By Jake Coyle, AP Film Writer
Music snobbery is making a comeback.
On the heels of the excellent serial remake of "High Fidelity," about a tasteful Brooklyn record store owner, comes "Trolls World Tour," in which different pixie clans each representing a music genre vie for sonic domination. Both are quaint in their own way, pretending that our musical borders didn't years ago disintegrate into a digital soup.
"Trolls World Tour," a sequel to the 2016 DreamWorks original, had been planned for theatrical release before the coronavirus pandemic. On Friday, Universal Pictures instead released it straight into the home, as a $19.99 digital rental — a rare breaking of the theatrical release window by a major studio.
That makes "Trolls World Tour" a kind of trial balloon, albeit a very glittery one. Is it worth it? That may depend on just how bored your housebound kids are. It is, at least, a shiny new object when there are few about.
Directed by Walt Dohrn, with co-director David P. Smith, "Trolls World Tour" is a sped up version of the jukebox musical. It runs through so many songs that it might be better called a Spotify musical, with infinite skips.
Both "Trolls" movies can be hard to look at. They're so garishly colored that I'd recommend dimming your TV set. But when they're not too loud and you've sufficiently shielded your eyes, their sugary highs are pleasant enough and occasionally tuneful. An animated movie can do worse than indoctrinate another generation to the joys of Earth, Wind and Fire's "September."
In "World Tour," our original clan, including Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake), discover a wider world of trolls. The trolls we know believe in the power of pop, but it turns out there are others out there devoted to techno, classical, country, funk and rock. There are even other pockets they find along the way, too, including those for hip-hop, Reggaeton and even dedicated yodelers. (Unfortunately, there are no cameos for Prog Rock or Crunk.)
It's the Rock Trolls that start the trouble in "World Tour." Their leader, Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom), sets out to dominate the other groups. Armed with heavy-metal power chords and Metallica-esque bombast, Queen Barb plots a rock reign to drown out the other styles.
The plot gives "World Tour" an opportunity to cycle through countless hits, and it does so so speedily that the film often feels less like a story than an impatient, candy-colored battle of the bands. When it slows down, and allows more than a snippet of a song, "Trolls World Tour" is more enjoyable. There's a good hip-hop interlude and a fine Kelly Clarkson country ballad.
Both "Trolls" movies exuberantly exalt the glories of diversity, and maybe some young ones will get a decent primer on a musical landscape far more vast than Kidz Bop. But "World Tour" can also sound like a bad Grammy medley that puts every genre into a blender until all the taste is rung out.
"Trolls World Tour," a DreamWorks Animation release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for some mild rude humor. Running time: 110 minutes. Two stars out of four.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More