Reviews by JxSxPx

I love this movie for its premise but cannot wrap my brain around its execution. Ostensibly a family-themed animated film, I can’t picture this resonating with a child audience or keeping the adults enthralled. It exists in the no man’s land between these twin points.

Granted, the fantasy sequences are quite lovely to behold, but Mirai can’t quite decide what to do with them or figure out when to leave its emotional resonances alone without thundering into cheap sentiment and heavy-handed crocodile tears. There’s enough weight in the story of a toddler grappling with the presence of a younger sibling and trying to understand his new place in the family unit. Once the prince of the kingdom, he’s now struggling for maintaining his parents’ attention and prone to fits in order to regain it.

This is the stuff of naturalistic cinema and a solid enough foundation to spring in elements of fantasy and whimsy. So Mirai does as the toddler meets the human embodiment of the family dog and various relatives from the past and future, including the teenaged version of his younger sister. It’s here that the film frequently goes off the rails as its fantasy sequences provide disarray in a narrative that was a clean line just moments prior. These two halves never quite meet in harmony and Mirai is too slight to take on this much water.

Namely, that one of the family members he meets is a handsome prince claiming to be his dog is just bonkers. The type of bonkers that never folds itself in nicely to the rest of the film. Same goes for a scene where the toddler steals the dog’s tail and transforms into puppy. Mirai quickly drops this much whimsy and fantastical action for explorations of family mythology and discovering your place in the family dynamics. You’re left wondering what exactly this interlude was all about and why it was there in the first place. Mirai is just too emotionally shallow to entertain the tots or provide meaningful engagement from the adults.

The artisanal process of stop-motion feels like a natural medium for a director as fussily detailed and idiosyncratic as Wes Anderson. His handcrafted forays into the medium have produced two distinct films that both provide a melancholic, winsome experience. He manages to, as Chuck Jones once described the entire process of animation, provide the illusion of life in his frames.

There’s a pleasingly tactile quality to every decision in Isle of Dogs. From the clouds that look like cotton balls pulled apart, to the explosions that appear like felt being shredded, to the matted dog fur that’s never quite consistent due to the animator’s hands moving it around, Isle of Dogs feels like a world in miniature infused with living dolls. Anderson’s penchant for symmetrical compositions remains as the film is littered with squares with squares and ornately designed with precision and purposefully analogue.

There’s only so much eye candy can paper over, and Isle of Dogs is aggressively bleak in its story and character development. The cruelty of humans in the name of profits and unquestionably selfish motives gets unscored in the eyes of these abandoned and abused dogs that still yearn for a scratch behind the ear. The greatest emotional pull in this film comes from the sight of dog puppets giving sad eyes.

It’s a glorious bit of dioramic dramatics that functions as a metaphor for the disenfranchised trying to escape persecution. What ever did these dogs do to deserve getting dumped on a trash heap in the Pacific? Something or other about a “snout fever,” but it just boils down to the prejudice of those in charge trying to remove the societal undesirables from the greater populace.

Can Anderson’s film really sustain that much emotional heft and symbolic import? Well, no, not quite, but it’s still heart wrenching and engaging. It somehow works to his strengths as an artist that stop-motion is already a facsimile of real life, so his tendency to art direct and reshape reality into his own variation of the world comes off easier and with more fluidity here.

I say all of this as a fan of his work, but I’m aware that Isle of Dogs has issues and ideas that it cannot quite reconcile with its lovely bric-a-brac. Did I care in the end? Not really. Isle of Dogs hit so many sweet spots and moments of pure cinematic elation and emotional complexity for me that I could forgive the foreign exchange student being another of Anderson’s strident overachievers without the “oomph” quality that made the others more engaging, for example.

Is this Anderson’s weirdest and darkest movie to date? Quite possibly, and I can’t think of a contender that would come quite as close to it. Yet for all its stark, tense qualities there’s a romance that bubbles up in unexpected moments. It’s these zigs and zags between emotional extremes that keeps things lively and interesting throughout. Ok, and the star-studded voice cast doesn’t hurt in the slightest. While Isle of Dogs may not rank among the highest of Anderson’s work, I still really loved it and its ambition.      

