Movie Nation

The “Beanie Baby Craze” of the 1990s silenced anybody who ever had a laugh when learning of the
“Tulip Fever” that gripped Dutch collectors, investors and ordinary folk in 17th century Holland. And no movie about the Clinton Era plush toy mania could fail to find the fun in remembering folks who made and lost fortunes hunting down and “investing” in cute, cleverly-marketed children’s toys.

“The Beanie Bubble” may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

Zach Galifaniakis brings his disarming charm and a layer of “almost adorable creep” to his portrayal of Ty Warner, the “genius,” aka adult “child” who founded Ty Toys and spun his own myth out of it and the Beanie Mania it helped create.

But “Beanie Bubble” is about “Robbie,” the woman (played by Elizabeth Banks) who co-founded the company and became Warner’s partner, in and out of the office, only to have Warner cheat her out of credit and ownership. It’s about Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the smart young college student who joined the company as receptionist and who masterminded internet marketing and helped Ty Toys surf the ever-shifting shape of a business that turned from toys for kids to collectibles for “investors,” only to have her value discounted by the dopey, infantile and sexist CEO.

And then there’s Sheila (Sarah Snook) a single mom and business woman whose daughters became the original test-market for Beanie Babies and even helped design them with Sheila seduced into agreeing to marry this charming, kid-friendly billionaire. No, that didn’t work out either.

Each of the three narrates a portion of the story — Banks/Robbie remembering her struggles through a failing marriage to a paraplegic husband whom she supported with shop clerk jobs, only to meet Ty Warner and have him change her life, Maya recalling her Indian-American family’s disapproval of her abandoning medical school to learn on-the-job and invent internet marketing and Sheila recalling the way she, too, was swept off her feet by this sometimes clever, sometimes screwy toy company tyro.

The film is based on a book by Zac Bissonnette but fictionalized here, with probable composite characters exaggerated to fill a larger function in teh story, as one can’t quite nail down who this “Robbie,” “Maya” and “Sheila” might be, although the Internet provides some clues.

In the first act, each woman gives great reasons for the company’s success and their attraction to Warner as a partner/lover, boss or just suitor.

“We didn’t set out to make America lose it’s mind, but that’s what happened,” Robbie remembers.

“If he liked the way you think, he’d listen to you,” Maya enthuses.

“Oh Sheila, I would DIE before I let you down,” Sheila was told.

Giddy business breaks and happy accidents and courtship are covered in giddy musical montages set to The Cranberries (“Dreams”) and INXS (“New Sensation,” of course) and others.

Ty and Robbie take over toy conventions with their flash and their increasingly hot plush toy products. Ty has little epiphanies, and in spite of his sometimes shortsighted moves, he latches onto big ideas when he hears them.

One of Sheila’s little girls complains that she can’t get his “understuffed” (his real breakthrough) toys into her backpack to take to school. Let’s make something SMALLER, he decies. The chocolate-milk-addict Ty then grills the kids on naming critters that become best-sellers.

They’re his co-conspiractors, learning to dance and lip-sync with him to “Oh Sheila” for his bowling alley proposal to their mom.

Maya takes it on herself to knock out tiny poems to put inside the tag on every Beanie Baby sold.

Let the good times roll, with the warning signs popping up even in the best moments.

By the second act, every woman is seeing the flaws in Warner’s mercurial personality, and in the role “luck” played in his “empire,” which blew up almost in spite of his often poor understanding of business and the karmet, his bad hunches and general backward thinking.

And by the third act they’re all paying the price for his shortcomings, especially in the way he treats women.

Origin stories and their “Eureka” moments are endlessly fascinating to some of us. I never owned a Beanie Baby, or bought one for a child (Furbys, on the other hand…) or played “Tetris,” but the history of a product, a fad or a movement is great fodder for a film.

Producer-turned-writer/director Kristin Gore and music video-maker and actor-turned-director Damian Kulash set us up for a lot of those “when it happened” moments — that first suburban Chicago outbreak of “collecting,” the name of that first Beanie frog.

