Month: January 2007

Madagascar (2005)

madagascar movie poster This review was originally written and posted on January 17, 2007.

Living during the animation renaissance is not always the wonderful experience people who call it that would have you believe it to be. There certainly have been some amazingly designed and animated films in the last ten years, and yet there have also been plenty of copycat clunkers, as there will always be.

Pixar seems to be at the forefront of the Renaissance creating beautiful films that are fun and entertaining to the littlest tikes to the oldest adults. A difficult task to achieve given the constraints both of those two groups place together – it can neither be too juvenile to bore the adults nor too progressive as to offend those same adults around their children.

Dreamworks has been much more hit-and-miss in their animated kid fare. With Shrek, they nailed a series that rivals the best of Pixar’s work, yet by all accounts a Shark’s Tale was disastrous, and having just seen Madagascar I must say they have struck out again.

All is not rotten in the state of Madagascar, but its flaws are detrimental enough to keep me from watching it again. The jokes are mostly funny and most of the characters are enjoyable. The basic storyline is a good one with plenty of potential, but they run out of gas too quickly and things run aground about the halfway point.

The basic plot is that a bunch of New York City zoo animals escape the confines of the zoo and flee into the city only to be captured, and shipped off to a Kenya wildlife preserve. Unfortunately, before the ship lands it is hijacked and the animals are plunged into the sea, winding up in Madagascar.

From there it is a classic fish-out-of-water tale with these city animals having to deal with life in the wild. My problem with the story is that once they get to Madagascar they take the story into serious territory, but, due to this being a family story, chicken out before coming to its plausible conclusion.

The lion, you see, has been living large at the zoo as the most visited animal. He lives like a king, basking in the love of the humans and eating as many steaks as he can. Once he is in the wild he begins reverting back to his natural state – for there are now no processed steaks – and starts to have thoughts of slaughtering his friends for lunch.

However, since kids would be very upset to find the lion eating the characters they have grown to love, the filmmakers must create a different kind of solution. Since there are no likable fish characters in the picture the lion is able to chow down on raw sushi. It is a ridiculous, tacked-on solution. I understand the need not to cause undue mental stress to children, but making him devour the fish – who are also very much alive and cute – seems a bad choice. Besides not fitting with the character, it doesn’t really resolve anything other than he’ll no longer eat his friends.

The main characters are mostly unlikable. None of them were particularly funny or interesting, and two of them were underused and annoying. It’s not hard to realize that the lion’s reluctance to leave the zoo will result in him eventually accepting the wild and becoming the true king of the jungle. But the transformation winds up being barely existent, and the character never becomes really likable.

The only truly interesting characters were the secondary ones. The penguins were great fun, and it is good to see the filmmakers realizing this by placing them in some short films. Likewise, the monkeys as sophisticated socialites (who still throw poo) were brilliant. Too bad they had such short screen time.

The animation felt too clunky and stylized to my eyes. There are lots of odd, stiff angles and lines that made the characters look more like plastic toys than living creatures. The lion was also full of kinetic energy, causing him to jump around like crickets on crack which got annoying really fast.

It’s not a bad film. There were numerous funny moments and the basic concept is a good one. The plot falls apart in the second half and the main characters never gain the dimensionality that their animation would suppose. I’d categorize it as an enjoyable kids’ film that adults will get a few laughs out of.

Pulse (2006)

pulse

Why?

Dear god, why did I waste 90 minutes of my precious life on this film? Why did the filmmakers waste so much of their time making it?

The story of how I came to watch Pulse yesterday afternoon is an interesting one. When it came out on DVD a few weeks ago I thought it sounded interesting. Or rather, when I learned that it was a remake of a Japanese horror film, I became interested in that.

I immediately went to Blockbuster.com and added the film to my queue. Well, I added the Japanese version, the American remake, plus another film named Pulse because I couldn’t quite figure out which version was the remake. Blockbuster’s website is amazingly slow, at least on my computer, and at the time it wasn’t worth the effort to try to figure out which was the proper one.

I put on the Japanese one first, figuring that if it was any good I’d determine which version was the remake and watch it. Of course, this being Blockbuster, their screwy queue system never works properly and I generally get my picks out of order. So, even though the Japanese import was number one in the queue, an American film titled Pulse, which was several movies down in the queue came first (and I should note the films above it are all listed as “available.”)

Putting the film in I assumed it was the American remake, but later found out later that it was in fact a British film titled Octane. Why the Americans have renamed it Pulse is beyond me. Is Pulse a better title than Octane? Do Americans not understand what “octane” means? The fact that it was changed means there was some board meeting discussing this very thing. Insanity reigns.

Anyway, the film was mostly lousy but contained a few interesting moments and was highlighted by a pretty good performance by Madeline Stowe. Then I soon discovered other movies that looked interesting, put them all way before the correct versions of Pulse in my queue, and promptly forgot about my desire to see the films.

Two days ago a friend and I went to see a movie (Night at the Museum – much funnier than I expected it to be for those of you keeping count) and afterward, he invited me over for some pizza. I had a Blockbuster return in my car so I decided to swing by there first. The only great thing about Blockbuster’s online rental program is that you can now return their mail-in movies to the local store where they will not only tell the computer to send another movie out but will let you exchange it for an in-store movie.

Being that my friend was expecting me, I quickly skimmed the new release aisle for something I hadn’t seen. Hmmm, what’s this? A new horror flick called Pulse? Sure, that sounds good. Now as insulting as it sounds, I really didn’t remember all the stuff that had happened previously in the above paragraphs and had no idea what Pulse was.

Took it home watched it and then remembered that this was the remake.

My kingdom for a better memory.

Oh! That I should have remembered and got something else. What a stinking goat turd.

Pulse has an interesting concept – the dead have found a way back into our world by slipping in through a previously unused and unknown frequency unleashed by some crazy virus-happy hackers. But the execution of this idea is astoundingly bad.

The dead find a way back to the real world, and what do they do? Drain the life out of the living, that’s what. That might make sense if this somehow made the dead more alive, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. They just like making us living people want to kill ourselves. It’s fun, I guess.

The movie doesn’t concentrate on things like plot, or meaning, but rather spends its time trying to give the audience cheap scares. Honestly, I don’t mind a cheap scare movie, I can dig being jolted time and time again, but here they transcribe the scares minutes before they happen. Every. Single. Time. Oh, there’s a scary musical queue. Oh, the lights are flicking. Oh, suddenly our character is alone and in a strange place. Do you think something is going to jump out at them?

“Terrible” is the word.

Did somebody say plot holes? Did I hear the word continuity? You can almost hear the film saying in a Spanish accent, “we don’t need no stinking’ continuity.” You see the dead, they come through the internet onto your computer screen and then into your soul. Except when the plot needs them to come through other portable media like cell phones and PDA devices.

Then that’s okay too. Because those things have wireless connections right? Then well, okay, sometimes they can come through the computer even when it’s unplugged. But maybe they made their way into the computer before the power outage. That makes some kind of sense, until a character is in the basement doing her wash, then we need the bad guys to come out of the dryer. I guess it was a souped-up internet-ready dryer.

That kind of junk happens throughout. They make some arbitrary rules and then break them because they need another scare. But again, it isn’t scary because you know it’s coming from about three blocks away.

The only redeeming quality about the film was the inclusion of Samm Levine (who played Neil on the excellent, but quickly canceled series Freaks and Geeks) and even he has a small, nondescript part.

I spit on this movie. I fart in its general direction. I damn the 90 minutes I wasted watching it.