The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinem

Dracula 04-20-2013 08:36 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema



The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema-

The Prince of Egypt/The Iron Giant

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I consider myself to be a very well-rounded movie watcher, but there’s been a blind spot through much of my film going experience: family movies. Live action, animated, whatever; for most of my life I’ve shunned just about anything that seemed like it was being made for children. I’ve consistently felt that way even though we just went through a decade in which family films have been really hip. So hip in fact that in 2011 I broke down and started a blog series where I watched every film made by the Pixar Animation Studio and wrote commentary about each one of them. It was a bumpy but rewarding experience and while I didn’t love all the films I saw in it, I did enjoy a lot more than I expected to.



It’s been a little over a year since I concluded that marathon and looking back I’m not sure my journey was really over. There were a lot of acclaimed family films made in the last ten or so years that weren’t made by Pixar, and they’re just as much of a blind spot for me as the Pixar movies were. And so, I’m now going to embark on a new journey into the realm of family cinema, but I’m changing up the format a little this time. Instead of doing one movie a month I’ll be looking at films in sets of two with each pair having either a theme or a creator in common. Half of the pairs I’ve chosen are meant to be samples of various trends that existed in family cinema over the last decade. The other half of the year’s selections will be a sub-marathon looking at the films in the Harry Potter franchise, which I initially ignored only to see it become one of the most popular and acclaimed series of our time. With this series I mainly plan to look at some of the most popular family films made after the turn of the millennium, but before I do I want to look at a pair of films from the late 90s which, in retrospect, have proven to be important precursors of what was on the horizon.



The late 90s were a chaotic and uncertain time for mainstream animated fare. Pixar existed during this period, but they weren’t really the mammoth institution that they are today and they hadn’t yet proven that they could succeed outside of their Toy Story franchise. Meanwhile, Disney-proper was struggling to recapture the success they had experienced earlier in the decade. While films like Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan were all sizable hits they were both artistically and commercially inferior to what had come before and the “mouse house” would only slide further into irrelevance going into the next decade. The rest of the major studios could clearly tell that there was blood in the water because we started to see studios like Warner Brothers and Dreamworks dipping their toes into the massive ocean of animation. One of these studios would work with a future Pixar poster-boy to make a cult classic during this era only to then bow out of animation after they watched it crash and burn at the box office, while the other would make a film that is now regarded as a forgettable mediocrity but be encouraged enough by its moderate box office success to stick with this animation thing, a decision which would eventually make them one of the most profitable ventures in Hollywood.



The Prince of Egypt



1998 was a major year for the newly formed Dreamworks SKG. It was the year they topped the box office with Saving Private Ryan, but perhaps more importantly it was the year that its animation division released its first two feature length releases: Antz and The Prince of Egypt. The former film was a clear shot across the bow in the direction of Pixar and is mostly remembered as “that other movie from 1998 about talking bugs” while the later is clearly meant as a film that would out-Disney Disney. To achieve this goal Jeffrey Katzenberg brought together a group of three directors including Simon Wells, Steve Hickner, and most notably Brenda Chapman, who’s hiring would make her the first woman to direct a feature length animated film for a major studio.



The hiring of Chapman (who would later go on to co-direct Pixar’s Brave) is perhaps ironic given that, between this and future projects like The Road to El Dorado and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, it’s pretty clear Dreamworks was trying to set themselves up as a more boy-friendly PG rated alternative to Disney. You’ll notice that this movie pointedly has the word “prince” in its title, which would seem to be the opposite of what their princess-emphasizing competitor would do. The film also relegates any kind of love-story to afterthought status and its slightly misleading advertising campaign heavily emphasized the film’s actions scenes and epic scale. In fact, the film does a rather laudable job of scrubbing away a lot of the sillier elements of the Disney formula that turned me off for so many years. There are no talking animals, the two characters that are meant as comic relief (a pair of aids to the Pharaoh voiced by Steve Martin and Martin Short) aren’t nearly as broad or annoying as their Disney counterparts probably would have been, and the film also doesn’t shy away from many of the story’s darker elements like slavery and deity assisted genocide. On paper these are all moves that I approve of, but that doesn’t change the fact that this ended up being a mostly forgettable movie.



The fact that this is an adaptation of a bible story was mostly downplayed in its marketing, but the film itself isn’t exactly shy about it. This is mostly the story of Moses as told in the bible with few major modifications and god himself makes a handful of appearances throughout the story. To the film’s credit, they do a pretty respectable job of taking a story that took Cecil B. DeMille 220 minutes to tell and having it play out in less than half of that run time. I also liked the way that the film was able to humanize the Pharaoh by emphasizing that he was once Moses’ adopted brother. I wish that the filmmakers had found a similar way to flesh out Moses himself, but they really don’t, and every single other character in the film is pretty much a non-entity. Additionally, even this early on Dreamworks was already infatuated with the prospect of stuffing their films with celebrity voice actors and that really backfires here because Val Kilmer is completely lifeless in the film’s title role.



Hard as the film tries to set a more realistic tone than Disney, the film still tries to be a full-on musical and this ends up being one of its biggest problems. Aside from the fact that these musical interludes don’t really fit the rest of the film’s tone and the fact that they usually bring the story to a standstill, the songs really just aren’t very good. The Oscar winning track "When You Believe" is the only tune here that’s remotely memorable and even it pales in comparison to even the second rate songs you’d hear in a Disney film. The film’s animation doesn’t exactly measure up to Disney standards either. For the most part the film looks pretty good and they do a particularly good job creating a character model for Moses, but there’s nothing at all special about what they’re able to accomplish and the places where the film tries to integrate computer animation looks pretty dated today.



Overall I found The Prince of Egypt to be pretty generic and boring, but I mostly respect what they were trying to do they just didn’t go far enough. The film would make about one hundred million dollars at the domestic box office, making it the highest grossing traditionally animated non-Disney film of all time until it was surpassed by The Simpsons Movie in 2007. That sounds like a success, but that probably says more about how commercially unimportant traditionally animated films would be in the coming decade than it does about the film’s popularity. In reality this gross wasn’t much higher than the film’s seventy million dollar budget and was only half of what Dreamworks would make on Saving Private Ryan that year. The studio would go on to make three more traditionally animated films, but that wasn’t the medium upon which they were destined to make their mark. Instead, Antz proved to be a lot more indicative of the formula the studio would eventually embrace: dumb humor plus simplistic moral equals lots of money.



The Iron Giant



Of course Dreamworks would become a force to be reckoned with over the years and in its wake 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Paramount (via its Viacom partner Nickelodeon) have all followed suit and developed similarly soulless animation divisions. The only studios that haven’t really bitten are Universal and Warner Brothers. That Warner Brothers haven’t tried for a piece of the pie is particularly surprising given that they do have an animation legacy going back to the 1930s and is responsible for the ever popular “Loony Tunes” stable of characters. In fact, Warner Brothers current disinterest in feature length animation seems to be largely rooted in a pair of bad experiences they had with the medium in the 90s when they tried to merge Turner Animation Studios into a larger Warner Brothers Animation Studio. The first film produced by this division was a film called Quest For Camelot, which was a troubled production from the beginning and which bombed so badly that the studio decided that animation was just not worth the trouble. Fortunately their next planned animation project was already in production and the studio’s newfound apathy for the whole endeavor gave its young director, Brad Bird, a level of creative freedom which allowed him to turn The Iron Giant into something far more solid than was otherwise likely to have been made otherwise.



The setting for The Iron Giant is a small 1950s town (appropriately called Rockwell, ME) and the film’s visual style reflects that. The film uses a cinemascope widescreen frame and uses the color palate one would expect out of a 50s Technicolor film like Bigger Than Life, Payton Place, or All That Heaven Allows. The film’s character models look like they walked straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting and while they aren’t overly detailed they have realistic anatomy and are very expressive. The film opens with a sequence that’s vaguely reminiscent of the opening scene of the 1954 film Godzilla in which a fishing vessel finds itself in the middle of violent waters as a large figure emerges from beneath the waves. The water in this scene is computer generated and was reminiscent of some of the weird looking CGI water in The Prince of Egypt, but aside from that and a scene towards the end involving a missile the film wisely chooses to only really use obvious 3D computer animation for effects that involve the titular giant. In these scenes the alien nature of the computer graphics is appropriate rather than jarring.



When I watched through all the Pixar movies I noticed a marked difference between the studio’s normal output and the two films directed by Brad Bird. Bird is able to replicate the look and feel of a well made live action film more than any other animation director that I’m aware of. Bird’s films aren’t any more realistic than any other animated films (they often feature fantastical elements like superheroes and talking rats), instead the magic is in the details. You can tell that he plans his “shots” more carefully, that he more meticulously creates more detailed and realistic worlds for his characters to inhabit, and he also knows when to avoid cartoonish flights of fancy. If anything, The Iron Giant is conclusive proof that this professionalism has been part of his approach since the beginning and that he was ahead of his time in this regard. While The Prince of Egypt took certain half-measures toward making a more realistic alternative to the Disney style, Brad Bird (who complained that Quest For Camelot was a craven Disney imitation) went all the way and divorced what he was trying to do from any traces of what Disney was up to during that period. There are no songs in The Iron Giant, no dumb comic relief sidekicks, and the film isn’t based on any kind of fairy tale.



That isn’t to say that The Iron Giant is a wildly original story, in fact its main flaw is that it bares an extreme similarity to the film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and other films where a child has to protect an alien from overly fearful and aggressive adults with guns. It also suffers from a protagonist that’s something of a stock “gee-whiz” 50s kid who begins to grate on the viewer as the film roles on. In fact the film has a very simple story in many ways and if it were a live action family film I suspect that it wouldn’t really be all that noteworthy. That’s the thing about Brad Bird’s style, its so rooted in his ability to make animated filmmaking feel like live action filmmaking that when he tries to make an actual live action film (as he did with the vastly over-rated Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) there isn’t really much of anything special about it. Were I to rank it against the other major family film of 1999, Toy Story 2, I would probably rank Pixar’s film higher than the Brad Bird’s even though The Iron Giant is in many ways less of a flawed work if only because Toy Story 2 has better ideas at its core. Still, being a very well executed family film that never stumbles or panders is accomplishment enough to be more than worthy of praise.



The Iron Giant opened in 1999 on the same day as The Sixth Sense and ended up in ninth place for the weekend (just behind the remake of The Haunting, which was in its third week) in spite of Pixar-like reviews. This was in part due to a rather anemic marketing campaign on the part of studio that was generally disinterested in the film and was willing to let it suffer for the sins of Quest for Camelot. To this day, Warner Brothers has never really tried again to break back into the world of feature length animation, but things worked out better for everyone else involved. Brad Bird would go on to great success at Pixar and his influence rubbed off on and improved that studio’s output. The film itself also went on to have a pretty strong shelf-life and is frequently cited as a favorite among animation fans. I can’t say that I see it as a classic, but I did enjoy it quite a bit and feel like it’s given me a better grasp of why Brad Bird is as respected as he is.



In conclusion



I was about ten or eleven when both The Prince of Egypt and The Iron Giant were first released and I suspect that if I’d gotten someone to take me to them that I would have enjoyed both of them. Seeing them now I think they both do a handful of things right (one more so than the other) but I’m ultimately more interested in them for their respective places in the history of Hollywood animation than I really am in their merits as fine cinema, but that’s alright. Most of the films that I’ll be looking at in this marathon aren't the same kind of sacred cows on pedestals that the Pixar movies I looked at two years ago were and I don’t really have the same kind of chip on my shoulder when they prove to be less than perfect. Next month I’ll start my inquiry into the Harry Potter series by taking a look at that franchise’s much maligned first two installments: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.



PG Cooper 04-20-2013 09:07 PM

Sweet. This should be a fun series and it's off to a good start. I really like The Iron Giant. Haven't seen The Prince of Egypt.



Neverending 04-20-2013 09:46 PM

Family films have always been "hip." Snow White and Wizard of Oz were two of the most successful movies of the 1930's. Shirley Temple was the biggest star of that era. Disney made iconic animated and live-action films throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s. Star Wars and E.T. are family movies. The Disney Renaissance, which you mentioned, was popular with audiences of all-ages. Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.



I know you're a snob and you're doing this for s--ts & giggles, no different than your Pixar reviews, but at least don't be condescending about it. Successful family entertainment isn't some post 9/11 phenomenon.



JBond 04-20-2013 09:50 PM

What's funny about The Iron Giant is that there's still an alien race out there that wants to destroy Earth.



Deexan 04-21-2013 04:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2851889)

That isn’t to say that The Iron Giant is a wildly original story, in fact its main flaw is that it bares an extreme similarity to the film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and other films where a child has to protect an alien from overly fearful and aggressive adults with guns. It also suffers from a protagonist that’s something of a stock “gee-whiz” 50s kid who begins to grate on the viewer as the film roles on.

The film is based on Ted Hughes' classic 1968 novel, 'The Iron Man'.



IanTheCool 04-21-2013 10:02 AM

I love Prince of Egypt. I admit it would have been slightly better without the songs, but I still find it highly enjoyable.



JBond 04-21-2013 12:19 PM

I've never seen Prince of Egypt. But Iron Giant was pretty good. Not great.



MovieBuff801 04-21-2013 05:53 PM

I haven't seen either since I was a kid, but I remember the song "You're Playing With the Big Boys Now" from Prince of Egypt. I love that song.



Doomsday 04-21-2013 06:03 PM

I think Jibbs should make a list like this for great westerns.



JBond 04-21-2013 06:03 PM

But I wouldn't like them. Who would want to hear me crap on the best westerns? (Movies, not hotels)



PG Cooper 04-21-2013 06:15 PM

Maybe not movies, but there's potential in the hotels idea.



Neverending 04-21-2013 11:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomsday (Post 2851987)

I think Jibbs should make a list like this for great westerns.

Maybe we should all review movies we normally wouldn't watch. Doomsday, you can start with the cinema of Chris Nolan.



Deexan 04-22-2013 04:31 AM

I for one would love to hear JBond crap.



Dracula 05-25-2013 02:57 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Harry Potter: The Columbus Years

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It would be an understatement to say that the Harry Potter franchise was one of the most profitable enterprises in the history of capitalism. Even if you ignore the films, the books alone have been successful enough to make author J.K. Rowlings a billionaire. In fact, the series as a whole has sold upwards of 450 million copies and when they were at their peak during the early 2000s they were almost inescapable. They were so popular among kids that multiple think-pieces were written about their potential to usher in a new era of increased literacy. They were the touchstone of a generation… and I didn’t read a single one of them.



It would be fair to say that my disinterest in the Harry Potter books was rooted in pretty much the same sentiment that kept me away from Pixar movies: I thought I’d outgrown that ****. I was ten years old when the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, but the series didn’t really catch on until 1999, when I was twelve. For most kids that might have still been in the target age range, but not for me. Even when I was really young I was always restless about having to read “baby books,” and I was really excited to move on to more challenging fare. That was partly because “young adult” fiction was not the semi-respectable thing that it is today, in fact most of it was straight-up crap. I mostly look back on the monthly paperback series of the era like “Goodbumbs” and “The Animorphs” with a certain degree of disgust. They were crass moneymaking schemes not too far removed from the Power Rangers and the ****ing Pokemon: garbage that you couldn’t pay an adult to read but which kids lapped up because they didn’t know any better. Beyond that the best you could do was get your hands on a Newberry Award winner or two like Hatchet or The Giver.



By the time I was twelve I was reading well enough to get into “mature literature” like Jurassic Park and Carrie and I wasn’t going to reduce myself to reading the “drival” that Scholastic was peddling to a new generation of susceptible kids. As such, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published at pretty much the exact right time for me to miss it, and I can’t say that I really thought I was missing anything, and that attitude carried forth when it they began making them into movies. For the next decade I’d see these big productions show up in theaters every other year or so and greet them with complete apathy. Critics liked them, but didn’t love them; they weren’t “shoved down my throat” like the Pixar movies were and I’ve never been under the impression that I had to defend my disinterest in them the way I have with other family properties.



But by the end of the series’ run I began to see the movies in a new light. The trailers started looking more exciting, the movies started earning PG-13 ratings, and all the talk of “the series growing up with its fans” started to make sense. I might have jumped in at one point or another, but by the time I started to finally get interested the prospect of catching up was already kind of daunting, especially considering that almost everyone seemed to not have many nice things to say about the series’ first two installments: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (AKA Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. These first films were directed by a guy named Chris Columbus, the man behind some of the most soullessly mediocre family movies of the 80s and 90s. He was most famous for directing the Home Alone movies, but he's also responsible in some capacity for such middle-of-the-road comedies as Mrs. Doubtfire, Jingle All the Way, and Stepmom. Not all of those movies are terrible or anything, but none of them really suggest that he’s the right choice to mount something that’s supposed to be this big.



Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone



Sometimes when I go a really long time without seeing a popular movie I’ll still end up hearing so much about it that when I finally do check out the film in question it will feel like I’ve already seen it by proxy. There was some of that going on in my viewing of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but the movie did throw me for something of a loop right up front. I’d always assumed that these films were set in some kind of vague 19th century fantasy world, but low and behold, the first film opens up in the middle of a modern-looking London suburb. I had no idea this took place in a world that resembled our own, but I can also see why the advertisers would de-emphasize these elements because they’re easily the film’s weakest moments. In fact I might go so far as to say that the first half hour of the film is kind of terrible. Harry’s aunt and uncle are completely over-the-top ass****s and just about every scene from Harry being left on the doorstep to a strange and out of place meeting with a talking boa constrictor were just grating. (EDIT: after seeing Chamber of Secrets the snake scene makes more sense, but is still weird in the context of the original film).



It’s only when Harry finally gets to Hogwarts that things begin to settle down a little and the film becomes watchable, but it’s certainly still flawed. The whole film is really episodic and almost serves as this two and a half hour exposition dump to set up the rest of the series, and some of the things that are set up are not all that promising. A lot of the basic tropes of wizarding (including the word “wizarding”) just come off as kind of lame things to build a series around. Flying brooms, wands, and spells based around pig-latin just seem really aesthetically dopey and I’m not too excited to have to deal with seven more films that are built around that foundation. There are other lame fantastical elements that would pop up here and there as well, in particular I think I’ll single out the talking “sorting hat,” which might be the stupidest thing I’ve seen in quite a while.



The film’s titular stone is a pretty unimportant macguffin in the grand scheme of things and the quest for it that concludes the film seems like a pretty small-scale and unimportant affair. The focus is really on Hogwarts itself and the characters that Harry meets there. A number of them conform to very typical middle school clichés, like Draco Malfoy, who is a pretty standard issue bully/rival. I also find it kind of weird that Hogwarts has basically set aside a sort of fraternity for ass****s like him and called it the “Slytherin” house. As for the main trio, well, it’s kind of odd to see these actors as eleven year olds after having seen them in other films as adults. Harry Potter himself is kind of an odd hero to set the film around, he’s kind of a bland Luke Skywalker type and his central placement in the series thus far seems to be more of a birthright than an earned position. Also the movie is awfully vague about who his parents are, why they’re so famous, and why they were killed; am I missing something? If he’s Luke Skywalker, then Hermione is his Han Solo. She’s significantly more capable than he is and has more of a personality as well, she’s easily the standout among the child cast and I can see why she has been tapped to be the actor with the most breakout potential. Ron on the other hand… well, I’m just going to reserve judgment when it comes to that character because he seems like kind of bland doofus here.