Their script bounces through two periods in time — the ’80s and the ’90s — taking shots at the Reagan recession and Reaganomics and the heady, unfettered new ideas (the Internet, instant-collectible toys) of free-for-all of the Clinton years, setting us up for “the fall.”

But the players are the chief assets here, with Banks giving us a magnificent meltdown, Viswanathan (of “Blockers” and TV’s “Miracle Workers”) embodying the tech, marketing and fad-savvy young person who isn’t so good at reading The Boss and Snook (“Run Rabbit Run,” “Steve Jobs”) impressing as the Only Adult in the Room.

It’s almost unfair to point out how this women’s story hangs on the quirky charisma of that damned Zach Galifianakis, but he’s just great here — charming, inspiring, motivating and in the end infuriating every woman he comes into contact with, real victim or a composite of all the women Ty Warner used and gave little credit or cash to in his heady years inflating “The Beanie Bubble.”

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sarah Snook, and Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, scripted by Kristin Gore, based on the book by Zac Bissonnette. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:50

For some reason, a Childersburg Alabama rescue squad member told a local TV affiliate in BFE, Alabama that a “TikTok Challenge” involving teens leaping off the back of speeding motorboats has killed four kids this year and that this was another example of social media and the Chinese-owned TikTok being bad for kids.

The story blew up and became national news. It was a lie, just another yahoo named Dennis making something up to fit an agenda.

But we believed it because it seems like every week, there’s a new viral example of something reckless young people are doing just to get “likes” on a video they post online. All a consequence of a performative generation trying to get noticed via online “attention culture.”

So the idea that teenagers might find this ceramic hand that serves as a portal for connecting with the gruesome, ghostly dead, use it as a party game, peer-pressure each other to try it and post videos of each other getting possessed and lashing out embarassingly or violently? Aside from the supernatural element, that’s an easy sell.

“Talk to Me” is an Australian horror film that taps into teen groupthink, gullibility and peer pressure with a jolting tale of this demon “hand” and how it keeps getting passed around for kicks and page-views despite its obvious dangers.

The drug-like rush of the experience and the social pressure to laugh off the dangers outweighs the eyes-averting gore of some of the consequences — captured on cell videos.

Maybe your teenagers wouldn’t fall for that. But by and large, most of us see that as just the sort of thing — like summoning Bloody Mary or The Slender Man — that no-consequences-considered kids would do.

The Danny Philippou/Michael Philippou film opens with a huge party that ends with a stabbing and a suicide, all of it captured on cell video because that’s what people do rather than “REACT” to something horrific happening in front of them.

The hand doesn’t show up until another party. That’s where Mia (Sophie Wilde), her bestie Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s “Christian” beau Danuel (Otis Dhanji) and Jade’s impressionable tween brother Riley (Joe Bird) show up for a little teen drinking, a lot of peer pressure and this experience that irresponsible Joss (Chris Olosio) and cruelly unpleasant Haley (Zoe Terakes) have to offer.

The hand has a few back-stories — legends — surrounding it, lore than nobody tries to confirm. It is covered in graffiti — names, cryptic words and the like. You light a candle, sit down with it and give the hand a shake while saying “Talk to me” and you see ghosts — decaying, angry, traumatized monsters that must have been people at some point or other.

Say “I let you in” and the demonic ghost takes possession of your body. The “rules?” Better not let it linger there for more than 90 seconds. Yank the hand away and blow out the candle to “close the door.”

Mia has a hint of the risk-taker about her. She doesn’t need the crowd’s “Do IT DO IT DO IT” egging on to shake hands with the afterlife.

But Mia’s recently lost her mother to tragedy. Mia is vulnerable. A glimpse of her dead mom is all it takes to make her eager to repeat the experience, heedless to the danger to her and it turns out, others.

As our parents always told us, it’s all in good fun until somebody gets hurt.

