Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

If someone had told me ten years ago that Brad Bird, the writer/director of the quirky, entertaining and rather moving hand-drawn animated feature film The Iron Giant, which bowled over critics but underwhelmed most audiences, would go on to direct arguably the best installment of the Mission Impossible film franchise headlined by Tom Cruise, I would probably have dismissed them as crazy.

Twelve years later, I've seen the actual product and still can't believe how good it actually was, especially considering how little I enjoyed the three M:I movies that came before it.

Since much of the narrative of the story is propelled by twists and surprises and can be somewhat convoluted, I'll sum up the plot by saying that a mysterious individual named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) has gotten hold of a device with which to initiate a Russian nuclear missile strike, and has managed to frame the Americans for doing so. Now, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Mission Force team of Carter (Paula Patton), Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Brandt (Jeremy Renner) have to find Hendricks before he is able to actually launch any missiles.

The story isn't particularly novel; it hearkens back to the 1997 film The Peacemaker starring George Clooney in which the protagonists had to hunt down a man who stole a single nuclear warhead from the Russians. The difference is mainly in the execution; Bird's film is superior in nearly every way, whether it's the staging of the action sequences or in building genuine suspense, which is not the easiest thing to do considering that, this being a franchise film, it's practically a given that the good guys are going to win the day.

I probably should not have expected anything less from the director of the animated tour de force that was The Incredibles, but as high as my expectations were this film managed to even exceed them. Although the script is credited to Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Bird, who wrote The Incredibles and his Pixar studios follow-up Ratatouille as well as directing them, had at least some writing input; it feels, at several points, like something he might have written.

Perhaps what this film has over any of the others is that all throughout, Bird maintains the "team" spirit that made the original TV series such a hit with its audience. In the first film the entire team, save for Cruise's Hunt and Ving Rhames' Luther Stickwell, was wiped out by the end of the first act. In the second film, the only "team" to speak of was Hunt and his long hair, while in the third film, which had a fantastic villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, was moving along pretty nicely until the climax, when writer-director J.J. Abrams decided that the only way Hunt could take down the extremely clever bad guy was pummel him to death. In Bird's film, however, the climax is divided into two parts as Hunt has to chase down the Nyqvist's Hendrick's while his team has to chase down his right hand and undo what he has done. Without the efforts of one, the other's efforts are useless. Also, even well before the climax, Cruise's co-stars, particularly The Hurt Locker star and man of the moment, Jeremy Renner, had some pretty generous helpings of screen time. I welcomed this development wholeheartedly as Patton is quite easy on the eyes, and because I can never get enough of the hilarious Pegg, who plays his comic talents quite to the hilt in this film and even gets quite a heroic moment at the end of it.

What made the film riveting for me to watch, however, was the fact that for the most part, even though the good guys were always going to get the bad guys, the filmmakers were able to keep me wondering how exactly they were going to do that. One thing that helped, I think was taking a page of The Peacemaker and making the arch villain someone who was not only quite formidable but who had apparently nothing to lose, which made him that much more dangerous.

The Mission: Impossible films have never been wanting in terms of technical proficiency. The production value of each and every one of them, no matter how forgettable the script, has been pretty much top caliber. The areas in which they've been wanting are directors and writers who were ready to accompany all this style with a little substance. Perhaps the closest they got to this prior to this film was the effort of Abrams and his team, but with Bird and his scriptwriters the franchise has finally gotten the creative shot in the arm it has needed all along.

When late in the film, Hunt breathes the words, "Mission accomplished" I could not help but agree.

4.5/5

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

At the outset, I'd like to state that, even as someone who's grown up with Tintin, I did not object violently to the considerable liberties that were taken with The Secret of the Unicorn, one of the roughly two dozen books that chronicled the adventures of the young Belgian reporter created by cartoonist Georges Remi, a.k.a. Herge, who has over nearly three quarters of a century become wildly popular in almost every part of the world (except, perhaps, for the United States). I'm not like one of those Lord of the Rings zealots who thinks that Eowyn's long-winded speech upon revealing her true identity to the leader of the Nazgul before fighting him made more narrative sense then choosing to make the big revelation just as she was about to deliver the coup de grace upon him. Sometimes it just makes sense to make changes for the big screen.

I had only recently re-read The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel Red Rackham's Treasure and had come to the conclusion that as impressive as Herge's signature ligne claire storytelling was, as feature length movies there was little these books had to offer that today's audiences had not seen before in one form or another. I get that there was a need to up the visual ante somehow.

I also get that, since this movie was the first time audiences would be meeting both Tintin and one of his stalwart companions, Captain Archibald Haddock, it was necessary to borrow elements from the book in which Haddock was actually introduced into the series, The Crab With the Golden Claws. I even get why director Steven Spielberg, producer Peter Jackson and their writers felt the need to cut and paste a crucial part of Red Rackham's Treasure onto this movie even as they strongly suggested that the second book of that particular story may yet form the basis of a sequel.

Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a journalist who moonlights as an adventurer. One day, in a flea market he spots a scale model of an old ship, a 17th century man-of-war called the Unicorn and, admiring its craftsmanship, buys it straightaway, only to receive two offers from strangers wanting to buy the model ship in rapid succession, the first such offer being made by a nervous-looking man who, upon being rebuffed, tells him the ship will bring him nothing but trouble, and the second, much more generous offer being from an affluent collector named Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who doesn't seem to want to take no for an answer. Tintin refuses him as well and takes the ship home. Unfortunately, an accident involving Tintin's dog, Snowy and a cat that wanders into his apartment results in the ship being broken and a small cylinder slipping under the furniture unnoticed. What Tintin doesn't know but will soon find out is that the contents of that cylinder will lead him on a globe spanning adventure involving mortal peril, the likes of which he will only be able to face with his faithful Snowy and his newfound friend, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose knowledge is key to unlocking the mysterious secret of the Unicorn.

From a narrative perspective, the film works. It's got a solid plot, brisk pacing, good character development and dialogue which retains by and large the spirit of the comic books (or at least the English translations that I grew up with, anyway). Full credit goes to the writers for even trying to situate the adventure properly in the Tintin chronology by making brief reference to Tintin's past exploits through news clippings on the walls. It's not quite the Tintin I grew up with, but to be honest, I don't think a movie geared for today's audiences could have been.

Oddly enough, my problems with the movie stem more from the visualization of Tintin and his world than anything else.

When Steven Spielberg said that motion capture technology represented the best way to bring Tintin's adventures to the big screen, I was skeptical. While I was more than ready to concede that Herge's unique aesthetic was not quite possible with a traditional live-action setup, I wasn't sure why Spielberg believed that mo-cap would be superior to key-frame CG animation; surely the folks at Pixar or Spielberg's own Dreamworks animation, with their technical prowess, were up to the task.

Admittedly, much of the action in Tintin went a considerable way towards convincing me that Spielberg was right, but not quite all the way. The camera movement is simply amazing, with Spielberg's signature flair for following the action with a single shot for several seconds on end where most directors would have cut at least half a dozen times if not more. The actions scenes on the ship at sea and in the streets of what I presume is London, as well as the madcap chase sequence in Morocco stood out for me in particular. Such techniques still remain beyond even Pixar's and Dreamworks' considerable capability.

Where the film falls short, though is in the quieter, character-oriented moments. Several characters in this film, and I am loath to say this because I really hoped that this movie would avoid this, suffer from the dreaded "dead-eye" syndrome that has plagued just about every purely mo-cap film to date. The most conspicuous of all is Tintin himself, and what pains me about this shortcoming is how, in many, many instances, the decision for his eyes or eyebrows not to move or distort or indicate any kind of emotion, even while actor Jamie Bell is trying his darnedest to convey that Tintin is excited or upset or anything else, strongly suggests that Spielberg's interpretation of Tintin is that he is largely expressionless. Anyone who has read even half of Tintin's adventures can attest that even though Tintin's face is little more than very simple lines and a pair of dots for his eyes, Herge was able to draw a fairly wide range of expression from that combination. Tintin's been happy, angry, sad, shocked, intent and a whole lot of other emotions, very few of which are conveyed by his digital avatar.

Not only that, but some characters simply don't translate very well at all, like opera singer Bianca Castafiore, magnate Omar Ben Salaad and a number of her audience members who were clearly rendered in "Herge-esque" fashion but all of whom ended up just looking kind of strange. In particular, Salaad looks like he stepped out of Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express.

The good news on the character front, though, is that veteran performance-capture actor Andy Serkis, who brought J.R.R. Tolkien's Gollum to life in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and who made two cinematic simians even more lifelike than the Hollywood actors they played against in King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes makes Captain Haddock seem as lively as Tintin seems inert. There is a consistency to this; Haddock was, in the comics, always the more boisterous of the two characters, and it is a delight not only that Serkis was chosen to bring this character to life but that screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have reproduced much of his signature colorful language ("Blistering Barnacles! Thundering Typhoons!") for his dialogue. Serkis, along with Spielberg's eye for action, makes a thundering argument for the use of motion capture, one that is not easily dismissed.

