Aurelia Butler

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    Thanks to Taylor Swift, Ranch Dressing Is ‘Seemingly’ Everywhere

    After a photo of the pop superstar at an N.F.L. game last weekend went viral, snack and condiment companies raced to capitalize.Can’t get enough of the budding relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Neither can ranch dressing.Ms. Swift, a 12-time Grammy winner whose stardom has reached new heights this year with the stratospheric success of her Eras Tour, was attending the Kansas City Chiefs’ football game on Sunday — Mr. Kelce plays tight end on the team — when she was photographed next to a plate containing a piece of chicken and two dipping sauces. A fan-run Swift account on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, shared the photo and said one of the dips was “seemingly ranch.”@tswifterastourA frenzy ensued. The post went viral, and brands ranging from Lay’s potato chips to Mercedes’s Formula 1 team jumped to capitalize. The Empire State Building lit up in “ketchup and seemingly ranch” colors.Heinz announced on Tuesday that it was releasing 100 bottles of a limited-edition version of “Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch” sauce. A spokeswoman for Heinz said that the company had settled on 100 because of an X post from a different Swift fan account that featured side-by-side photos of Mr. Kelce’s number (87) and Ms. Swift wearing a No. 13 jersey.Hidden Valley ranch dressing renamed its X and Instagram accounts Seemingly Ranch. And Buffalo Wild Wings used the moment to promote its ranch dressing and other dips, referring to several of its dips as “Possibly” Bleu Cheese, “Might Be” Asian Zing and “I Think This Is” Buffalo.“We love when ranch has a moment in culture and of course wanted to jump in when we saw ‘seemingly ranch’ trending,” said Vicki Haber, a spokeswoman for Hidden Valley. She added that the company had gotten a record number of engagements with its social media posts since changing the name of its accounts.Most companies that have capitalized on the fervor have done so through targeted social media, not by creating new products, as Heinz did. In a post on X, Lay’s promoted a fake flavor of ranch chips, while Sonic Drive-In posted a fake No. 89 football jersey, a reference to Ms. Swift’s “1989” album.Ms. Swift’s appearance during the Sunday afternoon broadcast coincided with strong ratings for the game, which Mr. Kelce’s Chiefs won easily over the Chicago Bears. More than 24 million viewers tuned in to Fox, making it the most-watched game of the week. Broadcast cameras frequently focused on Ms. Swift, who sat in a luxury box next to Mr. Kelce’s mother and was seen cheering him on after every big play.The person running the Eras account on X, who declined to give a name, said in a message over the platform that the attention to the post was completely unexpected and that the business reaction was “quite entertaining.”“All I hope is if Taylor has seen it, she finds it just as funny as the rest of the internet does,” the person said. More

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    Enough About Gram Parsons’s Death. It’s Time to Celebrate His Music.

    The country-rock pioneer died 50 years ago at age 26 with two influential solo albums to his name, leaving a legion of “what if”s behind.More than almost any other musician, the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons’s legacy is entwined with the story of his tragic death, 50 years ago this month.The details are sad, macabre and sordid enough to have inspired a movie titled “Grand Theft Parsons.” Let’s dispense with them here and be done with it: Parsons, a 26-year-old former member of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers who dreamed of creating a utopian genre that he called “cosmic American music,” was preparing for the release of his second solo album when he made a trip to his adopted sanctuary of Joshua Tree National Park.On his second day there, Parsons — a prodigious drinker and drug user who once attempted to kick heroin cold turkey while locked in a room with an also-detoxing Keith Richards — overdosed on morphine and could not be revived. His stepfather immediately arranged to have Parsons’s body flown to Louisiana, perhaps so he would stand a better chance of inheriting a chunk of Gram’s family fortune. More

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    Onstage, Michael Gambon’s Depth Transcended the Unspoken