From a production standpoint, the film does hold up pretty well. Hogwarts is a pretty well designed combination of British boarding school and general fantasy stuff, and a lot of the makeup effects also look pretty good. The film’s CGI shows some age, but for the most part it holds up. Pretty much the only effect that really looks bad today is the mountain troll that attacks Hermione in a bathroom, and maybe a centaur that shows up during Harry’s exploration of the magical forest. The mid-film quidditch match also holds up as a fairly effective mid-film action scene (sort of the film’s response to the pod-race scene from The Phantom Menace) even though quidditch itself seems like kind of a ridiculous sport.



All in all, I can’t say I was either impressed by the first Harry Potter film or disgusted by it. If anything it kind of leaves me wondering why this series was such a big deal right from the get-go, because this kind of feels like a pretty average kid’s fantasy film. It’s closer to what I would have expected from one of the many Harry Potter imitators like Percy Jackson & The Olympians that would pop up later than it does like a genuine original (EDIT: upon further research I’ve learned that Percy Jackson & The Olympians was actually directed by Chris Columbus, which explains a lot). From what I’ve heard the series does get a whole lot better after this, but that things get worse before they gets better.



Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets



I didn’t think the first Harry Potter films was all that great, but the rest of the nation seemed to disagree. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was something of a phenomenon; it was the highest grossing movie of 2001 (though LOTR was hot on its heels) and for a short while it was the third highest grossing film of all time at the worldwide box office. To date it remains the second highest grossing film of the entire series and is likely still the highest grossing if you adjust for inflation and for 3D up-charges. Impressive as that is, this extreme success was somewhat fleeting. Its follow-up, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was also quite successful but not on the massive scale of its predecessor. In fact it stands as the second-lowest grossing film of the entire series. That’s relative of course, but that plunge clearly indicates that someone let the air out of the room.



Indeed, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is by far the most disliked film of the series and holds the lowest metascore of all the films in the series. One of the film’s bigger detractors was Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times who said the film was like “deja vu all over again.” Indeed, these first two Harry Potter films have followed much the same pattern: arrive at the school, take some classes, play some quidditch, then go behind the staff’s back in order to uncover some dark secret hidden underground at Hogwarts culminating with a duel against some form of Voldemort. The series is feeling less like a fantasy epic and more like “The Hardy Boys" with wizards. But I’m not really going to give it too much of a hard time for that because, frankly, the film works way better when it’s unraveling the mystery of the titular “chamber of secrets” than it is when it’s doing anything else.



The basic premise of a secret chamber created by Salazar Slytherin to enact some kind of Wizard Final Solution is kind of intriguing and also acts as a good way to flesh out the wizard-world and its history. I also liked the movie when it was acting as a who-done-it, although I do find it strange that Harry and company do so much investigating without consulting with Dumbledore and the other trusted adults. The film’s last twenty minutes or so when Harry confronts “Tom Riddle” and the basilisk are also pretty good and allow the audience to leave on a pretty decent note. At its core there is a passable Harry Potter movie to be found in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the problem is that Chris Columbus (or J.K. Rowlings) has surrounded this passable Harry Potter movie with a whole lot of stupidity that hampers the film as a whole.



Like the last film, this installment of the series starts off terribly. I kind of assumed we’d be done with Harry’s retarded uncle and aunt after the last movie, but they’re back and dumber than ever. The film’s slow start can’t entirely be pinned on those characters though because Harry and Ron’s slapstick filled journey to Hogwarts is just as bad. I don’t know why Chris Columbus thinks his audience wants to see thirty minutes of bull**** before each of his stories finally kicks off, but this is the second time in a row it’s happened. At least last time most of the stupidity ended once they finally arrived at the school, but that’s not necessarily the case this time. This is the film that treats us to Dobby, the most annoying CGI creature this side of Jar-Jar Binks. I don’t think I need to go into detail about how lame this third-person talking mother****er is, it kind of speaks for itself. There are other WTF side-characters too, like Moaning Myrtle, the ghost of the bathroom. I thought the ghosts were a strange aspect of Hogwarts in the first film, but they were small enough that I didn’t point them out, but not this time.



Then there’s a dumb span of the film where Harry and Ron try to infiltrate the Slytherin camp (because two of Draco’s henchmen are dumb enough to eat whatever cupcakes happen to be levitating in front of them) and then prove to be incompetent at subterfuge. Also, Hermione turn into a cat person for some reason, one of many cases where magic backfires on people for purposes of dumb comedy. And speaking of Hermione, she’s kind of sidelined in this movie, which is disappointing because she’s a much more likable and interesting character than Ron’s bumbling ass.



Another thing that’s really starting to bug me about this series is that it’s kind of painfully obvious to the audience which characters should be trusted and which shouldn’t, yet the staff at Hogwarts seems largely oblivious. I mean, this is an organization that actively employs a guy named Snape, who wears black all the time, heads an evil fraternity of ass****s, and is played by Alan Rickman. In this film they also employ a guy named Gilderoy Lockhart even though it’s comically obvious that he is both incompetent and corrupt. Then there’s Draco Malfoy, who in this film goes from being merely a bully to being a spoiled little bigoted s*** of Joffrey Baratheon proportions, and yet he’s not only allowed into the school but his feud with Harry seems to be actively egged on by his staff. Good god is this series not subtle when it comes to its heroes and villains.



Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is not just stupid; at times it’s actively boring. This is a film that doesn’t have to do nearly as much exposition as the last film, and I can only assume based on the number of pages in the books that it also has less story to tell than future installments, and yet this is actually the longest film in the entire series. They easily could have molded this into a much tighter and more enjoyable experience, and I can only attribute their failure to do so to some kind of misguided fealty towards J.K. Rowling’s books. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets isn’t a terrible movie, but its negative aspects really stand out even when compared to the already less than great original film. In fact I almost feel like I owe that original film an apology because when it made mistakes it at least didn’t make them as hard as its sequel does.



In Conclusion



I dismissed the Harry Potter movies back in the day because I thought they were “kid stuff,” and based on what I’ve seen so far I don’t think I was really missing out on much. If I had given them a chance I think there’s a good chance that I would have given up on the franchise at this point because these two movies are average at best and rather lame at the worst. Fortunately I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight to work with and I know that the next film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is thought to be a major step forward which sets the series back on the right course. I look forward to seeing that, but for now I am definitely not sold on this series. Next Month I’ll dive into the world of claymation by looking at a pair of films from the Aardman Animation Studios: Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.



Deexan 05-25-2013 04:01 PM

Like you, I had avoided all things Harry Potter-related until this year. I just had no interest in it whatsoever. However, at the behest of a female of the species I started reading the books last month and am now halfway through the last one. They're fantastic, particularly the first 4 and the 6th. The 7th I'm holding out judgment on for now.



I decided to watch each film after reading each book and have been immensely underwhelmed by what I've seen. Compared to the books they are major disappointments and even the much-vaunted 3rd in the series - Prizoner of Azkaban - is little more than a mediocre entry in the series.



Some lovely wizard fights, mind.



MovieBuff801 05-26-2013 04:37 PM

I'm probably one of the biggest Harry Potter fans out there, but you won't hear much argument from me on the first two films, even though I'd rate each half a star higher than you did.



One thing that you can sort of take comfort in is that while the 3rd and 5th films still open with The Dursleys, those sections are much briefer than they are in the first two.



Fanible 05-26-2013 05:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2855236)

The film’s CGI shows some age, but for the most part it holds up. Pretty much the only effect that really looks bad today is the mountain troll that attacks Hermione in a bathroom, and maybe a centaur that shows up during Harry’s exploration of the magical forest.

I wasn't impressed in this department for the most part, and whenever I recall the film, the two scenes you mentioned always stick out in my mind. I thought they looked awful even upon the release of the film. If my memory serves correctly, so did Rowling, who was reportedly upset with the results considering the money she was putting into the film(s).



IanTheCool 05-26-2013 10:38 PM

I'm a defender of the first film. I think it has a classic family movie quality to it.



MovieBuff801 05-26-2013 11:02 PM

I like the first one, too, but it still has a few rough patches.



Dracula 06-17-2013 07:26 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Chicken Run/Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

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One of the smartest things that John Lasseter ever did was to very publicly express support and admiration for the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. I doubt that the strategic alliance that Pixar formed with Studio Ghibli ever gave him too much money directly, but it gave the studio all kinds of artistic “street cred” and also gave the critics a sort of permission to take Pixar a lot more seriously than they might have otherwise, and in return it offered Miazaki the vast resources of the Disney distribution empire when bringing his films to the west. Being the craven copycat that he is, I think Jeffrey Katzenberg was trying to do the same thing by forming an alliance between Dreamworks animation and the quaint but well respected British studio Aardman Animations.



Though it took them a while to break through to the mainstream, the history of Aardman Animations goes back to 1972 when they were founded as a sort of cottage studio that would produce low budget shorts for British television. Their most famous work from this era was probably the effects work on the famous video for the Peter Gabriel song “Sledgehammer,” but aside from that most of their work remained very small-scale and local. Eventually the studio’s creative control began to form around a team of three men: Peter Lord, David Sproxton, and Nick Park. Together they made a number of animated shorts (many of which earned Oscar nominations) and over the years they slowly began to earn a following in the animation industry and among people in the know. All that goodwill finally paid off in the late 90s when they signed a five-film deal with Dreamworks for $250 million dollars which would finally allow them to make feature length films. The first of these was to be a project that Aardman had long had in production called Chicken Run.



Chicken Run



While people don’t seem to talk about it much today, Chicken Run got a lot of positive press when it came out in the June of 2000. Toy Story 2 had come out the November before and this was often held up alongside that film as an example of an animated family film that was going above and beyond what was usually expected from those kinds of movies. It’s garnered a Pixar-esque 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was also a surprise box office success: it took in $224 million world-wide, making it the all time highest grossing stop-motion animated film to this very day and that’s without even adjusting for inflation. That’s a hell of a lot of success, so why don’t we hear more about the film today? Well, I feel like a lot of the reason is that what people expect from a family film has changed a lot since 2000, and I suspect that if Chicken Run were released today the response to it would be positive but not necessarily as rapturous. There is of course something to be said for being ahead of one’s time, so I’m not completely dismissing the film on that level, but this is still something of a transitional film in the world of modern family cinema.



Chicken Run is essentially an animated parody of the 1963 classic The Great Escape except with the POW plant turned into a chicken coop and the Nazis turned into chicken farmers complete with references to specific shots from that earlier film. The Steve McQueen role here is filled by a rooster named Rocky, who’s voiced by the film’s only Hollywood actor, Mel Gibson. The Richard Attenborough role is taken by chicken named Ginger (Julia Sawalha) who is, interestingly, a strong female character. In fact I thought it was more than a little interesting that the film accurately portrayed the gender ratio you’d expect to see on a chicken egg farm with the hens vastly outnumbering the roosters.



For the most part, the film’s story leans pretty heavily on clichés. We’ve seen a trillion movies where an outsider comes to help a group of oppressed outsiders, bases his promises on lies, is shunned when said lies come to the surface, but then comes back to save the day at the last minute. The relationship between Rocky and Ginger is also a pretty standard “opposites attract” type thing. Of course if Avatar taught us anything it’s that a formulaic story like this still can still work pretty well if the execution is really above and beyond usual expectations, and while I wouldn’t call the execution here “amazing” it is mostly fun enough to make the film work. The animation here isn’t terrific, the characters move kind of slow and awkwardly, but that’s okay really. Unlike other forms of animation, you kind of want claymation to have a bit of a rough DIY feel to it. What’s more important is that you add in a lot of neat little details to all the sets and models; you want the world of the film to feel like the most over-ambitious fifth-grade art project of all time, and that’s certainly what Aardman delivers here.



I suppose I’d be more enthusiastic about the film in general if I thought its comedy was genuinely funny. While the jokes here don’t necessarily descend into the realms of outright stupidity, they did strike me as being kind of dopey. For example, Mel Gibson’s character is introduced with a really lame Braveheart parody and there are a couple of other Dreamworks style references for adults, but otherwise puns and physical comedy seem rule the day whenever the film is trying to be funny. I guess eight-year olds will find it funny. Anyway, Chicken Run clearly isn’t my kind of film, but it’s also hard to really get mad at it. It works well enough both as a parody and the animation is pretty fun, and since no one’s really proclaiming it to be some kind of modern classic that’s probably good enough.



Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit



Chicken Run remains Aardman’s highest grossing film, but their most famous and lasting creations are almost certainly the characters of Wallace and Gromit. This inventor/cheese enthusiast and his long suffering dog were dreamt up by Nick Park and debuted in his in the 1989 short film A Grand Day Out and would recur in the short films The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. I’m not exactly sure how these films caught on with the public, but they did. One admirer was my sixth grade science teacher, who would occasionally pull out his VHS copy of the films and show them to the class whenever he thought the class had earned some downtime. They were sort of like the “Downton Abbey” of children’s entertainment: simple enough at their core to be liked by a wide audience but English enough that people could latch onto them and feel sophisticated for enjoying them. By the time they finally used the characters to make a feature length film in 2005, there was a whole network of people familiar enough with the characters to turn Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit into a box office smash to the tune of $192 million worldwide. On top of that, the film even managed to snag an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, partially because it came out in one of the few years when Pixar had opted to take a breather and not release a film.



Like Chicken Run, this Wallace & Gromit film serves as a sort of cute little parody of an older film genre. In this case they take on old monster movies, specifically werewolf films, but they also throw in a little bit of Frankenstein and King Kong. This time out our “heroes” have started working as “humane” pest exterminators, who go to various clients homes to capture the rabbits that plague their gardens (and it seems that the people in this village are positively obsessed with their gardens). The film’s villain is a dude named Lord Victor Quartermaine, who fancies himself a “great white hunter” of sorts, and would much rather just shoot the damn vermin. Between this and Chicken Run’s less than flattering portrayal of the poultry industry, I’m beginning to wonder if Aardman is funded in part by PETA or something. Anyway, after a couple of comic misadventures, the town’s vegetables start to come under siege every night by a gigantic “were-rabbit” and it’s up to Wallace & Gromit to stop it.



For those who don’t know, Wallace & Gromit have a dynamic that’s not completely dissimilar to that of Inspector Gadget and his niece Penny: one is the ostensible hero with a bunch of impractical gadgets, but also a blundering idiot, while the other is the secret brains of the operation that gets no credit once the day is saved. Aardman hasn’t done a whole lot to change the look and feel of the characters, they still have kind of weird freaky looking lips and Wallace is still voiced by the aged English sitcom actor Peter Sallis. The budget is lower here than it was on Chicken Run, and it shows, but Aardman is still able to do a handful of pretty cool claymation things. The film’s comedy isn’t much funnier than in Chicken Run but there are fewer moments of blatant pandering and I was at least slightly amused by some of the little puns and references that they peppered throughout the world of the film.



For the most part I think Aardman did a pretty good job of sticking to their guns and I don’t think they let Dreamworks push them around too much. They managed to make a feature length version of what they delivered with the shorts, but that’s not entirely a good thing. At their heart these are a pair of really slight characters, I don’t think they were ever really meant to sustain any kind of extended narrative like this. As such, there isn’t a lot of character development here and the story itself seems kind of low stakes and hard to really invest in on any kind of serious level. At the end of the day I think that these characters were really meant to star in short films and I suspect that the people at Aardman feel the same way because they’ve never tried to make another feature length film with the characters again even though they could probably get the funding if they wanted to. Instead, the last we’ve seen of the characters has been in a 2008 short film called A Matter of Loaf and Death.



In Conclusion



The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was a pretty big success for Aardman, but in retrospect it was probably also something of a peak. Their next film, Flushed Away (which was computer animated instead of stop motion), was pretty much a bomb and it led to them being dropped by Dreamworks. Since then they’ve shacked up with Sony Pictures Animation and have made two films: Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! Band of Misfits (AKA The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!). Both of those films achieved some moderate box office success, particularly in international markets, but neither of them had the success of their first two film in spite of having much larger budgets. They also haven’t really been able to recapture the imagination of critics, and I suspect that that’s partly just a matter of a certain novelty factor having worn off.



Unlike some of the other forces in family entertainment, Aardman hasn’t really been successful because of any attempt to make family movies deeper or more sophisticated. Instead they’ve mostly managed to get by because they had a certain quaint charm in their favor. In other words, their films are really cute. There’s nothing wrong with any of that as long as things are kept in perspective, and for the most part I think they have been. I found both of these films fairly amusing, but I wasn’t thrilled by either of them and I’m probably not going to be seeking out any of the studio’s other films any time soon. But I also don’t blame anyone for digging these flicks either because they are more or less what they promise to be: above average children’s entertainment made with a decent amount of skill and creativity. Next month I’ll return to the Harry Potter franchise and look at the two films which are said to have really set that series off in the right direction: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.



JBond 06-17-2013 08:08 PM

Pretty accurate reviews of the first couple Harry Potter films.



"Good god is this series not subtle when it comes to its heroes and villains."



Agreed, Draco's one of the worst parts of the franchise. He gets a little better in time, but you have to wait 5 movies.



MovieBuff801 06-18-2013 06:09 PM

Ah, I remember Chicken Run. Well...sort of.



sshuttari 06-25-2013 12:26 AM

I think you'll enjoy the next Harry Potter movies a lot more. I felt the same way with the first 2 and I read the books!



They got much better directors and as far as I'm concerned a lot more artistic in tone, color, and film editing



JBond 06-25-2013 01:00 AM

Yeah, they grey the s**t out of the sixth one.



Neverending 06-25-2013 02:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2857270)

Yeah, they grey the s**t out of the sixth one.

LOL. Yeah. People give Chris Columbus a lot of crap but at least his movies had some damn colors. Although, visually, the best director was Alfonso Curaon. Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite one.




Bane 06-25-2013 03:19 AM

The Deathly Hallows Part II was great ending to the saga and probably my favourite of all 7 films. Handled well and had plenty going for it.



MovieBuff801 06-25-2013 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2857273)

LOL. Yeah. People give Chris Columbus a lot of crap but at least his movies had some damn colors. Although, visually, the best director was Alfonso Curaon. Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite one.

Yeah, Cuaron's vision is the closest to what I imagine when I read the books.



Dracula 07-22-2013 08:32 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Harry Potter: The Replacement Directors



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I’m always surprised whenever I overhear someone casually say something like “I’ve never seen one of those Lord of the Rings movies, are they any good” or something like “is ‘Star Trek’ the one with the laser swords or the one with those guys with pointy ears.” My first response to hearing things like this is “these people have to be lying, how could anyone be that oblivious to something that this ubiquitous in pop culture?” And yet I’ve come to realize that these statements really aren’t that far removed from my long time resistance to the Harry Potter franchise. I mean, this was a huge film franchise that was endlessly advertised and enjoyed by millions, and I completely skipped it. It’s made me think about how these people could dismiss all these beloved franchises as just a bunch of silly things for kids and a bunch of weirdoes who should have outgrown such childish pursuits.



