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Over the Hedge (2006)
This was horrible.
I don't normally rate films so low, but this was a major disappointment. I was not impressed by the trailers, but was encouraged by all the positive reviews. I rented it with some expectation of a good time.
This film is paced for four year-olds with ADHD. There is a chase or a crazy action sequence or just characters darting around the scene every 10 seconds. You can hardly tell what's going on, and you never learn anything about any of the characters. By the end of the movie, I could only remember a couple of their names, even.
The 'emotional' scenes that the movie attempts do not work at ALL, because you know nothing about who these animals are, what their history is, or what relation they have to each other. They are just a random bunch of animals, each with his own, irritating and frenetically-paced shtick, that live together for some reason. RJ is this raccoon with no back story at all, and the film starts with this random scene where he is in front of a vending machine, and then suddenly tries to steal a bear's food. Who is the bear? How do they know each other? Why is this raccoon living alone? What happened to his family? Does he have ANY personality beyond trying to get food ??
And when did it suddenly become OK to make movies that are this crazy and don't bother to tell you anything? The other thing that is SO annoying here is that all the animals have to exaggerate every word and facial expression to the point where they are just obnoxious, hyperactive, flailing, face-stretching ciphers. The human characters are even worse and do nothing but scream a lot, gesture wildly, run around, and again twist every facial nuance into grotesque overacting. What happened to characters being believable or even close to realistic and having normal conversations?
It is just stupid and this is not what animation is supposed to be. A *little* overacting is sometimes necessary to get the mood across, but this has gotten ridiculous. It was a little annoying in The Road to El Dorado, Treasure Planet, and some of the newer films, but it is taken to unbelievable extremes here where every character is doing it constantly.
This movie was so irritating I almost shut it off. The only thing that kept it going was an occasional joke that was funny. Otherwise this was totally stupid and I would not recommend it if you are the type who enjoys a NORMAL movie that has actual character development, drama, well-timed humor, good story pacing, etc.
There are too many great animated films out there to waste your time on this one.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Just OK. Nothing new here.
I am in that boat of people who must have seen a different movie.
This is just a louder, bigger version of Two Towers (Which was OK good and easily the best of the three). Well, there's another war on and we still don't have enough soldiers, so we're in for certain defeat. But then suddenly more support shows up from an unexpected quarter. But we still don't have enough, so we find even more unlikely help and a huge, CGI battle ensues. Then there is a ton of action, fun to watch I guess, though the graphics get *very* dodgy in places.
Meanwhile the parts with Gollum drag ON and ON (!!) and are exactly the same as in Two Towers. Well, he's leading the hobbits along for another hour and a half, and we don't know if we can trust him, and he has about 40 conversations with his "Evil Self" about how he's going to betray them. (Or NOT?! The suspense is dreadfully boring!) There is something *really* wrong when the only character that gets dialogue is the one constantly ranting about the "Precious."
Whose movie is this, anyway? Who is the main character, again??
Aragorn still feels conflicted about the same girl from the second one, and we get more weird flashbacks to Arwen and the supposed relationship that he has with her but that we've never seen and don't understand why he's so attached to her. Worse, while Part Two reduced Gimli to a scarce and bumbling punchline, Legolas is a ghost here with no lines who spends most of his screen time as a poorly-rendered CGI version of himself.
That's very sad, since we all know that people are only there to see Orlando Bloom. Well, he and Frodo are the only interesting characters. We all know it. This is why all those elves showed up randomly at Helm's Deep in Part 2. The audience loves Legolas and adores his cute little species and wants to take them all home and snuggle them. But the whole Aragorn/Arwen thing is just confusing and insubstantial and no one wants to take them home. (In all fairness, Aragorn hasn't showered in the 6 years we've been waiting for this epic to end.)
The pacing in this film is horrible. As with Two Towers, some scenes are way too long, and there is plenty more that you wish they would take the time to explain. Giant eagles show up out of nowhere. A new villain appears and he is supposedly a most feared and notorious character, but no one has heard of him and we never find out who he is or where he came from. And the evil wizard (Sauron?) just vanishes from the film at about the 3/4 mark. I guess he walked off the project and they forgot to write an ending for him? A lot of the characterization is just repetitive, like Sam who has no role except to encourage Frodo and keep him going, and a lot of it is just inexplicable, like the continued absence of black riders and ringwraiths. I guess they went extinct or something at the end of Part 1? Maybe they went on break and just never came back.
The story also jumps around between so many different characters that you have to be well-versed in the lore to be able to follow it. You're probably used to that already since Part Two had us careening between epic battle sequences, boring Gollum leading Frodo, and that giant Tree walking along carrying the other hobbits for an hour. The scene leaps here are even more jarring since even more characters get screen time in flashbacks and lots of those "Meanwhile, back at Headquarters..." moments.
I also did not really "get" the ending (When you go on that boat with Gandalf, does that mean you die, or..?) and it dragged on in a lot of sappiness and goodbyes. It was also a big jolt right after the battle scene to have everything so happy and wonderful, and suddenly Aragorn is king and has even less personality than before, if that's possible. It was all so joyous but at the same time so bland and weird and not fun. And Sam getting married: Who cares?
(It was made official several years ago: No one cares about Sam. I guess Pete Jackson didn't get the memo.)
There is some genuinely scary stuff in this movie (the huge spider and the ghost soldiers), and it held my attention OK and didn't *feel* long, but it was unsatisfying on the grandest scale. It always is when you spend this much time with characters but don't get to know them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a very expensive One-Trick Pony. People say this one is the best, but I think that just because it's all finally over and we can get back to our lives instead of spending years analyzing how so many people can love a movie like this when it is so obviously not very good.
I agree, too. The obscenely expensive FX already look dated and will be embarrassing pretty soon.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
Will the fans ever learn to spell "Dalmatian" ?
It's more than 30 years later, and "dalmations" are still the order of the day. The turn of the century brought us several sequels, both animated and live action, but none are as good as the original or even have the right "feel."
Now, this film is not perfect, as the first half is pure gold, but it gets tedious beyond that. The animation is classic and fluid with nicely stylized dogs, even if it's a sketchy in places, and at times you can see the same puppy with the same spots running across the screen over and over. It's also a clashy film in that it has childlike themes (cute puppies, lots of slapstick with the barnyard animals) alongside mature themes (animal slaughter, marital relations, a truly evil villain), so it lacks a certain consistency.
The first half is all wonderfully written and sure to please any adult or child: Pongo trying to find a mate for Roger, the cruelty of Cruella, the birth of the puppies, and especially the charming family scenes like when the dalmatians are watching TV. ("Why Patch, where did you ever hear such talk? Certainly not from your mother...") As long as Pongo and Perdita are around, the story stays nicely grounded, and it is lovely entertainment of a type we seldom see anymore. This isn't the modern "Joke Every 2 Minutes" animated film; it's pure storytelling with all sorts of clever detail that never gets old.
But then we get to the antics of the animals in the barn, the madcap car chases and the constant scenes of puppies running away, and it loses most of its appeal. Scattered in there are a few good moments (like when the puppies are slipping on the ice), but it's mostly downhill because that adult feel from the beginning is gone.
I give this a 6/10 because it's great fun up until the puppies are kidnapped. The design of the dogs is so cute, as is the way they interact and fall in love without being "too human." It's also good to see a villain with some grit; this is from a time when family entertainment was much broader and could appeal to anyone, unlike the dumbed-down fare of today.
Overall, a must see just for the experience, but subsequent viewings need only the first half.