Madagascar
3: Europe’s Most Wanted
I couldn’t quite get through all of the
first Madagascar movie, and had no
desire to sit through another one. When
my brother and his wife decided to take their daughter to it on Father’s Day, Mom and I were
invited along. I was reluctant, but Mom said
she had enjoyed them. How in the world
did she see them if I didn’t, and what made her like them? When I questioned her, I realized she was
mixing these up with the Ice Age
films. She hadn’t really seen any of the
Madagascar movies. Now that she has, she doesn’t want to see
another one.
While
leaving the theater, my neice asked me what I thought. I told her it was too over-the-top and
bombastic. She asked me what bombastic
meant, and I did a lot of annoying mugging for her, shouting “Circus! Afro!
Circus! Afro! Polka-dot! Polka-dot! Polka-dot! Afro!” while dancing around her
with my arms jutting all over the place.
She got the point. If the film
were a bit less, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they might just have something there
they could work with, but this was strictly for kids, and for teenagers who
remember them fondly from their childhoods.
Old guys like me don’t apply here.
Big
Miracle
Okay, for as much as the right, and I
included, might want to complain about movies with a leftist, pro-environmentalist
message, such as Avatar or the
otherwise superb animated film The Lorax,
none of them are as blatant as this supposedly warm-hearted family film. Barrymore here plays a character she and the
left probably admire to no end, based on a real Greenpeace volunteer, yet I
found her to be thoroughly detestable!
She’s one of those crazy, rabid, domineering, self-righteous, leftist
environmentalists who belittle the likes of Ann Coulter for being so vicious
while they go around attacking anyone who doesn’t agree with them, able to
spout a bunch of facts and figures at the slightest provocation! The whole movie was based on a true story about
a group of three whales (dubbed Fred, Wilma, and Bam Bam) that got stuck behind
in Alaska when the calf was injured (in some sort of net – another crack
against the right), and the adults stayed with it and were now trapped, with the
media jumping on the let’s-all-save-these-three-poor-whales bandwagon, and so
does Ted Danson as the head of a big oil company (his wife covertly directing him to that
decision for good PR) and eventually, even the Russians get involved. And in the middle of it all is Drew
Barrymore, getting self-righteous and hot and bothered with her annoying little
bubble-headed lisp.
I liked the John Krasinski and Kristen Bell characters, and it does have a nice
message about looking out for the planet (that is, when the Barrymore character
isn’t going completely off the deep end).
So it’s not a total loss. It
would have been better without such a heavy-handed, liberal assault!
The Iron Lady
There is
always hope that any film we watch is going to be good. How many of us really sit down to watch a
film we know is going to be bad? And
yet, unfortunately, it happens more often than we’d like. I was expecting great
things from The Iron Lady. There was no reason in the world this film
shouldn’t have been as entertaining as The
King’s Speech, especially with Meryl Streep winning yet another Oscar for
her portrayal of Ronald Reagan’s British colleague, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, who, like Winston Churchill before her, was highly thought of in
conservative republican circles. Yet
despite all of this, this film was NO The
King’s Speech! Yes, Streep gave a
great performance, but that performance sort of just sat there in a
bubble. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever
seen quite that great of a chameleon-like performance in the middle of such a
mediocre, historical film, especially about somebody I actually liked and
respected! One of the problems was the
way the film was edited together. Ever
since Pulp Fiction dazzled critics by
turning narrative film structure on its head, we’ve gotten countless movies
that tend to jump all over the place.
I’ll even admit it can be quite dazzling if it’s done right (though for
the life of me, I can’t think of a single example), but if it’s not, it’s just
confusing! This was confusing, and there
didn’t seem to be any rhyme of reason for it, and the audience winds up asking
the same thing the actor does when a film is shot out of sequence: “Where is the character at during this point
in their life?” It makes it so hard to
follow! So disappointing!
