Clues

Searching
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La
Released: August 31, 2018

I am going to write this review in three parts. First, I am going to give a basic plot of the movie without spoilers. I highly recommend you watch this movie without being spoiled because half the fun is trying to solve the mystery and if you knew who is or isn't involved, then it wouldn't be a satisfying watch. The plot of the movie is about a single father, David Kim (John Cho) trying to find his daughter, Margot (Michelle La), who's missing. At first, he thinks she's avoiding him because she's mad at him, but when he tries to reach her at her piano lesson, her teacher tells him she quit lessons six months ago (even though she's still been taking the $100 a week for lessons he gives her). He then finds out that she was invited to go camping with a group of friends, so he thinks that's where she is, but discovers that she never went. This is when he really starts to worry and  Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) is assigned to help find her. The gimmick of this movie is that the whole thing is told through screens: phones, computer, security cameras, news camera. Social media plays a huge part of the movie as David uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of those to help find clues about Margot's whereabouts. There are very few times when you see two actors in the same room together; most of them communicate by FaceTime or video chatting or texting. I can only imagine that would have been very difficult to have no one to act against! So if you've never seen this movie, please go see it before you read the rest of the review! This is a debut of a young director and even though I had more questions at the end and some things seemed a little too convenient, I think it was a really good mystery movie and it's fun to watch a second time to see all the clues that were right in front of you and you get things from a different perspective when you know what happened.

In this next part, while I'm not giving away the main reveal of what happened, I will be talking about all the red herrings (as in any good mystery, you always have a few of those!), so I will be talking about the eliminated suspects. First of all, you always know the obvious ones are never the ones who did it. We get a couple of those here. David talks to a bunch of his daughter's classmates who were study group friends of hers and I never thought they were involved in her disappearance. For one thing, she didn't have any close friends and no one really paid attention to her. One of the first real suspects the movie wants you to think could possibly be involved (which meant he wasn't) was a guy named Derek Ellis who often made pervy remarks on her Instagram posts. I assume he was a classmate of hers. I don't know if he was a perv to just Margot or all the girls, but I'm surprised she never blocked him because in another scene when we see David looking at vlogs she did, she blocks a pervy user. David gets Derek's number (by paying $50! I thought he was going to get a bunch of results since he had a pretty common last name, but he gets the right guy.) At first, Derek refuses to tell David where he was the night Margot disappeared, but after David threatens to call the police, we find out he was at a Justin Bieber concert...and it's confirmed, haha. Once this case goes public and is all over the news with people posting their thoughts and prayers and theories about what happened on social media, David sees a post from Derek saying that Margot is with him and implying they've been having sex. It's another gross post, though I don't know which is worse: that or the girl in Margot's study group who told David they weren't close friends, but posts a YouTube video saying they were best friends. Thanks to Facebook and people loving to post where they are every minute of the day, David is able to find Derek at the movies and ends up beating him up. Detective Vick tells him to stop interfering in the investigation.

Another possible suspect is David's brother, Margot's uncle, who we meet early in the movie. I also knew this was a red herring because it seems to come out of nowhere and is only there to shock the audience as David finds texts between his brother and Margot implying something illicit is going on, like perhaps a sexual relationship, but I knew that wasn't it. Of course that isn't the case, but rather David finds out that Margot has been hanging out with her uncle to smoke weed. Hmm, is this a slight reference to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle?

Another suspect is a girl Margot had been communicating with through a YouTube-like site called YouCast. It's the only made up social media platform in the movie. I understand why YouCast doesn't exist in real life because it's quite possibly the most useless thing. It's like YouTube in the sense that you post videos, but you're always live, so it's like when someone live streams on YouTube. Live streaming makes sense when you're a popular podcaster or YouTuber and have a live show where people can join in and ask questions or make comments. It makes sense when you have well over 100 people who are watching live. However, every time Margot goes on YouCast, she's lucky if she has even one "viewer". I guess the point of YouCast is to answer questions that people who join your cast can ask you. I've seen popular YouTubers stream live videos where they answer questions that people join in and ask, but Margot isn't a popular YouCaster; so how would people even know about her YouCast channel? It's just very weird. David goes through many of her videos and you can see that the highest number of people who ever viewed a single video was eight. It's no wonder, because the videos were super boring. Half the time she's having a one on one conversation with a young woman from Pittsburgh named Hannah who goes by the user name "fish n chips". Hannah types a question and we see Margot answer it verbally on the screen. It's a very weird way to have a one on one conversation with someone, especially when other people can listen in. It appears Hannah has a lot in common with Margot and she's the most prominent person in those YouCast videos, so naturally David wants to have her alibi checked out. Detective Vick tells him she was indeed in Pittsburgh at her job as a waitress and it was also confirmed by the girl's boss. So those are all the main suspects who seem the most likely, but they all have confirmed alibis. The plot thickens!

