Based on a 36-page book by Marla Frazee, “The Boss Baby” is a feature length riff on “Look Who’s Talking” as imagined by “Family Guy’s” Stewie.
Tim Templeton (voice of Miles Bakshi, grandson of animation hero Ralph) is an imaginative seven-year-old only child of parents Ted and Janis voiced by Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow. “It was just the three of us,” he says. “The Templetons. Three is the perfect number. Interesting fact, did you know the triangle is the strongest shape alive?” He’s content to be the centre of attention but his carefully constructed life is turned upside down when Mom and Dad come home with his little brother (Alec Baldwin).
The baby is… different. “I may look like a baby but I was born all grown up,” he boasts. Wearing a suit onesie he carries a briefcase and speaks the language of the boardroom. “He’s like a little man!” says Mom. Seems he’s from a purveyor of fine babies, a company that supplies tots who arrive via a chute. Those who giggle when tickled are placed with families, those who don’t, like Boss Baby, are sentenced to a Kafka-esque, humourless life in BabyCorp management, kept infant-sized by special formula. “If people knew where babies really came from they’d never have one,” says Boss Baby. “Same goes for hotdogs.”
In his quest for a promotion and a corner office with his own private potty the ambitious Boss Baby lands with Tim and family. He’s placed himself with Ted and Janice to get closer to their boss, Francis E. Francis (Steve Buscemi), CEO of PuppyCorp. Francis is developing a forever puppy, a new designer models of Frankendog, each more adorable than the last. They’re so cute they threaten to soak up all the love usually reserved for babies. It’s a threat to BabyCorp’s giant-sized baby business and if Boss Baby doesn’t get to the bottom of the puppy problem his special formula will be taken away and he will turn into a regular baby. With Tim’s reluctant help he takes on PuppyCorp.
Echoes of the lamentable “Storks” and its baby making company reverberate throughout the “The Boss Baby’s” infant delivery sequence but the comparisons between the two movies ends there.
At the mushy heart of “The Boss Baby” are messages about the importance of family and unconditional love and other kid flick platitudes, but at the forefront is Boss Baby as a more devious version of Beck Bennett, “Saturday Night Live’s” CEO with the body of a baby. Baldwin brings his distinctive rasp to the character, dropping riffs from his “Glengarry Glen Ross” super-salesman character. “Put that cookie down,” he scolds. “Cookies are for closers,” and “You know who else wears a diaper? Astronauts.” With an aplomb that makes the whole silly story worth a look.
Director Tom “Madagascar” McGrath uses various kinds of animation to paint the screen with vibrant colours and images. His ninja spy sequence is striking, drawing from kung fu movies and horror movies to create the film’s most interesting few minutes. Most characters resemble Margaret Keane’s big-eyed children but McGrath finds interesting ways to jazz them up. Baby Boss’s James Brown strut up walkway to the house is more than choreography, it tells you all you need to know about the character before you even see his face. A scene with incomprehensible Elvis impersonators is hilarious and strange for adults and kids alike. In those sequences and small character moments McGrath and company shine.
Despite those character and animated flourishes “The Boss Baby” doesn’t go out of its way to truly distinguish itself. It’s a pleasant diversion for big and small but the story and its lessons feel like things we’ve seen done before and done better.
“We don’t have time for zingers!” says Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) midway through “Hotel Transylvania 2.” No time for zingers, indeed. The sequel to the 2012 kid friendly animated horror comedy is short on laughs but long on sentiment.
Like all of Sandler’s movies—no matter how outrageous the characters—the new one is all about family. It picks up after Drac’s daughter, vampiress Mavis (voice of Selena Gomez) married human Jonathan (Andy Samberg). In a twist on “Twilight,” the vampire mother and human father soon have a child, Dennis (Asher Blinkoff). The question is, which side of the family will it take after, the monster or human?
“Human. Monster. Unicorn. As long as you’re happy,” Drac says to his daughter, while secretly hoping the child will inherit the vampire genes. On the eve of the child’s fifth birthday the boy still hasn’t shoed any signs of vampiric behaviour—“He’s not human,” says the Prince of Darkness, “he’s just a late fanger!”—so Drac and friends—Frankenstein (Kevin James), Wayne the Werewolf (Steve Buscemi), the Invisible Man (David Spade) and Murray the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key)—take Dennis to their old haunts to teach him their scary skills.
“Hotel Transylvania 2” features great kid friendly monsters designs (that will make equally cool toys) like zombie bellhops and Blobby, a gelatine creature that looks like Grandma’s Gazpacho Aspic come to life but the creativity that went into the creatures didn’t extend to the script.
It’s a sweet enough, amiable story about acceptance and family, but the jokes barely rise to the level of the “101 Halloween Jokes for Kids” book I had when I was ten-years-old. If calling Murray the Mummy “talking toilet paper” makes you giggle, then perhaps this is for you, but by the time they have explained why Drac is called “Vampa” for the second time, you get the idea that Sandler and co-writer Robert Smigel know they should have driven a stake through the heart of this script.
