Movie Review: Rio

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Samba....samba...samba lessons, see samba dancing....samba dancing. Oh sorry, didn't see you sitting there. I'm flipping through the yellow pages looking for places where I can learn to do the samba. After watching Rio, I'm very tempted to learn how to shake my own tail feathers just like an animated small blue macaw in Rio de Janeiro rain forest. He too was overcome by the infectious beat of the bossa nova and shook his tail feathers. In fact he shook them so much the new born or would that be new hatchling fell out of his tree only to be captured by exotic bird poachers and shipped to a frozen Moose Lake, Minnesota. The shivering youngling is befriended by a young Linda. So there is the set up for our movie. They start off strong with song, sounds, music, rhythms, syncopation, motions and colors spellbind the viewers. I saw the movie in 2D but it was very obvious how they were using the 3D in the opening sequence.

Oh wait...I forgot. Before Rio started, we had a visit from your friendly neighborhood Scrat. The sabre-toothed squirrel has been part of each of the Ice Age movies. Blue Sky Studios produced both the Ice Age series as well as Rio. In this go around Scrat will not only go to the ends of the earth to save his beloved acorn, but he will go to the middle of it as well! You can't but help laugh when the Scrat is up on the screen!

Time passes and about 15 years later we meet up with a grown up Blu (Jesse Eisenberg) and Linda (Leslie Mann). He's become a domesticate house pet without a care who never learned to fly. He didn't have to. His world is all upset when he ends up traveling back to Rio de Janeiro in order to meet up the last female blue macaw. Boy meets girl in order to save a species from extinction. But, they say things happen in cycles. He is once again kidnapped along with his new "friend" Jewel (Anne Hathaway). Can Blu overcome his domestication and fly the coop in order to rescue Jewel and return to his home in the rain forest or Moose Lake?

The movie is very catchy with the music and the animation. Where it fails is with the story line within the 96 minutes running time. There are somethings that just overwhelm the story. Instead of one side kick, there end up being three, well actually four but two come as a set. The first is Rafael, a rain forest toucan (George Lopez) who acts as the guide to help Blu realize that flying is in his DNA. Then are the two urban birds, Nico and Pedro (Jamie Foxx and the Black Eyed Peas will.i.am) who provide musical interludes and date and love making advice. Lastly is the bull dog Luiz (Tracy Morgan) who's biggest dream seems to be to dress up like Carmen Miranda and dance in the carnival parade while trying to keep drool off of his outfit. For you kids who don't know, Carmen Miranda appeared in the 1943 movie The Gang's All Here which then made the fruit headdress popular and a stock item when describing a samba beat or talking about Chiquita bananas. Director Carlos Saldanha tried to pack a lot of action into the time allotment and didn't allow enough slower times between skirmishes.

3D computer animation has come a long way with the detail and textures that is now capable of being rendered especially when it comes to hair, fur and feathers. What I found interesting is in many places the lack textures. The animal characters were highly meticulously designed. But at times there were items like clothes or walls or cloth that were left with lots of color and parts, but not the surface gains and qualities.

The writers did leave out a heavy environmental message. They didn't rant about the raizing of the rain forest or poaching of animals into extinction. But they did make jokes of men (and dogs) dressing up for carnival earning the movie a PG rating for mild off color (not referring the the vibrant reds, blues, greens and yellows found in a color wheel and the birds feathers) humor. Also when you think about it, they are trying to get a male and female blue macaw together in order to perpetuate the species. The one line that I thought would have been used but didn't is when under the standard "boy looses girl" segment of the plot she or he in anger blurts out the "I wouldn't go with you if you were the last person" or in this case "bird on the face of the earth!" and they go storming away from each other yelling "FINE!" So it wasn't totally predictable!

With the humor, colors, animals, love story, music and the travelogue to Rio de Janeiro and Carnival, there is something everyone could find to enjoy in Rio.

The Movie Monkey

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Movie Review: The Social Network

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Fade into a dimly lit bar and observe a man and a women having a discussion that is scattered and yet very pointed. Eventually one walks away from the other and the relationship is over. When a women gets wronged the phrase "Hell hath no fury like a women scorned" is oft quoted. When a man gets scorned, specifically brilliant computer programmer and Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg), the seed is planted for a software product that eventually evolves into a technological and marketing achievement that is Facebook. At least this is what we are shown in the opening for The Social Network. Chances are pretty high if you are reading this or listening to the audio versions of the Movie Monkey reviews that you use Facebook.

On July 21, 2010 Facebook hit their 500 millionth "friend". In October 2003, Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook was created in mere hours after Zuckerberg was scorned. (again, the movie version) The site is an instant success with over 22,000 hits in just a few hours. Eager to get their own social networking site going the Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler along with their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) contact Zuckerberg to code for their idea. Zuckerberg spins off their idea and with funding from his roommate Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield who is to be the new Spiderman) launch thefacebook.com on February 4, 2004.

