minions (2015)
“and that is how the minions found their new boss! he was cunning! he was evil! he was perfect! he was… despicable!”
hung out with my irls yesterday for a litttle late galentine’s day celebration. our plan: watch the basketball game and then find some awesome movie to watch. first step of the plan almost fell through after we didnt have a usb-c cable for the fire tv stick to watch the basketball on. good thing another friend was able to route the stick through their powerbank onto the tv. with the cable length being so short, it took a shoebox and someone’s food container to get this precarious setup to work at all. after the warriors went up 20 in the 4th quarter, my friends cable gave up and disconnected from the fire tv stick. we felt like that was a good note to end on and started looking for movies. parasite? nahh. random reality tv dating show? ill save that for later (the ultimatum1 is so crazy). RANGO??? my request was lost to the wind. but thats when we landed on absolute gold.
this movie is honestly pretty epic man i cant lie. its illumination animation so it always looks good and the actual character design was awesome, capturing the times of the 1960s. of course its a supervillian superhero movie so its gonna break SOME rules (shoutouts high heel spaceship) but in terms of non fantasy aspects they kept it quite real. i also just love how no one gives a fuck that the minions exist, and all interact with them as if they were also humans. its great that they can just ignore that whole complication and even pull some pretty funny moments out of the minions and humans interacting. surprisingly i never got tired of the “minionese” speak (thats what the subtitles called it), and most of the jokes hit pretty nicely. even the mostly kid targeted jokes were funny ill give them that. i think my favorite bits always included them just throwing in random adult stuff like the hitchhiker family randomly loading a pistol in center view for a bank heist, queen lizzy downing a freaking beer, and herb trying to hang a minion. this movie got some real good subverting expectation type humor (is that a term?) and i really loved just how much there was.
of course the plot isnt anything too special but its enough that the little team of minions (kevin (goat), bob (goat), and stuart (kinda the goat)) can explore the whole two settings of new york and london. i have to go on a tangent about how this movie lowkey just makes fun of british people after a certain point. crazy how they rendered queen lizzy’s teeth like fucking timmy turner man why did they do that. also like i heard an “oh my days” in there dude that was the funniest shit ever. theres even a pub scene and i definitely saw some Barry63s2 rendered (as stated earlier queen lizzy was freaking killing it). i fucking wish they had a liverpool game on the tv (THEY SAY TELLY) that wouldve been funny as fuck. it even starts fucking raining during the movie in london like holy shitttt. on the topic of setting, i was really surprised with just the amount of iconic spots and the detailing of the backgrounds. ik its illumination quality, but damn dude the cobblestone streets, the old ass castles, and the big ben looked soooo nice. every combat and fight scene in london was so fun to watch because of it. this applies to pretty much every city setting in the movie; new york looked fucking dope with depicting the hippie movement and the city’s early entrepeneurs, and the villian-con setting had sooo many cool characters contained in it. shoutouts to the time traveling scientist with his 10 clones. one of the clones killed the original and then the rest of the clones all fucking dissolved. IN FRONT OF THE MINIONS! now THAT was a premium bit. ill give a quick shoutout to scarlet overkill for being a pretty unhinged and fun villian to watch. she has that “im a bad bitch” type energy except she also has that repressed childhood dream failure vibe, if you know what im saying (for sure you do). she makes it fun to root against her, with that freaking rocket dress and twenty lava guns hiding beneath it. the sheer absurdity of having her “villian hideout” in the middle of london (BEING A WHITE CASTLE WITH THE S LOGO EVERYWHERE) in contrast to orlando’s villian-con being hosted under a swamp has got to be one of my favorite nonsense moments ever in a kids movie.
i dont think ill give out ratings whenever i post a stream of conciousness about a certain media, but i would for sure put this one on when you’re with the gang and you need an easy watch. this is NOT the movie if you want a long committed watch along. or maybe it is if you’re a fun loving guy like me, and also if you have minions 2 queued up.
i got pixar and illumination mixed up thanks scott