Delgo

Posted on December 11, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	PG for sequences of fantasy action violence
Profanity:	Some insults, some mild crude humor (crotch hit)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	A lot of fantasy violence, sad death
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 12, 2008

The good news is that animation software is so widely available these days that just about anyone can make an animated film. That’s also the bad news. It is now too easy to produce a professional-looking film without the same level of care in story-telling, and that is the problem with the new fantasy film “Delgo.”

It has all-star Hollywood voice talent and some delightfully imaginative visuals, but its professional strengths only sharpen the contrast with the amateurish elements of its script – an over-plotted story and under-written characters.

“Delgo” more closely resembles a 1990’s video game than a feature film. Most of today’s games have stronger plots and the advantage of participant involvement. And today most games have mastered physical properties to provide a believable sense of gravity and motion. In this film, individual characters and creatures are well designed and there is a nice fluidity of movement in close-up. But each moves so independently that we get no sense of how they interact and the characters and objects on screen seem to pass by each other without impact or any relationship to the laws of motion. Even creatures without wings occasionally seem to float and the result is disorienting and distracting.

Delgo (voice of Freddie Prinze, Jr.) is an energetic and sometimes impetuous teenager and a member of the Lockni, a reptilian race that maintains an uneasy truce with the winged Nohrin. When Delgo was a child, Sedessa, the sister of the Nohrin King (Anne Bancroft in her last screen role), attempted a sort of ethnic cleansing to get rid of the Lockni and was banished by her brother. Years later, the two groups still do not trust each other and myths and prejudices have grown as their knowledge of each other has faded.

Kyla (voice of Jennifer Love Hewitt), the curious and independent-minded Nohrin princess, finds Delgo about to fall one day and rescues him. Kyla is kidnapped by Sedessa and Delgo is framed and thrown in jail. He escapes with the help of Bogardus (Val Kilmer), a Nohrin General, who grudgingly begins to join forces with Delgo to rescue the princess, defeat Sedessa, and teach the Nohrin and Lockni how to work together.

The look has an impressive flair and attention to detail. Its biggest weakness is too many characters, too many plot diversions, and too much violence for a very young children. Older kids will find it a weak reprise of better films, with a gravelly-voiced master intoning about using feelings, not thinking, to move the mystical fire-rocks.

The most creative aspect of “Delgo” is the way it was made. For its first feature film, Georgia-based Fathom Studios invited its audience behind the scenes over the past few years, allowing visitors to its website to see internal notes and watch as the visuals of the movie evolved. If they had opened up the screenplay to the same sort of Wiki-esque review process, it might have made the the story on screen as engaging as the story of its development.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Posted on December 1, 2008 at 8:00 am

prince%20caspian.jpg The Pevensie children are back in London and contemporary life seems pale and uninvolving compared to their adventures in the magical land of Narnia. As they wait for the Tube, a wall opens up and just as happened when they went through the wardrobe, they stand before the entryway to Narnia again. This time, they know immediately where they are. What they don’t know is when they are. Everything is different. “I don’t remember any ruins in Narnia,” one says. Lucy (Georgie Henley) confidently approaches a bear, introducing herself as though she was inviting him to tea. But he growls and charges. “I don’t think he could talk at all,” she says with surprise. “If treated like a wild animal long enough, that’s what you become,” explains Trumpkin (Peter Dinklage in heavy gnomish make-up). “You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember.”
“Everything you know is about to change,” says one character and that serves as a warning and a prediction that applies to all of the great adventures before the Pevensies — the battle for Narnia, the challenges of growing up, and the struggles of leadership, faith, and principle.
As the Pevensies explore, they find that 1300 years have passed in Narnia since they helped Aslan the lion (voice of Liam Neeson) defeat the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) and end the tyranny of Narnia’s perpetual winter. It is summer, but there is no peace and prosperity in Narnia. The nearby Telmarines have done their best to wipe out all of Narnia. Those creatures who are left are in hiding, without a leader. Aslan, who seemed the answer to all questions in their first visit may have been glimpsed by Lucy, but the others are not willing to believe her. And they meet up with Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), the rightful heir to the throne of the Telemarines, usurped by his evil uncle. Wary of each other at first, Caspian and the Pevensies join forces to battle for the freedom of the Narnians.
Like the first film, this is a grand and visually stunning epic with thrilling battle scenes and powerful themes. This one has more violence but also more humor, especially from the most welcome new character, a mouse with the heart of a lion and the voice of Eddie Izzard. Like the book, one of the less compelling of the seven-volume series, it is not as involving as the first. Barnes has a nice screen presence (though his accent sounds like he is trying out for a road show version of “West Side Story” as one of the Sharks). The pacing is strong, the effects are superb, and the battles are exciting. The themes are presented with a subtlety that encourages thoughtful consideration, with a range of possible interpretations.
Don’t let the PG rating fool you. This is a long, intense, violent epic with the deaths of both good guys and bad guys, and it is not suitable for young children. The earlier film had some difficult and troubling material, including the shearing and apparent death of Aslan and the emotional corruption of one of the Pevensie children by the White Witch. But this one has a childbirth scene (with the mother in evident distress) and a retreat from battle that involves the loss of Narnians that is the fault of one of the Pevensies. The disturbing material may be darker than the first for some viewers.

