Reviews

Short review this time - bright and colorful - Finding Nemo is yet another delicious piece from the good people at Pixar. The characters and designs are fun and neat, the voice casting and characterizations are perfect (many Pixar regulars, John Ratzenberger stands out as the Fish School science teacher). The visuals are amazing : the wholly fluid environment is beautifully designed and rendered. 9 of 10

I've always admired the kinetic artwork of comic book artist Kevin O'Neill, and the marriage of his artistry with the writings of Alan Moore produced a wonderful graphic novel. The stylish victorian steampunk fantasy setting combined with impeccable research, attention to detail made it a compelling read. What made the book stand out in particular was the strong, and interesting characters and sharp witty writing. The movie fails spectacularly because it has none of these qualities.

Moore's comic book version of the heroes were obvious and unapologetic derivatives from established classic fiction, a hodgepodge of fantasy brought together in the mother of all steam fantasy crossovers. Putting together the likes of Captain Nemo and Allan Quatermain, Hyde/Jekyll, the Invisible Man, and more such well-established classical characters would have been an emberrassing fan-fic in the hands of any but the most talented writer. More than a revival or self-serving fantasy, the comic book is a homage to these cherished works of classical fantasy. The movie fails spectacularly because it has none of these qualities.

There's just nothing much good to say about the movie, which is utterly average and unspectacular no matter how you look at it. The sound mix is probably the best thing about it, and even that is just average, nothing special.

The camera work is sloppy and uninspired, the fight scenes are so badly choreographed and overcut that the action becomes a stroboscopic string of meaningless flashes. The set designs are dull and silly in most places.

Nemo's Nautilus is a quarter-mile long thing with designs in gleaming silver and decorative statues and other such meaningless features bolted on. Suspension of disbelief fails here, it just looks like a very obvious, under-realized and badly designed CGI fluff piece. The Nautilus of Disney's classic technicolor adaptation (and that of Kevin O'Neill's comic book version) were both much more interesting and inspired.

The whole Venice subplot was plain dumb, that's about the nicest way I can put it. The car chase was completely out of place, and with the gun fights and all the explosions and CGI everything it just felt like any other action movie, pre-digested for audiences with very short attention spans - who would not have read the comic book before, and almost certainly would not want to pick it up after seeing this trainwreck of a dull and very unmemorable movie.

Oh, if one has to end a review on a positive note, the Mina character was pretty much spot on.

I have no idea what this was supposed to be, but the end result was atrocious. It certainly seems to fit in nicely with the current Disney run of "cheapquels" being cranked out at furious pace to squeeze a few more dollars out of their "properties", quality be damned. Certainly whoever produced this misaligned heap of bouncing blobs set to jarring and annoying music was hired by ghouls in suits or possibly accountants to do a dirty job, and no love went into it whatsoever.

The direct-to-video animation is clumsy, the characters are ghastly and vague impersonations of themselves; worse, the storyline is retarded, so much that even my 5-year-old nephew (who made me watch this awful thing) could see that it was dumb and didn't "feel" like any of the classics. The characters all have the same personality of ill-defined bouncing blobs without motivation, and the "story" couldn't have taken more than a few minutes to work out. Indeed, this thing has all the sincerity of a street hustler and all the charm of a corporate powerpoint presentation.

The music was apparently provided by a handful of lounge entertainment dinosaurs armed with cheap Casio synths.

7 out of 10

THE CORE - Decent sci-fi flick with a competent cast of "nobodies" and an intelligent script full og adventure and suspense. Decent if not outstanding spfx. I'm pleased to report the absence of Ben Affleck branded testosterone in this movie. The ARMAGEDDON comparison is certainly not fair either: For example, THE CORE has space vehicles moving like space vehicles as opposed to X-wing fighters, and the production design is much more sober and free of the comic book logic, trite cliches and gratuitous BMW commercial style shots which plagued ARMAGEDDON.

The plot is pretty straightforward: The Earth's core has mysteriously stopped rotating, which upsets the planet's magnetic field and threatens to cook all life on the surface in cosmic rays. What to do, what to do. Enter a team of brilliant clever people to build a fantastic vehicle which will take them to the center of the Earth, where they hope to jump start the core with ATOMIC POWER!

In the best of sci-fi traditions the rules of the "universe" are established at the beginning of the movie ("Unobtainium", heh!) -- and the neat thing here is that the movie universe is internally consistent, and follows those rules. The planetary geophysics SOUNDS believable, and sci-fi fans should be happy that the whole thing feels 'true'. The characters in the movie are believable and their actions don't seem contrived. Even the hero is likeable and there's really no annoying bad guys being dicks for no reason. This is pretty rare in sci-fi, particularly the hollywood low-calorie brand. So all in all, it's an enjoyable piece. There are about two places in the movie where cheap f/x sort of looks cheesy, but that hardly detracts from an otherwise fine and interesting movie.

