Movie Reviews, April 6

When Cartoons Go Bad (Printable Version , E-mail to a Friend )
Ice Age Deaux should be extinct.

You know what we need?

More computer-animated movies with cute and fuzzy animals. I mean, seriously, we don’t have nearly enough of those.

Better still, how about this? How about every computer-animation studio make a movie about animals in the NYC zoo? How’d that be?

When I went to see Ice Age 2 last week, we sat through a preview for Walt Disney’s The Wild, which looks an awful lot like Madagascar with some hints of Finding Nemo thrown in to season the plot.

What the hell?

Didn’t they do this with A Bug’s Life and Antz?

I understand that when a film does well, the studio execs with little imagination and dollar signs in their eyes jump at the first thing they find that even remotely resembles the film that was successful.

I don’t get it. It happens all the time. There were two biographies of Alexander the Great in production at the same time (one got made, the other withered on the vine). We had Armageddon and Deep Impact.

Ugh. Drives me crazy. Make something original. Stop copying. This’ll fix your problem.

Anyway, Ice Age: The Meltdown.

Way of the Dinosaurs

Holy crap it was boring. Booooorrrrinnng.

I liked the first one. Well, I enjoyed it. I remember enjoying it. I’ve only seen it once and I’ve seen a couple hundred other movies in the interim.

Can’t say I wanted to see the sequel. The shorts with the pre-historic squirrel are kinda funny and all, but they really don’t warrant a whole other movie.

Which really isn’t a summary of what’s wrong with the movie, when you get down to it.

So, the story.

It’s been a little while since the first film and Manny (Ray Romano) the Mammoth, Diego (Denis Leary) the Sabertooth Tiger and Sid (John Leguizamo) the Sloth are happily living out their days with a mismatched herd of other prehistoric cartoon animals.

An armadillo-ish conman named Fast Tony (Jay Leno) starts screaming about the end of the world, about how the world’s going to flood in a very short time.

At first, no one believes him. But then Manny and the guys go to the top of the ice wall and see that in fact, the wall is melting and there’s a whole sea of water behind it.

So they round up the other animals and head for the other end of the valley.

Along the way, they encounter another mammoth named Ellie (Queen Latifah) and her two “brothers,” Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck), who just happen to be possums.

The rest of the movie is this band of misfits walking the earth and having adventures, you know, like Kane in Kung Fu.

Here are the positives: There are a few laughs. It looks pretty, especially the water. Uh . . . Sorry. That’s all I got.

I hated it. I was so bored, I just wanted to get up and leave the theatre. The kids weren’t even laughing. It’s a bad sign, I think, when the kids don’t laugh during a kid’s movie. Know what I mean?

Honestly, I think the filmmakers knew they didn’t have enough for a real movie. Even at just 91 minutes, probably 20 of that is spent with the goofy buck-toothed squirrel chasing the elusive nut.

The whole “movie” could’ve just been cooked down into a normal cartoon or an extra on another DVD.

You might disagree with me. Apparently, lots of people watched it as it pulled in $70 million plus. But that doesn’t make it any good. I’ll cut a movie a break if it’s at lest enjoyable. I didn’t enjoy it. It was a waste of 91 minutes of my weekend.

Next.

Slime Meets Slime

Where I expected Ice Age: The Meltdown to be at least entertaining, I had no such expectations for Slither. In fact, I was almost gleeful in anticipation.

I’ll admit it. Sometimes, as a critic, there’s nothing more fun than getting to trash a really bad movie. It’s almost my way of fighting back. When a movie’s that bad, you can bury it under hyperbole, which is nice.

Yeah, I was looking forward to Slither.

And then . . . it wasn’t so bad. Dammit.

On the whole, I’d call Slither gooey with a side of funny. And here’s why . . .

A comet crashes down just outside a small town. The town is full of the requisite cast of characters. (Does anybody remember “The Blob”?)

There’s Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), the Chief of Police. He pines for Starla (Elizabeth Banks), who’s married to Grant (Michael Rooker). Grant’s the wealthy guy. Starla’s quite a bit younger than Grant.

The town has a thing for deer hunting. Not sure why. The town also has a crazy Mayor, Jack MacReady (Gregg Henry), who’s a total jackass.

Starla won’t give it up to Grant, so he goes to the local watering hole where he encounters Brenda. Brenda used to have a crush on Grant back in high school and she’s still kind of into him.

They take off into the woods where they find the comet crash site. There’s a slime trail leading away from the site, and Grant, because he’s one of them there smart guys, follows it. He finds the thing, which looks like a giant slug, and pokes it with a stick. It shoots him in the stomach and infects him with the alien creature.

He starts turning into some weirdo monster and begins either infecting or impregnating the townsfolk. Once infected, they become zombies of sorts, completely under Grant’s control.

It’s up to Nathan and Starla to save the world.

Be warned: There’s Air Supply involved.

So what’s good? Well, the whole tone of the thing is goofy and similar to that of Shaun of the Dead. It’s not as good a movie as Shaun, but similar in tone. There are tons of funny one-liners and plays upon the standard genre clichés. There are even subtle nods to Carpenter’s The Thing and Predator, if you’re paying attention.

Probably the best thing the film has going for it is Fillion. The guy has fantastic timing. Then again, he kind of won me over in Firefly and Serenity, so I hope the guy starts getting more parts.

To sum up: there’s plenty of gore, plenty of laughs and the film never plays dumb. It’s not Academy Award quality, but it isn’t supposed to be. If this is your kind of movie, you’ll dig it. You already know if it isn’t.

Blowin’ in the Wind

That just leaves us with Ask the Dust, which opened this past weekend at the AMC.

It’s a movie I didn’t want to like. It doesn’t get off to what I’d call a strong start. I’m not really a big fan of voice-over narrative in feature films. It depends on the film, but usually that tactic is a copout. You should be able to figure out a better way to tell your story.

Anyway . . .

Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell), a first-generation Italian immigrant in the days of The Great Depression, has dreams of being a writer. He moves to L.A. to find his fortune, which involves being widely known and married to a blond-haired, blue eyed All-American Girl.

He goes broke, and with one nickel left, walks to the diner for a cup of coffee. There he meets Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek). They hate each other instantly.

Okay, not really. But they have a kind of antagonistic attraction to each other. Her dreams are similar to his. She wants to marry rich and white and get an American-sounding last name.

They have a series of arguments, then sort of get together.

And there you go.

The first half of the movie sort of stumbles along. Too much voice-over, too many fights, verbal, that make no sense. That and Farrell just isn’t a good enough actor to carry the film that way.

That said, once they get past the petty arguments and differences, the story actually levels out and gets interesting. Because it ends well, it feels like the movie is all right. Won’t call it good because I don’t think it was, but the last 30 minutes of the film are decent.

Later.