(more…)

Tropic Thunder

Posted on November 18, 2008 at 6:07 pm

With constant coverage of every baby bump and trip to rehab, we all feel like show business insiders these days. And co-writer/director/star Ben Stiller makes the most of that with this pointed but ultimately sweet take on Hollywood excess.

The characters are brilliantly introduced via a stream of what at first appear to be pre-feature shorts, until we realize that they are hilarious and only slightly exaggerated parodies of a rap star’s soda commercial and trailers for movies featuring a fading action star (“Global Meltdown Part VI: Here we go again. Again.”), a tubby comic who plays all the parts in low comedies — very low (“The Fatties: Fart 2”) and wants to do drama but is battling a substance abuse problem, and a Serious Actor from Australia who throws himself completely into every role (a trailer for “Satan’s Alley” about the forbidden love of a pair of friars) and has had a controversial medical procedure to darken his skin to play an African-American. They are Alpa Chino (say it aloud) (Brandon T. Jackson), Tugg Speedman (Stiller), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.). And they are joined by newcomer Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel) in a huge career-building Viet Nam War epic, based on the true story of “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte) and directed by first-timer Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan).

Everything, of course, goes very, very wrong. When they’re a month behind after five days of shooting and the studio executive (a very funny performance by a major star I won’t reveal) is very colorfully threatening to do many very bad and painful things, Cockburn decides to go commando, so to speak, and take the actors out into the jungle like it was “The Blair Witch Project.” And that is when things really go wrong and the actors get mixed up in some real fighting they think is part of the movie.

Stiller is great at nailing the way that the actors and the people back in Hollywood have such a permeable sense of reality that they buy into whatever is happening at the moment. That may be the way to get an Oscar, but it makes it difficult to deal with actual reality when it occurs. The overlay of these pampered stars (Speedman’s agent is frantic about the failure to provide his client with TIVO) playing tough guys (and they are not the only ones pretending to be tough) is very funny and the inside humor (“I stay in character until the DVD commentary”) is choice. A movie about a fake movie has the truest laughs of the summer.

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Comedy War

Wall•E

Posted on November 18, 2008 at 11:06 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	All Ages
MPAA Rating:	G
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Tension and peril, themes of environmental degredation and toxic waste
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 27, 2008
Date Released to DVD:	November 18, 2008
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0013FSL3E

