The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:11 am

A gallant warrior mouse and a dragon with a secret join the two youngest Pevensie children for a voyage and a quest in the third and best so far in the Narnia series. War has come to England and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) tries to enlist, protesting “I’ve fought wars and led armies,” when he is rejected for not being old enough to join. Peter (William Moseley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) are on the brink of the adult world. But the younger children, Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund are packed off to live with relatives, including their arrogant meanie of a cousin, Eustace (“Son of Rambow’s” Will Poulter), a young man who believes that he (with the help of science and logic) has all the answers. Time for a trip to Narnia, this time via a magic painting of a ship at sea, which suddenly floods the bedroom and washes them away.

They are picked up by a ship called the Dawn Treader, led by their old friend King Caspian (Ben Barnes). And soon they are on a quest to find seven banished lords and their seven swords.

They will face daunting challenges, some of the most terrifying coming from themselves, sometimes amplified by malevolent magic and sometimes just a reflection of their own youth, inexperience, and insecurities. They accuse each other of not being up to the tasks as they wonder themselves whether they are. They are drawn to worldly prizes. Lucy is so eager to be as pretty and grown up as her big sister that she steals a spell from a book of incantations. Eustace keeps stoutly insisting that he wants them to get the British consulate to sort things out and tries to stuff treasure into his pockets. Edmund sees a vision of the White Queen, still tempting him to betray the others. In one moment reminiscent of “Ghostbusters,” “Harry Potter,” and “1984,” an evil force brings into life whatever is most feared by the people it is attacking.

The movie succeeds most as a visual treat. The title vessel is genuinely enchanting, exactly what you would want a fairy tale ship to look like. The series moves smoothly into 3D, designed more to draw you into the world of Narnia than to make you swat away distracting objects seemingly suspended in front of your nose. It also achieves a nice balance, accessible to those who are not familiar with the books and the first two movies or interested in the Christian allegory but satisfying for those who are.

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Source Code

Posted on March 31, 2011 at 6:08 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some violence including disturbing images, and for language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense peril and violence, bombs, huge explosions, characters injured and killed, brief graphic images of wounded character
Diversity Issues:	Brief reference to racial profiling
Date Released to Theaters:	April 1, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	July 26, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0053F042G

Director Duncan Jones (“Moon”) has produced a first-rate thriller with Jake Gyllenhaal as Captain Colter Stevens, sent back in time and into the body of a man on a commuter train eight minutes before it will explode, to see if he can find the bomber.

At first, we are as confused as Stevens, as he comes to on a Chicago-bound commuter train, apparently mid-conversation with a beautiful woman (Michelle Monaghan), with no idea of who or where he is. He goes into the bathroom and sees someone else’s face in the mirror, as in the old television series “Quantum Leap.” And then everything explodes and he is in some sort of capsule, talking to an officer in some sort of operations center on the other side of a window, (Vera Farmiga as Colleen Goodwin), trying to understand his mission though she answers most of his questions with “not relevant.” Her sense of urgency is clear, though. He must find the bomber on the train before he makes it into downtown Chicago to set off an even deadlier bomb.

Like an action-adventure version of “Groundhog Day,” Stevens is sent back over and over to re-live the same eight minutes to try to notice as much as he can about the people around him. He is in the past, Goodwin tells him. Those events have happened. There is nothing he can do to stop the bomber from killing everyone on the train, including the man whose body he is temporarily occupying. Those people are already dead. His mission is limited to identifying the bomber so that he can prevent the even greater tragedy that is yet to happen. As Stevens goes back and back again over the final eight minutes before the explosion, he is able to learn from his mistakes and start over. But it also means that whatever he has to do must be accomplished in eight minutes. And he re-experiences those minutes over and over again, learning more about what is happening on the train, and in his reports to Goodwin more about what the program he is working for it all about, his ideas about what his mission entails begin to enlarge.

Jones makes each replay different and enthralling as we work with Stevens to find the bomber and then to solve the bigger issues he uncovers as well. It is fast, fun, and exciting and bolstered with a top-notch cast to make some of the wilder elements of the science fiction work (though no one ever really figures out how to manage temporal anomalies). Gyllenhaal is believably dashing, dedicated, and dreamy, and Monaghan is believably someone it would take far less than eight minutes to fall for. Jeffrey Wright clearly relishes his role as the single-minded creator of the system that sends Stevens back in time and Farmiga is ineffably moving as the officer whose conflicts about what she is asking Stevens to do deepen as she keeps hitting the rewind button. Jones shows a sure hand in delivering on the concept and the action but he has already mastered pacing, story-telling, and heart. He makes each of the replays vital and engaging and knows just when to lighten things up. And he even sneaks in an affectionate “Quantum Leap” reference, with Scott Bakula providing the voice of Stevens’ father and even throwing in a signature “Oh boy.” It is the wit and attention to detail (pay close attention to that last shot) that makes this story worth going back to a few extra times.

