School of Rock (2003)

Would you tell Hendrix to sell his guitar?!

And we shall teach rock...to the world.

If you answered 'yes' to this question, then getchow ass outta my neighborhood! School of Rock holds at least one record in my life: it is the only movie I ever watched twice in the cinema... in one day! My sister and I went, then went again - it was that good of a movie. And most of all, it inspired us to get more into music. My siblings and I were heavily influenced by our mother to make music, and to this day, I play eight instruments and sing. Although I didn't get into a serious band until I was 15, I spent years pursuing music because of this amazing movie.

Jack Black plays Dewey Finn, your typical pub-singing rock musician, whose "rock'n'roll authority" is deemed too much for the band that he founded. The band kicks him out, and he declares that he will find an awesome new group to kick their asses. Dewey lives with his friend and former bandmate Ned Schneebly (Mike White) and his pain-in-the-ass girlfriend Patty (Sarah Silverman), who constantly pressure him for the rent he owes them but can't give them, thanks to his unstable professional habits.

STEP OWWFFF!

When Dewey answers the phone relating to a teaching job offer for Ned, he sees his opportunity to pay off his debts and maybe get fucking Patty off his back for a while. He easily lands Ned's job at a posh prep school, naively headed by Principal Mullins (the hilarious Joan Cusack), and quickly hijacks the class as the next upcoming rock band and their extensive crew to play at the upcoming Battle of the Bands. While Dewey find his professional and spiritual calling, the kids feel liberated from their strict middle-class upbringings, and everybody embraces their skill and happiness. It is a shared turf of happiness for people of every age and background.

So what makes School of Rock so fucking awesome? Well Jack Black has to be awarded a considerable amount of credit. He is the kind of character that most people had in their school class at some time; someone charismatic and funny and annoying and enviable. I certainly remember a girl called Lotte who was my class's Jack Black. He, like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey before him, improvs so much of his performance, and is as engaging and loveable as both of the guys aforementioned. I imagine that even without the amazing script by Mr Schnaaayblaaay himself Mike White, Jack Black's improvisation skills would have carried the movie.

The script and direction is reminiscent of John Hughes, with a childish naivete in adults that turns out a miraculously compassionate coming-of-age film. It doesn't pull a "how do you do, fellow kids", or make every child character a brainless brat with no second (letalone third) dimension. The kids have their own struggles, from weight issues to overbearing parents, and they are really relatable - Tomika's line "cos I'm fat" breaks my heart every time. These were not experienced kid actors (except perhaps for Miranda Cosgrove), they were young and enthusiastic musicians who brought their own spark to this amazing ensemble movie. And God knows that in the company of Jack Black, they were clearly made to feel like a million dollars in their own selves, and each one of them shines.

"Bubblegum!"

Jack Black is a really special dude. To many adults, he probably comes across as a maddening man-child who has never 'grown up'. He presents a real Peter Pan sitch. He clearly lives every day in joy and fun and fulfilment, and it doesn't hurt anyone. In fact, it seems to do so many people so much good: from his fans, to his kids, to his colleagues, to his own self. His personality is infectious and has such a liberating quality. I don't care how few people admit to it, many folks would love to feel so comfortable as to be a Jack Black of this world. I sure know I would. It's the kind of feeling adults only get on drugs or at festivals.

The adult creators have never lost their roots, and totally get what it is to have adolescent angst, and manage to channel them into creative arts. It is so rare for a movie that truly understands kids to be released, and God knows, at that stressful and crazy point in life, kids need a couple of movies that speak to them. School of Rock can be that to pretty much anyone. I still haven't played in a hardcore rock band that people love, but this movie makes me feel like I still can.

Trolls World Tour (2020)

Please...help me!

Never has a movie been so painful to watch for me. The Amityville Haunting was dull, ignorant and had a strangely incestuous vibe; Disney's remake of The Lion King was a 260-million-dollar autopsy; Up (much to the disbelief of everyone around me) struck me as unbearably saccharine. Of course, the last few years have churned out an obscene number of merchandisable family movies: some were surprisingly enjoyable (The Lego Movie), others were the cinematic equivalent of a puppy massacre (The Emoji Movie). But never have I sat through a movie more vapid, vacant or insulting than Trolls World Tour. I managed to miss the first movie, but got roped into watching this one, and within minutes, my face was contorted into a shape reminiscent of Gordon Ramsay dredging his bare hand through a bucket of rancid shrimp chowder. It remained that way until long after the credits mercifully rolled.

