drqshadow-reviews

The simplistic story of a hard cider brewer who loses his business, goes hungry, learns to live off the frozen tundra and falls for a trader's flirty daughter. But it's not really about any of that. Instead, our eyes and minds are glued to the pure, syrupy stream of superficial sight gags and charmingly made-at-home SFX gimmicks. With only the loosest scraps of a narrative, Hundreds of Beavers instead offers sharp, tireless doses of inane slapstick that owe an awful lot to silent pantomime and classic Looney Tunes, especially the wordless Wile E. Coyote episodes. Those ones were always my favorites, growing up, and it didn't take long for this homage to find a similar standing in my heart.

You're going to want a few minutes to acclimate, so don't write this off right away. I know I needed ten or fifteen to realize that it wasn't just an extended prologue, to take a step back and re-center myself in the right head space. Once I recognized the kind of ride I'd just boarded, embraced the madcap and let go to the flow, I had myself a ball. This is raw, unfiltered pandemonium; a fire-hose surge of stupid ideas that are seen through with excited theatrical charisma, even as they completely lose sight of reality. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd would be proud, although their work would only bend the law of physics where Hundreds of Beavers eagerly smashes it into a million glittering pieces and then dances amidst the wreckage. It's shallow humor, flat and dumb, often perverse and scatological, but I'm not above cackling at childish jokes when they hit me right. I think we could all do to be a little more adolescent, honestly. And, while the punchlines all dwell right there on the surface, their composition is surprisingly adept. Each time we circle back around the hunting loop, to check traps and revisit recurring gags, the laughs are complicated and amplified. Like its hero, who progresses from buck-naked neophyte to almost-competent trader, the script does a great job of gradually leveling up, of perverting and tilting the bits that came before to boost their later renditions. Mayhem this may be, but it's well-orchestrated.

Hundreds of Beavers isn't high art, but it's as enthusiastic and creative, not to mention laugh-out-loud funny, as any comedy I've seen in the past two decades. It might not be for everybody, but it won't keep you waiting to find out. Straight out of the gates, these guys show you exactly who they are, exactly what we can expect. It's on us to recognize that, and to understand if we're the intended target. The team must've spent a fortune on furry, big-head mascot costumes.

Kenji, a lowly high school math nerd, swallows his heart when he's offered a summer job by a beautiful classmate. It doesn't pay well, but... would you mind accompanying me to a reunion on my vast ancestral estate? The unspoken catch is that he'll also be expected to play fiancé for her huge, overbearing extended family. That deception doesn't last very long, but the big, noisy household doesn't have much time to grouch over it. While they've been sharing meals, spending quality time and sussing out imposters, greater society has seen its strings snipped by a malevolent, self-sufficient artificial intelligence. And Kenji might be tangentially involved.

Summer Wars splits its time evenly across those two fronts: the digital world, where a handful of teens try to thwart global chaos by challenging a bot to mini-games, and the physical one, where the stakes are more emotional. The story kicks and weaves, trying its best to buck convention by trimming plot points and suddenly changing direction, but it's still overly convenient and predictable. The online world of OZ, an all-encompassing social media strawman that houses the online action, is rudimentary and unrealistic. Its influence is broad enough that a service outage has major planetary repercussions, but three key players in its existential crisis all happen to be in the same house when the crud really hits the fan. One of those, a renowned cyber-fighter, freely transitions from zen-like kempo training on the lawn to frantic keyboard smashing in the den. I don't see how either translates to success in fighting games. That kind of hand wavy e-fantasy abounds in the OZ scenes; impractical nonsense that's borderline insulting to anyone who's ever visited a VR chat (which is, basically, all this place amounts to). Feels like it was written by someone who doesn't fully understand the boundaries of technology, which is odd because director Mamoru Hosoda actually got his start working on Digimon movies.

I was hoping for more from Hosoda, whose efforts I enjoyed in 2015's The Boy and the Beast, and from Madhouse, who handles the production duties. This is an unusually restrained effort from the famed visual team, especially for those scenes set in the electronic realm. The no-limits environment of OZ gives them ample opportunity to cut loose and really go for broke, but the results are only marginally better than a Wii avatar. They go streamlined and gestural for the analog scenes, and while those fare much better, they also fall short of the studio's usual high standard. Call it a disappointing work, through and through.

Unless you're an OCD weirdo with an unnatural urge to go though a director's dirty laundry (that's me!), there's really no good reason to see The Seafarers. This is Stanley Kubrick as a hungry student of the game, experimenting with color for the first time, but it's also Stanley Kubrick as a hired gun, pressed beneath the thumb of a client with more interest in self-promotion than self-expression. I can't fault the Seafarers International Union for that. I'm sure they never would've imagined their flimsy little recruitment tool being discussed amongst cinephiles seventy years later. But here we are, and here it is, and whew, I had to keep reminding myself why I wanted to see it through.

At best, The Seafarers is on-par with the shorts Joel and the bots would sometimes skewer before lighter Mystery Science Theater features; a mind-numbingly dull illustration of facts and figures that might have served as a good target for zany zingers and ironic punchlines. At worst... man, just how interesting can the guy behind 2001 really make a visit to the accounting department or roll call at the annual meeting? Answer: not interesting. Not at all. We tag along for a tour of the job boards and the commissary, see injured workers claim benefits from a cozy hospital courtyard, and all the while, an insistent narrator breathlessly hammers his talking points. Bland and flavorless, but it hits its marks. If I were in the industry, and alive two generations earlier, I may have been compelled to survey my options. None of this is true, sadly, and as such its entertainment value is close to nil.

I'm sure the client was pleased with this work. I'm sure Stanley was happy to cash the check and move on to bigger and better things. And I'm sure both would prefer it remain buried in the early '50s. Resist the urge: you don't need to watch this. I didn't need to, either.