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Hop

Posted on March 31, 2011 at 6:00 pm

“Hop” would more accurately be titled “Stumble,” a disappointing follow-up from the producers of one of last year’s best family films, “Despicable Me.” It is just another story of a hapless live action character who has his life turned upside-down by an animated animal, as in “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” also from director Tim Hill. Character design by New Yorker artist Peter de Sève and some subversively cheeky asides from Russell Brand are not enough to make up for a dull script, pointless celebrity cameos, and an overall nutritional content lower than a stale Peep.

As a little bunny on Easter Island, E.B. looks up to his father, the Easter Bunny (aristocratically voiced by “House’s” Hugh Laurie). He is dazzled by the vast underground factory. Enticingly elaborate assembly lines produce all the candy for the annual Easter basket delivery, with the help of second-in-command a big, fluffy yellow chick named Carlos (voice of Hank Azaria). But when he grows up, E.B. (Brand) no longer wants to take over his father’s egg scepter and delivery duties; as the song goes, he just wants to bang on his drums all day. Just before he is about to go on his first delivery, he runs away to the place where dreams come true: Hollywood.

Fred (James Marsden) is another son whose lack of focus and responsibility is a disappointment to his father (Gary Cole). His frustrated parents throw him out of the house to force him to get a job. Sam, his sympathetic sister (“The Big Bang Theory’s” Kaley Cuoco), gets him a job interview and a place to stay, house-sitting in a mansion to care for her boss’s dogs. He literally runs into E.B., and takes him to the mansion to recover.

E.B. creates chaos and frustration for Fred in various locales including the mansion, the job interview, and a school play. But E.B. also inspires Fred by validating his childhood memory of seeing the Easter Bunny’s egg-shaped flying ship, pulled by a flock of yellow chicks. If E.B. does not want to be the Easter Bunny, Fred resolves that he will do the job. But someone else also has his eye on the post – Carlos.

“Hop” repeatedly gets in its own way by establishing intriguing set-ups without any satisfying resolution. It is pointless to have Fred interviewed by a notoriously outrageous comedian (Chelsea Handler as “Mrs. Beck”) if she is not going to have anything funny to do. All she does is look a little annoyed when he is late and show him around the office. And it is not much better to have the “Pink Berets,” commando bunnies sent to Los Angeles to bring E.B. back, without finding something clever or interesting for them to do. They’re super-effective and powerful until for no special reason they are not. It all feels slack and sloppy, less a story than one under-written set-up after another, cut and pasted together with little sense of moving forward.

It has a poor sense of its audience as well. Kids will not understand or care that E.B.’s first destination is the Playboy Mansion because he is “a sexy bunny” or recognize Hef’s voice on the intercom. Even adults are more likely to find that encounter more skeezy than humorous. David Hasselhoff is a good sport about spoofing himself as the host of a talent show, but how many in the audience will get the KITT joke? When Carlos offers to take over the Easter Bunny duties, the only reason the boss turns him down is a broad and dismissive “a chick can’t be the Easter bunny.” Compared to the generosity and insight shining through the comedy of “Despicable Me,” this seems clumsy and thoughtless – and not much of a message for kids about tolerance.

The Easter Bunny has nothing like the secular appeal or extensive mythology of Santa Claus and this movie does nothing to make us wish he did. Despite some surface appeal, it is as hollow in the center as a chocolate rabbit.

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Animation Comedy Fantasy

Sucker Punch

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:13 pm

Girls in thigh-hi stockings and tiny spangled miniskirts take on steam-powered corpses, WWI bi-planes, samurai robots, and an angry dragon, along with a series of odiously predatory men in the latest film from Zack Snyder. His versions of “300” and “Watchmen” overwhelmed the storylines with striking, provocative visuals. Here, he solves that problem by pretty much not having any storyline at all. He literally and metaphorically cuts to the chase. It’s not so much punch, a bit more sucker.

Baby Doll is a young girl in blond pigtails, framed for her sister’s murder and thrown into a nightmarish mental hospital by her abusive step-father. Emily Browning plays her with just two facial expressions, which I came to think of as “Mom said I can’t go to the mall until I finish my math homework” and “I really want to go to the mall.” The step-father pays a corrupt orderly (Oscar Isaac, in the film’s best performance) to have Baby Doll lobotomized so that she cannot tell anyone what he has done, and that he tried to molest her after her mother died. She enters a dingy lounge area called “the theater,” where a sympathetic therapist (Carla Gugino, sounding like Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) is encouraging the patients (all young and very hot women) to re-enact their stories.