And yes, I’m more than willing to admit that a big part of why I continued to stick my nose up at Harry Potter and never give it a second look is that I frankly didn’t need one more nerdy thing under my belt. It was bad enough that I’d seen ever episode of every Star Trek series, could recite the title of every James Bond film in chronological order, and knew more about the Academy Awards by the time I was twelve than most people should probably know in a lifetime. I was not going to get swept up into some series about a twelve year old wizard. It’s the same reason I’ve never touched a Dungeons and Dragons game and refuse to wear pocket protectors.



In many ways realizing this has helped me better understand why geeky cults can seem kind of weird and creepy when you’re on the outside looking in. Seeing grown men talk about “muggles” and **** always filled me with laughter and so did watching people line up the day each one of those books was due to be released at midnight. In retrospect it seems more than a little hypocritical to have had that attitude when I could speak on arcane aspects of Narn-Centauri diplomacy and was more than happy to rush out on day one to see all the Star Wars prequels. There are of course levels of geekery that I’m not going to defend regardless of franchise like the learning of the Klingon language and the actual playing of “quiddich,” but I’ve come to realize that I maybe shouldn’t go casting stones at other fan cultures, especially not out of some sort of attempt to pretend I was better than “those nerds.” Still, there is a difference between coming to respect other fans and agreeing with them, and given that my first forays into the world of Harry Potter didn’t work out too well I’m so far still pretty outside of that circle.



Of course I’m probably in good company in not much liking those first two movies and I’m kind of lucky that I knew what I was getting into. Just about everyone who’s written on the subject seems agree with me that the first two films were problematic at best and that things got a lot better with the third, and in some people’s minds the best, film in the series: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Even the producers (possibly inspired by the box office dip between the first and second films) seemed to realize that they had made mistakes, and responded by giving Chris Columbus the boot. These next two films show evidence of clear soul searching within the series as they try out a pair of new and altogether more interesting directors who sought to explore what kind of content and tonality could fit within the existing framework of the series.



Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban



The first director they decided to try out was a real doozy: Alfonso Cuarón. Were it not for the fact that Alfonso Cuarón had directed this third installment, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be giving the series a shot today. His reputation wasn’t quite as set in stone when he was first hired, but he’s a world-class filmmaker and easily the most prestigious filmmaker to direct one of these films. More importantly, he’s pretty much the opposite of Chris Columbus. While Columbus had made a career out of making dedicated children’s movies (and comedies for adults who aren’t much more discerning than children), Cuarón had solid indie credentials and was just coming off the triumphant success of his sexually explicit 2001 film Y tu Mamá También. For Cuarón this job was most likely a spring board that would allow him to make larger productions like Children of Men and the long delayed Gravity, for the Harry Potter series it was a chance to start over and re-mold itself into something altogether more respectable.



Cuarón did indeed do a lot to improve this film, but one thing he wasn’t able to do was ditch the series’ love of stupid and over-long opening sequences. This one was a little shorter than the previous ones, but it may well have been twice as stupid. It starts with Harry puffing up a woman like a balloon, which is weird because we never see her changed back. Not since Willy Wonka’s reign of terror have we seen someone so casually murdered in a family movie. Then we get a rather bizarre scene involving a magical double-decker bus and a severed shrunken rasta’s head. What the ****? These opening scenes are just bizarre, they feel like they belong in a different series and it continues to confuse me why they keep getting made. Fortunately things rebound pretty quickly once Harry gets on the magical train and things get altogether darker. First we get a glimpse of the “Monster Book of Monsters,” a living book that tries to bite its readers. I can’t help but wonder if Cuarón got that design from his friend Guillermo del Toro. We’re also introduced to “Dementors,” which are these creepy grim reaper looking things.



This slightly darker tone continues throughout the film, though when I say “slightly darker” the emphasis is on the “slightly.” The series hasn’t suddenly become Se7en, and for that matter it hasn’t suddenly become The Dark Knight, but things have changed a little since the last film. For that matter, Harry Potter himself has also changed. Daniel Radcliffe is getting noticeably older in this film and Harry is beginning to get into something of an angsty teenage phase. He’s not some cute Dickinsian orphan anymore: he’s pissed about his place in life, about what happened to his parents (which still hasn’t exactly been explained), and about all the people who keep ****ing with him. This is the first time when Harry hasn’t been completely overshadowed by his sidekicks and actually seems like the most important presence in his own film. I’m not exactly ready to call him a hero for the ages or anything, but they’re on the right trajectory at least.



When I looked at Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets I complained that these films were beginning to feel less like fantasy epics and more like “The Hardy Boys with Wizards.” That’s still sort of true here, but at least the mystery at its center doesn’t seem like a complete retread of the last two. I’m not going to say that all the business between Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, and Timothy Spall made complete sense to me or that all of it was satisfactory, but at least it was presented well and it didn’t involve yet another duel between Harry Potter and some proto-magical form of Voldemort. Though I’ve got to say, Hogwarts’ hiring practices continue to seem rather suspect. In the last three films we’ve seen them hire a conman, a werewolf, and dude with Voldemort sticking out of his head. It’s come to a point where the introduction of a “new professor” has become analogous to a random red shirted dude going with Kirk and Spock on an away mission; you just know there’s going to be trouble.



This of course brings us to the film’s climax which, questionable werewolf CGI aside, was pretty damn cool. The sudden reveal that Hermione has had a magical time travel device this whole time is way too convenient and raises a number of troubling problems, but if it can allow the films to go full on Back to the Future Part II for twenty minutes I can live with that. I maybe would have liked a slightly more satisfying cap to the scene than “they fly up and save the dude,” and I also feel like they leave a loose thread dangling by not explaining Snapes’s reaction to being attacked by Harry. Still, this was a much more creative and satisfying climax than Harry’s battle for the Sorcerer’s Stone or his fight against the Basilisk.



Ultimately I think what elevates this installments isn’t so much what’s in it as much as what isn’t. Cuarón wasn’t able to completely rid the film of stupid stuff; the Draco Malfoy character is as ridiculous as ever and I’ve already talked at length about the opening scene, but the silliness isn’t nearly as omnipresent as it was in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. If anything this film makes it clearer than ever what a waste of time that second film was. In fact I feel like the first two films would have been better served if they’d been compressed into a single film and that this had been the first sequel. So, this is a big improvement, but there are a lot of people who cite this as the best the series has to offer and I seriously hope that isn’t the case. This movie is good, but it isn’t great, and this series has a lot more work to do if it’s going to convince me that this series as a whole is even successful, much less great.



Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire



For all the praise that’s been leveled on it, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is actually the lowest grossing film of the franchise (which isn’t saying much since it still made almost a billion dollars worldwide). I suspect that this says less about the film itself than it does with the general drop in enthusiasm that the general public had with the series after two lackluster Chris Columbus movies. Still, their decision to bring on a real director seems to have paid off because there was a big box office rebound with the next film: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which would out-gross both Azkaban and Chamber. The catch of course is that the new director of that fourth film is a man named Mike Newell, whose most impressive credits up to that point had been Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco, and an almost forgotten Julia Roberts vehicle called Mona Lisa Simile. Since directing his Harry Potter film, he’s gone on to direct a botched adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera and the Jake Gyllenhaal bomb Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In short he’s a guy with a resume which screams “we only let this guy direct one of these for a reason.” And so, all of my anticipation leading into these movise was directed towards Cuarón’s film and I hadn’t expected more out of this one than “more of the same, maybe.”



Holy **** was I wrong. This movie is so so so much better than the three movies that came before it. It’s not perfect, mind you, but this is the giant leap forward that I expected from Cuarón’s entry into the series. And I knew I was going to be in for an improvement right away when the movie started and Harry’s idiotic aunt and uncle were nowhere to be seen. I’m more than happy to put up with anything if it means not having to deal with twenty minutes of slapstick and magical forms of public transportation right up front, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this film’s opening scene is kind of problematic in its own ways. Not the very opening, that was cool, but the whole “quiddich world cup” thing was more than a little bit weird. For one thing, it seemed pretty episodic and removed from the main story in much the way the slapstick antics were in the first films, but it also just sort of straight up confused me. When Harry finally got to the school and no one was mentioning the terroristic attack by skeleton KKK members on a major wizard sporting event, I began to think I’d misunderstood the whole scene and that what I’d witnessed was in its entirety a dream sequence… but looking back at the Wikipedia summery I realize that I was right the first time, all of that was real and was just kind of superfluous to most of the rest of the film.



Fans of the books apparently aren’t big fans of that opening either, they say that it was an example of the filmmakers rushing through the material in order to fit everything into a 157 minute film, but that is perhaps inevitable given that this is an adaptation of a book that’s almost twice as long as its predecessors. That would seem to be a problem for the filmmakers, but I suspect that its actually an asset in that it gives them an excuse to cut out all the stupid stuff that brought the films to a standstill in the past. This one isn’t completely devoid of dumb ****; Draco is still a cartoon character, Mertyle the perverted bathroom ghost shows up again, and there’s an almost laughable scene involving a wizard rock band. Still, the ratio of good **** to wack **** is getting better and better. Also, this movie just generally moves at a much faster pace and whenever it slows down it’s for things that actually seem important.



The film also benefits from a pretty strong structure provided by the Triwizard tournament, which provides the film with three pretty strong action set-pieces. Harry’s tangle with the dragon in particular stands out as the series best straight-up action scene to date, and is easily the special effects highlight (even if the CGI looks a little dated). The only thing breaking up the parade of Triwizard events is an extended episode where the characters prepare for and then attend a Yule Ball. In the back of my mind this series has been reminding me of the video game “Final Fantasy VIII,” which was also partially set in a school for spell casting warriors, and its interesting that both properties have key scenes set in formal balls. Anyway, it is a little strange that the movie sort of drops everything to deal with all this, if I were writing it I would have brought the prospect of the Ball up earlier and spread all of the buildup to the event out more evenly instead of wedging it and everything about it into a small stretch of the film in-between the first and second Triwizard events. Still, it is kind of amusing to see all these character deal with teenage stuff with all the same awkwardness that the non-magically-inclined had to.



It is of course a bit odd that Harry himself has so much trouble getting a date to the dance, I mean, shouldn’t taking down a dragon be more than enough to turn a guy into Hogwart’s number one pimp? Maybe not, but it is indicative of Harry’s slightly unusual development as a character. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabam Harry seemed to show a little more stride to his step and expressed a little more anger about his situation. He might not have been the most confident kid in the world, but he was a lot more willing to step in and take control of a situation. Here he seems to be back to being a meek and modest little wizard that keeps getting pushed into situations he’s not all that interested in. Also his haircut in this movie is a lot dopier than in the last movie, but I digress.



This was the first Potter film to bear a PG-13 rating, and while it doesn’t exactly seem exponentially nastier than the previous installments, it does seem to have given Mike Newell license to drop the “family film” feel of the previous installments and make the movie like a proper blockbuster. There’s more genuine danger to all the proceedings, and that’s especially true of the film’s finale, in which Voldemort himself finally shows up and is a lot more talkative than I expected. I can’t say I fully understood all the magic involved in allowing Voldemort to hijack the tournament and send Potter into some other dimension. I also thought it was kind of lame and distracting that our hero could be held at bay by a cheap-looking prop statue, and I also didn’t particularly like the fact that the whole scene ended on something of a deus ex machina, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a nicely tense finale and that it actually seems like a truly major event that will hopefully kick off the main conflict of the series.



Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is an imperfect and somewhat messy film, and I kind of expect that to be the status quo going forward. Adapting long-ass books with rabid fans who don’t want a single thing cut isn’t easy, and there’s probably too much silliness in the DNA of this series for an installment to go by without its fair share of WTF moments. All that said, this installment is successful beyond my wildest dreams, and I seriously wish that they hadn’t waited this long to deliver the goods. If I’d known that the series could ever get this compelling I suspect I would have been a lot less friendly to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I’m all the more annoyed at how much Chris Columbus squandered his opportunity to launch the series correctly in the first place.



In Conclusion



The auteur theory has failed me this time. I thought for sure that it was going to be Alfonso Cuarón who would be this series' savior, but it seems like it was actually Mike Newell. Or maybe he was just working with a much better book, I don’t know, but something happened between these two films to give this series a much needed jump start. Between the two films I’ve seen a slightly improved glimpse of this franchises lame beginning as well as a glimpse of its more promising future. I don’t know if the series can replicate Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’s success, and I do have reasons to suspect that the next two films are going to have their problems, but I’m still a lot more excited about seeing this series through than I was when I finished watching the last two. Next Month I’m going to be looking at a pair of films from director Robert Zemeckis’ controversial foray into motion-capture animation: The Polar Express and Monster House.



sshuttari 07-22-2013 11:56 PM

Great reviews.



As much I would like not to blow your "Harry Potter High bubble" a lot of us feel Harry Potter 4 is the best in the series. In fact it kind of starts to start dwindling Til "Deathly Hallows"



Also I would love to see some Star ratings on these movies.



MovieBuff801 07-23-2013 12:25 AM

I think you're gonna appreciate what David Yates does with the series.



Neverending 07-23-2013 12:52 AM

David Yates is the John Glen of the Harry Potter franchise. He kept the series alive and consistent but he does nothing to standout.



Dracula 07-23-2013 05:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sshuttari (Post 2859275)

Great reviews.



As much I would like not to blow your "Harry Potter High bubble" a lot of us feel Harry Potter 4 is the best in the series. In fact it kind of starts to start dwindling Til "Deathly Hallows"



Also I would love to see some Star ratings on these movies.

Sorcerer's Stone: **1/2

Chamber of Secrets: **

Prisoner of Azkaban: ***

Goblet of Fire: ***1/2



MovieBuff801 07-23-2013 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2859280)

David Yates is the John Glen of the Harry Potter franchise. He kept the series alive and consistent but he does nothing to standout.

What Dracula's gonna like, most likely, is that he scales back quite a bit on the "stupid stuff" and lends the series more maturity.



MadeaRules 07-25-2013 03:49 PM

Feel the need to weigh in here. The "Harry Potter" series is one that many people (obviously not that many, considering the box office) avoid due to being "nerdy" or "for kids". Starting in the third (but really coming into its own in the fourth installment), the films become decidedly adult, excepting that they are still about wizards and magic and, of course, that the main characters themselves are still children. They are dark, violent, convoluted, and decidedly British.



I know this is a tall order and requires a great deal of investment (and yes, I know this is a film forum), but Id urge any fan of the movies to read the books. The movies are great, and they capture both the spirit and the intent of the series, but they are necessarily hobbles by their limited run times. The fourth movie alone (which seems to be a favorite among those who haven't read the books) is missing 2/3rds of the plot of the book. The tri-wizard tournament is the focal point of the movie, but in the book there are maybe 200 pages in between each element of the tournament.



By reading the books, you'll learn more about the motivations, the reasons, and the quirks of the characters, and everything makes a bit more sense. I watched the movies before I read the books, and while I very much enjoyed them, half the time I couldn't tell you what exactly was going on, beyond the very surface level story elements. It's dense, which is a compliment to the universe Rowling created, but it leaves a lot out because each movie would be four hours long if they packed it all in.



Just my thoughts. It took me from enjoying the series to becoming an actual fan.



JBond 07-25-2013 04:57 PM

All I remember about the book Goblet of Fire that wasn't in the movie was the stupid Elf slave subplot. It was a great book, though.



MadeaRules 07-25-2013 09:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2859521)

All I remember about the book Goblet of Fire that wasn't in the movie was the stupid Elf slave subplot. It was a great book, though.

You learn a lot more about the ancillary characters. Krum and Hermoine actually have a developed relationship. Bill Weasley is developed further (I don't even think he's in the movie) and

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:

. There's also a subplot about Hagrid being a half giant and the constant tension between the giants and the wizards.

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:

Stuff like that. Yes, there is the house elf subplot, but again

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:





It certainly doesn't ruin the movie or the series by any means, but the fourth film felt by far the most "different" than the book.



JBond 07-25-2013 09:56 PM

Ohh, didn't that book have Harry give money to the Weasley twins? I liked that.



Neverending 07-26-2013 03:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MovieBuff801 (Post 2859306)

he scales back quite a bit on the "stupid stuff"

What's more stupid than the goofy fat kid defeating the bad guy? I have never read the books, so I'm looking at this from a different perspective, but Harry Potter is the worst hero in cinema history. He does nothing for 7 movies except rely on Hermione to save the day. Then in the last movie, the fat kid has to kill Voldermort. I watched all these movies as they were being released, and after investing 10 years on it, it felt like a waste of time.



MadeaRules 07-26-2013 08:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2859547)

What's more stupid than the goofy fat kid defeating the bad guy? I have never read the books, so I'm looking at this from a different perspective, but Harry Potter is the worst hero in cinema history. He does nothing for 7 movies except rely on Hermione to save the day. Then in the last movie, the fat kid has to kill Voldermort. I watched all these movies as they were being released, and after investing 10 years on it, it felt like a waste of time.

A point of contention here:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:





I understand that Harry is what you'd call a "conflicted, bewildered" protagonist, but I liked that. He's significant for who he is, not really what he can do. He's surrounded by more capable, more knowledgable people, but there are forces beyond the material realm that propel his status. He's still a nerdy kid with bad eyesight and self esteem issues. Had his parents not been killed by Voldemort, there would be nothing to make him special. Mythos is often far more impressive than reality. Just my thoughts.



MadeaRules 07-26-2013 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2859531)

Ohh, didn't that book have Harry give money to the Weasley twins? I liked that.

Yeah, that happens in the movie too. He gives them his tri-wizard winnings to open their joke shop in Diagon Alley.



Doomsday 07-26-2013 10:04 AM

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MadeaRules 07-26-2013 10:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomsday (Post 2859563)

replygif.net/i/537.gif

And just like that, MadeaRules is banned from the ComingSoon forums.



FranklinTard 07-26-2013 10:39 AM

they are based off books?



learn something new everyday...



sshuttari 07-26-2013 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FranklinTard (Post 2859568)

they are based off books?



learn something new everyday...

If you are trying to be funny... It didn't work



FranklinTard 07-26-2013 01:36 PM

lol - noted.



now get back to stealing reviews from other sites and posting them as your own.



Neverending 07-26-2013 02:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MadeaRules (Post 2859557)

Neville has a pretty significant connection to Voldemort as his parents were tortured to the point of insanity.

I'm aware. A lot of fans believe Harry Potter was just a decoy.



Quote:

Had his parents not been killed by Voldemort, there would be nothing to make him special.

If Batman's parents hadn't been killed he'd be a typical trust-fund-kid. If Krypton hadn't exploded, Superman would just be the kid of a scientist. If Uncle Ben hadn't died, Spider-Man would be at the WWE. You can't make excuses for Harry Potter. He had 8 movies to get his s--t together.



MadeaRules 07-26-2013 02:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2859579)

If Batman's parents hadn't been killed he'd be a typical trust-fund-kid. If Krypton hadn't exploded, Superman would just be the kid of a scientist. If Uncle Ben hadn't died, Spider-Man would be at the WWE. You can't make excuses for Harry Potter. He had 8 movies to get his s--t together.

I think what separates Harry is the intrinsic connection to Voldemort. True, Bruce Wayne wouldn't have been Batman, but SOMEONE could theoretically defeat any of the bad guys in the series. In Harry Potter, Harry is the only living human being with a chance of success because of the psychic link to Voldemort.



Neverending 07-26-2013 02:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MadeaRules (Post 2859585)

Harry is the only living human being with a chance of success because of the psychic link to Voldemort.