In this final part, I am going to discuss my prediction, then what really happened. I will say my prediction wasn't right, but I was kind of on the right track, but not really. But if you're still reading this and haven't seen the movie yet, this would be a good time to stop reading, go watch the movie, then come back and continue reading because some major spoilers are about to start right now! You have been warned! Do not read another word of this if you do not want to know who or what is behind the mystery! Spoilers start...NOW! 

Okay, so Detective Vick tells David that they got a confession from an ex-con who admits that he abducted and killed Margot. Of course this is horrible and David is overcome with grief, but I'm checking how much time is left in the movie and thinking, Hmmm, there's still half an hour left; something isn't adding up. Not to mention that even though they found trace evidence of the guy at the lake where Margot's car was found, her body isn't found. They can't question the guy because he killed himself after he taped the confession. And keep in mind this is the first time we're seeing this guy. I didn't know why he was confessing; maybe he just wanted the attention, but I knew he wasn't the reason behind Margot's disappearance.

Let me tell you who I thought was behind Margot's disappearance: I thought it was Hannah aka fish n chips, the girl Margot had been chatting with on YouCast. Like I said before, they have a lot in common, but one of the main things is that Hannah's mom is sick with cancer and Margot has a lot of empathy for her because her own mother died of cancer about a year ago. Because of this, David has a hard time talking to Margot about her mother and their relationship has been a bit strained. I didn't think Hannah lured Margot away or anything malicious like that, but rather Margot decided to run away. Of course, I probably thought that because that's the narrative being pushed by Vick. She finds that Margot had created a fake ID and the money she was apparently sending to someone was actually going to herself.

I was right that fish n chips was involved, but I was also way wrong! When David is going through his emails on the day of Margot's memorial, he gets an e-mail from the funeral service telling him he can upload photos of Margot to preserve her memory. After he does that, he sees a photo of a young redheaded woman holding flowers as part of the site's homepage. It's a different picture, but this young woman is clearly the same young woman fish n chips uses as her YouCast profile pic. Hmmmmm. I was like, WTF is going on here?!?! And then I was like, Aha! I knew fish n chips had something to do with this! You think they made her a redhead so you would think she was just a red herring? (Ha ha). But I knew better. Okay, so while I was right that fish n chips was somehow involved, everything else I didn't see coming...and probably should have. It didn't even occur to me the Margot was being catfished (duh!) and when David calls the young woman who he finds out is a stock photo model (her name really was Hannah, though) living in L.A., she tells him she has no idea what YouCast is and never spoke to the police. This probably should have sent a red flag to David, but he calls Vick and gets her secretary who reveals to him that Vick had volunteered for the job rather than was assigned to the case as he was led to believe. Long story short, Vick's son, Robbie, was the one who was cat fishing Margot. He had a crush on her, but was too shy to tell her and pretended to be "Hannah" and brought up things in the conversation he knew about her (hence the reason "Hannah's" mom had cancer) and Margot had sent $2500 of the piano lesson money to "Hannah's" Venmo account after she finds the same user name. To be fair, "Hannah" never asked for the money, but we do see fish n chips telling Margot how rough money is, so that's why Margot sent her the money. Margot may be book smart, but she seems a bit stupid. Why is she sending some stranger she's never met TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS? This person could be lying to you, oh wait, they were! Robbie wants to come clean to Margot, but instead of talking to her at school or calling her on the phone, or even Facebook messaging her like any normal person would do, he FOLLOWS her to the lake around 9 in the evening where she's just parked and smoking weed, and then surprises her by getting in her car. Seriously, what kind of a creep does that? Not surprisingly, Margot starts freaking out and runs away with Robbie following her and "trying to explain", but she's still fighting against him. I believe this is the moment when she calls her father, who's sleeping, but I didn't understand why she didn't leave a message or leave the phone on while she was having the confrontation with Robbie. He ends up pushing her down a fifty foot ravine and calls his mother, who is conviently a detective. Instead of calling the police and telling them there was an accident (which it was) or making sure Margot was still alive (she told the police there was no way she would survive the fall because she didn't hear anybody calling for help, but didn't she think of the possibility Margot may have been knocked unconscious?), she goes through this elaborate rouse just to protect her son where she pushes Margot's car in the lake, then gets in touch with David to help him with the case where she sends him on a wild goose chase making him think she had run away with the story of the fake ID. A huge clue David gets that Vick was involved was that there's a photo of her standing next to the man who confessed to killing Margot. He was an ex-convict who had worked with Vick in some volunteer project and when he's making his confession, he's clearly reading from something so you know Vick was there making him read it, then killed him after. This crazy bee-yotch went through some serious lengths when all she had to do was call for help and Margot would have been fine. Actually, Margot was fine (well, alive, anyway) when they found her because it had rained for a few days so that meant she only had to go two days without water.

