Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

You know what’s really hard to animate? Fur. Think about it. You have all these individual strands of hair that can move independently of each other yet they need to move a certain way to look believable. It takes some skill to be able to control fur on an animated character. There’s also something of a challenge when the characters are less than a foot high and they are constantly dwarfed by regular-sized human beings and objects. If those characters are the star, then a director must constantly be thinking about camera angles and tricks to make sure those characters are the center of attention all the time. It takes a fair amount of creativity to think about types of shots that you wouldn’t normally have to consider.

Why am I talking about computer-generated fur and shot composition? Because that’s what was keeping me interested during this film. Rhythm and Hues did a great job animating all the chipmunks and gave them some great physical personality and amusing scenes (including a nice chase sequence with remote controlled helicopters and motorcycles), but all in all, nothing else in the movie really kept me interested. There is a character, Toby (Zachary Levi) who is the chipmunks’ guardian, that is irresponsible, unfocused, clumsy and an avid video gamer, and I could not even muster any animosity toward the filmmakers because it was such an obvious and tired stereotype (also a bit hypocritical as there will most likely be a videogame tie-in coming out).

If the filmmakers meant for this to be a film that would appeal to all ages, then they didn’t succeed. I had DJ with me when I saw it and he thought it was really funny. So if your a Chipmunks fan or a kid, you will probably enjoy this film better than I did and you’ll probably be buying it for them when it’s released.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

One of the benefits of writing these reviews without being beholden to a strict deadline is that I can distance the hype surrounding a movie from the movie itself. With the phenomenon that is the Twilight series (excuse me, the Twilight SAGA), waiting this long to see New Moon is highly necessary to attain some level of objectivity. So what happens when you subtract the crazed fangirls, the massive marketing machine and tabloid rumors from this pic?

You get a movie that wasn’t worth seeing in the theater.

The story is told decently enough. Bella and Edward have some semblance of normalcy in their relationship when suddenly he has to leave, driving Bella to depression, reckless acts and Jake, a local Native-American boy who turns out to be a werewolf. Meanwhile Edward, believing Bella to be dead is driven to a reckless act of his own which leads to a race to set things right. Romeo and Juliet is referenced very early on in the movie and even derided a little bit before the characters find themselves making similar choices that Shakespeare’s characters did. The parallel was a bit too obvious, and the previously mentioned distance between film and frenzy laid much of that obviousness open to sparkle. The twists and turns of the story are not hard to predict even if you haven’t read the books. Enough to keep me following the story, but not enough to make me invest in it.

Also, it’s not fair to point out the outlandishness of the vampire/werewolf/love story combination. Fantasy and sci-fi are designed to take feelings and issues and blow them out beyond normal boundaries to see them in a different light. However, one thing I noticed is the movies the characters watch are so far-fetched (a romantic comedy is called “Love Spelled Backwards is ‘Love’” and an action film is called “FacePunch”) that I pondered how cartoonish those movies had to be to make the Twilight world seem believable by comparison.

The direction on this film is an improvement over the last. Although montages are used to denote the passage of time more than once, there were actually done quite creatively. There were some excellent action sequences as well, especially the fights between vampires and between vampires and werewolves. The were very interesting and combined wirework and CG to show a supernatural conflict that was really enjoyable. Having said that, some shots, particularly some on the cliffdiving sequence felt a bit fake. I think even someone who isn’t versed in special effects could find those shots a bit fake in their composition. It would have been nice if care was taken to keep the quality of the effects consistent overall.

The acting was good overall, but I must say the Volturi (the highest authority of vampires) were a too over-the-top and ended up looking more cartoonish-B-movie-villains than creepy vamp-Illuminati. Except for Dakota Fanning. She seemed to get her part just right.

New Moon is a good rental, maybe even a decent purchase, but that’s about it. It’s a decent story and if you watch it at home and avoid the crowd of people getting worked up over Eclipse (Forgive me again, “THE TWILIGHT SAGA: Eclipse”).