It's a good thing Hermione kept him alive for 8 movies.



JBond 07-26-2013 03:10 PM

The lesson of the Harry Potter books is that despite the call to adventure and saving the world, Harry found it more important to stay in school and get a good education first.



Doomsday 07-26-2013 03:10 PM

www.reactiongifs.us/wp-conten...l_ted_whoa.gif




MovieBuff801 07-26-2013 03:20 PM

What makes Harry endearing to so many people isn't that he's a typical movie/book hero, but that he's someone ordinary thrust into extraordinary circumstances. That's what we identify with.



Neverending 07-26-2013 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2859590)

The lesson of the Harry Potter books is that despite the call to adventure and saving the world, Harry found it more important to stay in school and get a good education first.

Well, to be fair, everything seemed to happen at school. The bad guys were very convenient that way.



Deexan 07-27-2013 04:47 AM

Dooms :funny:



The HP movies are pretty much redundant, the books are so much better that it's not even funny.



The only thing from the series that disappointed me was the doorway in the Ministry of Magic that Sirius fell through. I expected somebody else to go through it or offer an explanation as to what it was exactly but we got nothing.



JBond 07-27-2013 01:56 PM

I agree, the doorway was intriguing.



sshuttari 07-27-2013 04:58 PM

Yeah but him being hit with Avada cadavra spell made the audience know he died



Deexan 07-28-2013 05:53 AM

Kinda made the doorway pointless though, didn't it? If he's hit by the killing curse what does it matter if he fell through some weird entrance to the Nth dimension?



JBond 07-28-2013 04:01 PM

Maybe they didn't think enough kids would really get that he's dead.



"Oh this wasn't just a killing curse, but he also tripped and fell through the maaaagical door that only exists to kill people!"



Doomsday 07-28-2013 05:29 PM

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JBond 07-28-2013 10:46 PM

Doomsday's involvement in this thread is beginning to confuse me.



Doomsday 07-29-2013 01:05 AM

now-here-this.timeout.com/wp-...PusSoupGIF.gif



Neverending 07-29-2013 11:41 AM

This is my life:





31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md...jni3o1_500.jpg



Dracula 08-19-2013 11:30 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- The Polar Express/Monster House

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For all my distaste for family films over the years, I’ve never been anti-animation. In fact I’ve spent a lot of time viewing animation as a very cool technique that was sort of being held hostage by a bunch of dumb family movies and I’d long waited to see it liberated from its lowly place as children’s entertainment. As such, I’ve gone to see a bunch of really suspect films just because I wanted to support various attempts to make the medium grow up a little bit. For instance, when I was twelve I went to see the mostly forgotten movie Titan A.E. just because I liked the idea of animation being used to make what appeared to be a rather straightforward sci-fi action movie. For mostly the same reasons I also went to see the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within the next year, but it seems like there weren’t many people who felt the same way. In fact, the extreme financial failure of that film would be a big portent for a lot of what we’ll be talking about in this edition of “The Journey Continues” because it was the first major film that was accused of falling into what’s called “the uncanny valley.”



The uncanny valley is a term that was coined in 1970 by a Japanese robotics engineer named Masahiro Mori, who noticed that whenever he tried to make a robot look very human-like it would have an unsettling effect on observers. People would have no problems with androids which looked actively machinelike and metallic, but when they actually had skin and hair they became harder and harder to accept. The theory was that people weren’t seeing what was human-like about these robots so much as they were seeing the small things which made them unhuman: their dead eyes, the fact that they weren’t breathing, their overly taut skin, etc. And the more humanlike an android would get the deeper into “the uncanny valley” it would find itself, and this would force the robotics engineers to either avoid the valley altogether by making inhuman robots or to brave their way through the valley until they could make a robot that actually did seem like a perfect replication of a human being.



The term “uncanny valley” would soon also be applied to realistic CGI representations of humans and the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was probably the first movie to make human characters that were realistic enough to seemingly fall into the uncanny valley’s clutches. While that movie had plenty of other problems (namely a loopy anime-ish story and a general lack of excitement), I never really had a problem with its animation. In fact I’ve never been all that concerned about the uncanny valley, I’ve always just seen it as a specific animation style and I think animators are generally a little more scared of the valley than they should be. It might be my experience with video game cutscenes, but I made my peace with realistic CGI humans a long time ago and never had much trouble with any of the films that have been accused of being in the valley.



And I suppose that brings us to the man whose name became synonymous with the uncanny valley during the 2000s: Robert Zemeckis. When Zhemekis made the desert island film Cast Away in the year 2000 I don’t think anyone could have predicted that he would have spent the next ten years trying to be a computer animation pioneer. I mean, visual effects had always had a place in the guy’s movies whether it meant sending a DeLorean into the past or digitially removing an amputee’s legs, but they were always used to very realistic ends in movies that were relatively down to earth. He never seemed like the kind of guy who would try to break new effects ground the way a Lucas or Cameron would and he never exactly seemed like the maker of children’s entertainment either. And yet, he and his company ImageMovers quickly began to specialize in the polarizing art of motion-capture animation, and would first unveil their work with a Christmas movie called The Polar Express.



The Polar Express



Let’s take a minute to talk about Christmas movies. I’m not a fan of them and never have been. In fact I’ve never been much of a fan of Christmas in general. When I was kid I viewed the holiday as an opportunity to get free stuff and could take or leave everything else associated with the holiday. Since then I’ve kind of grown to hate everything about the “holiday season.” I hate having to hear Christmas carols all the time, I hate having to see evergreen trees and wreaths for two straight months, and I’ve just generally gotten sick of having the damn holiday take over the public consciousness for an extended period of time every god damn year for no particularly good reason. And nothing expresses all the bull**** inherent in the “holiday season” quite like Christmas movies. I mean, there are plenty of good movies that happen to be set on Christmas, but whenever Hollywood deciders to churn out another movie about how “magical” and “important” Christmas is I immediately grab for the barf bag.



Given my distaste for both Christmas movies and animated movies for children, you’d think I’d have shunned Robert Zhemekis’ The Polar Express with a passionate fury, but I’ve actually been kind of curious about it ever since it was first released. Aside from my general curiosity with motion capture animation; there was always something about the tone and style of the film’s trailers that intrigued me. It seemed like an oddly… dignified... version of a Christmas movie. Furthermore, Roger Ebert absolutely loved the movie and gave it four stars, and this was at a time when I pretty much worshiped everything that guy wrote as gospel. In fact, in 2004 I tried to watch each and every movie that Ebert gave four stars to… but I ultimately balked at The Polar Express for all the usual reason I tended to skip critically acclaimed family films. Still there was always a lingering curiosity in the back of my mind about the film and I figured, what better time to finally see this yuletide “classic” than early July!



There are a lot of very specific things about family movies that have turned me off over the years: juvenile humor, cutesy aesthetics, rank sentimentality, the abuse of pop culture references, etc. For the most part The Polar Express is devoid of all of these elements, which would seem to suggest that it is right up my alley. It isn’t. In fact, The Polar Express is a bizarre and horrible movie, the kind of film you watch and then immediately wonder what the hell was going through the minds of the people who created it. To make it all the more frustrating, there are moments of true potential to be found in the film, but they’re all lost in the midst of a sort of black hole of weird story-telling, confoundedly misguided filmmaking decisions, and technological blunders.



I guess I’ll start with what is oddly one of the film’s strongest (and yet most infamous) aspects: its animation. There’s actually a lot to like about the CGI used in the film. The train looks great, the snowy landscapes look great, the interiors are great, pretty much everything that doesn’t involve a human being looks great. It all looks so great that it would have looked odd if they’d filled these environments with cartoony caricatures instead of realistic looking humans, but the technology wasn’t really ready for that. The faces in this movie are just bad, it doesn’t matter whether or not they’re in some sort of uncanny valley, they just look plastic and weird. For a lot of critics that was the big deal-breaker, but it’s more of a minor annoyance for me. Every field needs pioneers to go forth and take risks and I’m not going to give Zhemekis and his company too much grief for being that pioneer.



What I can blame Zhemekis for is the fact that The Polar Express is one of the most meandering and pointless films ever made by a major studio. The film’s plot is thin to the point of non-existence. In short: it’s about a kid who gets on a train, goes to the North Pole, hangs around there for a second, then comes home. What do we know about this kid? Well, he’s about eleven, he lives in the suburbs, he has a sister, and he’s beginning to suspect that Santa Clause isn’t real. That’s it. We don’t learn anything more about him through the course of the film, not even his name. What are his motivations for getting onto the train? Well, maybe that’s not a fair question; I also probably would have gotten onto a magical train if I was his age as well. Still, this kid remains a completely passive character throughout the film. The motive of getting to the North Pole is sort of thrust upon him and he goes along with it, but we have very little real reason care if he gets there.



What about the side characters? They’re all terrible. There’s a girl that our hero meets on the train who we later learn is supposed to be a leader, but all the film allows her to lead anyone to do is wander off from the group late in the film. There’s a younger child who pretty much stands around looking depressed, and then there’s the character credited as the Know-It-All Kid. Boy did I hate this guy. He’s basically a stereotypical nerd who exists to be a cartoonish a**hole… and in spite of the fact that he looks like an eleven year old he sounds like he was voiced by a fifty year old man who did nothing to disguise his voice. The film doesn’t do a whole lot to establish any real rivalry between any of these kids, or any real friendship for that matter. In fact there isn’t any real conflict to speak of in this film. There’s no villain trying to hold them back and while there are a couple setbacks on their “adventure,” its ultimately a pretty smooth journey north and there’s almost no suspense about whether or not they’re going to get there. And what do they finally do once they get to the North Pole? ****ing nothing. They wander around a bit, get a little bit lost in Santa’s factory, but then meet Santa and then leave.



Looking at it from a certain angle I'm tempted to wonder if what Zhemekis was trying to make was some kind of David Lynch style charismas movie that operates on some sort of kooky dream logic. This would explain the films “was that or wasn’t that a dream” ending and also some of the more random imagery that pops up here and there, but no, I’m not buying that as an excuse. Towards the end this movie seems to boil down to some super-hokey message about this journey teaching this kid to keep on believing in Santa Clause, as if that’s some kind of virtuous thing to do. Hell, the movie doesn’t even hold up believing in Santa Clause as some sort of stand in for any other leap of faith, there’s nothing interesting about choosing to believe in something that you already have empirical evidence for in the form of having personally witnessed it. No, there’s nothing deeper going on here, this is just a schmaltzy Christmas movie albeit one that fails miserably at its corny goals.



I don’t know how the man who made Back to the Future and Forrest Gump could make this thing. For all their flaws, Zhemekis’ films could never be called lifeless or boring, but this movie is both of those things to an extreme extent. Hell, this barely a narrative film at all, it’s more like some kind of slow moving Christmas-themed amusement park ride that’s been turned into a film. If I can say anything nice about the film it’s that it isn’t a film that could be made by a hack. As bored and confounded as I was while watching it I can still say that it’s a more valuable bad Christmas movie than something like Jingle All the Way or something. At least this movie was trying to be… unique and interesting even if the results are, to my eyes at least, disastrous.



Continued Below...



Dracula 08-19-2013 11:32 PM

Monster House



There’s no doubt that a lot of people hate The Polar Express, and I’d always assumed it was a box office bomb as well, but it actually wasn’t. It had a fairly weak opening weekend (in part because it opened the week after The Incredibles), but it proved to have unusually strong box office legs and quietly made quite a bit of money over the holiday season, eventually grossing over three hundred million dollars worldwide. Zhemekis would do the same thing five years later with his version of A Christmas Carol, which also quietly made a killing over the course of its holiday season. In fact, outside of the disastrous Mars Needs Moms, all of the motion capture films that Zhemeckis’ ImageMovers production company has made has been profitable to one extent of another.



The company’s first post-The Polar Express motion capture film, Monster House, was simultaneously its most critically respected and also its lowest grossing outside of Mars Needs Moms. Actually, it might be unfair to mention that the film grossed less than many of the studio’s other films, in part because those other projects had much higher budgets. Monster House only cost seventy five million to make, which is less than half what it cost to make all of the studio’s other projects, but it does still kind of say something about the film’s somewhat middling impact on the public’s consciousness. It certainly had its supporters back in 2006; it scored a respectable 74% on Rottentomatoes and it also managed to score ImageMovers its one and only Best Animated Feature nomination at the Oscars, albeit in a weak year for the category where it would end up losing to Happy Feet of all things. Despite all that, you really don’t hear about this movie all that much anymore. It really kind of came and went and its supporters moved on pretty quickly.



It’s because of the relatively brief interest that the public had in the film that I can’t say I was expecting much from this one. I mostly expected it to be a sort of attempt at combining motion-capture animation with a more straightforward family movie than The Polar Express was; essentially a Dreamworks movie, but with more realistic faces. I probably wasn’t entirely wrong to expect something along those lines, but I must say I got a lot more than I’d bargained for. Monster House is, in fact, one of the more pleasant surprises that I’ve come across in this review series so far.



For one thing, this feels way more like a Robert Zhemeckis film than The Polar Express did, which is odd because Zhemeckis actually didn’t write, direct, or even produce this movie. It was made by Zhemeckis’ company and used the technology that he developed, but he personally had relatively little to do with the project. The movie was directed by a guy named Gil Kenan, who directed another movie for young adults called City of Ember two years later and then seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet. I got a better idea of what creative juices were at play here when I looked to the writing credits. The film was co-written by Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab, and Pamela Pettler.



Pettler’s other credits include Corpse Bride and 9, which were both productions that Tim Burton had a hand in. She’s clearly been an innovator in the sub-genre of gothy horror influenced animated family movies, and she’s presumably responsible for the film’s skewed take on the horror genre. I wouldn’t exactly put this on the same level as a “real” horror film, but I did find the film’s take on the haunted house genre to be pretty fun. Normally haunted houses are just regular houses that happen to have ghosts in them, here they make the actual house into a monster… literally. The floorboards open up to trap people, the carpet snatches people up, the chandelier is a uvula, etc. And at the end of the film the house itself starts walking around and tries to attack people. It’s all good fun and I suspect that the film has enlivened many a child’s Halloween party over the years.



The writer who’s probably most responsible for the touches that really make the film special is Dan Harmon. Harmon is of course the creator of the cult sitcom “Community” and is a master of fun genre pastiches that still work as stories that can be taken at face value. In this case he’s sort of doing a take on the old Amblin “realistically ill-mannered suburban kids go on a fantastical adventure” genre. In fact the Amblin logo is seen at the beginning of the movie, and I guess it managed ride this particular wave of nostalgia long before the movie Super 8 got the same idea. The film really gets the interplay between these three kids right and succeeds at making each one of the kids into an individual personality unto themselves, at least by family movie standards. I was even more impressed with the film’s side characters like the babysitter, her boyfriend, the guy at the pizza place, and the two neighborhood cops. These weren’t fully formed characters or anything, but the writers put in more work than they needed to in order to make each one of them a fun personality without making any of them into bland archetypes.



Most of all, I like that the film has a certain twisted sensibility to it. This is a film that seemingly begins with an old man dropping dead right on top of a small child and traumatizing said child for a decent chunk of its running time. Elsewhere it shows the house eating a puppy, and it also makes no attempt to turn its characters into “role models” and it also doesn’t shove any sappy moral down its audience’s throats. It’s filled with fun little details that could easily be overlooked by most of the audience but which still elevate the film above what it otherwise could have been. For example, there’s a fictional video-game that’s played in one brief scene mid way through the film. The filmmakers easily could have mocked up a really fake looking game for this sequences, but instead they actually made something which looks like a genuine 80s arcade game. Its little touches like that which really engenders a project like that with certain audiences, and it’s the same attention to detail which would go on to make Harmon’s show “Community” such a cult hit.



Hell, with all the good vibes the film was giving off I forgot to even bring up the animation, which for the most part works really well here. Technically, this film is a lot less ambitious than The Polar Express. The character models are a little less caricatured than the characters in Dreamworks and Pixar movies, but their faces are cartoony compared to the other ImageMovers films. That’s probably a good thing given how bad the faces looked in The Polar Express, but it also means that the backgrounds don’t look as real. That’s probably a worthwhile tradeoff, although I was disappointed by how lifeless and neighborhood seemed at times. There didn’t seem to be a single “extra” on the streets and at times it seemed like this suburb was completely empty outside of the speaking characters. Still that’s kind of a minor issue, and it’s probably for the best that the film’s animation doesn’t detract from the film’s other charms. I wouldn’t call Monster House a classic by any means, but I did enjoy it a lot more than I expected to and by the standards of the family film genre, it’s pretty damn solid. I suspect that if it had had the Pixar logo in front of it the film would have really had people going nuts for it, but as it stands it feels like something of a cult item in spite of its moderate initial success.



In Conclusion



Talk about the best of times and the worst of times. One of these movies is terrible and the other one is really good. Were I watching these in a vacuum I’d be left without any real notion of whether or not ImageMovers Digital was something to get behind, but with hindsight it’s pretty clear that they didn’t really go in much of a positive direction from here. After Monster House the studio made the more adult oriented Beowulf, which I saw and mostly enjoyed back in ’07. From there though they went back to the Christmas well with A Christmas Carol and then made the infamous bomb Mars Needs Moms. The studio’s future is kind of uncertain at this point. Robert Zhemeckis has gone back to making live action films, Disney has cut ties with the studio, and they don’t seem to have any more animated movies in production. That’s not to say that their experiments in motion capture have been a complete waste. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson used similar techniques on their The Adventures of Tin Tin project. Even on that the tech wasn’t all there, and my dream of motion capture opening up animation for a wider breadth of cinema still hasn’t come true, but I’m glad people are trying. Next Month I’ll be moving into the home stretch on the Harry Potter franchise by looking at the first two films of the series directed by David Yates: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.



Dracula 09-24-2013 06:05 PM

Harry Potter: The Dawning of the Age of Yates

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The last round of Harry Potter films really through me for a loop. I thought for sure that the Alfonso Cuarón helmed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would be the more impressive accomplishment than the Mike Newell directed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but it turned out that the opposite was the case. I’ve spent some time trying to figure out why this was and I’ve come to something of a conclusion: the Harry Potter series isn’t really a film series, it’s a television series. A very well made and very expensive television series, but at its heart a television series. Obviously I don’t mean this literally; the films came out in theaters and were projected on celluloid, but in many ways they are created the way that one would create a TV show.



In television the director takes a much more secondary role than they do in film. TV directors are solid but anonymous craftsmen who put together solid episodes using an already established formula and the quality of any given episode they make is in many ways at the mercy of the particular script they’re given that week. Similarly, I’m beginning to think that this series may be more the work of producer David Heyman, screenwriter Steve Kloves, and of J. K. Rowling than of any of the given director. Taking this analogy further, one can perhaps dismiss the first two Harry Potter films as a bad pilot that isn’t indicative of the series as a whole, while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is like one of those late first season runs that right the wrongs of a given show’s early missteps. By extension, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is like that awesome second season in which a show really finds its voice and manages to be confident and strong right out the gate.