Sure, a few things make you go "Hmmmmm" and what are the odds that the random girl's photo Robbie chose to be to pose as fish n chips would also be the same girl on the funeral site, but it's a pretty impressive movie. I wouldn't want to watch the computer/phone screen POV all the time, but I felt like I did learn a few things about technology while watching this!

Video Review: The Mountain Between Us

I watched The Mountain Between Us and here is my video review of it (with spoilers):

What Happens in Vegas...

The Hangover

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifinakis, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham, Ken Jeong

Released: June 5, 2009

Viewed in theaters: June 15, 2009

I know this movie is already ten years old, but I will be spoiling key plot points, so there is your spoiler warning.

I remember this movie being a big hit when it came out. (Of course I remember! It was only ten years ago!) It was the highest grossing rated R comedy in a very long time and it won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical. Usually the movies that win in those categories are usually musicals or slight comedies like Shakespeare in Love or Lady Bird. There might be a few laughs, but they're not giving you belly laughs. It was so popular and talked about that I even went to see it in theaters. I did see the other two sequels (terrible...the second one was exactly the same as the first one, only set in Thailand and I barely remember the third one except it was set in Vegas again). Obviously the sequels were made because the first one was so popular and made a ton of money. The first movie was lighting in a bottle; it's just hard to recapture that magic. 

The Hangover kind of reminds me of a comedic Memento. Now it's not told backwards, but our main characters are trying to piece together the puzzle of what happened "the night before", during their friend's bachelor party in Vegas with the clues they obtain. It's a fun and clever concept and you're going along for the ride along with Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) as they try to find their friend, the soon-to-be-married Doug (Justin Bartha). And when I say soon-to-be-married, he has his bachelor party two days before the wedding which seems a bit crazy, especially since the wedding is in Los Angeles and they go to Vegas for the bachelor party. But they need to set the stakes high. If there wasn't a chance Doug might miss his wedding, it wouldn't have an urgency to it and wouldn't be as compelling.

Most movies would have just shown this movie with the bachelor party as the focus: we would have seen them stealing a cop car, Stu getting married to a stripper, and them stealing Mike Tyson's tiger among their many hi-jinxes. It probably still would have been funny, but not nearly as satisfying as watching these three guys try to figure out what the hell happened the night before. And there is some crazy stuff that happened!

Phil and Stu are friends of Doug's, but Alan is meeting them for the first time as he is the brother of Doug's fiancee. It's not just me, but there's something a bit...off with Alan, isn't there? It's not just that he unknowingly gives the other guys roofies (he puts them in their drinks when they're having a toast before they start their night) he bought from some guy at the drug store thinking it was ecstasy. What is up with that scene when he and Doug pick up Phil at the school he teaches at and Alan says, "I'm not supposed to be within 200 feet of a school or Chuck E. Cheese." And later, when they're talking about returning to Vegas another week, Alan tells them that week won't work because "The Jonas Brothers are in town." Pretty sure the Jonas brothers were teens back then. And then you get that weird line when he tells Alan that he "found" a baby before at Coffee Bean. I don't think he's a sinister person, but there's definitely something off about him. Not to mention he keeps insisting that he's best friends with Phil and Stu even though they've just met. He's a bit...intense when he declares his friendship towards his sister's fiancé's friends. He tells Doug that he doesn't care if they kill someone during their stay in Vegas (spoiler alert: they don't, thankfully!) and while he's giving his speech on top of the roof, he gets out a pocketknife and starts to slice open his palm so they can be blood brothers! A bit much!