Planet 51

In trying to start this movie with a quick summary, I find that I have trouble doing so. Not that the plot is convoluted or incomprehensible (Dude must win over girl while helping astronaut get back to ship. There, twelve words.) but that there is a lot of trope surrounding it and trying too hard to be funny that it almost succeeds in distracting from the plot (Kid finds courage saving human to woo girl. Eight words this time.)

About the only thing that was original about this movie was the decision to make the world ‘alien’ and the spaceman human. Unfortunately, the filmmakers took that starting point and boldly went where every comedy kids movie has gone before. Planet 51, while being a nod to Area 51 is also an obscure reference to the fact that socially and culturally, this alien world almost identical to America in the 1950’s (Even down to the fact that for no adequately explained reason, this world has the same English spoken and written language and has a breathable atmosphere identical to Earth). That combined with the astronaut is from our world and our time, allows the film to joke about or drop reference to pretty much every sci-fi film from 50’s schlock cinema to recent classics. Unfortunately, all the jokes either fall flat or were used in the trailer. The characters are also pretty typical, so much so that instead of naming them Neera, Skiff, Grawl and Kipple they might as well have named them Love Interest, Goofy Friend, Grumpy Antagonist, and Grumpy Antagonist’s Sidekick.

I had no complaints about the animation. It was well done, but again, nothing groundbreaking. Probably the most unique character (Yes, even more interesting than the green-skinned aliens) was Rover, the robot sent ahead of the astronaut to take pictures and gather samples, and even he looked highly derivative of WALL-E. All the actors did well voicing their characters, but no one is going to be remembered for this movie. Justin Long (Lem) will still be known as Mac, Dwayne Johnson (Captain Charles Baker) will still be The Rock, and John Cleese (Professor Kipple) will still be known as old and English.

I value the time I spent seeing this movie as a matinee because of the people I saw it with. I don’t think it would have been worth seeing at full price, and I definitely don’t think it’s worth purchasing when it comes out. Pretty but dull. (Boy saves spaceman, gets girl. Ha! Five! New record!)

Surrogates

Today’s technology makes it easier for most anyone to hide behind a digital mask. Everything from the personas some project in chat rooms, posts and tweets that say things they might never even whisper in real life to the domination of Photoshop applied to models on magazine covers and MySpace pages that are decried as unattainable, to the stories of singers’ voices being automatically corrected with Autotune.

In this movie a majority of the population lives through their titular surrogates: robots that transmit all sensory input to their controller sitting in a remote control chair in their home. If there was any type of setting that is ripe allegory for our online habits, this is it. The problem is that it doesn’t dive very deep at all. We are to believe that surrogates can look like anything the owner can imagine, but aside from one shot on a subway with one surrogate covered in metallic blue skin sitting next to a female with mohawk of actual spikes the main character’s robots are not much more than idealized versions of the actors with impeccable hair and skin just on the unrealistic side of smooth. Considering at least one character’s emotional and physical scars (Greer’s wife, played by Rosamund Pike) it would seem to me that her surrogate might be a chance to adopt a wildly different appearance in order to distance herself from her past.

While controlling a surrogate, one is not supposed to be able to be harmed. Your surrogate get crushed, burned, or otherwise destroyed, you’re still safe in your chair. Yet someone has found a way to kill people through their surrogates. This idea was something that could really add some unique twists to the usual murder/investigation plot. Yet this too felt a bit pedestrian. When FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Rahda Mitchell) relate that this is the first murder to occur in years, they do it with an inexplicable air of nonchalance. It didn’t make this event very significant for me. It might as well have been another body on Law and Order. A story like this should bring characters who aren’t what they seem, so in a setting where anyone can be anything, it doesn’t lend itself to a surprise the audience couldn’t foresee. I blame another part of this on the trailers released for this movie. This is unfortunately one of those instances where the trailer pretty much gives away the ending of the movie. I tried to find a trailer to embed here that didn’t have any of that footage, but all of them have that footage, so I’m not even embedding one in this post. This is probably one of the worst offenses marketing has made on a film’s trailer.

The movie isn’t bad. It’s certainly not unwatchable. The tribe and I were entertained by this movie. Bruce Willis, who has played the investigator role many times before does a great job in the lead. Rosamund Pike did some excellent work in creating distinct performances for when she was controlling her surrogate and when she was herself. Many of the other players in this film could have taken cues from her, as this was one of the few things that really touched on how people behave in public and private.

