Rise of the Guardians Review

I’m told that Dreamworks isn’t doing so well financially. Several of their more recent movies (apart from Home) did poorly in the box office. I’m not sure why. The recent ones I’ve seen were pretty good. Adding to that list is Rise of the Guardians (2012). Featuring a mash-up of modern children’s folk tale heroes, it’s been compared to The Avengers for kids. I think that’s selling Rise of the Guardians a bit short; it is truly a fun movie!

Generation after generation, immortal Guardians like Santa Claus (Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) protect the world's children from darkness and despair. However, an evil boogeyman named Pitch Black (Jude Law) schemes to overthrow the Guardians by obliterating children's belief in them. It falls to a winter sprite named Jack Frost (Chris Pine) to thwart Pitch's plans and save the Guardians from destruction.

I can see why people would think to compare Rise of the Guardians with The Avengers. Both have completely mismatched sets of heroes uniting and gathering together to fight a mutual powerful enemy. Both have lots of fun action and high stakes for their respective world settings. But saying that Guardians is for kids is selling it short. Guardians has a delightful whimsy and charm to it that I’m sure would delight anyone of any age.

I loved the characters in this movie. As a general rule, any movie that features Santa Claus will inevitably be awful. That wasn’t the case in Guardians. The Santa here is not your traditional Santa; he’s got a Russian accent and has a prominent Russian cultural personality. He has tattooed arms that say “Naughty” on one and “Nice” on the other, and he fights with two swords. But he’s still a fanciful and lovable character; he’s just fun! The Easter Bunny is voiced by Hugh Jackman who apparently loved the role because he could use his natural Australian accent. The Easter Bunny is another fun tough guy who wields boomerangs. Everyone in the movie is likable and interesting in his or her own right.

The story moves logically and practically. The setting is a little bit on the complex side, but everything is explained gradually and shown to viewers as the story evolves, sometimes even during action scenes. There are rules specific to the settings that need to be established so that they can be adhered to or even broken to make a suitably compelling story. Everything is well written and shown to us so that we understand enough to get us to the next scene where the stakes are even higher. Yet the story is simple enough that even young audiences can keep up with it.

The animation is stellar here. The characters are unique and have very interesting designs. Their powers are really neat to behold as they conjure up portals around the world and paint windows and leaves with icy frost. One of the more visually interesting characters is the Sandman; he’s basically mute, but has small images made of glowing golden sand appear above his head to illustrate what he’s trying to communicate. Coupled with his expressive facial features you can still tell what this silent character is thinking, which is a marker of superior animation.

Guardians, as stated above, was a box office bomb. It was released on November 21, 2012 and received mixed to positive reviews, but was a financial disappointment, contributing to a studio writedown of $83 million for the quarter and the layoffs of 350 employees. Rise of the Guardians was the last DreamWorks Animation film distributed by Paramount, as DreamWorks has signed a five-year distribution deal with 20th Century Fox, which started in 2013 with The Croods. With that kind of a financial failure, I’m not surprised Paramount didn’t want to renew a distribution contract with Dreamworks. Guardians may not have been the event that destroyed the deal with Paramount, but it probably contributed to it.

I have to admit that the idea of a group of holiday mascots and children’s urban legends teaming up to fight the Boogieman certainly sounds rather outlandish, childish, and probably not something that anyone over the age of eight would enjoy very much. But Rise of the Guardians is a good, solid animated feature. I genuinely liked it. It was complex and humorous enough to be compelling to adults while also being simple and whimsical enough for children. I don’t think it’s fair to say it is like The Avengers for kids since this is a creative and engaging fantasy story that is sheer fun to get lost in. It was a box office bomb, but I really don’t understand why. I liked this movie enough to want to get a copy of on Blu-Ray eventually. Rise of the Guardians makes a fun family movie night, and it’s still fun even if you don’t have kids to watch it with.

Did you have a particular holiday mascot or urban legend that you were fond of as a kid? Comment below and tell me why!

Into the Woods Review

I'm ordinarily not fanatical about musicals by any means, but they can be deliriously fun on occasion. There was tons of hype and excitement about a movie version of the Broadway musical Into the Woods (2014) being made. I confess I knew next to nothing about Broadway production apart from the fact that it involves fairy tale characters. It sounded fun, but what I saw was nothing like I expected.

As the result of the curse of a once-beautiful witch (Meryl Streep), a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) are childless. Three days before the rise of a blue moon, they venture into the forest to find the ingredients that will reverse the spell and restore the witch's beauty: a milk-white cow, hair as yellow as corn, a blood-red cape, and a slipper of gold. During their journey, they meet Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) and Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), each one on a quest to fulfill a wish. As they work to make their wishes come true, their actions release great danger upon the land.

