Kung Fu Panda 2

Posted on May 26, 2011 at 6:39 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for sequences of martial arts action and mild violence
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Martial arts action and violence, children separated from parents, characters in peril
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	May 27, 2011

Po, the kung-fu master panda (Jack Black), has everything he hoped for in the first movie. He has the martial arts skills to protect and impress the community and he is accepted as a teammate by the greatest champions in China. But he has not yet found inner peace, and that will require an even greater struggle.

Po has not wanted to think about the fact that his father is not a panda, until a glimpse of an all-but-forgotten insignia on an enemy unlocks some memories so painful Po does not want to think about. But a new villain (Gary Oldman as the peacock Lord Shen) is the most vicious Po has faced, and he cannot be defeated unless Po understands the tragedy that links them together. He cannot fight his memories and his adversaries at the same time. Po must make peace with his past to move on to the future.

As with the first one, this film combines exquisite, Asian-influenced design and a story that includes the classic heroic themes and gentle humor. The action sequences are exciting, especially a sensational scene with our heroes hiding out in a dragon costume. Before the peril gets too tense, there is always a laugh to remind us that we are safe with Po. “Ah,” he says, walking into battle, “my old enemy — stairs!”

It has some nice parallels — Po and Lord Shen were both given up by their parents, for different reasons. And both make use of fight techniques that can be used for good or evil. The same gunpowder that creates inspiring firework displays can be weaponized into something that could mean the end of kung fu. Po fights for freedom and for the discipline and skill of martial arts itself.

It opens with some background, beautifully told with traditional shadow puppets. Po’s existential crisis is handled deftly, with the reassuring message that even when the beginning of our story is not happy, that does not have to control who we are.

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Midnight in Paris

Posted on May 26, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 27, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 20, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005MYEQ4U

Woody Allen’s best film in years is a nostalgic tribute to nostalgia. And this is one you’ll enjoy more by knowing less, so consider this entire review a spoiler alert and stop now if you want to preserve all of its surprises.

It begins with postcard Paris, a series of shots of iconic locations and a rueful jazz score.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a successful Hollywood writer who longs for something richer and more challenging. He has come to Paris with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams, doing her best in a thin role), and her parents, caricature Californians who prefer Napa Valley wine and American movies, even when they are in France. A character calls him Miniver Cheevy because he romanticizes the Paris of the past, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote and drank and things seemed — at least in retrospect — simpler and filled with promise. It all seems even more appealing as he struggles to do the writing he says he wants to do and fumes as Inez seems enthralled by Paul, a fatuous know-it-all (Michael Sheen).

Okay, now spoiler alert again — stop reading if you don’t want to know what happens. One night, when Inez has gone dancing with Paul and his girlfriend, Gil goes for a walk. Just as the clock chimes twelve, a car pulls up and he is beckoned inside. At first, he thinks he has happened upon a costume party, but then he realizes that he is not talking to a couple dressed as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill); he is speaking to the legendary writers, and seeing them when they were young and happy and excited by the world around them. He meets his heroes. They accept him as one of them. He begins to live the life he believes he was meant to live — but only at midnight.

And there’s a girl. Marion Cotillard plays a free-spirited but warm-hearted girl who has had relationships with some of the now-legendary names of the era. And Gil is engaged. But she and Gil are drawn to each other and suddenly the only thing he can remember that he has in common with Inez is a fondness for Naan bread.

Allen makes no attempt to re-create the historical Paris of the lost generation. Part of the charm of the story is the way that it is very much Gil’s idealized dream of the era, with all of the now-famous names friendly and obliging. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) is perfectly happy to read his novel (about a man who owns a nostalgia shop) and give him both encouragement and constructive suggestions. Just from reading what Gil wrote, a famous author (portrayed with great wit and gusto by Corey Stoll) has insights about Inez that Gil could not see. In a Jungian sense, each of the real-life characters is here simply as a manifestation of some aspect of Gil, a way for him to think through things he has been too successful to consider. When the story takes an “Inception”-like inverted twist, Gil begins to understand, like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, that the power is inside him when it is time to go home.

