StevePulaski

After wading in the water in terms of quality for the better half of this year, Illumination Entertainment finally gets the above-average film they deserve with Sing. The sad part about a film like this - which is basically an animated variety show of animals covering yesterday and today's pop tunes - is it's more likely to fail than succeed on the simple merit that its narrative prompts for things like humor based on recognition, general unevenness, and lazy screen writing. While all of those certainly come into play sooner or later, you might just be surprised, as I was, how Sing's effervescent charm sneaks up on you well into its second act and manifests its way into becoming an enjoyable, character-centered experience.

The film revolves around the perky Buster Moon (voiced by Matthew McConaughey), a Koala bear who owns the historic Moon Theatre and has for the past twenty-five years. In the present day, however, the theater is dilapidated, with crippled, worn infrastructure that can barely stay intact. Buster hasn't put on a show in three years, but with the help of his elderly, but well-meaning lizard assistant Ms. Crawly (director Garth Jennings), they decide to host a singing competition which will eventually pave the way for a variety show of sorts for the entire neighborhood.

Originally intending the winner of the competition to get $1,000, a typo by Ms. Crawly renders the cash prize $100,000, money that Buster doesn't have but must fake like he does until the show is over. This becomes harder to do when he sees exactly how troubled most of his talent are, and how they're all singing to escape or better themselves. There's a teenage gorilla named Johnny (Taron Egerton), who is trying to forge a path for himself unlike his father's that doesn't involve petty crime and gang activity, a mouse named Mike (Seth MacFarlane), who is in total debt with no immediate relief, a young elephant named Meena (Tori Kelly), who needs to overcome stage-fright in order to pursue his dreams as a singer, a porcupine named Ash (Scarlett Johansson), who gets accepted while the other half of her duo/boyfriend Lance (Beck Bennett) does not, and a pig named Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), who is caught in the middle of a struggling marriage with her husband and twenty-five piglets as she tries to relive her years as a performer.

A movie where animals sing once-popular radio hits feels like the "cat video"-infested bowels of Youtube taken to the next level, so on that note, much like their film The Secret Life of Pets, Illumination has cracked the secret to getting people interested in their films on a purely conceptual (no matter how basic) level. But after insulting us with Minions and shortchanging us with Pets, the studio finally gets it right with Sing by giving us what we subconsciously expected to see, which was a bit of a story behind the characters. We'll come for the cuteness, but we'd also like to be given a reason to stay and a reason to connect to the film.

Sing features an amiable cast of characters with familiar voices - McConaughey and MacFarlane are very good, for that matter - and infuses their stories with enough interest to make them transcend the tropes they could've fallen into it quite easily. For example, the stories of Meena, Rosita, and Ash are actually kind of sad, and give way to the wonderful idea of female empowerment based on breaking out of "your place" or your comfort zone and fully becoming your own, confident person. Common, absolutely, but screenwriter Jennings infuses a bit of disillusionment into their stories to give them an emotional layer that might even echo or resonate with parents, who thought they were taking their kids to see another cute and cuddly kid movie. Maybe they might even see something in the way the Johnny character feels, as he's constantly pressured by his father to be tough and to be a part of his gang rather than encouraging him to be his own person.

Sing has moments where its lazy screen writing does prevail, such as the handful of montages we get that show a goofy pig dancing to Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" or kangaroos singing the Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance." They're moments of brief amusement until you realize how entirely vapid and distracting they really are. Thankfully, where Jennings could've stopped writing, he decided to keep going, and the result is a modestly successful animated film that at least makes an admirable attempt to give us more than the internet and other movies of the like already have.

Voiced by: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane, Taron Egerton, Scarlett Johansson, Tori Kelly, Beck Bennett, and Garth Jennings. Directed by: Garth Jennings.

I write this review of the documentary Addiction Incorporated as not only a casual smoker of both cigarettes and cigars myself, but as someone fascinated by the variety of tobacco and tobacco-related products in the United States. Ever since I turned eighteen, I've been a casual smoker, smoking no more than three cigarettes a day, researching on tobacco trends and specifics of particular cigarettes and cigars, while frequenting tobacco shops and lounges with my friends. It's a culture that's attractive because of its variety, history, and stigma, especially in recent time. I distinctly remember being a young child going into Red Lobster or another restaurant and having my mother, a smoker for several decades, and my grandmother, another smoker for several decades before quitting in the late 2000's, asking for a "smoking table." Now, you'll be lucky to smoke immediately outside of that same building.

Addiction Incorporated is a documentary about tobacco losing its respectable place and staple in American culture. What was once a proud staple of unabashed freedom and Americana has now become viewed as a gross habit with seriously lethal consequences, with concrete evidence and support to back up such statements. It concerns a man named Victor DeNoble, with a cool demeanor and relaxing narrative voice that was made for any documentary, who was hired by Philip Morris several decades ago to develop an equally addictive substitute for nicotine. This was during the time that companies like Morris (Marlboro) and R.J. Reynolds (Camel) were beginning to succumb to proof from studies that a correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was undeniable and prevalent. Nonetheless, even DeNoble himself confirms that they did want to develop an alternative to nicotine. After all, as stated in the documentary, dead smokers don't buy cigarettes.

DeNoble worked with a man named Bill Farone to help develop the substitute, but during this process, DeNoble worked with lab-rats as he worked to discover what nicotine really does to the brain. In DeNoble's experiment, rats were given doses of nicotine to their brain respective to their body-size whenever they pressed a button. Eventually, over the course of just a few days, the rats went from pushing the button just a few times a day to pushing it over one-hundred times a day. After this discovery, the evidence was indisputable; nicotine did dangerous things to the brain and was delivered by way of one of America's favorite social activities and passtimes.