700 years after the last humans left the planet they had made uninhabitable through environmental degradation, one small robot is still continuing to crunch the mountains of trash. He is a Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth-Class, or Wall•E. His eyes are binoculars, his legs are treads, and his torso is a garbage compacter. But somehow, somewhere, he has developed the heart of a true romantic hero. His speech may be made up of beeps and squeaks but he thinks about the trash he picks up, puzzling (as well he might) over a spork and a Rubik’s Cube. He feels affection for the only life form he sees, a friendly brown cockroach. And every night he comes back to his little home and puts on an old video tape of “Hello Dolly,” watching the big dance numbers and dreaming robotic dreams of having a hand to hold, just like the characters in the movie. Just as we always suspected, after total annihilation of everything else on the planet, the only survivors will be cockroaches, Broadway show tunes, and Twinkies (okay, the lawyers made them call it something else on the package, but trust me, it’s a Twinkie). The genius of Pixar, the most successful movie studio in history, the only one ever to make more than $100 million with every one of its releases, is that they may spend blockbuster money on a film (reportedly $180 million for this one) but hold on to the soul of an independent movie made on a microscopic budget. They are happy to take on the consumerist culture that has made their corporate owner, Disney, a world power larger and more influential than most countries. They don’t rely on pre-sold characters (fairy tales, television shows) or focus-grouped storylines with all of the risk and quirkiness squeezed out of them — along with all of the authenticity and character. Like the humble little hero of this film, they hold onto their dreams. If that makes the films more challenging, less easily accessible, good for them and good for us, too.Indeed, that is one of the themes of this film, whose robot characters have much more wisdom, courage, intelligence, and personality than the humans. After 700 years away from Earth, humans have devolved into a sort of perpetual infancy, their minds and bodies all but atrophied. They float through their space station in hover chairs, mesmerized by media screens before their eyes that block their ability to see anything else. Food and drink are constantly brought to them by robot drones and they, like their space station, are on automatic pilot. One of the lovely ironies of this story is that the machine who watches “Hello Dolly” on a broken-down videotape is inspired by it to seek companionship and intimacy while the humans’ media immersion puts them in a constant state of dazed isolation. Wall•E’s life is changed when an egg-shaped space probe named Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) arrives. At first, they seem like opposites. He is scuffed and rusty and she is sleek and pristine. He is a romantic and she is all business. But like all great screen romances, their initial disconnections spark their affection. In this case literally. Their kiss is electrifying.Wall•E and EVE end up on EVE’s space station where her mission is revealed — and then imperiled. It is the misfit robots and one brave human who discovers that he can think for himself who must find a way to bring the humans and their home planet back to life. Just as the first courageous little tendril of a plant is willing to give Earth another chance, so the first tender stirrings of empathy, affection, curiosity, and honor in the small robots and the oversize humans inspire each other — and us. (more…)

Role Models

Posted on November 6, 2008 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for crude and sexual content, strong language and nudity.
Profanity:	Extremely strong and crude language used by adults and child
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs, character is a recovering drug abuser
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic violence, fantasy battles, swords
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 7, 2008

It takes some brains to make a good dumb comedy. Paul Rudd, who has been the best thing in too many films that ranged from dumb, to awful, to wildly uneven, has co-created a film that manages to insult the intelligence of its characters without insulting the intelligence of its audience too badly.

I could have done with less emphasis on the inherent hilarity of hearing an angry little kid use bad language and make sexually precocious comments. And some of the double entendres were so nudge-nudge obvious they were closer to single and a fraction. But some good lines and sharply observed characters make it above average for its genre.

Rudd and Seann William Scott play Danny and Wheeler, who work for a company that sells a soft drink called Minotaur by visiting schools for a phony “don’t do drugs” talk that is really just a way to push their soda. Wheeler wears a Minotaur suit and Danny half-heartedly tells the kids to drink Minotaur instead of doing drugs and then they drive off in their Minotaur-obile. This is all just fine with Wheeler, a walking id who just wants to get high and have sex. But Danny once wanted more from life and when his increasing bitterness causes his lawyer girlfriend to leave him, seeing the Minotaur-obile towed away is just one indignity too many. He objects, leading to arrests, leading to community service at Sturdy Wings, a Big Brother-style place run by a former drug addict (Jane Lynch). Each is assigned a “Little.” Wheeler gets a precocious kid (Bobb’e J. Thompson) who swears all the time and accuses everyone of racism and child abuse. He is also way too fascinated with feminine anatomy, a trait they manage to bond over. And Danny gets Augie (“Superbad” McLovin’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a cape-wearing nerd whose life revolves around a Medieval-ish role-playing game

Director David Wain manages the tricky balance between having some fun with the conventions of the genre without getting mean about it. Yes, everyone learns a few lessons about self-respect and relationships (and sword-fighting) but when they do it in medieval role-playing gear inspired by a rock band, it’s a lot of fun to watch. Note, however, that a child actor’s bad language and sexual obsessions are more disturbing than funny and raise serious questions about whether the laws protecting child performers are adequate and adequately enforced.

Related Tags:

Comedy Movies -- format