For the last week of September, I got stuck with a movie that neither of us wanted to watch, Cinderella (2021). An Amazon Prime “Original”. The movie poster alone for this one already pissed me off. How the hell are you going to sit here and sell the story of Cinderella to me as an “original”??? The origins of this folk tale date back to 7BC in Ancient Greece for pete’s sake! I do suppose it was an “original” take on the story, in that they used god awful pop music as a majority of the songs for the musical aspect of this version. But that only made it worse, not better. 

I don’t think I have to go over the premise for this movie, as everyone is familiar with it. We have Cinderella AKA Ella (Camila Cabello) and her step mom, Vivian, (Idina Menzel), her two step sisters, Narissa (Charlotte Spencer) and Malvolia (Maddie Baillio), the King (Pierce Brosnan), the Queen (Minnie Driver), and of course, Prince Robert (Nicholas Galitzine). We all know the tale of these characters.

The movie was shot in some Ultra HD filter, and it looks strange. It does not fit the setting of this movie whatsoever. The close up shots of Camila Cabello’s face are honestly off-putting and strange. Prince Robert looks too sharp in his closeups. The closeups of the older cast members, like Idina Menzel and Minnie Driver are slightly terrifying, you can see every wrinkle and age line in their faces. Pierce Brosnan looks like he’s had an amount of Botox over the years, or perhaps some work done.

The other extremely off-putting part of this movie are the CGI mice that are destined to make an appearance in any telling of Cinderella post-Disney. (I may be wrong on this as some quick googling told me that Charles Perrault’s 1697 version, Cendrillon, features mice that are only there to serve the purpose of being turned into the horses and footmen for the carriage.) The Disney version may be the first one that has them as actual characters and friends of Cinderella. The CGI is honestly bad, on par with a made for TV children’s movie level of CGI, which I suppose in a sense is what this version is ultimately trying to be.

The pop songs used in this movie are all mash-ups, and it made me dislike this movie even more. They couldn’t write original songs for their retelling of the story? The worst offender is the mash-up of “Whatta Man” by Salt-n-Peppa and “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes. It was an abomination to both of the originals. The weird electric cello they used for the main riff of Seven Nation Army was grating, and you could tell it was artificially made by some audio engineering program. Not only that, but I didn’t understand the purpose of mashing these two songs together. But then again, I didn’t understand the purpose of this movie as a whole either.

This movie also seems like it attempted to “shake things up” and be more pro-feminist in its story telling. Cinderella is trying to be a dress maker, her step mom isn’t that evil, just has some ideas on what love and marriage “should” be… And the Queen, while not having been her own person for some time prior to this story occurring, is able to stand up to the King and tell him what she wants and why it’s important to her. The daughter, Princess Gwen (Tallulah Greive) is trying to be more involved in running the Kingdom. The story line with the daughter is kind of forced, and commical in a very non commical way. She’s seen sneaking around during the King’s Court meetings, and is always caught and laughed off by the King.

When Prince Robert finally finds Cinderella post Ball, and learns that she is a dress maker who dreams of travelling the world making fancy dresses, he fully accepts it. Princess Gwen is only granted the right to be the heir to the throne because her brother, the man, hands it to her in favor of true love. The pro-feminist aspect of this movie feels very forced, while also being so far in the background of the story, that it really doesn’t add much to it. Cinderella is still trying to find true love (with a man) and Princess Gwen only gets to step up into her role for the throne because her brother, the first born son, gives it to her on a silver platter. None of it feels earned or warranted. 

The Fabulous Godmother (Billy Porter) that narrates the movie, and appears in the pivotal scenes you’d expect to see them in, is probably the most obnoxious character in the entire movie. An extremely eccentric, loud, obnoxious, gay black man. Again another swing and a miss from this production. 

They used the same song FOUR times in this movie, F-O-U-R, 4, times. “Million to One” by Camila Cabello. This song is obnoxious. The fact it’s featured so many times in this movie is a travesty. The other song that was beyond aggravating to sit through was the end scene song, “Million to One (2nd Reprise)” mashed up with “Could have Been Me” by the Struts, which bleeds into “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez. This end scene lasts for more than SEVEN minutes, as they sing and dance throughout the entire town, with an ensemble cast and everything. I had to skip the movie back to measure the time. It felt like an eternity, it had about three, maybe four, false endings. And of course once it finally ended and cut to credits, the end credits song was yet another version of “Million to One”……….

If you’re not a 12 year old girl, I would not recommend this movie to you whatsoever. This is the kind of movie that other countries see and go “this is what’s wrong with America.” There are basically no redeeming qualities about this movie. The story is older than all get out, it does almost nothing new or interesting with it, and what it does try to do that’s new or interesting is done in such a cowardly way that it doesn’t even matter. The mash-ups of pop songs used throughout the movie don’t help or add to the story at all. Everything about this movie, from the story that we already know, the bad songs, and the way it was shot add up to being a pretty bad watch. Do yourself a favor and skip this one. 

