G-Force DVD Review

Versatility and originality are two things with which Jerry Bruckheimer isn't often credited. The mega-producer's filmography is heavy on sequels and derivative works, especially in the past 15 years he's spent almost exclusively at the Walt Disney Company.

But, in 2009, as franchises continued to dominate the box office, Bruckheimer actually released two very different non-sequels, neither of which comfortably fit into the high-octane spectacle genre he usually calls home. First came Confessions of a Shopaholic, a small chick-lit-adapted Touchstone chick flick that garnered little notice. Then summer brought G-Force, a bigger film with some of the year's smallest stars.

G-Force centers on a team of four highly-trained, high-tech commandoes working for the United States government. There is Darwin the brave leader (Sam Rockwell), Blaster the wisecracking goofball (Tracy Morgan), Juarez the feisty Latina (Penelope Cruz), and goggled tech guy Speckles (Nicolas Cage). Oh, did I mention that they're guinea pigs? They all are, except for Speckles, who's a mole! The talking critters are part of an experimental animal communication unit headed by a nice scientist named Ben Kendall (Zach Galifianakis).

When the film opens, the rodents, mammal, and their ally Mooch the fly (Dee Bradley Baker) are hard and stealthily at work to uncover the secret plans of rich, influential entrepreneur Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy). To an excited audience, Saber announces that all of the company's existing household appliances have been covertly fitted with computer chips. When activated, the devices will be able to connect, communicate, and revolutionize the way we live.

Casually adopting the name G-Force, the tiny spies try to steal Saber's encrypted data and assess the true threat of the unmanned weapons initiative that's apparently only posing as a commercial enterprise. Doing so without a warrant and proper authorization, however, the guinea pigs invite heat on Ben's department from the FBI, particularly skeptical special agent Kip Killian (Will Arnett).

On the run from the law, the fearless foursome winds up in a Los Angeles pet shop. There, they encounter boorish guinea pig Hurley (Jon Favreau), who haphazardly becomes a part of the mission. The gang is divided when Blaster and Juarez are purchased by a couple of unthoughtful kids. Can they reunite, ward off the feds, and prevent the impending Clusterstorm launch that just might bring global extermination? For the answers to these questions, you'll have to see this movie.

Though marketed partly as a comedy, G-Force is as packed with action as just about any Jerry Bruckheimer film. Chases, gadgetry, and explosions are all supplied in abundance. In assuming the perspective of computer-animated rodents, the humor skews younger, the action tamer, and the colors more natural. But this isn't otherwise a far cry from the Bruckheimer oeuvre, delivering fast pacing, visceral emphasis, and snuck-in character development. Were our leads humans instead of animals, this may have qualified as competent popcorn entertainment. That they're not applies a thick coat of stupidity to the proceedings, one that teens and adults are much more likely to mind than the kids primarily targeted.

The movie plays out fairly seriously, finding more time for peril and suspense than lingering on the goofy driving conceit. One obvious drawback lays in the design; as commercials enforced, G-Force was tailor-made for 3-D theatrical exhibition, Disney/Bruckheimer's amusing first live-actionish selection for such treatment. Watching it on DVD, viewers will notice the ongoing obsession with objects moving towards them. However, with no 3-D option offered, they'll miss the payoff, which must have been significant (at least in theory) based on the way the film serves up such illusions with nearly the regularity of gimmick-based theme park attractions like Honey, I Shrunk the Audience and Muppet*Vision 3D. That technique will limit the movie's value long after the industry's current 3-D fascination wears off, even if TV technology can recreate the polarized theatrical experience and consumers genuinely care.

Beyond that, G-Force plays out about as predictably and comfortably as any big commercial family film. There are a slew of one-liners for kids ("Poop in his hand! Poop in his hand!") and adults ("Yippie-ki-yay, coffeemaker!") alike. There are brief snippets of songs in today's pop electronic hip-hop stylings clearly selected for the mutually beneficial exposure of music videos (surprisingly, a soundtrack wasn't even made to download).

The live actors -- hip comedians like Galifianakis, Arnett, Nighy, and Loudon Wainwright III -- are merely there to attract fans who would otherwise stay far away. It may be excessive to consider such performers neutered here, but they aren't even asked to be funny. Galifianakis, the most entertaining thing about one of the year's most entertaining movies (The Hangover), manages to mildly amuse in one throwaway gag. He's more readily utilized to elicit sympathy and decency as the chubby hero who believes in the chatty creatures.

