Reviews

Yes, every frame of this is a work of art. I havent seen this level of natural detail since MOANA, and it is stunning from beginning to end.

The storyline? A little convoluted, but eventually it shakes down and you know what's going on. Some things seem to just get lost in the rush because they're trying to do way too much for a film of this length, but they do their best.

But what's truly sad here are the songs, all of which sound like rejects from the first film... including two variants on "Let It Go". Everything comes to a dead half too many times because, hey, here's yet another song on the way that really doesnt do much to advance anything. It killed what could have been a worthy successor to the first film.

Smoke a little weed, put the mind in neutral, and forget that the collars around the kitties' necks have a tendency to move just slightly slower than the necks themselves. Dont ask why one cat is stripping off her skin to show more fur underneath - and certainly dont ask what her outer garment would be made of. Really, just dont do it.

It never ceases to amaze me when a director takes essentially bulletproof material like this and says, "Hey, let's see what I can do to really screw it up." Still, it had some nice moments (that lasted maybe a few seconds apiece) and some intriguing ideas (that lasted even shorter time). The background were, in the main, charming, but clearly meant for another movie altogether. Maybe a French musical with Gene Kelly. But not this one.

It's difficult to put into words how I feel about this film. It's gorgeously animated, exquisitely written - there are so many wonderful things about it that it's difficult to know where to start. I'm just hoping that Dreamworks doesnt screw it up with a fourth film. This thing ended just as it should have, with everything beautifully in place. There are at least four moments in the film where you feel your heart leap out of your chest, and I may have missed one other. Stunning, stunning work. Kudos to everyone who worked on it.

OK, let's get the positives out of the way. Incredible production design (especially the use of computer graphics to suggest DaVinci's POV), great storytelling, a wonderfully wicked villain, plenty of hot eye candy of both genders (which at the time was pretty rare!), and a great arc of a storyline about DaVinci's mother. All in all, well worth watching.

But...

(You knew it was coming, right?)

What is it with the Las Vegas showgirls in South America? Who thought those outfits were even remotely in line with the rest of the production work? Honestly, I found them so bizarre that it wrenched me right out of the show. Yes, there are other things that truly stretched credibility, like the giant plasterboard cannon they whipped up overnight. But those ladies.... gads...

Not a Great Classic by any stretch, but SECRET LIFE OF PETS is still a pretty awesome achievement, both from a story, design, and animation point of view. There are moments in the film when you wonder how the animators pulled off scenes of such dazzling complexity, such as the one on the Brooklyn Bridge towards the end - and speaking as a 3D artist, watching the hair dynamics pf the various characters was. at times, truly jaw dropping.

But the most fascinating aspect of this was how the film moves from how we see our pets to hoe they see the world. The writing is especially clever during these moments.

All in all, a film I will probably watch again, simply because so much happens that you cant take it all in in one viewing. And if you're a pet owner, the final montage (no spoilers) will grab you by the heart.

Production design? Check.

CG work? Check.

Good 3D? Check.

Chris as Thor? OMG check. (loved the fan service scene)

Some mindless humour along the way? Check.

Stan Lee cameo? Check.

It's a comic book, folks. A great big, dressed up, very glossy comic book — and if you get that wrong, then there's something terribly wrong with you.

Now, a couple of minor cavils: the appearance of Doctor Strange at the beginning and Thor not recognizing him? Sorry, had trouble believing that — and the whole scene, while fun, seems more than a bit gratuitous. ("Hey, we can put in another Marvel character here!"). The Hulk's appearance seemed likewise contrived, with no real reason save to move the plot along a bit. Yes, he plays a big part later, but how we got him there in the first place wasn't really explained any more than "Hulk crash here!" Equally WTF was how a certain other Asgaardian shows up. It was like this planet was Grand Central Station for the universe.

That aside, it's a fun, mindless movie with a lot of great eye candy. Cant go wrong with that.

Just to get the big complaint from everyone out of the way... yes, the CG work has a cartoonish edge to it. Know what? Don't care. It's a big ol' fantasy film with flying swan ships and elephants running amok and soldiers being slung like cannonballs.

I loved every second of it.

It's big and loud and full of eye candy — both in the production design and the obvious hard work put in by the two male leads. The cinematography is gorgeous: every frame, bar none, is a painting. Even the musical numbers feel almost organic to the plot. It's a stunning achievement, and I'm sure someone in Hollywood is thinking about an American remake.

Go see it. You will not be disappointed. But see the first one before you do. The only thing that prevents a full ten star on this was I got a little confused by the timeline. But once you figure that out, you see it as even more of an achievement because of the artful way the director ties them back and forth.

Three stars only for the sequences that actually came from the book, as the stop motion work is quite beautiful and well executed.

But the framing story, which seems to think we need the message pounded on us with a twenty- pound sledge hammer, was totally unnecessary and — as I"m afraid it might be — put in a sop as part of the "empower little girls!" campaign currently running through almost all media. (Let me add, I have no problem with empowerment, but it doesn't need to be slathered over *everything*.)

The Little Prince isn't about empowerment. It really isn't about the power of imagination, although the marketing might like you to believe that. Rather, it's a meditation on life and death, on love and loss — and the filmmakers here completely missed the point in their rush to create this mangled view of a book whose message comes from a more delicate and thoughtful place. I applaud the art, to be sure — the CG work is nice... just not for this particular story. It needs its own story to tell, not tailgating on the back of something else.

Anyone who knows much about anime knows about Hetalia, this insanely charming series in which countries are person-fied and portrayed with as much stereotype as possible. It's garnered a huge online presence, woth other folks providing Hetalia versions of their own country... or province... or state.

