Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs. Evil

Posted on April 28, 2011 at 6:52 pm

The Weinstein Company may be nowhere near the gold standard set by Pixar in the imagination and technical ability of its animation, but it beats all ten of the champion’s justifiably lauded classics in one category. Pixar has yet to produce a single film with a female hero, while “Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs. Evil,” has two, both brave, strong, compassionate, loyal, smart, and independent.

As director Mike Disa wrote in The Huffington Post, female characters in animation – the human ones anyway – are nearly always focused on love and family. “How many animated films have you seen where the female lead is little more than a cliché object for the hero to impress in the last reel? Face it, if you want to be a strong female character in animation you are better off as a mouse.” He was determined to make a movie for girls and boys with female characters whose idea of happily ever after did not necessarily mean the perfect date.

The first “Hoodwinked” movie was a fresh and funny take on the tale of Red Riding Hood, with appealing characters and a clever script to make up for animation that tended to be static and pedestrian. We entered the story at the climax, with the woodsman breaking into Granny’s house just as Red realized it was a wolf wearing Granny’s nightie. As each of the characters explained what happened to a patient cop who happens to be a frog (elegantly voiced by David Ogden Stiers) we learned that everything we thought we knew about the story was wrong and any assumptions we had about the intentions and capabilities of the characters was entertainingly turned inside out and upside down. The wolf (with the impeccably wry voice of Patrick Warburton, “Seinfeld’s” Puddy) was merely a reporter trying to get a story. Granny (voice of Glenn Close) had a secret – she was an X-games champion. The burly, ax-wielding huntsman was a gentle soul who just wants to yodel. Red did not need to be rescued by anyone. And the real villain turned out to be the adorable little bunny named Boingo (voice of Andy Dick), who was trying to steal Granny’s recipes.

As the sequel begins, Red (voice of “Heroes’” Hayden Panettierre, replacing Anne Hathaway) has taken a leave of absence from working with the Wolf at a super high-tech law enforcement operation called HEA (for Happily Ever After). She is studying with the Sister Hood, a training camp high in the mountains with a combined program of martial arts and cooking.

Surveillance experts Bo Peep and her sheep, stationed at the control center’s bank of monitors, report that two children have been seen in the vicinity of a house made out of candy.

Wolf tries his best, but this time huffing and puffing won’t blow the door in. To rescue little Hansel (voice of Bill Hader) and Gretel (voice of Amy Poehler) and Red’s granny from a masked wicked witch named Verushka (voice of Joan Cusack), he needs some help.

Red has yet to learn the Sister Hood’s most carefully guarded secret, the missing ingredient in the magic truffle recipe. She still makes the mistake of getting distracted from her task by impetuous pride and impatient insistence on doing things herself. But those lessons will have to wait – or be learned on the job — as she races to the rescue.

Red and Wolf get the help of old friends: the frog cop (who mutters “Mammals!” when things get out of hand), Twitchy the over-caffeinated squirrel (voice of co-screenwriter Cory Edwards), a banjo-playing goat, the yodeling huntsman (voice of Martin Short), and even an old enemy – Boingo, now confined, Hannibal Lecter-style, in prison. Welcome new additions include Wayne Newton as a singing harp, Cheech and Chong as two of the three pigs, and David Alan Grier as Moss the Troll, who tries to keep Red from crossing his bridge.

The jokes come very fast, with a whirlwind of pop culture references from “Happy Days” to the Food Network, “Goodfellas,” blogging, and the Disney classic “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” There are some nice 3D swoops and drops, but the more vertiginous entertainment of the film is in the script as once again what we think we know about fairy tale heroines, villains, mean girls, old ladies, witches, and happy endings are deliciously turned upside down and inside out.

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3D Animation Fantasy Series/Sequel

Gulliver’s Travels

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 8:00 am

A cringe-inducing catastrophe with all of the appeal of fingernails on blackboard, this movie’s first early warning sign should have been the omission of Jonathan Swift from the opening credits.

I thought at first it was an arrogant oversight. Now I think it is more likely his ghost showed up and threatened to haunt the film-makers and their descendants forever if they did not remove any mention of his name. Swift is the man who wrote the book, with satire so biting and fantasy so thrilling that it has endured for almost 300 years. It will survive this, too, but just barely.

The story has been updated so that Gulliver, like every other aspect of the story, is downgraded (and degraded). In Swift’s book, he is a surgeon. Here, played by a doughy and lusterless Jack Black, he is a guy who works in a newspaper mailroom, too insecure to try to get a promotion or ask out the beautiful editor he adores (Amanda Peet, who does her best to pretend she is in a better movie).

In order to impress her, Gulliver plagiarizes some travel pieces. She gives him an assignment to investigate the Bermuda triangle. I know this is a fantasy, but since when can newspapers afford a mail room staff and what appears to be a bountiful budget for investigative travel pieces?

Gulliver gets trapped in a vortex that lands him in a kingdom called Lilliput, populated by people who are just six inches tall. As in the book, at first he is captured, tied down while he is asleep on the beach. He stands up, ripping the ropes open. But there was noting in the book about his pants falling down, and then having him fall backwards with a poor Lilliputian apparently smothered by his, uh, tush separation.

