The last super hero movie of summer 2005, and maybe the last kids movie too, is Disney’s SKY HIGH. It’s directed by Mike Mitchell (DEUCE BIGALOW: MALE GIGOLO), with a script originated in the ‘90s by Paul Hernandez, later rewritten by Bob Schooley & Mark McCorkle (creators of the cartoon Kim Possible, plus they wrote 7 episodes of the New Kids on the Block cartoon).
It’s a play on comic book super heroes, but not based on any existing ones, so it’s your basic dollar store super heroes with standard abilities, generic names and no real origins, they just genetically inherited powers. It’s the kind of comic book movie where the opening credits have to be in comic book font and there are drawings that do not look worthy of a comic book that dissolve into the live action shots. You know – like a comic book! Have you seen these? A bunch of little squares with stuff drawn in them.
Michael Angarano (last seen in LORDS OF DOGTOWN) stars as Will Stronghold, a kid whose parents are the world’s most famous super heroes, The Commander (Kurt Russell, last seen [briefly] in JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME). He’s about to start attending Sky High, a secret school floating in the sky for the children of super heroes. But he’s kinda terrified because he hasn’t developed super powers, which seem to be related to and/or a symbol for puberty. So he’s very self conscious. (read the rest of this shit…)
ZOLA tells a wild road trip story that, I feel, doesn’t amount to much, but it’s worth it for the ride, and for the telling. The big hook is that it’s based on the 2015 “now iconic series of viral, uproarious tweets” (source: A24films.com), something that’s not only emphasized in the marketing, but noted on screen at the beginning. The official onscreen title is @zola (which is actually the Twitter handle of some wedding company, not author/protagonist A’Ziah “Zola” King), the main characters are often looking at their phones and monotonously speaking aloud their texts to each other, and there’s a notification sound heard frequently throughout the movie – I was never really sure if it was meant to be diegetic or not. Admittedly all that sounds stupid, but when it comes down to it this is really just “based on a true story.” Not even entirely based on a true story told in an unusual medium, because a Rolling Stone article about the whole affair…
