Sincere if ambling children’s adventure movie. The episodic structure of the film makes for good trailer cutting but robs momentum and ultimately payoff. There’s a bit of forced Wes Andersony whimsy but the lead kid is pretty awesome. Good characters. Decent silly movie.
A picture like a walk on a breezy, sunny day. Submissive, girl-crazy, young boy, early 20th century, French country summer. Bittersweet memories, the ghost of your childhood. A family uses a secret key to shortcut through the canals in the backyards of Marseilles’ wealthy elites. Most everyone is full of love and help but there are a few dickheads (just like life). Pages turn to dust, families turn to death. World War 1 looms, casts a shadow. Novelists cast a spell. This movie is a spell. This movie is sweet, sunny insects buzzing and river water lapping in concrete sluice.
Sweet soaring hullabaloo! For the love of the dance! An Ugly Duckling picture, an Aussie adventure. There’s sexy jazzy Cyndi Lauper covers, and scenery chewing caricatures. I watched this movie and stomped my feet, shook my hips, grabbed the dog and improvised some bossa nova steps.
All the ocean’s fauna (save one squid) rally behind the eponymous blue tang. When beset by doubt they ask what she would do, “WWDD?” Dory herself utilizes this trick, the guiding principle larger than the fish it represents. Larger than the Christ it recalls, though come to think of it he, too, is symbolized by a fish. Am I saying Ellen DeGeneres is Jesus? No I am not.
According to Eckhart Tolle our slavish devotion to the mind robs us of the deep divine stillness of being. Turtle brothers battle a brain. Taoist, hormonal, subterranean, CGI New Yorkers in the latest filmic entry of an ip with an awesome/grotesque toy-line from my youth. Megan Fox symbolically strips onscreen out of old April into new. Will Arnett does a comedy bit with a wall cable. There’s a pop punk cover of the 80’s cartoon theme. Tyler Perry is wonderfully unrestrained here, he never turns into a fly though. Not even post-credits.
Moose! Mammoths! Matricide! Floppy-lipped dog-bears crooning Phil Collins. A brash-headed, prehistoric eskimo learns to respect the interconnectedness of all things. This is lesser Disney but still the backgrounds are sumptuous. I watched it by lamp light in the den with my father. We snacked on caramel corn, pulled faces, wiggled eyebrows. Inside of us were tornados unmatched by the small screen’s efforts.
I’m interested in mainstream foreign cinema. What translates? What reveals? Here’s a transformative-power-of-Fatherhood flick. It’s kinda Big Daddy-esque. Acapulco playboy stuffed with sun. Baby on the stoop. He jumps from cliffs, he sneaks into the states. He has a custody battle, he’s haunted by wolves. There’s a Johnny Depp impersonator & some weirdly timed poop jokes. The colors are candy bright. The twist has some chutzpah but ultimately contributes to an overarching feeling of artifice that left me feeling deadened & (I think) the wrong kind of sad when I should have been moved. But y’know, my favorite movie’s The Holy Mountain so my opinions are likely very different from yours.
Christian orphans ask Mickey Rooney for a bedtime commercial. Outer space angels of the Ursidae family keep tabs on sad earth kids. A magician is named after pasta. Eventually the bears face off against a dark carnival run by murderous toddler sociopaths. Some of the bears are bears and some of the bears are penguins, lions, raccoons, monkeys and pigs.
Jasper At The Movies 