The appearance of Mel Brooks as Great Vampa Vlad simply brings to mind “Young Frankenstein,” one of the funniest horror comedies of all time.
The biggest laughs come from the background, the sight gags that keep things visually frenetic in the first hour.
“Hotel Transylvania 2’s” family friendly scares won’t give kids any nightmares, but it won’t make them laugh either.
There’s something missing in the new Adam Sandler movie. Notable in their absence in this story of a cobbler with the uncanny ability to change into other people, are jokes of, how to put this delicately… a gastrointestinal nature, one of the hallmarks of the Sandleronian oeuvre.
In “The Cobbler” he plays Max Simkin, a shoe repairman from a long line of cobblers. Like his father and grandfather before him, he runs the family business on New York City’s Lower East Side. He’s dissatisfied with his work, with his non-existent love life and living with his elderly mom. When he repairs Leon Ludlow’s (Method Man) shoes on an old stitching machine, unused since his father left the business years ago, Max discovers the machine imbues the shoes with the magical power of transformation. With that discover Max steps into a world of wonder where he can be anyone he wants… as long as he has their shoes and they are size 10 ½.
This is a slight movie; a one-joke idea stretched to feature length with the addition of a crime subplot. There will be no spoilers here, but let it be known that by the end of the movie he becomes known as The Cobbler, a guardian of souls.
There are jokes to be made about walking a mile in a man’s shoes before you can presume to know them, but this movie doesn’t make them. In fact, it makes very few actual jokes. There are laughs but this isn’t one of those Adam Sandler movies that strains to make you giggle several times per minute.
It’s one of his kinder, gentler fantasies, like “Click” or “Bedtime Stories.” Sandler is the likeable center of the story, and he carries it through the first half until the plot starts to become cluttered with characters and later, sentiment. The amazing transformation shoes could have been used to deepen the story by showing Max learn about himself as he learns how the other half lives. Instead he goes undercover to get money to buy his mother a headstone which leads him to help an old man keep his apartment and possibly even get a date with a pretty activist (“Fruitvale Station’s” Melonie Diaz). Deep it ain’t.
Then it flies off into a wild flight of fancy that I still can’t decide if it is the greatest or stupidest plot twist ever in a movie. There’ll be no spoilers here, but let’s just say the film is set up to be the first in a series.
“The Cobbler” has more sole than soul, and is a bit flatfooted in its approach to the story, but it is a nice change to see an Adam Sandler movie and not be bombarded with bathroom humor.
Merry Christmas Dude. This Big Lebowski Kit abides and it’s only $16.95!
From target.com: In 1998 the Academy Award®-winning Coen brothers released the film The Big Lebowski—the hilariously quirky comedy-thriller about bowling, avant-garde art, nihilistic Austrians and a guy named . . . the Dude. Starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro, The Big Lebowski has grown into a cult classic more than a decade after its original release.
Now Achievers everywhere can enjoy The Big Lebowski Kit—a boxful of fun, Lebowski-style, with:
• Oriental-rug mousepad that “really ties your desk together”
• Severed big toe—with polish! (rubber)
• Magnet with the classic phrase, “The Dude Abides”
• Little Lebowski Urban Achievers Certificate
• “the Dude” embroidered bowling-shirt patch
• 32-page book with trivia and images from the film
Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. The Captain and Tennille scored a hit with Muskrat Love, their ode to arvicoline amour and Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on rat back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.
Ben, of course, was the theme song to the 1972 movie of the same name. It was the sequel to Willard, the original “revolución de las ratas” flick. Ben and Willard, along with Stuart Little, Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack, Rizzo the Rat, Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz, the gang from Once Upon a Forest and of course, the biggest rodent star of all, Mickey Mouse, have left their mark in movie theatres. This weekend a new set of rodents that go by the collective name G-Force hope to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.
This mix of live action and animation from hotshot producer Jerry Bruckheimer centers on a team of trained secret agent guinea pigs. There’s team Leader Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), Blaster (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) and mole Speckles (1996 Best Actor Nicolas Cage). In the midst of their biggest US government assignment ever—stopping evil billionaire Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy), from destroying the world with household appliances—they are shut down and sent to a pet shop. There they go rogue, hooking up with Hurley (Jon Favreau) and hamster Bucky (Steve Buscemi) and get back to the business of saving the world.
On the cute scale the G-Force members are somewhere between Ratatouille and Stuart Little, which is to say they are quite adorable. Pet stores should brace themselves for a run on guinea pigs but I couldn’t help but think that the rodents are less characters than prototypes for action figures and other toys. As is so often the case with bad kid’s films, more thought seems to have been given to the spin off toys kids will want after they leave the theatre than what is actually up on the screen.