G-Force marks the feature directorial debut of veteran visual effects artist Hoyt H. Yeatman, Jr., who also receives story credit with fellow effects man David P.I. James. (Husband-wife National Treasure scribes Cormac and Marianne Wibberley are billed for the screenplay.) It's an inauspicious first for Yeatman, who won an Oscar for his work on James Cameron's The Abyss and has supervised VFX on a number of Bruckheimer's adult-oriented action flicks. Disney fans might be interested to know that the company bought Yeatman's effects house Dream Quest in the mid-1990s and turned it into The Secret Lab, the ambitious unit that worked on Dinosaur and was closed two years later. With the dream of a Disney visual effects company never again realized, the fine character animation on G-Force is the work of Sony Pictures Imageworks.

With a domestic gross of nearly $120 million and an over-$200 M worldwide tally, G-Force would appear to be one of Disney's bigger hits of all-time. In fact, though, those numbers only narrowly cleared the film's $150 M production budget and no doubt kept the film in deficit when the hefty marketing costs are considered. (By comparison, Alvin and the Chipmunks cost less than half and earned nearly double.) Based on those results, I would guess there is as much chance of a G-Force sequel as there is of Touchstone making more Shopaholic movies.

But don't worry about Bruckheimer or Disney's faith in him. There's sequel potential in each of next summer's live-action tentpoles (especially Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), a third National Treasure and fourth Pirates of the Caribbean adventure are planned for 2011, and beyond that, there is The Lone Ranger to star Johnny Depp as Tonto.

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Opening Pandora's box

Eleven years ago James Cameron's Titanic premiered in China and was the country's highest-grossing film, until Transformers 2 this summer. Now, a month before his 3-D extravaganza Avatar debuts in theaters here, the director is talking up his latest creation.

"The Chinese economy is growing so rapidly (and) is beginning to face the same problems that we've had in America and Europe, such as the degradation of our natural environment and resources," says Cameron in a telephone interview.

"I think that for anybody that loves nature, for anybody that feels that their life is being changed by living in a technological society or civilization, Avatar has something to say. "The theme is going to have relevance for Chinese people the same way it has in all the places that is dealing with this issue about industrialization."

In the $230 million fantasy film, Cameron creates a new alien world named Pandora, where Avatars, or hybrid creatures that are a mix of the DNA of humans and the local species Na'vi, fight with pure Na'vi - tall, blue aliens - for a precious mineral on the planet.

Cameron's other smash hit, The Terminator, is widely known as being inspired by a feverish dream in 1981, in which he saw a chrome, metallic and skeletal robot came out of a fire. Avatar, he says, was inspired by all his dreams. "I call it my dream project, or pinch-me project. It pinches me and lets me know I am actually awake now," he says.

Cameron, whose parents were an electrical engineer and an artist, was keen on futurology even as a kid. He read science fiction during the day and painted the subjects at night. The University of Toronto dropout did various jobs, such as truck driver and machinist, while writing and illustrating science fiction stories. In 1977 he decided to start his film career after seeing Star Wars, which stunned him and made him obsessed about how George Lucas had done it.

"For me, Avatar is the opportunity to do the kind of movie I've always dreamed of making, in which you create an environment, plants, landscapes and creatures," he says. "I guess I've been working toward it for all this time."To make the flick, which according to Wired Magazine could change the way people watch films, Cameron has worked hard in the 12 years since making Titanic, even though he directed no feature films.

He partnered underwater camera specialist Vincent Pace and deep-sea explorer Andrew Wight to make four documentaries on the deep ocean, two in 3-D, while perfecting what he visions as "the holy grail of cameras" - a high-definition rig that is maneuverable, digital, high-resolution, 3-D and will not give viewers a headache.

He let other directors, such as Robert Rodriguez, test his system to demonstrate demand for more 3-D movies, while talking directly to theater owners to persuade them digital 3-D is the new trend in cinema and they should invest in new-generation projection systems right away.

In 2002, when Peter Jackson's Weta Digital in New Zealand created the stunningly believable computer-generated character Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, Cameron found the special effects technology was ready, too.