This movie is an entirely forgettable low-budget production.

It's got dumb writing and obnoxious contrived characters and situations serving only as random obstacles to a paperthin 'plot' having to do with some world-threatening geological disorder, which, according to the Scientists, can be fixed only by nuking the city of Los Angeles. That's it! That's the whole movie: The President (Rutger Hauer) says go for it, so they go nuke L.A. Kaboom, The End. Except for those obstacles along the way, which are : 1) Traffic. They don't just fly the damn bomb in on a helicopter, they DRIVE IT from the airport. While the city is being EVACUATED. 2) Then there's Some Annoying Guy with a blowtorch, who wants to set fire to Some Chick, who is the daughter of the special forces Colonel assigned to nuking L.A.; she gets out of her mess by using some gratuitously product-placed pager to page (oh no sorry : INSTANT MESSAGE) Daddy. This pointless subplot grates on forever, but even that didn't quite manage to pad the movie to the intended length of 95 minutes, so they throw in obstacle number 3: Some Other Annoying Guy who annoys everyone for another 15 minutes or so, at which point the good guys blows up L.A along with the annoying guy and everybody's happy. Unbelievable piece of trash.

Oh, if you have to watch this, be sure to look for all the lifted pieces of footage from other films and the last L.A. riots. The cheapo F/X are pretty fun too.

WHY?

Disney already made the definitive cinematic adaptation of Jules Verne's novel in 1954 (needs DVD reissue badly;) there was no reason at all for Hollywood to crank out this awful piece of television fluff. There are so many things wrong with it, one does not know where to begin. A review is hardly even necessary, a rock-bottom vote should speak plenty:

During the shameless 'creative reimagineering' process they stripped away pretty much everything from the novel save for the basic premise of a rogue skipper named Nemo who has a submarine. Oh, and Nemo is now a cyborg with a metal hand and is "portrayed" by the formerly respectable Michael Caine. A standard multi-ethnic sample of modern teenagers or twentysomethings get on board and there's much Angst and Father/Son conflict and everything goes kablooie in the end with a bunch of cheap video effects. The production design is flat and dull and totally undercooked, but things of course happens very fast. The skewed camera angles, MTV paced cuts and the aforementioned cast of bratty young people all add up to a pre-chewed microwave fluff pastry of a TV movie for the types of young people who were very happy to learn there really was a J. Dawson on board the real Titanic. ("OMG!")

rating : 1 of 10

The acting is probably slightly better than the writing in this fascinatingly bad, undercooked mishmash of Mad Max and Independence Day.

The premise is silly enough : A subway construction excavation in London comes upon a hollow deep below ground. A kid (Quinn) with no safety equipment or hard hat or reason for being there, is recklessly urged by one of the construction workers to enter the hole, in which he finds and wakens a hibernating dragon. The dragon escapes, mayhem ensues and the whole globe is devastated by the 'reign of fire' in which thousands of these fire breathing beasties lays waste to everything. Fast forward a couple decades. A bunch of survivors led by now-grown-up Quinn lives in a fortified castle somewhere North of London.

They basically sit around and do nothing but wait for a meager tomato (?) harvest to ripen. (For no apparent reason the tomato field is kept outside the castle fortifications). We're told that everybody is starving, which makes for a minor mutiny in the ranks (prompting a fatal tomato plucking raid,) but a bunch of cornfed, rosy-cheeked kids in blue pajamas shows no want or lack of food. Indeed, for a land allegedly devastated by these dragons there's no shortage of neither water or fuel in the castle.

Enter the Americans to save the day... Matthew McConaughey chews up the scenery with an unconvincing performance as a dragon slaying Yankee tank commander who shows up with a small batallion of armored vehicles and a helicopter (!).

The Americans have determined that the dragons they encounter and kill (with highly improbable aerial acrobatics) are all female, and they're looking for the male of which they surmise there's only one, presumably located in London. Quinn states that the dragon he saw as a kid must be the feller they're looking for, so after some testosterone is spent on growling and scowling and getting blown up, they go to London in the helicopter to kill the beastie and some half hearted love interest is established between the helicopter pilot and Quinn.

By the way, please don't ask how a male dragon would spawn a thousand other dragons, or how by destroying him victory would be certain as the plot according to the Yanks would unfold. The egg carrying females would presumably explode in a puff of smoke. Mysteries of reptilian plumbing! This is not even the worst of the plot holes, and the whole writing is absolutely rotten and derivative - it's inconceivable how the X-files director would agree to shoot this dreck.

