Dear Watchers,Would you like to spend time with a chemical sludge boy or an anime moon girl? On this Genre Movie Wednesday, you can pick both! Our expert in sci-fi, Elisabeth Vincentelli, plunges into the goo to recommend a clever reboot of an ’80s cult classic. She also looks at a shimmering, comic (and cosmic) animated picture, complete with musical numbers. Read her takes on each below, then head here to check out more of her out-of-this-world selections. Happy Watching. ‘The Toxic Avenger’
Where to watch: Stream “The Toxic Avenger” on Hulu. More than four decades ago, Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’s cartoonishly gross-out movie “The Toxic Avenger” became a cult horror comedy that kicked off a franchise of sorts across mediums — there’s even been a stage musical. Now here comes Macon Blair’s reboot, in which once again a janitor, here renamed Winston (Peter Dinklage), turns into a green mutant after being thrown into a vat of chemical sludge. Toxie (who is voiced by Dinklage and embodied by Luisa Guerreiro) still has Winston’s good heart, but he also takes no guff, especially from the criminal executive Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon, having a ball). And so we go into comic mayhem, or just plain mayhem. While Winston has a stepson, Wade (Jacob Tremblay) — giving Dinklage the opportunity to play a loving single dad in straight (sort of) scenes — Blair doesn’t lean on familial pieties. The point remains for Toxie to battle greed, corruption and good taste. The dystopian American health-insurance system figures into the plot, too, in case anybody was still wondering what ails this country. Fear not, though: Blair doesn’t sermonize, and he commits to the franchise’s history by amping up the schlock factor. ‘Cosmic Princess Kaguya!’
Where to watch: Stream “Cosmic Princess Kaguya!” on Netflix. Anime fans might remember Isao Takahata’s poetic, delicate feature “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” (2014), in which the mysterious foundling of the title is revealed to be from the moon. The movie was inspired by an oft-adapted Japanese story, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” which has returned, yet again, in a new film by Shingo Yamashita. This new take is extremely different, although the earlier film gets a nod from Yamashita, whose heroine, Iroha (voiced by Anna Nagase), brings it up after finding a baby inside a glowing telephone pole. Said baby, Kaguya (Yuko Natsuyoshi), grows up at lightning speed; within hours, she is close in age to Iroha, a hard working high schooler who escapes to a fantastical world through her V.R. contact lenses. Yamashita drives the movie at a fast clip, full of rat-a-tat gags involving mostly the ebullient Kaguya. (There are even musical numbers with a hyperpop franticness.) But bittersweetness lurks behind the shine, especially as we learn more about Iroha’s stress and loneliness and about the moon visitor’s origin. Under its bright, comic exterior, “Cosmic Princess Kaguya!” has things to say about the gap between real and made-up worlds.
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