YES DAY (2021)
Directed by Miguel Arteta
A mom and dad who usually say no decide to say yes to their kids' wildest requests — with a few ground rules — on a whirlwind day of fun and adventure.
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9 films that influenced YES DAY
What critics say influenced YES DAY
Ramírez is the one who’s stretching out of his comfort zone here, but it never feels that way; the criminal vibe he channeled in the likes of “Wasp Network” and “Point Break” is refashioned into a conspiratorial dad energy that carries the movie’s biggest laughs (especially when it leads him toward “Meet the Parents” degrees of Ben Stiller body harm).
Don't expect this pic to start a nationwide trend of Yes Days any more than 2011's Hall Pass inspired a legion of wives to give their man-child husbands holidays from their wedding vows.
It’s a Jim Carrey sort of premise, warping Yes Man (itself kind of a spin on Liar Liar’s compulsory character trait) into a Nickelodeon-esque kids-run-the-world movie.
Granted, this is a movie based on a kids’ book, not a rethinking of “Apocalypse Now.”
The next few hours alone will see people get arrested, parents wind up in the hospital, and a prepubescent child paraphrase “Apocalypse Now.” That’s one thing American kids movies have always understood all too well: When it comes to parenting, keeping the peace is always worth its price in chaos.
From there, you can pinpoint the type of fuzzy messaging that’ll await the family’s eventual endgame, but first a trip to magic mountain, driving through a carwash with the windows down, and an elaborately staged water balloon fight shot like a sequence from “Apocalypse Now.” It’s unspooled in rapid succession as to not give any of the characters a chance to breathe, because in this technology fueled landscape where films compete with iPads, YouTubers playing “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” and “Minecraft,” things can’t lag.
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Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Cedar Rapids”) has an underrated ability at crafting comic, humanistic movies out of commercial concepts.
Director Miguel Arteta has become a reliable go-to filmmaker for kids’ films (“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) in between the edgier fare (“Duck Butter”) he got his start with (“The Good Girl”).
Miguel Arteta broke out with dark indies like “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” but the last decade has found the filmmaker largely making bland studio fare like “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and “Like a Boss.”
What keeps the movie from feeling totally bland is the stable of scene stealing supporting performances that belie the fact that even though Arteta is a hired hand here, we’re still watching a movie from the guy who directed Duck Butter and The Good Girl, as well as Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day .
Arteta has a dramatic background in film and television with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Youth In Revolt , Succession and The Good Girl on his resume.
Looking at Miguel Arteta’s name in the credits of Yes Day , an effervescent new comedy premiering on Netflix, it’s easy to forget that he once directed an adaptation of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ; the director of transgressive films like Chuck & Buck and Duck Butter hasn’t helmed a lot of family entertainment before, but at least his prior credit includes pedigreed children’s literature.
Miguel Arteta broke out with dark indies like “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” but the last decade has found the filmmaker largely making bland studio fare like “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and “Like a Boss.”
Miguel Arteta directs — he directed the 2000 offbeat cult hit “Chuck & Buck,” so he can get weird.
Director Miguel Arteta (2000’s Chuck & Buck, 2020’s Like a Boss) keep things moving at a brisk pace since it only runs under 90-minute long minus the standard-issue preachy tones typically associated with family-friendly movies.
The latest pivot in the long and strange filmography of “Chuck & Buck” director Miguel Arteta (who leveraged early Sundance fame into a career spent pinballing between off-beat indies like “Beatriz at Dinner” and broad studio fare along the lines of last year’s “Like a Boss”), “Yes Day” swan-dives into its premise with all the gloss and obviousness we’ve come to expect from streaming movies in the content age, but there’s also a knowing sharpness to the opening scenes that should intrigue parents even as the film’s blitz-fast story unfolds at a pace designed to keep up their kids’ short attention spans.
But there’s more to this “Yes Day” than a chance for the kids to blow off some steam and get it all out of their system like some Nickelodeon movie remake of The Purge .
Like an innocuous kid version of “The Purge,” Miguel Arteta’s “Yes Day” imagines an annual 24-hour holiday of lawlessness.
That idea has legs beyond what's on screen here; "The Bucket List" was once just a movie, too.
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Based on the 2009 book by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld, director Miguel Arteta’s fun, but forgettable family comedy is certainly a step-up from last year’s awful Like a Boss , but not a patch on the similarly themed Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day .
Looking at Miguel Arteta’s name in the credits of Yes Day , an effervescent new comedy premiering on Netflix, it’s easy to forget that he once directed an adaptation of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ; the director of transgressive films like Chuck & Buck and Duck Butter hasn’t helmed a lot of family entertainment before, but at least his prior credit includes pedigreed children’s literature.
This film makes for a solid double feature with Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day .
Arteta’s made his name with offbeat, darker comedies—dropping the kid-centric Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day between hyper-adult things like Duck Butter—and he injects enough strangeness into the film’s proceedings to keep its rote elements mostly engaging for the older crowd.
What keeps the movie from feeling totally bland is the stable of scene stealing supporting performances that belie the fact that even though Arteta is a hired hand here, we’re still watching a movie from the guy who directed Duck Butter and The Good Girl, as well as Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day .