Still, I couldn't help but feel that this film could have been a lot more than it was if Spielberg and his crew had done a few things a little bit differently. Still, I suppose budgetary constraints may have prevented them from being too daring. One definite disappointment I have to voice, however, was with legendary composer John Williams' music which, unthinkable as this may sound, actually sounded generic. The 3-D in this film, while it still did not provide as amazing an experience as the 3-D presentation of James Cameron's Avatar did, was put to good use here, and in just the right scenes.

All told, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn hits a lot of the right notes for me, and personally I think Spielberg and Peter Jackson, who's slated to direct the next installment, deserve another crack at this, although I qualify this with the statement that there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Rating: 3.5/5

Why Pixar Should Acknowledge that Cars 2 was a Failure.

I understand the concept of standing by one's work, for better or worse, which is why I get why Steven Spielberg is not trashing the last Indiana Jones movie despite the negative reaction to it by many of the franchise's fans, and why Avi Arad is in the habit of making excuses for even the most poorly-received Marvel movies. Therefore, when I read an interview in which Pixar's head honcho John Lasseter, on the eve of the movie's home video release, defended Cars 2 from the brickbats slung its way by film critics, citing the film's global box-office as proof enough that they had made a good film, I understood his position, even if I ultimately disagreed with it.

As a fan of Pixar's, I feel their interests, and those of their global audience would be better served if they acknowledged, at least among themselves, that Cars 2 was a train-wreck of a movie, for reasons I shall enumerate:

1. Citing box-office as indicators of a movie's quality is a merchant's argument, not a filmmaker's. For years, Pixar has made original movies which placed story and character development above all else, with the spectacular animation and visuals actually coming in a distant third, even though they're also well-covered in that department. Because Pixar's rivals at Dreamworks Animation and a number of other studios have shown increasing prowess in the technical department, though, Pixar has always had to rely on their virtually patented ability to come up with moving, clever stories and characterizations to stay ahead in the game, sometimes at the expense of ultimate box-office success. Sure, Shrek 2 cleaned up at the box-office in 2004, but I defy anyone to say that years from now, that film will be remembered more fondly than Pixar's The Incredibles, which came out later that same year to smaller box-office returns but considerably greater accolades. Also, the second Transformers movie made over a billion dollars at the global box-office, but that doesn't stop it from being a steaming pile of shit any more than the box-office receipts of Cars 2 do.

Of course, Pixar has to sell movies; it's how to stay in the animation game at all; but they must think like filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND. Moreover, notwithstanding the merchant's argument propounded by Lasseter, Cars 2 is the first Pixar movie since A Bug's Life in 1998 to gross below $200 million in the United States and Canada. Factoring in inflation and 3-D surcharges, Cars 2 is actually the lowest grossing Pixar movie ever, despite being easily the most unabashedly commercial one. Prior to this movie, Pixar had achieved the unprecedented: for years, every Pixar movie after A Bug's Life was an undisputed $200 million sure thing, a unique feat which none of their rivals (or anyone else for that matter, including the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise or Will Smith) could claim, and one which they achieved by thinking as filmmakers FIRST and merchants SECOND, even when making their sequels (e.g. Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3). Whatever Lasseter's protestations to the contrary, Cars 2 felt like the products of merchants and not filmmakers.

2. The Incredibles was a rare animal among Pixar movies in that writer/director Brad Bird managed to tell a story that incorporated both Pixar's signature flair for all-ages stories with a slightly edgier, more mature sensibility in which violent death, of both good guys and bad guys could occur. The Incredibles remains easily the most violent of all Pixar movies, and the only one to sport a 'PG' rating from the MPAA, but Bird made it work because early on, he established that his was the kind of world where things like that could happen. It's all about context.

In Cars 2, however, Lasseter and his crew make easily the most jarring tonal shift in Pixar's history by going from a peaceful Americana atmosphere, in which a barrel-roll at a racetrack is supposed to be a horrifying moment (which the character involved survives) to a knockoff "James Bond" setting where a number of supporting characters get regularly crushed and/or blown up, with one of them even getting tortured before he gets blown up. There is no context here; if anything, the first film was the anti-context. If one can imagine the sequel Finding Nemo having fish getting eaten by angry piranha or Bruce and his friends going on regular feeding frenzies, one can then imagine how...off the second Cars film felt with its rather gratuitous violence.

The lesson is simple; if future Pixar films are going to feature deadly violence, they should follow the model of The Incredibles, and contextualize it from the get-go instead of spending a whole movie establishing one kind of narrative atmosphere only to abruptly replace it with another in the sequel.

3. Finally, and most importantly, I think Pixar is getting a little too comfortable making sequels. Sure, the Toy Story trilogy is probably likely to go down in history as one of cinema's best, along with the original Star Wars trilogy and the LOTR films, but the fact that they decided to make a sequel of the film that was the least well-received by critics, and the one film that broke their streak of Best Animated Film Oscars was already a misstep, one Lasseter, if his interview is any indication, feels rather smug about, and if I understand correctly, another misstep is on the way; they're making a prequel to Monsters, Inc., a highly satisfying film that doesn't really scream for any kind of sequel, let alone a prequel. The truly chilling thing is the only recent buddy-comedy prequel that I can think of is Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. I'm sure Pixar will make a better movie than that, but it's still rather dubious company for them to keep. I don't think even Pixar will deny that their best movies are their original ones, but even if they have to visit sequel territory, I dearly wish they would craft a sequel for the ONE Pixar movie that was really built for one: THE INCREDIBLES!

The Everyman's Caper: Tower Heist

Watching Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, I got the impression that the people who wrote its final script worked from the premise: what would the heist in Ocean's 11 be like if the guys who pulled it off were a bunch of blue-collar schlubs instead of super-slick professional thieves?

The result is an often fun and rather silly comedy caper film which, thanks to some clever casting, manages to stay afloat for the entirety of its running time, but, due to some sloppy writing, only just.

Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the building manager at a posh New York apartment building, the most affluent resident of which is penthouse owner Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), who, early in the film, is put under house arrest for swindling about $2 billion in Bernie Madoff fashion. Among Shaw's victims, unfortunately, are Josh and just about the rest of the building's staff, whose pensions Shaw misappropriated. Having been a loyal valet to Shaw for a decade Josh is at first incredulous, but when he sees Shaw's indifference to the revelation that the building's doorman tried to step in front of a train he realizes the truth and in his anger smashes a highly expensive classic Ferrari which Shaw has in his penthouse. Having lost his job, Josh is approached by the lead FBI agent handling Shaw's case, Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) who buys him a drink and, in the course of their conversation, reveals that the Bureau is still searching for Shaw's stash of cash, considering that he has cleaned out just about all of his bank accounts.

Josh, having worked for Shaw for a decade, believes he knows exactly where this special stash is hidden, and in order to steal it he recruits his obnoxious, small-time crook neighbor Slide (Murphy) and a motley assortment of conspirators, namely, three of his co-employees at the tower, his brother-in-law Charlie (Casey Affleck), chambermaid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe), and elevator operator Enrique (Michael Pena), and finally, a former Wall Street wizard who was recently evicted from the tower, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick).

As heist movies go, this is certainly not the most clever. For me, the beauty of the Ocean's 11 remake (of which Affleck, incidentally, is a veteran) was how effectively the writers, director and actors sold the idea of the heist before it even happened to the extent that when it did happen, I was so blown away by how the characters pulled it off that I didn't even bother to ask how some of the things they did were even possible. There was a real magician's sleight-of-hand to the planning and staging of the whole thing.

In this film, Ratner is far more preoccupied with two things: 1) getting the audience to hate Alan Alda's Madoff-like charlatan and in the process to sympathize with Stiller and the rest of his blue-collar crew, and 2)milking his cast, from Stiller to Murphy to Broderick to Pena, for as many laughs as he can. This is good for a fair number of laughs, but the heist itself goes from unlikely to absurd in pretty short order as a result. To his credit, Ratner really tries playing to his actor's strengths: Stiller does the everyman he has done so well since the late 1990s, Murphy plays the foul-mouthed con man he played in the 80s, and Broderick seems to be recycling the mousy accountant he popularized on stage in the musical version of The Producers (at least, based on what I've seen from the largely ignored 2005 film version of that play). At least Affleck played against type; from the willing conspirator in the Ocean's 11 remake and its sequels he went to being the reluctant one in the group.

Still, it was good to see Murphy once again play the fast-talking scoundrel he popularized in the 80s, if in a slightly watered-down, PG-13 version, as opposed to the R-18 version that invariably had a more colorful vocabulary. It was surprising to see that the privilege of dropping the film's lone F-bomb went to Broderick, who as the former "one percenter" who suddenly finds himself as one of the less fortunate 99% was a heck of a lot of fun to watch. His meltdown in one of the film's climactic scenes, where Fitzhugh is asked to grab the bumper of a dangling car (don't ask), is comedy gold. Oh, and Tea Leoni still looks smokin' hot at 45.

