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carterkenney
Reviews
After the Wizard (2011)
A Boring Mess of Forced Dialogue
After the Wizard is one of those movies that you know no one is looking for. I happened to stumble upon it and seeing its 29% audience approval decided to watch, hoping to have found a "so bad it's good" flic. Disappointingly, the movie is poor in its story telling, but not entertaining in its shortcomings. We follow the Tin-man and the Scarecrow who decide they need to leave OZ after the people of OZ have rejected them as leaders. The sets (at one point OZ is set as a hollow cement plant) and character designs (The tin-man is festooned in a gray button down with silver face paint) convince the viewer of the films limited budget. The plot is not redeeming. Most of it is vague exposition, focusing on the duo's journey to Kansas where they clumsily bump into extras as they travel first via, air ballon, train, then bus. The movie is hardly entertaining, even with awkward transitions and odd continuity errors. I fell asleep watching and I'm sure your child will too. The movies summation is an insult to its audience with not even the finest resolution or cause for the scarecrow and tin man's travel. They end up with nothing in the end and so will you.
Bee Team (2018)
Laughable failure. Nothing Happen-ZZZ. Ugly Characters. ZZZ-terrible
Zip and Zap are young bee forms, I say bee forms because they scantly resemble bees, taking generous inspiration from a minon. Six people worked on the character designs and IT SHOWS. Any way so like the film opens wirh Zip and Zap getting bullied by two bees with hard hats ( the only way to distinguish the bee characters is by their accessories). We learn that Zip and Zap are freshly grown bees having just developed past their larva stage. This means that all the other pees think they're pretty much useless. Next thing that happens is the Zip and Zap have a chance to prove that they are more than larva when the bee queen lets everyone in the hive know that someone stole their honey. It's important to note that while the queen mentions their being 50,000 bees we only get to see about 7 in the entire film. I was waiting to see inside the hives (like in Bee movie) but its pretty apparent that these massive bees would never fit into the hive. Any way so are too bee-tagonists are like "hey queen Elanor, we're smart and fast enough to figure out who stole the honey" and Elanor is like "no". And so the bees are like "whatever we'll do what I want". WHat happens next is the longest and most anti-climactic wild bee chase ever. We meet character after atrocious nightmare fuel hastily designed character (the horse Mr. Hay Neigh has been keeping me up for WEEKS) and each character contributes essentially nothing to the plot. We do learn that Zip and Zap are complete Neanderthals because they don't know what a dog, frog, or rabbit is. They interact with more computer generated monsters than I could be paid to remember and then they get to a stick man named Sonny who can talk to bees. Sonny just apologizes and then says he'll put all the honey back. HOW SONNY? HOW ARE YOU GOING TO INSERT THE HONEY INTO THE BEE HIVE? So the day is saved and the bees celebrate because they aren't going to die after all. But the celebration is just the bees talking outside the hive and flying. Queen elanor literally has no class and this bee doesn't show an ounce of gratitude for Zip and Zap who saved her entire colony from certain death - beyond a a very simple speech.
The reason why I've been so generous with this movie is because of the unintentional comedic tendency that comes from taking such a massive poo and calling it a film. When studios excrete a movie with such rapidity the result is something so ugly and inconsistent that you can't help but laugh. The character designs are the most evident. However the voice acting the bee dialect created in the film are especially worth condemning laughter. The bees in this movie will add a ZZZ to almost every word, in places where it doesn't make any sense to do so. For example, they added a ZZZ in front of "puzzle" instead of emphasizing the Z's already in puzzle.
The film does have a very subliminal note about the role humans play in deconstructing the environment. There are notes about how pesticides drove all the bees away - which is nice. Maybe somone will watch this movie and become an entomologist, or a park ranger - sheesh I don't I'm trying to be nice. But even with this morale tossed in there, the human character Sonny doesn't realize the greater stakes of his and other human actions. He doesn't fill in the lake that was drained. He doesn't write to his congress man - the message is there but its week.
Any way so I'd recommend this movie if you want to laugh at it (the failures of the films, there are no jokes in the entire plot) and you have a good stash of recreational drugs to help you get through it.