The budget appears to have been largely spent on renting that silly helicopter. Indeed, the production company evidently had to return it in mint condition right after the shoot - they weren't even allowed or able to dirty it up a bit to even pretend the story was supposed to be set in a time where infrastructure and civilization had been absent for decades so the helicopter looks shiny brand new, at odds with the condition of all other vehicles and sets in the movie. Consider also how much fuel is consumed by a helicopter in just a minute, and this thing is flying around near constantly, for hours and days on end. The logistics of supply and maintenance for a perfectly kept helicopter in active use totally don't fit the poorly executed reality of the production, which in every way neglects to establish location or reality in any way:

There's no visual evidence on the screen that any of this takes place in a previously inhabited, civilized world. A simple corroded, bent M25 roadsign shot in post for the helicopter fly-bys would have established England. Or a burnt out pub, or anything. But there's nothing like that, just the (largely intact) castle and endless fields of ash and rubble with no discernible structures, while the laughably poorly done "London" set where the heart and source of all the destruction was supposed to be set in, looked mostly like a junk yard plopped into the ruins of a newly demolished factory with virtually no trace of fire damage. It's all trash, poorly executed and severely underimagined. This picture has zero redeeming values, and even the other big budget item - the CGI dragons - aren't convincing at all. They fly like something between drunken seagulls and the video f/x shuttlecraft from the equally bad 'V' TV series. The movie in no way manages to establish suspension of disbelief, which is lame because it would have cost very little to achieve it - just a little effort.

Funny how dated this movie looks today. Billed as a sequel to "2001", it seems reasonable to compare the two.

Good science fiction flicks live or die by the successful suspension of disbelief and solid credibility of the technology. Few scifi films have achieved these points other than "2001", and "2010" certainly isn't one of them, though a few parts come close. The "2001" space tech was all designed by or with the support of Apollo-era aerospace engineers - this shows. The research paid off. The 'fiction' of the science of the technology in "2001" is an earnest artistic extrapolation of science and engineering fact. This is akin to a caricaturist knowing the features of a face so well he can exaggerate it and produce an instantly recognizably caricature. A copycat basing his rendering only the distorted, caricatured version will have an inferior product because its foundation is secondhand impression. This is where "2010" fails a lot of times because much of its space tech design is derivative and little serious research or tought appears to have gone into any of it. The russian craft is big and blocky and looks much like Alien's "Nostromo" and its design is quite improbable for the atmospheric 'aerobraking' supposed to assist its insertion into Jupiter orbit -- a vehicle with any kind of intra-atmospheric capability would have certain aerodynamical features with thermal shielding on its leading edges like you see on the Space Shuttle or the cone shaped CM on an Apollo spacecraft. However, the 'ballute' airbag idea seems credible and it probably came from an actual study in the feasibility of such a scheme. I'm just not sure the realization of the idea as shown in the movie is very credible.

Worse, the interiors again derivatively loot properties from earlier films and some of the set pieces are flat out silly. Notably the big airlock is as silly as they get, with a guy on a wire walking down the wall for no good reason -- in indoor zero g environments people FLOAT to get from place to place. It's safe and practical. And the whole damn interior is loaded full of bulbous CRT screens with endless pixelated color cycles. You can tell how exciting to play with 256 color color mapped bitmaps was to the production designers. In 1984 this was still a novelty and it was used again and again. Did any planning and thought go into the practicality of these designs? On-screen visuals were important in "2001" and some clever concepts shown predating actual animated computer graphics involved 'attract modes -- flashing bold-letter acronyms to permit at-a-glance identification of the nature of data on the following 'pages' of information as curves and text readouts being shown. In "2010" all this stuff is simply eyecandy with no attempt at realism or rationale for why a color cycle on a lo-rez pixel display in any way could help make the information shown more useful.

By contrast, the extremely well conceived spacetech shown in "2001" is timeless and not at all dated to the late 60s in appearence. This is where "2010" fails spectacularly to impress, as its ubiquitous CRT computer screens with crude pixelized computer graphics demonstrates only how shitty computer graphics looked like in 1984. It was no doubt much more complicated and expensive in 1968 to visualize , produce and project "computer graphics" on set-mounted 16mm film screens, but the "2010" production designers neglect to pay such attention to detail and design and they instead revel in bulgy CRTs showing pixelized color cycles.

"2010" was an elaborate and expensive effort to bring Clarke's novel to the screen, but was Hyams fully up to the task? The novel was interesting and the character portrayals in the movie are pretty good. Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban, John Lithgow and Elya Baskin all had memorable parts. The cold war stuff seems very dated now, obviously - but it's still interesting to see how the future looked like from the gloomy perspective of the mid 80s. As a movie, where "2010" fails the most seems to be in how literally everything is spelled out. People are TALKING all the time, summarizing and commenting on the action the whole way throug. This leaves little room for dialog-less scenes permitting individual subjective interpretations as in "2001".

