It’s Awesome Friday on a Sunday! This week we’re talking about West Side Story, which has just been released to Disney+, and the new Ryan Reynolds starring Netflix family action movie The Adam Project.
There are streaming links as well as our ratings after the jump. Join us!
Greetings programs, it’s Awesome Friday on a Sunday, which means we’re back with another episode of the Awesome Friday Movie Podcast!
Join us this week as we discuss two new movies. First up is the new Sony Pictures Animation film Vivo, which features the voice, and songs, of Lin-Manuel Miranda and was released to Netflix this week. Second up is James Gunn’s triumphant return to superhero movies; the Warner Brothers and DC released The Suicide Squad, now in theatres (and on HBO Max in the United States).
The basic premise of Vivo is both simple and heartfelt: A kinkajou goes on a quest to deliver a love letter from his father figure to his father figures long lost love. That’s it, that’s the whole pitch, and if you pack the cast with talented actors and singers and hire a nearly-EGOT-winning songwriter to turn the whole thing into a musical, that’s a recipe for something special. Most of the time, anyway.
That’s not to say that Vivo is bad; exactly, it’s just fine. It opens with a toe-tapping duet that will stick in your head for ages and closes with a reprise of the same, but there’s a long stretch in the middle where the film takes no exactly no chances and suffers for it.
The marketing for _Guardians of the Galaxy_ has basically been omnipresent for the last few months. Hardly a day went by without a new poster or image or teaser or whatever. The reason for this is simple: this is the first real test of Marvel’s brand. Guardians, like it or not, is a lesser known property and while this film connects with the over reaching continuity of the established Marvel Cinematic Universe it doesn’t actually feature any characters that we’ve already met meaning that they can’t trade on the popularity of Iron Man or Captain America they have to rely on the corporate brand. In this world of “new things are risky let’s remake something from the 1980s” that’s kind of a big deal.
So it’s a good job they knocked it out the fucking park with this movie otherwise they’d be in trouble. Yes, it’s great and you should see it. No need to even finish reading this review. Just go. Or finish reading this review and I’ll give you a few reasons why.
Here’s another trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy. This one is (slightly) longer and features more of the Guardians themselves rather than people talking about them plus if you don’t blink you’ll catch a glimpse of Michael Rooker as Yondu (who looks awesome) and hear a line from Lee Pace as Ronan The Accuser. Lots of characters in this movie have the name “The”. It’s a thing we’re going to have to get used to if the MCU keeps heading down the cosmic path.
Guardians of the Galaxy is out in just over a month so it’s time for marketing to kick into overdrive. Here’s the latest trailer from the UK which has a slightly more traditional, for lack of a better word, trailer feel to it.