In the end I’d say this is worth seeing as a matinee once or when it comes out for rent. It might be worth a purchase. But that’s about it. Decent story. Interesting setting. But it leaves you with a sense that a lot more could have been made from the material.

9

9 is the name/number of the main character, a burlap-covered creature who literally comes to life in the beginning of the film who must find his way through a landscape demolished by human war and sparsely populated by other numbered creatures and find a way to defeat the giant robotic machine that seems capable of sucking the soul out of whoever it encounters.

Anyone who saw the ads or posters for this movie might look at the funny-looking creatures on them and guess that this might be a kid’s film while they ignore the bleak backdrops these ragdolls occupy. This reflects the film quite accurately, in fact. This film dives into very heavy concepts: war, death, fear, humanity’s inner drive to create as well as destroy, even drug addiction, all serving as the setting for the adventure of these bizarrely cute little creatures.

The tone of this film is something you would expect from something with that involves Tim Burton (he executive produced) but it doesn’t feel like a film that would get the type of advertising exposure it has received. It’s a very atmospheric film, happy to let characters’ actions speak for them if at all possible. I like the fact that although they used many celebrities to provide voices (Elijah Wood as 9, Jennifer Connelly as 7, Christopher Plummer as 1, Crispin Glover as 6, John C. Reilly as 5), they are all very excellent actors who bring character to their roles and not just fall into the usual convention of ‘big-name actor lends voice to cartoon’.

When I was younger one of the major yearly events for me was when the animation festival would come to the local theater. It was always amazing to see the different styles and designs that animators could conjure onto the screen beyond what was fed to us on Saturday mornings and showed how truly versatile the art of animation was. However in doing so, the art could be raised above the story, which tended to be the most uneven part of the event. True, there was some brilliant pieces that could make me laugh much harder or reflect on concepts much more deeply than any live-action film could, but some films were so caught of in their visuals that the animators lost sight the story. I was reminded of these festivals when I was watching 9. This made even more sense when after doing some research I found that this was based on a short film from 2005 by director Shane Acker, one that most likely made the rounds in similar festivals, that served as the basis for this film (I’ve included the Youtube post of that film in this review). There’s a lot of questions about the characters and the world that both the short film and the feature film leave up in the air. While this works for the short film to keep focus on the main plot, it doesn’t quite work in the feature. There is a lot more room in the feature to expound on why things are the way they are so the audience doesn’t get lost and this room wasn’t used to it’s fullest capacity. A little mystery is good, of course, but I don’t think I had enough information or familiar ground to see why I should care about the creatures and their plight, and in one part of the story the characters’ actions actually made me lose quite a bit of sympathy for them and question why they would act this way in the first place.

This film is really beautiful, with a some imaginative visuals and some good action and distinctive characters, but I would have felt ripped off seeing this at evening price in the theater. It was worth seeing as a matinee and It might be worth the purchase of a download. However, this doesn’t really get beyond more than eye candy for me. It would have been nice to have an equally compelling story to match the visuals.

Gamer

TheJoe, DJ and I saw this Friday at the AMC in the Santa Monica Promenade.

Movies about video games suck. They’re either lackluster and disappointing adaptations of a game or a half-hearted attempt to ‘connect’ to the gaming culture by dropping a few gaming terms that Hollywood hopes will be enough to connect with the gaming crowd yet not be so alien as to confuse the average viewer.

Nothing about Gamer struck me as something that was going to impress me, either. The main plot about an inmate fighting for his life in a violent game against other inmates (It’s MORE than a game! It’s REEEAAAALLL!) has been done in other movies and games before, and the idea that the main character is being controlled in the game by someone else has also been explored before (and seems to be the trendy story hook used in upcoming movies like Surrogates and Avatar).

This is the mindset I had going into this movie. The most exciting thing I was looking forward to was checking out this theater I’d never been in and whether the popcorn was any good.