It's certainly not the most memorable heist movie (or movie, for that matter) to come along in awhile but until Eddie Murphy goes full-on Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond it'll do, and it certainly was nice of Ratner to shift from Chris Tucker's annoying Murphy knock-off act that as seen in the Rush Hour movies in favor of the real deal, even if he does feel a little bit like a parody of himself.

Rating: 3/5

Tintin and the Uncanny Valley

I grew up reading the adventures of Belgian reporter Tintin; he was as much a part of my childhood as Spider-Man, Batman or the Hulk. I was therefore excited to hear a few years ago that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would finally be bringing him to the big screen. That the duo have hired British actors Jamie Bell as Tintin and Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and the writers of the popular British TV show Dr. Who, goes to show that they're ready to go the extra mile to infuse the story with the distinctly European sensibility for which the character and his world are known.

The thing is, I'm not necessarily thrilled by the format Spielberg has chosen to tell his story. I know that I am but one of a long line of bloggers, armchair experts, moviegoers and Tintin fans not thrilled with the prospect of yet another dead-eyed, chillingly artificial adventure in the vein of Beowulf and The Polar Express, but with the release of The Adventures of Tintin merely weeks away (it opens in the Philippines on November 30, 2011), I find myself willing to get in line for yet another "Motion Capture" movie.

Motion capture is really such a tricky proposition. As someone who's sat through the progenitor of all of these recent movies, The Polar Express, with my children through multiple viewings on DVD (and one in the theater), I know how difficult it can be to endure. I found Robert Zemeckis' follow-up to that film, Beowulf to be just creepy, and even though I respected Zemeckis' vision for A Christmas Carol, which had already been done in just about every other format, I still found it difficult and at times terrifying to watch, even with some virtuoso performances from the actors involved in that process. Ominously, Disney, the parent studio of Zemeckis' Imagemovers outfit has shut down the studio after its latest effort, Mars Needs Moms, tanked at the box-office and has permanently scrapped Zemeckis' plans to produce a mo-cap version of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.

It strikes me that audiences aren't violently opposed to motion capture as an aid to storytelling, as shown by the unparalleled box-office returns of James Cameron's mo-cap-heavy, live-action sci-fi spectacle Avatar, as well as Jackson's own Lord of the Rings trilogy, which featured an entirely digitally-rendered mo-cap character in Gollum, but apparently what really unsettles audiences is to do away with human characters completely and to replace them with the strange approximations of them that mo-cap characters often are.

It's not like pure animation where the stand-ins for humans are, well, conspicuously distinct from humans; after bloggers (and maybe some professional reviewers to boot), have written whole treatises on the subject of the "uncanny valley" and how the phenomenon tends to occur most commonly in mo-cap films, one wonders why Spielberg and Jackson would take the risks that they have, although Jackson's success in the format (as evidenced by Gollum and later, King Kong, both portrayed by Serkis) speaks for itself.

Of course, since Tintin was well-into production when Mars Needs Moms tanked, and millions of dollars had already been spent, the makers were fully committed to seeing the project through, no matter how ominous it is that The Adventures of Tintin is the first mo-cap project to hit screens since rival studio Disney threw in the towel and shut down Imagemovers. Apparently, the perceived risk on Tintin is so high that two studios had to finance it and split global territories more or less equally, which is a departure from the usual practice of one studio distributing the film in the United States and Canada and the other studio distributing it in the rest of the world.

The reviews that are trickling in and the reports of box-office success as the film rolls out slowly around the world (as opposed to one big global premiere as is usually done for Harry Potter or superhero movies), are encouraging, but I'm still on tenterhooks as to whether this film will be the breakout hit I'm hoping it will be, or whether or not I'll enjoy it, which I'm dearly hoping I will.

I suppose one could say that if anyone could make this work, it would be Spielberg and Jackson, but really, with something as big as Tintin the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here's hoping they're able to vault across that uncanny valley; that in itself would be one of Tintin's greatest adventures ever.

Zorro...with Fur: A Review of Puss in Boots

Like many people, I was glad to see Dreamworks Animation finally end the Shrek franchise last year. I felt that the franchise had pretty much worn out its welcome, and considering that Dreamworks has come up with new, utterly charming stuff like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, there simply wasn't any need for dipping into the ogre well anymore.

I confess, then, that I wasn't too keen the announcement of a Shrek spinoff, Puss in Boots. I liked the character and how he was a riff on Zorro, the character whom voice-actor Antonio Banderas had revitalized in the late 1990s, but I wasn't really looking forward to another hour and a half of pop-culture references, Hollywood inside jokes and borderline toilet humor.

To my utter surprise, Dreamworks Animation has put together a film that is more in keeping with Panda and Dragon than any of the Shrek movies in that there seems to be a genuine attempt to put heart over snark. Sure, there's plenty of clever humor in it, including one Fight Club reference, and the fairy-tale lampooning that made the first couple of Shrek movies so engaging is back with a vengeance but there's still a notable difference in tone from past Shrek films.

Puss in Boots is an outlaw in search of a big score. He learns that the one big score he seeks is the quest for three magic beans which will take him to a castle in the sky, where he will find a goose that lays golden eggs. After an unsuccessful attempt to steal the magic beans from hillbilly outlaws Jack and Jill, he finds himself recruited by an old acquaintance, Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianikis) with whom Puss apparently has an unpleasant history. Puss, Humpty and a sexy female cat thief, Kitty Soft Paws (Salma Hayek) then team up to get the beans from Jack and Jill and get to the castle in the sky. There are, however, a couple of nasty surprises in store.

In terms of technical proficiency, Dreamworks has never had a problem keeping up with its rivals at Pixar; the characters are every bit as meticulously rendered and every bit as lifelike. One would expect no less from a studio that Steven Spielberg co-created.

Where Dreamworks has most often fallen short is in infusing their films with the heart that has characterized almost virtually all of Pixar's movies (with the possible exception of the exceedingly crass Cars 2). Apart from a surprisingly touching Shrek, for years the folks at DW Animation couldn't really seem to nail what Pixar had elevated into an art form, so they abandoned the concept altogether and just decided to go for belly laughs. They've been mostly successful with their efforts, though I wasn't a fan of a lot of their movies, such as Shark Tale, both Madagascar movies, A Bee Movie or Monsters vs. Aliens. A lot of the time, with their celebrity casting and pop-culture references ad nauseam felt like products being popped off a conveyor belt, especially considering that Dreamworks often releases more than one movie a year.

With Panda and Dragon, though, Dreamworks showed that they are fully capable of both humor and heart, even though the yuks still remain their bread and butter in the story department.

PIB has plenty of laughs and liberally pokes fun at fairy tale conventions (as well as at the whole Zorro mythos), but there's a surprising amount of heart in the proceedings as well, which was not something I was expecting out of a movie spun out of the long-soulless Shrek franchise. The relationships between Puss and Humpty, Puss and Kitty, and Puss and his adoptive mother, while not exactly nuanced, are all nonetheless quite well developed in the course of the film and they give it a nice center.

That said, given that Puss is, in this incarnation anyway, a riff on Banderas' own portrayal of Zorro, the film is inevitably derivative in many ways, though of course in the spirit of homage and parody. Still, I wasn't a huge fan of how they basically ripped off much of the music score of The Mask of Zorro. Ah well, nobody's perfect.

If this succeeds at the box-office, another franchise is inevitable, and should that happen, here's hoping that DW have learned from the decline of Shrek and come up with good sequels this time.

Rating: 4/5

Winner by Split-Decision: Real Steel

When I read on a movie news site I frequent that Shawn Levy was making a movie about robot boxers starring Hugh Jackman, I didn't mark the date on my calendar or do much of anything other than briefly wonder why executive producer Steven Spielberg didn't just direct the film himself and click on the next article. Having sat through several of his films, including two middling Night at the Museum movies and the forgettable Date Night, I was pretty sure that a movie which looked, in its trailers, like a cross between Rocky and the Transformers, was not going to change my opinion of Levy's talent. When the movie came out, though, reviews seemed to suggest it was something my kids might enjoy, the digital violence notwithstanding, and so I took my kids to see it.

I can readily admit: I was pleasantly surprised.

Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a down-on-his-luck ex-boxer who, since human boxing has been replaced with robot boxing, has been touring the country with his robot boxers. The thing is, Charlie doesn't appear to be very good at what he does, and is as a result rather deep in debt, a situation which gets compounded when his latest charge, a robot he has named Ambush, is destroyed by a bull at a rodeo, leaving him even deeper in debt and without a robot.

