Turbo

Posted on July 16, 2013 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild action and thematic elements
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Cartoon peril, characters injured, minor snall characters eaten by birds
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	July 19, 2013
Date Released to DVD:	November 12, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B008JFUR92

Who declared this the summer of the animated snails? In Twentieth Century Fox’s “Epic,” a snail and slug duo stole the spotlight from the human characters, even the Beyoncé-voiced nature queen. The end credits of Pixar’s “Monsters University” features not the movie’s main characters but a cute snail coda. And now DreamWorks'”Turbo,” one of this year’s best family films, gives racing snails center stage in a story that puts the “go” in escargot.

Ryan Reynolds is Theo, a garden snail who knows to the bottom of his snail-y soul that there is only one thing that will make him happy: “terrifying, terrifying, blazing speed.” He longingly watches car races on an old VCR, imagining that he is racing alongside French-Canadian Indy 500 champion Guy Gagné (Bill Hader). When Guy proclaims from the winner’s circle that “no dream is too beeeg and no dreamer is too small,” Theo feels that the message is meant just for him.

But that dream seems far away. Theo and his very cautious older brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) work at the plant. Literally. It is a tomato plant, with an intricate series of conveyer belts to deliver the fresh tomatoes to the snails. Theo is in charge of rotten tomatoes (possibly a gentle swipe at the popular movie review website of that name) and there is an amusing series of shots with Theo getting repeatedly hit by squishy, overripe fleshy fruit.

Theo gets exposed to a chemical accelerant that hits him like the radioactive spider-bite hit Peter Parker. When Tito (Michael Peña), half-owner of the Dos Bros taco stand, enters him in a snail race, he zooms across the finish line and changes his name to Turbo to fit his new identity. Tito and his strip mall neighbors, proprietors of a hobby shop, a nail salon, and a garage, trick up Turbo with a snazzy shell cover and enter him into the Indy 500 race, where, it turns out, you don’t need to have a car, you just need to be fast. Turbo will be racing against his idol, Guy Gagné.

The movie, it must be said, gets a bit slow in the middle, with too much time spent on the human characters. The economic struggles of the human strip mall denizens are dreary and under-written compared to the big dreams of the little snail. The effort to create a parallel in the strain between the taco-selling brothers of Dos Bros and those of the snail brothers, one adventuresome, one risk-averse, is labored.

But it picks up every time the racing snails come back on screen, thanks to the adorable character design, with very expressive use of those googly eyes at the end of their antennae, and especially to the voice talent. Reynolds’ Turbo has a lot of heart and gives a nicely dry twist to lines like, “Let me get my calendar, so I can time you.” The stand-outs are Giamatti as the perpetually worried but caring Chet and the indispensable Samuel L. Jackson as Whiplash, a racing snail who leads Turbo’s hilarious pit crew. He’s the snail who has “the skills to pay the bills,” if snails had bills to pay, that is. “Your trash talk is needlessly complicated,” he crisply advises another racer. Just hearing Jackson say “I’m going to preTEND I didn’t hear you say that,” coming from the mouth of a snail with a toy race car chassis over his shell, gives the same boost to the movie that the jolt of nitrous gives to Turbo.

Parents should know that this film has some cartoon-style peril and violence, with minor characters getting eaten by birds and hit by a car.

Family discussion: What do you think separates the ordinary from the extraordinary? What is your one thing that makes you happy and how will you follow your dream?

If you like this, try: the forthcoming “Turbo” television series and the Pixar classic, “A Bug’s Life”

Battle: Los Angeles

Posted on March 11, 2011 at 3:40 pm

Destined to be remembered primarily as yet another step toward closing the gap between games and movies, the essence of “Battle: Lost Angeles” is a lot of boom-boom and a bunch of “ooo-rah.” And essence is all it is; no room here for anything but action. That’s a good thing because every time they start talking, you hope for the chases and explosions to start up again.

We see that the world is under attack and then we see 24 hours earlier, just enough time for brief introductions to the characters we’ll be following. Come on, say it along with me! Seen-it-all and seen-too-much vet on his last assignment, still struggling with survivor guilt over the men who died on his watch, innocent from the sticks whose mother signed for him to enlist at 17, guy about to get married, Navy corpsman earning his American citizenship and hoping to become a doctor, team leader just out of Officers Training School and about to become a father, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter much because pretty soon they will all be wearing so much gear and running around so fast we will hardly be able to tell them apart.

At first, it appears to be meteor showers that for some reason were undetected until they were about to crash off the coast of California and some other regions. But then we learn that the objects hurtling toward earth are slowing on descent; they are mechanical. And then stuff starts blowing up in a “textbook military operation” from another planet. And they have all the intel. We know nothing about who they are, what they want, what weapons they have, and basically, how to stop them from the complete annihilation that appears to be their goal. Troops are mobilized and deployed, with circumstances changing so quickly around them that quickly they are providing more information and support than they are getting. Our group is originally sent to rescue a small group of civilians and get them out of the way before US forces bomb the city to eradicate the enemy. But things are far worse than they thought. Contrary to their briefing, the aliens are attacking by air as well as ground. Their mission becomes survival, recon, and then out and out combat.

It tries to be “Independence Day” crossed with “Black Hawk Down.” It doesn’t come close to either. It’s howlingly bad in places, with clunky construction and ham-handed attempts to insert moments of drama in the midst of all the action (one of the men just happens to be the brother of a Marine who died under the Staff Sergeant’s command, and sadder but wiser civilians and fighting forces learn that war with aliens is hellier than ever). No one expects this film to be anything more than a delivery system for adrenaline and testosterone, with a bit of alien autopsy and some welcome recognition of the abilities and integrity of the military, but even in that category, it doesn’t pass muster.

