Movie Review: Despicable Me

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So for months now we've been seeing these enlarged mutated corn pops with either one or two eyes wearing goggles and overalls everywhere; certainly in the trailers for the movie. But in ads for different products, restaurants and even Best Buy...we'll talk about Best Buy in a moment. Well this weekend were were able to find out what they are all about in the release of computer animated Despicable Me.

Turns out these little yellow pills of humor are called minions who adoring love their boss Gru (Steve Carell)

and would follow him to the ends of the Earth. They listen to him, cheer for him and almost completely fawn over Gru as they carry out his plans. They truly epitomize the very definition of minion meaning a loyal servant of another, usually more powerful being. Did Gru find them somewhere and offer them a place to work like Willie Wonka did for the oompa-loompas? Were they the result of a genetic or radio active experiment on Twinkies gone wrong? We don't know and quite frankly we don't care. Watching them help Gru with his plans is funny.

And just what are Gru's plans? Well, after his stealing of the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower replicas from Las Vegas, someone else stole the Great Pyramid from Egypt. Gru decides he wants to step up his game and steal the moon! Why the moon? Well, it's out there, it's big and everyone would notice if it was gone and maybe, just maybe he'd gain his mother's approval in the process. In flash backs we see Gru who has a dream constantly being nonchalantly dismissed by his mother (Julie Andrews). For a change of pace instead of daddy issues, this character has mommy issues!

Gru turns to Dr Nefario (a very subdued Russell Brand) to help design the necessary tools to carry out his plan. Gru is the idea guy dependant on hard of hearing Dr Nefario to fill in the details with the gadgets and gizmoes necessary for Gru's diabolical dealings. Due to a couple of misunderstandings between Gru's nondescript eastern European accent and Nafario's hearing issues, there are a couple of surprising creations made. Ultimately, Gru needs a shrinking ray and rocket to steal the moon. Luckily Dr Nefario doesn't need to make the shrinking ray gun, it already exists. Gru just needs to steal it from the new upstart Super Villain in town Vector (Jason Segel).

In come Margo, Edith and Agnes (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Elise Fisher), three orphans who Gru will adopt and use to gain easy access to Vector's highly guarded contemporary and stylish lair. Does he care about the girls? Nah, they are just pawns to be used in the bigger picture. As the plans for capturing and ransoming the moon move forward, the girls manage to steal Gru's heart at the same time. He hadn't planned on that! Just like the Grinch didn't expect his heart to grow three sizes after his raiding of Whoville that fateful Christmas day.

Are there some laughs in the movie? Yup, there are some good laughs in there. One of the minions looks like he stole Ned Flander's mustache. Some minons have dual purpose functionality. Gru's totally un PC transportation would make SUVs seem heavenly in an environmentalist's eyes. What the story lacked was a cohesive plot to smoothly keep it all together. It was enjoyable to watch, but not a very memorable watch.

One thing you want to remember to do is to stay and watch the credits, especially if you are going to the 3D version. I saw the 2D version. The minions came out and were doing some pretty funny things and I'm assuming in 3D they would have been funnier and even funnier still if I had been able to understand what they were saying. This is where I now rip into Best Buy. There were promotional materials telling you to go to their web site to download a minion translator app. Goto this page, send a text to that number, even at the theater they had posters and stand ups with QR codes. Get the app they beg you. Turns out that the app is only good for iPhone, Androids, Blackberrys and Windows mobile phones. Any other type of phone and you're screwed. For all the advertising they put in for this promotion and how limited it was, I give Best Buy a big FAIL!

The movie ran for 96 minutes and was rated PG for some rude humor and mild action. They also received tax credits for making the film in France. I wonder if that's why the Eiffel Tower and a mime both appear in the film. I wouldn't be surprised that when Christmas rolls around you'll be able to go to your local big box or toy store and get a customizable minion for yourself or a loved one. I would also expect the Sleepy Kittens book to be there on the shelf next to the minions!

The Movie Monkey

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Movie Review: The Last Airbender

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This was the week that the new Twilight movie, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse came out. I purchased my ticket and was planning on writing a review. There is something about the Bella character that just totally turns me off so I decided to try The Last Airbender and enjoyed it so much more that I decided to give the latter a review. I saw both movies in regular 2D format.

At one point in time the four elementals: air, earth, water and fire lived in harmony. There were respected people called benders that could control individual elements except one who could control all four. This special individual was called the Avatar who bridged between their world and the world of the spirits. The Avatar kept harmony in the world. But, the Avatar disappeared. With the Avatar not present, the Fire nation made its move to control all the nations.

So there's the set up for the movie. So far, so good. A century has passed and the Fire nation has expanded its control and this is where we pick up the story. A brother and sister from the southern Water nation find an ice sphere and inside is a boy and some large furry creature thingy. They take the boy back to their village where he is promptly kidnapped by the Fire nation. Just his luck, out of the ice sphere and into the fire! Aang (Noah Ringer) is now under the watchful eye of Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) and his uncle Iroh (Shawn Toub). Zuko needs to bring Aang back to his father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis), to redeem himself for disobedience to dad. Katara (Nicola Peltz) who is the last water bender in her nation and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) set out to rescue Aang. Rathbone has an interesting weekend for himself as he is also playing the vampire Jasper over in Eclipse.

I sat in my seat thinking that I had seen some of this before. Finally it hit me, I was seeing part of The Never Ending Story! Here is a child with a destiny to fulfill with the help of a flying furry creature. Airbender's Appa kinda looked like a cross of one of the creatures from Where the Wild Things Are and a beaver then splice in some genetics of a insect so that you have this fuzzy round faced, six legged, long flat wide tailed creature that's broad enough to carry an open air howdah configured with a front section for a driver and wide enough to carry two or three passengers sitting side by side. Appa didn't have the dialog that Falkor had, but he, if it was a he, was cute in a weird pet sense of cute.