The twenty years between her scrappy, minimalist disco self-titled debut and this release, her ninth studio album, is an eternity as far as pop singers go. You didn’t exactly see Paula Abdul, Cyndi Lauper, or Taylor Dayne maintaining the same amount of chart presence, if not outright dominance. Madonna (and Madonna) was derided as a wispy flash-in-the-pan. How wrong the critics were and continued to be as every successive release spelled the proverbial end of her career. That last point amped up with the release of Erotica and all the ruckus surrounding it, including companion releases Sex, a limited-edition book, and Body of Evidence, another one of her questionable forays into acting.

By the time 2003 rolled around, proclaiming Madonna’s career over was as inevitable a piece of white noise to accompany her latest album release as was any controversy, major or minor, that swirled around it. The press loves nothing better than to wag their fingers and cluck their tongues at her, to chastise and discipline her for extending beyond the parameters of her gender and/or age. Yet there was something doomed about American Life from the start.

Our favorite pop provocateur blinked in the face of controversy for the first time. Remember the nasal intonations of “I’m an artist!” that went hand-in-glove with the reaction of her “Justify My Love” video? Well, that sass and conviction wasn’t here this time around. Our proudly defiant Midwesterner has always courted major reactions to the imagery she assigns her music, more so than any other artist to emerge from the music video era and stood by those titillations.

That makes it sound like she’s provided empty platitudes and not actual work worth reconciling on a political and artistic level. She very much has, but that doesn’t mean everything she’s done has been at home run. There’s been a fair share of groan-inducing self-importance, and American Life dripped with it from the start.

Ignoring the actual merits (or demerits) of the first single, Madonna’s planned video was released during the invasion of Iraq and married fashion with war imagery. It culminated in her throwing a grenade at stand-ins for former President George W. Bush and deposed despot Saddam Hussein. The actual video has its moments, but the marriage of a song recognizing some of the hollow trappings with fame and the horrors of war takes balls of steel. It’s hard to reconcile the two together as the song is trite, but there’s a deeper truth she’s clearly trying to press about war profiteering, war’s obscenities, and the media’s sensationalism, something one could argue she’d helped along in some shape or form.

She pulled the video, released a sanitized version in which she wore military garments and sang in front poorly rendered CGI flags, and the whole thing seemed like a concession of defeat right out the gate. It didn’t help that it was a poor choice of a lead single when “Hollywood” was sitting right there right along a collection of startlingly reflective, haunting ballads. And so, it was that American Life was released as a bit of a swing and a miss causing the singer to do what she swore she’d never do dust off those “embarrassing” oldies and hit the road. (For the record, I love the Re-Invention Tour.)

That’s a lot of time spent chronicling the history and cultural context of this album, but it’s important as American Life is as obsessed with the singer’s placement in the pop cultural firmament as the tabloids are to displace her from the throne. It’s a dark, insular, complicated song cycle about fame and privilege that isn’t immediately engrossing upon your first, second, or even tenth listen. There’s some work involved on your part to get into the groove (I’m sorry), but faults and all, I find myself continually coming back to it.

Ignoring the awkward rap section of “American Life” for a moment, the song’s basic premise is intriguing: the regrets, isolation, temptations, and compromises involved in attaining her level of notoriety and fame. Loneliness and ruminations on her personal demons provide the major framework for the album. “Mother and Father,” another song about the loss of her mother and fraught relationship with her father, finds the singer realizing she must let go of the anger in order to heal and grow as a person. “Nobody Knows Me” is a denouncing of media frenzy to tear down and gossip about public figures, specifically Madonna, and it’s a bit outré to think this was the same woman who twenty years prior declared to Dick Clark she wanted to rule the world. I guess it really is lonely at the top.

What emerges as you listen to the back-half of American Life is that this wasn’t a pop album at all. If it resembles anything, it’s a piece of eccentric folk music that’s laced through with electronic components. There’s a lack of polish that’s both hideous and refreshing as the reediness of Madonna’s voice isn’t soothed over, or it’s distorted into a malfunctioning fembot and unrecognizable as human. This transition shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise given Madonna’s words on Joni Mitchell: “I was really, really into Joni Mitchell. I knew every word to Court and Spark; I worshipped her when I was in high school.” Of all of her surprising influences, Mitchell’s painterly and impressionistic musings on love lost and won finally reflecting in Madonna’s midlife crisis is possibly the most shocking.

In reflection, Madonna’s self-appraisal and existential crisis were always looming on the horizon with the first cracks in her armor appearing on Ray of Light and Music. She’s given over to these questions, and there’s something brave about an icon removing the idolatry and showing the naked, vulnerable person beneath it all. American Life would be the big flop of her career up to this point, and I don’t foresee any critical reappraisals salvaging this one like they did for Erotica. It may not be one of her best efforts, but there’s just something so beautiful and strange about it that keeps me coming back.

