#EllenRapoport

[antoniomartinezentertainer]

• @minxstarz (MINX Season 2) 🪩 now streaming on @starz 💪🏽.

• @msaagency Dancers #MSAFAM: @lockybrownlie @antoniomartinezla

• Huge thanks to @megnhunt of @msaagency 🧡

• Choreography: @alison_faulk

Assistant choreographer: @anthonybartley

• Writer/creator: @ellenrapoport

• Director: @annarameyborden

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[adamwatchesmovies]

Clifford the Big Red Dog (2021)

While Clifford the Big Red Dog is missing some essential ingredients, it’s good-natured, with a nice message for the young children it aims to entertain. There’s not much here for adults but you could do much worse.

Lonely middle schooler Emily Elizabeth Howard (Darby Camp) is being babysat by her down-on-his-luck uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall) when they run into Mr. Bridwell (John Cleese), an eccentric animal-lover who gives Emily a red puppy. After “Clifford” suddenly grows to gigantic size, he catches the attention of Lifegro, a genetics company that wants to experiment on the oversized pooch.

There’s something clumsy about the screenplay, which first has Clifford separated from his mother, then rescued by Bridwell, then handed over to Emily. What’s weird is that Clifford is his unusual red color BEFORE he grows big, which makes you wonder if Bridwell had anything to do with the canine’s strange size… despite his magical abilities being explicitly shown. Also strange is the casting. Emily speaks with an American accent. Her uncle Casey does too but his sister/Emily’s mom (played by Sienna Guillory) is British. It means the film has to cram in a line about how he moved away when they were kids but she moved to the States to raise her daughter. It’s a puzzling choice but a trivial issue. The real problem concerns Emily and Clifford’s relationship.

This film’s story is not revolutionary. It’s E.T., The Iron Giant, and Bumblebee: a lonely child gets a strange, wonderful/magical friend that some official/corporate guy wants to take away. That’s fine as long as the humor is effective (which it mostly is) and the love between the girl and her pet is felt. That's what's lacking. There are few scenes of Emily and Clifford playing, helping each other out of various comedic jams, or bonding. In their place, we get several (some might say too many) of Emily’s quirky neighbors. To be fair, they effectively get the film’s message front and center: Like Clifford, many of them could be called weird but in this wild adventure, their unique skills/attributes are exactly what is needed to rescue the big red dog from the nasty owner of Lifegro, Mr. Peter Tieran (Tony Hale).

A long hard look at Clifford the Big Red Dog does the film no favors but something about it somehow manages to wriggle its way into your heart. The scenes of puppy chaos are funny. Emily’s only friend at school is Owen (Izaac Wang) and the two young actors play well with each other. Acting-wise, they do pretty well considering they were acting against a green ball on-set. Thankfully, the references to TikTok and other similar social media are reduced to a minimum and the focus is primarily on Emily, Clifford, and their friends.

Although adults will have seen pretty much all of Clifford the Big Red Dog in some other form, the children they're accompanying to the theater won't. For them, I will call it a good movie. Overall, it's gentle, moves along quickly, and has a fair number of laughs. That's enough. (Theatrical version on the big screen, November 6, 2021)

[antoniomartinezentertainer]

Check out my latest reel 🎞️… Here are 3 BTS pix of “The Club Minx Dancers!!”

• Watch “Bambi”, played by @jessmarlo - rock the stage with us in @minxstarz (MINX Season 2) 🪩 now streaming on @starz 💫.

• Writer/creator: @ellenrapoport

• Director: @annarameyborden

• Choreography: @alison_faulk

Assistant choreographer: @anthonybartley

• Dancers: @charlie_bartley @lockybrownlie @alcalderon @iamtheking.jah @dangdangviet @chrisdiprete @canondson @mikey_graceffa @antoniomartinezla

• Huge thanks to @megnhunt of @msaagency for connecting me to this amazing creative team!

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[adamwatchesmovies]

Desperados (2020)

Throughout Desperados, I thought “If it does this one thing I know it’s going to do, I promise I’ll give it some credit”. So why am I giving it the lowest score I can? Because the one thing it does “right” is a crumb next to a monolith of unfunny, badly written trash. Everywhere I look, the running time is listed at 105 minutes. That can’t be right. It felt so much longer.

Jobless, romantically desperate Wesley (Nasim Pedrad) is at the end of her rope when her date, Sean (Lamorne Morris), walks away minutes after meeting her. After this catastrophe, she meets Jared (Robbie Amell). He seems like a sure-thing but suddenly ghosts her. Furious, Wesley sends him an essay-long hate-email. That’s when she discovers Jared's just awoken from a coma in Mexico. Wesley and her best friends Brooke (Anna Camp) and Kaylie (Sarah Burns) decide to delete the message from his inbox before he can read it.

It’s a comedy but even so, Wesley immediately establishes herself as too dumb to live. She bombs a job interview so bad you wonder who's the one recovering from a head injury. Despite the fat stack of bills at home, she’s still able to spontaneously travel to Mexico and drag her two friends along. They really must be the greatest BFFs ever to agree to go on this insane mission.

Immediately, you know where everything is headed. Wesley and her pals have to navigate through shenanigans that include accusations of pedophilia, inconvenient nudity, sex toys, a randy dolphin, Mexican jail, a car accident, and more. Meanwhile, you know the Jared thing is doomed. Wesley’s been lying to him non-stop. Even if she pulls off this con, things aren’t going to last. You’re forced to sit and wait for the inevitable, groaning at the lame attempts to make you laugh. You can keep yourself semi-amused by imagining this scenario with the genders reversed. Cast Penn Badgley (or better yet, someone who ISN’T handsome), tweak the soundtrack and you’ve got yourself a thriller.

Desperados is horribly dated. It’s got references to social media, text messaging, and some modern-day references but the characters have been plucked out of a time machine. When Sandra Bullock was still doing this kind of plot she was nabbing “Worst of” awards. It’s even more sexist today, making the female director (LP) and writer (Ellen Rapoport) doubly disappointing.

You want to know the one “good thing”? It’s got to do with Sean. He happens to be in Mexico and bumps into Wesley over and over. Obviously, he and Wesley will wind up together. You hardly ever see a black man with a fair-skinned woman in comedies of this genre. Too bad him tolerating all her red flag-raising eccentricities proves he’s as stupid as she is. 

Desperados deviates so little from the template it guarantees no one will remember it down the line. Thank goodness. It'd be a waste of precious neural connections. (September 26, 2020)