Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Posted on October 27, 2009 at 8:00 am

This third in the Ice Age series is a bit sweeter and gentler than the first two, perhaps less ambitious in scope than the first but much more engaging than the second. The 3D animation is beautifully immersive and the story is exciting but so low-key that everyone, even the scary dinosaurs with the big teeth, ends up happy.

Again this is the story of woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), and saber tooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary), now joined by Manny’s mate Ellie (Queen Latifah), who is about to have a baby. Everything seems settled and happy, but of course we would not have a story unless everything got unsettled pretty quickly. Diego is feeling left out and worried about getting older and less powerful, so he decides to leave the makeshift “tribe” they all think of as family. Sid finds three huge eggs and immediately adopts them, his nesting instinct so over the top that he insists he is their mother. The eggs hatch, and at first the little dino babies happily follow Sid around like ducklings, though they are not entirely on board with the idea of vegetarianism. But then their mommy dinosaur comes to get them, grabbing Sid along with her chicks, and pending childbirth or not, Sid, Manny, Ellie, and Diego go off to rescue him.

They end up in an underground portal to a place where the weather is temperate and the dinosaurs still rule. “I thought those guys were extinct,” one of our heroes comments. (Note that in real life the last Ice Age was about 20 thousand years ago and the last dinosaurs were about 65 million years ago, but what the heck, animals do not talk or build playgrounds, either.) There they meet up with an off-beat piratical weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg), who teaches them some survival skills and leads them to Sid. Along the way, they have a number of adventures, and yes, that baby decides to arrive at just the wrong place and time, but despite some chases, several falls, and one near-ingestion by a hungry plant, everyone ends up happy and healthy.

Children and their parents will enjoy the portrayals of family life. “You’re trying to childproof nature,” Ellie chides Manny as his approaching fatherhood brings literally home to him the dangers of the world. And they will enjoy Buck’s rakish antics and the traditional subplot about the prehistoric squirrel Scrat and his perpetual quest for the elusive acorn. This time, his biggest impediment is a long-lashed female, who outsmarts him at every turn.

Scrat’s romantic confusion is a lot of fun, but there is a sense that the folks behind this movie are not evolved enough to think of the female characters as anything other than wise and nurturing — and a little bossy. Ellie’s job in the movie is to be the grown-up; apparently even in pre-historic times the females were more, uh, evolved. Not as funny, however.

But the sweet nature of this film is engaging and the adorable characters designed by illustrator Peter de Seve make this movie both satisfying and fun. The squirrels’ tar pit dip, romantic tango, and post-romantic home-decorating session, Sid’s efforts to mother the adorable dinosaur babies, and a nimble balance of action and humor make this one of the best family films of the year.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 8:00 am

Oh, dear. #TransformerFail

I truly loved the first Transformers movie. It was everything you need in a big summer explosion movie, with stupendous special effects, shot through with heart-thumping adrenaline, with just enough character and storyline to allow us to catch our breath and keep us interested. Our hero, high school senior Sam (Shia LeBeouf), is befriended by a car that turns into a friendly robot called Bumblebee, one of a cadre of good-guy transforming robots who fight against the bad-guy robots, called Decepticons. He is aided by a beautiful girl who is very good with cars (Megan Fox) and an armed services division led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel).

This sequel has some great special effects, but the story and the characters are poorly handled and the pacing is a mess. When the robots give a better performance than the humans, we have a problem. When the action is so complicated we can’t figure out who is where and in some cases why they are there, we have a bigger problem. When the characters are so irritating we begin to consider rooting for the bad guys, well, you know what kind of a problem we have. And when the racial humor gets so completely out of hand that it becomes uncomfortable at best and genuinely disturbing at worst, it’s a serious problem.

LeBoeuf is always appealing, Fox looks good stretching over machinery, and the movie briefly takes an interesting turn when both human and transformer characters show that they can learn from their mistakes and switch over to the side of the good guys. A stop at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum leads to Jetfire, an engaging junkpile of an autobot.

But it is too loud and it all goes on much too long. The bloated running time is well over two hours, overstuffed with pointless and increasingly annoying attempts at comedy — Sam’s mother accidentally gets high and talks about his sex life, Sam’s father doesn’t get high but talks about his sex life, good guy robots talk like the end men on a minstrel show, and Sam’s college roommate is a loudmouth who wants to get with some ladies and shrieks like a little girl when he is scared, which happens a lot. There’s another series of confrontations between a clueless bureaucrat and our know-better heroes. But the last movie’s clueless bureaucrat somehow switches sides. I would complain that this is not adequately explained, but I don’t really care. By this point, I began to think the Decepticons might have a point about how they could do better with our planet than we could.