The story concerns a very dystopian world where the opiate of the masses is in the form of games where real people are willingly placed under direct neural control of a gamer with enough money to make they’re character do whatever they want. This takes the form of two games: “Slayers”, a massive first-person-like shooter where violent inmates use overpowered firearms to survive and make it to through enough matches to win their freedom, and it’s predecessor, “Society”, a very Sims/Second Life-like MMO where lower-class people fortunate enough to be pretty enough earn a living as ‘characters’ that follow the (usually) sexual whims of whatever gamer is in control.

When I got out of this movie I wanted to give it no thumbs up. As I was talking to TheJoe about the movie I talked about how gamers really weren’t put in the best light in this movie. There’s the cocky young gamer who controls are protagonist who talks trash and has a bloated ego from being the top player. There’s the wife of the protagonist working in “Society” that’s really controlled by an overweight male shut-in. There’s the juvenile, nonsensical names characters are given in “Society”. When I was complaining about all this to TheJoe, his response was basically, ‘isn’t that what gamers do right now?’ I realized that I was taking the material too personally. I also realized that this movie was made by people who understand the gaming world and I was giving a lot of thought to the concepts presented by a summer action movie.

This movie was written and directed by the team of Neveldine and Taylor, the same guys behind the Crank movies, which I thought of as movies about a video game character that had yet to be created, never mind the numerous video game references in the movie itself. These are definitely two people that understand the gaming culture (and the internet culture) and have more accurately portrayed it onscreen than anyone has done lately, giving it a future-tech sheen of 360-degree surround sound screens and ‘the-computer-just-translates-my-movement-into-action’ controller schemes. I wasn’t bored by this movie by any means. The story moves along OK, and it goes beyond it’s action movie shell to make statements about control and class. These people indeed DO behave the way gamers and internet surfers behave these days. The act of giving those actions real consequences to real humans tends to expose a mindset that some would consider very ugly. Like I said, I had to step back from this part of the movie. I play a LOT of first-person shooters.

I had no complaints about any of the acting in this film. Gerard Butler delivers as the top Slayer Kable trying to get out of the game and back to his wife (Amber Valletta) and daughter (Brighid Fleming). Michael C. Hall plays Ken Castle, the mastermind behind the technology driving the games and richer than God and Bill Gates. He plays him with a full evil and cockiness he doesn’t get to flex in his role as TV’s Dexter. Ludacris works well as the face and leader of the underground hacker group Humanz. An unexpected cameo is made by Milo Ventimiglia as “Society” character Rick Rape. Despite the name, his turn is actually amusing.

Not everyone is going to ‘get’ this movie. Although many more people play games now than in the past, some people might still get lost in the use of concepts like ping, mods, and memes. For those people this is a one thumbs up movie. For those that game like me, this could very well be a two-thumbs up. I’m glad I saw it in the theater and will definitely download it upon release. It’s one of those few movies that, for me, will actually be different upon repeated viewings.

Video game movies suck. But then comic book movies used to suck too. Then people who understood the culture of comics started making movies that took it as the legitimate art form it is and realized that there were real stories to be told from this medium. I don’t think this is the turning point for game movies, but it is a step in the right direction.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Went to see The Taking of Pelham 123 this weekend, partly because it was showing in a theater I haven’t checked out yet and wanted to see what it was like.

The story, if you don’t know is about a subway train hijacking in New York that mostly focuses on the interactions between the lead hijacker Ryder (John Travolta) and train trafficer Garber (Denzel Washington). I found no real surprises in it. The most unique and original thing I noticed was how the ‘New York’ attitude prevailed over the whole movie. Sure, there’s the scene with the mayor (James Gandolfini) talking to the press to try and quell rumors and insipre confidene, but that doesn’t stop the reporters from grilling him about a rumored affair. While the story was predictable, the overall attitude made it slightly unique and a bit amusing to boot.

The only performance that stood out for me was Travolta. Although he’s a more well-rounded actor that many aren’t willing to admit, he can play very engaging antagonists and this one follows that trend. I almost ended up rooting for him as he shuts down all authority and bureaucracy that try to take control of Ryder and the situation.

Audio was really good. The biggest standout for me was the opening sequnce that was cut with a very extensive remix of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”. It’s one of the few instances where using music in a movie went far beyond just licensing a track and sticking it in the background of a scene, and I’d love to see more uses like that in the future.