The retro scenes are brimming with charm, an all-star parade of early 20th century luminaries, charmingly written and beautifully portrayed. They may be Gil’s projections, but they are enchanting. The opening postcard shots shimmer into the dream of Paris and we embrace it as happily as Gil does, swept up in the bittersweet nostalgia you can only feel for something you never really experienced. Those midnight excursions for Gil are what movies like this one are for us, an emotional vacation that, if we are lucky, provides respite, clarity, and renewal. Allen continues his exploration of the great capitals of Europe next year with Rome. I’m nostalgic for it already.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Posted on May 19, 2011 at 6:50 pm

Jack is back.

And he is doing what he does best — stealing the movie from everyone else. Johnny Depp continues Captain Jack Sparrow’s conquest of center stage with this fourth in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, which abandons any pretense of having anyone else as the hero, and just lets him take over.

The series inspired by a theme park ride has for the first time relied on a book as its source. According to the credits, it is “inspired by” On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers, an award-winning fantasy novel about Blackbeard and the fountain of youth. The Disney series characters are grafted onto the story, which takes us from the courts (in both senses of the term) of London to Spain and then back to the Caribbean, with some historical figures like King George II and Blackbeard. And we also get to enjoy zombie crewmen, a gallant missionary, sword fights, Keith Richards, chases, explosions, a pirate with a peg leg, shifting loyalties, daring rescues, revenge, voodoo dolls, a carefully balanced struggle on a shifting surface, and mermaids summoned by song who are as deadly as they are gloriously beautiful. Hurray for summer movies!

Director Rob Marshall (“Nine,” “Chicago”) takes over seamlessly from Gore Verbinski, adeptly managing the tumult of the various characters (three pirate captains plus Penelope Cruz!), locations, and perils. And everyone is looking for the fountain of youth, where you can steal someone else’s years if you have the chalices — and a mermaid’s tear.

In the previous films, Captain Jack Sparrow’s rapscallion impishness set off nicely the brave, honorable, but not exactly colorful romance of Will and Elizabeth. Here, Ian McShane, with his gimlet eye and gravely rumble of a voice, joins the cast as Blackbeard, “the pirate all pirates fear,” to remind us that pirates can be ruthless. “If I don’t kill a man every now and then they forget who I am,” he explains, leaving Jack to be as close as we get to a hero. Cruz plays Angelica, a woman Jack once wronged who may be more of a pirate than he is. “You haven’t changed,” she says to him. “I haven’t found the need,” he replies. And that pretty much sums up the enterprise.

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Mia and the Migoo

Posted on May 12, 2011 at 10:13 am

The influence of acclaimed Japanese animation wizard Hayao Miyazaki is clear in “Mia and the Migoo,” an award-winning film from French director Jacques-Rémy Girerd. It has a Miyazaki-like brave young heroine on an eco-themed journey and random encounters with grotesque characters. And, like Miyazaki, Girerd remains committed to traditional, hand-drawn animation, a welcome shift from computer-created images.

But “Mia” incorporates some of Miyazaki’s weaknesses – narrative incoherence and a remote, chilly quality – while never reaching the soaring visual or emotional scope of “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,” or even “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” And a weak script feels like “Ferngully 3: Revenge of the Developers.”

Mia (voice of Amanda Misquez) is a little girl in an unidentified South American country. Her father, Paulo (voice of Joaquin Mas) has taken a dangerous job far from home to earn money to take care of her. As he works on a luxury homes construction project in a pristine part of the rainforest, he is trapped in a landslide. Mia immediately senses that her father needs her. She visits her mother’s grave to say goodbye and sets off to find him.

The man behind the construction project is Jekhide (voice of John DiMaggio of “Futurama”), a callous bully who relies on bribes, intimidation, and worse to get the project done. Gunpowder is “the smell of brute strength and power,” he tells his kind-hearted young son, Aldrin (voice of Vincent Agnello). “I’ll take that flame-thrower as well,” Jekhide tells a weapons dealer (voice of James Woods), as he prepares to hunt down the mysterious creature that has been obstructing the builders.

The Yeti-like creature is the Migoo, guardian of an “Avatar”-style Tree of Life. Mia and Aldrin will have to help the Migoo guard the tree or all life on earth will be at risk.