Charlie then receives notice that his ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him the sole remaining parent of his eleven-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo). Charlie wants nothing to do with the boy, but during the custody hearing for Max, during which he is set to sign over custody of Max to his late ex-girlfriend's wealthy sister Debra (Hope Davis) he sees an opportunity to get himself back in the robot-boxing business. During a recess in the trial he makes a deal with Debra's husband Marvin by threatening to sign Max over to the state unless he gets paid $100,000.00. To make it look credible that Charlie is not ready to let Max go, he is to spend the summer with him.

Even though Max, of course, hates Charlie, it turns out he's very much a fan of robot boxing himself, and he ends up twisting his dad's arm into taking him along for his next fight. When Charlie sneaks into a scrapyard for parts, Max stumbles on an old sparring robot which he cleans up. After he pleads with Charlie to get the robot, named Atom, a match, Charlie relents, and to his surprise, the robot actually wins the match.

So begins an underdog story in which father and son bond, the little guy stands up to the big guy and scene after glorious scene of meticulously-rendered, robot-on-robot carnage is unleashed, albeit this time in the confines of a boxing ring rather than the urban landscapes the Transformers are used to demolishing.

The movie is loaded with one boxing/underdog cliche after another, but what impresses about it is how surprisingly sincere the performances feel. Jackman and Goyo carry the movie here, and truth be told if their acting was anything less than rock-solid it could all have gone so very wrong. I doubt they'll be handing out any awards for the performances here, but to my mind full credit goes to a couple of actors who transcended the material. Oh, and I found the touch of having Max dance with Atom "shadowing" him really fun.

Another thing that the filmmakers got note-perfect here was the blend of computer generated imagery (CGI) and actual animatronic robots. Although the robots are not actual characters here the way they are in the Transformers movies, the boxing is what drives the film forward, and therefore the steps taken to ensure an authentic boxing experience, from getting the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard to choreograph the fights to motion capture to the incredibly slick CGI work of known VFX vendor Digital Domain, were just what the film needed to keep things moving along briskly. And what I really liked about these robots, as opposed to the ones in the Transformers movies, was that they really looked like they could take a hit.

High-tech wizardry notwithstanding, though, the film actually has a distinct 80s feel considering how liberally it has borrowed story elements from movies of that time like the Rocky films and another Stallone vehicle, Over the Top. Maybe it's with this in mind that composer Danny Elfman has composed a theme that sounds like it was taken right out of the 80s. It may not be Elfman's best work, but it's pretty catchy just the same.

I'm not about to sing Levy's praises, or even those of the rest of the crew here; the direction and script left quite a bit to be desired, and it struck me that this was not the kind of movie that would hold up to repeat viewings considering the holes in the plot. If nothing else, though I really have to credit Levy with getting the best out of his actors, both actual and virtual.

This is worth a look for sure.

Rating: 3.5/5

The Importance of Worldwide Audiences...

I've been noticing an encouraging trend in a lot of Hollywood movies lately. Lately, a lot of Hollywood producers have been making movies--and by movies I mean big-budget action-adventure extravaganzas as opposed to quiet little Woody-Allenesque art house affairs--knowing fully well that their content might not necessarily be appealing to mainstream American audiences.

A good example is the third installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, namely The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which was shot and released despite disappointing box-office take of the second installment, Prince Caspian, in the United States. The global haul of Caspian, however, was significantly bigger than the U.S. grosses, so putting two and two together it seems that whatever they might lose in the U.S., the Narnia producers were confident they could make it back in the rest of the world. Sure the original studio of the film, Disney, dropped it, but Fox picked it up and managed to make a little money in the bargain.

Another example is Tintin, which for years has been one of the world's most beloved comic-book properties but remains relatively obscure to American readers. That fact that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson gambling over a Hundred and Thirty Million dollars (about fifty million more if one includes marketing costs) to see if Tintin will take off tells me they aren't just after American audiences, who have been largely indifferent to the character for years; they're eyeing the wallets of everyone else around the world who has been devouring Tintin's adventures for nearly six decades.

They're looking at the people who paid $1.9 billion to watch James Cameron's Avatar, and who paid three-quarters of a billion dollars to see the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie which, if one goes strictly by its earnings in the United States and Canada alone, was actually a box-office failure. In short, they're looking at the rest of the world.

So are the people who made the recent Captain America, judging by the addition of the phrase "The First Avenger" to the title. It makes good business sense, too; these days most blockbusters make the majority of their worldwide grosses outside the United States, and in fact all three of the latest movies bearing the Marvel logo, Thor, X-Men: First Class and Captain America: The First Avenger, made most of their total grosses outside of the United States.

The nice thing about this trend, and the reason I find it worth writing about, is that down the line it could open the door for more cultural diversity in Hollywood products. The thought that Hollywood execs may one day make movies while bearing in mind how well they may sell in Asia, or Latin America could mean we could see less of the blatant white-washing painfully evident in recent movies like The Last Airbender and 21. Heck, considering how many Asian films are being plundered by Hollywood for remakes, it's not too far-fetched to imagine Hollywood using actual Asian stars for Asian-themed movies down the line, who knows? Sure, it seems fanciful now, but I'm sure there was a time when idea of an African-American actor like Will Smith being the biggest box-office star in the world was unthinkable too.

The world is getting smaller and smaller, even to Hollywood's accountants...

10 Film Franchises That Should End

There's been talk lately of reviving the Ghostbusters franchise. Personally, I think it's a bad idea; after the second movie killed any momentum the first one generated, they're really just better off letting sleeping dogs lie.

Ghostbusters, however, isn't the only film franchise that, in my opinion, should be made to give up the ghost, as it were. I have my own list of film franchises that have been around too long for their own good, and the collective good of the viewing public as well. Here they are, in the order of what I feel to be least obvious candidates to the most obvious:

10. The Toy Story series - financially there is no argument to be made for closing this series down, but creatively, it strikes me that they really don't have any place else left to go. The third film was actually a reiteration of the metaphor for fear of one's own demise that was explored in the second film, and fortunately for John Lasseter and his cohorts they were able to get lightning to strike twice. This series stands as the perfect trilogy and can stand the test of time along with such other films as the Lord of the Rings movies and the original Star Wars trilogy. Besides, the debacle that Cars 2 turned out to be should teach them what can happen by tacking on unnecessary sequels. If they want to create more sequels, they should make one for The Incredibles.

9. The Hulk series - It actually pains me to say this because I think that with the right budget, director, writer(s) and cast, a truly incredible Hulk movie is possible, but the reality of the matter is that this franchise has had its shot in the spotlight, first with a huge budget for an angsty, introspective movie by a then-Academy-Award-nominated director, then later with another huge budget for a flat-out action film starring Edward Norton, arguably the best possible actor as Hulk's alter-ego, Bruce Banner, with an overcaffeinated Frenchman at the reins this time who was not shy about pouring on the violence. Both times, and despite both approaches, the movie failed to earn a whole lot more than a quarter of a billion dollars at the worldwide box-office, not such a bad figure for a teeny tiny little art house movie, but not good news for a would be tentpole franchise. It's good to know he'll have a prominent role in next year's Avengers movie but it's just as well that Marvel spends Disney's money on launching some of its other characters. Besides, Marvel appears to have finally figured out that the Hulk, outside of the comics, has achieved the most success on the small screen, and it is there that he's headed, under the eye of no less than Guillermo del Toro.

8. The Indiana Jones series - It's bad enough that George Lucas had to piss away an unconscionable amount of goodwill from the original Star Wars trilogy with his generally piss-poor prequels, something he continues to do by altering the actual dialogue of the original films as he puts them on new home video formats (with Darth Vader now uttering a superfluous 'nooooo' as he hurls Emperor Palpatine to his death in Return of the Jedi), but he had to add insult to injury by tacking on a wholly unnecessary film to the Indiana Jones series despite the fact that the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had a perfect ending for the entire series. The last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, left such a foul taste in people's mouths that even one of its stars, Shia LaBeouf reportedly badmouthed the film years after its release. Given that Harrison Ford will be 70 years old next year (though Sean Connery starred in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at 73), and given further that I'm pretty sure nobody wants to see Shia LaBeouf (or anyone else for that matter) wearing that old fedora, I think they should really just let the franchise keep whatever respectability it has left and let it be. Of course, given that the last film still managed to eke out three quarters of a billion dollars at the worldwide box office there might be other concerns at work, but to my mind, neither Lucas nor Spielberg really needs the money so really, they should just move on to newer, better things.

7. The Mummy series - while I doubt the first Mummy movie in 1999 will ever be regarded as a classic, it arguably had its own charm as an unpretentious, throwaway action movie. The second movie, with its guffaw-inducing CGI punctuated by a hideously awful "Scorpion King" creature should have sounded the death knells of the franchise but with an increase in the movie's global box-office no one was about to worry themselves over such piddling concerns as quality filmmaking. After all, the series was making money. Considering that the third film in the series, released three years ago, made less than half of what 2001's The Mummy Returns made in the United States, even less when one factors in inflation, the writing should be on the wall for the makers of this franchise, even though they clearly left the door open for more films. Knowing when to quit never was one of Hollywood's virtues. Speaking of which...