Normally I mention the name of the actor or actress after the character's name is mentioned in the review. I didn't do that for the twins. Armie Hammer played Cameron Winklevoss and Josh Pense played his brother Tyler. But wait! They're supposed to be identical twins, you can't play identical twins with two non related actors! These roles were pulled off uniquely with the use of special effects. There were two bodies, but Armie's head was digitally imposed on Pense's body. Pretty cool stuff. I didn't catch it until I was doing some research for this review.

The timeline is laid out as we get to be flies on the wall in two separate depositions. Zuckerberg is being sued on one hand by the twins and Narendra for theft of what they claim was their idea and on the other hand by Saverin who was supposed to be his best friend and the CFO who has a substantial share of the company. The depositions reveal the time lines, players, interactions, the highs and the lows as this dorm room start up became the huge 800 pound gorilla on the Internet that everyone wanted a piece of including Sean Parker (Justin Timerlake,) the man responsible for Napster.

Facebook is a tech geeks dream. Taking the idea out of your head, start working on it in humble surroundings (I mean really, how humble is a Harvard student's room) to eventually transform it into a global phenomenon in just a few years. Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg with this cold calm steeliness about himself but with a duplicity of "I know what I want", but "I don't know where exactly this is going to go" at the same time. With Timerberlake there is the irony of playing the man who forever changed the way that we consume and pay for music while himself being directly affected by what Parker did to the music industry.

The movie shines with the dialogue, pacing, editing and acting. At one particular point there was the use of tilt shift video which has been used in a number of viral videos and so much so that even Disney used it for some of their internet promotions. Tilt shift is when the movie frames are processed in such a way that the items as real as they are appear to be toy models. For me, it was the first time that I've seen it used in a movie. Coupled with the particular musical selection it gives a rather out of body like experience. Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing and Charlie Wilson's War fame was the screenplay writer based off of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.

The two hours for the movie was well spent and rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language. I mean really, can you talk about a college experience without touching on those topics? This movie is worthy of a movie theater viewing but if you can't make it out to see it on the big screen, make an effort to rent it when it becomes available.

The Movie Monkey

To subscribe to the audio podcast of the reviews via iTunes click here. Audio versions are released the following Wednesday.

Movie Review: Zombieland

Zombieland....kind of reminds you of things like playing Candy Land, singing winter wonderland or dancing to Earth Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland, right? Well, sort of....

The world had been overrun by zombies. How? By a fast acting virus. These are not slow moving zombies, they move quick they too are fast acting! The narrator of the story goes by the name of Columbus played by Jessie Eisenberg of this year's Adventureland movie and he has his rules that he lives by in order to survive. Rule number one is Cardio! Once you see the undead, you understand why. Hmmm....I wonder if Jessie has any other "...land" movies coming up? He was good in Adventureland too.

Coming into the picture is Tallahassee played by Woody Herrelson who really, really wants to find Twinkies in and amongst all the quick moving dead. He meets Columbus and the two start traveling together and this is really what the movie is about, it's a buddy road movie just like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on The Road to Zanzabar. The zombies are just obstacles preventing them from getting to their destination which due to running into two sisters, Wichata and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) ends up getting changed from east coast destinations to Pacific Playland in California where zombies haven't taken over. Or so they hope. Going back to the names for a second...why names of cities? Because that way it can't get personal. Between the sisters, guess which of the two was the older one?

Like all good road pictures there are trust issues that need to be overcome. Issues between Columbus and Tallahassee and the guys vs the girls. As they work out those issues they end up in LA where they take refuge in a celebrity mansion before they make their final destination.

Along the way we the audience are brought into the movie with little interstitchels that made the movie fun. Columbus' rules were constantly being brought up and the rule was displayed on the screen. While they don't show you all 32, they show a good sampling. Kinda like tapas table service. You got to both read the rule and get a practical demonstration as to why the rule was important. Talking about ways to kill zombies or really not talking so much as seeing demonstrations are handed to you the audience. The scene in Los Angeles was funny. Lesson learned there is watching zombies killings is fun while dealing with real zombies is NOT. Notice the capitalization there.

What surprised me most was not the movie itself, but what was going on in the theater. The movie runs for 80 minutes and is rated R. So why in a movie rated R were there so many kids in the theater? It never ceases to amaze me seeing (and hearing) kids in these types of movies. You would think more parents would be concerned with showing their 6-10 year old kids about human sushi. I don't know what's going on in their own gray matter.

Overall it was a fun movie and would give it a double thumbs up for the appropriate age groups.