Elemental and The Flash, Take 2

I did actually take two on Wednesday night, when I watched all of Elemental and the 83% of The Flash that I missed on Sunday when my son and I had to leave the movie early. 

And I really liked both of them.

The context of learning all the details of Ezra Miller's many trespasses -- literally and figuratively -- in the time since I started my Flash viewing did not turn me off to them. In fact, I thought they were hilarious in this film, at the times they were supposed to be hilarious, and poignant in the times they were supposed to be poignant. (Miller is non-binary, hence the "they" pronoun. The grammarian in me still has a hard time with that pronoun and wishes there might be a better option.)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Wednesdays are the day I most consistently go into the office. I didn't last Wednesday because I was still at the tail end of being sick, nor did I any of the other days last week, but this past Wednesday it was back to business as usual.

So Wednesday is also the day when I am out of the mix for domestic things, a price my wife will gladly pay because she enjoys having the house to herself those days. And she doesn't really have an issue with me just extending my absence until, oh, 11:30 at night if that's what it takes for me to catch up on the movies I haven't seen in the past two weeks.

The only thing about the schedule I drew up for Elemental and The Flash, though, was that it worked best for me to come halfway home on the train rather than staying in the city, and to see both movies at the Sun in Yarraville. That's my favorite cinema so no issue there. The issue is that the Sun is also where I started watching The Flash on Sunday. They are so casual at this place that I know they're not keeping track, but I did feel bad about making the same cinema give me a free ticket to the same movie twice. I did wonder whether it would be the same clerk who had served me on Sunday, but it wasn't, and they probably wouldn't have cared anyway.

But I am getting ahead of myself again as Elemental was the first up at 4:50. I had to leave work 20 minutes early to make it on time, but my boss is also one of those who doesn't care about such things. I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth (I didn't state the reason I was leaving early) and she was metaphorically brushing me out the door with her hands. In fact, I left early enough that not only did I catch the train I needed to catch to make the movie on time, but I caught the one before it.

As I said, I really enjoyed Elemental. It steadily climbed from 3.5 stars to 4 stars to 4.5 stars as I was watching, and though it's a generous 4.5 stars, I don't give that rating out willy nilly. It got there in the end, as Pixar usually but not always does. (In fact, wondering if I were too generous toward Pixar in general, I've re-read my two-star review of last year's Lightyear, to confirm that I'm not totally in the bag for this company.)

The Flash was set to start at 7:30, which left me plenty of time to go next door to Grill'd to get three sliders, a Corona and a basket of fries, or chips as they call them here. While waiting for the food to arrive, I started my review of Elemental -- and while eating it, I finished it. Yeah, I've gotten this review-writing thing down to a science. (You can read the review here.)

But I also took my time with it. Seven thirty came and went and I was still leisurely wrapping up my dinner.

It wasn't that I knew the Sun plays a lot of trailers. They don't, actually. You can rely on a movie to start within five minutes of its scheduled start time.

It was that I had already seen 25 minutes of The Flash just three days earlier. In fact, I think I arrived late on purpose just for the novelty of it. 

I got in at about 7:38, and sure enough, the movie had already been going on for a couple minutes. 

I wondered for a moment if the other people in the audience shook their head at me casually sauntering in late. I had wondered the same thing about the woman who'd gotten me my ticket -- who was the same one who had gotten me my Elemental ticket, and we had a little laugh about that.

But I know I didn't miss any of The Flash -- in fact saw 20 minutes of it twice -- and that's all that matters.

And I'm glad I prioritized tying up that loose end, as I really liked this one too. The review is here if you would like to read it. 

And just when I thought I was all multiverse'd out. 

Neither Elemental nor The Flash

I've been sick on and off for about two weeks, so that also means I haven't really gotten out to the movies. I'd say I haven't gotten out at all, except that's not exactly true -- though more on that in a minute.

In fact, because I started to get sick two Tuesday nights ago, I hadn't been to see a movie since the Saturday night before that when my older son and I went to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That was 17 days ago, an eternity in my world.

I'm a grown-up and I can wait to get back to the movies. But my website can't wait -- or at least, that's what I tell myself. You need to keep feeding reviews to your hypothetical audience or else they will leave you.

There haven't been any good streaming releases lately, and the offerings at the cinema hadn't really been wowing me either. That is, until all the sudden in one burst they started to.

Last Thursday saw the release of DC's The Flash, Pixar's Elemental and Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, all of which I planned to see and review. And by this past Sunday, I was feeling well enough to take my kids to one of them -- though probably not the one starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woman in a co-dependent relationship.

My first instinct was Elemental, since I still consider Pixar movies to be events and since I knew there would be no issue of the content appropriateness for my younger son. I knew it would probably rule out my older son, but he's getting pretty indifferent to movies in general -- or wanting to watch things like Scream VI, as I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Elemental is that the younger one is going to daytime activities at his school some of the days during school holidays, which starts at the end of this week. One of those is going to see Elemental, and my wife didn't want to lose that as a carrot on the end of the stick to get him to go to those activities without complaining.

So I shifted to The Flash. Bad idea. 

The older one still didn't want to go -- he's a bit superhero'd out -- and the younger one agreed with a shrug, which seemed to say "I wouldn't have considered it, but okay." He's still at the age where any activity with his daddy is a good activity.