DOWNLOAD: “X-Static Process”

She was nineteen when she released Control in 1986, a declarative statement of purpose and proclamation that her brothers weren’t the only pop geniuses in the family. Janet Jackson’s “I’m a grown woman” mission statement seemed a little odd coming from someone that young, but her resolve and personality gave edge to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ new jack swing and synthpop grooves. She shook off her two prior albums in a manner Alanis Morissette would eventually copy, then strolled down the road towards pop dominance and emerging as an artist of tremendous depth beneath the bouncy pop veneer.

Flash forward ten years and Janet Jackson was one of the music industry titans. She’d just released janet., an album of luxurious beats, sensuality, and opulence. It seemed like a nice summary of where she’d been and a glimpse of where she was going. Hey, if Madonna could release a best of only seven years into her career, then Janet was past due by the rapid pace of pop music standards.

Design of a Decade: 1986 – 1996 functions as a summary of Control and Rhythm Nation with “That’s the Way Love Goes,” “Runaway,” and “Twenty Foreplay” thrown in for good measure. It’s a bit odd that janet. gets only one of its singles, but “That’s the Way Love Goes” is a perfect choice. It’s still astonishing to think of how quickly she evolved from Penny on Good Times to admonishing would-be suitors on “Nasty” to the tight beats and iconic choreography of “Miss You Much.”

It’s no wonder that MTV used her as the inaugural artist for their Icon series. Janet Jackson’s career was tied to the rise of music videos. Granted, many of them run together as they typically involve her and a fleet of dancers doing tight choreography in an abandoned location, but her presence livened up the screen and made you want to watch and listen to her. It didn’t hurt that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis provided a gauntlet of mutant R&B/pop beats as embellishments for her joyful declarations of love or attitude serving put-downs.

Design of a Decade proves that Janet stands on her own. Her voice, not her singing but her authorial intent, is all over these songs. Only a daughter raised under the controlling thumb of a manager father could pronounce her independence in a pop song. She stated that she was all grown up then went about proving it in a succession of increasingly sexual dares in songs like “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” and “Throb,” sorely missed on this set.

Without Control there would be no succession of chart-busting albums and singles, and my childhood wouldn’t have been populated by songs like “Escapade” or “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” Thank god she hooked up with Flyte Tyme and found a perfect sonic partner for her warm, pleasant (if thin) voice. Design of a Decade is one hell of a summary of a pop princesses first decade in music. If she’s been floundering a bit since Damita Jo, just ask yourself if any of her successors have crafted anything half as good or defining as “The Pleasure Principle,” a title that seems the overruling mantra of Janet’s body of work. I’ll wait.      

DOWNLOAD: “Control,” “Runaway,” “Twenty Foreplay”

Paul Schrader’s work is obsessed with men in perpetual crisis, frequently punctuated by acts of great violence. Rarely is the aura of his work so muted as it is in First Reformed, a late-career masterpiece from the purveyor of toxic masculinity in self-destruct mode. Think of the explosions of violence and impotent rage viewed in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Affliction, then turn around and give First Reformed another look. All the hallmarks are there, but a quiet maturity has taken hold.

This makes sense as Schrader’s camera has turned itself towards a crisis of faith, of spirituality, morality, purpose and an ever-present sense of guilt encroaching behind its main character’s eyes. There’s a lot going on behind the placid surfaces of Ethan Hawke’s reverend, and Schrader’s camera is obsessed with catching all the flickering thoughts and repressed emotions as they slowly leak out. It all culminates, as it often does in Schrader’s work, with a scene of violence and (possible) redemption.

Yes, this film is something of a summary of Schrader’s body of work, be it as screenwriter or director. It’s undeniably bleak and stark an affair. This is a world where one character’s suicide is something of spiritual rebirth for the holy man. While he may not literally bath in the blood of the lamb here, there’s enough symbolizes and juxtaposition of images, music, and ideas placed next to each other to underscore this point. A votary must have a flock in crisis in order to do the good deeds and works involved in that vocation, and this inciting incident gives him a renewed sense of purpose.

