Cars 2
I understand why this one didn't do nearly as well as the first one, and is generally considered Pixar's first flop. It's not horrible; in fact, it's a lot of fun in some places. The whole "cars as spies" thing was different, though the "hapless idiot gets mistaken for spy but somehow manages to succeed anyway and even get the girl" thing has been done to death. My guess is that both themes are pretty new to most kids, which is fine, but Pixar's strength has always been that it doesn't play down to kids. The themes have always had universal appeal, and this one was missing that rather important factor.
Also, it put me off a bit very early in the movie, and I don't know if I ever recovered from it. Yes, we're talking about sentient, anthropomorphized automobiles, but within that setting, the laws of physics generally still apply. In fact, Pixar often goes to great lengths to justify how cars (or bugs or toys) manage to do the things they do. So how in the hell did Finn get from the crab boat over to the warship? Jump? Swim? Fly? We saw later that he could do some pretty impressive things with those grappling cables, but he obviously didn't use them here. Cars can't swim, for obvious reasons, and while we've seen them jump maybe a foot or two (strictly in a "human-like" way), leaping from the boat to the ship is insane. But suddenly he's over there. How? Because he's a spy, and spies can do stuff like that was apparently the only answer we're gonna get, and I wasn't buying it. By time we got to parachutes being able to support tons of metal, I was taken out.
So, not horrible, but not great. Fun, but you have to turn your brain off for this one, and that's a first for Pixar.
Mr. Popper's Penguins
From the trailers, I was afraid that old Jim Carrey (that is, young Jim Carrey) would return. The one who gets cheap laughs by making silly faces and talking funny and doing slapstick. I was pleasantly surprised that that was not the case. It was similar, but a much more toned-down version of that Jim Carrey. Sure, the whole premise of the movie was dumb, but it stuck to its guns and gave it to us and left it up to us whether we wanted to buy into it or not. I bought it. Fun movie, kid safe, good time.
Coulson from the Marvel movies was predictably evil and annoying. Carla Gugino was hot as always, but if her lips keep growing like that, they will soon envelope her entire face, which would be a bummer because she's pretty. Actually the most distracting thing was that the daughter Janie looked so much like our own Alirocker that every time she came on screen I thought "Hey, it's Alice!" and missed whatever she said. The actress and character are both 15, so I gotta be careful what I say, but she was really pretty and she's gonna be a killer when she grows up.
Apparently the plot of the movie has nothing to do with the book, but I've never read the book, so that didn't bother me a bit. It didn't even bother me that the plot we got was completely stupid. I was in the mood for some brainless fun, and got it.
Topic: The Movie Thread v. Ultimatum (Read 198217 times)
