To reiterate, this review is literally dripping with spoilers, so DO NOT READ if you want to discover stuff on your own.
You've probably noticed that I, like most of the people around here, have given LOST OLLIE a very high rating.
In my case, this is a side effect of my movie rating system. I don't actually have to LIKE a movie in order for it to get a high rating from me. This peculiarity doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I'll spare you the boring details.
Honestly, I don't like LOST OLLIE at all. I am astonished about how most people sing its praises when, to my way of thinking, it's a movie about relentless, soul crushing misery and insufferable loss. I can't believe that most of the reviewers around here saw the same story I did.
EVERY major character, and most of the minor ones, endure horrific loss, even to the point that it drives an otherwise good and loving character insane with rage, morphing into the villain of the movie. In the end, considering what he went through, I had to feel bad for the villain in spite of his monstrous behavior. Poor sad bastard.
I wonder at so many reviewers seeing this movie as happy and uplifting. It just isn't.
Ollie thinks he was abandoned by his little boy, Billy. (More on this later...).
Billy and his father lose their mother/wife to cancer, and there's even a scene where Billy and his dad are waiting around for her to die.
The mother goes to her grave having to worry if her husband and son will be able to manage without her since she is keenly aware of their emotional issues. After all, she's the one who's been holding the family together all along. What will happen when she's gone?
Zozo, once a kind, giving, generous character loses his beloved (what? Girlfriend?) Nina and literally spends decades searching for her, becoming hateful, twisted and vengeful even to the innocent along the way, and his reward at the end is to find out that his beloved Nina eventually disintegrated (fell apart) with age because he couldn't find her. And immediately following this revelation, he gets run through with a cocktail saber in the back from his only remaining friend (Rosy) who sadly sees that he has to be put down like a rabid dog. The last we see of Zozo and his friend Rosy is the pair of them, apparently dead, drifting away down a gutter, drowned. A truly nightmarish death scene.
Why did Zozo and Nina hang around in the abandoned amusement park when they easily could have run away at any time? The movie makes it clear that mobility is an option for them. Oh, no, they wait around for who knows how long to be split up and auctioned off and separated from each other forever.
And why did Ollie think his friend Billy had abandoned him? Well, because he did. He fairly quickly regretted doing it, but his motive was being embarrassed and ashamed to have a homemade plush rabbit toy. Bizarrely, although children throughout the movie are capable of "seeing" the fact that certain dolls and similar toys are "alive", somehow NONE of the kids in Billy's own classroom CAN. This causes the classroom bully to pick on Billy about it because it's just a wimpy kid with a dolly toy to him. Have to think the scene might've played out differently if EVERYBODY in the class, like all the kids outside of the class, could see that Ollie was a magically living toy.
And so on ad nauseam.
And much of the story doesn't make any sense to me. Fairytales are my favorite genre and I can readily accept the magic of toys and dolls coming to life.
But even stories of magic have rules that must be obeyed and this structural requirement for a good story is mostly expressed by story consistency.
There's no consistency in LOST OLLIE. Sometimes the magical dolls have to hold perfectly still so adults don't see their magical nature, and at other times here's a whole parade of magical dolls walking along a city sidewalk so densely packed with people they're having to dodge their human legs, and yet nobody bats an eye. Huh?
Near the end we find out that Ollie hasn't actually been gone for just a day or two, but has actually been missing for decades. We first discover this when OLLIE finally makes it back home and the place is literally falling down, full of dead leaves and broken furniture. And yet it's still full of Billy's family belongings, as if they just got up and walked out one day. Important family photographs and papers and such just left in place and the home abandoned. What? What on earth happened here? What exactly was it that happened to Ollie such that he didn't know how much time had passed?
We are led to believe that there is treatment for the mother's cancer, although it is extremely expensive. Rather than go into debt to save her life, she insists that she just dies and the father and Billy just go along with it. Who does that? My wife's family pauperized themselves trying to save my mother-in-law in the same situation. But these people are like, you're too expensive to try to save mom, so off you go.
The kind of-sort of "happy ending" did not mitigate the quantity of loss and suffering throughout this movie. This is a monstrous, brutal movie composed primarily of misery and loss. But it is well-made.
