Posted on December 9, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Rescue on the Rails
I have one copy to give away. Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Thomas in the subject line and don’t forget your address. Tell me which engine is your favorite and I will pick a winner on December 16. Good luck!
Posted on December 4, 2011 at 10:08 am
Babar and Father Christmas
I have one copy to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Babar in the subject line and don’t forget your address! I’ll pick a winner on December 6. Good luck!
Posted on November 22, 2011 at 6:12 pm
A sleigh pulled by reindeer? That’s so five decades ago. With the population topping seven billion and the Duggars getting ready to welcome baby number 20, Santa (Jim Broadbent) needs all the support modern technology can provide. He may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but he has swapped the sleigh for a state-of-the-art spaceship with a cloaking device, and he has a battalion of elves with the precision technology of Seal Team Six and nifty hand-held devices with naughty/nice indicators. Santa’s head of ops is his burly son, Steve (Hugh Laurie), who barks orders from mission control in camo fatigues and a high and tight haircut. Meanwhile, his bumbling but kind-hearted brother, Arthur Christmas (James McAvoy), sits by himself and answers letters from children old school-style, one at a time by hand, wearing a fuzzy Christmas sweater decorated with candy canes and reindeer-faced slippers.
The British Aardman studio is beloved for claymation films like the “Wallace and Gromit” series, characterized by off-beat characters literally showing the fingerprints of the humans who created them and a refreshing unwillingness to focus-group their stories to make them bland and culturally non-specific. While this one has some accommodation to American sensibilities — surely a little girl from Cornwall would address her letter to Father Christmas rather than Santa — the Aardman sensibility has thankfully been transferred to the digital world without looking sterile or boringly hyper-real. Steve’s goatee is shaped like a Christmas tree, an elf has a pierced eyebrow, and a reindeer has a plastic cone on his head. The settings, especially on the North Pole, are deliciously intricate and the characters understatedly quirky. I longed for a pause button to explore the witty details, especially the Enigma code-inspired analog machines Arthur and his grandfather use to send messages.
Santa’s family is endearingly flawed and familiarly dysfunctional. He loves his sons and knows he should retire, but he just cannot give up the spotlight, even in playing a Christmas board game with his family. His father, Grandsanta (Bill Nighy) longs for a chance to show he can still take the starring role. I was especially taken with Mrs. Christmas (Imelda Staunton), whose comfy demeanor hides some unexpected skills. Steve is a numbers guy who is comfortable with a delivery record that is almost perfect and he is angry and frustrated at not being promoted to become the new Santa. Clumsy, anxious Arthur knows that no child should be disappointed on Christmas morning. So when one gift is mistakenly left behind, it will be up to Arthur to save the day. With Santa and Steve in bed and mission control shut down, Grandsanta, Arthur, and a spirited stowaway wrapping elf (Ashley Jenson as Bryony) set off in the sleigh to deliver that last gift, a pink twinkle bicycle, to a little girl in Cornwall before sunrise.
From the brisk Justin Bieber video that opens the story to the warm-hearted happy ending, this is a holiday charmer that shows us how imperfect families can still feel just right.
Posted on November 21, 2011 at 8:00 am
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | All Ages |
| MPAA Rating: | G |
| Profanity: | None |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | None |
| Violence/ Scariness: | None |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | 2011 |
| Date Released to DVD: | November 23, 2011 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B005J4N5G8 |
Based on one of the top-selling children’s books of all time, The Littlest Angel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS9YOoI0_5Q
I have one copy to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with “Angel” in the subject line and don’t forget your address. I’ll pick a winner this weekend!
Posted on November 19, 2011 at 6:23 pm
I loved the original Happy Feet, but five years later only liked this sequel. It’s still a lot of fun to see dancing, singing penguins, but the meandering storyline never catches hold.
In the original, a small Emperor penguin named Mumbles (Elijah Wood) could not sing like the others but loved to dance and ultimately found a way to be true to himself and be a part of the community. Toward the end, the movie took a darker turn by acknowledging the impact of climate change on the Antarctic’s pristine world. This movie seems to have adopted the same template with a few random variations. Once again, there is a mash-up of music from a variety of genres (now a more familiar idea in this post “Glee”-era) and a small penguin who does not fit in, but this movie begins with the environmental crisis as the penguins see something — and a color — that is new to their black and white world. The ice is beginning to melt and underneath is green grass.
Wood returns as Mumbles, with rock star Pink replacing the late Brittany Murphy as his spouse, Gloria. Their son son Erik (Ava Acres) is a misfit like his father. He cannot sing or dance and after a humiliating failure in front of the whole penguin tribe, he runs away from home, followed by two of his friends, Atticus and Boadicia (charmingly voiced by Benjamin Flores Jr. and Meibh Campbell). As Mumbles did in the first film, they meet up with some Adelies penguins led by the wild, sweater-wearing Lovelace (Robin Williams), who has a new friend, Sven (voice superstar Hank Azaria), a penguin with the ability to fly — and a secret about his identity. Mumbles goes after the penguin chicks, but on the way home, they find that the ice has broken apart so that their community is cut off. They cannot get back and their friends and family cannot get food. They will need the help of the Andelies and some other friends to rescue the Emperor penguins and find a new home. Meanwhile, though the penguins have no idea, a couple of microscopic krill named Will and Bill (voices of Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) are on an adventure of their own, trying to move beyond the hive mind of their species to evolve into something more independent.
The music choices are delightful but too often just frustrating snippets. The relationship between Mumbles and Erik never comes to life. The segments about Will and Bill are far more engaging (the movie I’d really like to see is the Pitt/Damon recording studio riffs), but they are not integrated enough to the rest of the storyline until a Cindy Lou Who moment at the end. It’s nice to make a movie about how everything is connected but in this movie, it does not really hold together.