We're told when nicotine enters the body, it directly affects a person's breathing as well as their heart-rate. It also is something that has to be introduced to the body; once acquainted, it activates nerves and emotions in the brain that weren't previously known to the body, which is what results in a sudden craving for a cigarette and the ongoing addiction. DeNoble was also one of the first people to look at acetaldehyde, a chemical that serves as one of the key factors in getting nicotine to resonate in the body and the mind. With that, DeNoble looked to present his research to the tobacco companies, who, regardless of the scientific findings, had two prime goals - sell more cigarettes and make more money.

DeNoble states that while companies like Philip Morris were selling a lifestyle, they were really engaging drug marketing. They were engaging in normalizing drug use in popular culture, where people could regularly purchase and use a legal drug while skeptically observing or writing off others perceived as "more dangerous" or "more deadly." The anomaly such a thing presents is quite striking, but DeNoble reminds us of a time where Americans refused to accept that one of their favorite, more cherished things was slowly killing them and turning them into addicts.

Addiction Incorporated covers all that and more, including the long legal battle between DeNoble and Philip Morris that famously had the tobacco company denying any prior knowledge that their product lead to a variety of diseases and resulted in a countless number of deaths. Curiously enough, I don't recall the word "cancer" being uttered once in the film; that's because the focus is largely on DeNoble, his findings, and Philip Morris's response to those findings. As a result, Addiction Incorporated winds up being a documentary that retraces well-covered steps, but nonetheless basks in an aura of importance with an engaging presence and understandable storytelling devices at its core. It doesn't predicate on fear, but on proved sentiments and winds up being thoroughly enjoyable and informative at that.

Directed by: Charles Evans Jr.

Whether or not Exit Through the Gift Shop is an authentic documentary, showcasing real-life events without a hint of fabrication or mockumentary-esque sentiment, I cannot say and I'm not prepared to wrap my brain around the multitude of justifications and possibilities. What I am prepared to do, however, is talk about what a visceral and entertaining experience Exit Through the Gift Shop is, and how its effective use and depiction of street art and the politics of street artists is something that deserves your attention. In a film that predicates itself off of portraying and capturing "art terrorists" in the action, and the limitless creative ways they can express themselves, this documentary works to be both an unabashed plunge inside an underground community, as well as a beautiful iteration of something many of us probably took for granted or didn't quite look at so deeply before.

Shot by an English street artist who goes by the name of "Banksy," and also assisted by Shepard Fairey, another street artist who is responsible for creating Barack Obama's animated, red/blue campaign image for his 2008 election campaign, Exit Through the Gift Shop chronicles the life of Thierry Guetta, a quirky Frenchmen living in Los Angeles who, since he can remember, shot and recorded everything that occurred in his life. No matter where he went or what he did, Thierry was always armed with a camera and collected thousands of tapes with unique footage stored on them. One thing Theirry was always fascinated with was street art, and learned that one of Los Angeles's most prolific street artists, a man named "Space Invader," who goes around tagging images around town of characters and sprites from video games, is one of his cousins.

This sparks a sudden interest in Thierry to begin documenting street artists in Los Angeles. Street artists are known as people that go around town illegally spray-painting, posting, or sticking images in public places. Often times it's taking traditional graffiti and vandalism to the next level by having enormous thirty-feet by forty-feet prints of quirky images plastered on the sides of brick buildings, drawing a countless number of eyes onto your work. Thierry winds up getting in touch with both Fairey and Banksy, and before long, after tirelessly following them around and capturing their process, gets the urge to make his own art under the name "Mr. Brainwash" (MBW), a name he gets from having the desire to infest the minds of who sees his work with his elaborate art involving everything from exaggerated images of celebrities, Warhol-style interpretations and manipulations of popular culture, to images made up of barcodes that distort and render the image into a series of parallel lines if you observe them from a close distance.

Through intense marketing by inspiring word of mouth through the Los Angeles area, and requested promotions via Banksy and Fairey, Guetta goes from an underground oddity to a mainstream sensation almost overnight, so much so that he begins crafting an art show so he can sell some of his own works. His inspiration to host a show comes after Banksy creates a storm of positive reception and sales by selling his eclectic street-art at a wild, unconventional art show of his own. This is where the politics of street art begin to conflict. Can one really say that Guetta and Banksy's work, at that point, adheres to the basic principles of underground, illegal art? When something becomes commercialized or licensed, often the authenticity and the roots of the work is compromised, and through Guetta's strives towards fame and acceptance, the concept of boasting "real" street art is almost entirely lost on him.

Banksy and crew present this progression so subtly that you might miss it. For example, when the film concluded, I felt a sort of malice and anger towards Guetta for reasons I couldn't adequately summarize. Most films or documentaries that make you detest a person leave you with the ability to summarize that person pretty cogently upon finishing the film, but with Guetta, who is so fundamentally interesting and layered, it took me a significant amount of time to pinpoint what exactly about him and his ways infuriated me. With contemplation, I realize I didn't necessarily hate or dislike him, but seriously pitied him.

Here was a person with such a passion and love for what he did, shooting countless hours of video and following around street artists, that he got so invested he wound up exploiting both for monetary and societal gain, in turn, losing the core thesis of what those ideas, particularly the latter, usher in for people and a neglected subculture.

What we're left with is Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film with a pulse and a sense of urgency. A film that reminds us of the fluidity and nonlinear capabilities of art, while showing us that it retains an inherent purity unless it is wrongfully utilized or manipulated by people. By having a clear emphasis on the eclectic and the silenced, and helmed by three truly unique and revolutionary artists, who take their voices to the streets to risk it all, real or not, authentic or fabricated, Exit Through the Gift Shop bears ideas that make it almost impossible to ignore. How many potentially fabricated documentaries can you say that about?

Directed by: Banksy.