    The actor conveyed the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, our critic writes.Even in silence, he thundered. Make that, especially in silence.The last two times I saw the mighty Michael Gambon onstage, his characters didn’t have much to say, and in one case, nothing at all. Both the plays in which this British actor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, was appearing on those occasions were by Samuel Beckett, “Eh Joe” and “All That Fall.”Few, if any dramatists, made better use of the resonance of the unspoken than Beckett. And few actors brought such profound visceral weariness — and agitation — to Beckett’s wordlessness. Even in performances that required him to bellow, quip or speechify, Gambon made sure we were aware of the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, beyond will, beyond life.He was not an obese man, but he was an uncommonly solid and fleshly presence in live theater, from his haunted, corrugated face to his bearlike torso and unexpectedly expressive feet. Here was someone, you felt, whom it was better never to cross.That impressive avoirdupois made him a natural onscreen for roles as different as the magisterial wizard Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies; the terrifying, vengeful gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”; and the hospital patient, fantasist mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s sublime television mini-series “The Singing Detective.” Onstage that presence allowed Gambon to convey, effortlessly, the subliminal menace and explosiveness in the husband and lover of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” and David Hare’s “Skylight,” and the rueful rage beneath Falstaff’s heartiness in the Henry IV plays.Yet he always gave the impression that all that powerful density might melt into the helplessness we associate with the newborn and the dying, a sense that thrums like a bass line through Beckett’s work. In “Eh Joe,” a television play that was brought to the London stage by the director Atom Egoyan in 2006, Gambon’s role was almost entirely passive.The only words we heard were spoken by an unseen woman, who voiced a droning litany of accusations of a life lived in bad faith. It was Egoyan’s conceit to have Gambon’s face projected on a scrim in immense, simultaneous video close-up, registering each blow of memory with flickers of expression so subtle as to seem subterranean.It was a device that reminded us of the miraculous way cameras can discover, in certain seemingly unchanging faces, a multitude of conflicted feelings. The astonishment was how even more complete a portrait Gambon provided through the physicality of his live presence, when the camera wasn’t running.Wearing a threadbare bathrobe in a shadowed, shabby room, Gambon’s Joe began the play by running his fingers across window curtains as he closed them, then sitting with immense weariness onto his bed. For much of those opening moments, you couldn’t even see his face.Nonetheless, you sensed you had been vouchsafed a vision of a man at his most defeated, so overcome by his own futility that movement had become pointless. The very set of his shoulders let us know that Joe was so raw, so spent that you felt, as you sometimes do with great actors, that you were violating a privacy you had no right to witness.I am sorry I missed Gambon in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in London in 2010. But I did get to see him in a lesser-known Beckett work, “All That Fall,” three years later in New York. Brought to the stage by the director Trevor Nunn, “All That Fall” follows a day in the life of the chattery, scrappy Mrs. Rooney (played, wonderfully, by Eileen Atkins), who goes to pick up her blind, broken-down husband at the train station.Gambon’s Mr. Rooney made his entrance late and didn’t begin to match his wife in loquacity. His physique, though, spoke volumes. He was, I wrote at the time, “a crumpled Goliath,” as he sloped onto the frail support of Atkins’s shoulder. Just to see the two of them, side by side, alone, in their codependency, was to understand the dynamic of a marriage.It is, however, as perhaps befits what was originally a radio play, a single sound that I remember most vividly from that production. The wife had quoted the text from the local church sermon: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.”And with those words, Gambon and Atkins roared, coarsely and deeply, with laughter. To grasp the absurdity of the text, you had only to look at the derelict couple before you. But there was the triumph of defiance in their laughter.That triumph was implicit in every performance that Gambon gave us. More

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    Arthur Russell’s ‘City Park’: Reconstructed, Newly Performed

