Wendell & Wild (2022)

Director: Henry Selick

Cast: Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Still on the lookout for potential Cabin movies, and with Peele’s latest effort pushed from this holiday season to sometime next fall, I went about widening the lens a bit.

Did I Like It: All of the elements are there. Key and Peele have created the most consistently satisfying sketch comedy show of the last twenty years, and that doesn’t even begin to cover Peele’s current metamorphosis into the legitimate heir to both Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling. Throw in Selick, whose The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) remains the gold standard of spook stop motion animation, and the entire affair seems destined for greatness.

And yet, the film is kind of a miss. I’m willing to write most of that off to pacing issues. Key and Peele play off of each other with the easy chemistry they brought to their sketches*, but every other character feels like they are reading their lines alone in a an undisclosed location, likely because they probably were. There’s a way to make dialogue recorded separately sound like it has the life of real conversation, but it is rarely on display here. Here, most lines have the self-aware delivery of someone reciting a monologue.

I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed in the design of things, too. Things are moody and creepy, but the titular characters come across as nothing much more imaginative than light pointy-eared caricatures of their performers.

Ultimately, if the pitch for this movie appeals to you, you might be better off watching any of Selick’s, Peele’s, or Key and Peele’s work. It’s heart is in the right place, just not quite its craft.

*I still marvel a little bit that they got their start on MadTV, a show I found to be an absolute chore to watch after attaining the age of 11. Maybe their years—towards the end of the show’s run—are better? I may never know.

Wonka (2023)

Director: Paul King

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Indeed, it was particularly off my radar as any attempt to catch the magic of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) ought not be worth anyone’s time. I did see large swaths of the end credits over the last month, incidentally, cleaning up the big theater at Circle before screenings of White Christmas (1954). So that’s got to count for something, right?

Ultimately, a weird twist of fate and my wife’s belated office holiday party put me in a seat at my favorite theater while the movie happens in front of me.

Did I Like It: Ultimately the film is inoffensive enough, and more interested in harnessing the energy of the original film—I’m looking in your direction, Tim Burton…-- that I’m willing to give the film a passing grade. Chalamet can’t quite measure up to Gene Wilder, but few could, and he brings some manic glee—if none of the menace—to the role. What’s more, seeing even a few members of the troupe that brought BBC’s Ghosts to the airwaves getting more exposure is always good news.

Is it possible I like the film?

Let’s talk a little bit about that magic I opened up with, shall we? I watch the climax of these films and can’t help but be a little revolted in watching people joyfully eat chocolate in which characters had been swimming in only minutes before. I never thought about that in the old film, even though terrible things happen to the people and the sweets in that one, too. Maybe it says more about me as I become an increasingly old, increasingly fuddish duddy, but I’m more than a little prepared to say that it says more about the film being a homogenized piece of entertainment that we’re all liable to forget almost immediately.