Coffin creator, voice actor for popular movie franchise<\/p>\n
Pierre Coffin would like a little respect \u2014 and maybe an Oscar. So would James, the Minion hero of Coffin\u2019s new movie, \u201cMinions & Monsters,\u201d and they\u2019re both going to go about it in the same way, by making a movie about Hollywood. Flattery will get you everywhere, especially in this town.<\/p>\n
Coffin is the French madman behind the Minions, those little yellow guys in overalls that are now ubiquitous. He\u2019s the voice actor, fluent in Minionese (a language he invented, a blend of Spanish, French, Italian, gibberish and various other sounds), and the director of the first four movies in the \u201cDespicable Me\u201d franchise (he was nominated for an Oscar for \u201cDespicable Me 2\u201d). While he has continued to lend his vocal skills, he has returned as director with a new Minions vehicle that\u2019s a bit more high-minded than the usual fare, both a love letter to Old Hollywood and a lightly spiky critique.<\/p>\n
The Academy loves to reward films about the noble quest of making art, especially movies, because who wouldn\u2019t want to see themselves reflected onscreen? Coffin may be banking on that narcissism, while simultaneously giving the American film industry a light, good-humored flamb\u00e9. But he\u2019s also legitimizing his Minions, placing them, Forrest Gump-style, in the lineage of cinema history. What is a Minion if not a silent movie star like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton gone through a few iterations? (Though the \u201cJackass\u201d boys would like a word on that front.)<\/p>\n
By placing the Minions in early films like \u201cL\u2019Arriv\u00e9e d\u2019un train en gare de La Ciotat,\u201d and the Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s sci-fi flick \u201cA Trip to the Moon,\u201d Coffin suggests that the earliest DNA of the Minions is in these experiments of sensation and spectacle. They\u2019re not just silly little creatures, they\u2019re cinema, he argues (with co-writer Brian Lynch).<\/p>\n
Coffin literally places his star Minions, Henry and James, in a movie museum next to George Lucas, where Allison Janney voices a tour guide who provides the framing device for this historical yarn. As she tells a group of unruly kids, in the old days, Minion tribes roamed the planet searching for evil masters to serve \u2014 no wonder they ended up in Hollywood, right?<\/p>\n
After stints with a cyclops, wizard, mummy, king, samurai, etc., this crew of Minions barrels into the Hollywood of the 1920s on a runaway train, where they become movie stars, taken under the wing of a movie director named Max (Christoph Waltz), who works for oversized super producers the Bright Brothers (Jeff Bridges). It\u2019s a heady, wild, decadent and debauched time (see also, Damien Chazelle\u2019s \u201cBabylon\u201d), until the advent of sound. Much like Lina Lamont in \u201cSingin\u2019 in the Rain,\u201d the Minions can\u2019t make the leap, and end up out on the street.<\/p>\n
Henry, James and Ed pursue their dream of making James\u2019 monster movie, while the rest of the gang team up with Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a friendly alien robot who\u2019d like to take over the planet. Big dreamer James is like any aspiring young filmmaker \u2014 blindly driven to the point of ignoring every red flag that comes his way. He and his pals want to conjure up a kaiju from their old wizard\u2019s spell book for the movie, but end up manifesting scheming monster Goomi (Trey Parker), who becomes a classic smarmy producer talking out of both sides of his mouth. The monster pals Goomi summons are liable to destroy everything, including a giant, all-consuming orange blob covered in eyeballs named Irene (Eye-rene?).<\/p>\n
Choose your own metaphorical adventure with the lovely Irene, a monster whose only motivation is to mindlessly devour. Does she represent corporate mergers and monopolies that swallow up every creator and craftsperson in her wake? Or is does she represent the kind of (dumb) artificial intelligence that consumes a whole town and industry, leaving us with only mass surveillance and nothing of use? Why not both?<\/p>\n
Either way, \u201cMinions & Monsters\u201d is a lightly barbed cautionary tale about the collective (hordes of brave little Minions) coming together to protect a certain way of life, and a certain way of making movies. It might be represented by a world that\u2019s now a hundred or so years old, but it\u2019s an era that we romanticize nevertheless.<\/p>\n
With the joyous James his avatar, \u201cMinions & Monsters\u201d is Coffin\u2019s Hollywood mash note, his cinephile cri de coeur, stuffed with historical in-jokes to please the movie nerds, and lots of other silly stuff to please the kids (and hopefully this movie can be a gateway drug to \u201cSingin\u2019 in the Rain\u201d). For this film lover, it\u2019s probably the first actual capital G Good \u201cMinions\u201d movie, but, there\u2019s a first time for everything. Always expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to the Minions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coffin creator, voice actor for popular movie franchise Pierre Coffin would like a little respect \u2014 and maybe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2305,56277,154916,154915,154917,48,52,51,47,50,49,154914,28505,154274],"class_list":["post-383493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-children","tag-cinema-of-the-united-states","tag-despicable-me","tag-illumination-company","tag-illumination-company-franchises","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-minions-despicable-me","tag-monster","tag-pierre-coffin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}