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!
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
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
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
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
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.
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
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
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
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