It just doesn’t this emphasis on violence and self-destruction causing growth, but the witnessing of one man’s inner turmoil that slowly burbles until it explodes. Much like Taxi Driver, there’s the prevalence of a journal and extensive voiceover where we’re placed inside the fracturing and jaundiced worldview of our main character as his corrosive anger makes him more of a loner and radical figure. Hawke’s character eventually adopting the same radical environmentalist methods and vestments of the dead man feels like the logical outgrowth of this emotional trajectory.

The symbolism is often heavy here, with a malfunctioning church organ reflecting the complicated relationship Hawke has with women and sex. Or in the way that Hawke’s been regulated to stewarding an old Dutch Reformed Church that’s mainly a starkly white tourist attraction and not a lively place of worship. He’s a man adrift with shaky relationships to the wider world and his own religious ideology, and here is he shepherding a largely empty house that’s been forsaken for one of those ghastly megachurches that practically spits in the face of true spiritual fulfillment and doctrine. Hawke’s reverend is the church and the church is him.

Into this near antiseptic world, one that makes hell look like parts of THX 1138 merged with Calvinism, comes a young couple expecting a child. The wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfried, did anyone see her being the breakout of Mean Girls?), is devout and looking for guidance in something from her childhood, and her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), a nonbeliever and the sacrificial lamb that will lead to the major reawakening and blasphemous feelings.

Michael and the reverend are something of twinning images of each other as they both feel tremendous guilt pressing down on them and conflicted feelings about progeny. Hawke’s character lost a son after pressuring him into joining the military in the wake of the Iraq War, while Michael looks upon his wife’s pregnancy with terror given the current state of the world. Life and death, both environmental and fleshy varieties, become conjoined and blur together in their separate mindsets but in their communications with each other.

When I wrote about The Wife, I made mention of cinema’s obsession with pointing a camera at an actor’s face and watching what happens as they express two different things at the same time. First Reformed is the male equivalent as it sticks its camera in front of Hawke’s face and watches him go. It’s amazing how slowly he burns and how repressed he plays so much of the film. His final scene where he debates wearing a suicide vest and forces himself to remove it only to tie barbed wire around his body is a knockout punch. Never has self-flagellation or an obsession with misery looked like the product of such deep introspection and clear-eyed resolve.

First Reformed is a glimpse of religious man going into the darkness and emerging with an Old Testament-like fury and mentality. It’s fascinating and absorbing, alternately hideous and beautiful, sacred and profane. Hallelujah.

After a string of four genre-defining and defying masterpieces, it seems inevitable that Janet Jackson would stumble. No one releases perfect albums every time, but the drop between The Velvet Rope and All for You is prominent. The Velvet Rope was the sound of an icon seeking personal and sexual self-actualization, and its intimacy, anger, sadness, and carnality was a breathtaking listen.

All for You is a limp pop confection. Some of the sex songs are embarrassing and/or hilariously pornographic, some of the ebullient dance tracks feel routine, and the entire thing feels like a retread of better Janet Jackson songs. Look at “Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You),” another mashup of famous 70s female singer/songwriter sample with Janet’s hip-hop/R&B/pop. While Joni Mitchell’s appearance on “Got Till It’s Gone” was a surprise, a very pleasant one for its quiet storm that turns into a hurricane brilliance, Carly Simon’s on “Son of a Gun” is a several car pileup. It’s a mess but you can’t turn away from it. The remix, with P. Diddy (I think that was what he was calling himself at the time) and Missy Elliott, is so much better for sidelining Simon’s cringeworthy braggadocio.

Still, All for You contains some unexpected moments of tenderness and daring. “Trust a Try” finds Jackson embracing her inner theater kid AND rock goddess in a bizarre song that’s genius for its sheer insanity. There are strings, a metallic guitar, and Jackson’s committed vocal delivery that somehow manages to tie it all together into an experimental pop wonder. “China Love” is so simple and effective for generating intimacy, both romantic and sexual, through its lush production and speaking about anything but Jackson’s voracious sexual demands. It’s a beautiful nugget stashed in-between filler.

There’s also “Better Days,” a song that causes me to imagine what the wider album might have been. Here is one of her strongest vocals on the album, its simplicity is pleasurable and alluring while she sounds strong and inviting. The hint of putting strife and sadness behind you and moving onto greener pastures makes the song a stronger piece than many of the more forgettable material, like “When We Oooo,” “Truth,” or “Love Scene (Oh Baby).” Hell, the aggression of “You Ain’t Right” makes you think that All for You’s mixed reception and legacy is deserving a reevaluation before you spend the next hour-plus discovering that no, it’s a decidedly mixed bag.