And then it really gets disgusting. Gulliver has to rescue the king from a fire and, finding no water within reach, pees on everything to douse the flames . As dispiriting as that is, it is not as bad as the flaccid torpor of the script, which shows utter contempt for its audience in every line. Every reference, joke, and plot development is tired and predictable. Gulliver collects — guess! Yep, “Star Wars” action figures. At work, he slacks off by — guess! Playing “Guitar Hero.” When he persuades the Lilliputians that he is known as President Awesome back home where he comes from, we see posters all over the city with Gulliver appearing as the hero of every movie or play from “West Side Story” to “Wicked.” Those are hardly recognizable, much less knee-slapping references for anyone under 40.

Even worse, Gulliver is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He reflexively lies to everyone. He is selfish, incurious, and thoughtless. There is a dull storyline about a Lilliputian commoner named Horatio (a sweet Jason Segal) who dares to love the princess (a regal Emily Blunt), but it is ineptly handled. When the princess challenges the bad guy (Chris O’Dowd, the movie’s sole highlight) to come up with a reason for loving her, predictably, he can’t. But then, shouldn’t Horatio demonstrate some understanding or appreciation of the princess to show his fitness? The script and director Rob Letterman cannot be bothered to follow through. It just keeps desperately throwing stuff at the audience, finally including a killer robot.

Letterman, who showed he knows better in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” blows all the possibilities of the book’s shrewd (and still very relevant) commentary for silly sight gags like Gulliver’s using the Lilliputians to re-enact video games and DVDs. A “Titanic” joke! Stop!

A lump of coal in the stockings of everyone behind this mess.

Rio

Posted on April 14, 2011 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Mild peril
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	April 15, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	August 1, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004HO6I4M

A South American setting and striking animation lend freshness to “Rio’s” otherwise much-traveled storyline about a pampered pet who has to learn to survive in the wild. We’ve seen this tale many times — “Madagascar,” “Bolt,” “The Wild,” “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,”and more. But this version is buoyed by local color — literally, with a vibrantly sun-drenched palette, along with a sensationally festive Carnival parade, and a slinky samba-liscious soundtrack overseen by Rio’s most enduringly popular musical export, Sergio Mendes.

Blu (voice of “The Social Network’s” Jesse Eisenberg) is a rare blue macaw who was captured by animal smugglers in Brazil as a tiny chick. His crate falls out of a truck in snowy Minnesota (identified onscreen simply as “Not Rio”) and is rescued by a little girl named Linda. He grows up blissfully domesticated and never bothers to learn to fly. Everything he wants is within reach. He brings Linda her glasses when she wakes up and she makes sure he has just the right number of marshmallows in his hot chocolate. As he explains, he is not a pet; he is a companion. And Linda says he is her best friend.

They are visited by an ornithologist named Tulio (voice of Rodrigo Santoro), who tells Linda (voice of Leslie Mann) there is just one last surviving female blue macaw (voice of Anne Hathaway as Jewel). Unless they mate, it will be the end of their species. Linda reluctantly agrees to take Blu to Brazil. But smugglers show up again to steal Blu and Jewel. Blu has to learn some survival skills and make some new friends to find his way back to Linda.

Blue Sky is the studio that produced the “Ice Age” series and it is obvious that they are glad to be done with the endless blues and grays of the ice, snow, and rock settings. Brazilian-born director Carlos Saldanha (director of “Ice Age” and co-director of the underrated “Robots”) takes evident pride and delight in bringing his home town to the screen, taking full advantage of 3D CGI so that we can swoop around the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue atop the Corcovado Mountain and hang-glide over miles of beaches. He has fun with Brazilian culture, too. When Carnival revelers cross in front of their car, Linda asks Tulio if a woman in a gold-spangled costume is a performer. “No,” he replies, “she’s my dentist.” As the woman in the spangles happily runs off to the celebration, she reminds Tulio to floss. And Blu provides a critique of samba music that will sound familiar to its fans.

Eisenberg’s tremulous voice is just right for Blu, giving him a neurotic, urban, understated wit. “You know how people say ‘it’s a jungle out there?'” he complains to Jewel when they find themselves in the middle of a rainforest. “Not a good thing.” He gets strong support from Tracy Morgan as a bulldog, George Lopez as a toucan, and Will.i.Am and Jamie Foxx as friendly birds. The story may not be new, but in fairness it is a theme that is very appealing to children, whose entire lives are about finding themselves outside their safe, domestic environment and trying to navigate the wild and sometimes scary unpredictability of real life.

The star of the show in every respect is a cockatoo named Nigel (voice of Jermaine Clement of HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords”), one of the most masterfully animated characters in movie history. Blue Sky Studios created a remarkable bird villain named Vlad three years ago in “Horton Hears a Who.” It was a daunting mechanical challenge to animate the infinite complexities of dozens of wing joints and thousands of feathers but Vlad was on screen only briefly. Here the Blue Sky animators take what they learned from Vlad much further. Nigel is a key figure with an even more complicated structure, at once menacing and shambling, who sings, dances, menaces, and fights, all in character. The algorithms necessary for what can only be called Nigel’s performance could probably have programmed a moon shot, and yet he seems completely natural and fluidly expressive. Clement’s voice work is a perfect balance of mean and funny, and Nigel’s musical tribute to his own villainy is pure pleasure.