Observe and Report

Posted on September 22, 2009 at 7:00 am

I have no affection for this movie but I have to admit to a grudging admiration for its willingness to be awkward, intrusive, and disturbing. A stark contrast to the similarly-themed and similarly plotted Paul Blart Mall Cop of just three months ago, this could easily have been a raunchier take on the same easy targets — mall shops, mall music, mall food, and mall shoppers as a proxy for an America that is soft in the middle and narcotized by things that can be bought by credit cards.

But writer/director Jody Hall (of the cult favorite “The Foot Fist Way”) makes comic movies with so much edge they can give you a paper cut. He does not go for the easy laugh that makes you feel good about yourself, you know, the one that lulls audiences into thinking that their families are not dysfunctional, just quirky, and that their pain makes them authentic and charming. This movie is funny but it is upsetting and very dark.

The overall structure of the movie is very much like the mall cop movie of just three months ago, “Paul Blart.” Both are about would-be policemen who take our their frustration with petty enforcements when they are not mooning over a pretty mall employee.

But where “Paul Blart” was cute and gentle, “Observe and Report” is harsh and bleak. There are no cheery pop songs on the soundtrack to let us know they are just kidding. And there is not much in the way of lessons learned or getting in touch with the life force. Seth Rogen plays Ronnie, a sad, lonely, and angry man who is borderline delusional. He lives with his alcoholic mother. He yearns for Brandi (a fearless Anna Faris), who works at a department store cosmetics counter. He bitterly resents Detective Henderson (Ray Liotta), who is assigned to investigate reports of a flasher who has been harassing women in the parking lot. In a subversion of the usual movie tropes, he decides to ride to the occasion and resolve the flasher case himself as a way of proving himself. But his instincts are skewed and he makes a series of poor judgments and expensive mistakes that are played for comedy.

Rogen, Faris, Celia Weston as Ronnie’s mother, and Michael Pena as his second in command manage the difficult material well, but Hall is more adept as writer (and selector of esoteric songs for the soundtrack) than as a director. The tone may be even more harsh than intended just due to an uncertain control of narrative and character. Hill says he was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy,” but he needs to do a bit more observing and reporting of his own to make sure he understands what makes those movies work.

Related Tags:

Comedy

Crash

Posted on April 29, 2005 at 4:32 pm

Everyone is angry. Everyone is scared. They all feel that something that belongs to them has been taken away and they don’t know how to get it back.

And in this movie, they say so.

“Crash,” the winner of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar, is an ensemble film with several intersecting stories, all of them about people who can’t quite seem to understand how things turned out the way they did or how they themselves turned out the way they did. Most of them find out, in the course of the movie, that they are capable of more — or less — than they thought they were.

Paul Haggis, the screenwriter for Million Dollar Baby has co-written and directed a devastating movie about people who are very much like us, with one important difference. It’s as though the drinking water in Los Angeles has been spiked with some mild de-inhibitor that makes people say what they are thinking. In this film, everyone says the most horrifyingly virulent things to everyone else: family members, people in business, employees, and strangers, reflecting a range of prejudice on the basis of class, gender, and, above all, race.

These comments are sometimes made angrily, sometimes carelessly or thoughtlessly, but often, and more unsettlingly, matter-of-factly. As vicious as the insults are, the part that hurts the most is that people don’t care enough, don’t pay attention closely enough, to know the people they are insulting. “When did Persians become Arab?” asks an Iranian, who cannot understand how people can hate him without taking the time to know who he is. A Hispanic woman explains to a man she is sleeping with that she is not Mexican. Her parents are from El Salvador and Puerto Rico. He tells her that it doesn’t matter because they all leave cars on their lawns anyway.

The movie is intricately constructed, going back and forth between the characters and back and forth in time. There are small moments that create a mosaic in which we see the pattern before the characters do. The movie has big shocks but it also has small glimpses and moments of great subtlety. A black woman looks at her white boss while he talks to his wife on a cell phone and we can tell there is more to their relationship than we have seen. The daughter of immigrants we have only seen in one context shows up in another and we see that her professional life is very different from what we might have imagined, reminding us that racism may be inextricably intertwined with America, but so is opportunity.

Every character is three-dimensional, utterly real and heartbreakingly sympathetic. The characters keep surprising themselves and each other, for better and for worse.

A white upper class couple gets carjacked. He’s a politician (Brendan Fraser) concerned about how it will look. She (Sandra Bullock) is terrified and angry. She doesn’t trust the man who has come to change their locks because he looks like a gang member. A black detective (co-producer Don Cheadle) tells his Latina partner and sometimes girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) that “in LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

A black actress (Thandie Newton) tells her black television director husband (Terrence Howard) that “The closest you ever came to being black was watching ‘The Cosby Show.'” The white producer of a television sit-com (Tony Danza) tells that same director to re-shoot a scene because “Jamal is talking a little less black.” A character in an overturned car is caught in a safety belt, hanging upside down. A pair of black carjackers believe that what they do is acceptable because they are not robbing black people. One of the tenderest father-daughter scenes in years is the set-up for an explosive emotional pay-off later on.

The brilliance of the movie is the way it makes each character both symbol and individual. As a whole, the cast is neatly aligned along a continuum of prejudice, and yet each character is complete and complex and real. Just when we think we know who they are, they surprise us. We find ourselves sympathetic to those we thought we hated and disturbed by those we thought we understood. Just when we think we know what bigotry is, it, too, surprises us by being more about fear and loss and feeling powerless than about hatred and ignorance. The characters confront their assumptions about each other and they make us confront our own about them and about ourselves.

(more…)

Related Tags:

Crime Drama