    Arthur Russell — former Midwesterner, avant-gardist in the making — moved to New York from San Francisco in the early 1970s to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where his teachers included the composer Charles Wuorinen. It wasn’t a happy relationship.Call it a clash of uptown and downtown, when such a dichotomy existed: Wuorinen, a prickly modernist of the academy, versus Russell, a post-Cagean thinker from Allen Ginsberg’s circle who was into Indian classical music. Neither was likely to be a fan of the other, and things came to a head over Russell’s “City Park,” created and first performed in 1973.The piece blends texts from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with a nonlinear, modular score of repetitive phrases and Fluxus-inspired directions. Russell is said to have explained to Wuorinen that the structure allows listeners to “plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential.”Wuorinen, famously cranky, shot back, “That’s the most unattractive thing I’ve ever heard.”Russell quickly drifted away from Wuorinen, seeking guidance from a different composer, Christian Wolff, and getting more into electronics. His career developed, ever-changing and exploratory — gathering support from peers like Philip Glass and David Byrne, freely floating among the worlds of classical music, disco and songwriting — and “City Park” faded into distant memory. Russell died in 1992 at 40, a victim of the AIDS epidemic, and the piece lived on mostly as an amusing anecdote about a lost work.Nick Hallett, center, rehearsing “City Park” at Wesleyan University, with Parsa Ferdowsi, left, and Lea Bertucci.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesNow, though, it has been reconstructed and will be performed for the first time in five decades at the New York City AIDS Memorial on Saturday, presented by the memorial outdoors for free and featuring an ensemble that includes Russell’s close collaborators. The musician Nick Hallett, who is responsible for the reconstruction, said that the piece was “about New York City,” and more important, “tells the story of Arthur’s New York City.”Russell is a particular case among composers lost to AIDS. Most around his age died without publishers or estates; their music languishes in archives like those at the New York Public Library. Russell may have been poor and perpetually underground, despite high-profile friends and collaborators like Talking Heads, but at least he had the infrastructure of an estate to maintain his legacy.More of a problem was his output. Russell, who was often seen around town with his Walkman, obsessing over mixing and production, recorded prolifically but released little. His attitude inspired some: David Van Tieghem, the composer and percussionist, who met Russell at the Manhattan School of Music and performed in the premiere of “City Park,” respected his friend’s belief that “if you’re going to do it, do it as best you can.”“City Park” features prerecorded material, scratch loops and instructions for a turntablist.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesRussell’s piece has been prepared at Wesleyan ahead of its performance in New York on Saturday.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesAnother collaborator, though, the trombonist Peter Zummo, said Russell could be obstinate about not making more of a living off his art. “One time he came to me, and he said, ‘The ideal record would be one,’ a press of one,” Zummo recalled. “Which would make it a work of art. He had standards, but there was also a stubbornness.”Russell has long been known for bits of his catalog, including the album “24→24 Music” (for which he enlisted friends like Zummo, Julius Eastman and Peter Gordon) and the disco song “Is It All Over My Face.” But his music, with its wide stylistic range, has taken on new life in the decades after his death as the recordings he left behind have been released this century.“I love seeing how people really latch onto it,” Van Tieghem said. “I have students at the New School who are huge fans. People have only recently come across his stuff and just love it.”Among Russell’s longtime admirers is Hallett, 49, who came of age in clubs and looked to him as an artist who “bridged the gap between disco, experimental and songs.” Hallett eventually met people from Russell’s circle, including Van Tieghem and Zummo, as well as younger musicians who were interested in preserving Russell’s legacy.Over the years, “City Park” lingered in Hallett’s mind like “a faint question mark,” he said. “Every new description of it intrigued me in a new way.” So, when the opportunity arose to reconstruct and revive the piece, he seized it.“City Park” includes Fluxus-inspired instructions for players, including “Play like the clouds always.”Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesHallett started with several sheets of material — which was all that Russell’s estate was aware had survived. There were two pages of notes, and two more of instructions on manuscript paper. Those only introduced more questions. “I saw so many potential roads to travel down,” Hallett said. “We see references to ‘scratch pulse.’ We see instructions for a turntablist. We see instructions for electronic tape.”He next turned to archivists at the New York Public Library, who tracked down two recordings. When Hallett listened to them, he was surprised. “From the score instructions, I anticipated a disco masterpiece,” he said. “This was different. And it fascinated me.”Unable to hear the turntable, he sought help from those who had performed in the premiere to figure out why. No one seemed to remember anything of use until, after what Hallett called some “memory jogging,” it emerged that the D.J. score is meant to be inaudible to everyone but the drummer.“Arthur uses the turntable not as we’d imagine a hip-hop D.J., but more in the way that John Cage was using the turntable in 1939, in the first ‘Imaginary Landscape,’” Hallett said. “The D.J. is the inaudible brain of the work; the drummer responds only to the scratch loops.”Not only is the influence of Cage here, but also that of artists he knew intimately, including Ginsberg and Jackson Mac Low. Among notated instructions are Fluxus-esque ones: “Play like the clouds always” and “Give a signal to someone, another player, without explaining what it’s for.” Elsewhere, musicians are told, “ask the drummer (when he’s not playing) what section he’s in, and play something from that section.”The New York City AIDS Memorial, where “City Park” will be performed outdoors for free on Saturday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The score is a map,” Hallett said, “one that is not intended to be followed literally but one that puts agency in the performer and allows them to make choices.”Van Tieghem said that, as far as he could remember, there wasn’t any rehearsal before “City Park” premiered. There is, Hallett said, a “great amount of planning” that goes into this piece, but it can’t be prepared in a traditional way. Saturday’s players got together at Wesleyan University last week, but, accustomed to Russell’s idiom and performance practice, are not repeatedly running through it.“You shouldn’t over-rehearse a piece like this,” Hallett said. “It’s meant to be interpreted in the moment.”That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. Zummo said that, like Terry Riley’s classic “In C,” “City Park” can’t be picked up by any musician. Looking at the score recently, he was reminded of the questions he used to ask Russell before playing a new piece of his.“I would say something like, ‘Where do you want me to start?’ and he said, ‘Anywhere,’” Zummo recalled. “At one point I asked a similar question, and he said, ‘It’s a sound field.’ It’s another way to describe the open form, I guess, and ‘City Park’ brings that to mind. In a way, it’s not going anywhere.” More

