Triple Feature: Smallfoot (2018), Missing Link (2019), Abominable (2019)

When I realized that I could watch all three of these dueling movies on one flight, I couldn't resist. They all came out within a year of each other and are animated adventure comedies involving humans who discover that bigfeet of some sort not only exist but are hardly monsters. Now I would know my personal preference among them.

The Remains of the Day (1993)

I have to reach pretty far back these days for an Academy Best Picture nominee that I haven't seen yet and might want to see, apart from some of the most recent. In truth, I didn't know much more than that about TRotD going in -- only that it was a rather esteemed drama starring Anthony Hopkins two years after his first turn as Hannibal Lecter. And Emma Thompson, accidentally in back-to-back reviews on this blog.

Had I noticed in advance that they play a butler and a maid in a mid-20th-century lord's manor, I would have thought hard before adding the DVD to my Netflix queue. Stories of old-time aristocrats, perhaps especially in Britain, threaten to bore me. A focus on their staff doesn't help much. Yeah, count me among the few non-fans of Downton Abbey. At least its predecessor Gosford Park has amusing moments, which I cannot say for TRotD.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Right from the first minute of the preview -- establishing that one Harold Crick suddenly hears his life narrated by a novelist -- I got the impression that Will Ferrell was attempting what Jim Carrey did with The Truman Show and Bill Murray did with Groundhog Day: a sci-fi/fantasy comedy-drama just philosophically serious enough that we may finally consider the star something other than a full-time clown. I welcomed this prospect, as Ferrell's humor has always struck me as about half decent and half obnoxious. (Like some other comedians I could name, he fares better in voice roles.)

It turns out that STF doesn't spend much time trying to be funny. As absurd as the above, unexplained premise is -- not to mention the addition of an apparently sapient watch that goes on the fritz to affect Harold's actions -- the story quickly introduces some dark ways for his setup to suck. In particular, the narrator indicates that Harold is going to die very soon. From there, it's a question of whether to go quietly into that good night or struggle to find an escape. Yeah, he spends more time doing the latter.