The story is silly, but really, what did you expect from a film about crime fighting guinea pigs? It’s not the story that brings G-Force down, but the flat, bored performances.
The live actors aren’t the focus of the movie, but Wil Arnett and Bill Nighy do little more than simply show up and Zach Galifanikis blows whatever street cred he built up after his bizarre breakout performance in The Hangover.
The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood. When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for a-listers.
Voice work wise only Nicolas Cage seems to be putting in much effort, doing a kind of Pee Wee Herman impression as the brianiac mole Speckles and Steve Buscemi has a naturally good cartoon voice but the other actors blow through their lines as if they had something better to do elsewhere.
The 3-D is sharp but other than a few fun stereoscopic gags it adds nothing to the movie except $3 to the price of the ticket.
G-Force has some good messages for kids about believing in yourself and the importance of family, but they are wrapped in a frenetic and cynical excuse for a movie that ends by setting itself up for a sequel which, if there is a patron saint of film critics, will never happen.
The world of Las Vegas magicians is a perfect place to set a comedy. From the glittery costumes, the elaborate poses and over-the-top theatrics, it practically begs to be parodied. But do the jokes magically appear, or do they do a vanishing act?
For years Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) ruled the Las Vegas strip with a magic show that made Siegfried & Roy look understated. But their dominance of Sin City’s showrooms disappears when a David Blaine type, guerrilla street magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey) starts a turf was in town. His daring act makes the glitter and glitz of their show look well past its sell-by date. To stay relevant Wonderstone and Marvelton stage their own daring stunt which just may be their grand finale.
I kept waiting for “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” to pull a rabbit out of its hat and take full comedic advantage of it setting, and yet the bunny never appeared. There are gags here and there that feel completely organic to the story—the Wonderstone’s elevator is so opulent people mistake the it for his suite, for instance—but it is the main character that lets us down.
Carrell is too likable an actor to pull off Wonderstone’s egotistical, one-note womanizing act. The fake tan and mullet do some of the work, but it never feels real, and even less so when he falls into Woody Allen territory during his romantic redemption with a love interest 23 years younger. On top of that his gearshift down from narcissist to nice guy doesn’t come off as anything but generic and predictable. Nothing magical about it.
Carrey fares better. No one plays controlled chaos like Carrey and his increasingly self-aggrandizing behavior is the best thing in the movie. Of the supporting cast Buscemi and Wilde weren’t really given enough to do to make any lasting impression. They play decent, nice people and in a movie like this featuring raging egomaniacs and insane illusionists nice guys and gals do finish last.
Arkin isn’t given much to do either, although he does have a nice gag or two, but at least he remembered to pack his trademarked deadpan delivery in his bag of tricks.
“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” has the odd laugh and a likable the cast that brings a lot of goodwill with them but the film’s worst trick is how it will make much of that goodwill disappear by the time the end credits roll.
The observance of Halloween dates back thousands of years to the Celts who used the date as a celebration of the end of harvest season. Since Irish immigrants brought the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century the way we celebrate October 31st has changed from a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter to our tradition of dressing up in outlandish costumes, carving pumpkins and gorging ourselves on Creepy Crawlers Gummy Candy and Twist & Glow Halloween Pops. These days it’s second only to Christmas in terms of the amount of people who decorate their homes for the holidays and North American revelers spend upwards of 5 billion dollars a year on Halloween costumes. Another great treat of the fall season are Halloween specials like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Mr. Boogedy. The latest entry on the Halloween scene is Igor, a new animated film for kids starring the voice of John Cusack.
Igor is a riff on the classic mad scientist movies, this time told from the lab assistant’s point of view. Igor (John Cusack) is a lowly hunchback with a “major in slurred speech and a ‘Yes, Master’ degree” who dreams of becoming a scientist. When his master is killed by his own invention Igor gets his chance to shine and maybe even win the annual Evil Science Fair. His invention, a female Frankenstein monster named Eva, is meant to be the most evil creature the world has ever seen, but turns out to be a sweet natured giant with aspirations of becoming an actress. To this end she says she’s interested in adopting kids from other countries and says she’ll become an environmentalist and only fly private when necessary. If she doesn’t drop her ideas of stardom and turn nasty how will Igor win the Evil Science Fair?
Igor is aimed at little kids. Written by Chris McKenna, who previously penned American Dad and voiced by an all star cast featuring Cusack, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Jay Leno and Christian Slater, it is a great looking cartoon that’s equal parts German Expressionism and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The highly stylized characters look like they just walked off the set of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the inventive backgrounds are bound to set off kid’s imaginations. The camera work, often so static in animated films like this, is fluid and cinematic.
