Family Switch

The title's misleading. 

The rebellious self-obsessed years during which curiosity is severely criticized, and traditional wholesome old school activities condescendingly dismissed with haughty verisimilitude. 

The resultant antithetical shockwaves producing unsettling bland confusion, as festive recourse to playful jocosity sincerely struggles amidst the pretension. 

It's the Holiday Season in High School and the Walker Family is bitterly composed, having lost the communicative cohesion that once underscored their familial unity.

Mom's (Jennifer Garner) got a big presentation and daughter CC (Emma Myers) might make the national soccer team, Wyatt's (Brady Noon) hoping to get into Yale and his father's (Ed Helms) band has a unique opportunity.

Usually, the power of Christmas would unflinchingly aid their courageous misadventures, and by harnessing the spirit of the season they would proceed confident and emboldened. 

The unextinguished light fails to constructively guide them however.

Until they stop by a local observatory.

Where corporeal mischief interpersonally accrues.

Given the flamboyant opportunity to craft ebullient effervescent dreams, Family Switch's yuletide extravagance lucidly facilitates transmutation.

It's more like Die Hard nevertheless, more like a movie that takes place at Christmas, the Holiday Season popping up from time to time but by no means the predominant focus.

The otherworldly transformations seemed a bit too studio as well, as if an eccentric mystical expert wasn't consulted when shooting the scenes.

A missed opportunity: when the neighbourhood wives show up and start grilling CC and Wyatt, who are stuck in their mom and dad's bodies, individual criticisms are shared. But without accompanying close ups (think the end of Crocodile Dundee). The focus thus remains on CC and Wyatt. If each individual criticism had been announced with its own striking close up, the collegial balance between supporting and principal actors would have been more universally sustained. 

Part of the narrative directly celebrates teamwork so the point is eventually made. There's actually a lot of cool in this film. They put a lot of time and effort into it (try and find like 6 Christmas films or films that take place at Christmas to watch, some of them don't attempt to excel that much).  

I thought the acting improved a lot after the body switches and the actors starting pretending to play someone else 😜, I don't know if that was intentional, but the secondary characteristic investments paid imaginative dividends. 

I also thought it made a lot of clever points about family, and was thoughtfully designed to bring disgruntled folks back together during the holidays without being too preachy or overbearing.

Director McG should score points for ensuring the cast and crew took things really seriously.

The cast and crew should score multiplie points for creating a year round Christmas film. 

Even without the mind-blowing mysticism. 

Christmas in California.

Worth checkin' out. 

Juyuso seubgyuksageun (Attack the Gas Station!)

A group of young adults, who have failed to professionally assert themselves, randomly decide to attack a local gas station, again, in Sang-Jin Kim's Juyuso seubgyuksageun (Attack the Gas Station!), their boredom invigoratingly eclipsed by rash hypertense pretentions, inspirations from which they reclaim the dignity that their culture's strict obsession with obedience has denied them, artists and athletes in/variably adjudicating calamitous caprice, with malevolent will, and assiduous extension.

But through their delinquent acts, through the ways in which they audaciously challenge their neighbourhood's modus operandi, their divergence necessitating that unanticipated rival factions gather, investigate, emerge, the established order riled, jurisprudence gingerly jabberwocked, a serendipitous state of affairs chaotically presents itself, wherein which everyone eclectically entertains novel nubile notions, energetically exceeding the bumptious bottom line, collectively assembled, to irascibly trench and tether.

Extreme masculinity deftly delineating the absurd, Juyuso seubgyuksageun satirizes sociopaths to exorcize easy living.

Note how the no-goodniks must pretend to be constructive citizens in order to eventually acquire the loot they're after.

Comedically crafted psychotically shafted supreme bizarro excess, like Walter Hill's The Warriors sponsored by Red Bull, like paddleboarding down the St. Lawrence, a culture's admiration for fighting shocked but surely syndicated, Juyuso's childlike unconcerned courageous illuminating lunacy still metaphorically cultivates the entrepreneurial path, with cold considerate recourse to hypocrisy notwithstanding, levels and layers and legitimacies, assuming roles to expedite karma.

Keanu

Can a ridiculous plot supported by an irresistible gimmick cast aside its kitschy credulity to generate a quivering constellation which instructively calibrates curricula of its own?

The cutesy.

The adorable.

Keanu does demonstrate how one can go about teaching struggling lost disadvantaged youth after bourgeois nice guy Clarence Goobril (Keegan-Michael Key) infiltrates a drug trafficking gang to help his depressed friend Rell Williams (Jordan Peele) recover his beloved kitten, using the music of George Michael to elucidate the art of communication, skills which they hilariously apply during the film's rambunctious climax.

Immersed in reckless carnage.

Said climax pulls together the best aspects of the film and was fun to watch but the build up consistently stalls since it's painfully apparent that these two suburbanites could never have tricked anyone.

The uneducated aren't that dumb you know.

It's too light.

Because it's too light, the situations Clarence (Smoke Dresden) and Rell (Oil Dresden) find themselves within lack the threat of death, even when they're almost killed, which is what Keanu required to transform into something other than a cute cat movie.

Yet, if they had just kept reintroducing Keanu, the sought after kitten, throughout, making him an integral part of the story rather than losing sight of him for prolonged periods, I probably would have thought, this makes no sense, it's a great nonsensical idea, and this incredibly loveable kitten's frequent appearances at least acknowledge the incoherency, highlighting its inherent encumbrances, while reminding me not to take it too seriously.

Instead I was stuck taking it seriously as it tried to be serious, Keanu having indeed plucked its lilies, to be crushed by the weight of its praiseworthy gambit.

Short-term prison sentences awaiting the heroes in the end.

Keanu!

Keanu!