Stop, they're gone: New "Minions" are saving Hollywood
The seventh full-meter of the Despicable Me series and the third "solo" spin-off, Minions and Monsters, looks completely self-sufficient. This is a journey into the past of cinema, the era of the "Golden Age" of Hollywood: the film is full of quotes from classics and the names of legendary directors. This week, the animated blockbuster was released worldwide, and by next weekend, Russian cinemas will begin screening as part of the pre-screening service. Izvestia tells you how to get the most out of the movie, even if you've never encountered either minions or Gru before.
What is the cartoon "Minions and Monsters" about
Already the first shots of the new cartoon are setting up a nostalgic mood. A medley of the first silent films is something that everyone has long been accustomed to. First, Lumiere's "Exit of workers from the Lumiere factory in Lyon", "Arrival of the train at La Ciotat station", "Feeding the baby", "Watered sprinkler". Paintings by Georges Méliès, Thomas Edison, "The Great Train Robbery". Now imagine that all these early masterpieces have nimble yellow imps embedded, cute but completely restless.
This is how "Minions and Monsters" begins, imitating the story of a tour guide in a large cinema museum. There's a living George Lucas behind the glass, and the master voiced himself in this touching cameo. But the minion story represents the classic madness of the Despicable Me franchise. Since prehistoric times, we learn, a crowd of yellow men have been running around the Earth in search of the perfect tyrant villain whom they could serve with dignity. But each new ruler ended up falling victim to the hilarious idiocy of his own slaves. By the way, this is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon, where kings' heads fly off their shoulders, and necromancer sorcerers ingloriously die because the minions misunderstood something again.
Fortunately for all mankind, fate one day brings the minions to Hollywood, where silent films are in crisis: producers demand that films be immediately fascinating, funny, and romantic, and that they be made quickly, and that people come pouring over them. The minions get to know the studio bosses (both voiced by Jeff Bridges) and the director (Christoph Waltz), who is fed up with their nagging and threats. And they become superstars because they are agile, nimble, active, funny and tireless.
And then their collective career comes to an end, like many other celebrities of silent cinema: with the arrival of sound on the screen, the chattering of the minions (Pierre Coffann still voices them all at once), no one wants to listen. And since Minion James dreams of an Oscar, he inspires his relatives to find a real super monster and make a movie about him that will hit the jackpot. Meanwhile, a robot named Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) has appeared in the Hollywood neighborhood, who wants to enslave the world, but along the way he falls in love with a suffragette (Zoey Deutch) and gets carried away with rallies and demonstrations.
Do I need to watch "Minions and Monsters"
The better you know the history of cinema, the funnier it will be for you. The new "Minions" quote and parody not only the works of Chaplin, Keaton, Fairbanks and Pickford, but also later paintings. It's especially piquant when jokes start about Christopher Nolan's upcoming "Odyssey" — a whole big episode with Cyclops, the perfect villain from the minions' point of view, was invented for this.
Usually, minions are perceived by us as extras, whose name is Legion, but in Hollywood, little men have either nicknames or real passport data for taxes. And suddenly we find ourselves in a crowd of great masters of cinema, who appear in the finale already in the monumental title. They say that the film "starred" Federico and Werner, Gus and Alejandro, Michelangelo and Jean-Luc — and a hundred more legendary names.
Of course, such a cartoon is for cinephiles, an ideal replacement for a crossword puzzle or quiz for the evening. For example, not everyone will immediately remember that the robot Gort is the hero of the 1951 science fiction blockbuster The Day the Earth Stood Still. Surely in the coming days there will be more than one competition on Internet forums to see who has dug up more roll calls and Easter eggs.
But at the same time, "Minions and Monsters" are arranged so democratically that the viewer has the right not only not to know anything about silent films, but not even to guess the creator of "Star Wars" in George Lucas and, it's scary to say, not to read "Odyssey" at school. Because all the best works are based on archetypes, and therefore even a small viewer can easily read all the "messages" embedded in the seventh film of the franchise. And closer to the finale, the authors completely discard the cinematic "crutches" of Hollywood and switch to the traditional leapfrog for the franchise-a whirlpool into which giant monsters, an alien robot, sorcerers, and film studios are drawn — and all this is rushing in an incomprehensible direction, because the viewer has already finished his popcorn and looks at the clock.
Western critics are absolutely delighted, the rating of the cartoon on Rotten Tomatoes is now 88%, and not only because the authors squeezed a tear out of the reviewers by referring to film classics. Rather, the fact is that the love of cinema itself does not often become a topic for a mass product, but here this love is pure, passionate and selfless.
However, the minions do not need money, but Universal studio plans to collect $ 170 million at the global box office in the first weekend with a budget of $85 million. And she delivered this release very successfully — for the 250th anniversary of the United States, which is celebrated on July 4, when much of the country's history will be remembered and discussed, especially what America has every right to be proud of. Hollywood is clearly included in this list, so a curious family cartoon blockbuster on this topic turned out to be very useful.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