Interestingly enough, the man who would direct all four of the Harry Potter films to come was himself a TV director for the most part. Aside from one obscure independent movie called The Tichborne Claimant, all of director David Yates’ experience prior to his work in the Harry Potter franchise had been in British television. This background is sort of indicative of his work as well, the rule of the day under David Yates seemed to be “don’t rock the boat.” It was also a period when the rest of the world seemed a little apathetic about the whole series. That’s not to say that it wasn’t popular, it most certainly was, but its fanbase had been firmly established and they sort of gave up trying to bring in outsiders like me at this point. The fanbase was so established that every movie between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows- Part 1 would make between 290 and 300 million, no more and no less.



For me personally, this was the era where my disinterest in the franchise was less of a protest against family entertainment and more of a complete apathy. Every two years one of the things would come out, critics would respect it but not get too excited, it would quietly make a ton of money, and everyone would move on. Before seeing them, I had a pretty good idea of who directed the first four Harry Potter movies and could probably recite a very basic description of what they were about, I knew next to nothing about these next two except that one had Imelda Staunton in it and that Dumbledore died in one of them. In fact I had to look up which one was the fifth installment and which one was the sixth. Still, given that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was so good, I was excited to see these next two in a way that I wasn’t when first going into the first four films.



Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix



Bad news first: Harry’s ****ing aunt and uncle are in the opening of this film, and so is his equally ridiculous cousin, who starts the film by mocking harry for being an orphan. I don’t for the life of me know what harry did to turn these *******s against him, but turn against him they did and in cartoon fashion. The good news is that they’re only in the film for a couple minutes and that, taken as a whole, this might be the least offensive opening to a Harry Potter film to date. In particular I liked the idea of harry being put in front of a wizard trial for having used a spell in front of a human. It seems like a rather odd charge considering that he inflated a “muggle” woman and watched her float away two movies ago. I guess that inconsistency can be explained away by the fact that Harry is being watched more closely by the authorities at this point than he was before, but I still can’t help but wonder why his wizard accusers seem to think it’s appropriate to summon him via a magical floating letter which is plainly seen by the very same “muggle” he who wasn’t supposed to be exposed to magic before.



Whatever the charge, I like the idea of seeing a wizard trial in action. For that matter I like the idea of seeing more of the politics of the wizard world, and we get a lot more of that in this film than we have before. In doing so we realize that there’s more of a difference between a wizard and a Jedi than I initially believed. These people aren’t a brotherhood of wise monk-like paragons; they’re a bunch of weak and petty fools trying to save their own asses. We still only really see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the politics of Wizard Land (seriously is there a real term for the world of wizardry that I’m supposed to know?), which is a byproduct of the story being told from the perspective of children, but I did like the glimpse that we did get.



It’s this pettiness that necessitates much of the story of this fifth installment of the series. After the events to the last movie I figured that the forces of good would have finally started their fight against the resurrected Voldemort, but no, most wizards are in denial about what happened at the Goblet of Fire tournament and they’re still playing that stupid “he who shall not be named” game. This movie is all about the fight to get the rest of the wizards on board with the fight, and as such it sometimes feels like something of a giant set-up for the later films. In particular, it sets up a core group of good wizards at Hogwarts who will presumably be some of the major players in future installments and it also serves to introduce us to Voldemort’s various henchmen like Helena Bonham Carter’s Bellatrix Lestrange and that dude who could turn himself into tornadoes.



Another villain of sorts is Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge, which was one of the few elements of the film that I remember getting much attention from critics back when the film was released. I can see why. This character is a dead on variation of the kind of infuriating alpha-***** that seems to dominate every PTA, HOA, and book club you’ve ever seen. The kind of lady who’s all smiles on the outside but who clearly wants to use whatever status she has in order to control everyone around them and mold their surroundings to a very specific vision and will tear down anyone who gets in their way. It’s her domineering that really brings Dumbledore out of his shell and turns him into a character I could actually see myself giving a **** about. Before he was facing off against Dolores Umbridge he just seemed like a pretty generic Merlin/Gandalf wannabe, but when compared to Umbridge he comes off as a much stronger and wiser character… gee, I hope nothing bad ever happens to him (har har har).



The fight against Umbridge also brings out the best in Harry Potter himself, who’s at his angstiest, but also his most active here. He shows real initiative by forming “Dumbledore’s Army” and while I’m not exactly sure how he’s educating his fellow students in spells that he himself presumably wasn’t privy to, it shows real leadership and character just the same. This is so much Harry’s own movie that his usual sidekicks are really pushed to the background. Instead this weird girl named Luna is given a pretty large amount of screentime and we also delve into Harry’s rather undeveloped and not overly rewarding relationship with Cho Chang, which quite frankly feels like it was just added to this series in order to appease certain fans who would insist that there be a love-interest added to the mix.



Of course the series does really need to prioritize its storylines at this point. As a book, this installment was even longer than the last one, and yet at 138 minutes this is actually the shortest film of the series (except of course for the individual installments of the bisected final film). In my analysis of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I suspected that the act of making shortish movies out of long-ass books would be beneficial because it would give the producers a reason to cut out some of the books’ dumber moments, but here things really do just seem extremely rushed. The filmmakers need to resort to montages and newspaper collages in order to steamroll their way across some fairly important moments like Umbridge’s ascent to the head of Hogwarts. To their credit though, this was relatively free of dumb “funny” moments. I mean there was maybe an off note here or there but for the most part this was pretty dignified. The only really cringe inducing element was the existence of Grawpy, Hagrid’s half-brother who’s chained up in the forest. The character is both a terrible idea and also an atrocious special effect.



I suppose I can forgive the film for one terrible effects since they were clearly dumping most of their budget into the film’s climactic action scene. The effects there are awesome, but I have mixed feelings about the scene as a whole. For one thing Sirius Black goes out like a punk *****. Why in the world would you spend the better part of three movies developing a character like that only to have him get hit by some vague spell and then disappear into some kind of portal thingy. Lame. But the bigger problem is that it really diminishes Voldemort as a threat. I always assumed this guy was going to be some vague and rarely seen threat like Sauron, but if he’s just going to attack Harry with a scheme in every movie only to be defeated each time and run off saying “I’ll get you next time, Potter” it makes him stop looking like a serious threat and starts making him look like some cartoon villain like Mumm-Ra or Gargamel or something. Still, I can see why they’d want to give the film a climactic action scene and for the most part the set-piece does deliver.



So, yeah, I guess my feelings about this one are pretty mixed. I mean, it’s not a bad movie, in fact of all the Potter movies that had been made to this point this is firmly the second best but I also think that it’s vastly inferior to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I don’t know, there just seems to be something very perfunctory about this whole production, as if everyone involved is just trying to get this one out of the way so they can get into the series’ final act. If everything that’s set up here does indeed pay off then it will have all been worth it, if not… well that would speak ill of the whole series but especially this one.



Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince



As usual, I should start with a report on what the filmmakers have done with the opening sequence this time around and for the first time yet I have pretty much nothing but good news. Harry’s aunt and uncle are nowhere to be seen, there’s no slapstick to speak of, no confusing tangent, no shrunken rasta head…. ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a Harry Potter movie that works from the get go. In fact, the opening here actually seems downright important as it establishes the film’s three main plot threads: Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore, his relationship with a potions professor named Horace Slughorn, and his conflict with Draco. The relationship with Dumbledore is perhaps the most important because, frankly, they need to make up for a whole lot of lost time. In my analysis of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix I mentioned that Dumbledore was finally starting to seem like more than just an aloof Merlin-clone, and here he finally starts to feel like an actual character… and not a moment too soon because as everyone knows this is the movie where he finally kicks the bucket.



That Snape would eventually kill Dumbledore is something I’ve known from the very beginning thanks in part to that viral video of the guy spoiling the twist for a bunch of people lined up to buy the book on its release day. Oddly enough, the movie seems assume that everyone else had already been spoiled as well, because there’s an early scene in the film that just goes ahead and reveals Snape’s true allegiance in the most anti-climactic way imaginable. Did I miss something? Was this already revealed earlier or something? I feel like there were quite a few more dramatic ways that this reveal could have been handled, I’m not exactly sure what they were thinking there. If I hadn’t already been spoiled I would have been more than a little pissed.



However, it isn’t too hard to look past that, because for the most part this is one of the most solid Harry Potter movies yet and tonally it’s a complete 180 from everything that made me a little uneasy about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This film slows down the pace substantially and puts much more of an emphasis on character than on plot. In some sense it feels closer to the pre-Goblet of Fire films in that things seem to be back to relative normalcy at Hogwarts and Potter and co. are back to participating in classes and whatnot. In fact the accelerator may have even been pulled up a bit too abruptly. I mean, the last movie ended with a full-on battle scene between two groups of wizards and culminated with a duel between Dumbledore and Voldemort. It kind of seems a little odd that the series could go right from that to this relative calm in such a short period of time.



Maybe I should take a step back and look at each major storyline, starting with the Horace Slughorn thread. On his surface Slughorn is easily the most boring professor to come through Hogwarts. He’s got no makeup gimmick and his personality doesn’t skew too far from the typical tweed jacket teacher type. However, I really liked the backstory that they gave Slughorn and I was generally impressed that they brought back the whole Tom Riddle/Voldemort backstory that was introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry’s little mission to get the truth out of Slughorn was consistently interesting and I also quite enjoyed Harry’s encounter with the “half-blood prince’s” textbook, even if it maybe stretches credulity that he never reports this thing to his teachers.



Less successful is the sub-plot about Draco Malfoy deciding whether he’ll join with Voldemort and Snape in… doing whatever evil thing that they’re planning to do. It could have been worse though. The character is adjusted just enough from the cartoon character we’ve seen thus-far to keep this plot from being overtly annoying. Still, there was an opportunity here to fully redeem the character which was just left on the table. For the most part this sub-plot just doesn’t really go anywhere and just sort of gets lost in the shuffle. Still, it’s remarkable that the movie even makes a Draco storyline moderately watchable, and that’s in line with a general absence of WTF stupidity throughout the film. I’m sure that if I looked back at the film there were probably one or two off moments, but they were so infrequent that they are not worth noting. The film also makes a lot more time for Ron and Hermione, which is nice even if their time is mostly spent engaging in petty high school love triangles.



And that brings me back to the Dumbledore material. I said earlier that the film was making up time for how long Dumbledore was sort of a non-character, and that does help a little, but I can’t exactly say I found his death to be a devastating occurrence. At the end of the day he’s just a very derivative and not overly interesting character, and he also proved himself to not even be overly competent at his job. There’s a line mid-way through the film where a character says something along the lines of: “It comes down to whether you trust Dumbledore’s judgment, [and] Dumbledore trusts Snape” which is an odd thing to say considering that throughout the series Dumbledore’s judgment in regards to who he trusts has been laughable. This is the same guy who employed Quirinus Quirrell (the dude with the Voldemort head), Gilderoy Lockhart (a full on con artist), Remus Lupin (a ****ing werewolf), an evil Alastor Moody doppelganger, and Dolores Umbridge. Admittedly he was kind of forced into that last one, but still, the point is he’s hired an evil teacher in every single one of these movies. His inability to do simple background checks has been an Achilles Heel of his from the beginning, and it’s that character flaw which ultimately killed him.



At the end of the day, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince probably has the same basic problem as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: it mainly exists to set up future Harry Potter movies. To some extent it feels like the series is treading water and padding itself out in order to sell more tickets/books than the story perhaps warrants, but it’s not too egregious about this. The filmmaking is also generally improved this time around, which is good though I wish that Yates had shown the same control in the last film. Overall though, I can’t say too many negative things about this one at all. It’s not perfect, but in many ways it’s the Harry Potter movie I’ve been asking for the whole time.



In Conclusion



I started this installment assuming that David Yates would even things out and make the films a lot more consistent in tone. Instead I’ve found myself analyzing two movies that, within the context of a series, couldn’t be more different. One is way too fast paced, the other feels way too relaxed. One is way too plot heavy, the other is too character oriented. One is filled with special effects and action, the other is only moderately filled with special effects and action. There’s merit to both approaches, but I can’t help wondering why these films needed to be so bipolar. Couldn’t they have found the right balance for both films instead of going all-in in two different directions in each? I don’t know. Both of the movies do work well enough and I’ll take either of them over the first three Potter movies, but they leave me feeling like a Goldilocks who’s desperately trying to find a Harry Potter movie that works “just right.” Next Month: The time has come to finally tackle the studio I’ve been dreading the most: Dreamworks. I’ll be looking at two of their least disreputable efforts: Kung-Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon.



Henri Ducard 09-24-2013 07:30 PM

No Shrek?



JBond 09-24-2013 09:03 PM

Good write-ups. I agree with you on just about everything.



Neverending 09-24-2013 09:08 PM

I must be the only one that still defends Prisoner of Azkaban, stupid ending and all.



JBond 09-24-2013 09:57 PM

I thought that was the fan favorite...



Neverending 09-24-2013 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2863252)

I thought that was the fan favorite...

That's only cause Hermione punches Draco in the face.



sshuttari 09-24-2013 11:02 PM

Goblet of Fire was my favorite Harry Potter film. Til of course Death Hallows part 2.



I love how they ended that series, except for the last 10 minutes that movie is perfect.



PG Cooper 09-24-2013 11:09 PM

I love Prisoner of Azkaban even with its flaws. It is the best mix of being dark and fun of the series.



EdReedFan20 09-25-2013 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Henri Ducard (Post 2863237)

No Shrek?

He's already seen Shrek... and hated it.



Knerys 09-25-2013 12:36 PM

Really interested on your thoughts on How to Train Your Dragon...



Neverending 09-25-2013 01:54 PM

He'll hate it.



JBond 09-25-2013 01:58 PM

Yep.




Knerys 09-25-2013 02:05 PM

I would hopw he'd share his sentiment in more than three words. Whatever it may be.



JBond 09-25-2013 05:09 PM

Did you see his Harry Potter reviews he just posted?



FranklinTard 09-25-2013 05:34 PM

patton oswalt and a small group of comedians gets called in to re work just about every dreamworks script on animated flicks. anything that is said off screen is pretty much guaranteed to have been one of them.



MovieBuff801 09-27-2013 03:21 PM

I'm quite honestly surprised you liked HBP more than OOTP, Drac. I woulda thought all the emphasis on the romance would slightly put you off. Still, I agree that it's indeed a strong movie.



Dracula 10-16-2013 10:20 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Kung-Fu Panda/How to Train Your Dragon

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...psc6c52443.jpg

Dreamworks Animation. Where do I start with these guys? Well, let’s start by saying that in my book they’ve long had the duel indignity of being the makers of family films and of appearing to be soulless hacks who were shameless in their pandering to the basest of audience desires. They seemed like the Brett Ratners and McGs of family cinema when compared to the “true artists” at Pixar. The whole internet knew it and there were ample memes to reinforce the notion, my favorite being an image that summed up Dreamworks’ creative approach as “Uhh, there are talking animals… and they all make this [grinning] face.” They also had the gall to be staggeringly successful at the box office. The Shrek franchise was pretty much a license to print money in and of itself, and by 2008 they’d also established their even less respectable Madagascar franchise. Even their forgotten “failures” like Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, and Bee Movie had managed to make hundreds of millions of dollars at the worldwide box office, often tripling or even quadrupling their production budgets. Worst of all, they managed to influence a whole cadre of other hacky animation studios to imitate their lazy and uninspired style in the creation of similarly brain numbing family fare like Ice Age and Hotel Transylvania.



I don’t know if it was Stockholm Syndrome or what, but there was a three year period between 2008 and 2010 Dreamworks actually managed to score some points with the critics with the release of a couple of movies that actually seemed to be pretty good. Not Pixar-good, but good. Mind you the studio would immediately shoot that goodwill in the head by putting out nothing but sequels and forgettable crap like Turbo in the years that followed, but hey, two semi-respectable movies are better than none, right? That’s not to say I went to see them. Hell, in 2008 and 2010 I wasn’t even seeing Pixar movies, I sure as hell wasn’t going to be seeing slightly over-achieving Dreamworks Animation movies. Still, I have from time to time wondered if they hype about these projects did have any legitimacy. So, today I’m going to give Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon in order to see if there really is something deep down in the soulless abyss that is Dreamworks Animation that can be appreciated.



Kung-Fu Panda



Never in a million years did I think I’d ever find myself in a position where I’d be both watching and writing about a movie called Kung Fu Panda, at least not one where the title was literal. This really is a movie about a panda, who does Kung Fu. It’s not just the combination of those two things that I find suspect, the panda in and of itself is suspicious. Every few years we see crazes where people fall in love with certain “cute” animals. It was penguins in ’05 and ’06 and pandas seem to have stepped in to take their place in the wake of that stupid viral video of a sneezing panda cub that was circulating around the time this film came out. As someone who hates pandas, this was not a pleasant turn of events. That’s one demerit against the film, and another is that it stars Jack Black. Now, I don’t hate Jack Black, in fact I’ve found him amusing on a number of occasions. However, voicing a CGI panda who knows Kung Fu seems like exactly the kind of project which would lead him to indulge in all of his worst tendencies.



Still, critics seemed to take a shine to the film. It’s sitting at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and it beat Wall-E in a surprise upset at the Annie Awards, although the prevailing theory is that it only won that because of professional jealousy within the animation community. In fact it’s kind of interesting that this and Wall-E came out in the same year and had kind of an odd relationship. It was sort of the Iron Man to Wall-E’s The Dark Knight; one was clearly the better and more respectable work but the other was seen as surprisingly well made and populist alternative. Of course if I wasn’t going to see Wall-E that year I damn sure wasn’t going to see this thing, at least not until now.



Unlike most of the family films I’ve seen over the course of this project, Kung-Fu Panda exists in a world that consists entirely of talking Animals. Pixar’s talking animal films like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and to some extent A Bug’s Life all took place in worlds that were still very much populated by humans and where the talking animals essentially lived in secret. Here in Kung-Fu Panda there are no humans and anthropomorphized animals have built societies and live as surrogate humans. More specifically they live as surrogate ancient Chinese people and their world bears a strong resemblance to the ancient China seen in the various Shaw Brothers films of the 1970s.



In many ways this is exactly the movie I was afraid it would be. Over the top slapstick and bad comedy rule the day in the film and Jack Black is pretty much what I thought he’d be in the lead role. The rest of the voice cast is pretty cool, but most of the big name actors they got are sort of wasted. I think Jackie Chan, for instance, has something like two lines in the film. It also trades in the cheesy and simplistic moralization of the “you can be anything you want” variety that Dreamworks Animation’s movies usually seem to come with. In this case the message comes when Jack Black’s character nonsensically seems to learn kung fu over the course of a training montage and then gets a self-esteem boost when he learns from a couple of sources that there’s no “secret ingredient” to success… or something. Whatever. Look, I’m not the type of person who gets bent out of shape when kids are handed participation medals and the like, but this ending that more or less eliminates both hard work and talent from the secret to success kind of comes off as ridiculous wish fulfillment. A similar story of a seemingly disadvantaged animal succeeding in a field that normally would have been closed to him was told much better in Pixar’s Ratatouille, in which a rat manages to become a master chef but only because he has real aptitude for the trade and also works like mad over the entire course of the film in order to make it.