6. The Bourne series - like the Toy Story films, the Jason Bourne films were a perfect trilogy. For all their flaws they were all very well tied together from a narrative perspective, and each film, even upon a second or third viewing, can stand very well on its own. The best thing is that the third film, while it could arguably lead to some sort of sequel, ends on a pitch-perfect note, with the lead character's arc ending in a highly satisfying, conclusive way. I have heard that there is currently a movie being filmed which will continue the franchise, using the "Bourne" name, without the Bourne character of Matt Damon, and to my mind that cheapens the entire franchise, exposing it as nothing more than a moneymaking venture rather than an actual storytelling endeavor. I could actually live with the continuation of the story of the shadowy CIA blackops unit and its strangely conditioned uber-assassins, but the fact that the producers, to make money, feel the need to tack "Bourne" onto a movie that doesn't even have Jason Bourne in it goes to show that they're not interested in creating compelling narrative but in filling their coffers. It's almost as bad as if someone called a movie The Karate Kid even though the film itself was about Kung Fu...oh wait...

5. The Ice Age series - As awful as the last two Shrek movies were, I'll give the makers credit for knowing when to quit (although there's a Puss in Boots spinoff on the way). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the folks who make the Ice Age films. This series, about a mammoth who hangs out with a sloth and a saber-toothed tiger, lost its charm about halfway through the second film. The fact that these three animals get along is basically a joke that was good for one movie but which has been stretched out across three, and the fact that the third film, through some ridiculous plot contrivance, managed to feature dinosaurs, really goes to show that the makers of this series are pretty much running on empty...or, to use a pun related to the films, on thin ice.

4. The Terminator series - this series should have ended when James Cameron's involvement did. The second Terminator film was a virtually perfect film; just the right amount of action and character development, and proper, judicious use of CGI before it became all the rage. Granted, the acting wasn't great, but sometimes, as in movies like the first Matrix movie (another franchise that should be left alone), sure-handed direction can transcend shoddy acting. Most importantly of all, T2, like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, had the perfect ending, which conclusively wrapped all story threads up with some real emotional resonance. The third and fourth movies in the series, as well as the TV spinoff served no purpose other than to line the pockets of the people who made them, and the fact that both these films suffered visibly diminishing returns should tell these suits that it's time to finally leave John Connor to his blissfully uncertain future.

3. The Final Destination series - the first Final Destination movie had an interesting premise about cheating death and what consequences this would have, and as with all good things, Hollywood milked it for all it was worth, with the latest film in the series of five films grossing significantly less than the last one. The makers of the Saw movies appear to have finally called it a day, so maybe it's time these people took a hint too and started thinking of some other scary thing with which to terrify audiences.

2. The Spy Kids series - I hate these movies; they all look the same to me. Not only that, but Robert Rodriguez pioneered this new 3-D craze back in 2003. These movies made money for a while, but considering that the original "spy kids" of the first film, Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega, are now adults, and that the latest installment has tanked at the box office, maybe it's time Rodriguez started looking at making that long-delayed sequel to Sin City instead, if not something altogether different.

1. The Punisher series - at the outset I want it clear that this movie is not on the top (or bottom) of this list because there have been three Punisher films, all of them bombs. I don't count the 1989 dog turd starring Dolph Lundgren because it was made at a more desperate time for Marvel and means about as much to their filmed canon as Roger Corman's 1994 Fantastic Four movie or Albert Pyun's 1990 Captain America movie. The films made in 2004 and 2008, particularly the latter, are not quite as forgivable, considering they were made around the same time, respectively, as Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. By then, Marvel had the resources and respectability to get the best possible filmmakers on this project, but ended up getting the scriptwriter for a Die Hard sequel to direct the first one and a woman whose previous claim to fame was apparently a film glorifying thuggish British football players to direct the second one. The painful irony of this, and in fact the main reason why this series is foremost among the series I feel should end, is that the second film, which I watched on a bus, actually hewed very closely to Punisher writer Garth Ennis's brand of storytelling, with its hyper violence and black humor. Irish actor Ray Stevenson even looked the part, managing to resemble both the Punisher who appeared on Tim Bradstreet's painted covers and artist Steve Dillon's almost permanently scowling vigilante. The makers of Punisher War Zone, in short, can actually claim to have made a movie quite faithful to the source material, but what they came up with was something almost unpalatable if morbidly funny in some sequences. Perhaps this just goes to show that the Punisher simply doesn't translate to the big screen very well at all, and that he's probably better off slaughtering mobsters in the comic books, where he can continue to do so without having to worry about squeamish movie audiences or review boards.

There are a lot of other franchises out there that deserve to be nipped in the bud (with films like The Last Airbender making a darned good argument for keeping the original series on which the film was based animated, and on the small screen) or discontinued (why on earth should there be a prequel to 300 that doesn't actually involve the 300 Spartans?), but to me these are the films that make a particularly compelling case for the conclusion of their story for the reasons already discussed.

On Film Reviewers Who Insult Filmgoers.

I like watching movies, and I like reading the reviews of people who watch movies. Sometimes, when I like a reviewer well enough, his or her opinion can spell the difference between watching or not watching a movie I'm not sure I want to see.

Now, as much as I like some film reviewers, there are others whose work I simply cannot stand to read, particularly those who hate some movies so much they feel the need to insult the people who enjoy them. As strong as my opinions can be about some movies, I recognize that at the end of the day, they are still opinions and would never try to pass them off as fact, nor would I try to take cheap shots at someone who disagreed with my opinion, but there are movie reviewers who do just that; proclaiming that people who do not agree with their (usually negative) assessment of a film are idiots.

I actually see their logic; after all, people wouldn't make films I hate like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans if no one paid to see them, so it would make sense for me to blame the people responsible for Jason Friedberg and Aaron and Aaron Seltzer's continued employment in Hollywood by calling them out in my reviews, but truth be told it still seems to be in bad taste to me. I know better than to think I'll be changing the minds of the fans of movies I don't like by insulting them for their choice in films, so I won't bother; my only concern is giving my own opinion, which I try to form strictly upon watching the full film and without prejudgments.

Thanks to the internet the negativity is reinforced when angry fans of a given movie, who take the insults to the audience personally, start slinging venom right back at the reviewers, some of whom engage them and some of whom don't, thus giving rise to even more enmity and ill feelings in a world that already has way too much of them.

I felt pretty annoyed when some self-important fanboy took a couple of swipes at me some years back for my review of Speed Racer, a movie most of the world hated but which I still gave a chance, only to be disappointed by what I felt were oddly-staged racing sequences. I deleted his comment but the irritation lingered for quite a while, not because someone had disagreed with me, which I could certainly have lived with, but because he had the temerity to make it personal. Of course, it would have been much worse had I proclaimed "the people who like this movie are idiots" the way that troll had insinuated that I and most audiences and reviewers were idiots because we didn't agree with him.

In short, film reviewers who insult audiences are a disgrace to their profession because they aren't contributing anything to a meaningful discussion on film; they're simply trolling, baiting people to get upset with them. If their goal is to get people to stop patronizing the films they don't like then they know nothing about human nature; as a rule people don't really enjoy being told what to do, especially not by some self-important, elitist pricks.

People will like the movies they will like, and the phrase "agreeing to disagree" should be something to bear in mind, especially for people who are paid to give their opinion on a film and not its audience. Anything else is simply unprofessional.

Pixar's Rare Lemon: Cars 2

In 2006, critics jumped up and down on Pixar Studios, who up until then had been producing films that none but the most curmudgeonly critics could possibly dislike, for finally coming up with a film that fell well below their established standard of quality, Cars. The single biggest criticism leveled against Cars was how derivative the storyline was, something unthinkable for a company like Pixar which was quite renowned by then for its strikingly original storytelling. References, and unfavorable comparisons to Michael Caton-Jones' 1991 film Doc Hollywood starring Michael J. Fox, were frequent.

Pretty much the same can be said for its sequel, Cars 2 which, even though it bears only a passing resemblance to the 1997 film The Man Who Knew Too Little starring Bill Murray, leans on so many narrative cliches, from the "whodunit" that isn't really a "whodunit" at all, to the Bond-esque turns, to the heavy-handed "be yourself" preaching that it takes the narrative larceny of the first movie to another level altogether.

The sequel, which brings us back to Pixar's world of anthropomorphic automobiles, begins with confrontation on an oil rig between British spy car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and a bunch of what appear to be lemons like Pacers and Gremlins other clunkers led by a bespectacled German scientist (Thomas Krestchmann, playing a car wearing a monocle and a comb-over if one can believe that). McMissile escapes, having taken pictures of a device that could be used for highly nefarious ends.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) the hero of the first movie, arrives home to Radiator Springs after having won his fourth Piston Cup and spends quality time with his buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) and tries to spend some quality time with his girlfriend Sally (Bonnie Hunt) when Mater, who poses as a waiter at the restaurant where McQueen and Sally are having their date, ends up getting into a televised debate over the phone with Italian Formula race car Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro) as to who the best racer in the world is. This little verbal tussle ends with McQueen agreeing to enter the first ever World Grand Prix, sponsored by Miles Axlerod (Eddie Izzard) inventor of Allinol, a revolutionary alternative fuel which will be used to power all of the contestants in the series, which will be staged in three different countries around the world and participated in by the best racers from around the world, including Bernoulli and racing heroes such as Jeff Gorvette (Jeff Gordon) and Lewis Hamilton (played by himself).

