SparklyPrettyBriiiight

SNAPSHOT
In the adorably different town of Uglyville, weird is celebrated, strange is special and beauty is embraced as more than simply meets the eye. Here, the free-spirited Moxy and her UglyDolls friends live every day in a whirlwind of bliss, letting their freak flags fly in a celebration of life and its endless possibilities, occasionally looking to the sky, where a new UglyDoll will appear and be embraced by the community.

Moxy (Kelly Clarkson) loves her square-peg life in this round-hole town, but her curiosity about all things leads her to wonder if there’s something – anything – on the other side of the mountain which nestles Uglyville. Moxy gathers a group of her closest friends and sets off to find what’s on the other side. They discover another world – Perfection – a town where more conventional dolls are trained in protocols before they graduate and are sent to the “real” world to find the love of a child.

In Perfection, Moxy and her crew are subject to the manipulations of Lou (Nick Jonas), the perfect doll in charge of training recruits. Here, the UglyDolls will confront what it means to be different, struggle with their desire to be loved, and ultimately discover that you don’t have to be perfect to be amazing because who you truly are is what matters most. (synopsis via Bleeding Cool)

When I first saw the Ugly Dolls trailer, an animated film based on a line of plush toys launched in February 2001, I was enchanted.

Here was a bright, fresh, fun and quirky animated tale – pretty much all my favourite things in one – with a very necessary message about valuing people for who they are.

As someone who was teased mercilessly all through school for being different – I was gay and none of the kids was prepared to let me forget it; keep in mind that this was in an era (the ’70s into the ’80s) when discussion of sexuality was nowhere near as open and free as it is now – I love the fact that the entire film is unashamedly celebrating difference and diversity.

I did a bit of a double take when I found it was based on a commercial line of toys, and yes the theme song is a little bit too chirpy and squeaky-perfect, leading me to wonder if the film might be a tad cloying and hamfisted in its approach, but honestly, if reminding kids once again that being a few steps, or a great many more, out of the mainstream is not just OK but wonderfully so, then I’m all for it.

This is a message that’s still vitally needed in a world where there are still far too many people who seek security and solace in hatred and bigotry rather than love and acceptance and if Ugly Dolls can play some role in changing that, I’m all for it.

Plus c’mon! It’s so freaking cute how can you not want to wallow in this technicolour wonderfulness?

Ugly Dolls opens 10 May 2019 in USA, 27 June 2019 in Australia and 16 August 2019 in UK.

… and here are posters, many, many cute posters to delight you … well, they delighted me … they may delight you … who knows?

SNAPSHOT
Armed with a camera drone, I travelled to Utah to capture the alienesque landscape of the desert on film. …Like many people, I’ve always wanted to visit Mars. But, it’s so far away. Last month I did the next best thing: I traveled to the deserts of Southern Utah. The landscapes there are otherwordly. Desolate. Stark. Abandoned. Millions of miles of dry, dusty red rock. You can truly get a sense of the millions of years of wind and water it’s taken to form the terrain. (synopsis via Laughing Squid)

For a film that only runs for 1 1/2 minutes and is dialogue free save for some command centre commentary, The Visitor leaves one hell of an evocative impression.

Telling the story of an astronaut exploring an alien world, it uses what Laughing Squid calls “the “active track” feature on a DJI Mavic Air drone” to turn the desert of southern Utah inside the famed Monument Valley into an alien landscape that is unutterably beautiful and yet desperately, poignantly lonely.

It’s an absolutely astonishingly transportive piece of work by Australian filmmaker and designer Pete Majarich that leaves you feeling as if you are on the planet with the intrepid explorer though from an entirely different, almost god-like vantage point.

Comedy is one of the great joys of life, a chance to sit back and ignore the serious business of life for a moment in favour of poking fun at, musing on its ups and downs, and sometimes just being plain silly and goofy in a way that is wondrously therapeutic to the soul.

But while comedy might be lighthearted and diverting on the outside, it is often anything but on the inside, taking a considerable toll on performers and their relationships which are anything but humourous away from the stage.

There are, however, exceptions to the rule, such as Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly), two comedians with backgrounds in vaudeville who were brought together by Hal Roach as a comedy team for his studio which for much of cinema’s early decades was a production force to be reckoned with.

The remarkable thing is that even though they were in essence an artificial construct borne of business necessity, they became fast and devoted friends, as in sync comedically as they were personally.