I was confused by Bradley Cooper's character, Phil. Through most of the movie he's a pompous jerk. He tells his students (who he refers to as "nerds") he needs the money for the field trip they're going on, but we find out he's using the money for his Vegas trip (and he has a LOT of it!). He sarcastically says he's going to miss his wife and kid on their way to Vegas and claims he hates his life. Basically, he's not a very nice person. You could even say he's a bit, ahem, shallow. However, at the end of the movie when he's at the wedding and his wife and son meet up with him, he's very lovely to her and super sweet to his kid....so is this all an act? Does he just act like a douche when he's around his friends or did the events of Vegas change him into a better person? I suppose watching the sequels again could help me figure this out, but I really don't want to watch the sequels again.

The straight man of the group is Stu. He's the most responsible one (although only when they're sober!), though that's not a hard feat with this group! I had seen all The Hangover movies many years before I binged-watched The Office on Netflix this past year. I knew Ed Helms was on that show, but I didn't realize he doesn't show up until the third season so when I started watching it, I kept wondering where "that guy from The Hangover was". It is pretty humorous when watching that show and Andy (Helm's Office character) is gone from several episodes or is written off the show for awhile and you know that he's filming one of The Hangover movies. Andy doesn't wear glasses and that took me awhile to get used to that since I was used to Ed Helms as Stu who DOES wear glasses. Stu is also a bit of a pushover as he has a girlfriend, Melissa, who is horrible to him and he's so afraid of her that he has to lie to about everything because he doesn't think she'll approve of anything he does, so he tells her the bachelor party is in Napa Valley where they're going for a weekend of wine tasting. 

On the rooftop, before their wild and crazy night, Phil makes the toast, "To a night we'll never remember, but the four of us will never forget." Truer words have never been spoken! We see a time lapse, then it's the next morning and we're back in their hotel suite. You know, their suite isn't as trashed as you think it would be. Sure, housekeeping isn't going to be too thrilled, but nothing you wouldn't be able to clean up and be good as new. We see a bubble-filled hot tub, a TV askew on the wall, a woman's bare legs as she leaves the room, a chicken strutting about (we never do find out how the chicken is involved in this story), and Stu is the first one to wake up with a missing front tooth.  

One of the most surprising reveals is the tiger in the bathroom. We first see it when Alan uses the toilet and when he sees the tiger, he just blinks at it and says, "Stupid tiger", then realizes that there's a TIGER IN THE BATHROOM and runs out screaming. The other surprising reveal is the baby in the closet. (Super cute baby, by the way). I love it when Alan says, "Check its collar or something." I also like the Three Men and a Baby reference when he says, "It's got Ted Danson, Magnum PI, and that Jewish actor." Now that's a movie I haven't seen in a long time!

Of course we'll find out that the baby is the son of Jade (Heather Graham), the stripper who Stu married in the early hours of the morning during their crazy night and the woman who is leaving the apartment, we find out later, to grab coffee for everyone. Jade isn't getting any Mother of theYear awards anytime soon. First of all, who marries a man she just met the night before? And who leaves their child with that man? She's lucky that Stu is a good person and is responsible (when he's not under the influence of drugs and alcohol!) I'm sure many mothers cringed when they put the baby in the police car (which they stole the night before) without a car seat and drove over the sidewalk; not to mention the part when the bad guy bashes in the windshield with the baby in the backseat!

Through clues they find in their pocket they find that Stu has an ATM receipt from the Bellagio for $800 and that Phil is wearing a hospital band where he went for "a mild concussion and some bruised ribs." This is also when they learned that they had roofies in their systems. Yikes! 

Stu's overbearing girlfriend keeps calling him during the worst times such as when they're in the police car with the baby who is crying and when the bad guys, who are after their money, are bashing in the windshield. He tells her they're just about to go on a tractor ride and for her benefit, says, "Sir can you please start the tractor?", but of course she can hear all the commotion and is highly suspicious of him.

When they return back to their suite, Mike Tyson is there singing along to Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight", one of the scenes I remember most from seeing it in theaters. I do agree with him; the part with the drums is the best part. We learn that the tiger belongs to Tyson and he wants them to return it to his mansion. At first I was wondering why he just didn't call animal control, then realize he was probably owning this tiger illegally as it is probably not legal to own wild animals. Oh, wait, hold up. I just did some Google research and Nevada is one of eight states where owning a pet tiger is considered legal. (Good to know my state isn't on this list! I don't want to run into anyone with their "pet" tiger!)

