JUDY AND JAMES; YETI AND INGRID

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, this week reviewing Judy...

...and the caper comedy Raising Buchanan...

...about a scheme to steal the body of President James Buchanan and hold it for ransom. That tired old plot device again.

Also opening this week:

  
Abominable--Following last year's peculiar Smallfoot, here's another CGI animated feature about Yetis. This one is peculiar, too.

In this Chinese-American co-production, a teenage Chinese city girl finds a fuzzy, sweet-natured Yeti hiding on the roof of her apartment building; he's escaped from a cruel scientific facility. She feeds him steamed pork buns and plays her violin for him, and then, with the help of two friends from the building, tries to smuggle him back to his home in the mountains, with the forces of the nasty collector hot in pursuit. The movie is of a New-Agey-bent; in the course of the odyssey we learn that the creature is tune with the forces of nature, and when he hums the sound causes flowers to blossom and blueberries to grow enormous.

As is almost invariably the case with wide-release animated features of the last few decades, the obligatory elements in Abominable, the stock villains and the stock character motivations, are highly tedious. This template for has been so successful for so long that it's hard to see it going away anytime soon, but it sure makes these films wearisomely repetitive.

That said, the characterizations of the Yeti and the kids are winning, and the Chinese setting is different and colorful. And this is almost certainly the only film to contain the line "Don't body-shame my yak!"

Finally, if you happen to be here in the Phoenix area, you could check out The House That Dripped Blood at 10 p.m. this evening, September 27, at FilmBar. This 1971 British horror anthology, scripted by Robert Bloch and featuring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Jon Pertwee and Denholm Elliot, has long been a fave of mine, largely on the basis of the scene near the end in which supremely sultry and statuesque vampiress Ingrid Pitt levitates and...her high-heeled shoes drop off her feet to the floor. I don't know why, but for some reason that detail remains one of the most deliriously sexy moments in movies for me.