After four years of production, Avatar turned from being an idea in his mind for 15 years to be the first action movie shot entirely in digital 3-D. The characters and objects appear to leap from the screen. Around two-thirds of the film is computer-generated, one-third real. Cameron deliberately blurs the distinction between the two so it is hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. The film features more than 3,000 effects shots, and Cameron has redone many of them up to 20 times.

"We have accomplished a lot," he says. "We figured out how to create a photo-realistic world, plants and characters. But what we didn't figure out is how to do it faster, so my next goal is to figure out how to do a film like Avatar, maybe in two years instead of four." Known as a genius for the way he seamlessly combines technology and storyline, Cameron is alert to the epic's emotional appeal.

The hero Jake Sully, an Avatar played by Sam Worthington, falls in love with Neytiri, a Na'vi princess played by Zoe Saldana. Their emotional bond, as Cameron elaborates, is at the center of the film. "I learned the lesson on The Terminator 2 that if a movie doesn't have heart, doesn't make you feel the emotion, it has no purpose," he says.

"The film is a little bit overwhelming from a technical stand point, but I think the audience cares more about what they see on the screen, they care about the people, the relationship." In Titanic, Cameron found the balance between technology and emotion was one of the biggest challenges for a filmmaker. Fortunately he made it, by putting the visual effects, giant sets and thousands of actors, in balance with small intimate moments, to make the film really resonate for the audience.

"You will see the same balance and blend in Avatar," he promises. "It costs a million dollars a minute to do computer-generated characters in Avatar, so it's a very difficult thing to stop for those extra few seconds, the extra bit of time to let the characters have an intimate moment together, maybe just a look, a glimpse, or just a line of dialogue, but you have to do it, that's really critical."

In a time when blockbusters need to be "pre-sold", by comic books (Batman), bestsellers (Harry Potter) or toys (Transformers), Avatar does not have these advantages and is a brand new thing to audiences, globally and in China alike. Yet Cameron, who proclaimed, "I am the king of the world", at the 1998 Academy Award ceremony, which he swept with 11 wins, sees it as a legitimate concern.

"It is not a limitation that I ever believed in because Titanic was not pre-sold, True Lies was not pre-sold, and when I made the first Terminator film, nobody ever heard of that," he says. "I don't think Hollywood should accept that limitation, Hollywood should have the courage to make films. I am sure in the Chinese film industry you have the same issue. People need to have the courage to make new things, even at a blockbuster level of budget."

Blockbusters with a mega budget have become a norm for Cameron. The 55-year-old earned a record $1.8 billion globally for Titanic, which cost $200 million, at the time the most expensive film ever made. When he made The Abyss in 1989, it was also dubbed the most expensive movie ever made, though that was not true. The Terminator 2 was also the most expensive movie made, at the time.

"I do like to make big, expensive and visually spectacular films," he says. "I think the way people should look at this is, you spend the same amount for a ticket, no matter what the movie costs. So if a film costs more and brings more pleasure, more visual enjoyment, more spectacle, that's the best entertainment bargain you can get. As long as my films make money, people should feel good about what they cost." The film is expected for a theatrical release on Dec 18 in North America and around Jan 2 in China, in both 2-D and 3-D.

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Movie Review - Old Dogs

Millions of years from now, when humans have left this planet for a better one and left nothing behind but our garbage, one imagines that our great works of art will be taken with us. Films like “Old Dogs” will stay behind, rotting in the massive landfill. Aliens will come to our former residence, exploring and poking through our remains, trying to figure out the type of society we were.

They will bring the DVD to their spaceship and watch with perplexed expressions as John Travolta and Robin Williams fight for camera time and race to see who can lose their dignity the fastest. When it’s all over, there will be silence and then, one little alien will mutter, “Let’s just go home.”

Simply put, there just aren’t enough negative adjectives available when it comes to describing “Old Dogs” — not enough suitable to print, anyway. The film’s concept is the typical dime-a-dozen concept: Hot-shot executives thrown into caring for children they didn’t know existed, and supposed hilarity ensues as poop jokes abound and lessons about the importance of family are learned. The plot is threadbare, and director Walt Becker seems to have no idea what he’s doing.