When a stage production moves to the big screen, there ought to be some significant changes in set and location. For example Little Shop of Horrors; on stage, the whole story takes place inside Mushnik's Skid Row Florists shop. For the movie adaptation, director Frank Oz took every opportunity to get the characters out of the shop and show them in many different locations. This gave the movie a bigger and more open feel to it, and made the fictional setting seem more real. For Into the Woods the primary location was, believe it or not, the woods. While events took place at different locations within the woods, many sets felt very much the same; there wasn't much variety in the background other than trees. Furthermore, most scenes didn't feature much happening other than characters singing dialogue to one another while standing around by the trees with the camera capturing close shots of the characters. This gave everything a claustrophobic look. We're shown a few wide aerial shots of the woods to suggest that its extensive, but when we're down in the woods we're given almost no sense of space or direction. And since the characters move and do so little other than sing dialogue, it almost feels like this could have been on a rather small stage. The whole point of making a movie adaptation is to make everything bigger, grander, and to do things that can't be done on a stage. Apparently no one told that to the director of Into the Woods, and it gave the whole production an uncomfortably amateur quality to it in terms of camera work, and set design. The sets looked good but seems so small that it was practically begging us to notice it was a soundstage.

Because the characters spend most of their time standing around in the forest singing dialogue about how terrible things are for them and what they wish would happen, the story doesn't lend itself to a whole lot of action. I don't mean in terms of chase scenes, explosions, and fights; I mean in terms of things actually happening. It is frequently suggested that events do take place but most of them occur off screen. This is occasionally a good thing, but is usually just confusing and robs the audience of interesting cinematography. For example, none of Jack's adventures up the beanstalk are ever shown; we just see him wander onto the set with an item of loot and hear him talk about what he did. This sort of thing happens a lot, and weakens a very visual storytelling medium by NOT showing us major events. Not showing us things that happen makes for a very slow moving and uninteresting movie. At one point some of the story arches were wrapping up and I hoped we were coming to the end of the movie, but then something happened to push the story further and I realized to my horror that there was a second act.

There were a number of times that something important happened but it wasn't shown happening. Towards the end there's a major character that dies; all we see is this character in a close up looking around and then stepping backwards to move off screen. I felt like something important had happened, but I was given no context to know what. It's not until halfway through the next scene that someone said they found this character, dead. There were so many times I was watching the movie and thought, "What just happened?", because we aren't shown enough of what little action there is to know what is happening in the story. In fact, there's another scene where another character makes a dramatic exit, and as soon as the scene was over a little girl in the back of the theater loudly asked "What just happened?" If small children who usually aren't concerned with things like movie logistics are left confused, then the movie is doing something very wrong.

The few times the lack of action was a good thing was in instances where story elements of the original Grimm's fariy tale were mercifully done off screen, such as Cinderella's Stepmother cutting off the toes of her daughters to try to get Cinderella's lost slipper onto her daughter's feet. It's moments like that which are dark and violent that are obscured enough to keep it's PG rating, but it still obfuscates any potential to actually show the audience something happening other than dialogue.

At least the music makes up for the poor camera work and lack of action, right? Wrong. I'm not sure how this musical has earned such notoriety. None of the music was catchy, exciting, or moving. The lyrics weren't profound, interesting, or inspiring. In the case of Les Misérables many songs were upbeat enough to enjoy, and lyrics so meaningful that they moved audiences to tears. That memorable and intense quality was completely lacking in the music of Into the Woods. None of the tunes have stuck with me. The only lyrics that stick out in my mind were when all of the characters were repeating the same line over and over and over. The opening song had the cast singing the words "into the woods" repeatedly for an obnoxiously long time. I understood very early on where they were intending to go and it would have been nice if they'd just get there and do something already. Much of the music was almost like listening to insufferable bored children trying to amuse themselves on a long car ride.

One of the few things I liked about the movie was how intricately the characters' stories were interwoven. We're all familiar with most of these character's stories already. The way that these stories influence one another and how some characters weave in and out of stories they don't originally belong to was highly impressive and interesting. The structure of the story was well done, even if the story itself was slow moving. It still would have been better if we got to see more of the story rather than just hear the characters talking about the story.

I honestly didn't know what to expect going in to see Into the Woods, but this wasn't it. The camera work was bad, the music was drab and forgettable, and the pacing was very slow. The intricacy of the story is impressive, but the story mostly features the characters standing around in the forest talking about things the movie should have been showing us. I can see how this would be a good production if it were on stage, but the transition to movie was not done well at all. The writing, camera work, and set design should have had a lot more attention for it to be a solid movie. It has cute moments here and there, but the bad aspects of the movie really do ruin the few good bits. I can't recommend seeing this. Fans of the musical might enjoy seeing the play with CGI special effects and such, but I imagine the awkwardness of the overall movie production would make it disappointing. If you had no prior experience with the musical, you'll probably get a good laugh at how bad and awkward this movie is. This isn't even worth renting. Go watch Hairspray or something else if you're in a mood for a musical.

