Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

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MichaelB
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Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#26 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 27, 2018 3:31 am

Yes, I don’t know a single parent here in Blighty who didn’t regard Paddington 2 as the proverbial manna from heaven. We’d already seen it twice by Christmas last year.

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dda1996a
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#27 Post by dda1996a » Fri Jul 27, 2018 3:51 am

It's not an apt comparison, but these two films are the closest in a long while to hitting that sweet spot that Amblin and other 80s family films hit.

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Dr Amicus
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#28 Post by Dr Amicus » Fri Jul 27, 2018 6:27 am

My 7 year old loved the second - she was originally not bothered, but saw the trailer and decided she wanted to see it. Afterwards she decided she wanted the DVD so she could watch it again and again... My ten year old liked it as well - but now his sister loves it, I wouldn't be surprised if his opinion changes!

On the whole, I would put the second over the first - both made me laugh and cry, but the second has Brendan Gleeson and Hugh Grant so just edges it. The prison sequence, especially Paddington's complaint about the food ("and nobody, but nobody, bonks me on the head with a bag-wette"), is a particular standout.

Incidentally, after Michael Bond's death, Private Eye had a rather lovely cartoon which was received very warmly by readers. Indeed, the following issue had a letter from a vicar confirming that it was a theological fact that Marmalade Sandwiches are indeed served in the afterlife.

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bdsweeney
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#29 Post by bdsweeney » Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:50 am

I’m a proverbial childless 40-something who greatly enjoyed both films (but don’t own either on blu), but also have to say that my nephews and nieces have a great love for the films (along with my 78-year-old dad).

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knives
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#30 Post by knives » Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:53 am

John Cope wrote:
Thu Jul 26, 2018 9:20 pm
Have heard the second was better than the first but I so supremely hated the first one that I haven't been able to bear (sorry) to see it. "Rather different" from the books is putting it mildly and kindly. As someone who adored them (and still does adore them) that first film felt almost like a sacrilege.
I totally get not liking it if fidelity to the source is a primary concern, but I feel as if King's goals wouldn't quite work on the everyday mundane excitement that the books possess. King seems more concerned about how niceness can make massive good and how it is an underrated value. Taken on its own I think this sequel (again haven't seen the first) is great, but as an adaptation of the books sure.

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MichaelB
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#31 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 27, 2018 9:05 am

Michael Bond approved of the first one, and doubtless would have approved even more of the second had he lived to see it (although he was involved with it up to his death).

In fact, one of the lovely things about Paddington 2 is the way that it pays tribute not merely to Bond's work but also to its BBC predecessor - I don't think it's remotely a coincidence that the style of the animation in the popup book sequence is visually almost identical (if far more technically sophisticated) than the cutout style used in the original 1970s adaptation.

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knives
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#32 Post by knives » Fri Jul 27, 2018 9:13 am

I didn't mean to say that it was a betrayal (the call back to the television show is indeed amazing and the closest I came to tears), just that I'm sympathetic even if I disagree.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#33 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Fri Jul 27, 2018 12:19 pm

They're both really fun films; and the Mighty Boosh influence in a kid's film works well.

I too like being one of very small % of viewers who 'get' the Modern Times reference.

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colinr0380
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#34 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 3:31 am

I think that, like Spider-Man, once the done to death origin story is out of the way yet again, Paddington 2 might be free to move in a different direction. The 'classic British children's text to modern adaptation' in this trend that I have been bracing myself for is Peter Rabbit which feels very much a PPP, or Post-Paddington Production (will James Corden finally be tolerable if it is only in voice form?)

(And I suppose all of these films are late ripostes to the wonderful Stuart Little films?)

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Magic Hate Ball
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#35 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Sat Jul 28, 2018 11:53 am

I didn't see the first one, but I've now seen Paddington 2 twice and actually got misty the second time during the opening because I remembered what a force of unbridled good nature Paddington is. My husband avoided it for a long time because the trailers made it look like everything bad about kid's films, but by the middle of it he had me get my jar of marmalade out because he'd never had it before and we passed it back and forth with a spoon throughout the second half. There's a really nice spark to this movie, it seems like it should be kludgy and sappy but it's got just enough flair and everyone looks like they're having such a good time (also Brendan Gleeson is a hunk in this yowza).

