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    Movie Review

    Brad's Status is an honest breath of fresh air in the land of make-believe

    Alex Bentley
    Sep 22, 2017 | 10:35 am
    Brad's Status is an honest breath of fresh air in the land of make-believe
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    Most fictional films, even those “based on true events,” attempt to heighten reality, emphasizing certain elements to make scenes more dramatic or comedic. It’s the rare movie that eschews this storytelling device in an attempt to show people as they really are, letting the chips fall where they may.

    Writer/director Mike White has delivered such a film with Brad’s Status, which follows Brad (Ben Stiller), a disaffected middle-aged man who’s envious of the success his college classmates have enjoyed. Each of them — Craig (Michael Sheen), Billy (Jemaine Clement), Jason (Luke Wilson), and Nick (White) — appears to live the life of a one-percenter, or at least well above Brad’s station.

    Brad has a good-if-unheralded job as a head of nonprofit company, he's in a comfortable-if-unspectacular marriage with Melanie (Jenna Fischer), and their son, Troy (Austin Abrams), is on track to make it into several prestigious universities. The bulk of the film takes place during a trip to Boston, in which Brad and Troy plan to visit several campuses.

    Much of the film’s spoken words actually take place in Brad’s head via voiceover, as he has seemingly endless thoughts on his lot in life. White uses the method so much that many may find it grossly excessive, but for my money, it brings Brad into sharper focus than a film full of traditional dialogue would have done.

    That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of meaningful conversations in the film. In fact, virtually every encounter Brad has is a significant one, full of the kind of talk that you rarely get to hear in movies these days. Consequently, the film feels achingly honest, as if you were witnessing someone go through real existential troubles instead of made-up ones.

    It’s here where the casting of Stiller pays off. Though he’s gained fame for comedy work, Stiller has some true dramatic chops, and he gets to show off a bit of each here. White slyly subverts expectations of Stiller, presenting multiple situations where we assume he’ll fly off the handle, Meet the Parents-style, only to have him pull back and show restraint like a real person would. There are a handful of hyperbolic scenes, but they clearly are conjured from Brad’s overactive brain.

    Some last-minute revelations do feel a little on the nose, presented as true discoveries when anyone who wasn’t as self-centered as Brad would’ve realized the truth well before then. But even then, it’s hard not to relate to him, as most of us would admit to getting lost in our own heads from time to time.

    There’s nothing fancy about Brad’s Status; it’s simply a straightforward story about one man’s struggle to come to terms with who he is. But when few movies dare to be so forthright, it also comes off as a breath of fresh air in the land of make-believe.

    Ben Stiller and Jenna Fischer in Brad's Status.

    Ben Stiller and Jenna Fischer in Brad's Status
      
    Photo by Jonathan Wenk/Amazon Studios
    Ben Stiller and Jenna Fischer in Brad's Status.
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    Movie Review

    Animated Disney film Elio is fun but falls short of Pixar top tier

    Alex Bentley
    Jun 19, 2025 | 1:22 pm
    Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio
    Photo courtesy of Pixar
    Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

    Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

    Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

    He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

    Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

    For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

    Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

    There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

    The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

    ---

    Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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