All that said, there were moments when I could see why this film appealed to people more than the average Dreamworks film. For one thing, the action scenes here are actually pretty solid. The makers of the film seem to have choreographed the fight scenes pretty carefully and I was especially amused by a scene where the Panda and his mentor “fight” over a piece of food during a training exercise. That’s not to say that I’d want to see any of these scenes over an actual live action martial arts film, firstly because the fights don’t have a real sense of danger to them and secondly because it’s a lot more thrilling to see real live people doing these physical feats, but the fights are certainly better than they had to be. Also, the people who made the film do seem to have a genuine affection for the martial arts genre, and coming from the studio that became famous by incorporating a Matrix spoofing bullet time sequence into a movie about a farting ogre, that’s a relatively cool thing to be referencing.



At the end of the day, this is not a movie I need. I have plenty of real martial arts movies to watch which aren’t filled with dumb jokes and stupid moralizing. However, I can see why kids who maybe haven’t been exposed to stuff like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin might like it in much the same way that the kids who weren’t allowed to listen to N.W.A might have liked MC Hammer. That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie and I’m not going to give it the pass that critics in 2008 gave it, but I guess I can see how a critical community that had been forced to sit through three Shrek movies, Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, and Bee Movie might have been in a position to over-rate it.



How to Train Your Dragon



If the critical success of Kung-Fu Panda was unexpected, the even greater success of another Dreamworks film two years later was downright shocking. That film, How to Train Your Dragon, looked like pretty standard family movie crap when it was first announced and advertised. It had a terrible title, a concept that didn’t really stand out, and a trailer with “hilarious” gag involving a dragon vomiting a fish part onto a dude and making him eat it raw. And yet, when the film finally opened it earned a Pixar-like 98% rating on Rottentomatoes, it won the Annie Award, and almost certainly would have won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature if it hadn’t come out the same year as Toy Story 3. On top of all that, it became the highest grossing Dreamworks film outside of the Shrek series. I wasn’t dreading the prospect of seeing How to Train Your Dragon the way I was dreading Kung Fu Panda, but when Kung-Fu Panda failed to live up to its hype I became all the more skeptical of all the praise that How to Train Your Dragon got back in 2010.



The first thing I noticed when I looked at the film’s pedigree before watching it was that its voice cast was surprisingly dignified, at least by Dreamworks standards. This is a studio that regularly thrives on the gratuitous casting of celebrities who seem to have only been brought in for the purpose of putting their names on the poster. The lead voice actor is Jay Baruchel, an actor who’s perfectly suited for the part of a vaguely nerdy but not cartoonishly pathetic young man, but who had very little name recognition in 2010. In fact, How to Train Your Dragon is the only Dreamworks film to date which doesn’t have an A-List celebrity voicing its lead role. Most of the rest of the voice actors here do have semi-recognizable names but aside from Gerard Butler and Jonah Hill none of them are really movie stars. For the most part they’re people like Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and David Tennant; recognizable talents that seem to have actually been hired because they matched certain roles rather than as a means to get famous people to promote the film on their talk show rounds.



When I finally popped the Blu-Ray in and started the movie what struck me was how much Dreamworks had upped their animation quality in the two years since the release of Kung-Fu Panda. I was actually kind of shocked at how dated and sort of cheap Kung Fu Panda had looked, especially when compared to 2008’s other animated hit Wall-E, but How to Train Your Dragon’s animation did seem to be on par with Pixar for the most part. The film’s look is certainly stylized, but stylized well. The characters all look cool, and I was especially struck but the visual design of the character of Astrid, who is one of the most believable “warrior princesses” I’ve seen. I also really liked the look of both the film’s signature dragon (Toothless) and the big “boss” dragon at the end, and was especially amazed at how realistic their bulging eyeballs looked. My one complaint about the film’s visual style is that, aside from the two aforementioned examples, all of the film’s other dragons look distractingly silly. It’s almost like the filmmakers put all their art resources into those two dragons and then left the rest of them to be finished by the B-team because they seem like they came straight out of a different movie.



The film’s story is, oddly enough, a sort of platonic inter-species take on “Romeo and Juliet.” As it often seems to be the case in Dreamworks' films, the film is about a young misfit who’s trying to find his place in a society that demands that he take a specific role he is unsuited for. In this case that’s the role of a soldier in an age old war between Vikings and dragons. Like the Montagues and Capulets these two sides have been fighting so long that they haven’t even considered peaceful co-existence as an option. What finally breaks the cycle is a forbidden… friendship… between two young members of each clan. This “friendship” is kept secret and only once it looks like the two “friends” have been killed do the warring parties see what a scourge is laid upon by their hate. I guess it’s not a perfect parallel, after all the feud is made rather one-sided by the fact that only one of the clans is made up of sentient humans, at its heart this is a classic forbidden… friendship… story.



The film isn’t overburdened with action set pieces, but when battles do occur the filmmakers do a fairly good job of maintaining a legitimate sense of danger while still keeping the onscreen violence toned down and PG. The bigger bulk of the film’s “action” comes from its flying sequences, which are appropriately sweeping, especially when accompanied by John Powell’s excellent score. In fact it was that first flying scene when I finally broke down and admitted that this is a pretty damn good movie. Are there some dumb jokes in it? Yeah, there are, but they aren’t as omnipresent as they were in Kung-Fu Panda. In fact there probably isn’t that much more dumb comedy here than there is in your average Pixar movie. And speaking of Pixar, I do think this probably is good enough to stand up to some of that more acclaimed animation studio’s works including their medieval romp: Brave. That’s not to say that How to Train Your Dragon is a great movie or anything. It’s not an overly deep work and it doesn’t really take all that many risks, but it is a solidly put together family film that manages to preserve more of its dignity than this studio’s fare usually does.



In Conclusion



So, in the battle of Panda vs. Dragon, I think I’m pretty firmly entrenched in Team Dragon. It isn’t even close really. Kung-Fu Panda is basically just another ****ty Dreamworks movie with a couple redeeming elements that make it a little more palatable, whereas How to Train Your Dragon is a genuinely good film with a few ****ty Dreamworks elements holding it back. I’ll give them credit for having finally made one movie that’s worth a damn, but at the same time that actually kind of makes them look worse. If they were really capable of making a film which is that good this whole time, what’s their excuse for how lame the rest of their filmography is? Maybe if How to Train Your Dragon had been the start of some new and more respectable phase of Dreamworks releases I would be more able to forgive them, but they’ve put out eight movies since then and every last one of them have had the whiff of being business as usual from the hacks at Dreamworks. So yeah, I’m glad I saw How to Train Your Dragon, but nothing about this experience has changed my mind about this studio. Next Month I’ll finish up my analysis of the Harry Potter series by looking at both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.



JBond 10-16-2013 10:55 PM

There's a Panda vs. Dragon battle?



Good reviews.



Neverending 10-16-2013 11:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2864660)

soulless hacks who were shameless in their pandering to the basest of audience desires.

And you've based this hatred by actually watching the movies?



Quote:

there was a three year period between 2008 and 2010 Dreamworks actually managed to score some points with the critics

So that historical Academy Award for Shrek means nothing?



Quote:

kids who weren’t allowed to listen to N.W.A

You're right. Every 5-year-old should be listening to gangster rap.



Quote:

I finally broke down and admitted that this is a pretty damn good movie.

You must have died a little inside.



Neverending 10-16-2013 11:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2864661)

There's a Panda vs. Dragon battle?

Only in Dracula's mind.



Knerys 10-16-2013 11:11 PM

Yay he like it! Sorta...





And I will forever say that Powell should have won the Oscar that year.



Neverending 10-16-2013 11:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Knerys (Post 2864664)

Powell should have won the Oscar that year.

Indeed.



sshuttari 10-16-2013 11:42 PM

who won instead?



Neverending 10-17-2013 12:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sshuttari (Post 2864668)

who won instead?

Nine Inch Nails guy for The Social Network.



Dracula 10-17-2013 06:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864662)

And you've based this hatred by actually watching the movies?

I said "of appearing to be soulless hacks," not "of being soulless hacks"



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864662)

So that historical Academy Award for Shrek means nothing?

True, the critics were overly generous to that one.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864662)

You're right. Every 5-year-old should be listening to gangster rap.

Yeah, it might teach them a thing or two about how they should feel about the police.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864662)

You must have died a little inside.

Just a little.



EdReedFan20 10-17-2013 01:24 PM

As much as I liked How to Train Your Dragon, I have a gut feeling the sequel is going to be terrible.



Here's the trailer (Note: I like the trailer):







sshuttari 10-17-2013 01:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EdReedFan20 (Post 2864700)

As much as I liked How to Train Your Dragon, I have a gut feeling the sequel is going to be terrible.



Here's the trailer:





What how does that look terrible?? The trailer had the best parts of the first movie with amazing music, and great amazing scenes of them flying... I want more of that and a decent story...



I'm sorry but that your comment is completely off



Neverending 10-17-2013 03:52 PM

The best part of the sequel is that they progressed the timeline.



sshuttari 10-17-2013 04:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864709)

The best part of the sequel is that they progressed the timeline.

Dark Knight Rises did it as well.



Justin 10-17-2013 05:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2864672)

Nine Inch Nails guy for The Social Network.

Reznor deserved it.



Neverending 10-17-2013 05:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sshuttari (Post 2864715)

Dark Knight Rises did it as well.

Okay? My point is that in animation you rarely get a sequel where the characters visually age.



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PG Cooper 10-17-2013 06:36 PM

I'm with Justin, Reznor deserved it.



EdReedFan20 10-17-2013 10:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sshuttari (Post 2864701)

What how does that look terrible?? The trailer had the best parts of the first movie with amazing music, and great amazing scenes of them flying... I want more of that and a decent story...



I'm sorry but that your comment is completely off

I didn't base that off the trailer. The trailer was perfectly fine. I just have a gut feeling DreamWorks will forget what made the first one work so well. I mean, it is a sequel after all. And as a minor side note, why did they age Hiccup so much. I remember reading somewhere that he was supposed to be around 18 during the events of the first movie. He looks like a totally different person.



JBond 10-17-2013 11:30 PM

The movie will be bad because they have two sequels in the works. That's kind of a red flag.



Fanible 10-17-2013 11:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EdReedFan20 (Post 2864750)

I didn't base that off the trailer. The trailer was perfectly fine. I just have a gut feeling DreamWorks will forget what made the first one work so well. I mean, it is a sequel after all. And as a minor side note, why did they age Hiccup so much. I remember reading somewhere that he was supposed to be around 18 during the events of the first movie. He looks like a totally different person.

Your post was extremely confusing if you weren't relating your comment on it going to be terrible with the teaser trailer.



Obviously they took some liberties, as he is only 10 in the book, but he's supposed to be around 14-15 in the first film. That puts him around 19-20 in the sequel.



Knerys 10-18-2013 02:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PG Cooper (Post 2864730)

I'm with Justin, Reznor deserved it.

Because it was edgy?



I'm not saying he was unworthy. But I think Powell was better.



Justin 10-18-2013 06:54 PM

I wouldn't call his soundtrack edgy. That seems like a way of describing his music with Nine Inch Nails.



EdReedFan20 10-18-2013 07:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Knerys (Post 2864766)

Because it was edgy?



I'm not saying he was unworthy. But I think Powell was better.

Powell really nails through music the feeling of soaring through the sky. A few examples from him are the Dragon Flight sequence from Shrek (he co-composed the soundtrack) and the Will Smith movie Hancock.











And then, this from HTTYD (One of my favorite tracks from the movie)







sshuttari 10-18-2013 09:48 PM

It's funny if you look at his IMDB page none of his recent stuff even come close to the soundtrack he made for this film.



I guess he's 1 trick pony, I hope HTTYD 2 and 3 live up with the soundtrack



Knerys 10-21-2013 04:06 PM

He's done over 50 films for the last couple of decades. He's doing something right.



Neverending 10-21-2013 04:39 PM

He's one of Hans Zimmer's "additional composers" so, yeah, he's very prolific. But his solo work can be hit-or-miss.



PG Cooper 10-22-2013 08:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Knerys (Post 2864766)

Because it was edgy?



I'm not saying he was unworthy. But I think Powell was better.

I think it's a more unique, interesting, and memorable score.



Neverending 10-22-2013 04:11 PM

The score doesn't work outside the movie. But with John Powell's score for "How to Train Your Dragon", you can blast it on your iPod anytime you want and be entertained by it. That's the big difference, Cooper.



PG Cooper 10-23-2013 10:36 AM

Well, I listen to The Social Network score on its own quite a bit.



Justin 10-23-2013 10:52 AM

That's a pretty large blanket statement for Reznor's score.



Dracula 12-20-2013 07:35 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Harry Potter: It All Ends



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For almost an entire decade, the Harry Potter series was an incredible cash cow for Warner Brothers. Adaptations of the first six books had generated a combined $5,421,637,048 in worldwide box office revenue alone. But there was an end to the gravy train in sight. J.K. Rowling had only written seven books, which would seem to suggest that there would only seven movies… or would there. Knowing that their audience would stick with them through pretty much anything, the Warner Brothers execs made the same decision that the producers of the Twilight series, the Hunger Games series, and the The Hobbit series would all end up making as well: the decision to split their last film in two. It’s a decision that earned the studio a billion dollars in extra box office revenue, but also inspired a bit of light backlash from critics and from the fan base. Of course the fan base wasn’t going to stay mad at the series for long and while the film is tied with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 still holds a fairly respectable 79% fresh score.



One interesting thing I took away while watching the recent adaptation of Ender’s Game (a story that pre-dates Rowlings but which, in retrospect, is suspiciously similar) is just how compact it is. Orson Scott Card’s story managed to tell a complete arc about a boy preparing for a fight and finishing it over the course of a 324 page tome that could fairly easily be turned into a 114 minute film. If it had been written as a YA novel today it probably would have been expanded into a multi book series whether it needed to or not. Now this isn’t to say that I wanted the Potter series to have been that compact, but it could have been if it wanted to. Instead its story was stretched out, and this stretching out of the story started long before Warner Brothers decided to split the final book into two movies. It was Rowling who decided to turn this fairly simple “chosen one vs. evil” story into seven books when it easily could have been two or three. She did it a bit more elegantly than Warner Brothers did by setting each book over a different school year, but things have already been slowed to a crawl in order to make the story span six installments up to this point.



I guess what I’m trying to say is that going into these last two movies I have a pretty cynical view of why this final installment was split in two, but I’m also willing to believe that it can potentially work out for the best if it’s executed right. After all, it’s taken Potter six movies/years to prepare for this final battle so it is sort of logical that it would take him longer to fight it than it did to, say, compete in the Goblet of Fire tournament. Still, these movies were packaged and sold as separate installments, and as such I will be analyzing them as individual movies rather than two parts of a single whole.



Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows – Part 1



Given that this is a single story split across two films, I expected it to be a rather slow paced affair that stretches a lot of things out, instead it establishes a pretty fast pace right from the beginning by more or less jumping right into the action. After a short prologue the film goes straight into a chase scene where Harry and his various allies are chased through the sky by Voldemort’s army. It’s a pretty good scene for the most part and it more or less establishes what the film to come is going to be: an action driven chase film. The gang never goes to Hogwarts and some of the characters we’ve come to know like Maggie Smith’s Minerva McGonagall are nowhere to be seen. As such this is unlike any other Harry Potter film and in some ways it’s a little closer to the Lord of the Rings movies in that it depicts three characters on a quest through enemy territory.



As was revealed in the previous entry, the only way to kill Voldemort is to collect and destroy a bunch of magical doodads called horcruxes. The film is structured around the gang finding these things, and that makes the film kind of episodic in nature. It moves from set-piece to set piece and is a rather action-driven affair. Fortunately a lot of these action scenes do have some real weight to them. This time around the wizards' wands feel almost like oddly shaped ray guns rather than simple magical instruments and more often than not it feels like Harry’s enemies are shooting to kill. There are some pretty solid set-pieces throughout the film like a shootout at a diner, a heist that plays out at the ministry of magic, a fight with Voldemort’s boa constrictor, and a rather intense chase scene through the woods which ends with Harry’s very short lived capture.



It does sort of stretch credulity that Harry is able to escape from all this non-sense. For all the time the series has spent showing Harry preparing for these battles, he still doesn’t really seem all that powerful. His success often seems to say more about the relative incompetence of his foes, particularly the rather lax security at the Ministry of Magic and Bellatrix Lestrange inability to keep the world’s most highly valued prisoner guarded. Beyond that, the gang’s success also all too often seemed predicated on their ability to use a rather convenient and ill-defined teleportation spell that often gets them out of hairy situations. When the gang isn’t going after horcruxes they’re hiding in the woods and arguing about… stuff. Honestly I’ve kind of stopped keeping overly close attention to the interpersonal relationships at this point. Here they mostly seem like friends until Ron suddenly turns into a little **** and tries to leave, possibly because he’s being influenced by whatever magic the horcruxes are giving off. Then he comes back. It’s not an overly fascinating arc, in part because this isn’t really a film that’s built to accommodate character development. These characters are pretty much supposed to be as developed as they’ll ever be going into the climactic battle with Voldemort.



Tonally, the series is darker than it’s ever been. It’s also literally darker than it’s ever been because Eduardo Serra seems to have really taken the moody look the series has been taking to something of an extreme. I like my lighting a little dark too, but man, I had to really squint to see some of the scenes in this one. But I digress. The series really seems to be at its most grim here, but that doesn’t stop it from incorporating its most ridiculous character at the end. That’s right, ****ing Dobby the house elf shows up in the final scene and is instrumental in the film’s climax. He also dies in the process, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be sad… but I mostly found it kind of funny. I’m not exactly sure why Dobby death is given all this reverence while Brendan Gleeson’s character is unceremoniously killed off screen, but that’s the direction they went with.



I also question a diversion taken earlier in the film’s final act where an old man is nice enough to stop and tell a long piece of wizard lore (which is helpfully illustrated through an odd animated sequence) even though he fully intends to betray all three of them. Obviously this story is going to play into events in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, but here it just feels like an open-ended exposition dump. Really the whole film feels odd because in many ways it’s a film that doesn’t have either a beginning or an end. The lack of an ending is obviously in the nature of the beast when you’re watching a movie with “Part 1” in the title, but I do think the film could have done more to ease us in at the beginning and maybe better establish what Potter has been doing in the time since the last movie and for that matter why he thinks for even a second that it would be a good idea to attend a wedding when he’s about to be fighting a war with the forces of evil for the fate of the world. If I had seen this movie in 2010 and spent full price to see this I probably would have felt a little ripped off, but I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t mostly find it enjoyable as it was happening.



Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows – Part 2



If there truly was backlash against the idea of splitting the final Harry Potter film into two, it had mostly died by the time the second of the two “Deathly Hollows” films came along. For the most part, critics and audiences were happy to embrace “Part 2” as the culmination of a big long journey they’d all taken. In fact it has the highest RT score of all the films and by a wide margin. It also killed it at the box office. It was the first movie to best The Dark Knight’s opening weekend record (it held the record for all of ten months before it was usurped by The Avengers), and would go on to gross 1.3 billion dollars worldwide. As of this writing it’s the fourth highest grossing movie of all time and far and away the highest grossing Potter film… unless you adjust for inflation, in which case the first film is number one with a bullet, at least domestically. Either way, I have to say I’m a little surprised that it was able to do that. This is a movie that would not make a lick of sense to anyone who hadn’t already seen the previous seven movies. Who were these people who bought tickets to “Part 2” but not “Part 1?” I guess they were just keeping up on DVD or something. Maybe this was a precursor to the rather strange phenomenon we all witnessed earlier this year when “Breaking Bad” suddenly had a huge spike in its viewership during its final season.



Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 is a different beast from most Potter movies. For one thing, it’s really short. Well, maybe not by most standards, but it’s definitely the shortest one of the series. This is of course a byproduct of the splitting in half of the final installment, but it is interesting to note that it's the 150 minute “Part 1” that received the brunt of the installment’s combined four hour and forty minute run time. Actually, come to think about it, almost all of the Potter movies that were released during the summer season have shorter run times than the ones that came out during the holiday season. Weird. Anyway, this “Part 2” definitely feels more like half a movie than “Part 1” did. In many ways it’s a film that just serves as one big long extended climax for its entire run time… and I’m not sure I like that about it. In fact, it kind of reminded me of The Matrix Revolutions. Both films seem to be missing first and second acts, both have humungous battles in the middle of them, both end with big fights between the hero and antagonist, both have their heroes knocked out at some point, hell, both even use train stations as metaphors for a sort of purgatory/limbo state. I’m not saying that it’s as bad as that rather infamous third Matrix film, but I do think both films suffer similar problems from having been forcibly split from their first halves.



Truth be told, there isn’t really a whole lot to say about this one. There’s not much of in the way of plot development beyond “we’ve got to finally kill Voldemort,” there’s no dramatic shift in tone, and there are no new characters (except for Dumbledore’s brother, who seemed like a bizarre and pointless element to be introducing this late into things). For the most part, the movie can be divided into three set-pieces: the robbing of the goblin bank, the Hogwarts battle, and the final confrontation with Voldemort. The whole bank robbery section was fun, but felt like nothing more than time filler. In fact, I’m calling “shenanigans” on this whole “find the Horcruxes” plot device. If they’d just cut the number of horcruxes down to about three they probably could have fit this installment into one film pretty easily. As for the battle scene… it was alright. I’m not exactly sure where Voldemort got this army from, prior to this film the “death-eaters” seemed more like a cult than a legion, but that’s probably nit-picking. To some extent these epic CGI battle scenes are to be expected at the end of a fantasy series, and this one was mostly passable.



If nothing else, seeing scenes like that one give me a newfound respect for what Peter Jackson was able to accomplish with the battles in his Lord of the Rings series: staging these things is obviously a lot harder than it looks. And, speaking of things that this movie gave me a renewed appreciation for, seeing the wizards fighting one on one made me really miss lightsabers. Watching Harry and Voldemort stand around and throw fireworks at each other just doesn’t have the same appeal of seeing Luke and Darth Vader fencing up close with that super memorable buzzing sound. Also, Voldemort’s tactics seem a bit suspect. He does a very bad job of protecting his snake for one thing. If I had a python whose survival was essential to preserving my immortality I’d probably keep it in a bank vault or something, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be using it as an attack dog like Voldemort did both here and in the last movie. I also don’t exactly understand how Harry’s whole journey through limbo worked, or why Voldemort failed to just ****ing behead him while he was out cold. Voldemort’s plan to just stroll over to Hogwarts and brag about his victory also just strikes me as stupid.



The only thing here I found particularly noteworthy was the revelation that Snape had actually been a double agent the whole time and that his defection to Voldemort had been a ruse intended to make Voldemort steal a really powerful wand under false pretenses. As far as plot twists go that’s not half bad, and I guess I should probably take back some of those potshots I took at Dumbledore for being stupid enough to hire Snape in the first place. Still, all of it seems like a rather convoluted way of setting up a somewhat anti-climactic ending where Voldemort gets killed by his own wand backfiring on him. I can’t help but think it was all done as a means of setting up a situation where Harry can kill Voldemort without actually getting his hands dirty. Oh, and don’t get me started on that ridiculous epilogue, who the hell wanted their last image from this universe to be one of comfortable domesticity? Not me.



Earlier I compared the audience that showed up to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 to the Johnny-come-latelys that waited until the last season to finally start watching “Breaking Bad.” Oddly enough, I kind of feel the same way about the last episode of that show as I did about this movie: it was exactly what I expected it to be, but disappointingly, nothing more. There are worse things it could be of course. Ultimately I think its Achilles heel is almost entirely derived from the fact that it’s the final act of what should have been one final film. In fact, and I’m shocked to be saying this, I might have actually liked “Part 1” a lot more.



Some Final Thoughts on the Series



So, I’ve now dedicated nearly twenty hours to this. Was it worth it? Eh, I don’t know about that. I’d say my final appraisal of the series is decidedly mixed. Of the eight films I’ve given positive marks to six, but my interest in the series peaked at the fourth film and none of the subsequent installments was ever really able to recapture that lightning in a bottle. In fact I kind of actively got pretty sick of the whole thing somewhere around the sixth movie, though I’ll admit that part of my problem there was that I was watching all of them over the course of a year rather than over the course of a decade. At the end of the day an “octology” of films just kind of feels like a rather unwieldy format. I think this is a story that either needed to be dramatically shortened into a three film trilogy or lengthened into a sort of epic Game of Thrones style T.V. series where you really got to know and understand everything about this world. As it is, I feel like only a small fraction of what was set up over the course of the series was really all that necessary if all the story was going to amount to was a mission to track down and break a bunch of trinkets followed by a pretty standard battle between CGI armies.



In retrospect, it kind of makes sense that the fourth film would be my favorite. The first three films were all flawed as hell, and then the “Yates” movies all had problems of their own. That Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire one was the only one that really managed to get everything right and sort of be the best of both worlds. I liked the fifth and sixth films as well, but in retrospect I think it was during those installments that things really kind of started to go wrong again. I think the whole series made a big mistake by sticking to the “another year at Hogwarts” formula for too long. It made it so that the whole series was just a big setup, one which no one final overstuffed installment was ever going to be able to really pay off. If I were to rewrite the series I would have started it with Harry a little older, then had him graduate after that fourth film, and then had the last few installments be dedicated to him spearheading this war against Voldemort.



That said, I’m not sure I ever would have really been in much of a position to fully take this series into my heart even if it was less flawed. It’s just not something I grew up with, and as such it was simply never going to displace Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, or Star Trek, or Batman, or Spider-Man or any of the other franchises that left an impression on me at a young age. To some extent I’m sure that all of these franchises can be torn apart, and I’m sure that all of them can seem kind of silly, but to a certain generation they were everything and I’m willing to bet that if this series had entered my heart at the right time I would have really been into it. As it is, I can certainly say that I’m glad I watched them if only to have better insights into Hollywood’s current obsession with adapting YA series. I know for sure that my recent review of Ender’s Game would not have been the same without this experience under my belt, for example. But beyond that, I did find plenty to enjoy while watching all these movies. I liked seeing the parade of British character actors, I liked a solid handful of the action set pieces scattered throughout the films, and it was interesting to see the films’ three young stars grow up in front of my eyes as the series progressed. All in all, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Next month will be my season finale and I’ll be looking at the two films that, more than any others, inspired me to start this series. A pair childrens’ films from directors who aren’t normally associated with family entertainment: Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Sipke Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.



Dracula 12-20-2013 07:41 PM

Oh, and, for the record:



1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (4/5)

2. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (3.5/5)

3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1 (3.5/5)

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix (3/5)

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2 (3/5)

6. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (3/5)

7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2.5/5)

8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2/5)



PG Cooper 12-20-2013 07:48 PM

You switching to a five star system?



Dracula 12-20-2013 07:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PG Cooper (Post 2868667)

You switching to a five star system?

No, but it seemed to make more sense for this situation since it otherwise would have been two 3.5s, four 3s, a 2.5, and a 2, and that wouldn't have made the distinctions as clear.



JBond 12-20-2013 08:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2868665)

As far as plot twists go that’s not half bad, and I guess I should probably take back some of those potshots I took at Dumbledore for being stupid enough to hire Snape in the first place.



Oh, and don’t get me started on that ridiculous epilogue, who the hell wanted their last image from this universe to be one of comfortable domesticity? Not me.



In fact, and I’m shocked to be saying this, I might have actually liked “Part 1” a lot more.



the fourth film would be my favorite.

Heh, I remember that.



Everyone not a child agrees.



Me too.



Me too.



EdReedFan20 12-21-2013 09:12 PM

Dobby (among multiple House Elves) was much more integral in the books, which made his death more meaningful. Had they cut him from the movies, regardless of his lack of screen time, fans would probably been unhappy that Dobby wasn't there to help Harry escape. If you thought Dobby was annoying though, you probably would have HATED Peeves, the poltergeist had they not cut him out of the movies.



IanTheCool 12-22-2013 10:39 AM

I like your final conclusion. Its nice that you can still recognize where the love for these comes from.



MovieBuff801 12-22-2013 11:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2868725)

I like your final conclusion. Its nice that you can still recognize where the love for these comes from.

Agreed. That's one of the reasons I prefer Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings -- I could just never get into LOTR from an emotional/personal standpoint. Plus, I've come to realize I prefer modern/urban fantasy to epic fantasy.



Dracula 07-24-2014 11:09 PM

By popular demand...



The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- The Lost Episode: Fantastic Mr. Fox/Where the Wild Things Are



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[Note: The following installment of “The Skeptics Journey” had a bit of a troubled history. I watched the two movies and started writing it in early January, but was quickly distracted by various end-of-year projects. The Fantastic Mr. Fox section was written within a reasonable time-frame, but the Where the Wild Things Are section went unwritten for so long that I pretty much abandoned the whole thing. However, I eventually decided that I needed to finish what I started and so I reconstructed my intended review using some old notes and hazy memories of the film. As such, half of this piece is going to be pretty rough but at least it’s out there, and I can move on.]



Bolstered by the critical and commercial success of Pixar, all throughout the 2000s the coolness-factor of family films started to go up and up and up. I think that this all peaked in the year 2009, which (perhaps not coincidentally) was the year that Pixar finally got its Best picture nomination for the movie Up. The trend had moved far beyond Pixar and it seemed like every studio was starting to get into the business of making movies that were ostensibly for children but which actually seemed to be made almost entirely for adults. It was the year of Coroline, of 9, of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and of Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol. More importantly, it was the year where two filmmakers who had heretofore made nothing besides R-rated live action films decided to try their hands at making movies that at least looked like they were made for children.



Those two filmmakers were of course Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze and their films were Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are. Both of these films were based on classic picture books and both were met with strong critical praise and not so strong box office returns. In fact, both movies barely made their budgets back at the box office and could probably be called bombs, which might explain why the percentage of “children’s films for adults” went down precipitously after 2009. The thing is, neither film really felt like a bomb if you were living in certain circles. These were movies that were made to appeal to certain nostalgic itches that upper-middle class cineastes in their late twenties and early thirties were feeling and if you happened to know enough of those people you were likely to hear a lot about these two movies over the course of that year. In fact there are no two films that inspired me to start this series of reviews than these two.



Fantastic Mr. Fox



I think Wes Anderson is pretty much at a place where he needs no introduction at this point. His whimsical neo-French New Wave style is almost instantly identifiable to anyone who’s been paying attention to cinema in the last fifteen years and his influence is beyond question as well. The thing is, around 2009 I and many other fans had kind of fallen out of love with the guy. In short, people were growing more than a little tired of his style and he wasn’t really helping his case much by making flawed misfires like 2004’s over-stuffed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and 2007’s under-stuffed The Darjeeling Limited, which is probably his least loved work to date. It was clearly time for Wes Anderson to change things up a bit, but at the same time I think that completely jettisoning his signature style probably would have been a mistake. Eventually he actually came up with a pretty clever solution to his little problem. He opted to make a family movie using stop motion animation, which was a novel enough idea on his own that the film could feel like something fresh even though he was otherwise sticking to if not increasing the use of every other aspect of his usual MO. The resulting film was an interesting little oddity called Fantastic Mr. Fox, which most people viewed as a comeback and it even managed to win over some people who never liked his films in the first place.



The film is based on a book by Roald Dahl, the famous author of offbeat children’s books. I never read any of his books either as a child or in adulthood, but I have seen quite a few adaptations of his work and have a pretty good idea of what is authorial voice is. Frankly I’m not exactly sure how his stuff caught on, it’s all just very weird. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” would seem to be one of his more straightforward books, a sort of take on Beatrix Potter style stories about woodland creatures having adventures. Being as it’s about talking animals, a live action version of the story was pretty much out of the question. Wes Anderson has always been a very tactile filmmaker (if he’s ever used CGI for anything you wouldn’t know it from watching his films), so it makes sense that he went the stop-motion route for the project instead of conventional or computer generated animation. Originally he was planning to work with Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach fame), who he had worked with on some of the effects in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but Selick was busy directing Coraline when production was scheduled so Anderson instead worked with a guy named Mark Gustafson who has had a more anonymous career in the animation world and who probably interfered less in Anderson’s vision.



The animation style that Anderson went with differs from the last barnyard set stop-motion riff on genre filmmaking I saw (Chicken Run) in that it’s more marionette-like than clay-like. It reminded me a lot of those old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials except it was done on a higher budget and was a little more detailed all around. The animation is not seamless, but it also isn’t really supposed to be. Anderson is going for a sort of warm lo-fi approach to animation, where you can pretty clearly see the animator’s fingerprints displacing the fox’s fur in-between takes. The film does end up doing a pretty serviceable job of replicating Anderson’s visual style within the animation, complete with Anderson’s signature pans and montages. The biggest difference from his previous work (aside from the obvious) is probably that he opted for the narrower 1.85:1 aspect ratio here, which he stuck with for Moonrise Kingdom and reports indicate that his next film (The Grand Budapest Hotel) will be at the even narrower Academy ratio for much of its running time.



So, I mostly approve of the visual style, but what about the substance… well, allow me to digress for a second. I’m not a big NPR listener, but one show I do listen to every week (in podcast form) is “This American Life.” The show is a staple of public radio and every week it manages to provide both important journalistic pieces and interesting personal anecdotes. However that show’s Achilles heel (aside from David Sedaris) is when it decides to broadcast fictional pieces that almost always take the form of hipster-ific short stories based around the “hilarious” conceit that they’re about talking animals (or storybook characters, or bible characters, or whatever) who, get this, talk and think like they’re contemporary yuppies. Its basically the same dumb high concept that fueled the cartoon “The Flintstones,” a one-joke show about how cave men are just like us except that all their stuff is made of rocks and/or named after some kind of rock related pun. I’ve got to say, at times this movie did not seem all that removed from that kind of bull****.



Here the various animals speak and behave almost exactly like typical Wes Anderson characters except that they’re wild animals who live underground and eat raw meat and stuff. They even curse like typical Anderson characters except with the word “cuss” being used in place of actual profanities in order to keep things PG. George Clooney in particular seems to be doing his usual “smartest guy in the room” routine, although the film does subvert that persona here and there. The rest of the cast is about as sprawling as it usually is in a Wes Anderson film, though I’ve got to say that some of the voice cast is maybe a little underutilized. One thing that’s not overly clear in the movie is the extent to which humans and animals interact in this world. At times it seems that the animals exist in their own little world and the farmers don’t know they can talk, but at times the farmers seems to interact with the animals as if they’re sentient foes. Particularly odd is the rat voiced by Willem Dafoe, who appears to have been hired by the farmers in order to oppose the Fox’s gang, but I have no idea how the farmers went about communicating this to him.



In retrospect, it maybe isn’t that odd that Wes Anderson opted to go the family film route if only for one film. His whole filmography seems to be defined by whimsy and a certain childlike innocence. His characters have a certain charming naiveté and innocence to them which, in the context of live action films made for and starring adults, have a certain nostalgic charm to them. Here it’s the opposite, we’re seeing a childish and whimsical environment but all the characters are acting like adults with adult problems. I’ve heard a lot of movies described as “adult movies disguised as kid’s movies,” and this is one of the few times where I really agree. That doesn’t necessarily mean I love it or anything, but I really don’t know what kids are supposed to get out of this. If it wasn’t about talking animals this easily could have fit into the mold of a standard issue mid-life crisis movie, albeit one with a lighthearted thievery twist. I don’t mean that as either a criticism or as praise, its just… this is a really weird movie.



It’s a movie that doesn’t make sense as entertainment for children and its visual style scares away all but the hippest of adult audiences who watch the trailers and just assume it’s another animated flick. As such I’m not too surprised that it failed at the box office. And fail it did. You’d think that the family film trappings would have been a means of getting the film more mainstream exposure than Wes Anderson’s usual indie fare but it didn’t. In fact it made less at the box office than three of Wes Anderson’s seven films (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and Moonrise Kindom), and would have also been outgrossed by Rushmore if you adjusted for inflation. Considering that those were all quirky indies with platform releases, that’s saying something.



Do I wish it did better? Well, yes and no. As a Wes Anderson fan I did find plenty to like here and I’m glad I at least watched it. When Criterion releases their Blu-Ray of the movie in February I probably will pick it up if only out of auteur completeism. Also, if family movies are going to get made, there probably should be a place for projects like this which try to do things a little different than the lame-ass Dreamworks/Ice Age formula. Anderson’s next movie was a live action effort that was clearly for an adult audience (even if the characters were children) and his next project seems to be as well, so it looks like this was just a one-off goof, and a fairly enjoyable one for the most part. As long as he keeps it that way I don’t mind too much.



Where the Wild Things Are



In the grand scheme of things, Fantastic Mr. Fox was a fairly low-profile effort aimed at Wes Anderson fans and at families looking for a quirky diversion, but the same cannot necessarily be said of 2009’s other major auteur family movie: Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. This was a $100 million dollar effort based on a much loved picture book that had been bouncing around Hollywood for nearly thirty years before Spike Jonze finally convinced Warner Borthers to let him make it. Like no film before, this seemed to be the ultimate test of whether or not this whole “kids' movies for adults” thing was truly a viable business model or whether or not it might be better to keep the worlds of indie cinema and children’s entertainment separate. I’ll give them this, their trailer almost had me convinced. That perfectly cut two minute masterpiece set to Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” was pretty tantalizing and almost made me want to give the movie a shot, but I ultimately decided against it in part because the reviews were so polarized. Some critics really seemed to love it, but most kind of sat on the fence between respectful bemusement and reverential bafflement.



Normally when I finally sit down to watch these critically adored family films I see what people like in them, but also come away with a feeling that what I just watched really was a lot more childish and juvenile than its supporters want to admit. With this one though, I finally didn’t feel cheated: this really truly does feel like a kids’ movie that’s truly meant for adults. It feels so much like it was meant for adults that failed to attract many kids to theaters when it was released back in 2009 and by all accounts the kids that did go (who were more than likely dragged there by their hipster parents) didn’t seem to like it much. I remember reading an audience reaction article that described a child looking to his mother half-way through the film and asking her something like “mommy, why does this movie have to be so sad?” So, we finally have a mature family movie, that should make me happy right? Wrong. Simply being a movie meant for adults does not make a film good, and while there were things I admired about Where the Wild Things Are, I don’t necessarily think it’s any good.