But my son has a couple sensory issues, and one of them is an aversion to loud noises. The cinema assumes the opposite of its viewers, that the louder they play it, the better. So the Sun in Yarraville played it as loud as reasonable, which was exactly the right amount of loudness for someone like me.

Not for him. He clamped his hands over his ears quite a number of times in the first 25 minutes, which I didn't interpret as an attempt to shut out the movie entirely. I figured it was kind of like how some people will put cotton balls in their ears at a concert so they can hear the music better but block out all the noise.

I can't tell you what he did after the first 25 minutes, because that's when we left.

It's been a long time since I've had to leave a movie prematurely -- never with this one, and only once or twice that I can remember with his older brother when he was several years younger than the younger one is now. But I soon realized that whatever was ailing my younger son was not going to be fixed by telling him to close his eyes for a minute.

No, see, he told me he felt like he was going to pass out. 

He asked if he could go outside. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit what I'm about to tell you, but because I ultimately did the right thing I am going to proceed. I tried to arrange a plan where he would go outside for a few minutes and then come back in once he felt better, and was trying to make sure he had a ticket so he could get back in. You'll be glad to know that I abandoned this train of thought after no more than ten or 15 seconds. I left the theater with him, knowing that we probably wouldn't be back. For a movie completist like me, it's either see the whole thing or you might as well have seen none of it.

You'll also be glad to know that my son was fine. He wasn't having a medical episode and he didn't throw up. I just think the movie was too intense for him. The volume got him off on the wrong foot, and then things like Batman involved in a shootout with fleeing criminals on his Bat cycle just ramped up the intensity beyond what he could handle. I suspect it didn't help seeing Barry Allen's mother having been stabbed in a flashback.

He never told me what exactly it was that had bothered him to a point that reached critical mass, and because I didn't want to make him feel any worse than he already did, I didn't ask. It appears he was worried he had disappointed me by making me leave the movie -- and though that's true, I can't really help that and I really don't think I let on. My first instinct may have been to salvage the viewing experience, but my next was to be there for my son, and I really don't think my demeanor suggested I was put out by it.

So Elemental would have been the right choice, right?

Not so fast. Then the next night at dinner, my wife mentioned the school program during the school holidays and how they'd be going to Elemental. He didn't look too pleased by the idea. Apparently some friends had seen it this weekend and they told him it was "really bad," and that "everyone was kissing," or something like that. 

So if neither Elemental nor The Flash is the right movie for this son, what is?

You may recall that this is the same son who was supposed to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with some friends the first weekend it was out, with me as their chaperone. Those kids ended up getting sick, which is when he bowed out so he could go with them on another day while I went that night with my older son. Poor kid, he probably didn't figure the option to go was never going to come up again -- but I gotta say, that movie wore me out enough that I don't really think I can sit through it again. 

So now, neither Elemental nor The Flash may get reviewed on my site at all, depending on how the rest of this week goes. Instead of those two top prospects with You Hurt My Feelings as a promising third, on Sunday night I watched and reviewed ... Extraction 2 on Netflix. (Which I liked quite a bit, actually. You can read the review here.)

Hey, gotta feed that hypothetical audience. 

The Pixar movie you'd pitch as a joke

I finally took my younger son to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie today (ugh) and I saw my first moving images of the next Pixar movie, Elemental.

Which confirmed where Pixar gets its ideas these days: from comedians who make jokes about Pixar.

I don't know any actual comedians who make their livings in humor related to animated movies, but if not a comedian, then some snarky but wise cinema commentator -- maybe even a blogger -- would have made the joke about a Pixar movie where elements all live together in a city, which probably most closely resembles Disney's Zootopia, but it's all under the Disney umbrella.

The actual joke I did see was a listing of all the movies Pixar has made and how each one involves the characters in the movie having feelings, even though you wouldn't expect them to. I believe they were posed as a series of questions: "What would happen if toys had feelings? What would happen if cars had feelings? What would happen if bugs had feelings? What would happen if monsters had feelings? What would happen if souls had feelings? What would happen if feelings had feelings?" (That last one is the best.)

"What would happen if elements had feelings?" feels like the joke there, but now it's real. 

I'm teasing Elemental, but in reality, I probably want to see it just as much as any other new Pixar movie that's coming out these days ... though that level is decreasing a bit from what it once was. Even with Turning Red snagging my #3 spot in 2022, that was offset by Lightyear, which I kind of hated. Their success rate is still very high -- it was only 2020 where both of the films they released that year were in my top ten -- but I no longer consider a Pixar movie a slam dunk. 

And for sure, the animation looks really nice. The character designs of the apparent Romeo & Juliet-style romantic leads -- a fire girl, a water boy -- are good. (And so what if they remind me a bit of characters in Inside Out and Soul ... I think it's inevitable at this point.)

Have all the things that could have feelings had feelings by this point? 

Likely not. They still haven't done ... kitchen appliances. Yeah, kitchen appliances.

You think I'm kidding, but just you wait. Check back here in 2028 and we'll be talking about the movie where the whisk and the vegetable peeler go on an exciting journey through the refrigerator.