“Talk to Me” grimly marches through the consequences of taking a handshake from the dark side. Mia soon sees her mother and other ghosts without the helping hand. Someone gets hurt and Mia’s history of risks — “Are you on something?” Jade’s mother (“Lord of the Rings” veteran Miranda Otto) wants to know. — and reluctance to finish off an injured and dying kangaroo, to “put it out of its misery” — foreshadow what’s to come.

Otto lends the picture gravitas as the literal Adult in the Room — a single mom who embraces Mia, hinting at her history, until she recognizes her as a threat to her children.

Oz TV vet Terakes makes her cruel, callous mean girl a hateful figure, egging on others, eagerly documenting their horror and embarrassment.

Wilde (“The Portable Door”) gives us a relatable, (somewhat) innocent beauty right up to Mia’s first possession. It isn’t just makeup, editing, sound effects and huge, inky-black contact lenses that sell her “possession.” This is good horror film acting, taking us from the nervous laughter of the peer-presseured to the manic, willful violence of “another” taking over your body.

The movie itself a bit of a slog, leaning into the dread and falling on the unpleasant end of the horror film spectrum. The tone is somber, the laughs are darker than dark, the violence sudden and shocking and the cruelty self-centered, narcissistic and oh-so-high-school.

“Talk to Me” feels much longer than the 96 minute run-time, and that’s not just because of pacing problems that permeate the middle acts. It can be a bit of a drag. But when your movie sets out to dare viewers to not avert their eyes, that’s part of the hard-to-sit-through bargain.

But kudos to all involved for making a horror movie with a simple gimmick, a lot of gore and a few things to say about teen culture in a social media age, none of them having anything to do with TikTok.

Rating: R for strong/bloody violent content, some sexual material and profanity

Cast: Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Alexandra Jensen, Zoe Terakes, Chris Olosio, Marcus Johnson and Miranda Otto

Credits: Directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, scripted by Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson and Danny Philippou. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34

Winter Park, Florida ready for a (preview) fright because they know if it’s an A24 horror release, it’ll be smart.

(Updated: A link to my review of “Talk to Me” is here.)

A good punch in the gut to end July, right?

A24 knows horror. This one opens July 28.

John Sweet’s not a name you think of when you remember the great actors, or even the lesser ones of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was a Minneapolis schoolteacher turned sergeant in the Army, training in Great Britain to liberate Europe from fascism when he was “discovered” by the producing/directing duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,

Something about Sweet’s drawl and lanky, folksy demeanor suggested an idealized GI to the British filmmakers — a blend of “foreignness,” common sense and common decency — so they drafted him into duty on their World War II allegory, “A Canterbury Tale.”

Sweet gives a grand, unaffected “real person” performance in this film, one of several “morale boosting” keep-calm-and-carry-on movies Powell and Pressburger made during the war, a lighthearted, sentimental follow-up to their anti-isolationist classic, “The 49th Parallel.”

It’s a vaguely Chaucer-esque yarn about “pilgrims” — an American GI, a British Tommy (Dennis Price), and a London shop girl (Sheila Sim) enlisted to do farm work in the country — who meet on the train to Canterbury, get off one stop short and tumble into a local crime and mystery.

Veteran heavy Eric Portman is Colpeper, the mysterious local landed gentry now magistrate of tiny fictioncal Chillingbourne, not far down “The Pilgrim’s Way” from the cathedral city immortalized by Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century story collection, “The Canterbury Tales.”

When the lost American Sgt. Johnson, ag worker Alison and received pronunciation posh Sgt. Gibbs stop there, Alison is doused by the locally-infamous scoundrel “The Glue Man.” As the magistrate seems to have all the power in town and a few peculiar habits with regards to the visiting soldiers, and no more eagerness to solve the crime than the constable or any other locals, Alison enlists the other “pilgrims” to crack the case, with all eyes pointing to Mr. Colpeper being the culprit.

I mean, he’s played by Eric Portman. Of course he’s the prime suspect.

The sleuthing entails Alison’s taking a farm job and quizzing the locals, Sgt. Gibbs working out the MO of the criminal and Sgt Johnson’s winning ways with the nosy, gossipy local boys, all of whom are busy playing war and providing clues.

