Something to watch tonight: Thursday 27 July

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Gosnell, 2008) is streaming on Disney+

When I relaunched Funerals & Snakes a few weeks ago, I did so with the same gag I had been using since the old blog: that I watched and reviewed every film released the­at­ric­ally in Wellington between 2006 and 2013 (except for some reas­ons Beverly Hills Chihuahua) so of course the first request from my Facebook friends was to rem­edy that omission.

Luckily, long ago I had bought a Blu-ray copy for this even­tu­al­ity but the film is also stream­ing – along with with the two sequels – on Disney+.

The film is prob­ably the epi­tome of Disney’s early 21^st cen­tury bland fam­ily out­put. It has a budget big enough to dis­tin­guish itself from the run-of-the-mill fare that they were churn­ing out for the Disney Channel (though the script isn’t much of an improve­ment) and while Jamie Lee Curtis is the only big name in the flesh (as it were), the voice cast­ing of the vari­ous anim­als is pretty good.

In fact, the anim­als gen­er­ally – mostly dogs but there’s also a digit­al rat and iguana – are a stout com­bin­a­tion of real world per­form­ing pooches with anim­ated enhance­ments (the lip­synch­ing that Babe made fam­ous a few years earlier).

Drew Barrymore is the voice of Chloe, pampered little bootied beast with a Harry Winston col­lar, lost in Mexico by her party­ing pet-sitter and thus dis­cov­er­ing a world of dog fights, anim­al traf­fick­ing and eco­nom­ic inequality.

By the time Plácido Domingo turns up as the voice of the revolu­tion­ary wild Chihuahuan lead­er Montezuma, you really do just have to go along with it all. It’s a museum piece but I think it will still keep kids occu­pied on a wet afternoon.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua dir­ect­or Raja Gosnell appears to spe­cial­ise in this sort of animated-real world hybrid pro­duc­tion and was also respons­ible for one of my most sur­pris­ing favour­ite films – The Smurfs 2 from 2013:

I was no great fan of the first Smurfs live-action film (“lumpy … utterly charm­less”) but the second out­ing took me very by sur­prise. Hank Azaria’s wicked wiz­ard Gargamel has hatched anoth­er dast­ardly plan to cap­ture the Smurfs and squeeze their essence out of them like blue­ber­ries at break­fast time, there­fore refuel­ling his magic dragon-wand. To the res­cue comes Neil Patrick Harris, this time with his step­fath­er played by Brendan Gleeson. Their rela­tion­ship is a rocky one but its res­ol­u­tion ably rein­forces the main theme of the movie – that the fam­ily you choose is more import­ant than the fam­ily you were born into. I cry at movies all the time but was not expect­ing to cry at this one.

At time of writ­ing The Smurfs 2 is stream­ing on Netflix and Neon in Aotearoa.