McQueen brings Mater with him, but Mater, quintessential hayseed that he is, manages to make a complete fool of himself in the company of the race cars from all over the world, and by extension of McQueen too. When McQueen loses one of the races due to a miscommunication with Mater, however, he loses his temper with him as well, causing Mater to slink off dejectedly.

What none of the racers know is that the the shadowy figures from whom McMissile narrowly escaped at the beginning of the movie have nasty plans for all the participants which McMissile and his assistant, Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), must stop. First, however, they must rendezvous with an American spy (Bruce Campbell, in a regrettably brief appearance) who has taken photographs essential to their identifying the mastermind of the sinister plot. The agent is caught, however, and in a moment of desperation he plants his information on Mater's underchassis while the both of them are in the men's room (or the boy car's room, whichever is more appropriate). McMissile and Shiftwell, who've never met their contact, rely on their tracking instrument and believe it's Mater, who finds himself, for reasons he doesn't understand, a target for the people out to ruin the race. The sabotage has already begun, with the lemons pointing what looks to be an ordinary television camera at the racecars and causing their engines, specifically the Allinol coursing through them, to explode. The plot is to turn off the public from using alternative fuels. McMissile and Shiftwell then get Mater out of harm's way and between the three of them they try to figure out how to get to the bottom of the sabotage. Time is of the essence too, as McQueen, who declares that he will continue to use Allinol, is targeted for destruction at the last race in London.

Now, this being a Disney movie, at no point did I ever believe Lightning McQueen was in danger, and at no point did I doubt who the mysterious head bad guy of the story was. As far as the latter was concerned, I had no choice as the story presented no alternative suspects. So in terms of thrills and mysteries the movie was a complete zero for me. Moreover, the "spy" angle, while enjoyable for as long as Michael Caine was onscreen, was played with next to none of the panache with which, over half a decade ago, Brad Bird directed The Incredibles, which I maintain is infinitely more deserving of a sequel than the first Cars film was.

I get that from a narrative perspective it wasn't possible to do Cars all over again. How many times could Lightning McQueen learn the value of humility, selflessness and small-town values, after all? Unlike the many existential crises that beset the characters of the Toy Story films, which really provide a fascinating look into the human psyche when one thinks about it, there wasn't anything new left about McQueen to tell. One would think that Pixar, seeing the narrative dead-end, would have then focused their efforts on something fresh, like their upcoming Brave feature which was teased just before the movie. Instead, they mined old material for spy and mystery movie cliches in the apparent hope of replicating the eight billion dollar payday they scored with the merchandise from the first Cars movie. So what's the big message here? Apparently that boorish Mater shouldn't bother to be culturally sensitive and that people should adapt to him and not the other way around. Quite a nice message to send to kids in an era where Americans have, up until recently, been viewed by the rest of the world as oblivious to anything and everything that goes on outside of their borders. This is the kind of drivel I might expect from Dreamworks or any of Pixar's less pedigreed rivals in the animation industry, but not from them.

The film certainly has its moments; its beautifully realized cityscapes provided a radical but welcome departure from the Route-66-inspired vistas of the first film, with races that take place in Tokyo, London and a fictional city in Italy, Porto Corsa, which has more in common with the legendary Monaco Grand Prix circuit than with any actual, real-life Italian grand prix circuit. These were truly a feast for the eyes, and I'm glad I didn't catch the film in 3-D, which is notorious for darkening the appearance of the picture; I'm glad I didn't miss out on any of that fantastic detailing.

Also, Finn McMissile, while an obvious James Bond takeoff, was one of the few highlights of the film. Caine has done spy-inspired work before in the Austin Powers movies, but at least here there was less buffoonery to speak of, and in any case Caine really makes the character fun to watch. Talking about the spy-movie texture of the film, though, I was annoyed by how many cars met their "manufacturer" in this film in order to preserve the faint "Bond" vibe. The film was quite violent considering how benign the previous film was, NASCAR-style car pileups and all. In that, this movie was a much clumsier take on the action-thriller than The Incredibles and to be honest, it did not, at least in my book, make a very compelling argument for its own existence when the end of The Incredibles very deliberately set the characters up for further adventures.

Probably the best part of this movie was the Toy Story short that came before it, which was pretty funny, but seeing how the featured characters were Barbie and Ken, who are made by Mattel, who made the Cars diecast toys that earned eight billion dollars, I'm pretty sure the people laughing hardest are Mattel...all the way to the bank.

Cars 2 is a film I'm sure kids will enjoy, but to the adults who have grown used to Pixar's uniquely textured and nuanced storytelling, all I can say is, brace yourselves.

Rating: 2/5

Thank You American Audiences

I griped more than once on one of my blogs about how during my lifetime in general and in the last decade in particular Hollywood has, in addition to its reliance upon franchises their multitudes of installments, consistently plundered the past for its films, with remakes being so commonplace that there are more than one of them on a regular basis invading cineplexes every year.

It had gotten to the point that last weekend, two remakes of hit movies in the 1980s, Conan the Barbarian and Fright Night, actually went head-to-head. The same thing happened last year when a remake of 1984's The Karate Kid, went up againt The A-Team, a film adaptation of a popular 1980s TV series. Even though one of them won and one of them lost, the really annoying part was that yet again, Hollywood execs could crow about the power of the remake (which was especially infuriating in the case of The Karate Kid considering it had absolutely nothing to do with Karate except an almost completely non-sequitur reference). I actually liked The Karate Kid remake, but was genuinely annoyed by the producers' determination to ride on the goodwill of the original series to the extent that they weren't even willing to change to title to reflect the actual martial art practiced. With the movie having done well at the international box-office, they can now claim they were right.

Fortunately for those of us with remake fatigue, both Conan and Fright Night lost last weekend to a new movie based on a very recent book, The Help, which happened to be on its second weekend in theaters. Best of all, both of those remakes were in the format du jour, 3-D.

This makes me happy, if for no other reason than that now studio execs cannot smugly proclaim that making a hit is as easy as ripping off a movie that's a couple of decades old, or as easy as converting film into some murky, almost unwatchable state just so one can charge extra bucks.

Movies, as a non-essential good, are arguably expensive, relative to other, more important consumer goods, almost anywhere in the world, so when we shell out our money for anywhere between 100 to 120 minutes of entertainment we definitely deserve our money's worth. Who better to slam this message home to the suits in Hollywood than the people living in their own back yard? I'm pretty sure they pay more to see movies than we do over here.

So again, thank you, American audiences, for telling Hollywood that as far as remakes goes, enough is enough. Sure, they'll probably hit us with more remakes and reboots and sequels to remakes and reboots, but if nothing else, at least we won't be seeing Conan the Barbarian 2 or Fright Night 2, in 3-D or otherwise, any time soon.

No Love for Art House Lovers

There was once a time, not too long ago, I think that people interested in movies that were slightly off the beaten path could go to a few movie houses in town and watch them. That was what movie theaters like Shangri-La and some of the Ayala Cinemas used to be known for: showing off art house movies. Nowadays, they seem to be exclusive to Ayala Cinemas, if at all.

This is a disappointing development as I am really quite keen on seeing Woody Allen's new film Midnight in Paris, which doesn't seem to have a chance in hell at mainstream distribution here in the Philippines. Our local distributors of foreign films seem far more preoccupied with the more commercially viable product, an impulse which, while understandable, is highly unfortunate.

In an entertainment climate where everything is an adaptation of something or other or a reboot/remake/sequel of such adaptations, original movies should be appreciated for the rare jewels that they are, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Sure, film distributors need to make money, but it would be nice if they could even make a token effort to ensure that for every ten popcorn movies they sell here we could at least get one art film. This is not to say that popcorn films aren't good in their own way, but to my mind movies are like food for our souls; too much commercially popular fare is just as bad for our souls as too many hamburgers, fries and pizzas are for our bodies. Sure, there is the occasional movie where art and commerce meet and make wonderful music together, as is the case with many Pixar movies, but there's really something wonderfully intimate about quiet little movies like Sideways and Little Miss Sunshine that no commercial juggernaut can ever really capture.

To the foreign distributors of local films, please consider this: the local film industry, such as it is, for all of its creative and commercial woes, still tries to keep the fire of independent film burning, even though the product is wildly uneven in quality. There are people who value small, independent films here, whether it's to make them or to simply view them. We know that downloading your independent art house movies or buying them on bootleg DVD is bad, and we're willing to pay to see them in movie theaters. Please oblige us by putting them there.