The story is stretched a bit thin even at the compact running time of 85 minutes, but there is enough going on to keep the under ten crowd entertained. Most of the irreverent humor is meant for the little ones, for example:
“I’m all thumbs,” says Eva the giantess. “Yeah, sorry about that,” replies Igor, “I got the thumbs on sale.”
Parents probably won’t find any big yuks in lines like that or the slapstick or even the bathroom jokes, but there are gags to keep older viewers interested peppered throughout.
Igor is a cute Halloween story with stylish animation; jokes that should make ten-year-olds laugh and good messages about the importance of friends and determination and at 85 minutes shouldn’t tax growing attention spans.
How do you make a movie for kids about monsters whose job it is to scare children without doling out nightmares along with the price of a ticket? That’s the fine line Pixar treads with their new film, “Monster’s University,” a very kid friendly mix of “Bad News Bears,” (without the drunk coach), “Mean Girls” (without the unadulterated nastiness) and “Carrie” (without the murderous rage).
Starring the voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and Helen Mirren, instead, it features strong messages and more complex characters than usual for a kid’s flick.
In this prequel to “Monsters Inc.” Mike Wazowski is a one-eyed–actually he’s mostly eye–green monster whose dream is to scare unsuspecting kids and capture their screams. Enrolling in the Harvard of Horror, Monster’s University, he’s a good student, devouring books on the five essential components of a scary roar and the like, but there’s a problem. He’s not as scary as his classmates, particularly Sullivan (Goodman), a blue beast with a family background in haunting kid’s dreams. In fact, he’s not scary at all. But determined to prove everyone wrong, Mike and the misfits of Oozma Kappa compete in the Scare Games, a spooky showdown to determine which frat house is the most gruesome.
There’s nothing particularly scary about “Monster’s University.” Very young viewers might be disturbed by the dramatic entrance of Mrs. Hardscrabble (Mirren), a winged dragon lady who scurries around on insect legs, but by and large the key word here is fun not fright.
The animation is top notch with creature designs that bring to mind plush toys. This campus full of multi-headed girls and tentacled boys, with blue, green and red skin that feels like Dr. Seuss gone wild. It’s fanciful eye candy that kids should love.
With the visuals comes messaging about perseverance, bullying and the virtues of honesty all set in an utterly unique world of Pixar’s creation. The story may be a prequel and have call-backs to other films but director Dan Scanlon pushes the story into unexpected territory. A predictable ending is avoided, and even though it forwards the iffy notion–MILD SPOILER!!!–that life experience is more valuable than school, it brings the movie to a satisfying conclusion.
“Monster’s University” once again exerts Pixar’s dominance in animation by giving audiences great characters and taking equal care with the visuals and the story.
“Saint John of Las Vegas” is the sort of movie that exists solely to give quirky actors like Steve Buscemi a chance to strut his stuff as the lead actor, rather than playing second fiddle to more traditionally handsome actors in studio pictures. It’s the story of a man whose life didn’t turn out the way he planned and Busicemi, with his cartoony hang dog expression was born to play him.
Buscemi is John, a compulsive gambler whose luck left before his habit did. Fleeing Las Vegas he drove until he ran out of gas, landing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Leaving the high life behind he finds work as a desk-bound insurance claims adjuster. When he asks his boss (Peter Dinklage) for a raise he is instead told to accompany Virgil, a hardnosed fraud investigator (Romany Malco) back to Vegas. Leaving behind his new love (and the boss’s ex-girlfriend), Jill (Sarah Silverman), John and Virgil they set out, encountering a surreal collection of people, including wheelchair bound lap dancer, a skittish park ranger, a human fireball sideshow performer and a mysterious man named Lou Cypher.
“Saint John of Las Vegas” isn’t exactly laugh-out-loud but it will raise a smile or two. Buscemi takes a thinly drawn character—we never really know much about him other than he has strange dreams and was once a high roller in Vegas—gives him pathos and makes him likeable and watchable, but it would have been nice to know a bit more of his back story.
Buscemi is at the center of virtually every scene of the film which is a good thing when he’s sharing the screen with Silverman or Dinklage—those scenes have some real spark to them—but not always great when he’s opposite Malco.
Romany Malco is a talented actor—his credits include “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, “Weeds” and the title role in “Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story”, and anyone who could survive that and go on to have a career must have something going for him—but here he seems to be trying to out quirk Buscemi, which is a fool’s game. In some scenes, as when he beats up a stuffed happy face pillow at a fair ground, he seems to be performing simply to be noticed. His strange posturing in these scenes doesn’t add anything to his character or the movie and he would have been better served paying attention to how Buscemi can own the screen without resorting to cheap attention getting tricks.
“Saint John of Las Vegas” is a slight movie, both in running time—it clocks in around 75 minutes—and in content. Buscemi, Silverman (as the “happy face” loving girlfriend) and Dinklage keep things interesting but this may be more of a rental than a night out.