Saldanha is at his best when there are dozens of characters on screen. Whether they are dancing or fighting, they are colorful, joyous, and meticulously choreographed. A battle between the birds and the monkeys is exciting and funny and the opening dance number is a kaleidoscopic treat. The climax, in the middle of a Carnival parade with massive floats and crowds of thousands is brilliantly imagined. Blu spends most of the movie trying to get off the ground, but with Nigel and these big, showy scenes, Saldanha makes the movie soar.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Posted on April 11, 2011 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sexuality
Profanity:	Some British swear words
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Constant intense fantasy peril and violence, some graphic injuries, major characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	November 18, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	April 12, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001UV4XHY

Harry, Hermione, and Ron have to grow up quite literally in the gripping second-to-last installment of the “Harry Potter” movie series, based on the first half of the seventh and final book. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) take a swig of polyjuice potion to impersonate three nondescript middle-aged people so they can infiltrate the Ministry. Afterward, they shed the older personas like giant overcoats. But they know they must stay in the adult world in this powerful story that sets up the final confrontation between the boy who did not die and he who must not be named.

No more Hogwarts school for young wizards and witches. No more Quidditch, no more short-term Defense Against the Dark Arts professors or visits to Hagrid’s creatures or OWL exams or excursions to Hogsmeade for a cozy chat over butterbear at The Three Broomsticks. Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is dead. Hermione has had to erase her parents memories so that not even a photograph remains as evidence that they once had a child. The dreadful Dursleys have fled 4 Privet Drive. Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is stronger. The Ministry is under the control of his Death Eaters, who despise muggles (humans) and want to eradicate any witches or wizards with muggle blood.

Everything is on the line. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, an important character is seriously wounded and another is killed. Deeper, direr losses are ahead. Harry, Hermione, and Ron are out in the cold as they race from one remote, chilly location to another and try to figure out how to locate the seven places where Voldemort has hidden pieces of his soul.

Director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves return, again showing a deep appreciation for the material, especially in the way the vast, bleak settings reflect the overwhelming task facing the three friends. The book is not an easy one to adapt and like its source material the movie sometimes seems to lack direction as its heroic trio often has no idea what to do next. But its young stars have grown into able performers who hold up well next to what sometimes seems like a battalion of classically trained British actors. The scene of Hermione erasing her parents memory is very brief, but Watson makes it sharply poignant. Radcliffe’s quiet dignity shows us how Harry has matured. And Grint, too often relegated to comic relief, gets a chance to show us his pain as a piece of Voldemort’s soul begins to infect him with jealousy and mistrust. A tender moment between Harry and Hermione lends a sweet gravity that does as much to add urgency to our anticipation for the next chapter as the prospect of the final battle. (more…)

Tron: Legacy

Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Here’s all you need to know about the stars: Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner return as Kevin and Alan and their avatar/doubles, CLU and Tron. They are joined by Garrett Hedlund as Kevin’s son, Sam, and Olivia Wilde as Quorra, a resident of the alternate universe on the other side of a portal called The Grid.

Here’s all you need to know about the plot: Sam goes into The Grid looking for his father, there are some fights and races and chases and discussions of meta-reality and the perfection of imperfection, and some more chases.

Now, let’s get to what we’re really here for — the eye candy.

Twenty-eight years ago Disney released “Tron,” a sci-fi saga about two men sucked into a computer game. The plot was murky but the design was sharp and the computer-generated effects were innovative, and later received an Oscar for technical achievement. It was a modest success on release, inspired future Pixar wizard John Lasseter and led to some popular computer games. Its effects now seem quaintly primitive, but it is still remembered fondly by fanboys, gamers, and Comic-Con attendees.

Time for a sequel, with another great leap forward, technically, at least. Actually, it is many leaps forward, even past “Avatar,” whose envelope-pushing cameras they used — after they tricked them up a little more. And the technical term for what they have produced is: Wowza.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Kevin somehow lives in a preposterously zen apartment with a lot of gleaming surfaces and aerodynamic curves, everything in cool shades of gray, but on his shelves are old, high touch leather-bound books like Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island with the jewel-like cover illustration by N.C. Wyeth. Then things really go over the top with a rave scene in a dementedly decadent disco, hosted by a flamboyant “Cabaret”-style emcee played by Michael Sheen with hat and cane. His eyes glitter and the curve of his nose is so impossibly perfect it might be another architectural flourish.

In IMAX 3D you will feel like you, too, have entered the grid, as the screen shifts from 2D to 3D when Sam crosses through the portal. And in a way, you have, to a world where the imperfect may not be perfect, but it is fun to watch.

Related Tags:

Fantasy Science-Fiction Series/Sequel