You've probably noticed that I, like most of the people around here, have given LOST OLLIE a very high rating.
In my case, this is a side effect of my movie rating system. I don't actually have to LIKE a movie in order for it to get a high rating from me. This peculiarity doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I'll spare you the boring details.
Honestly, I don't like LOST OLLIE at all. I am astonished about how most people sing its praises when, to my way of thinking, it's a movie about relentless, soul crushing misery and insufferable loss. I can't believe that most of the reviewers around here saw the same story I did.
EVERY major character, and most of the minor ones, endure horrific loss, even to the point that it drives an otherwise good and loving character insane with rage, morphing into the villain of the movie. In the end, considering what he went through, I had to feel bad for the villain in spite of his monstrous behavior. Poor sad bastard.
I wonder at so many reviewers seeing this movie as happy and uplifting. It just isn't.
Ollie thinks he was abandoned by his little boy, Billy. (More on this later...).
Billy and his father lose their mother/wife to cancer, and there's even a scene where Billy and his dad are waiting around for her to die.
The mother goes to her grave having to worry if her husband and son will be able to manage without her since she is keenly aware of their emotional issues. After all, she's the one who's been holding the family together all along. What will happen when she's gone?
Zozo, once a kind, giving, generous character loses his beloved (what? Girlfriend?) Nina and literally spends decades searching for her, becoming hateful, twisted and vengeful even to the innocent along the way, and his reward at the end is to find out that his beloved Nina eventually disintegrated (fell apart) with age because he couldn't find her. And immediately following this revelation, he gets run through with a cocktail saber in the back from his only remaining friend (Rosy) who sadly sees that he has to be put down like a rabid dog. The last we see of Zozo and his friend Rosy is the pair of them, apparently dead, drifting away down a gutter, drowned. A truly nightmarish death scene.
Why did Zozo and Nina hang around in the abandoned amusement park when they easily could have run away at any time? The movie makes it clear that mobility is an option for them. Oh, no, they wait around for who knows how long to be split up and auctioned off and separated from each other forever.
And why did Ollie think his friend Billy had abandoned him? Well, because he did. He fairly quickly regretted doing it, but his motive was being embarrassed and ashamed to have a homemade plush rabbit toy. Bizarrely, although children throughout the movie are capable of "seeing" the fact that certain dolls and similar toys are "alive", somehow NONE of the kids in Billy's own classroom CAN. This causes the classroom bully to pick on Billy about it because it's just a wimpy kid with a dolly toy to him. Have to think the scene might've played out differently if EVERYBODY in the class, like all the kids outside of the class, could see that Ollie was a magically living toy.
And so on ad nauseam.
And much of the story doesn't make any sense to me. Fairytales are my favorite genre and I can readily accept the magic of toys and dolls coming to life.
But even stories of magic have rules that must be obeyed and this structural requirement for a good story is mostly expressed by story consistency.
There's no consistency in LOST OLLIE. Sometimes the magical dolls have to hold perfectly still so adults don't see their magical nature, and at other times here's a whole parade of magical dolls walking along a city sidewalk so densely packed with people they're having to dodge their human legs, and yet nobody bats an eye. Huh?
Near the end we find out that Ollie hasn't actually been gone for just a day or two, but has actually been missing for decades. We first discover this when OLLIE finally makes it back home and the place is literally falling down, full of dead leaves and broken furniture. And yet it's still full of Billy's family belongings, as if they just got up and walked out one day. Important family photographs and papers and such just left in place and the home abandoned. What? What on earth happened here? What exactly was it that happened to Ollie such that he didn't know how much time had passed?
We are led to believe that there is treatment for the mother's cancer, although it is extremely expensive. Rather than go into debt to save her life, she insists that she just dies and the father and Billy just go along with it. Who does that? My wife's family pauperized themselves trying to save my mother-in-law in the same situation. But these people are like, you're too expensive to try to save mom, so off you go.
The kind of-sort of "happy ending" did not mitigate the quantity of loss and suffering throughout this movie. This is a monstrous, brutal movie composed primarily of misery and loss. But it is well-made.