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Luke M
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#36 Post by Luke M » Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:38 am

The fiancee and I decided to watch both of these tonight. We were especially interested to see if the sequel was better than Citizen Kane. The future Mrs. M loved them and I couldn't even fake enthusiasm towards them. Sure, the visual effects are great. However, both movies play out like standard PG adventure movies. They reminded me of movies I found magical as a kid (Matilda) but complete duds as an adult (also Matilda). Also having witnessed them during a time when half the screens at the local cineplex are not taken up by some Marvel monstrosity didn't do the movies any favors. They're fine. Really I think they're just fine. Complaining and praising come in equal sparse amounts. Lastly, maybe 30 years from now they'll be enough millennial (still childless) film scholars to rank it above 2001 or Vertigo but for now Orson can rest peacefully.


Orlac
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#37 Post by Orlac » Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:49 am

As a kid, I loathed the Matilda film. Compared to the novel (which is still my favourite), it felt very twee and immature.

That said, I'm interested in seeing it again. And the one about the boxing kangaroo.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#38 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Thu Apr 29, 2021 6:54 am

It's not that anyone actually thinks Paddington 2 is on par with Citizen Kane or any other canon film. It's just that it has had universally positive reviews - they could all be 4/5 standard. Is the RT universal acclaim like Metacritic's, which for a film is usually anything above 60%?

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tenia
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#39 Post by tenia » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:21 am

The issue is that RT's metric is rubbish. Mediocre but consensually good movies can hit 100% while more demanding much better movies are likely to get a few rotten critics. That's why RT% isn't enough as such to assess this kind of things but the average score aggregated by RT also needs to be used as a 2nd metric. And indeed : Paddington 2 has an excellent 8.8 out of 10 average, but Citizen Kane has an insane 9.7 one.

MC isn't using a transformed metric to consider the overall consensus but directly the average aggregated score. If RT was to do so, much less of those movies would be Fresh, or they'd have to decrease from 75% (IIRC) to 6.5 or maybe even 6 out of 10 their Fresh threshold to keep that amount of certified movies. Same goes for the extremely low RT%, many movies with those have mediocre averages (though usually negative ones, say 4 or 4.5 out of 10).
Last edited by tenia on Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

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knives
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#40 Post by knives » Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:09 am

I think it is.

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dustybooks
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#41 Post by dustybooks » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:24 pm

I found the first film so obvious and unfunny I could barely finish it but I seem to be having more and more trouble warming up to children’s films in the last few years (I also had issues with Moana and Inside Out, though I did really enjoy Coco). One problem is I’ve started to have trouble seeing CG animation as anything but lifeless and free of character. I haven’t always been like this and I don’t really know what happened.

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MichaelB
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#42 Post by MichaelB » Fri Apr 30, 2021 6:53 am

tenia wrote:
Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:21 am
The issue is that RT's metric is rubbish. Mediocre but consensually good movies can hit 100% while more demanding much better movies are likely to get a few rotten critics. That's why RT% isn't enough as such to assess this kind of things but the average score aggregated by RT also needs to be used as a 2nd metric. And indeed : Paddington 2 has an excellent 8.8 out of 10 average, but Citizen Kane has an insane 9.7 one.

MC isn't using a transformed metric to consider the overall consensus but directly the average aggregated score. If RT was to do so, much less of those movies would be Fresh, or they'd have to decrease from 75% (IIRC) to 6.5 or maybe even 6 out of 10 their Fresh threshold to keep that amount of certified movies. Same goes for the extremely low RT%, many movies with those have mediocre averages (though usually negative ones, say 4 or 4.5 out of 10).
I realised that Rotten Tomatoes was useless as a yardstick when The Lego Movie managed 100% for several weeks on the back of what were overwhelmingly reviews that stopped one short of the maximum star rating. Now, I happen to really like the film (along with the Paddington duo, it was one of the more pleasant surprises I've had with compulsory parental cinema visits), but the vast majority of those reviews offered a very fair assessment - in which case surely the score should have been nearer 75-80%? Which is still very very good, but not "unimpeachable perfection".

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hearthesilence
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#43 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:42 am

This goes back to Siskel (then Roeper) & Ebert's inane thumbs up/thumbs down endorsements. There was an archive - I think an OFFICIAL archive run by the show when Ebert was still alive and before he launched his own website - that had reviews from the past, and at the time it seemed like the most interesting stuff that went over Ebert's head was getting 2 1/2 stars in print and a flat out thumbs down on the show alongside useless trash that also got the same "thumbs down."