Surprisingly Sophisticated Simians: A Review of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes

My exposure to the Planet of the Apes mythos is limited to a scene at the end of Mel Brooks' 1987 sci-fi sendup Spaceballs, and the much reviled 2001 remake by Tim Burton starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham-Carter. Suffice to say, then, that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic for the reboot when the ads for it first started playing a few months ago.

My wife was the one who first piqued my curiosity by showing me an interview that James Franco did for the movie, in which he predicted, with tongue probably half-in-cheek, that critics would hate it. My wife, half in jest, said we should watch the movie to support Franco.

With all due respect to the other cast members who appeared in the Spider-Man film series, Franco does seem like the most versatile in terms of acting chops, and daring in terms of role choices, having played the gay lover of Sean Penn's character in Milk and a rock climber who has to cut off his own arm in 127 Hours, the latter of which nabbed him an Oscar nomination. Sure, people talk about how he dropped the ball with a pretty bad job at hosting this year's Oscars, but I think it'll take more than a hosting gig gone bad to keep a good actor down.

And a good actor Franco definitely is. In this film he plays a scientist named Will Rodman, who works for a major pharmaceutical company and whose main preoccupation is coming up with a cure for Alzheimer's disease, with which his father Charles (John Lithgow, in a wonderfully moving performance) is currently afflicted. His company experiments on chimpanzees with great success, but a terrible incident with one chimp has the boss of the company (David Oyewolo) deciding to put all of them down. As it turns out, however, the real reason the ape went amok was that she believed her baby, which no one knew about, was in danger, and because one of the other scientists is too squeamish to put the baby chimp down, Will, who is similarly reluctant, ends up taking him home.

Suddenly, Will finds himself growing attached to the baby chimp, whom he names Caesar, and ends up raising him to adulthood. The chimp likewise bonds with Charles, and in the course of the development of this relationship Will is astonished by how intelligent Caesar actually is, having apparently inherited the intelligence that his mother obtained from the Alzheimer's treatments. Breaching protocol and ethics, and desperate to see Charles well again, Will begins using the drug on him. When Caesar gets into an accident, Will takes him to a vet, the lovely Caroline (Frieda Pinto), who eventually becomes Will's girlfriend, and between his recovering father, his genius of a chimp, whom Will regularly takes to a Redwood forest preserve to climb the trees and have fun, life couldn't be better for Will.

Things, however, take a turn for the worse when when Charles relapses, apparently due to his body's ability to resist the treatment. A misunderstanding involving Charles and the Rodmans' neighbor make Caesar believe that Charles is threatened, and he assaults the hapless neighbor, getting taken away to what appears to be some kind of ape shelter for his mischief, where the caretaker Dodge (Tom Felton) is as cruel to him as Will was kind. Unfortunately for Dodge, however, Caesar is getting smarter by the day, and doesn't intend to stay cooped up forever, and he figures he'll have a better chance busting loose with the help of the other apes.

I wasn't particularly keen on watching a movie that I thought would be about apes taking over the world, whether or not it was because of humanity's foolishness and hubris, but I'd like to reassure anyone similarly leery of this film that, whatever the title and trailers of this film may suggest, it's not like that at all. Sure, there is a bit of the "ape uprising" that the trailers suggested, but at its heart this story is about a rather moving family relationship, made particularly impressive by the fact that one of the family members is basically a digital effect (even though the actors got to work opposite motion-capture veteran Andy Serkis rather than a tennis ball or some other marker).

No new ground is broken here, not even in terms of visual effects (although they are quite wondrous to behold), but the execution of the effects is easily the best I've seen all year, even when stacked up against such tentpole films as the Harry Potter conclusion and Thor. The CGI used to bring the film's apes to life is simply the refinement of techniques that have been around for over a decade now courtesy of WETA Digital, but director Rupert Wyatt uses the technology to incredible effect. The apes are central to the story, but at no point to they overwhelm it; their seamless integration into the narrative is less a function of proper lighting and animation and more one of some pretty steady direction and performances by the actors who both play the apes and those who play against the apes. Andy Serkis, of course, is the star of the show even the audience never sees his actual face.

This is no slight to Franco, however. It is thanks to his wonderfully grounded performance that all the science is properly contextualized. Franco is key to this film, just as Serkis and WETA are, because it is Will Rodman's discussion of the medication that places the story firmly in a reality the viewer can embrace for a couple of hours. I have know idea how believable the science in this film was, and for all I know it was a complete load of malarkey, but Franco sold me on the idea completely. More than that, though, it's his genuinely moving relationship with his father and Caesar that really serves as the beating heart of this film. Caesar is only able to reach his potential because of how Will nurtures him over the years, and it is not something the hyper-intelligent ape forgets.

I've always liked John Lithgow as an actor, but there's something about the gentleness and vulnerability with which he portrays Charles Rodman that really made me look at Alzheimer's in a totally new way and made me fully understand on an emotional level why Will would want to cure him, even though on an intellectual level it's already an easy enough concept to understand. Like Franco, Lithgow helps bring Caesar to life with his performance.

The actors are ably backed up by some of the best (if not necessarily the most novel, or even the most ostentatious) visual effects of the year, some striking cinematography by Andrew Lesnie (who, like Serkis and WETA, is a Lord of the Rings veteran) and a nice, sweeping musical score by Patrick Doyle (who also helped Thor along nicely with some pretty hummable cues as well).

What really strikes me about this film is that at no point does it strive to be "epic;" there are no money shots, and almost no Zack-Snyder-slo-mos, and no overbearing music cues. The filmmakers one and all simply focus on telling a good, compelling story, if not necessarily an original one, and, to my mind, succeed immensely. There are a number of hints at a sequel, of course (considering that this is, after all, the revival of a franchise) with the only truly gratuitous one being the appearance of an ape whose sole apparent purpose is to look evil and foreboding, and who will probably be set up as a major villain in future films. That notwithstanding, the film stands quite well on its own, and its easy to forgive the filmmakers their aspirations towards a sequel after such a satisfying film.

This movie, especially when juxtaposed against Tim Burton's 2001 disaster (which, as I understand it, was a highly unpleasant experience for Burton himself), is a classic example of how a truly good film is all in the execution.

5/5

Good Old-Fashioned Fun: A Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

I'll admit at the outset that I was really looking forward to Captain America: The First Avenger, but as subjective as the process of reviewing a film can be I sincerely believe that this is a movie that deserves all of the raves it's getting from critics and audiences. Marvel has hit another one out of the park yet again.

The film begins in the present day, with mysterious men, many of whom apparently work for the United States government, uncovering something apparently very significant buried under the ice of the North Pole.

The film's narrative then begins in earnest as it then shifts to Norway in 1942, where a troop of strangely outfitted and equipped Nazis led by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), break into an old man's house and make off with a strange glowing cube which Marvel Comics readers and viewers of Thor may recognize.

Meanwhile, 90-pound weakling Rogers (Chris Evans) has tried five times to enlist in the U.S. Army, going to the extent of applying in five different American cities and even falsifying his application, but due to a laundry-list of physical defects on top of his very slight stature, he has been turned down every single time. Steve's luck finally changes when, after he has been dragged by his best friend Bucky (Sebastian Stan) to a world expo, and while arguing with Bucky over his efforts to enlist, of which Bucky disapproves, he is heard by German scientist and defector Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci with a delightful accent).

Erskine picks Rogers for an experimental treatment which, if successful, will transform Rogers into the ultimate physical specimen, much to the chagrin of Colonel Chester Philips (Tommy Lee Jones in top form), who takes one look at Steve and thinks Erskine is joking. Erskine knows that the treatment amplifies everything about a man, and believes that it is Roger's inner qualities which make him an ideal candidate. British liaison Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) can't help but notice some of that inner strength in Rogers as well.

The treatment works, and Steve grows to be twice his previous size, but due to a sudden and tragic development the experiment cannot be replicated and Steve is the only one of his kind.

The United States senator responsible for overseeing the Super Soldier program takes a keen interest in Steve, but instead of sending him off to fight, puts Steve in red, white and blue tights and sends him traveling across America to sell war bonds with a bevy of leggy chorus girls in tow.

When Cap's tour heads to Europe, however, the G.I.s on the front are less than impressed, but a daring rescue mission to save Bucky, whose unit has been decimated, changes things for Cap and he finds himself in the thick of the fight, taking on the Nazi's "deep science unit" known as HYDRA, which is led by none other than Schmidt, also known as the Red Skull.

The story of Steve Rogers, the skinny army reject with a lion's heart who is transformed into the ultimate he-man by a military experiment is one that comic-book geeks like me know backwards and forwards, but it is to the full credit of director Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park 3, The Rocketeer), screenwriters Christoper Markus and Stephen McFeely, star Chris Evans (Fantastic Four), and the rest of the cast and crew of this film, that it is made almost perfectly accessible to everyone else. Fortunately for us fanboys, however, there are enough references to the Marvel Universe to reward our devotion. I know I'll be going over the DVD of this more than once to see if I can spot all the Easter Eggs.

