Hey, sorry it's been like a month since I last posted something. With these three new postings, I hope to kickstart the new year and get back on track with the intended schedule. Anyways, here's the last posting for 2006 films.
1. Hoodwinked!
Director: Cory Edwards
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi, Patrick Warburton
Release Date: January 13, 2006
Running Time: 80 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
Perhaps one of the most harshly undercut forgotten gems of my childhood, Hoodwinked met with a fairly poor critical reception upon initial release, but lives on in the memories of many who saw it as a hidden classic of kid-pleasing comedy gold. I think one of the main criticisms about Hoodwinked was that it seemed to rip off the whole fairy-tale subversion thing that Shrek was going for- but comparing the two, there's a different atmosphere- both structurally and emotionally that Hoodwinked is going for. Shrek stays entirely within its medieval time period with a few anachronisms, Hoodwinked updates its fairy tale characters to a sort of modern universe- there's extreme sporting events, there's helicopters, police cars, corporate greed, cable cars, etc. But beyond that, there's even a different tone than the Shrek franchise. Hoodwinked from the start was resolved not to respond with cynicism and rebellion to the old nursery rhymes (because its universe does indeed seem to stem more from the Mother Goose nursery rhymes than it does from legitimate fairy tales)- but rather, it aimed to be kind of a respectful retelling of the old story, or to be more precise, it's a tongue-in-cheek politically correct bedtime story, intended to look back at the familiar characters and give them a new dimension. Now, I can't deny the film has some flaws- its animation, though barely passable, is downright atrocious to look at for anyone who's not too young to really notice. However, this is more than compensated for by the film's fantastic dialogue. Not only are the characters hilarious and interesting, but the film's smart script and quick pacing keep the jokes coming with equal frequency and quality. The plot structured up into such a way that we wind up seeing the same story from four different angles, each perfectly juxtaposed to the other. Just when a character has made a half-amusing quip such as "We don't arrest people for being creepy," then a policeman in the corner will take the joke further by turning on his walkie-talkie: "Hey, you know that one we got in the tank? The creepy guy? Yeah, better let him go." There's a kind of parodic twist on everything, a kind of insanity you could only find in something as surreal as Monty Python, Airplane! or Woody Allen's Love and Death. There's a goat who sings every line he says, and before you know it, you realize he's got a whole collection of detachable horns for every purpose, and he's got a mine cart rail beneath his house, and- you know, it really doesn't cut it if you're not actually seeing it, I guess. Hoodwinked is too clever for its own good, and it didn't deserve to be made on a tenth of the budget of your average animated film.
2. Cars
Director: John Lasseter
Starring: Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Paul Newman
Release Date: June 9, 2006
Running Time: 116 minutes
Rating: 4/5
Certainly one of the more obnoxious films to emerge from Pixar's studios, and the film that began the company's downward spiral (after all, if it weren't for the success of Cars and the team's attachment to its characters, we wouldn't have Cars 2, and the tipping of that domino set in motion a whole string of lazy sequels and half-okay films.. Monsters University or Brave, for example, and I hear we've got Finding Dory and an unnecessary Toy Story 4 in production). I can't certainly say I like Cars. Probably because, well, this is a film done by someone who loves cars, and I, for one, don't like cars. In fact, I pretty much downright dislike them. They're ugly, most of them pollute the environment, and on top of that, they're expensive. Another thing that this movie features a lot of that I'm not particularly a fan of is the scenery of the American West, the film's immersion in celebrity culture, roadway culture, small-town aesthetics. But despite all of my initial aversions, I can still admit that it's not a bad film. In fact, it's even better than what many would call a "pretty decent" film- in fact, I'd say it's worth watching, if you were indeed planning to watch through all of the Pixar films that were "worth watching". Its scenery is beautiful, and there is a lot of talent in it. The dialogue manages to be pretty funny when it tries to be, and there are some pretty interesting scenes- the "tractor tipping" scene will particularly live favorably in my memory- and all in all, the characters are pretty distinct and diverse. But despite all the attempts to make the characters in Cars colorful and iconic, they still seem a little... obnoxious, to me- scratch that, very obnoxious. I'm just as much a fan of Owen Wilson as the next guy, but the character that he voices in this movie is absolutely unlikeable at the start of the movie- and I understand that the entire plot is his transformation from a jerk to a nice guy, but like, haven't we seen that plot before? It just makes for a really boring movie with a really weak emotional center, and even all of the other characters we see are really only interesting on the surface- there's the hippie van, the military jeep, the low-rider, the old-timer- yeah, the team really got creative with inventing these characters, but when it came to developing them, they're just... one-dimensional. All in all, at the time this felt like even though it's technically a pretty good film (in terms of beginning, finish, end and the solid progression in between), it was still Pixar working at half of their usual abilities.
