Wreck-It Ralph

Though I will say, as a family experience it's rare that we all agree on a movie, even if we all agreed we hated it, so at least there was that!

song gave me a few giggles AND got me teary, i'm a sap.

idk i really responded to the whole idea of friends that move away/follow their own thing but that doesn't mean the end, etc.... i agree it was laid on a little thick, and to get us there ralph has to be a REAL doof for most of the movie. just do one-third as many scenes that reestablish his problem. i also think it wd have been better if his toxic masculinity had been provoked and encouraged by some gamergate svengali types who picked up on his jealousy of shank, etc. the whole virus scheme just took too much time and verbiage.

i wish all the corporations were fake equivalents, just as the made-up video games are funnier and more charming than having the street fighter characters and pac-man there.

i'm not a parent so what do i know - but it struck me as cool that the takeaways from this went beyond "believe in yourself!" to more practical lessons like "don't read the comments," "don't be a clingy jealous jerk dude," "the internet is toxic," and "your friends are going to move away someday, but seeing them in a few months and staying in touch by phone is still a real friendship."

I know these are supposed to be good but I can't shake my prejudice that they aren't far enough removed from Pixels/Ready Player One territory. And that's my bad, I know.

One thing I'm appreciating at this particular moment is that John C. Reilly is able to both enjoy a pretty decent level of success and also, additionally, do basically whatever ridiculous project he wants, seemingly without compromise at any point on that continuum. Like I just now remembered that he was the dad in We Need to Talk About Kevin. I love him.

yeah if this is making it easy for him to spend however many years wheeling and dealing to get The Sisters Brothers made, that's worth it in and of itself.

another admitted gripe: the dangers of the internet are sort of limited here. tho obviously the movie doesn't have to be ALL about that, and it does find an emotional hook and metaphor for one big one (amplification of toxic insecurities), it's almost by design unable to address at least some big ones, like "giant corporations like disney want you to use the internet constantly to gather your data" etc. etc.

Yeah, exactly. There is a good, smart, almost subversive movie that could have been made here, but ... this is not it. This was just a half-assed hodgepodge of ideas in search of a movie. My wife actually fell asleep, probably around the time it went from "we have to get that steering wheel!" (apprx. the first 3 hours of the movie) to "why can't we be FRIENDS! I JUST WANT TO BE FRIENDS! WON'T YOU BE MY FRIEND!"

Seriously, are there kids out there who saw or even liked the first one and wondered, even once, how the friendship between Ralph and Vanellope was working out? They ain't exactly Anna and Olaf, or (insert Disney character and sidekick here).

I loved the whole Slaughter Race idea / Alan Menken musical number!

but if you don't like Zangief jokes, gtfo

very much enjoyed this though i agree it's kinda forgettable in the end. at least 30 minutes of the film was just meme gags that had no relevance to the story (which is fine! but gives the whole thing a much floatier air)

Can't decide if making clickbait virus purveyors sympathetic was subversive reminder of the humanity of even the scummiest aspects of the internet or insidious propaganda by scumlords.

counterpoint on the ralph/vanellope friendship: isn't this what makes the film interesting? so many kids' movies end with a best-friends-forever kind of thing, as the first one did. i think doing what this does with that friendship, showing that such a happy "ending" isn't one, that it can still hit a rough patch, that one person can be a jerk by wanting to keep that "forever" in stasis, is worth doing.... and wouldn't work with a brand-new movie where we don't care about the characters and their lives. i like that both characters actually move forwards into new places and don't end where they start, etc., which is a real plague on sequels like this. again tho i agree that it's sold a little too hard and repetitiously.

I mostly didn't care about their friendship or whether it survived, but maybe that's just me.

I found the sequel enjoyable but a bit of a mess; my main problem was that, to me, the character motivation and plot progression were all over the place. It felt like the story had been cut down from something much longer.

The princess scenes were great, too bad we had seen most of them already.

Oh yeah I was all in on the friendship so that probably makes all the difference!

Agreed about it feeling cut down. It was long as-is so it bugs me more that they shoehorned in the Star Wars stuff, the orphaned racers stuff, and other things that take the movie off track.

I didn't see any trailers or anything so that helped with the princess stuff. A kid a few seats away had memorized the first big princess scene and was speaking every line along in time. I was sort of okay with those bits, Family Guy-ish tho it might be.... since even if the autocritique is all points we all know by this point, it's still good for Disney themselves to say them. Not like they're gonna pull the more problematic characters out of circulation of course. If anything I imagine they're now selling alternate versions wearing their new outfits etc.

My kids loved this, especially the Princess scenes, which we had no idea about beforehand. My 3 year old daughter still talks about this move from time to time even though we saw it about a month ago. It's her first favorite movie.

Ooh, you want forgettable, I forgot The Incredibles 2 even came out. I really didn't like that one, either.

wtf the Incredibles 2 was incredible! it's right there in the name!

I thought it was as plotless and thematically muddled as Ralph (though at least Incredibles 2 looked great!).

And mentioned in this thread a little earlier, but the Spider-man cartoon is sooooooooo good - smart, gorgeous, funny, moving - that it really shows how subpar Incredibles 2 and Ralph are.

We can have both! I don't really see them as being in the same category at all, especially since Spider-Man drew from tons of source material and the other two are original properties (well, for the most part)

Both movies had pretty clear themes, even if you didn't like 'em lol

I can't even remember the theme of Incredibles 2. Was it that dads have trouble being stay at home parents and women should work? I dunno. I do seem to recall the villain's evil plan being to make superheroes legal again so that they can frame them crashing a boat into stuff so that superheroes would be made illegal. Lots of runaway vehicles in this one.

Regardless, I did literally forget Incredibles 2 came out this year!

The theme of Incredibles 2 is "I, Brad Bird, am a better person than I was 15 years ago"

"I, Brad Bird, made the jump to live-action blockbusters with Mission: Impossible, but then flopped with the terrible and boring Tomorrowland, so was forced to go back and make a sequel to my best known animated hit in order to get out of movie jail."

look, if you can't appreciate a stealth-Randian family film i don't know what you to tell ya

I did not appreciate it

evergreen