Zookeeper
My sister said she and her girls actually liked this one, and perhaps I should
give it a second chance. After all, Napoleon Dynamite was funny in
retrospect, and Just Go with It was funnier the second time around. I
like Kevin James, and there were a few funny sequences, and to be fair, some of
my favorite films over the years have had talking animals, such as Babe, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s
Web, Enchanted, and
Alice in Wonderland. But this one just doesn't measure up. My brother made a comment while we were watching it that he
was just starting to enjoy the movie when Kevin James manages to get away from
the zoo and starts to have a good time with costar Rosario Dawson. Then he made the mistake of, to quote Terry,
“calling the gorilla for dating advice,” and the whole thing started to fall
apart again.
Easy A
I like Emma Stone. I really
do. I loved her in The Help and The Amazing Spider-Man. And going in, I was kind of
intrigued by the concept about a high school student using some concepts from
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlett
Letter, yet actually wearing that red “A” with pride, even though she had
not actually been adulterous. As with
such characters as Ferris Bueller, Charlie Bartlett, and Juno, she tries to rise above the
normal riff-raff of her fellow students and clueless teachers, but it all comes
crashing down before the end, and she really winds up no smarter than anyone
else in this movie. She tries to wield
her magic “A” like a superpower, to help her geeky classmates out of the social
pariah pool or to aid her gay friends into remaining in the closet, safe from
the heckles and suspicions of their classmates.
It even works for a while, but in the meantime, she skates on the edge
of morality, even though she isn't actually doing the deed.
In the end, I’d say it’s probably as bad to pretend to do it for money,
and it puts her only one step above a hooker. I think this film would
like to think it’s socially conscious like Heathers or Mean Girls, but it
falls way short. With the right script,
this film could have even been, possibly, another Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but it simply is not that
entertaining. Actually, if you want to see a better Emma Stone film in a similar vein, check out The House Bunny.
Limitless
This was not
what I was expecting. Based on the previews, I was expecting something quite different from the story I actually got. Bradley
Cooper, looking the worse for wear here (if you can imagine that!) plays a
junkie who takes a pill that will give him full use of his entire brain,
changing him into a genius extraordinaire! That part was in the preview. The trouble is, the effects don’t last, and he has to keep taking it, or
it will kill him! So instead of a movie about a super-genius superhero, it is, rather, the story of a common junkie, who just happens to take a rather uncommon, yet still highly addictive, and ultimately fatal, drug. The focus is on the junkie
aspect of the characters and not really on the possibilities of what a person could do with full access
to all of their brain. It merely revels in the baser elements that happen to accompany drug abusers, such as [SPOILER ALERT] the scene towards the end when
the main character infects his girlfriend just to help him, and, when he’s dry and
in need of instant IQ points, he disgustingly sucks blood off the floor belonging to a
murder victim who was himself taking the drug.
This is far from what I was expecting.
Super 8
This
movie should have been better than it was, and maybe it’s because Terry’s TV
was set too dark. I couldn’t see
anything. The movie had a certain
nostalgic appeal that brought to mind a myriad of other films such as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Explorers, Stand By Me, The Monster Squad,
Matinee, Monster House, The Blob (both versions), and even The Goonies. Some kids growing up in the 70’s are making a
very cheap 8mm zombie film similar to what famous directors like Spielberg and Abrams
must have made when they were young, and in the middle of filming, they capture
the destruction of a derailed train.
When the military starts to take over the town, the kids discover it has
something to do with a mysterious, and very dangerous, alien creature. For me, it didn’t have one tenth of the
appeal of E.T., and I actually preferred
all these other films that mixed artistic, youthful nostalgia with a bit of
sci-fi creepiness. [SPOILER ALERT] When they showed the
monster in all its gory glory, which was still very hard to see, the
main kid has developed some sort of mental connection with it, and it lets them all go, but this is after
it has killed a whole bunch of people, some of them perfectly innocent victims,
and I just couldn’t feel sympathy for it.
In the end, it makes a new spaceship to leave earth, but to complete it,
it needs the necklace with the locket of the protagonist’s dead mother. Sweet to some, I guess, but for me, it was the last straw.
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