Stan & Ollie, directed by Jon S. Baird from a screenplay by Jeff Pope, celebrates the durability of this partnership which survived the ruthless business machinations of Hal Roach, who had the men on separate out-of-sync contracts that meant they could never leave him as an intact team, one or two poor career decisions engendered by Roach’s contractual arrangements and the shifting tastes of comedy consumers.

While there is some tension embedded in the narrative, generated by the need of every biopic to create some drama with a capital “D”, it is largely fabricated for cinematic purposes with the tensions between the two men no more malignant or generated than those between any two long time friends.

Contrary to the trailer which suggests a major rupture at play between the two during a make-or-break tour of England and Ireland in 1953, when their star was sadly very much on the wane, their friendship survived everything that was thrown at them, standing them in stark contrast to our great comedy duos such as Abbott & Costello who famously hated each other (or again, so the story goes).

Not that there weren’t pressures aplenty on them.

After riding high through the 1920s and ’30s and into the 1940s on a beguilingly whimsical blend of slapstick comedy with Hardy as the impatient straight man and Laurel the clumsy child-like friend, Laurel and Hardy found themselves in the early 1950s, after an impressive 107 films (short and feature-length), as publicly-perceived has-beens.

They weren’t of course having made their last film, Atoll K, in 1950 and continuing an exhaustive tour of stage shows to crowds who remembered with affection the comedy of a duo where Laurel was the creative powerhouse and Hardy the perfect partner.

But the truth was they were past their prime, professionally and in Hardy’s case, physically, with a congestive heart condition imperilling his ability to perform the necessary slapstick vigour on stage,with the tour acting as a last ditch attempt to secure a film deal that would put them into the cinemas of the world, and erase the idea that they were outdated retirees (a running joke through the film).

The very real pressures facing them, or more particularly Laurel who bore the brunt of the creative and business side of their partnership, form a significant part of the central narrative of Stan & Ollie, with most acutely aware that time is likely against them.

Refreshingly though Pope, who describes the duo as comedy heroes, doesn’t let this thread dominate with far more attention paid to the closeness of the men’s friendship (and the frenemy status of their wives, Hardy’s Lucille, played by Shirley Henderson, and Laurel’s Ida, played by Nina Arianda), and the obvious affection between two men who loved each other as much off-stage as on.

In various low-key but powerfully emotional ways, Stan & Ollie demonstrates again and again how much their partnership extended beyond prat-filled singing, whimsically silly dance routines (usually to their theme music “The Cuckoo Song”) and superlatively simple visual comedy, much of which is recreated as we follow the two men on what amounted to their final big tour together.

This closeness is demonstrated when they’re on the ferry to their tour dates in Ireland, where they received a rapturous rock star welcome, where the two men talk openly and honestly about their likelihood of making another film (not high), their love of the same jokes (very high) and how they would miss each when they were no longer performing.

The intimate friendship demonstrated in just this one beautifully-moving scene is buttressed by their final performance on stage in the film where Hardy, heart conditions be sweetly damned, danced through a physically-demanding dance routine because it matter so much to him and he knew, to Laurel.

The odds of him collapsing then and there are quite real but he soldiers on, the two men smile at each other revelling in the ease and comfort of their friendship and on-stage partnership in a way that will leave you smiling at the sheer joy of their transportive rapport.

Even the credits provide a touching homage to how close they were, explaining that even after Hardy died in 1957 that Laurel kept writing material for them until his own death in 1965.

It’s a simple two line update on the legendary comedy partnership but it speaks volumes about two men whose lives are brought to moving, heartwarming but never less than real life in Stan & Ollie, performers who weren’t inured to career struggles and business and creative schisms but whose friendship survived all kinds of ups and downs, allowing them to bring joy and endless amusement (including to yours truly who spent his childhood watching the short films on TV) well past their heyday, reminding us at every turn that it is possible for voluminous on-stage and on-screen laughs to be every bit as resoundingly loud and appreciative away from the spotlight.

There’s a good reason why falling in love is so popular in the movies – real life romance, lovely though it can be at times (most of the time if you find the “right” person), rarely comes close to the magnificently-confected perfection of the average romantic comedy or rom-com.

The vastness of the gulf between what is and what we dream of becomes most obvious in the better-crafted rom-com where every last aspect of falling gloriously in rosy-hued love is writ large and in colours so glitteringly beguiling that you would have to have a heart of blackened concrete not to be swept in the Cupid-ian machinations.