The movie doesn’t just lack comedic timing; it lacks a sense of simple cinematic pacing. The movie stumbles all over the place, with no beginning, middle or end to most scenes. Just as something starts going, the film cuts to another establishing shot marking a new scene. It’s as if the editor got drunk the night before and accidentally trashed a third of the dailies, forcing him to work with the remains.

The “comedy” at hand is a failure across the board, often going for cheap gags like nut-shots, fart jokes and obvious, easy punch lines. The saying goes, “It’s funny because it’s true,” and there isn’t a single moment of truth here. These characters and situations are absurd. These characters do and say things that don’t make sense. At times I wondered if a twist was coming and the “old dogs” would be revealed as clinically insane.

“Lighten up,” you may say. “It’s just a harmless family comedy.” Well, imaginary disgruntled reader, I argue it isn’t harmless. The film’s message is that the worst thing you can possibly do is to strive for something. Instead of working for a living, earning money and contributing to society, you should stay home and play with your kids. With your kid’s love and a pocket full of dreams, everything you ever hoped for will fall into your lap. I have news for you

As wonderful as that would be, it isn’t how it really is. Dreams should be followed through with work, and a joy earned is much more powerful than a joy stumbled upon. Any film proposing the opposite is harmful to the impressionable minds watching.

“Old Dogs” is inept in every possible way; a movie that makes me wish there was a grade lower than an F to give it. But that would require some creativity, and I’d rather not waste another moment thinking about this pathetic excuse for a movie.

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Star of Where The Wild Things Are braves rain at London premiere

The 12-year-old , who plays mischievous young Max in the film, said: ''London seems pretty great, honestly. It's so rainy, it's awesome. I live in Portland, Oregon, and it's like this a lot.'' However, fans both young and old braved the winter weather on Wednesday to see the star and director of the feature length adaptation of Maurice Sendak's much-loved children's book.

Looking comfortable in the limelight, the young actor even stopped to sign autographs for some of his equally young fans. He responded to a journalist's question about what it was like acting alongside monsters with: ''Pretty much like working with a guy wearing a monster suit.''

Spike Jonze, the film's director, explained the London premiere was something of a home coming for many of the team who worked on the film. He said: ''We were doing visual effects here for the last year, so we've been here so much and every day on the way to work we'd walk through Leicester Square and see a premiere here, so it's exciting that we're actually able to come to our premiere here.''

The show's producer Vince Landay confessed the biggest problem they faced making the film was turning a handful of short sentences of prose into a one-and-a-half hour long feature.

Landay also paid tribute to his young star's efforts during the filming.

''He worked harder than any other actor we've ever worked with,'' he said. ''Really, he's in every scene of the movie.''

Max replied: ''I didn't realise how hard I was working... I was too busy falling asleep to do that. The only time I ever had to think about it was when I was at home, and when I was at home I was sleeping.''

Landay joked: ''Shhh! Don't tell the child labour laws about that.''

Kate Nash, the singer, Miquita Oliver, the television presenter, and the model Daisy Lowe - carrying two stuffed wild tigers - arrived at the premiere in London's Leicester Square. Where The Wild Things Are is released in UK cinemas on December 11.

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Movie review- Brothers

There's no shortage of film talent on hand in the new war-themed Brothers. The film stars Spider-Man himself, Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman, is written by acclaimed screenwriter David Benioff (25th Hour, The Kite Runner), and is directed by Jim Sheridan, who's earned Oscar nominations for his work on such films as My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and In America.

Given the strength of the material (the film is based on the Swedish film Brødre, which garnered a slew of awards/nominations in 2004/2005), it's no wonder so many big people jumped on board. Maguire plays Capt. Sam Cahill, an Army officer sent to Afghanistan for another tour of duty.

His being shipped overseas just so happens to coincide with his brother, Tommy (Gyllenhaal), being released from prison. The lives of the two couldn't be any different, with Sam, married with two kids to the beautiful Grace (Portman), viewed as the clean-cut hero and Tommy seen as the no-account screw-up, especially by their father (Sam Shepard).

Things start to shift dramatically when Sam is reported dead after a helicopter crash. Tommy begins to feel protective of Grace and her daughters, taking time to visit with them every day and offer his services as a contractor to fix up their kitchen. Meanwhile, Sam is actually alive (why would the Army tell his family he was dead if they had no proof?), suffering unspeakable torture at the hands of his Afghan captors.

