As we get started on this week’s Republibot Weekend Movie Preview round up, I just want to reiterate again, for those just joining us, I‘m not really reviewing anything here. Unless stated otherwise I’ve not seen any of the movies in this “Preview”. The only thing that I am doing is quite thoughtlessly passing judgment on films that are scheduled to open this week and that I haven’t researched at all. I am doing this because I find it interesting and because it makes me laugh, and as long as the Republibot site is okay with me doing this I will keep it up as long as it amuses me. All of the film information in these previews, including the plot summary, has been pulled from the Opening This Week page of IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/nowplaying/). In this week’s installment we are taking quick looks at: Planet 51, New Moon, and The Blind Side – among others….
Planet 51
Director: Jorge Blanco Javier Abad
Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Jessica Biel
Studio: TriStar Pictures
The Plot: The inhabitants of Planet 51 live in fear of alien invasion. Their paranoia is realized when astronaut Chuck Baker (voice of Dwayne Johnson) arrives from Earth. Befriended by a young resident, he has to avoid capture in order to recover his spaceship and try to return home.
The Republibot Take: This looks a bit like Avatar: The Big Expensive Cameron Movie That No One Is Looking Forward To Seeing. And when I say that it looks like it, I mean that it looks like it except that it takes place in a Leave It to Beaver version of an Alien world. It also looks like Battle for Terra which was surprisingly good (see our own Republibot 3.0’s review here: http://republibot.com/content/movie-review-%E2%80%9C-battle-terra%E2%80%9D). I hate kids movies like this. They feel like they are stamped out in a factory in China during the night shift when the Adidas child-dominated day crew is finished stamping out shoes. There is a template and it en-angers me that absolutely know one working in a decision making capacity on these movies seem to be embarrassed by that fact in any way.
I have the same issues with Wall-E and UP! from Pixar as well. And honestly, Pixar frustrates me the most – those two films started out so beautifully and fresh, but it is like there exists, in animated film, a gravity well for plots – as hard as they try they cannot escape the need to have a trumped up bad guy to increase the drama and threat to our beloved main characters. Isn’t saving the earth and teaching a bunch of fat humans how to take care of themselves drama enough without complicating the matter with an evil Auto-pilot character with a secret agenda? Isn’t an old man and a goofy kid riding a house held up by balloons all the way to a South American wilderness in order to fulfill a dream drama enough without having to add in a mean old explorer that is trying to kill a prehistoric bird for his completely unnecessary collection? Plus, they dropped him to his death!! In a kids’ film!! A senile deluded old man that just needed to be looked after and helped, they dropped him to his death!!
Anyway, Sci-fi quotient on this is probably
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Comments
27 December 2008
18 min 5 sec
Yeah, I was really pleasantly surprised by Battle for Terra. My kids liked it, too. Also: I love Thai food.
27 June 2009
12 min 13 sec
The problem with the new CGI kid’s movies is the same as most of the big movies now. The producers are so in love with the technology they neglect the story telling. In almost everyway the writing and acting was better in Hollywood before the mid 70’s. Sure some great films have been made since then but not in the numbers that they used to do.
Hollywood just does not have people like Dick Van Dyke, Julie Andrews, Fred MacMurry and Roddy McDowall making children’s films anymore. Maybe if actors today spent less time worrying about their press and a little more time on their craft better movies would be made.
2 January 2009
13 hours 18 min
Man, I loved Mary Poppins - but I loved Chitty Chitty Bang Bang even more. The issue I have with most recent CG films is the unadventurous nature of the storytelling. Pixar gets their movies off to a good start, but by the end they have fallen into a too familiar rut. Battle for Terra though was much more daring, even though it was pretty cliched as far as the story went - it took some character chances and the presentaiton was serious and thoughtful instead of goofy and hyperkinetic.
I am not terribly taken by SNL, but this digital short was pretty funny: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/digital-short-firelig...
25 July 2009
6 weeks 1 day
"...drugs or child prostitution, because that is basically the extent of Thailand in films usually."
Well, there isn't really anything more to Thailand than that. Except maybe the food, but I can't stand the stuff.
"The movies represent such horrid things that they would be the camel that broke the haystack’s back to push me over the edge to suicide."
I am so flipping sick of Twilight. I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly for reasons that escape me, and they have a Twilight fetish. Every fourth issue or so has those darn fruity vampires.
Of course, if they did this, I might go to see it.
27 June 2009
12 min 13 sec
The Twilight movies are the modern Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella but instead of teaching little girls to wait for that rich man they are being taught that they should be with older men with weird problems.
Planet 51 looks cute and is no more mindless than Mary Poppins and the other kid’s movies they forced down my throat in the 60’s.
The Blindside looks to sweet for me; even though I am a sports fan I usually do not like sports movies. (I do tear up at the end of the original Brian’s Song)