Example A, in this instance at least, is Set It Up, a Netflix-exclusive release starring Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell as two beleaguered personal assistants, Harper Moore and Charlie Young respectively, whose lives are most definitely not their own.

They work seemingly impossible hours with one scene seeing Harper required to wait until midnight at her desk to wake her demanding sports journalist star boss, Kirsten Stevens, from a nap; in another Charlie has to rush across town to meet his boss at an exclusive club, thinking he has one errand to run and then he’s off the clock.

He’s not of course with his boss, Richard “Rick” Otis (Taye Diggs), first wanting not wanting dinner then wanting it and then tossing it away.

It’s not an easy life, and honestly so monstrously-caricatured are Kirsten and Rick that you wonder how either Charlie or Harper haven’t taken out a contract on their boss’s life or at the very least resigned and gone to join a peaceful hippie commune somewhere.

Of course, the mercurial nastiness of both bosses, a lawsuit waiting to happen in anyone’s language, is all in service of a plot that is basically a paint-by-numbers rom-com narrative, as are Harper and Charlie’s lives who, it is clear, from the moment they clash over a delivery meal in the lobby, are destined to be A Thing.

What makes Set It Up a cut well above your average rom-com is that for all the been-there-done-that narrative functionality, and there’s plenty of slavish adherence to convention, it manages to take its tropes and do something magically delightful with them.

So well-executed is Set It Up, so adroitly does it summon the kind of romance we all wish for ourselves, naturally set in either New York or Paris with a large budget and elastic days that dare 24/7 normalcy to constrain them, that it’s well nigh impossible to resist being swept up in its abundant charms.

Helping matters considerably are Deutch and Powell who enjoy chemistry so perfectly-beguiling and enchanting to watch that it reminds you of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.

There is an ease and joyfulness, even in those scenes where the idea of freedom from the tyranny of their bosses and a return to some sort of personal autonomy seems like an impossible pipe dream, that powers the film, with Deutch delivering her snappy oneliners with the kind of comedic energy that makes you smile every time, and Powell displaying the kind of suck-it-up vulnerability that is appealing because it hints at the fact that he’s not really such a corporate sell-out after all.

So natural and unaffected is their rapport that you buy all kinds of narrative twists-and-turns that otherwise wouldn’t, and probably still don’t when objectively examined, make sense such as the time, nearing the final act, when Harper and Charlie decide to go to the engagement party of Harper roommate Becca (Meredith Hagner) despite the fact that Charlie has a girlfriend Suze (Joan Smalls) with whom he is supposed to be hanging out and who has been oft-neglected up to this point by her boyfriend’s insane schedule.

Naturally, Suze is nice enough but not a fit for Charlie not really and so when they decide to go to the party and then blow off the party after a short time to eat pizza and act goofily cute together, an act which might seem a little over the top given their current circumstances, you totally go with it.

How could you not? Harper and Charlie are a delight and as they plan for their bosses to fall in love and get off their backs for a while – yeah it’s kinda of selfish and eventually messy but honestly if you have managers like that, you’d throw the ethics out with the spurned dinner too – you totally root for them to succeed so they can have their lives back, preferably with each other.

Set It Up manages to feel both aspirationally blue sky-fabulous and grounded all at once, a mesmerisingly-good mix that you can likely attribute to the fact that two women wrote and directed the film.

The screenplay by Katie Silberman and direction by Claire Scanlon radiate the sense that life can be remorsely-demanding and full of all kinds of moral and ethical compromises – refreshingly some of the questionable tactics pursued by Harper and Charlie are called out and Rick and Kirsten are not complete ogre archetypes – but there is the capacity for something wonderful to happen too.

It’s this one eye on what is and the other on what we’d like to be that comes from an ability to see the full emotional panoply of life in all its gloriously contradictory complexity that defines Set It Up as something special, and at the risk of sounded misandristic, is something that women writer and directors such as Scanlon and Silberman, and the late great Nora Ephron seem to capture more expansively and fulsomely than men.

Whatever the drivers of its rom-com perfection, Set It Up is one of those films that sweeps you up in its hastily-constructed glittering universe so completely and unashamedly that its tropes and cliches feel organically real and possible rather than contrived and silly, marking it as an exemplar of its genre, that rare re-user of the conventions of its cinematic type, and let’s face it, all rom-coms are to some degree, that feels fresh, original and most of all transportively and reality-defying romantic.

Best of all, for all its otherworldly rom-com-ness, it feels weirdly and appealing possible, which for all of us, in love or otherwise, is probably its greatest gift of all.