Brothers has many of the right elements in it for it to succeed – the story is set up to be gut-wrenching, it has tons of talent (heck, even U2 contributed a new song for the soundtrack) – but for some reason, all of that is not able to add up to a great film. Part of that is the feeling of inevitability over much of the story. Many of the plot turns are preordained, so there are no real surprises in store. And what surprises there are seem blunted by poor choices.

For one, Maguire and Portman are much too young-looking to convincingly pull off their roles. Sam is supposed to be Tommy's older brother, and while Maguire does have five years on Gyllenhaal in real life, the opposite appears to be true when looking at them. While Portman has played a mother before, she falters when it comes time to show off her maternal skills here (strange, since she handles the other aspects of the role just fine).

But the biggest misstep is the acting of Maguire. Whether it's his boyish face, his semi-squeaky voice, or something ineffable, he was entirely the wrong choice to portray the anguished Army captain (it also doesn't help that Gyllenhaal played a similar role much better in Jarhead).

Not enough background is provided for his character to be trusted as a military higher-up. Also, he is given multiple opportunities to scream in torment (mental and/or physical), but his pain is never truly believable. He feels more like a kid acting out than someone who has experienced things no one should ever have to go through.

Brothers fits all the right criteria for an end-of-the-year, Oscar-baiting war/family drama, but it never fully lives up to that promise. There's a good movie in there somewhere, but it's obscured by a rote plot and some uninspired acting.

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Carol re-telling takes a darker spin

Disney’s 3D retelling of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” focuses more on social commentary than on pure holiday movie fun, highlighting disparities in wealth and good fortune among social classes. The movie is a dark one, both visually and in tone, in order to express the difficulty of Victorian life and the darkness of Ebenezer Scrooge’s hardened attitude and outlook. Some scenes were so eerie and surreal yet magical that one might think Tim Burton had directed the film.

Indeed, the movie is not well-suited for young children, as one screaming child in the theater found the scene in which the ghost of Scrooge’s business partner Jacob Marley appears particularly frightful. That said, the three-dimensional animation of this classic movie remake delights and amazes. Director Robert Zemeckis and his several hundred person staff clearly devoted huge amounts of time and effort to the production of the movie. The artfully crafted characters seem part human, part doll.

This characterization expressed the childlike, pure nature of many of the characters, particularly Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), while also conveying in them an almost cartoonish exhaustion from the difficulties of everyday life in the Victorian era.

Playing a multitude of roles, Jim Carrey is the star of the show. Playing Scrooge at five different times of his life as well as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, Carrey, in his ghostly roles, coaxes Scrooge out of his “bah-humbug” attitude and into a full appreciation of the people around him and the holiday season.

Some deviations from Dickens’ book are made during the ghost of Christmas future portion of the movie, but through this artistic license, Carrey conveys a nearly universal fear of death and regret for past actions. As always, the moral of the classic tale is to appreciate relationships with others and to share good fortune and a joyful attitude with all humankind.

Robin Penn Wright, who plays Belle, Scrooge’s former love, described the realism of the creative technique used for the film.

“It’s like watching a 2D performance, but you feel like you can reach out and grab Jim’s hand and feel the snow falling at the same time,” she told Rick DeMott in his Nov. 6 article for Animation World Network. “You’re actually in the environment. That’s what’s so incredible about it.”

With such realistic 3D effects, one might wonder how the film was created. According to the movie’s official Web site, “The film is the first film developed by ImageMovers Digital, which was created by Robert Semeckis, Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke to develop 3D performance capture films exclusively for The Walt Disney Studios.”

So, what exactly is the creative process for making performance capture films?

“In performance capture technology, sensors attached to an actor’s body digitally capture their performance and create a life-based animated character in the computer,” Duane Dudek, Journal Sentinel film critic, wrote in his Nov. 15 2007 blog entry.

“A Christmas Carol” is not the first performance capture film, but it is Disney’s first. Zemeckis used the technique in “Beowulf,” and “Sony Pictures Imageworks pioneered the technique with ‘The Polar Express’ and ‘Monster House,’” according to a July 26, 2007 article in Variety.

“A Christmas Carol,” a delightful yet dark holiday classic, pleases audiences with amazing 3D effects and fantastic performances by Jim Carrey. It also foretells the future of Disney movies — a bright and interesting future indeed. Four of five stars.

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