Someone described this to be as perfectly geared to the sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy, although any such boy might have trouble seeing it without a parent or guardian. This person, neither 14 nor male, wasn’t meaning that as a compliment, yet couldn’t keep from recounting a few of the funny parts. It’s that kind of movie, about what you’d expect with a plot about a man living with a foul-mouthed teddy bear that came to life when he was a boy, especially if it’s directed by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane. I've always found that Fox show more outrageous than actually funny, and some of the humor here, like the mildly homophobic gay jokes and ethnic humor, falls into that category. And some of the humor is basically watching a two-foot stuffed bear smoke pot and talk with a potty mouth…which can be funny, for a little bit. The bear, incidentally, has pretty much the same voice as McFarlane uses for Family Guy’s Peter Griffin.
The main human character is played by Mark Wahlberg. An overgrown child, he disappoints his employer and his girlfriend (Mila Kunis), though he has a good thing going in each case. Basically, he’s Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, but with an animated bear in place of the three roommates and a non-pregnant girlfriend. Adult-male roommates don’t complain about not having a penis, but some of the funnier moments are non-toy related. In one, Wahlberg rattles off about four dozen “white-trash names” in half a minute trying to guess who his best friend is dating. (Thus the complaint about the missing appendage.) Since there needs to be a story arc, eventually Ted finds himself in jeopardy. I suppose McFarlane is trying to pull off the same trick as in Lars and the Real Girl in which the absurd premise — dating a blow-up doll — becomes kinda sorta heartwarming. He doesn’t quite manage that, although it’s kind of sad to see even a non-talking stuffed bear lose a limb. On the other hand, notwithstanding that Lars had a sex doll as a main character, Ted has way more dick jokes. Beats it easily, in fact. If that sounds like a recommendation, you’ll enjoy this.
IMDb link
viewed 7/14/12 8:20 at Riverview and reviewed 7/21/12 and 7/24/12
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts
Friday, June 29, 2012
Friday, November 16, 2007
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (***)
Of the many types of family films, perhaps my favorite is the kind in which the characters inhabit a fantasy world that exists in parallel with the regular one, a world where slightly different rules apply, and fanciful things may be found. I am thinking of films as beloved as The Wizard of Oz, or as dreadful as The Cat in the Hat. This is such a film. Played by Dustin Hoffman, who has lately specialized in playing eccentric wise men, Mr. Magorium is a man of some 240-odd years who presides over an urban paradise that appears as an ordinary toy store. Writer-director Zach Helm did the same sort of fantasy/reality blend in his last movie, Stranger Than Fiction, though here a more family audience is targeted.
It reminded me somehow of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Hoffman is a decent variation on the Gene Wilder character, an eternal optimist who thinks he’s found his successor in his less-confident assistant, a prim young woman (Natalie Portman) who worries that she lacks “sparkle.” As there must always be, there is a boy who is kind and lonely, though eccentric as well. The little store is full of wonder indeed, like the fish mobile made with real, wriggling fish, though the accountant hired to assess the store’s value doesn’t see it.
I’d like it if the movie were more about the store itself than the characters’ attempts to grasp the power of positive thinking, but on the whole there’s enough originality here to please, and the script is pleasingly free of attempts to be hip.
IMDB link
reviewed 12/01/07
It reminded me somehow of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Hoffman is a decent variation on the Gene Wilder character, an eternal optimist who thinks he’s found his successor in his less-confident assistant, a prim young woman (Natalie Portman) who worries that she lacks “sparkle.” As there must always be, there is a boy who is kind and lonely, though eccentric as well. The little store is full of wonder indeed, like the fish mobile made with real, wriggling fish, though the accountant hired to assess the store’s value doesn’t see it.
I’d like it if the movie were more about the store itself than the characters’ attempts to grasp the power of positive thinking, but on the whole there’s enough originality here to please, and the script is pleasingly free of attempts to be hip.
IMDB link
reviewed 12/01/07
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Transformers (**1/4)
Having been too old to play with the original Transformers toys when they came out in 1984, I had for the following 23 years also managed to avoid the comic books, the video games, the TV series and the 1986 animated film based around the concept of battling robots who can turn themselves into various machines, mostly the kind you drive. But with Michael Bay’s live-action extravaganza landing in American cinemas like the evil transformer Megatron stomping on an SUV, I found myself for a time transported, though not transformed, by Bay’s vision of Earth as a battleground for the powerful Decepticons and Autobots. (Guess who the evil ones are.)
Bay, director of big, loud, and emptyheaded blockbusters like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, has never made a movie you’d call deep, but has occasionally made entertaining ones, most notably 1996’s The Rock. So, for about the first 45 minutes I was entertained. It’s true that the story has barely progressed, but it hasn’t gotten dumb either, and the first sight you get of the airplane unfolding itself into a giant killer robot will probably have you about as much in awe as the frightened soldiers about to get their asses kicked. The screenplay takes the usual effects-movie approach of splitting its time between befuddled government types and a random male youth, played by Disturbia’s Shia LaBeouf (whose parents, I guess, dreamed of raising a female porn star). Not only does he happen to unwittingly own the key to victory for the Decepticons, but he (coincidentally?) buys a car that turns out to be even more special than Steven King’s Christine, which also boasted a self-tuning radio.