All in all, though, I can’t really say I was glad I saw this in the theater. The unique takes on the standard story were not enough to justify a movie ticket. It will most likely be a digital download.

Terminator: Salvation

TheJoe and I caught this on Friday. Amidst a very geeky summer of movies, another popular franchise is given another chance to captivate a new audience. Which it completely fails to do.

It’s a real shame because all the elements are there. McG does a very good job of directing and utilizing today’s technology to bring to life a man vs. machine war that could only be glimpsed in the previous movies. The action sequences are very well-done with some very excellent long one-shot sequences that give a very cool cinema verité quality to them.

The actors are all soild. Christian Bale takes on another iconic geek role as John Conner and plays him very well. Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the just released Star Trek) also admirably takes on a second sci-fi icon as Kyle Reese. I actually didn’t quite recognize him at first; a testament to his acting as well as to his skill at accents. Helena Bohnam Carter (Marla Singer in Fight Club, Beatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter series) give a good turn as Dr. Serena Kogan; a doctor whose fight to save her own life as well as humanity’s resonates into future more than she could imagine.

The story, which I find to be one of the weakest elements in a movie this deep in the sequels, is actually well done and quite cohesive, if a bit predictable (I think it’s thanks to the trailers and billboards that I could see twists through my plot telescope early on).

So all the elements are there, but it’s just not compelling. All these good elements didn’t add up to a good movie experience for me. I could follow the story, I could dig the action, but it just felt like business as usual. It didn’t really add anything new to the franchise. Man fights machine, machines develop new ways to fight man, John Conner is a prime target for Skynet… These plot points have all been covered before. It might even be less compelling since the novelty of time travel to the past to kill John has been taken away.

I can’t really recommend seeing this in the theater. It’s maybe worth a rental or download when it comes out that way. In the battle of the technique versus the soul of movie storytelling, in this case the machine have unfortunately won.

Push

Someone REALLY wanted to make “Heroes: The Movie”. I went into the theater expecting that from the trailers in the first place. It’s a world where people with powers don’t wear capes or costumes and have ambiguous nicknames like “movers” (telekinetics), “watchers” (can see the future), “pushers” (can implant thoughts in your mind), and “sniffers” (can track someone by touching or smelling an object the person has touched). It’s a very gritty world with a secret government agency attempting to turn these people into war weapons. In other words, not much surprise in the way of the plot or the characters, from Chris Evans’s reluctant hero to Dakota Fanning’s smart-alec kid with mission for reluctant hero to Djimon Hounsou’s evil agent who must foil plans of smart-alec kid and reluctant hero.

OK, so most stories have to have some familiar elements to get the audience in on the ride, and there was an interesting story element about how to get the jump on a watcher, but it felt like there were some decisions made about the movie in post-production, most notably a few obvious voice dubs that wrapped the story up instead of extending it to a possible sequel which was more likely the original intention. This tended to water down the movie’s impact as a whole. Nothing in the movie was really bad, but nothing was really good either. There was no ‘push’ to it.

Having said that, I wasn’t bored watching the movie, but I would wait for a rental or buy when you can see this at home with friends. It’s defenitely better than the movies SciFi Channel airs. This is something you can watch when they re-run “Dungeons and Dragons 2″ and pretend they got a hold of a decent movie, for once.

Taken

Saw this in the theater. Liam Neeson plays a retired field agent who launches a one-man war to get his kidnapped daughter back. There was really nothing surprising about this film. The plot was very much by the numbers. I could see where this film was going to go every step of the way. The action scenes were filmed in a way I’ve grown to hate with what seems to be very unecessary shaking of the camera in order to add more intensity to the pieces, but it ultimately leaves me confused and unable to follow what’s going on.

Having said all that, I can still say I enjoyed the film. Neeson was enjoyable and sympathetic in his role as the lone agent trying to making up for his absentee past as a father. While Maggie Grace is a little too old to play a 17-year old, she pulls the role off quite well. Although the story is very generic I never really found myself bored with the film and was able to enjoy the ride as the filmmakers presented it.

Defenitely a good rental. Maybe a matinee.