The rest of the movie is best summarized by the song memorably performed by En Vogue: “Free your mind and the rest will follow.” Baby Doll then either sees or imagines the hospital as a brothel, run by the evil Blue (Isaac again, in sharkskin suit and gigolo-style mustache), where the girls are forced to dance for the customers. Baby Doll has the ability to mesmerize men with her dances, which somehow turn into deliriously deranged gamer-style battle sequences as she and the other girls must, in classic computer game tradition, obtain a map, fire, a knife, a key, and make some unknown sacrifice to achieve freedom.

They could have had fun with this, but instead everyone acts as though it is deadly serious, and so it just drags. The other girls, played by Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung, are supposed to be tough but vulnerable, but they look absurd, racing around on heels in skimpy costumes as they fight with swords and guns, as though they believe they are exemplifying female empowerment and solidarity instead of parodying it. It is sad to see these talented actresses feel that they have no other opportunity for career advancement than to appear in this dispiriting dreck. A movie about finding freedom from that prison would be something worth seeing.

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Yogi Bear

Posted on March 22, 2011 at 7:38 pm

Yogi Bear (voice of Dan Aykroyd) is genuinely perplexed by the suggestion that he might want to forage for food and catch fish with his paws. “Isn’t that kind of unsanitary?”

He may live in the woods, but for Yogi, star of the 1960’s series of cartoons from Hanna-Barbera, that does not mean his life has to be bereft of civilization. He has a best friend named Boo Boo with a natty bow tie (voice of Justin Timberlake!). His cave is equipped with a soda machine. He is never seen without his hat, collar, and tie. And he is a well-known aficionado of fine dining. His preferred cuisine is the contents of picnic baskets brought by visitors to Jellystone Park, the campground and nature preserve that is his home. He loves picnic baskets so much, he’s given them an extra syllable, to hold onto the word just a little longer. He calls them “pick-a-nic baskets,” and they are to him what the grail was to Galahad, the whale was to Ahab, and the Road Runner is to Wile E. Coyote.

But to the frustrated Ranger Smith (the always-likable Tom Cavanagh), Yogi’s antics make it impossible for him to have the nice, peaceful, orderly park he dreams of. “There’s no better place on earth,” he sighs, “except without him.” And Smith can’t figure out how to talk to the pretty nature nerd who has arrived to make a documentary about the talking bear in Jellystone Park (the always-adorable Anna Faris as Rachel).

Soon, though, Smith has a bigger problem. The Mayor (slimy Andrew Daly) and his aide (elfin Nathan Corddry) want rescue the city’s budget by privatizing the park and selling off the logging rights. Ranger Smith has just one week to get enough money from increased admissions to the park to save the day.

Yogi Bear began as one segment of the 1958 animated series “Huckleberry Hound.” He quickly eclipsed the other characters, who are all but forgotten (I don’t see “Pixie, Trixie, and Mr. Jinks: The Movie” coming to a multiplex any time soon), and soon became a headliner with his own series. Yogi’s adventures were filled with the same silly slapstick, but he had a special quality that endeared him to kids. They identified with his place midway between the animal world of the forest and Smith’s ultra-civilized world of a uniformed, rule-enforcing (but always-forgiving) grown-up.

Yogi often brags that he is “smarter than the average bear,” but he often outsmarts himself, allowing kids to feel that they are a step ahead of him. As often in comedy, especially for kids, a lot of the humor in cartoons comes from ineptitude and foolishness. Children, who are constantly surrounded by things they do not understand love to see characters who are even more confounded by the world around them. In this film, Yogi may be smart enough to design a flying contraption. But his efforts to persuade Ranger Smith that it is not intended for stealing picnic baskets fails when the Ranger points out that printed across its stern is “Baskitnabber 2000.”

Moments like these are classic Yogi, but it is still an uneven transition to a live-action feature film from the very simplified story-line and animation of a seven-minute hand-drawn cartoon. The running time, computer graphics, and 3D effects overwhelm the slightness of the material, especially when it departs from the core relationship of Yogi and Ranger Smith. The story drags in the middle, when the junior ranger (T.J. Miller), chafing because Ranger Smith won’t let him do anything but sort maps, agrees to sabotage the efforts to keep the park going in exchange for a promotion. Smith’s inept efforts to romance the pretty film-maker are weak and it hardly helps when Yogi offers his advice to Smith about, ahem, marking his territory.

These are what I call “lunchbox movies.” We’ve had a string of big-budget multiplex fodder featuring whatever character was on some studio executive’s second grade lunchbox (Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Inspector Gadget). They toss in some potty humor for the little kids and some boombox oldies to amuse the parents (Sir Mix-a-Lot will be cashing yet another royalty check). But Yogi and his pic-a-nic basket — and the kids and parents looking for a holiday treat — deserve better.