The historic road has had a bit of archeological excavation recently, and coupled with this idealized view of the WWII English (Kentish) countryside, we hear a little about English patrimony, the long history of freedom, and cracks about the “tea drinking, left-side driving” and of all things The Domesday Book from cornball Bob, the Sgt. from Oregon.

“Tea? I don’t like that stuff.”

“Sure, it’s a habit, like marijiuana!”

“I’ll take marijuana!”

The “snooping about” and clue-collecting “story” isn’t what’s interesting now, almost 80 years later. It’s this sense of “This is the Britain, the traditions, people and freedoms that we’re fighting for” messaging.

The jokes that still work (one of them Cheech & Chong approved) include cracks about “isolationist” Americans, the Anglo-American language barrier and the wonderful black and white depiction of Kent — thatched barns, rolling fields (traversed by speeding Bren-gun armored personnel carriers) and ancient horse-and-wagon folkways still in use there.

And then there’s the cathedral city of Canterbury itself, and a glimpse of what inspired this “tale” — a war brought home to all of Britain, at one point or another.

Powell was a star director by war’s end, and would go on to make some of the most gorgeous movies ever filmed in color — “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissis” among them.

Price enjoyed a long career after this film, Sims only worked for another decade. And Sweet, the soldier drafted into film acting for just a short period of 1944, playing a poster boy American GI of the day, made it through the war and back to teaching school — with a little stage acting on the side — in America.

He’d played the earnest, honest and upright uniformed American come to save democracy and not hit on every English rose he spied in the lcoal pubs and dance halls, a bit of home-front propaganda for pre-D-Day Brits perhaps wearying of the noisy, boisterous and catnip-to-the-ladies Yanks who had “invaded” their “scepter’d isle.”

Who could live up to that “ideal Yank” image? Maybe John Sweet could. He took the $2000 he was paid for his one and only major film role and donated it to the NAACP. He retired to the English-style retirement village “Fearrington” in North Carolina, and died at age 95 in 2011, a model example of “The Greatest Generation.”

“A Canterbury Tale” may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, John Sweet and Dennis Price.

Credits: Scripted, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. An Eagle-Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 2:04

Christopher Nolan turns his considerable talents back to World War II era history for “Oppenheimer,” a biography that plumbs the genius, foibles and moral and ethical dilemmas faced by “The Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

It’s an all-star revisiting of an epic undertaking, the race to build a bomb “before the Germans get one,” envisioned as a cinematic whirlwind of science, history, intrigues and tragedy. Riding on the shoulders of a haunted performance by Cillian Murphy in the title role, a subtly-shaded turn by Robert Downey Jr., the bluff, blunt and funny presence of Matt Damon and a brilliantly brittle interpretation of Oppenheimer’s wife by Emily Blunt, it’s a magnificent film, head-and-shoulders above every other movie of the summer, and not just in its ambition.

Nolan’s script, based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” sweeps us through the genius physicist’s academic achievements as the “man who brought quantum mechanics to America,” his mastery of any subject that entered his field of vision, his masterly management of The Manhattan Project, a very smart man’s dalliance in liberal-to-left-wing politics, his humanism and his womanizing.

Murphy’s Oppenheimer has the faraway eyes of a dreamer, with Nolan slipping vivid imaginings of what that mind was “seeing” when he pondered black holes and the physics that runs the universe. And this “Oppie” has the cocksure quick wit and swagger of a someone who knew he was the Smartest Man in the Room, and acted — sometimes recklessly, sometimes humorously — on that confidence.

“Why don’t you have a Nobel Prize?” Army officer/West Point-and-MIT-educated engineer Leslie Groves (Damon) bluntly asks the man he wants to manage the “Manhattan” project when they meet.

“Why aren’t you a general?”

The story is framed within Oppenheimer’s closed-hearing “trial” which revoked his security clearance in 1954, with his critics and defenders facing judgement from the likes of Gordon Gray (Tony Goldwyn) and grilling from judge/prosecutor, Roger Robb (Jason Clark).