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    Jorja Smith’s ‘Falling or Flying’ Gives Polished Voice to Messy Emotions

    The English songwriter uses vocal nuance instead of volume and lets the rhythms stir things up on her second studio album.There’s always a forlorn edge to Jorja Smith’s voice, even when things are going well. “A love like this is nothing I have known before,” she sings on “Make Sense,” a track from her new album, “Falling or Flying.” Even as she rejoices, “A home in you I’ve found,” the chords circle around a minor key and she sounds cautious, almost disbelieving.Smith, 25, has been delivering pensive British R&B since she emerged with “Blue Lights” in 2016, singing about racism and police violence. She has released a steady string of her own tracks and collaborated prolifically and internationally: with Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Burna Boy, Stormzy, Kali Uchis and Ibeyi, among many others.From the beginning, and more than ever on “Falling or Flying,” her second full-length studio album, Smith has kept her sound strictly focused. No matter how many layers are in the final mixes — and there can be plenty tucked in — the songs present themselves as minimal, with stripped-down riffs behind aching vocals. In other words, rhythms and blues.On first impression, Smith might seem diffident. Her tone is natural and understated, and as her catalog has grown, she has raised her voice less and less. Smith uses nuance instead of volume. With a voice that often sounds like it’s on the verge of tears, she brings flickers of vibrato, jazzy curlicues, grainy inflections and subtle pauses and accelerations to her phrasing. It’s not modesty at all — it’s precision, and it has been ever more sharply honed.Although Smith established herself as a ballad singer with songs like “Addicted” from her 2021 EP, “Be Right Back,” she has always been canny about rhythm. With “Falling or Flying,” she raises the tension in her songs by pushing the beat upfront, sometimes shifting it into double time. Smith isn’t joining the disco and house revival. On the contrary: She and her producers — especially Damedame, the partnership of Edith Nelson and Barbara Boko-Hyouyhat — come up with un-nostalgic beats. And while the tracks can be sleek, they strive to make Smith sound exposed, not glossy.Throughout the album, the insistent physicality of rhythm hints at the jitters that someone hides while putting on a brave face. “Try Me” opens the album with a Bo Diddley beat laced at first with finger-cymbal pings and later with a pistol-cocking sound, as Smith confronts naysayers and past wounds. “I don’t have to tell you what I’ve changed,” she sings.The songs on “Falling or Flying” are about primal needs: for love, for sex, for comfort, for understanding, for independence. As the rhythms push forward, Smith’s voice ponders and hesitates, working through doubts and then taking chances, physical and emotional.In “Little Things,” a hopping bass line and brisk Latin percussion drive a bold come-on — “Won’t you come with me and spend the night?” — while dissonant, syncopated piano chords hint at suppressed misgivings. The title song, “Falling or Flying,” is even more ambivalent about a new infatuation; with percussion and rhythm guitar ricocheting left and right, Smith urges, “Show me you want me.” Then she wonders, “Who else could get me to fall from these heights?”Most of the album is filled with goodbyes, not connections. “Go Go Go,” with a syncopated guitar backbeat and slamming drums harking back to the Police, summarily jettisons a lover who wouldn’t keep things to himself. In “Broken Is the Man,” Smith looks back on a relationship she now realizes was toxic: “Can you believe I put myself through that all/Just to realize you mean nothing to me,” she sings, over a slow, thudding beat; she won’t let it drag her down.But Smith refuses to simplify partners into heroes and villains; she knows it’s never that clear. The final stretch of the album moves back toward her old ballad mode — guitars, piano, string arrangements — as she sings about reluctantly, guiltily but unequivocally pulling away. “What if My Heart Beats Faster?,” the finale, contemplates the way even the closest partners ultimately can’t know each other. “Think that I’ve always been this way/Funny how life will change but they never figure it out.” It feels like an internal conversation that somehow turned into song. And the drums hit like a heartbeat.Jorja Smith“Falling or Flying”(FAMM) More