The decision to set this film in the Second World War rather than updating it was the first thing Marvel did right, and the second was to hire a director and a cast who nailed the tone perfectly. Though I felt trepidation at the casting of Evans as Cap, he allayed my fears with an earnest and ultimately involving performance. Though he anchors the film, he gets ample support from the other actors in the ensemble including Lee Jones, Tucci, Atwell, Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, future dad of Tony Stark of the Iron Man films, Toby Jones as Arnim Zola, and Weaving. It was a pleasure seeing the Howling Commandos in action too, in particular Band of Brothers vet Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan, wearing his trademark bowler hat and handlebar mustache.

What sets this movie apart from just about every other in the Marvel stable is its distinct period feel, which not even the recent X-Men: First Class, supposedly set in 1962, was able to adequately capture. The 1940s setting, complete with such improbable (and goofy) concepts as the "super soldier serum" and "vitarays" could have been the film's greatest stumbling block, but by embracing it wholeheartedly, Joe Johnston and the cast and crew have turned Captain America: The First Avenger into the kind of rip-roaring adventure yarn a lot of audiences haven't seen since the first couple of Indiana Jones movies.

There are a few sobering scenes and set pieces intended to remind the audience of the setting, like one with a depressed Cap sitting with Peggy Carter in a destroyed tavern somewhere in London after one of the bombings that routinely took place during the war, among others. For the most part, however, Johnston and company sidestep the potentially more sensitive aspects of staging the narrative during such a tumultuous period of human history through numerous storytelling tweaks that set Schmidt apart from Hitler and which actually reduce the bloodshed if not the actual body count. No one will ever mistake Johnston for Spielberg, to whom he pays due tribute in the course of the film, but he has a steady hand for directing action, and judging by the outstanding performances turned in by his actors, a genuine feel for effective storytelling in general.

Setting the film in the 1940s also created wonderful opportunities for art director Rick Heinrichs to really cut loose with the period look of the film. Particularly outstanding were the retro-futuristic designs of Hydra's facilities, weapons and vehicles. Interestingly enough, apparently Heinrichs and his crew drew upon the actual designs for unused Nazi prototypes.

Finally, the choice of setting and tone gave composer Alan Silvestri the chance to turn in some of his best work since Forrest Gump, or even the Back to the Future movies. Indeed, the music of this film makes just about every other Marvel music score, even the ones I've enjoyed, as well as comic-book movie music of the last twenty years sound absolutely generic. To my mind it's right up there with John Williams' original Superman fanfare, and the "Captain America March," that plays during the end credits feels distinctly like an homage to the venerable Mr. Williams.

The visual effects are fantastic, even though the seams show here and there, but the one that has everyone talking is the trick of turning six-foot-tall Chris Evans into the scrawny and tiny pre-serum Steve Rogers. The effect was reportedly achieved mainly by actually shrinking Evans' actual body using computer graphics as opposed to merely cutting and pasting his head onto a smaller man's body. It's a remarkable effect, one that is made all the more convincing by Evans' fine performance.

Ironically, perhaps the only truly jarring thing about this movie is its very reason for being, which is to set up next year's superhero ensemble piece The Avengers. The modern-day bookends do nothing to serve the story of the film itself and serve only to set up Joss Whedon's film.

Fortunately, in between all of this is a complete, stand-alone film with handsome visuals, compelling acting, dialogue and directing, and a somewhat poignant ending that comic book fans will recognize and non-comic book fans may appreciate just the same.

This movie is definitely worth seeing, though to get the best value for money it would be best to avoid 3-D, as I did. This is a movie for anyone who feels they don't make action movies like they used to anymore.

4.5/5

A Potentially Rich Subgenre: Period-Comic-Book Films

Two decades ago, Walt Disney Pictures and director Joe Johnston gave audiences The Rocketeer, an action movie based on a cult-favorite comic book created by the late Dave Stevens in 1982, set in 1937 Los Angeles. It was a flawed but wonderfully energetic movie that boasted some slick period sets and costumes, some solid performances by Bill Campbell as the title character whose alter ego was down-on-his-luck circus pilot Cliff Secord, Timothy Dalton as his nemesis, a luscious Jennifer Connelly as his love interest and Alan Arkin as his mentor, mechanic and father figure, visual effects by renowned F/X house Industrial Light and Magic and a propulsive music score by future Avatar composer James Horner.

The problem was, apparently the filmmakers hadn't counted on the fact that most of the people who didn't read comic books (and even quite a number of people who did) really didn't care much for Cliff Secord and his adventures, and the movie was a box-office dud. Speaking for myself, I had major problems with its visual effects, particularly the flying ones, which, thirteen years after Richard Donner's Superman first flew into movie theaters, looked grotesquely unconvincing, even when compared to the work of that much older film.

There was, however, a lot about that film that I liked (I have the soundtrack, in fact), not the least of which was the 1930s setting, which the filmmakers wholeheartedly embraced. I felt they were on to something there.

With X-Men: First Class, the first film of the series set in the 1960s, having done decent business at the global box-office, and with Captain America: The First Avenger, also directed by Johnston, set in 1942, and apparently set to do better than decent business, I wonder if the time has come to look into making more of them.

Of course, the problem with Hollywood is that when it comes to making certain kinds of movies, it's kind of like strip-mining; they don't stop until the whole genre has crashed and burned and scarred the public consciousness for years to come. It was like that with disaster movies, with audiences finally saying "no" when Warner Brothers and Wolfgang Petersen remade The Poseidon Adventure in 2006. But the thing about genre filmmaking is that, unlike strip-mining which basically involves exploiting a non-renewable resource, it only takes one good film to get the genre going again, which was what happened when 2000's X-Men revitalized the comic book movie scarcely three years after Batman and Robin nearly killed it.

The thing that makes period-comic-book movies an idea that might be worth considering (especially if Captain America makes decent bank) is that like Captain America and the X-Men, most of the truly well-known comic book characters like the ones whose adventures are published by Marvel or DC comics were actually created back in the 1940s, 50s or 60s. Placing at least some of those characters in period-specific settings would in some cases imbue their stories with the socio-cultural flavor that characterized the first appearances of these characters, and actually give them an internal logic they might not otherwise have.

Of course, I'm glad they updated Iron Man and Spider-Man rather than setting them in the 1960s, but to my mind the X-Men's filmed mythology became that much richer for its throwback to the historical milieu in which the book was created, with the Civil Rights movement only just beginning. I'll have to reserve judgment on Captain America: the First Avenger till after I've seen it, but if the buzz is to be believed, apparently the period setting truly enhanced the storytelling as well.

Period pieces have proven bankable time and again, with the four films of the Indiana Jones series, the setting of which varies from the 1940s to the 1950s, and the four films of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, which take place sometime in the late 18th century or perhaps the early 19th century, all making significant amounts of money most film producers would kill to have their films earn. Even recent period fare, like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, have been eagerly embraced by audiences, which goes to show how marketable period films, even those which aren't dead serious and angling for Oscars, can be.

A lot of comic-book characters, even the ones who've been updated over the years, could arguably benefit from period-specific treatment. Luke Cage, who basically looks like a bouncer masquerading as a superhero these days, walking around in nondescript jeans-and-t-shirt ensemble with a shaved head, is a good case in point. Admittedly, his yellow-shirt-and-tiara setup may be a little hard to carry off on screen, but a film that pays solid tribute to his origins as a product of blaxploitation, complete with period-appropriate music and costumes, could potentially have more narrative heft than a generic, hip-hop, "gangsta" movie which could very easily get lost in the shuffle of movies about dance-offs, rap-offs and drive-by-shootings, many of which go straight to video. It could have an American Gangster vibe to it.

Doctor Strange, long rumored as the first Disney-produced Marvel film (with Patrick Dempsey reportedly chasing the role), actually owes a lot to Steve Ditko's funky, psychedelic visuals, which would feel pretty much at home, I imagine, in a 1960s milieu as well.

The list could go on, really; DC comics' heroes are even older than Marvel's, so there's a bit of potential period goodness to play with right there, not to mention all of the other comic book characters created in the Golden and Silver Ages of comic books or comic strips who sort of fell by the wayside. Maybe if characters like the Shadow and the Phantom had been treated with a little more reverence, their filmed adaptations wouldn't have done as badly as they did.

Heck, if this next version of Superman fails to fly the way Bryan Singer's quasi-sequel failed, maybe they could think of rebooting it again, but this time setting it in 1938. Just a thought.

Personally, I'd love to see more comic-book movies get made, even though most of the big ones I was looking out for have already been done, with only a handful left that I'm really pining for, but in a market where superhero films are starting to feel generic, with audiences and critics claiming "superhero fatigue" maybe a little subverting of the genre is in order.