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Reviews (3)
12 June 2010
He-Man
In summation, I loved He-Man as a kid, and I don't feel all the cartoons and comics and little biographies on the back of the toys limited my imagination any more than I allowed it to be limited. Most kids, I suspect, will be the same way. If anything, playing with toys inspired my imagination so much that I'm now an aspiring fiction writer. Of course, there are some parents who might want to avoid encouraging their children to that particularly lucrative career.
17 April 2009
Ace Ventura Deluxe Double Feature
I loved these movies plus the bonus cartoon. I have nothing bad to say about it at all. Would Recommend.
12 June 2010
Chicken Little
It has been something of an article of faith in the movie industry lately that two-dimensional feature-length animation is obsolete. The kids supposedly want the shiny new 3-D, computer-generated critters and monsters and have no appetite for old-fashioned drawn and tinted cels. Evidence for this trend has been found in the lackluster performance of some of Disney's recent animated features, which seemed not to be capturing the imaginations of audiences enchanted by Buzz Lightyear and Shrek.
So Disney stepped away from the 2-D business on which its empire had been founded and set about catching up with Pixar, its sometime partner, and with DreamWorks. "Chicken Little" is the first Disney-produced computer-animated film, and its publicity material announces that the 3-D version being released in some theaters "has the distinction of ushering in a revolutionary new digital 3-D motion-picture viewing experience." Cluck, cluck! It also has the distinction of being a terrible movie - a hectic, uninspired pastiche of catchphrases and clichés, with very little wit, inspiration or originality to bring its frantically moving images to genuine life.
The story begins tongue-in-beak, with a sendup of the familiar barnyard fable. In a town full of rubbery anthropomorphic animals, Chicken Little (Zach Braff) is a brainy, nerdy fellow who alarms the town with news that the sky is falling. After a year of ridicule - during which he becomes a local laughingstock, and subject of a forthcoming movie - he is ready to move on, as is his father, a nervous widower named Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall).
"Widower" should be the tip-off that, computer-generated or not, we are safely in the familiar land of dead mommies, where entertainment is wrapped in family therapy. Buck and Chicken Little have a lot of healing to do, a process helped by Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack) and accomplished through dreadfully teary soundtrack songs and moments of wet-eyed bonding.
Of course, such sentimentality cannot stand alone. It must be complemented - and also, in a sense, subverted - by jokey pop-culture humor and a kitchen-sink plot. So we have a pig named Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), who is passionate about 70's Top 40 hits, giving us a chance to groove, with sagging irony, to Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees for the thousandth time. Then, since the idea of a town populated by farm animals is apparently insufficiently exciting for today's sensation-addicted youngsters, there is an alien invasion right out of "War of the Worlds."
Disney, the great pioneer of American family entertainment, has apparently been reduced to turning out knockoffs of well-known products, its own and those of its competitors. Chicken Little's knack for inventions and his posse of misfit friends owes a lot to Jimmy Neutron. There are not one but two cute, antic sidekick types: a fish (whose diver's helmet and incomprehensible chirping is weirdly reminiscent of Kenny on "South Park") and a fuzzy, three-eyed orange alien.
Not to be Chicken Littleish about it, but our children deserve better. They will clamor to see this heavily advertised movie and beg for the tie-in merchandise, and the resulting revenue will be taken as an affirmation of quality. But "Chicken Little" joins "Shark Tale," "Robots" and "Madagascar" as the latest evidence that technical novelty is a cheap - or, rather, a very expensive - substitute for good storytelling and memorable characters.