Yogi Bear (1:20, PG, 3-D) — other: talking animals, 3rd string, crossover
If I'm going to rate this dog as high as 3, I should be able to find 3 good things about it, right? OK, here goes:
(1) It was a brilliant move to cast the immensely talented comic actress Anna Faris as nature documentarian Rachel Johnson. Regrettably, Director Eric Brevig utterly wastes her, as she spends most of her time grinning madly like an orangutan in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.
(2) There was a new wrinkle on how to use 3-D effectively. Instead of having stuff come out of the screen directly AT the audience, it often shoots off just to the sides, or to the top or bottom, so as to minimize the startle or flinch reaction (probably a good thing in a movie aimed at a really juvenile audience).
(3) Um, what else? I know there was something. Oh, yeah, there's a new Warner Brothers roadrunner cartoon, "Rabid Rider", that provides 3 minutes' worth of chuckles before the main feature starts. In it, the ever-optimistic Wile E. Coyote decides that maybe the Segway was just the ticket he'd been looking for. This, however, is the Acme knock-off version.
The tie-wearing talking bears from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series are brot to what passes for life by the voices of Dan Aykroyd as veracity-challenged Yogi and Justin Timberlake as his timid half-pint sidekick Booboo. Their antics are familiar to Jellystone Park rangers Smith and Jones (Tom Cavanagh and T. J. Miller) but sometimes alarm visitors, and park attendance is down. As a result of the negative balance sheet, it's now legally possible for the cash- strapped city to rezone the park and sell it off to lumbering interests, which oily, corrupt Mayor R. Brown (Andrew Daly) sets about doing.
Smith and Johnson set up a 100th-anniversary celebration for the park in hopes of selling lots of season passes to put the operation back in the black, but Yogi's hijinks scuttle the effort. In a final act of desperation, the park advocates try to bring to national attention the existence in Jellystone (as a pet in the bears' cave) of the frog-mouthed turtle, long thot to be extinct. The best time to do this, they figure, is during the mayor's announcement that he's running for governor based on his financial successes.
Lots of people who attend the film will fail to appreciate the resemblance to real-life Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, who, like Mayor Brown, drove the county's finances into the ditch and started selling off the fruits of the previous century's labors and careful stewardship to balance the books. Unfortunately, nobody was able to find a vanishing species that Walker was trying to exterminate, or incriminating shots of him making an "it's all about power for me" statement in range of a video camera, so he will be Wisconsin's next governor.
However, while the movie's storyline might be snatched directly from yesterday's headlines, and while it has an admirably pro-environment underpinning, any goodwill established thereby is blown to smithereens by the relentlessly juvenile attempts at slapstick humor and the vapid dialog.
Most scenes are live action, with the bears animated in. This worked OK, but everything looked pretty cheap.
I was going to complain about the annoying and overused pronunciation "pic-a-nic basket", but I subsequently had the misfortune of watching professional sports announcers, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the express purpose of communicating effectively, using "words" like athalete and Wesconsin, so I guess I can hardly fault Yogi for being dumber than a human and grant that, since he can talk in more or less compete sentences, he really is smarter than the average bear.
If I'm going to rate this dog as high as 3, I should be able to find 3 good things about it, right? OK, here goes:
(1) It was a brilliant move to cast the immensely talented comic actress Anna Faris as nature documentarian Rachel Johnson. Regrettably, Director Eric Brevig utterly wastes her, as she spends most of her time grinning madly like an orangutan in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.
(2) There was a new wrinkle on how to use 3-D effectively. Instead of having stuff come out of the screen directly AT the audience, it often shoots off just to the sides, or to the top or bottom, so as to minimize the startle or flinch reaction (probably a good thing in a movie aimed at a really juvenile audience).
(3) Um, what else? I know there was something. Oh, yeah, there's a new Warner Brothers roadrunner cartoon, "Rabid Rider", that provides 3 minutes' worth of chuckles before the main feature starts. In it, the ever-optimistic Wile E. Coyote decides that maybe the Segway was just the ticket he'd been looking for. This, however, is the Acme knock-off version.
The tie-wearing talking bears from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series are brot to what passes for life by the voices of Dan Aykroyd as veracity-challenged Yogi and Justin Timberlake as his timid half-pint sidekick Booboo. Their antics are familiar to Jellystone Park rangers Smith and Jones (Tom Cavanagh and T. J. Miller) but sometimes alarm visitors, and park attendance is down. As a result of the negative balance sheet, it's now legally possible for the cash- strapped city to rezone the park and sell it off to lumbering interests, which oily, corrupt Mayor R. Brown (Andrew Daly) sets about doing.
Smith and Johnson set up a 100th-anniversary celebration for the park in hopes of selling lots of season passes to put the operation back in the black, but Yogi's hijinks scuttle the effort. In a final act of desperation, the park advocates try to bring to national attention the existence in Jellystone (as a pet in the bears' cave) of the frog-mouthed turtle, long thot to be extinct. The best time to do this, they figure, is during the mayor's announcement that he's running for governor based on his financial successes.
Lots of people who attend the film will fail to appreciate the resemblance to real-life Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, who, like Mayor Brown, drove the county's finances into the ditch and started selling off the fruits of the previous century's labors and careful stewardship to balance the books. Unfortunately, nobody was able to find a vanishing species that Walker was trying to exterminate, or incriminating shots of him making an "it's all about power for me" statement in range of a video camera, so he will be Wisconsin's next governor.
However, while the movie's storyline might be snatched directly from yesterday's headlines, and while it has an admirably pro-environment underpinning, any goodwill established thereby is blown to smithereens by the relentlessly juvenile attempts at slapstick humor and the vapid dialog.
Most scenes are live action, with the bears animated in. This worked OK, but everything looked pretty cheap.
I was going to complain about the annoying and overused pronunciation "pic-a-nic basket", but I subsequently had the misfortune of watching professional sports announcers, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the express purpose of communicating effectively, using "words" like athalete and Wesconsin, so I guess I can hardly fault Yogi for being dumber than a human and grant that, since he can talk in more or less compete sentences, he really is smarter than the average bear.