I did some research to see if Mike Tyson had a pet tiger and not only did he have one, but he had three of them! (I also found another source saying he had seven of them at one time...good Lord!) I'm not sure if the one used in the movie was one of his or was a tiger "actor". He doesn't own them anymore because he didn't have the proper license so they were taken away. That's probably best for everyone involved!

They put some roofies in a raw steak to knock out the tiger and drive him to Tyson's mansion, but the tiger ends up waking up on their way and claws Phil, who's driving, in the neck. Now you can tell it's a fake tiger head (the only part you see) in the backseat when they're all in the car because they didn't want any of the actors in close proximity to the tiger. They have to push the car with the tiger inside the rest of the way. There, Tyson shows them a video of them stealing the tiger so that's how they ended up with it. Now, I've never been to Las Vegas, but I can only imagine that people are up during all hours of the night so I find it peculiar that nobody saw them with the tiger when they returned to Caesars Palace. At the very least, you think there would be cameras and the tiger would have been caught on those! Oh, and this probably shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone, but Mike Tyson is a horrible actor.

They find their Mercedes, the one Doug told his father-in-law that he would be the only one driving and when they hear something in the trunk, they think Doug is in there, but it is Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) who accuses them of stealing his 80 grand and that he has kidnapped their friend, Doug. Alan, who brought a book about counting cards, gets an idea of how to get the money back for Chow and this is when we get the Rain Man scene (with Alan as Rain Man and Phil as Tom Cruise) where they're coming down the elevator in the casino complete with "Iko Iko" playing. I laughed when there's all these equation swirling around Alan's head on the screen. They obtain the money and make the trade, but the man is not Doug. He is named Doug, but he's a black guy who they start calling "Black Doug".

Stu finally figures out that Doug is on the roof of the hotel and they find him there and have to get him back to California with just hours before he's about to get married. The poor guy was there for nearly a day! If I were his fiancee, I would have been so pissed he was late to our wedding! The do manage to make it just in the nick of time, but it's pretty down to the wire. Stu breaks up with his girlfriend and makes a real date with Jade who tells him the reason he lost his tooth was because Alan bet him he wasn't a good enough dentist to pull out his own tooth...and he did! We see this as one of the pictures on the digital camera they find where they took a bunch of pictures of the night they didn't remember. We still never find out how they came to get a chicken! 

Ranking the Disney Renaissance movies

If you have 15 minutes to spare, I would love it if you watched the video I made where I ranked the 10 animated movies from the Disney Renaissance, which came out between  1989-1999. They are known for rejuvenating the Disney studio after a dismal time spent in the '70s and '80s known as The Dark Ages when they had a lot of box-office flops and critical failures. This is one of the best eras in Disney animation history (although the current era certainly rivals it!) and while not every film is a masterpiece, there are a lot of great films that came out during this time. This era of Disney movies holds a special place in my heart because it's the one I grew up with and I saw most of these in the theater. 

So...Let's get down to business and rank the Disney Renaissance movies! 

The Dragon King

How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Director: Dean DuBlois

Voice Talent: Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Cate Blanchett, F. Murray Abraham, Gerald Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Kristin Wiig, Kit Harrington

Released: February 22, 2019

Viewed in theaters: February 27, 2019

My last line of my How To Train Your Dragon 2 review was "I'll see you in another couple years for How To Train Your Dragon 3!" and here we are. 

It's a good thing Toy Story has a fourth movie coming out or else I wouldn't know which animated trilogy would be my favorite animated trilogy. How could I choose between those two? But why couldn't Toy Story 4 come out a year earlier or a year later because now it's going to win the Oscar for Best Animated Movie and Toy Story 3 already won that Oscar over How To Train Your Dragon (and they were both wonderful movies, so I'm not complaining or anything!) I just want one of the HTTYD movies to win an Oscar for Best Animated Movies because they are all so good! I thought the second movie DID win said Oscar, but while it was nominated, it lost to Big Hero Six. 