And that frame is tucked within another, the Senate hearings of a former Oppenheimer champion and 1950s Eisenhower administration cabinet nominee, Lewis Strauss (Downey).

The thread that runs through those scenes and spreads into the flashbacks that recreate Oppenhimer’s much-documented life story is “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” He can dismiss ill-informed questions about why he didn’t attend the finest physics program in America, at Berkeley, with “Because I hadn’t built” that program yet. But studying in Britain and especially the world’s enemy, Germany, was seen as a red flag in his life story.

Oppenheimer’s attraction to the mercurial, unromantic communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) is shown, and when this “questionable association” is revisited in his security clearance hearing, their sexual encounters migrate from hotel rooms to his chair in the hearing chambers, both of them naked before his accusers.

The story of Oppenheimer’s life is reflected in the great figures who were his peers — Kenneth Branagh is somberly playful as the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Tom Conti is the weary, elderly Einstein, Josh Hartnett is Nobel prize-winner Ernest Lawrence, Benny Safdie is an always-sweaty H-bomb champion Edward Teller.

Through it all, the politics of the era pass by outside the halls of academia and later the hastily-built city of Los Alamos. Oppenheimer knows Marxism and its limitations because he read “Das Kapital” in “the original German.” He supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, because only fascists didn’t, and his brother and sister-in-law became “card carrying communists” and he wouldn’t distance himself from them because they were his brother and sister-in-law.

He loved women, and impregnated and married Kitty (Blunt), whom he met at a cocktail party with her significant other.

“You’re married to Dr. Harrison?”

“Not very.”

And he learned Sanskrit to read the “Bhagavad Gita,” and when the “Trinity” nuclear test blast succeeded in July of 1945, he quoted it.

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Nolan shot Congressional hearings and media scrums surrounding the Oppenheimer of the 1950s in the black and white of TV memory, and the epic story of Los Alamos and the life that led up to it in vivid color, folded into flashbacks within these frames.

Nolan’s films are famous for their sound design, and here that’s most impressive in the Trinity sequence, stunning silence underscoring the (non digital) pillar of boiling fire created by the world’s first atomic bomb, shattering noise erupting not just when the shock-wave of the blast passes over the scientists and soldiers, but when the shock of what they’ve achieved and what he’s wrought rattles Oppenheimer.

This brisk but long film’s third act delivers a clever echo of that shock, when Oppenheimer plays to the crowd at a celebratory gathering of those who worked on the project, stunned by their noisy enthusiasm even as he is almost as conflicted about this achievement as colleagues like Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz, terrific) about the carnage their bombs wrought.

The film balances the much-debated moral quandary of the fateful decision to drop bombs on a fanatical enemy whose war-criminal leadership would have never surrendered via characters and character studies. Oppenheimer is parked on the fence while Groves and others march on in a panicked rush and sensitive colleagues question how much “blood” they will have on their hands.

Nolan leaves no doubt in where the “plain-speaking” American president at that moment sits on that scale.

When the movie makes points about what Hitler disdained as “Jewish science,” it hints at what might have played a role in Oppenheimer’s fall, an outspoken man in an era when America proved itself willing to remember anti-Semitism and forget the many Jewish scientists involved in bringing World War II to an abrupt end.

The filmmaker sees Oppenheimer as a war hero torn by his place in history, martyred by McCarthy Era politics, which isn’t necessarily a new or fresh take. There was a memorable BBC/PBS TV series — 1980’s “Oppenheimer” starred Sam Waterston — a good TV movie (1989’s “Day One” film David Strathairn as Oppenheimer, with Brian Dennehy as General Groves) and the ambitious but not-quite-epic 1989 feature “Fat Man & Little Boy,” which starred Paul Newman as Groves and Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer.

But Nolan gives us something like a definitive take on the man, his work and the times he lived in, a film with the science and scientists of “The Theory of Everything,” the tortured/martyred genius of “The Imitation Game” and the mad scramble headiness of America in a race against history’s villains of “The Right Stuff.”