Star Trek Into Darkness Movie Review

Back in 2009, J. J. Abrams took on the tricky task of not only appeasing a notoriously judgmental fan base but of winning over a new generation of movie goers with a relaunch of the 1960's cult classic TV series, Star Trek. Four years later we get a much anticipated sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and it's quite a ride!

The USS Enterprise and her crew have been sent to a distant planet to observe a primitive civilization. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) violates the Prime Directive when the life of First Officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) is jeopardized, exposing the Enterprise to the planet's civilization during the rescue. Called back to Earth, Kirk is demoted to First Officer of the Enterprise with his mentor Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) resuming command. The two attend an emergency meeting at Starfeet Command to discuss the bombing of the secret Section 31 installation in London, perpetrated by former Starfleet agent John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch). The meeting is attacked by Harrison who flees to the Klingon home world, Kronos, leaving Pike dead. Kirk is reinstated as the Enterprise Captain, and is given special permission from Admiral Alexander Marcus (Peter Weller) to hunt down and kill Harrison with 72 long-range prototype photon torpedoes. This violates several of Starfleet's usual codes of ethics. With some trepidation, Spock, Uhura (Zoe Saldana), "Bones" (Karl Urban), "Scotty" (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), and Checkov (Anton Yelchin) follow Kirk as he leads the way to seek out Harrison, the one-man-weapon-of-mass-destruction.

Into Darkness picks up where Star Trek left off. In the previous film, the character driven plot revolves around Kirk and Spock being at odds with one another. Now the two have found a means of working together. They still have polar opposite personalities, but now they have an understanding that Kirk is the captain and Spock is the first officer and should have Kirk's back at all times. Spock does have Kirk's back but "Vulcans don't lie" and sometimes when Kirk breaks the rules, Spock is obligated to address that. It's a logical progression of the two characters' development and we get to see how this interesting dynamic brings the two of them closer together as friends. This relationship is the heart and soul of Star Trek; the ambiguous compound of rivalry, warmth, and interspecies misunderstanding. There are plenty of other characters who are well developed and make significant contributions to the story; it doesn't exclusively revolve around Kirk and Spock. The whole Enterprise crew gets multiple moments to shine.

The visual effects are brilliant. There are massive explosions, outstanding chases, beautiful scenery created through CGI, and the sets for the interior of the Enterprise look amazing. I loved seeing the Enterprise go into warp, buildings collapse, and space ships crash. Everything was shown in glorious detail. There were no shaky cameras to obscure details, and we got plenty of wide shots to show the magnitude of the damage. Into Darkness spares no expense on its stunning visuals nor it's riveting action.

There's an interesting theme that lends itself to a cautionary tale of real world politics. Yes, Harrison is a great villain, but I think the real "enemy" is the prospect of war, or rather how to best handle the onset of war. Kirk and Spock represent the two arguments about war; what is expedient and what is right. They have specific orders that are not in harmony with Starfleet's values, and would probably start a war with the fearsome Klingons. Spock readily puts forth the counter-argument to the crew's mission to destroy the fugitive Harrison; aren't they morally obligated to capture the suspect and bring him to trial instead? Our heroes are often set upon by the dilemma of choosing between moral ideals and making hasty retaliations. We aren't necessarily given a specific answer to the question, but it should make the viewer think about their country's stance in the face of contemporary international conflicts.

I think Into Darkness has a few more Star Trek references from the old TV show and movies than the first movie did. If you're a hardcore Trekkie, you'll notice lots throwback references throughout the movie. There's even some classic Star Trek lines delivered in new and unexpected ways, which was a very creative implementation. But even if you lived under a rock and never watched Star Trek before, you won't become lost watching Into Darkness. I watched Into Darkness with a couple of non-Trekkie friends and the only thing they were confused about is what a tribble was, and that is at best a detail of miniscule importance.

Star Trek Into Darkness was incredibly fun. I didn't think it was quite as good as its predecessor, but it was a good solid movie. J. J. Abrams knows how to construct a good blockbuster with a perfect blend of incredible action and meaningful characters. We are shown an excellent script which brought us some good dialogue. The visual effects are gorgeous and detailed, the action is exciting and well presented, and the classic Star Trek references are delightful. This will keep old school Trekkies and noobz captivated and enthralled.  Star Trek Into Darkness is worth catching on the big screen, and is worthy of a blu-ray purchase once it becomes available.

There are plenty of Star Trek movies out. Star Trek Into Darkness is the 12th. Do you have a favorite? Comment below and let me know!