The cold war conclusion seems particularly contrived as plot device, though the final scenes are beautifully conceived -- they suffered MUCH in transition to pan & scan VHS. I was very pleased to finally see the last bit in widescreen when I got the DVD.

All in all it's not a BAD movie, but it doesn't have the magnitude, mystery or grandeur of its predecessor. It is very much a movie of the mid 1980s. Where "2001" was an open-ended cinematic 'experience', "2010" seeks to tie a neat little bow to the whole enterprise and serve up light science fiction with pretty visuals in a neat and digestible package geared to the attention spans of its contemporary audiences, hence the continous unrelenting dialog prattle. The brief metaphysical re-apparation of Keir Dulleas character doesn't really work but instead clashes against the strictly literal and mostly hollow nature of the rest of the movie. All in all it's a flawed sequel, but quite entertaining and the ending is no doubt more approachable to most people than the enigmatic "2001" conclusion.

Fun trivia: The cold war TIME magazine cover depicts Clarke and Kubrick as the American and Soviet heads of nations.

Detail: The brilliant visualization in "2001" included such gimmicks as portable wireless data pads. Notice in "2001" as the two Odyssey astronauts have their dinner -- As Bowman descends the ladder from the central corridor he casually leaves his flat-panel quarter-inch-thick datapad gizmo at an angle, later he watches BBC on that. Poole has an identical device, and they both watch the same transmission at the same time, so the devices has to be wirelessly receiving the video stream from inside the ship. Very plausible with today's technology. Even the placement of buttons and absence of keyboard suggests the device resembles an oversize PDA in operation. Were there any such 'speculative but plausible' futurism shown in "2010"?

This movie is a serious contender for the 'worst sequel ever' awards nomination category.

Let me elaborate on that...

I'll assume that when you read this review you are already familiar with Don Bluth's "The Secret of NIMH", which was a fine, dark and unusual animated movie that not at all conformed to the patented Disney cartoon mold which was lightweight, wholesome, pastel-colored nonsense with the characters spontaneously erupting in songs or other pace-annihilating planted plot permutations.

Instead, Bluth had the guts to try out his own formula, which was delightfully dark and mystic and devoid of pesky singing characters. The late Elizabeth Hartmann most excellently provided the voice for the humble and brave female protagonist rodent, Mrs. Brisby, and made the timid little mouse bigger than any animated character on the screen I had seen yet. NIMH was a good movie, even if Bluth made some liberal interpretations of the book on which it was based.

Jerry Goldsmith's rousing themes throughout the movie are a delightful bonus too. (the fact that the movie got trashed in the box office by E.T. was partly responsible for the advent of Bluth's most excellent animated laserdisc video arcade games coming into being.) Bluth never quite made another good dark movie after NIMH... The Disney Bug ate his brain, or something, because most of his subsequent films had pukey-cute designs and pesky critters singing (and even pesky marketable comic sidekicks.)

Now, NIMH 2 ...

1) Starts with a lame recap of the first movie; notably, Peter Strauss' voice for Justin has been dubbed over...

2) ... Is followed by the worst video-animated logo you can imagine. It's like a demented 3D Studio learner's first project. You can see the friggin PIXELS!!

3) Has god-awful backgrounds painted in naive primary colors

4) Has god-awful animation which was allegedly outsourced to a bunch of animation sweatshops in eastern europe. It shows.

5) Introduces a token female 'love interest' for the now-grown-up Timothy. She has BOOBS. She's a friggin MOUSE! How revolting... I thought this sort of crap was only made by sweaty fanboys.

6) Introduces a token comic sidekick, which is some kind of incredibly annoying, talking green bug with orange hair, a suit and bowler hat. How out of NIMH style is that, I ask you?

7) Has songs. And I don't mean incidental, or is that accidental stuff you can just crank the volume down at. (Many people didn't like that "Flying Dreams" song in the first movie either.) But noooo! The critters are all a-singing and a-dancing, and the songs are shrill and cacophonic and performed and orchestrated like high school theater plays. How unbearable! One of the songs even has a 'duet' performed with a video split-screen! Wheee!

8) Has the whole NIMH thing, which was a relatively sober and seemingly 'real' medical research lab, turn into Castle Frankenstein and brings one of the most perfectly stereotypical 'villains' into existence, complete with stiff mechanical (meniacal?) cackles and rolling demented eyes. This character looks like a left-over from a budget PC adventure game.

9) Is just stupid (pardon the regression)

10) Is a complete and utter waste of money, an insult to all thinking viewers, kids and grown-ups alike, an iron-studded MGM boot in the face to the artists who made the first movie possible, and the fans who liked it.

In closing, all I want to remark is that I hope MGM will release "The Secret of NIMH" in widescreen on DVD as they promised.