As such, the idea of a Hetalia movie just seems ideal, but this one was essentially just a mash-up of a rather weak storyline involving aliens, coupled with pieces of animation from the old anime series. The latter gave everything a strange, disjointed feel because the extracts really didt go anywhere with the plot of the film (such as that was). And while it was fun seeing countries outside the core group — like Cuba — they were just walk-ons put in, I gather, for fanboy service.

It's a pity because the original series if so wonderfully whack. Instead it got appended to this rather lame storyline.

I"m sure some people will scream and yell that "this isn't how it is in a real kitchen!" — to which I say, go work in one and see how well you fare. This is one of those films where it's not the destination (We know where it's going soon enough), but the journey... which is handled quietly and with understatement. I've never thought of Cooper a dramatic actor, but he handles himself well in this. It's not an Oscar performance, but the material doesn't demand one — rather, it asks for everyone to underplay to the point of appearing bland... and yet none of them are. The handling of the maitre d' subplot was quite lovely, by the way. Like so much in this movie, you didn't need everything plastered onto the screen in 10-foot-high letters. You just had to sit back, think a bit, and appreciate.

Kudos to all involved.

Lots of points for production design: the costumes are uniformly magnificent, from the lowest peasant to the highest king. The sets get a tad monotonous after a while: big, colonnaded halls of dark beige and grey and lots of oversized statuary, but even those can be breathtaking in their own way. The CG work just gets better and better with each season: tighter, cleaner, more layered and intricate. Many of the performances are quite good, even after six years, and the photography is outstanding.

That's the good stuff.

The bad? OK, I"m halfway through season 6, binge-watching the DVDs, and the sins of the series are becoming so obvious that the writers are in real need of a walk of atonement. Having not read the books, I don't know how closely they're adhering to them at this point — or if indeed they even are anymore, since I understand much of this season was planned in expectation of the next book which Martin has yet to finish. But increasingly, each episode is a combination of (1) some characters wandering around the countryside in the snow, (2) some characters getting killed off for no particular reason, and (3) one really big CG-laden scene somewhere towards the end to keep you coming back to see what happens next.

My biggest complaint with GOT S1 was that it felt like the old TV show "Dynasty" with a lot of fur costumes: lots of rich, powerful people going after each other in a somewhat pointless way. S2-4 gave it a bit of a rise above that, but S5 and (thus far) S6 have almost completely reverted to type: Fantasy Soap Opera with Furs. At this point, I'm not sure why the show has lasted this long: the story lines seem to be running on auto-pilot. There hasn't been much with the same visceral impact as the Red Wedding. By now I would have hoped to see at least something of where the series hopes to wind up, but instead it's just wandering in the snow.

I understand that it's been contracted for two more seasons. I'm starting to wonder if any of the major characters will even be left by then, that perhaps they're bringing it to a close because no one will be left alive to sit on the stupid Iron Throne. That would be almost as disappointing as the ending of LOST, but at this point, certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

I'm hedging on the 10 only because of very minor things that other commentators have noted, like everyone's perfect teeth... but even that is forgivable in this utterly amazing piece of work. I can understand why there's so few episodes in each season and why the seasons are so far apart: these things took work, and every effort shows — from the sets to the costumes to the photography to the writing to the acting to the direction, every episode is a movie unto itself, done with nearly impeccable style.

To that end, it's almost laughable — in a sad sort of way — to read some of the negative reviews for this. "Not enough sword fights!" "Too much gay sex!" (I'm trying to remember just one, but then perhaps that reviewer was watching SPARTACUS?) "Too much talking!" — as though simple communication is a bad thing. Get over it, folks. This is a show with action, adventure, *and* a whole bunch of moral ambiguity about things. Almost every character, from Captain Flint to Eleanor to John Silver to the lowest crew member has some kind of wonderful personality flaw, which is one of the things that makes this show so *genuine*. The writers have taken characters from literature and made them fully developed people: not an easy task when you consider how much baggage people would bring to a series that's a prequel to Treasure Island... and they do it with amazing skill Just watch how things shift in the final episode of Season 3: a conversation at night in the jungle that, at first, we cant quite put into the chronology, until it starts wending its way through the climactic battle to follow. Brilliant writing and extraordinary performances all around. I cannot recommend this thing too highly/

The "silver screen" edition, which takes the film back to its pre-CG roots (and was indeed the first version I'd seen), is currently available (for the moment anyway) on YouTube. Wanting to see if it was as good as I remembered, I sat down one night and watched it.

OK, yes, most successful franchise in movie history. Got it. Great soundtrack. No doubt about it. But strip away the layers upon layers of CG work, and what do you have left? Not a whole lot.

The acting is almost as cardboard as the sets. The screenplay is a mash-up of things that even in their day were sci-fi-movie clichés. The models are clearly that: plastic and styro models. The puppetry and stop-action work is almost unbearably bad. The pre-CG post work looks almost laughably lame. Perhaps Lucas is right: this is not the version we want to remember, because it's just a cheezy 1980s movie. STAR WARS' advantage, at the time, was that it was so different from what else was being produced at the time. But now, with the perspective of all these decades? It ain't holding up well.

It's still a great series of space operas, no discussion needed on the point. And God knows it's made a kazillion bucks.

But is it *good*? Well, sorry, no.

I could only bear to watch the opening few minutes before it was painfully obvious this was less a reboot so much as a sad parody.

Mr Humphries? Please. Yes, he was gay in the original, but he certainly did not go around lifting men's jackets to look at their ass. From what I've read, this "reboot" is just a far cruder version, which completely trainwrecks the intent of the original.

I"m sorry, but no. This is just sadly pathetic. If it gets made into a series, then God help us all because the writers will not have anywhere near the wit of the original staff. This thing will go down in flames (real ones, not those acted by the Imam-wannabee) — and deservedly.