The Migoo are lumpen, golem-like muddy figures who are so dim-witted and consumed with bickering it is hard to imagine that they could protect a paperclip. But briefly there is one intriguing suggestion that they – it – is/are not several entities but a single one, at the same time big and small, many and one. This echoes Mia’s mystic connection to her father, somehow waking, hundreds of miles away, the instant that he was in trouble, as well as the theme of the film about our interconnectedness to our environment. But it quickly gets lost in an unbalanced, too-many-cooks script (five credited writers). Distracting flashes of crude humor dissipate any connection to the characters and odd encounters derail the momentum. And the climax muddles its own message.

The total control permitted by computer-generated animation has achieved and even exceeded photography to reach a kind of hyper-realism, liberating the few remaining practitioners of hand-drawn animation to experiment with a more free-form, impressionistic form of story-telling. Recent masterpieces of animation like “Coraline” or the “Triplets of Belleville” are thrilling demonstrations of strong personal taste rejecting many of the tools offered by computer graphics in favor of a distinctive personal vision.

This freedom puts even more of an obligation to make each artistic choice in service of the story. “Mia and the Migoo” does have some striking images with strong blocks of color. They would be impressive illustrations in a book. But animation, as the word indicates, is about movement. The lack of fluidity in “Mia” is not an artistic choice; it is inadequacy that in close-ups recalls the lips-only action in old “Clutch Cargo” cartoons.

Girerd makes the odd choice of outlining most of his figures with a glowing alizarin crimson. It may be intended to suggest the heat of global warming but it makes them look bruised. Red underpainting seems to add a radioactive glow to the backgrounds as well, highly out of place for a movie which celebrates the rich greens and blues of fertile vegetation and life-giving waters.

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The Green Hornet

Posted on May 3, 2011 at 8:00 am

Anyone here remember Van Williams?

He was the star of the 1966-67 television series, “The Green Hornet.” But the only thing anyone remembers about the show today was the actor who played the title character’s martial arts and automotive expert sidekick, Kato: Bruce Lee. The tradition continues with this new film. Jay Chou (“Curse of the Golden Flower”) has the screen charisma, timing, and fight skills to make Kato watchable. That guy who plays the Hornet? Not so much.

In fact, the three things wrong with this movie are: Seth Rogen co-produced, Seth Rogen co-wrote, and Seth Rogen stars. Seth Rogen the co-producer and writer badly over-estimates the appeal of Rogen the performer. When called upon to play a clueless schlub, he can convey a certain shambling lack of pretension or artifice with some appeal. He was perfect as the brainless jello character in “Monsters vs. Aliens” and held his own fairly well as a secondary character in “Funny People,” “Superbad,” and “Knocked Up.” He may have some meta aspirations in casting himself as a self-indulgent and irresponsible playboy who decides to become a force for justice. But he doesn’t even make a persuasive dissolute. When he tries to do more, he loses all of the affection from the audience he ever mustered in playing guys who were better than they knew. Here is is so much less than his character believes to be and is supposed to be, he comes across as full of himself and egotistical; it’s as though his success in Hollywood and his hyphenate status have finally gone to his head. And even though he apparently recognizes his limited range by reducing the character arc to about an inch and a half; even after Britt decides to become a sort-of grown-up and a sort-of crime-fighter, Rogen the writer and Rogen the actor keep him pretty much an immature dope all the way through. It wears thin long before the movie is half over.

It also drags down the parts of the film that do work, especially Chou, whose precise, understated delivery is a nice counterpoint to Rogen’s messy stumbles. Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Be Kind, Rewind”) has a gift for whimsy that adds visual interest. An impossibly souped-up supercar has an old-fashioned turntable for playing disarmingly retro LPs. He slices up the screen into segments resembling something between “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch,” and that Breck shampoo commercial about “and they they told two people and they told two people.” And he makes good use of the depth of 3D in the fight scenes. We get Kato-vision to see how he sizes up the opposition, with a clever variation later on. Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”) manages to make more of the villain than the script gives him and there’s a nice cameo from the ubiquitous James Franco (giving us time to think that he would make a great Hornet).

Rogen is falling into the Adam Sandler/Peter Pan trap, the endless boy-man, alternately wolfish toward and intimidated by girls (Cameron Diaz has the thankless role) and incapable of taking responsibility at home or at work. At one point, Kato literally puts him in a diaper. The only reason to give the audience such a mess is so we can have the fun of seeing him learn some lessons. But he never does. This is a hornet that’s all buzz, no sting.

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