3. Over the Hedge
Director: Tim Johnson, Karey Kirkpatrick
Starring: Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carrell, William Shatner, Wanda Sykes
Release Date: May 19, 2006
Running Time: 83 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
While Disney produces more of the well-loved, well-received, Dreamworks has often fallen behind in the shadows. And while many would say that their products are inferior or mediocre (which they are, usually, don't get me wrong), they're not terrible, nor are they really failures. I think Dreamworks is a genuinely misunderstood company actively trying to go for something different, and Over the Hedge shows this more clearly than any of their other films. Dreamworks' crude humor serves to tilt their films more towards the adult audience, but looking at the content of their repertoire, it seems that there's something in the stories and the general mood of their stuff that is more pushing towards adults. Their formula is comedic, irreverent- and generally, the stakes are pretty light. I mean, Antz, Madagascar, Over the Hedge- all of them are fairly emotionally lifeless. There's no teary-eyed relatable stuff like in Finding Nemo. But then again, are Pixar films really trying to be comedies? No; they're trying to tell stories. Dreamworks tries to make us laugh. And what's more, it tries to bring in some socio-political themes as well. Over the Hedge makes this especially clear to me simply on account of the fact that it's a social satire on American suburban consumerism and gluttony masked as a light children's film. And taking this in context, it may still be lifeless on the outside, but it's still a more or less funny film which should satisfy kids just by delivering what Dreamworks usually delivers. And though it may not be as great as some of their more impressive efforts, it's by no means the worst of their films, despite its mediocrity.
4. Happy Feet
Director: George Miller
Starring: Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Hugo Weaving
Release Date: November 17, 2006
Running Time: 108 minutes
Rating: 3/5
It's weird coming to terms with the fact that George Miller, director of the classic Mad Max films, also directed that penguin movie from my childhood. I guess I can see how that works? I mean, they both have environmental themes? They both take place in deserts? (Yes, the icy wastelands of the Antarctic are technically a desert). Enough about the oddness of that, though. There is plenty of oddness in Happy Feet itself to constitute a pretty big discussion. There's its heavy political (subtly anti-religious) themes, its strange and stark animation style (which is CGI, but visually somehow different than anything I've seen done before), and its jukebox-musical-centric story. All adding up to a film which is really just an amalgamation of a lot of different elements which are ugly by themselves and equally ugly in unison. But there's still something interesting about this story of a dancing penguin (in a culture of singing penguins, making him an outcast) that keeps coming back to me- maybe it's the imagination of the film. The way that animals interact with humans, referring to them as aliens, and the way that live action footage is eventually worked into the story and- yeah, it's just weird. There's this one really strange image halfway through the film where a cliff of ice collapses and a backhoe falls into the water- it's an image which is never really explained (how did the backhoe even get locked in ice that way?) and in context, it's a very frightening sort of image, and I still can't pin down why it was frightening- it's a familiar object laced with the rust of the past and made unfamiliar. Perhaps that explains some of it. Unlike Over the Hedge, I'd actually see it again, but only because it's such a disorienting film for the kinds of people that it aims to entertain. Happy Feet is a very unique movie, at best, and it tries to do a lot of things which I'm not sure it completely achieves, making it awkward to watch and equally awkward to talk about.
5. Ice Age: The Meltdown
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Starring: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah
Release Date: March 31, 2006
Running Time: 91 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5
It's a shame that the first Ice Age movie (which was, in my opinion, pretty darn good) had to be ruined by an endless string of sequels. Beginning with this one: Ice Age 2. I think it's also a shame that the first film, which had smart writing, a good story, and great characters, had to be plagued with such bad animation. This film, has much better animation, but is significantly inferior in pretty much every other category. Yes, we see the same characters, but it seems that everything is taking place in a different world. The first film was something of a road movie, very spacious and isolated, like you would imagine the prehistoric world to be. This one, by contrast, sends our characters on a similar journey from one side of a valley to the other, but there seems to be something of a civilization amidst the animals, like an inter-species society. It's a far more crowded film, and even though the first one wasn't above some pretty lowbrow humor, there's something significantly less intelligent about this one. Perhaps it's the forced romance. Perhaps it's the unnecessary added comic relief of a mammoth who believes she's a possum (give me a break) and her two possum twins who encourage this delusion. Some people reading this may have seen the two or three Ice Age movies- I haven't seen those, but it's pretty easy to understand why I stopped keeping up with the franchise after this film.
-Julian Rhodes
No comments:
Post a Comment