Anyway, I won't complain about Paddington 'cause I have a soft spot for those teddy bears, which I also gifted to various newborns and relatives. I only remember the first book - I've never seen either movie.

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domino harvey
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#44 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:58 am

They both constantly qualified their thumbs up/thumbs down distinctions with "Marginal thumbs (up/down)" and gave their reasons why on their show. A **1/2 and below review is not a thumbs up based on his own scale that never changed for the entirety of his tenure, so I don't see the issue.

I also don't see the issue with RottenTomatoes. All 98% means is that 98% of critics pulled in gave the film a positive review, not that it's 98/100 on a quality scale. Anyone who thinks that isn't looking at it right and that's on them. And if RT extensively utilized period reviews like they do contemporary ones, Citizen Kane would be scored much lower on the scale, so be glad for the rose colored glasses of seeing the film's lasting impact. In fifty years, it's likely the Lego Movie wouldn't fare as well, but RT isn't about legacy, it's about immediacy. If you're using it to gauge the likelihood that any viewer watching will enjoy a given film, it has some value, though likely not for any of us here who already have a good idea of our own film tastes and which critics or friends or posters here have opinions that mostly match our own.

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tenia
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#45 Post by tenia » Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:43 am

The issue isn't so much RT's model that the confusion pushing their % has generated. You can be a very mediocre movie but if you're not getting any negative review, you can hit a very high Fresh score. This is made to increase the gap between scores, both in terms of Fresh AND Rotten ones (we tend to forget it also artificially generate impressions for some movies looking very bad), and indeed because it generates artificial instant buzz about it, exactly like now with this one. Looking at the average scores makes it clear there's still a noticeable critical gap between Paddington 2 and Citizen Kane, a gap the % transformation erases. That's how you get dissimilar critical consensus ending up with similar %, but also similar consensuses yielding different %.

In short, it's a purely marketing metric but a pointless critical one.

And it's also a rubbish one for comparing movies from very different periods, but that's not really the issue here.

And indeed, a good playground for this are the whole MCU DCEU movies, which make for a large enough pool of movies to see how the meter is biasing perceptions one way or another, simply because it decorrelates just enough the score with the meter for that. I never plotted the % vs the scores on a plot graph, but I'm quite certain the correlation between them on those is pretty much zilch. I'm also quite certain the MCU is loving the meters more than the scores.

Last edited by tenia on Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#46 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:47 am

If you go back and watch the show, you might get that context, but part of the problem with up/down, yes/no assessment is that it allows any assessment to be reduced to just that. I didn't watch the show regularly, but it was common that the only thing that would be carried over on the web or in print was a thumbs up or down with no context, often in something as simple as a chart.

At one point, Sound Opinions - also a Chicago-based show, albeit for pop music, using critics from the city's two biggest papers, and one that did aspire to be like Siskel & Ebert - adopted the same approach, and they eventually ditched it years later because they realized and admitted all the problems spelled out above.
Last edited by hearthesilence on Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#47 Post by swo17 » Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:48 am

RT % is a helpful measure if you don't watch enough movies to know your own taste that well and just want to pick something to watch that you're unlikely to consider a waste of your time

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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#48 Post by Monterey Jack » Fri Apr 30, 2021 12:45 pm

Look at how many flagrantly mediocre MCU movies routinely get RT scores in the mid-80s and higher. Black Panther is a good movie, sure, but 96% good? A movie that gets a **1/2 out of **** review is still technically "fresh", but it's hardly a rave. Sadly, too many people just look at the overall percentage instead of sitting down and actually reading said reviews.

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domino harvey
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#49 Post by domino harvey » Fri Apr 30, 2021 1:07 pm

I can't tell if you all are just being obtuse on purpose or what, but the site is extremely clear on what their scores mean
The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show. A Tomatometer score is calculated for a movie or TV show after it receives at least five reviews.

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: Paddington 1 & 2 (Paul King, 2014/2018)

#50 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Fri Apr 30, 2021 2:21 pm

RT's explanation of their scores is one thing; the public's perception of those scores is another. Based on conversations I've had and things I've seen online, I find it likely that most people see a higher RT score not as evidence of a more uniform critical consensus but as evidence of a higher quality movie.

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