While All for You is loaded with too much filler, the three major singles (“All for You,” “Someone to Call My Lover,” “Come on Get Up”) are sunny, bright, and effervescent gems that fit snuggling within Jackson’s wider range of work. The inclusion of “Doesn’t Really Matter” from the Nutty Professor II: The Klumps soundtrack is nice as its confidence and simple pleasures fit nicely with the album’s wider emphasis on cheer and escapism. It’s still more coherent and stronger than its follow-up, Damita Jo, but those goddamn skits and interludes! They weakened the strengths of The Velvet Rope at times, and they underscore the unchallenging material here.  

DOWNLOAD: “Trust a Try,” “Better Days,” “Someone to Call My Lover”

One of the blessings and obsessions of the cinematic eye is intensely observing the faces of great actors telegraphing conflicting emotions through the subtlest movements. It’s in the way a mouth may tighten while the eyes are trying to look soft and kind, or the terse body language that contrasts with the words coming out of the mouth. Sometimes it’s the silences that are filled with so much palpable tension as the emotional undercurrents spark off the actor’s face.

What I’m really talking around here is that these faces are frequently of the feminine persuasion. Ingrid Bergman’s emotional unease in Casablanca sustains several quiet moments with electricity. Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina is justifiably famous for its ending that zooms in on her face alternating between heartbreak, totemic solemnity, and romantic poetry. Then there’s the entirety of The Passion of Joan of Arc which obsessively caresses Renée Falconetti’s face as it traverses from frightened youth to blessed martyr.

Behold, The Wife and the chance to watch Glenn Close give an interior, subtle performance that makes you want to throw a shoe it’s so good. The rest of the movie is not quite up to her level, but it’s never an outright bomb. The Wife mistakes the audience’s intelligence to understand what Close’s masterful performance is doing that it must speak loudly what she’s already communicated quietly.

Close’s work places itself in the same hallway as those classic films, but the rest of the film is decided lesser. There’s too many subplots and diversions away from the central core of the film – the secrets, resentments, and deferments involved in the marriage between Close and Jonathan Pryce, scheduled to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. There’s more than another drama there to sustain the narrative, but The Wife throws in Christian Slater as unauthorized biographer who exists merely to create flareups and a scene in flashback with Elizabeth McGovern as a jaded female author. These moments are too on the nose and literal when Close has already expressed it so much better.

I both loved and hated this movie. My feelings towards it and about the ways in which it tackles its various subjects has not settled with time. Vice is a political hit job, a takedown of American media, and an indictment of political dynasties throwing us into never-ending conflicts and quagmires over petty squabbles and unchecked greed.

That’s a lot for any movie to take on, and much like The Big Short before it, Vice has a severe tone problem. This type of subject matter is typically presented with grim seriousness and color drained cinematography. There’s lots of hushed speaking in hallways and clandestine meetings in cramped rooms. Vice has all of that, but the volume is turned all the way up.

Is this a satire or a straight-faced look at one of the more disturbing political figures of the past 50 years? Yes, it’s both at the same time. It’s also neither as this ever-shifting tone has a strange canceling effect on everything it presents.

There’s a lack of momentum to anything presented here. Dick Cheney goes from drunken shitkicker to political novice after a stern talking to from his wife, Lynne. Then he ingratiates himself with Donald Rumsfield and we’re presented a slideshow of his life and potential crimes, including the invasion of Iraq, torture, and the Valerie Plame scandal. Yet this film’s argument that his betrayal of his gay daughter, Mary, was the moment he lost his soul feels limp. If he’s willing to do what he did as an uncommonly powerful vice-president, then it stands to reasons that he’d cast his family aside if the political math demanded it.

It’s hard to care about Cheney as a character, so it’s in this film’s favor that it never asks us to like or care about him. Yet again, there’s that strangely negating effect at play. If we’re not supposed to care about his controlling, manipulative figurehead, then why are we watching a 132-minute grab-bag about his life and career? I suppose the guffaws and laughs from the already converted is reason enough for writer/director Adam McKay.

Much like The Big Short, Vice also presents a false ending before continuing with the story proper and surrealistic touches. This time though, Vice presents this false ending towards the middle of the film as Cheney mulls over the decision to leave the private sector and return to the political one. This glimpse of Cheney’s life if he kept out of politics is both hilarious, for obvious reasons, and depressing for everything that follows.