You guys, the How To Train Your Dragon movies are so good! Seriously, if you've never seen them, I HIGHLY recommend you check them out. Also, I'm being quite serious about that because I will be spoiling some things from the first and second movies in my review as I rewatched both of them in preparation for the final movie. These movies are put out by DreamWorks which seem to have more bad movies than good, but even these movies could rival something from Pixar. (Apparently not Toy Story, though! But if I had to choose between the Toy Story movies and the HTTYD movies, I would just curl up in a ball and start crying because there's no way I could choose between them!) 

The animation is gorgeous, the score is amazing, the actors they got to voice the characters are great, the story is touching and has a lot of depth (all three make me CRY hardcore!), but there's also touches of humor (not all the humor works all the time, but when these movies are funny, they'll get you laughing), oh, yeah and the dragons are super awesome! Plus I just love the simple story of a boy bonding with an animal, so I feel this movie appeals to pet owners who also share a special bond with their own animal.

Spoilers ahoy for all three movies! Go watch these movies if you've never seen them! 

Mother of Dragons

We are told that the third movie takes place only a year after the events of the second movie. I thought it would have been a lot longer since there's a five year gap between the first and second movies (only four in real life, though!) This means that Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is 21 because we learned in the second movie he is 20. (Whoo hoo! I can do math!) While watching the first movie (for the third time), I was wondering how old Toothless, the Night Fury that Hiccup befriends, is. We are told this in the second movie (only my second time watching it since I saw it in theaters) by Valka (Cate Banchett), Hiccup's mother, that Toothless is the same age as Hiccup. She appears to be reading his scale lines or something. Now I'm assuming that Toothless hasn't literally been on Earth for twenty years, but rather that's in dragon year. I don't know the life expectancy of a dragon (does anyone?), but I'm assuming you count your pet dragon's age in dragon years much like a dog or cat owner uses dog/cat years to determine their pets' age. I'm just going to assume Toothless is three or four and that equals twenty in human years. Yes, I have put way too much thought into this.

Toothless and Cloudjumper

I remember watching the first movie for the first time way back in 2010 and thinking how much Toothless reminded me of a cat. He has very feline qualities. He also reminds me of a bat with his wings, especially when he's flying. (Or when he's hanging upside down!)  While watching the movies again, I noticed that a lot of the dragons remind me of at least some kind of animal. Obviously you have ones that take on lizard or snake-like qualities, but there are other animals I noticed in the design of the dragons. Valka's dragon, Cloudjumper (my second favorite dragon after Toothless....absolutely adorable, yet very fierce!) was like a cross between an owl and a bulldog; the large "alpha" dragons in the second movie reminded me of walruses with their tusks; the dragon-killing dragons that belonged to the bad guy in the newest movie reminded me of scorpions.

We learn the reason that Night Furies are so rare is that Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham), our movie's bad guy, has killed most of them almost into extinction. He has plans to kill as many dragons as he can, especially any remaining Night Furies. You may think it's ironic for someone who hates dragons so much to have his own dragons (he has about four), but much like in the second movie with Drago, they have been trained to serve him and will do whatever he wants. 

The island of Berk has become overcrowded with dragons (of all shapes and sizes - everything between itty-bitty and massively huge) as Hiccup and his mother and friends (which include his girlfriend, Astrid (America Ferrera)) have rescued captured dragons and bring them back. Hiccup knows that they need a better place to live, not to mention that Grimmel knows about them and he decides the only safe thing to do is to move everyone and every dragon somewhere else. We see Stoick (RIP Stoick :::sniff:::: seriously, was that not one of the saddest moments in animation movie history?) appear in flashbacks (voiced by Gerald Butler) when Hiccup was younger and he tells his son about a Hidden World where dragons live and how he wants to find this place and seal the door so humans and dragons don't have to co-exist. Of course, we know now that humans and dragons can live together peacefully. There is a cute moment when young Hiccup asks about Night Furies and then adds, "They're scary!" Oh, if only you knew, young Hiccup! 

I suppose the good thing about having dragons when you move somewhere, is that they can carry all the heavy stuff...which is exactly what they do. A lot of the much bigger dragons are carrying Viking ships and heavy bundles of things. They see a sparse island and Hiccup decides they should make camp there. 