The only time this latest film on this controversial figure feels too long is the third act, which makes its “decline and fall” points, and then labors on to the point of belaboring.

In “Oppenheimer,” Nolan tells an epic story tacked onto an introspective, multi-faceted life, a hero in the Greek tragedy mold — brilliant and focused, but a man who knew his flaws and conflicted enough about his work that he all but accepted his fate as just deserts for all the “blood on my hands.”

Rating: R, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Mattew Modine, Kenneth Branagh, Josh Hartnett, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Tom Conti and Gary Oldman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. A Universal release.

Running time: 3:00

A cynical, snarky semi-musical about womanhood and marriage from the Latvian director of “Rocks in my Pockets.

Oct. 6.

It begins all conjunto cute and jaunty and finishes with a banda band flourish.

But it’s the dull, cluttered and formulaic middle acts that let down “The (Almost) Legends,” a tale of half-brothers and a Mexican band/Mexican road rally racing legacy that they try to live up to.

This Mexican comedy — titlted “Los (casi) ídolos de Bahía Colorada” south of the border — is colorful in its setting, its music and some of its characters, but sadly colorless in execution, a picture that loses its edge and its “cute” when it puts down the accordion.

Our narrator is Valentin (screen veteran Guillermo Quintanilla), banda conjunto king and self-described “The People’s Idol” of Bahia Colorado, a beachside tourist town in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

He jovially tells us the story of his happy family in the town…and “family B,” seemingly just-as-happy, working and living aboard the cruising ferry where his band plays a regular gig.

“God gave me plenty of love to give,” Valentin admits.

In town, he races his 1980s AMC Eagle in the annual circuit-around-the-state road rally thanks to help from his mechanic mother (Nora Velázquez). His little boy Romeo dreams of doing that some day.

On the ferry, his other son Preciado idolizes the musician and dreams of leading his own band some day.

Valentin is such a smooth talker than when Preciado’s mother dies, he’s able to persaude his other wife to take Preciado in. But after Valentin’s untimely demise — at sea — things fall apart. Romeo ditches his mom to seek telenovela fame in Mexico City. Romeo’s mom kicks Preciado out, leaving his grandmother to take him in and under her wing.

Years later, the still-cocky but unsuccessful Romeo (Benny Emmauel) returns to try and score some cash by winning the race that his dad dreamed of winning, and struggling band-leader/mechanic Preciado (Harold Azuara) figures he’ll do the same.

As Romeo can sing and his hated half-sibling Preciado cannot, we know where this picture is going. But the middle acts bog us down on the way with intrigues involving a rival family, a sexy rally-driving prodigy daughter (Ana Celeste) and visits with relatives and old allies in search of a winning ride and the like.

The nice touches include losing one’s delusions of your “famous” “almost” legend father and any time any band strikes up a song, no matter how bad the singer. The middling bits are pretty much everything else, including the under-staged “race” that was the picture’s big hook, in the minds of the writer and director anyway.

Emmanuel and Azurra are OK, but the older players, especially Quintanilla and Dagoberto Gama as his still-living rival patriarch give the picture its few laughs. Tiresome gags about rival Don Tasio’s son preferring hair-dressing to racing cars don’t play.

But the many disses and references to “f—–g Americans” (in Spanish with English subtitles) are worth a cross-cultural giggle. And the band bits and musical moments are “authentic” enough to make one wish they’d focused on that more, and on that damned AMC Eagle a lot less.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity.

Cast: Benny Emmanuel, Harold Azurra, Ana Celeste, Nora Velázquez, Dagoberto Gama and Guillermo Quintanilla.

Credits: Directed by  Ricardo Castro Velázquez, scripted by Carolina Rivera. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

No “Minions,” but birds in flight. And a family having relationship and “vacation” issues.

Looks good, vegetarian and “green.”

Dec. 22.

Disney Springs AMC. Here we go.

The only way to see this. My review is here.