(2026 dir. Dave Green) Date Seen: August 30 2026
- CatZup Entertainment out here continuing to do the Lord’s work, rescuing a shelved treasure from an ungrateful parent company --while the WB the actual ancestral home of the Looney Tunes appears increasingly prepared to sell itself to the literal Antichrist; the objectively harmful & right-wing Ellison family (three cheers for late-stage capitalism i guess).
- COYOTE VS ACME is way smarter than it needs to be as an exercise in comic juxtaposition & spatial subversion. The toon world doesn’t just merely intrude upon physical reality, it also re-organizes its rules. + finally Dave Green made a feature worthy of the talent he showed early on in those FEARnet zombie webisodes from back in the day.
- I especially loved the design aspect of the Tunes themselves. Much like the Chip character in the CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS (2022) movie, they’re all technically 3D objects whose poses & expressions have been disciplined toward the graphic clarity of traditional 2D; Like freeze any frame & you could believe it had been ROGER RABBIT '88 style. After some of the uglier experiments with 3D in some of those 2010s O’Callaghan LOONEY shorts (Elmer & Granny's faces in particular) & especially all the post-"Serververse" trash in SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY 🤮, I’d been apprehensive about these characters making another jump to 3Dizzle.. Thankfully they look terrific in this movie.
- There’s a curious fidelity here to the antique verbal music of old cartoons, to rhythms of speech & joke delivery that can seem alien in 2026. Like James Gunn’s two postmodern SCOOBY-DOO scripts, COYOTE VS ACME's lovingly clinging to an artificial form of banter, to the point where the humor almost seems aggressively clean. If I seem to have unfairly knocked this one down a star, it’s only because DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP set the bar so unfairly high in 2024. That one was just raw uncut Looney Tunes energy distilled to its purest form.
- Jessica & I were blessed enough to see COYOTE VS. with a large crowd of diverse families & it helped me appreciate the comedy even more because kids were losing it over the simplest visual gags. You really don't need profound wit to recognize a toon character falling away from the camera & thudding into a cloud of dust is still funny 80 years on.
- surprise witness appears during the big courtroom finale of this & it got me a little dusty-eyed. I had to pretend like I was cutting onions (unYawns).
- Lana Condor is wonderful as always, & Forte remains a virtuoso of comic timing, but John Cena stole the human half of this movie for me personally: a wonderfully greasy corporate grotesque that seemed like the type of role Christopher McDonald would've nailed in the 90s.
- objection I have of zero aesthetic importance: The idea of Granny banging Peter Lorre is grotesque LOL.
No comments:
Post a Comment