Grimmel decides to lure Toothless by using the captured Light Fury he has to entice him. A Light Fury looks exactly like a Night Fury, only it's white instead of black. We get some pretty cute scenes between Toothless and the Light Fury (who never gets a name, but I guess that makes sense since she isn't anyone's pet) doing their mating dance. The romance between these two dragons has to be the cutest romance between an animated non-human pair since Wall-E and Eve from WALL-E. When the Light Fury flies away, Toothless is upset because he can't follow her because, if you remember from the first movie, a part of his tail fin (the horizontal stabilizer if you will) was torn off when Hiccup shot him down) and he can only fly when he has a full tai. So Hiccup creates a new one for him and he is able to fly off and find his female counterpart who takes him to the Hidden World. Meanwhile, he's been gone for awhile and Hiccup is starting to get worried as he thought Toothless would be back by now. Astrid points out to him that he gave Toothless his freedom. Hiccup thinks that his dragon might be in trouble so he and Astrid hop on Astrid's dragon, Stormfly to find him. All the dragons must be able to find the Hidden World because Stormfly seems to know exactly where to go. As expected, the Hidden (Dragon) World is gorgeous with this extra-worldly light and if full of dragons (I even saw Drago's alpha dragon from the second movie who loses its tusk, but it's hard to miss that thing as it's so massive!) and Hiccup and Astrid see that Toothless and his new girlfriend have become the Dragon King and Queen of the Hidden World.

Crouching Dragon, Hidden Dragon

Since many of these dragons are wild and not been domesticated, when they spot the two humans, they start to attack them. They are rescued by Toothless who flies them back to the island where they've set up camp. Meanwhile, Ruffnut (the other young female who isn't Astrid) has been captured and held by Grimmel and we get one of the funniest scenes in the movie where she is going on and on and won't shut up. She is voiced by Kristin Wiig and you know they just set up the scene for her and let her ad-lib. If I hadn't known Kristin Wiig voiced this character since the first movie, I would have no idea that was her because she makes her voice sound gruff. It is a very funny scene because she is just going on and on (she doesn't seem to realize that she could easily be killed at any moment!) and you think Grimmel is going to make her dragon chow, but then she lets slip where her people have landed and Grimmel uses this to his advantage and lets her go so he can follow her. The Light Fury has also followed Toothless back to the island and she is captured by Grimmel which results in Toothless being captured when he goes to her aid. Look, we can all blame the incompetent Ruffnut for unknowingly leading Grimmel to their camp, but if Hiccup had never gone looking for Toothless in the Hidden World, then Toothless would have never flown him back and his Queen wouldn't have followed, and she wouldn't have gotten captured, etc., etc. Hiccup knows this because he guiltily points it out to Astrid. I love the callback to the first movie when Astrid asks Hiccup, "What are you going to do about it?"

Grimmel warns Toothless to keep the other dragons from attacking him or else he will kill the Light Fury, so instead the other dragons follow willingly without any threat leaving the Vikings without their dragons. Of course the humans find a way to save the dragons and Hiccup saves the Light Fury, who in turns saves Toothless, then saves Hiccup from falling to his death. It's a sweet moment because before then, the Light Fury, who has never been around humans, had always been apprehensive around Hiccup, breathing fire in his vicinity whenever he was  around.

So around this time, we're near the end of the movie and I have't cried...yet. Well, that's about to change! Get out the Kleenex because the tears are about to start flowing. Now this wasn't a huge surprise that I cried as I bawled during the first and second movie, so I knew this moment was going to be inevitable. Hiccup realizes that Toothless and all the other dragons belong in the Hidden World where they will be safe from humans who are trying to hunt them, not to mention that Toothless has found his soul mate and needs to be with her. I cried so much when they say their goodbyes and we also see the other Vikings saying goodbye to their dragons. If you think about it, Hiccup and Toothless were only together for six years which isn't that long at all!

The very last five minutes of the movie take place a few years later and Hiccup and Astrid are married and have two small children. This is when we see Hiccup with his beard which they show in some of the promo posters so I was wondering when we were going to see that. The family is on a boat and they come across Toothless, the Light Fury, and three absolutely adorable baby dragons! I think I literally "aw!"-ed. Hiccup is reunited with his friend and he introduces his children where we get a great callback from the first movie when Hiccup puts up his palm towards Toothless while looking away and Toothless nuzzles them. We get that scene again, only this time it's Hiccup's children who are putting their palms towards the dragon while looking away. It's a very sweet ending and I'm having to take a handkerchief out of my purse to wipe the cascade of tears flowing from my eyes.

I love these movies so much! I just have to make sure I have Kleenex nearby when I watch them!