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    Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

    The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

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    ‘Reptile’ Review: Unusual Suspects

    Benicio Del Toro plays a detective investigating a suburban homicide in this overstuffed thriller.The tortuous crime thriller “Reptile,” streaming on Netflix, at times feels like the unwise attempt to cram an entire season of a cops-and-perps show into just over two hours. The movie, peopled with a near-bottomless supply of unsavory rogues, tracks the aftermath of a grisly murder by trailing the policemen on the case. Domenick Lombardozzi (of “The Wire”) is even featured among the crew — although his presence is merely another reminder of the sharper stories this movie aspires to replicate.Set in an overcast marsh town in Maine, the movie opens on a couple facing friction: Will (Justin Timberlake), a real estate mogul, and Summer (Matilda Lutz), an agent at his company, converse tersely while readying a house for a showing. The sheeny manor is all stainless steel and vaulted ceilings, a home that, in its moneyed facade and alienating interior, offers an apt metaphor for the pair’s domestic strife.Once Summer is found stabbed to death in a for-sale property, however, the movie shifts into procedural mode. We swivel to center on Tom (Benicio Del Toro), a detective who’s fresh meat on the local force; he and his wife, Judy (a convincing Alicia Silverstone), decamped to the hamlet following a scandal in Philadelphia. Working under the stony police captain (Eric Bogosian), Tom presents as a weary but devoted enforcer of law and order. “There’s only one thing I love almost as much as I love you,” he smolders, less to Judy than at her, “and that’s being a cop.”Thank goodness for that fidelity, for this particular homicide soon proves a Pandora’s box of treachery and pretense. The poised Summer, during her short life in suburbia, managed to mingle with a legion of kooks and creeps, including her ex-husband, Sam (Karl Glusman), an artist fond of stealing human hair for his sculptures, and her glum confidante, Renee (Sky Ferreira), who seems to resent her pal’s success. That’s not to mention the bratty, well-to-do Will, whose resting pout face is only partially the fault of Timberlake’s restricted acting range.In his first feature, the director Grant Singer (who wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro) demonstrates a knack for building suspense. In one stylish sequence, Tom dials a mysterious number that could be the key to cracking the case. As he listens to the tone, Singer cuts to multiple characters reaching for ringing phones. The small scene oozes with Hitchcockian tension.The trouble with “Reptile” is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices. Once the film gets around to revealing the culprit, we have already lost interest, enervated in the face of a movie that, like an overeager snake, bites off far more than it can swallow.ReptileRated R for coldblooded murder. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie’ Review: Sit, Roll Over, Save the World

    In this sequel, the canine gang faces Taraji P. Henson’s villain who sends a dangerous meteor toward Earth. And, yes, Kim Kardashian returns too.Adventure City’s fluffiest heroes return in “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” the second film tie-in to the popular Canadian TV show.This time the gang faces a brand-new villain, Victoria Vance, a.k.a. Vee (voiced by Taraji P. Henson), who sends a dangerous meteor toward Earth in an effort to prove herself as a reputable scientist. The Paw Patrol successfully saves Adventure City from disaster, but they soon discover that exposure to the meteor and its magical crystals has given each of the pups unique superpowers: lightning-fast speed, super strength, and so on. This is a particular boon to Skye (Mckenna Grace), the youngest member of the team, who is struggling to fit in as the runt of the litter.Much of the cartoon action and canine wisecracking found in the TV show — and “Paw Patrol: The Movie,” from 2021 — is rehashed here. It isn’t long before Vee joins forces with (former) Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo), the mustache-twirling, cat-loving villain from the first film, whose grand plan of stealing the crystals from the Paw Patrol leads to all sorts of antics. There’s even a cameo from Delores, the previous film’s self-absorbed poodle character, voiced by Kim Kardashian.Directed by Cal Brunker, who also helmed the first installment, the film has no shame in being formulaic in plot or execution. Skye’s zero-to-hero plot arc is predictable as they come, though it’s easy to see why younger audiences may find it relatable. The animation is cute, but there are noticeable moments where corners were cut and characters or objects slide awkwardly across the screen.Still, if you can imagine your kiddo enjoying an animated car-chase scene featuring puppies and kittens, set to Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” they’ll probably be thrilled with “The Mighty Movie.”Paw Patrol: The Mighty MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More