Jingle Jangle — A Christmas Journey: Sparkling all the way

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.18.20

This is an impressive slice of holiday razzle-dazzle.

 

The tag line for writer/director David E. Talbert’s opulent fantasy promises that viewers will “discover a world of wishes and wonder,” and that’s an understatement. This often breathtaking blend of Alice in Wonderland, Babes in Toyland and Hugo also seems to be gunning for the seasonal crown long worn by The Wizard of Oz. 

 

Perky Journey (Madalen Mills), not one to be denied, insists that her grandfather
Jeronicus (Forest Whitaker) take another crack at perfecting his Buddy 3000 robot toy.

Because yes: Just as we’re getting accustomed to the production design and special-effects overload, John Debney’s orchestral underscore shifts into a Broadway-style prelude, and we realize, goodness, these folks are about to break into song.

 

Which they do. In addition to everything else, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey — a Netflix original — is an old-school musical, complete with a few extravagant dance numbers.

 

Actually, Talbert might hit us with too much of a good thing: a notion emphasized midway through this saga, when we’re introduced to an oh-so-cute little robot dubbed Buddy 3000 (and looking like he wandered in from WALL-E’s universe).

 

Events are related in storybook fashion, much the way Peter Falk narrated the action in The Princess Bride to grandson Fred Savage. The raconteur here is Grandmother Journey (Phylicia Rashad), who shares her childhood adventure with a pair of rapt young listeners.

 

First, a prologue, set in 1860 in the quaint Dickensian town of Cobbleton. Jeronicus Jangle (Justin Cornwell) is proprietor and designer of the delights found within Jangles and Things, the town’s famed toy shop. It’s chockablock with colorful, steampunk-inspired gadgets, gizmos, whachamacallits, thingamabobs and doomaflatchies, including a huge pendulum clock and a contraption called the Jangulator.

 

Production designer Gavin Bocquet went absolutely nuts with this eye-popping set, with its checkerboard floors, damask wallpaper and stairwell filigree; it’s impossible to take it all in.

 

Anyway…

 

Jeronicus uses the Jangulator to grant life to a doll-size, Spanish matador puppet dubbed Don Juan Diego (and played, via deliberately jerky motion-control, by Ricky Martin). Ah, but Don Juan is an evil little creature, and he persuades Jeronicus’ assistant, Gustafson (Miles Barrow), to set up a separate shingle and claim this miracle as his own.

 

Everything, Everything: Adorable, adorable

Everything, Everything (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.19.17

Nicola Yoon’s fans will be over the moon.

They really couldn’t ask for more. Director Stella Meghie’s adaptation of Everything, Everything benefits from the savvy casting of two engaging stars — Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson — and a script (J. Mills Goodloe) that adheres faithfully to the 2015 young adult best-seller.

Once Olly (Nick Robinson) learns that Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) cannot ever leave her
house, he struggles for ways to help "imagine" her into the big, wide, outside world.

The film is swooningly romantic, start to finish, and guaranteed to send its target audience into dreamy euphoria.

The rest of us ... perhaps not.

Folks who enjoy both books and films have long known that some things work very well on the printed page, not so much on the big screen. Suspension of disbelief is easier, when we concoct the pictures in our minds; we gloss over inconvenient details likely to interfere with the unfolding narrative.

Having such a story translated into the real world of a motion picture brings such “problems” into the crisp focus of cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo’s lens, making them impossible to ignore. Contrivance becomes obvious, particularly since the story unfolds much faster, in a 96-minute film, than in a 336-page novel. Questions emerge; eyebrows lift; and — worst case — the spell is broken.

And, sadly, Meghie and Goodloe make that very likely to occur. They’re not sufficiently careful with niggly little details that Yoon’s readers will be happy to overlook, but which will prompt frowns from the uninitiated.

Suburban-dwelling Madeline Whittier (Stenberg), days shy of her 18th birthday, suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), popularly known as “bubble baby disease.” Since infancy, she has been confined to a hermetically sealed wing of the Los Angeles house that she shares with her mother, Pauline (Anika Noni Rose), a physician who cares for her around the clock.

Maddy cannot leave the house, or come in contact with anything that hasn’t been thoroughly sanitized. Her sole contact with the outer world is Carla (Ana de la Reguera), the nurse who visits each day while Pauline is at work, and Carla’s teenage daughter, Rosa (Danube R. Hermosillo). Everything they wear must be disinfected, each time they enter the house.

(Just in passing, Pauline must be an über-specialist who makes more money than God, because the state-of-the-art medical and physical enhancements to this home didn’t come cheap, and would be atrociously expensive to maintain. And that’s niggly detail No. 1.)