-1 mallard/5

-Seann

Running on Empty (2024) is a movie that I had never heard of before, which is not surprising, because it wasn’t very good. No burying the lead this time. I also didn’t hear about it because it had a limited theatrical release, a very low budget (I’m assuming), and is far from an arthouse film. If a film is not a major movie with stars and TV trailers and is not a small independent arthouse film featuring one of my darlings, then it’s unlikely that I would have heard of it. This isn’t due (entirely) to ignorance on my part, but merely because there’s just so many movies that come out each year. The film industry is inundated, which is both a good thing (more overall volume of films = more good films, right?) and in many other ways a bad thing (…how do you find the good ones?).

This movie has a similar premise to In Time (2011), which I absolutely panned, giving it the dubious title of tying for my lowest rated film of the year (so far). In this movie there’s a scientific procedure you can undergo that will tell you how many days you have left to live (before dying of natural causes) within about a two-week window. How do they do this? The answer is simple: “it’s science”. This is where the first plot hole of this film begins. The doctor who administers these results makes sure to specify that the date is ONLY taking into consideration natural causes, and cannot predict things like accidents, murder, etc. Or protagonist, Mortimer (who is a mortician….), takes this scientific study and his result is only 345 days left. Is he sick at all? No, he’s not. He dies from getting hit by a car. In this universe getting hit by a car is, apparently, a natural cause of death.

This is all beside the point, because the true plot of the film revolves around Mortimer meeting the manic pixie dream girl of his dreams, played by Lucy Hale (of Pretty Little Liars fame). She is an artist, with multicolored hair, who rides a fixed gear bicycle and is a photographer. This is in contrast to Mortimer, who wears a black suit and tie everywhere, drinks daiquiris, and drives an old, boring station wagon. This movie is basically one giant superficial exploration of tropes. The characters are astoundingly flat, and also Jim Gaffigan is here. He plays the creepy Uncle who is always trying to find a girl to date. 

In general I do enjoy Lucy Hale, and this is no exception. Her acting was really great, despite the very low quality of the source material, and she seemed to do her best to resuscitate that which really never needed to be born in the first place. The other actors in the movie are fine and unobtrusive, with the exceptions being the aforementioned Jim Gaffigan (whom I never found to be particularly funny) as well as Rhys Coiro (of Entourage fame…if you can call that fame), who plays a pimp that chases and terrorizes Mortimer throughout the movie. The characters are all so flat in this movie that I honestly had to look up to see if it was considered a satire or not. No, it turns out, this is actually categorized as a “science fiction” film – truly bewildering.

I’m struggling to find good things to say about this film. One of the positive aspects is that it’s short. The runtime is one hour, 30 minutes, and 52 seconds (including credits and everything), so they’re just barely ticking the 90 minute box. I get the feeling that they also used MOST of the footage they had to reach that 90 minutes. Some of the shots are slightly out of focus, some of the lines are not delivered particularly well, the action is choppy, etc. There can’t possibly be much B-roll for this film, which is another reason that I feel the budget was pretty low. This feels almost like they’re trying to make a Napoleon Dynamite-esque cult classic, which never really works out. Cult classics attain that status through inadvertent ineptitude, not effort to be bad. It’s kind of like how the best way to seem like you put a lot of effort into your wardrobe is to not really care at all (sprezzatura).

That being said, this movie was not offensive to the viewer in the same way that my previous watch, Game Over, Man! (2018) was. This movie tries really hard to be funny and doesn’t really succeed, but there are scenes where being funny seems to not be the main goal. Despite the stakes being somehow lower, there is a sense of tension at times in this one. The ‘action’ sequence in which Mort fights his would-be assailant is slightly comical because it features Mort riding on a fixed gear bicycle, dodging gunfire. What comedy there was in this scene is quickly undone when the antagonist falls to his doom and, on the way down, yells “make me look pretty!” If you recall, Mort is a mortician, who does the makeup and clothing for the corpses before funerals. Talk about undercutting what would otherwise have been a good scene.

Running on Empty (2024) has an IMDB rating of 4.9/10, a Rottem Tomatoes tomatometer score of 16% (ouch) and a Letterboxd rating of 2.6 out of 5. I’ll echo a lot of the Letterboxd reviews here when I say that there’s really not that much to recommend about this movie. The concept, though not in any way original or inspired, is just interesting enough to make one think, however that aspect of the film is treated merely as an instigating device for the real plot to happen. It’s not brought up again. Whereas In Time (2011) went so far into the other direction as to suggest that everything we know about how society operates would change if people knew the date of their death, Running on Empty (2024) suggests that almost nothing would change. This is a pretty boring watch, and I honestly don’t picture myself ever thinking about it again after I hit “post” on this review.

-1.5 mallards/5

-Maxwell