism here to catch your eye, but not enough to justify awarding it any weird honors.

COMMENTS: For those who’ve been living in a cave far from the nearest ocean, “Spongebob Squarepants” is a popular American cartoon about an emotionally buoyant marine invertebrate who lives in a pineapple in an undersea town by the name of “Bikini Bottom.” His pals include a dimwitted starfish, a dyspeptic squid, and a squirrel from Texas who lives under a dome. The show’s “surreal” (by mainstream standards) humor, which coexists alongside an unironic cuteness, gives it a crossover appeal for heady adults. Hey, Max Schreck made a guest appearance on one episode, so it has to be somewhat hip, right?

Still, the second Spongebob feature-length movie (which debuts a full decade after the first one) caught me by surprise with its trippier aspects. The movie itself is a gimmicky mix of live action, CGI, and traditional 2D animation. It begins with pirate “Burger Beard” (Antonio Banderas) and his talking seagulls in an Indiana Jones-styled prologue, then moves to traditional animation as the story moves under the waves to Bikini Bottom. This segment of the movie, which features antagonist Plankton enacting one of his many schemes to try to steal the recipe for Krabby Patties, feels like an extended TV episode. Things get weirder when the recipe is successfully stolen by a third party, forcing Sponegbob and Plankton to team up to try to get it back as, bereft of its staple cuisine, Bikini Bottom slides into Mad Max-inspired anarchy. Their plan involves the construction of a time machine, and eventually results in their transformation into fish-out-of-water superheroes in an action-packed finale.

In between you get the really weird stuff: swirling psychedelic time-travel vortexes, a trip inside Bob’s saccharine brain, where talking Popsicles and kitty cats travel his candy-coated neural pathways and everyone vomits rainbows, and metanarrative shenanigans as characters magically rewrite the story as it happens. Strangest of all is a cameo from a cosmic space dolphin who, naturally, raps at the end of the movie. His name is Bubbles, he has a British accent, and I suspect he’s a member of the Illuminati. Although the 3-D renderings of the cartoon characters are meant to be the blockbuster highlights, it’s these small psycho moments that give the movie its lovably crazy texture. The semi-rationality of kid-logic is a close cousin dream-logic, and the best children’s films exploit this kinship. Kids laugh at the weirdest things, and you can, too.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the story is just a pretext for sustained, rapid-fire gags, many of them hysterical, that range from movie parodies to Gary Larson-worthy flights of cartoon weirdness.”–Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: 88 (2015)

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DIRECTED BY:  April Mullen

FEATURING: Katharine Isabelle, , Tim Doiron,

PLOT: A woman wakes up in a diner with a gun in her handbag and no memory of how she got there; she accidentally shoots a waitress and goes on the run while experiencing a series of flashbacks that explain her personality change.

Still from 88

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: 88 is confusing and has some hallucinations, but it never gets really weird (or truly interesting).

COMMENTS: 88 shifts back and forth between two timelines, in each of which Katherine Isabelle has a separate personality—for easy reference, she’s generally a hot-blooded sociopath when she’s in red and a confused innocent in blue. There are also fractured flashback montages to even earlier times within each separate storyline, and a few hallucinations thrown in too (although these are obvious and generally don’t affect the plot). It’s tangled, but you never get the sense the knots are worth working out, a suspicion confirmed in the final reveal. Isabelle is formidably sexy and distinct in her dual roles as Gwen and Flamingo, but neither character is well-written or believable, and as nice as she is to look at we don’t care much what happens to either of her personalities. Christopher Lloyd makes for a surprisingly good heavy and seems to legitimately enjoy playing nasty, but there is only so much he can do as a cardboard villain. The script is pure B-movie contrivances, full of shootouts with magic bullets that mow down extras at will but swerve around principals, only wounding them at plot-specific moments when they’ll have a chance to wheeze out some final exposition with their dying breaths. If you told this story front to back, it wouldn’t be very good; chopping it up hides the narrative deficiencies for a while, but they catch up eventually.

Although the action scenes are ridiculous, director Mullen stages generally competent scenes, especially when doing music video-type stuff like filming montages of Isabelle dousing herself in milk and smoking a cigarette in the shower. Milk is a recurring image—Flamingo is obsessed with drinking a particular brand with a sexy spokesmodel whom she resembles—and the beverage is used to humorous effect at times. Mullen takes a turn in front of the camera in the movie’s worst scene, a side trip to visit a quirky gun runner that looks like it was ripped off from a bad ripoff. This digression feels out of place when the rest of the movie is like a bad ripoff: Memento with a hot chick. Together, Isabelle’s sex appeal and Lloyd’s professionalism—and the general trashy ambiance—keep it just watchable; it would make decent late night pay-cable filler.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the movie works best in theory rather than execution; it lacks the budget and wherewithal to push things to the envelope, settling instead for something that feels edgy and looks it from a distance but that’s actually rather pedestrian upon closer examination.”–Martin Liebman, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)