Winky & Stinky

    I'm guessing some movie producer (or whomever) was looking at his dog and wondering how all this love came to be. Now that , he thought, would make a great movie ! Just how did a Homo Sapien become the Alpha leader to a vicious wolf?     Apparently, you do this by having a mini-group of Paleolithic tribesmen leave their mini-village to travel for weeks (if not months) in search of food, across a totally barren landscape (somehow always finding plenty of firewood), cleverly killing dozens of buffalo, presumably drag back enough unpreserved meat to last the winter, inadvertently leaving one boy to bounce off a 100 foot sheer cliff, set his own leg, fight off a pack of wolves, befriend a fierce adult female wolf, survive after falling into a frozen lake during a blizzard, kill a 300lb prehistoric mountain lion with a homemade arrow, and so on and so on.         In some r...

Obviously working off a miniscule budget, producer/director/screenwriter Bo Burnham managed to put together a video poem or ode to a trial of childhood most of us are familiar with - middle school. However, the parade of aching situations endured by Kayla (aptly performed by Elsie Fisher) during her last week of eighth grade seemed more allegorical than real. From her isolated immersion into cyber fantasy (presumably, as you never really see what she's spending all her alone time looking at), to her acne, to her estranged relationship with her sole parent, to her being the only (slightly) chubby eighth grader at a large pool party, to her struggle with language, well...absolutely nothing is going well for poor Kayla. Even an exciting preview of High School ends in profound distress. Although you may feel the distant plucking of heart strings as you sympathize for Kayla, I don't see the film as a whole representing what middle school is for most a...