Lenny Schafer

Slow paced to provide a quiet, sad mood. Into the third act, the father, the main character expresses the theme: "This is what fathers do, they give for their families" as he expresses no remorse for giving up a bucolic solitary life and farm. Rather, he is glad to be able to send off his grown children into lives they choose for themselves. The movie ends with a reference to Shakespeare's King Lear, a man who went crazy trying to extract love from his children through manipulation.

Well done quirky rom-com. The characters are all mildly neurotic, but engaging and well written.

It was great to see the cheap paper mache painted sets representing alien planets. State of the art for black and white television.

Another formula super powers comic book movie. Some gratuitous racial wok preaching. Lead female girl has dumb ghetto superpower: she raps? What? and sells nasty drugs. Can we get more stereotypical? For a poor oppressed black girl, she seems to get enough to eat and stashes hundreds of thousands dollars under her mattress. Oh, boo hoo. At least its a movie where black kids actually interact with a strong black male father figure who talks and acts decent, not a gang banger. Wow. Now that is different.

Whoda thunk a millennial romcom musical series would ever get funded, let alone produced. You would need a bank of triple threat actors (act, sing and dance), good writing and acting. ZEP pulls it off. What adds to the polish is the characters do not overact and the plots are not over the top. More bonus points for minimal preaching of "awareness." The genius was to create the magic device of mental music hearing (and choreography) as a Zoey superpower, thus eliminating the awkward transitions between dialog and song that can jar and distract the audience. People do not break into song in the middle of dialog, normally. I would give this 5 stars, but I save that for only those rare works which are really, really special.