Sneak Peek: 14 Seconds from ‘New Moon’

Posted on August 11, 2009 at 10:44 pm

The full trailer premieres before “Bandslam” this Friday!

Race to Witch Mountain

Posted on August 4, 2009 at 8:00 am

After an enormous train crash/explosion, a line of dialog reassures us that the engineer (played in a quick cameo by Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook) was not hurt. This is, reassuringly, a Disney movie. The entire planet may be at risk in the storyline but the latest in the Witch Mountain saga is more exciting than scary. The 1968 novel by Alexander Key about two kids with paranormal powers became the the cheesy-but beloved Disney 1970’s “Escape from Witch Mountain” and its sequel, “Return to Witch Mountain” and made-for TV follow-up “Beyond Witch Mountain.” The story has now been “re-imagined” for the 21st century with Duane “The Rock” Johnson as a Las Vegas cab driver whose mysterious teenage passengers have special powers. It may be high tech and big budget this time around, but it unabashedly retains its essential cheesiness.

Johnson plays Jack Bruno, a guy who is trying to stay out of trouble, which means keeping out of the way of some thugs who want him to work for them as he delivers costumed fanboys and an expert in extraterrestrials to a UFO convention. At first he thinks the blonde teenagers with the stiff demeanor and robotic speech patterns are just another pair of nutty nerds. And at first when he is chased by ominous black vehicles he thinks it is just the same thugs he keeps turning down. But he discovers that these are a different kind of thug — they are from one of those mysterious government agencies that act like big bullies all the time. There is also a Terminator-like armored stalker-sort of guy who is after the kids, too. And when you are being chased by bad guys from two different planets, it helps to have a former WWF champion around to open up a can of whup-, um, butt (I said it was a Disney movie).

Johnson is the always-appealing heart of the movie, whether he is making a self-deprecatory or skeptical wisecrack or throwing a punch. The kids’ roles are unfortunately all robotic delivery and special effects wizardry, which doesn’t give them much of a personality. I don’t know why it is that movie aliens, whether they look like humans or giant insects, whether they are super-smart or super-scary, never seem to have emotions or senses of humor. It would make them much more interesting and involving as characters. The very talented Carla Gugino does her best with the under-written role of the scientist who researches extra-terrestrial life and Garry Marshall has fun as her nemesis, who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t adopt, expand, and write a book about and who lines the windows of his RV with aluminum foil. Fans of the original films will enjoy seeing its child actors, Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards, appearing as a sympathetic sheriff and a waitress. Johnson’s warmth and star power and some cool effects are fun even when the storyline drags a bit, if not enough to make the suggestion for a sequel at the end especially welcome.

Fast & Furious

Posted on July 28, 2009 at 8:00 am

How fast? How furious? Well, this fourth in the series is so zippy it doesn’t even have time for “the” or “and.” And how necessary? Is there any more fastness or furiousness not fully covered by the original The Fast and the Furious, the terminally vapid 2 Fast 2 Furious and the let’s-drive-around-Japan “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.” Do you think it tells us something that they expect the fans’ attention spans are so limited that they have to give every movie in the series pretty much exactly the same name? And the imagination of the almost-identical title matches the imagination of the almost-identical script, which primarily consists of racing cars, squealing brakes, crashing cars, tough-guy stares, shifting gears, exploding cars, meaningful pauses, big muscles, and girls with long, long legs and tiny little shorts.It’s something of a bromance, with Brian (Paul Walker) still conflicted about why he let Dom (co-producer Vin Diesel) go back in the first movie when he was a undercover cop investigating a car-theft ring and ended up romancing Dom’s sister (Jordana Brewster). As is almost inevitable in series sequels, this time it’s personal, with Dom seeking revenge for the murder of someone he loved, but the real issues that need to be resolved are who drives faster and how much Brian and Dom really like each other. The only thing glistening more beautifully in the sunlight than the paint jobs on the sleek contours of the cars as they hug tight corners are the muscles on the sleek contours of Diesel’s arms, hugged by tight t-shirts.There’s a bad guy who picks his drivers by having them race each other, so we are soon, well, off to the races, and director Justin Lin has some fun with close-ups of shifting gears and smashing steel. But the fourth time out is kind of a drag, and not in a good way. (more…)

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