The film starts out pretty well by looking at young Max in the real world and doesn’t hesitate to make him an authentically annoying kid in a way that most family movies don’t. In fact, he’s a walking condom advertisement if ever there was one. The film opens with him throwing a major tantrum after he provokes some older kids and they get slightly rougher than he intended and then don’t give an apology that he considers sufficient. He quickly takes this “trauma” out on his mother, who is too busy to play along with the attention starved little ****’s imaginary games, which pisses him off to no end. He gets so angry that, like Dorothy before him, he runs away and suddenly finds himself in a fantasy world populated by “wild things,” and that’s where the movie starts to go downhill fast.



I feel like this is a film where Spike Jonze has essentially cast himself as this kid’s savior. He’s telling this kid that he understands how much of a bummer it is to be a ten year old who can’t get his mommy to play with him in his stupid fort so he’s going to provide this kid with a wonderful escape into a magical world filled with understanding people in freakish mascot outfits. Not only will these wild things understand him and play along with his every retarded fantasy, they’ll also praise him and make him their leader. These imaginary friends don’t really have lives of their own, so they’ll happily play with Max all day and night and are happy to build him a gigantic fort. And that’s more or less when I really started getting pretty actively bored with the whole movie. At a certain point it just turns into this really aimless hang-out movie where Max and all the monsters are just playing together.



To his credit, Spike Jonze brings a lot of panache to the film. This is a much better showcase of his visual capabilities than the two relatively visually restrained Charlie Kaufman movies that he made previously and Lance Acord cinematography almost reminds me of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist in the way that it manages to simultaneously look beautiful and naturalistic. However, no amount of visual beauty is going to matter when the movie itself is this misguided. In many ways it actually reminds me of another movie I watched for this project: The Polar Express. Like that movie, this one is imaginative and visually grand but in service of a movie that’s almost impossible to enjoy. Jonze’s movie didn’t have quite as many bizarre moments and had a slightly better handle on tone, but there was a similar boredom that set in once it got going and a similarly insane sense of melancholy whimsy. The film’s trailer makes a pretty good case that this visual aesthetic could have made for a very good music video or something, but at feature length the thing gets old fast.



I’m sort of conflicted on this one. On paper I think it is a noble effort. In general I’m a believer in the idea of giving big budgets to people like Spike Jonze and allowing them to make bold artistic expressions like this. Jonze clearly had a vision, it just happened to be a vision that I do not share or enjoy watching… at all. It was also a vision that most of America didn’t seem to share. The movie wasn’t a complete bomb at the box office, it did make about $100 million dollars worldwide (77% of it domestically, interestingly), which theoretically means that it broke even but that’s hardly the kind of return on investment that Hollywood wants out of its big budget family movies. Jonze clearly bounced back by making the lower budget and decidedly adult follow-up, Her. Ultimately I’m going to have to call this one a failed experiment and a nice try, but also a pretty massive failure.



In Conclusion



As I said at the outset, 2009 was the epicenter of the “kid movies for adults” trend. It was also the year that Hollywood maybe started to see the limitations of the trend and learned that they maybe needed to reign in vanity projects like Where the Wild Things Are. In fact I almost want to envision a scenario where all the studio-executives got together and greenlit that movie as some sort of crazy experiment to see just how arty they could allow a family movie to become before it starts to alienate the target audience. I think they got their answer, because movies like that stopped getting made pretty quickly. You’d occasionally still get an auteur driven family movie like Hugo (another movie that made less money than its buzz would suggest) but for the most part family movies have gotten a lot more Frozen and a lot less Fantastic Mr. Fox in the last few years. Hell, even Pixar seems to have lost a lot of its luster. Part of me is disappointed that these movies are being made with less artistic ambition now, but truthfully I’m kind of relieved. A world where people aren’t insisting that the latest cartoon is Oscar worthy is a world where I don’t feel as much pressure to go to the damn things.



That was the last installment of my planned “season 1,” the original plan was to have a brief hiatus for award season and then start all over again, but that plan is clearly out the window. In fact I don’t plan to make any more monthly commitments like that, but I’m not quite ready to call it quits on the series altogether. I will be doing some future installments, but they’ll probably be a little more sporadic and I’m not making any promises.



Deexan 07-25-2014 05:10 AM

Great read.



PG Cooper 07-25-2014 08:18 AM

Lesson learned; if I pester people long enough, I get what I want. Thanks, Dracula!













In all seriousness though, this was another great read. I mostly agree with your sentiments on Fantastic Mr. Fox in that it's an enjoyable, off-beat oddity. I'd place it above Darjeeling Limited, on par with Grand Budapest Hotel, and beneath The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, and Moonrise Kingdom.



Still haven't seen Bottle Rocket or The Life Aquatic. And on this topic, I haven't seen Where the Wild Things Are either.



Dracula 07-25-2014 08:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PG Cooper (Post 2885418)

Lesson learned; if I pester people long enough, I get what I want. Thanks, Dracula!

You were lucky, you latest round of pestering came at a time when I managed to get my main weekly reviews done in a relatively timely fashion. Any other week and I would have just blown it off again.



Justin 07-25-2014 10:37 AM

I think the problem with Where the Wild Things Are is the overt symbolism. Once you've picked it up, you can guess with certainty what the next scene will likely be. On top of that, it's so blatant that Max's evolution feels contrived and artificial. Stylistically, it's beautiful and matches the book. Same goes for the acting. It's the under-cooked screenplay that causes the movie to sink.



EdReedFan20 07-25-2014 04:03 PM

Well, maybe Hollywood went in TOO different a direction after 2009, because this article (https://www.yahoo.com/movies/child-r...455297727.html) seems to imply that there seems to be NO movies that are meant for children. She (the author) laments the lack of movies she can bring her child to and was annoyed at how aggressively Transformers was being advertised to her son (she won't allow him to see it). There is a major flaw in her argument, though, which I think makes this article moot. She thinks there are too few movies appropriate for kids today, yet her examples for movies from when she was a kid (and wants to return) were movies like Goonies and Gremlins. Even Return of the Jedi. Had PG-13 existed back then, all of them (maybe not ROTJ) would've been PG-13 (Gremlins is one of the reasons why PG-13 even exists in the first place!!). If those movies were out today, she would not be letting her son watch them.



Dracula 08-31-2014 08:58 PM

The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs/The Lego Movie

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One of the great documentaries about filmmaking is Martin Scorsese’s “A Personal Journey Through American Movies,” in which the esteemed filmmaker outlined the various roles that a director can take. There was the director as storyteller, the director as illusionist, the director as iconoclast, and most importantly the director as smuggler. The “director as smuggler” referred to the way that filmmakers, especially those working within the Hollywood system, would often use commercial films as a sort of Trojan Horse as a means to tell stories with themes that were secretly personal, subversive, or political without offending or boring their audiences. I bring this up because the filmmaking team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have not so subtly seemed to build a career by smuggling semi-subversive commentary into films that otherwise appear hopelessly commercial. Their 21 Jump Street films, for example, appear from their trailers to simply be raunchy comedies based on a crappy old T.V. show. They are that of course, but to liven things up Miller and Lord filled these movies with in-jokes about the banality of Hollywood franchise thinking.



This approach works to their advantage firstly because it allows them to get the films made because of their veneer of commerciality, but also allows them to succeed because that same veneer gives critics and audiences such low expectations that they really don’t have to do a whole lot in order to impress people. The truth of the matter is, 21 Jump Street and its sequel aren’t exactly brilliant satire, they just seem that way when compared to the bland alternative and there’s something kind of ballsy about the way they sort of call themselves out. Additionally, the films have a certain unpretentiousness about the way they make their various points. In general Miller and Lord don’t consider themselves to be above the tropes they’re critiquing, but it also seems like they can’t bring themselves to fall into the usual filmmaking traps without calling it out.



So, how did these maestros of R-rated comedy break into Hollywood? Animated family movies actually. Yeah. In general animation directors and live action directors tend to stay segregated. A live action director like a Wes Anderson or a Gore Verbinski might dabble in animation from time to time and an animation director like a Brad Bird or an Andrew Stanton might try to break into live action occasionally but you rarely see filmmakers who are willing to keep feet in both worlds like Lord and Miller do. Of course I was familiar with their live action comedies, but I haven’t checked out their family friendly animated movies until now even though one has sort of become a phenomenon while the other has a number of fans and defenders. As such the time seems to be right to give these movies a chance.



Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs



During my Pixar series I talked a lot about how Dreamworks Animation was sort of like Pixar’s evil twin. While Pixar seemed be run by people with a genuine passion for making movies, Dreamworks seemed to be run by greedy hacks who made dumb pandering movies directed straight at the lowest common denominator. It should be noted that as much as I hate what Dreamworks represents, they are clearly not the lowest of the low in terms of animation studios because they can at least claim to be innovators. As much as I dislike Dreamworks Animation’s house style, it was at least a style that they developed and improved upon to some degree over the years. The same cannot be said for the other two Hollywood animation studios that aren’t under the Disney umbrella: 20th Century Fox Animation and Sony Pictures Animation. These are the sudios that gave us movies like Surfs Up, Rio, The Smufs, Robots, Hotel Transylvania, and of course the four Ice Age movies. In other words, these two studios are in the rather dubious position of being blatant Dreamworks wannabes. They take everything that’s lame and disreputable about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s vision and turns it up to eleven.



And yet, it’s from one of these studios (Sony Pictures Animation) that Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who shall henceforth be lazily be referred to as PLCM) somehow managed to breakout as a major filmmaking force. Before that though, the two (who met at Dartmouth before heading out to L.A.) actually honed their skills at Disney… well, the Disney television division anyway. Their work their eventually resulted in the creation of an MTV animated series called “Clone High,” which was successful but was still cancelled after an episode featuring an irreverent depiction of Gandhi caused mass protests and hunger strikes in India. After that they were hired by Sony to write an adaptation of a picture book by Judi and Ron Barrett called “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” which told a fanciful story of a town that naturally had food raining on it for some reason. The two completely reworked that story, and after years of development they finally got their chance to make it into a feature length film.



This version of “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” follows a young aspiring inventor who fits pretty well into the usual family film protagonist mold of the “well-intentioned misfit with daddy issues.” He apparently makes wacky inventions which keep blowing up in his face, but no matter how much he’s discouraged by the town, the police, and his father he just keeps on following his dreams. This of course culminates in his inventing a food replicator, but because this scientist is so damn clumsy it ends up launched into the sky where it starts raining down whatever food order gets sent to it by a computer on the ground. Formulaic shenanigans ensues as he needs to decide whether to keep on helping his town by keeping the food falling even though the food is beginning to mutate, or stop the gravy train and discard his newfound respect.



It’s pretty clear to me that this film is mostly in keeping with Sony Pictures Animation’s usual M.O. of ripping off the Dreamworks style at every turn. The animation style is mostly derivative, its humor is largely juvenile, and it also throws in trite “lessons” at the end to justify itself as a “positive” movie for kids. But is there something buried beneath the bland façade, something that PLCM smuggled in under the guise of banality. Well, maybe a little. They definitely show their penchant for calling out genre tropes here and there, particularly in relation to the film’s status as a disaster film of sorts. For example, there’s a scene where the food weather starts to invade the rest of the world leading to scenes where a sandwich uses the Eifel Tower as a toothpick and Mount Rushmore gets pies in the face. Immediately afterward we see a faux-news report where the anchor says something along the lines of “as usual, this weather is affecting landmarks first and then spreading out from there.” Also, in the grand disaster film tradition they make the town’s mayor a complete moron who does nothing but ruin things for everyone. PLCM’s movies often come really close to breaking the fourth wall like that and there are a handful of little moments like that here if you look for them.



That’s all well and good, and I suppose one could also view the film as an allegory for Rust Belt economic hardships and for global warming. However, most of this smart stuff is pretty deeply hidden beneath the film’s surface. In many ways most of it can be chalked up to routine Dreamworks style adult in-jokes that are thrown into an otherwise juvenile film. Instead I think what saves this film from being completely forgettable are some of its visual ideas. For example, there’s a scene where the protagonist constructs builds a gigantic hotel made entirely of orange Jell-o, which is the clear highlight of the movie to me. Elsewhere we see some other interesting things like a rolling fish bowl and a spaghetti tornado. Still, the overwhelming Dreamworksiness of it all still seemed to over-power the film and kind of kill it for me.



The Lego Movie



I’ve established already that PLCM have largely achieved prominence by picking projects that people have very low expectations for, and they might have outdone themselves in the regard with their early 2014 project The Lego Movie. Pretty much the only thing more disreputable than a movie based on a lame 90s cop show is a movie that is explicitly based on a toy line, especially a toy line which is as abstract and devoid of story as plastic building blocks. Personally, my disinterest had less to do with the fact that it’s based on a toy and more to do with the relentlessly upbeat tone that the film seemed to be selling. Every trailer and advertisement seemed to be selling this insane hyperactive perkiness that almost reminded me more of a Saturday morning cartoon than a film. Hell, it didn’t even seem like a cartoon, it felt like a cereal commercial that would air during a Saturday morning commercial: “everything is AWESOME when you watch the wacky fun adventures in the wonderful Lego™ world!” But, as often seems to happen in the kind of movies that show up in this article series, the critics suddenly started to rally around it and it became a cultural touchstone to my general annoyance. Unlike most of the movies that get covered in this series, I’m actually catching up with it relatively soon after its initial release.



Sometimes when I’m watching a movie like this I begin to wonder just how someone goes about making a movie like this. Someone must have to sit down at a computer somewhere and write a screenplay filled with stage directions like “Wyldstyle picks up objects around her and builds a motorcycle on the spot.” There is something genuinely impressive about being able to even dream up worlds like this and create a visual style that makes a “Lego world” come to life. Indeed the faux stop motion look that PLCM have created is interesting and computer graphics have really advanced to the point where the Lego people and Lego settings really do look like physical objects rather than polygons on a hard drive. What’s more they do some relatively creative things here and there like creating different “realms” based on the various kinds of Lego sets that have come out over the years or using little circular blocks in order to represent water.



Of course making a movie about Legos look good was probably the easiest part. The real challenge was making a movie about Legos and not making it look like the most crassly commercial nonsense imaginable. To counteract this impression I feel like PLCM were given a great degree of latitude that they may otherwise not have had to give a middle finger to a lot of commercialized aspects of society in ways that are gleefully unsubtle. The bad guy in this movie is named President Business for Christ’s sake, and the film also goes out of its way to mock people who strive for mediocrity and lap up the various opiates that the powers that be throw out to distract people from the smiling dystopia they live in. Case in point: “Everything is Awesome.” “Everything is Awesome” is not a good song and for that matter it isn’t supposed to be. It’s actually meant to be a stand in for mindless pop music and it also serves as propaganda telling the masses that their lives are perfect when they decidedly aren’t. That so many people in the real world seem to enthusiastically love this song even though it’s supposed to be the embodiment of evil is the height of irony, it’s practically the equivalent of right-wing war hawks mistaking Team America: World Police’s “America **** Yeah!” as a genuine bit of flag waving patriotism.



The film applies the same willful lack of subtlety in the way that it satirizes cinematic tropes, particularly the hero’s journey. After the protagonist discovers something called the Pièce de résistance (an item that PLCM must have wanted to call the Mac Guffin or something subtle like that at one point), thus fulfilling a prophesy that he would be the world’s most important person despite the fact that’s he’s kind of a dumbass screw-up. Damn near every scene of this movie is some kind of referential piss-take about common script structure and frankly I found it kind of tiring. I’ve long found genre-deconstruction to be kind of a cheap tactic, and this disinterest only grows in me the longer Joss Whedon’s influence looms over Hollywood. Movies like this and Cabin in the Woods kind of drive me nuts because they feel like they mainly just exist to point out tropes that everyone already knows about and do so with the smugly, like they think they’re the first ones to notice these things. This one was a little less irksome than some genre deconstructions, partly because it’s looking at general film tropes instead of the over-exposed patterns associated with super-rigid genre, but this still isn’t exactly my cup of tea.



I suppose this brings me to the film’s unexpected third act, the film daringly transitions to a live action piece where it’s revealed that the story we’ve been watching has in fact been a child’s fantasy as he plays with his father’s elaborate Lego models. Daring as this is, I don’t think it quite makes sense. Nothing about the story we’ve just seen and the comedy therein makes it seem like something an eight year old kid would come up with the film never really explains why these characters still seem to have some degree of agency even when they aren’t being directly controlled by the boy. That the Chris Pratt character is able to move in the real world makes zero sense and is inconsistent with every other aspect of the film’s framing story.



In general, I feel like The Lego Movie is just really over-stuffed. It’s a film that can’t just be a celebration of a beloved toy, or a satire about corporate control, or a parody of Hollywood conventions, or a meta-exploration of childhood imagination, or a rumination about the defense between order and creativity, or and pandering romp filled with pop culture cameos… it feels the need to be all of that and maybe doesn’t have the time to focus on any one of those things. In other words it’s a jack of all trades and master of none, and I found its anarchistic spirit a bit exhausting. It’s a movie that’s insanely desperate to please and it undermines its story at pretty much every opportunity. This is not to say I dislike the film, after all much of what’s thrown to the ceiling does in fact stick, but I tend to like my comedy a bit more disciplined and backed up by a stronger story.



In Conclusion



So, I’ve now seen all four of PLCM’s movies and I’m left feeling that they are a pair of filmmakers who haven’t quite found the right balance. Let’s go back to the hypothesis that these guys are a modern embodiment of the director as smuggler. With Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs they concealed their sensibilities a little too well and weren’t really able to transform an otherwise fairly standard children’s movies, while I kind of wish that they’d done a little more to conceal their sensibilities with The Lego Movie. At this point I think the closest they’ve come to finding the right mix of comedy, storytelling, and meta commentary was with the first 21 Jump Street movie, and even that it pretty far from being what I’d call high art. Still, I would say I like these guys. They have a unique comedic sensibility and while it doesn’t always gel with my tastes I do think it’s good that they’re doing what they’re doing.



sshuttari 08-31-2014 10:46 PM

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" I can understand why you didn't like it... But "The Lego Movie" you don't understand the appeal... I barely know anyone that didn't enjoy that film... I mean I should be surprised, but still...



Dracula 08-31-2014 10:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sshuttari (Post 2888626)

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" I can understand why you didn't like it... But "The Lego Movie" you don't understand the appeal... I barely know anyone that didn't enjoy that film... I mean I should be surprised, but still...

I understand the appeal, I just don't necessarily share it to a great degree. Referential humor isn't my thing.



To be clear, I'd probably give Lego three stars, I wouldn't say I dislike it exactly.



sshuttari 08-31-2014 11:19 PM

That makes more sense. Okay good stuff, keep em coming



JBond 08-31-2014 11:35 PM

For the record, I didn't really like The Lego Movie.



MovieBuff801 09-01-2014 12:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JBond (Post 2888632)

For the record, I didn't really like The Lego Movie.

You are a sad, strange little man. And you have my sympathy.



Fanible 09-01-2014 01:43 PM

I'm in the same boat. I feel I may have pulled a Doomsday with The Lego Movie, though. I didn't get out to see it right away. It took me awhile, and by the time I finally did everyone was saying how brilliant it was. It was a decent kids flick, but I've not felt the need to see it again.



Fiverrabbit 09-02-2014 11:57 AM

Quote:

Fiverrabbit is kinda odd but then again think he likes animated features as a genre.

Quote:

Hell, with all the good vibes the film was giving off I forgot to even bring up the animation, which for the most part works really well here.

I give Monster House 5/5