It’s the lengthy midsection where the movie spirals downward. The semi-dorky teenager gets outfitted with a hot (but also savvy) female sidekick, the USA threatens to go to war on false pretenses (the satire being, I think, unintentional), and then there’s where someone thought it was time for some lame comic relief. It’s probably when the robots start calling the boy by his ebay user name that it starts to seem silly. Certainly it’s before Anthony Anderson turns out to be a computer expert living with his mom who’s the key to saving the world. (Wow, this is exactly the role Kevin Smith plays in Live Free or Die Hard, and yet somehow it was more believable there.) But for sure things have soured by the time we hear the robot voices. They all sound like, well, robots, male-sounding robots, except for (shall I call it) the aspiring “urban” transformer, who sounds like he’s TiVo’d a lot of bad TV shows. Can studio executives just get together and declare a moratorium on robots and nerdy white people and anyone else, for that matter, screwing up and then saying “my bad” in any way that suggests that the line is humorous?
Not only isn’t the movie funny, but it’s so silly that it ends up undercutting the action in a way. What I think an audience really wants from a movie like this is a big Godzilla/Kong Kong-type scene where the big monster or robot or whatever goes apeshit and starts ripping things apart. Ideally, this ought to be thrilling but also put you into the scene enough so it’s a little scary as well. And it really doesn’t help if you have a ten-year-old boy in a car saying “cool!” about a second after the Decepticons have just barely managed not to get him slaughtered by a falling overpass. It’s the people who paid to watch who are supposed to be saying that. (On the bright side, or not, depending on your point of view, the movie’s body count is fairly low.)
Yes, we finally do get to see the (overlong) battle between good and evil in the big city with skyscrapers getting knocked about, after quite awhile without anything really interesting happening or the story developing much further. (Um, exactly why do the Decepticons want to kill everyone? Oh, right, they're evil.) But even though the effects are flawless in terms of realism, the live-action Transformers still winds up seeming as cartoonish as anything on Saturday-morning TV, only much less compact in its storytelling. I didn’t expect this movie to be a master class in screenwriting, but nor did I expect to be as bored as I was.
In short, this toy story could have used some tinkering.
IMDB link
written 7/12/07
Bay, director of big, loud, and emptyheaded blockbusters like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, has never made a movie you’d call deep, but has occasionally made entertaining ones, most notably 1996’s The Rock. So, for about the first 45 minutes I was entertained. It’s true that the story has barely progressed, but it hasn’t gotten dumb either, and the first sight you get of the airplane unfolding itself into a giant killer robot will probably have you about as much in awe as the frightened soldiers about to get their asses kicked. The screenplay takes the usual effects-movie approach of splitting its time between befuddled government types and a random male youth, played by Disturbia’s Shia LaBeouf (whose parents, I guess, dreamed of raising a female porn star). Not only does he happen to unwittingly own the key to victory for the Decepticons, but he (coincidentally?) buys a car that turns out to be even more special than Steven King’s Christine, which also boasted a self-tuning radio.
It’s the lengthy midsection where the movie spirals downward. The semi-dorky teenager gets outfitted with a hot (but also savvy) female sidekick, the USA threatens to go to war on false pretenses (the satire being, I think, unintentional), and then there’s where someone thought it was time for some lame comic relief. It’s probably when the robots start calling the boy by his ebay user name that it starts to seem silly. Certainly it’s before Anthony Anderson turns out to be a computer expert living with his mom who’s the key to saving the world. (Wow, this is exactly the role Kevin Smith plays in Live Free or Die Hard, and yet somehow it was more believable there.) But for sure things have soured by the time we hear the robot voices. They all sound like, well, robots, male-sounding robots, except for (shall I call it) the aspiring “urban” transformer, who sounds like he’s TiVo’d a lot of bad TV shows. Can studio executives just get together and declare a moratorium on robots and nerdy white people and anyone else, for that matter, screwing up and then saying “my bad” in any way that suggests that the line is humorous?
Not only isn’t the movie funny, but it’s so silly that it ends up undercutting the action in a way. What I think an audience really wants from a movie like this is a big Godzilla/Kong Kong-type scene where the big monster or robot or whatever goes apeshit and starts ripping things apart. Ideally, this ought to be thrilling but also put you into the scene enough so it’s a little scary as well. And it really doesn’t help if you have a ten-year-old boy in a car saying “cool!” about a second after the Decepticons have just barely managed not to get him slaughtered by a falling overpass. It’s the people who paid to watch who are supposed to be saying that. (On the bright side, or not, depending on your point of view, the movie’s body count is fairly low.)
Yes, we finally do get to see the (overlong) battle between good and evil in the big city with skyscrapers getting knocked about, after quite awhile without anything really interesting happening or the story developing much further. (Um, exactly why do the Decepticons want to kill everyone? Oh, right, they're evil.) But even though the effects are flawless in terms of realism, the live-action Transformers still winds up seeming as cartoonish as anything on Saturday-morning TV, only much less compact in its storytelling. I didn’t expect this movie to be a master class in screenwriting, but nor did I expect to be as bored as I was.
In short, this toy story could have used some tinkering.
IMDB link
written 7/12/07
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