What this film thinks I look like while watching

Trolls World Tour is worse than a Lifetime movie. It is worse than an after-school special. It is worse than any educational film ever played on a janky old VHS machine in a classroom. You see, Trolls has a very particular AND SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS moral to it. It offers the absolute laziest allegory for racism and the pursuit of a multicultural environment I have ever witnessed. Basically, it turns out that the Trolls from the first movie are Pop Trolls, and that there are many other races of Troll in the world, all defined by their musical genre preference. Other tribes include Rock, Funk, Techno, Classical and Country, each of which has inherited a magical guitar string that represents their culture. Well, some of them did. We meet a number of other genre trolls, such as Reggae and K-Pop, who were apparently not important enough to get their own magic string.

Queen Barb is the head of the Rock Trolls very obviously modelled on Joan Jett, and for whatever reason, she has decided to indoctrinate all the other races with high-voltage rock, with the ultimate goal of a world of Rock Trolls. She rampages round Troll World, assaulting the residents with neon sound waves in order to snatch their strings away. Poppy (voiced irritatingly by Anna Kendrick) is now queen of the Pop Trolls, and sets out on a quest to be the most brightly-coloured SJW in history.

What I actually look like while watching

Now don't get me wrong - these are the sorts of setups that can engage young audiences with more adult topics like discrimination and acceptance, if handled appropriately. But too many family movies these days assume that kids are stupid, and insist on providing their audience with the moral in large print, audio and braille forms, and this is one of the worst offenders. It's apparently not enough for the plot to involve different races trying to remain separate while one character sees them all as one and the same; this movie is determined to be a 90-minute Michael Jackson Black or White music video. Poppy keeps spouting such obvious lines as "There's no difference between us, we're all Trolls!" and basically doing whatever she can to telegraph the point... well, at least when she's not being an empty-headed bitch. The idea that the five writers were sat on their solid-gold sofas somewhere, having been paid to write this trash, made me want to commit harakiri.

Not only is this the worst movie I have ever seen, Poppy is perhaps the worst character I have ever seen. She follows the modern cartoon trope of being loud, 'quirky' and hyperactive, but is emotionally empty. She is an absolute non-character, and when the movie gets to the essential "friends have a fight and go their separate ways" part, she furrows her brow as if we are supposed to believe she feels any emotions beyond self-fellatio. She treats everyone around her horribly, ignoring everything they say while purporting to be an amazing queen who is trying to save her people and unite the nations. Some cuck of a fellow troll called Branch (Justin Timberlake) nips at her heels the entire movie, and eventually professes his love for her, despite her being a cunt.

Ah's ain't no racial stereotype,
noooo Suh!

A llama-type creature that grew up among the Pop Trolls sets out too - again, for some reason - and finds out that he was born to the Funk Trolls but his egg was stolen before he hatched. Given how racially sensitive this shit movie is trying to be, I find it amusing that the character with Funk genetics is voiced by a black guy, has dreads and is a quadruped while all the other trolls are mostly human-like. This character stands out almost like Steve Martin in The Jerk, but supposedly in the name of acceptance. When he meets his birth parents, he is suddenly turned on the race he grew up with, because it turns out that the Pop Trolls stole the Funk Trolls' string years ago. You heard them -- THE WHITE MAN STOLE THE BLACK MAN'S STRING! Unbelievable.

If this wasn't sounding sickening enough to you yet, the human form of Ipicac syrup shows up, because apparently no American family movie can get by without some foreigner shaking things up with a Kent accent. Fucking James Corden voices some stupid fat character that carries around a gimp maggot, who will ultimately give us the first of two "friends have a fight and go their separate ways" skits.

The characters, plot and moral may remind me of Jeff Goldblum saying "that is one big pile of shit", but I'm not even close to done complaining about this celluloid abortion. What Trolls even more obviously than its racially inclusive message, is rip every ounce of nostalgia from our souls, sticks it in a blender and hits frappe. If The Lego Movie has taught other filmmakers anything, it's that pop culture references make a movie. It acts as a Jukebox Musical of the worst kind, filling itself out with heavily-autotuned covers of everyone's favourite songs. "Hey, you like Cyndi Lauper? Well here's her best song if it got sent through Brundle Fly's teleportation pod!" The whole thing goes exactly like that. The majority shareholder of this movie is Mr Horrendous Song-Covers, and every ounce of his input is obnoxiously bright and flashy like an arcade game, seemingly to distract the audience from the lack of substance with shiny things. What isn't horribly boring and vapid dialogue is uber-colourful and robotic music video. The fucking thing even resorts to a 30-second Hammer Time reference to endear us to it, but it made me feel like I would punch this movie if it were a person.

Why do I like you again?

I have never had cancer, but I'm certain that this movie caused some insidious DNA mutation in me. This movie actually made me feel like crying because of how bad it was. When Rolling Stone magazine finally recognises my brilliance and asks me in an interview what the two most painful experiences of my life were, I will reply, "Childbirth and Trolls World Tour". My eyes, ears and soul were violated by this movie, my intelligence had seven shades of shit beaten out of it by this movie, and the only thing this fucking movie taught me is that black people are actually troll llamas named Quincy.