The fantasy aspect of the film kept my attention as well as the locations. Starting off in a glacial arctic area where Katara and Sokka call home, we then head to areas that look like jungles with buildings from Angkor Wat. Something that made me go "huh?" was the home of the water benders. Why would water benders live where the water is frozen instead of a nice lush tropical area like say Bora Bora or the Cooke islands. You know, some place where they could have created nice water action to lull themselves to sleep on sounds of waves crashing gently into a white sand beach instead of an area where they could freeze to death in a white out?

Another location that made me go "hmmm?" was the North Water nation. Here it was like Helm's Deep from The Lord of the Rings met the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz and had an offspring together. This massive city tucked away from the onslaught of the Fire nation was a fortress of protection that had the colorings in both architecture and the citizen's finery comprised of whites with blue tints and various shades of medium to dark blues. It was here that the large climatic battle takes place and where the sound in my theater went out. We're all sitting there in a perfectly quiet theater as we see what should be causing loud explosions and instead hearing someone slurp down their soda. So for several minutes I had to leave the theater to try to find theater staff to get the sound back on. Luckily they managed to get the sound pumping again just at the right moment within the battle.

One major flaw that I had with the movie was when people were being hit with dirt or water or fire, they didn't seem to really have the physics of the item being bended. Case in point, if you had a huge column of flame pass by you and then hit say a wall you would expect to see items react to heat like singes or burn marks and maybe steam when fire and water interact. That didn't happen. Then again, this is another world and fantasy so maybe our physics don't work there the same way.

The end of the movie left it set up for a sequel as the Avatar needs to move forward on his journey to once again bring balance to the world of the four elements. My theater did it again. As the credits were running they overlapped it with the preshow slides. But the manager did take care of me when I complained and now have a free readmission ticket sitting in my wallet. Based on some other reviews that I've read, any sequel might not happen. When I started this review, the Rotten Tomatoes meter was at a 9% and now as I finish, it's down to 8% and it's been compared to Battlefield Earth which won the Razzie this year for Worst Movie of the Decade. Ouch, that's really harsh! All in all, I still enjoyed The Last Airbender more than Eclipse.

The movie has a PG rating for fantasy violence and runs 103 minutes.

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: Grown Ups

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It was another tough decision at the theater this week, Adam Sandler or Tom Cruise. I thought heavily of checking out the art cinema but timing didn't work out. So I choose Adam Sandler in Grown Ups and was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, it had it's problems but it was better than I thought. BUT before I could get to the comedy gold (tongue planted firmly in cheek) of Sandler, I had to get through the previews. I'm really starting to loathe them. First there were five shown before the movie. I can deal with that, not a big deal. Two of the movies are "coming in 3D and in 2D at select theaters." Argh! That's starting to get annoying! Then there was this trailer, I won't plug the movie, but it stars Will Farrell. Why must I be tortured with Will Farrell? It was more of a Talladega Nights:

The Ballad of Ricky Bobby than Stranger than Fiction type of movie. By the looks of the preview, I think that he'll be up for a Razzie.

Will Farrell aside, Grown Ups was your standard Adam Sandler movie with some of the language and potty humor. Rob Schnieder showed up in this movie as usual but instead of the cameo type appearances he was one of the leads in this film along with Chris Rock, Kevin James and David Spade who play five life long friends. They've gathered back in New England after 30 years to attend the funeral of their beloved basketball coach, Coach Buzzer (Blake Clark) who lead the team to a championship when the boys were 12. As a reward they had a party at a gorgeous lake front house.

As the town gathers at the church for Coach's funeral the five are reunited Lenny, Rob, Eric, Marcus and Rob (Sandler, Schneider, James, Spade and Rock) along with their families. As they see each other the insults and one upmanships start flowing. Even during the service they take bets as to what one of the guys would do. It's like the five of them never separated and continued their friendship right where they left off many years ago. Lenny, a successful Hollywood agent, decides to rent the lake front property and have all the families, all 17 people: wives, children, pets, nannies and mother-in-laws stay under one roof for the Fourth of July weekend.

Each family has their own issues. Lenny has his successful clothes designer wife Roxanne (Selma Hayek Pinault) who needs to get to Milan for a fashion show and two very spoiled children. Eric has unique family issues with his wife Sally (Maria Bello) who can't seem to break their four year old son from breast feeding. Kurt is a stay at home dad with a successful bread winning pregnant wife (Maya Rudolph). Rob is a new age type of guy on his fourth marriage with kids from previous marriages and a new, rather unconventional wife. Pulling up the rear is Marcus, the single guy on the prowl for anything that moves, kinda like the same character he played on Rules of Engagement.

There are some funny scenes, there are some gross out scenes, there are some things that should NEVER be tried at home. They apparently tried, like the Wadsworth poem "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I know not where." and make a game out of it. Kids, if you see this movie don't EVER try what they do with a bow and arrow. Something really BAD could happen. Actually, I shouldn't limit that just to kids....adults, this applies to you too! The movie has a PG-13 rating due to crude material including suggestive references, language and some male rear nudity, you know typical stuff for a Sandler movie.

Some of the editing was choppy. With some great comedic people together I'm sure they did some improvisation that the director Dennis Dugan (Don't mess with the Zohan and The Benchwarmers) had to try to stitch together in the editing bay. Some of the incidents and conclusions were just too contrived and easily resolved, but ultimately the story was about friendship and family and that part of the movie was enjoyable in the 102 minute running time.

The Movie Monkey

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