This negating effect trickles down into the performances as well. Amy Adams comes roaring out in the earliest parts of the film as a Lady Macbeth in waiting, but one that’ll never have the “out damn spot” breakdown. Her machinations are disturbing and fascinating, and then the film jettisons her in the back half and Adams is regulated to “the wife” role that the earliest parts sidestepped. A similar thing happens with Steve Carrell’s Donald Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell’s George W. Bush – they’re grotesques and caricatures without any real cores. They’re too broadly drawn. Bush, in particular, is a clueless boob with daddy issues here. A popular idea, sure, but there’s a lack of curiosity to explore where it came from, why, and what basis it has in reality.

The same lack of intellectual curiosity and happy stereotyping dips into Cheney. Christian Bale is clearly trying to form a portrait of a man enamored with power to the point where it becomes his narcotic of choice, while McKay sees a cartoonish figure of villainy. These two ideas can coexist side-by-side, but McKay is working on one track while Bale is working on another. They rarely, if ever, are operating on the same one.

This lack of intellectual curiosity comes to a groaning climax when the identity of Jesse Plemons’ narrator is revealed. Throughout the film he’s been used as a device to word vomit more factoids that McKay couldn’t work into the mouths of others. Was this choice supposed to be satire? It’s not funny, it’s eye roll inducing. Just because you can scattershot your bile against numerous political targets that deserve it, this doesn’t mean you’ve crafted something smart to say or observe about them.

Vice is Adam McKay’s political rant. I happen to agree with him, but I also think audiences are smarter than this.   

Let’s check in with Ralph and Vanellope after six years and see what’s new. Well, they’ve established a fun pattern of spending the day in their games, drinking root beers at Tapper’s, then talking the night away before repeating the cycle over again. But there’s a rippling in their friendship, a sense that one of them is perfectly content while the other yearns for a change, something larger.

Then, while the entirety of the arcade is hanging out in the power strip hub, something of a Grand Central Station for all the various game characters, something new is added – WiFi. Before you know it, something bad happens to Vanellope’s game, and she and Ralph embark on a journey to the internet to fix it. Kinda funny that Ralph both wrecks it then tries to fix it – isn’t some of that equation supposed to be Felix’s job?

Anyway, Ralph Breaks the Internet expands on its Toy Story-like conceit by introducing the wide world of the internet, online gaming, harsh comment sections, and embodiments of viral videos and online avatars. The story smartly integrates many of these elements and they feel like organic growths from the plot points, yet there’s also a weakness to overloading the narrative with so much. Ralph Breaks the Internet is best when it narrows its emotional scope and journey to evolving relationship between Ralph and Vanellope.

There’s plenty of humorous gags, like Twitter being a both of bluebirds in a tree chirping out literal dialog balloons, but the presence of so much vertical integration is a mixed bag. The presence of the Disney princesses, and their corporate-safe feminist redesign and jokes, is alternately incredibly humorous for its self-aware humor yet distracting for feeling yet another instance of Disney cannibalizing itself. Same goes for the cameos from Star Wars characters and Marvel properties, although a silent Stan Lee cameo is wonderfully melancholic.

Same goes for the presence of YouTubers either in quick cameos or minor supporting roles. I get that they’re aiming for a specific audience demographic, but the gag involving Miranda Sings is going to age like milk left on the counter in a few years. Ralph Breaks the Internet feels calculated and synergistic in these moments. A similar thing occurs when it pokes fun at viral videos and the concept of likes. It’s a bit of low hanging fruit to merely remake/remodel the videos with Ralph. All we’re missing is a bit of a “Vanellope bit my finger!” to complete the illusion.

Yet there’s the central heart of the film – the bond between Ralph and Vanellope – that keeps it charming and deeply touching throughout. It’s easy to read their relationship as longtime friends preparing to either go out in the workforce or off to college. Ralph’s perfectly content with the way things have developed and doesn’t see a need to change them. Vanellope wants something more, and even gets the requisite Disney princess “I wish/I want” song, one that gives a bit of Alan Menken’s classic bite from the Little Shop of Horrors days.

The strength and fluidity of this bond is pushed to the limits and everyone learns some life lessons along the way. It’s here that Ralph Breaks the Internet shines brightest and hits the hardest. Less so when Ralph, the Disney princesses, and Vanellope team up to take down the big bad, a phalanx of Ralph’s insecurities made corporeal. Ignore the shiny distractions and look at this film’s beating heart. It’s a vibrant and touching one.