(Jon Turteltaub, 2010)
The makers of The Sorcerers Apprentice don't seem to know quite what they want it to be.
It's a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Summer Blockbuster, but despite the tens of Millions of dollars lavished upon the many special effects sequences and the location shooting in New York City, somehow it never quite feels like one. It is a kid-friendly action-fantasy, but it has a strange setting, seemingly borrowed from Spider-Man comics. It's hero Dave (Jay Baruchal, whose wonky charm works surprisingly well surrounded by so much nonsense) is a geeky Science whizz at a Manhattan University, with no girlfriend or social life. That all goes back to the traumatic episode in his childhood when he encountered Balthazar (Nicolas Cage, in relatively restrained mode) a powerful, ancient sorcerer, who revealed that Dave is himself destined to be a powerful sorcerer before the appearance of Horvath (Alfred Molina doing his stock villain routine) led to a destructive magical battle and Dave's humiliation before his entire school class, including a girl he liked.
The plot resumes a decade later, with Dave engaged in mad scientist experiments (channelling his sorcery into science, you see), that girl from school, now revealed as pretty Becky (Teresa Palmer) reappearing in his life, and Horvath and Balthazar suddenly freed from the urn in which they have been sealed together for the last ten years. They both seek a Russian Doll which imprisons Morgan Le Fay, Horvath to free her and destroy the world, Balthazar to ensure she remains trapped, and Dave, of course, gets caught in the middle while Balthazar tries to teach him how to become the sorcerer he is destined to be.
That makes it sort-of-a-superhero film, since it deals with the origin of a young hero with supernatural abilities, but despite all the magical battles in the streets and skies of New York, it has no iconography, no costumes, no secret identities. Baruchal and Toby Kebbell (as Horvath's apprentice, a celebrity Magician who lives like a Rock star) both seem to play much of it for laughs, but Cage is, well, Cage, all loony intensity and odd delivery, and the tone is all over the place.
Turteltaub is an odd director, a successful hack who has made romcoms, big family blockbusters, and semi-serious dramas, all without ever evincing any particular personality or great talent beyond efficiency, and he might be the problem with the Sorcerers Apprentice. Despite a nice cast (also including Monica Bellucci and Alice Krige as Sorceresses), some interesting elements, particularly some of the clever ways magic in the modern world is manifested, and several good moments, it all feels quite anonymous and tired and the last act is a bit of a trudge to the inevitable ending.
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Friday, 8 March 2013
Saturday, 9 February 2013
WRECK-IT RALPH
(Rich Moore, 2012)
If you have children and watch a lot of the many animated films produced by Hollywood these days, then the emotional arc they invariably follow can become wearyingly repetitive. That stock formula wherein a character learns a valuable lesson about what really matters to them while being led astray by their own basest desires or a dangerously attractive bad influence: that seems central to every kids film I see. And I see just about all of them, these days.
Still, some can deliver that formula beautifully, and some cannot. That depends on a number of different factors; the storytelling is crucial, the strength of the characters, the wit, the tightness of the plotting. Well, Wreck-It Ralph is excellent in just about all of those categories.
Set in the world of a 1980s arcade game, the film centres upon Ralph, the bad guy in a game called "Fix-It Felix Jr", a Donkey Kong rip-off. After the arcade closes each night, the video game characters live on inside the dormant machines, and it is the richly imagined world of their lives which is perhaps the film's strongest single element. Ralph, fed up with 30 years of being shunned inside his own game, decides to head off in search of some heroism. His quest leads him through violent Space Marine Sci-fi First Person shooter "Heroes Duty" and then "Sugar Rush" a candy land-set Kart Racer game, where he meets Vanellope, a "glitch" and fellow outsider. Meanwhile, Fix-It Felix, the hero from Ralph's game, is desperately searching for him so that he can return and stop the game from being declared out of order, and the Commander of the Space Marines is also in Sugar Rush, hunting an escaped Cy-Bug which Ralph unwittingly took with him.
Thats quite a lot of plot to cram into under two hours, and it means that Moore's movie zips along like one of the video games it depicts, stuffing in countless sight-gags and references to games for the adults without ever stinting on the slapstick and toilet humour for the kids. The multi-socket adaptor powering all the consoles is here revealed to house a Game Central Station, where "homeless" Q-Bert avatars beg for change and off-duty combatants from Street Fighter go to drink. There are cameos from characters from Mario, Pac Man, Frogger and many more in these scenes, and the way flashbacks are rendered in different resolutions, and some characters flicker like older game pixels are the sorts of details that give Wreck-It Ralph a feeling of a richly textured, deeply imagined world most reminiscent of the one seen in the Toy Story films.
All of that - and the sensitive, nicely judged voice work from John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman - helps immeasurably when it comes to selling that familiar emotional arc in the somewhat overstuffed, hyper-frenetic last reel.
Feeling much more like a Pixar production than any Disney film in recent memory, Wreck-It Ralph is a an immensely entertaining family film with layers and laughs in equal measure.
If you have children and watch a lot of the many animated films produced by Hollywood these days, then the emotional arc they invariably follow can become wearyingly repetitive. That stock formula wherein a character learns a valuable lesson about what really matters to them while being led astray by their own basest desires or a dangerously attractive bad influence: that seems central to every kids film I see. And I see just about all of them, these days.
Still, some can deliver that formula beautifully, and some cannot. That depends on a number of different factors; the storytelling is crucial, the strength of the characters, the wit, the tightness of the plotting. Well, Wreck-It Ralph is excellent in just about all of those categories.
Set in the world of a 1980s arcade game, the film centres upon Ralph, the bad guy in a game called "Fix-It Felix Jr", a Donkey Kong rip-off. After the arcade closes each night, the video game characters live on inside the dormant machines, and it is the richly imagined world of their lives which is perhaps the film's strongest single element. Ralph, fed up with 30 years of being shunned inside his own game, decides to head off in search of some heroism. His quest leads him through violent Space Marine Sci-fi First Person shooter "Heroes Duty" and then "Sugar Rush" a candy land-set Kart Racer game, where he meets Vanellope, a "glitch" and fellow outsider. Meanwhile, Fix-It Felix, the hero from Ralph's game, is desperately searching for him so that he can return and stop the game from being declared out of order, and the Commander of the Space Marines is also in Sugar Rush, hunting an escaped Cy-Bug which Ralph unwittingly took with him.
Thats quite a lot of plot to cram into under two hours, and it means that Moore's movie zips along like one of the video games it depicts, stuffing in countless sight-gags and references to games for the adults without ever stinting on the slapstick and toilet humour for the kids. The multi-socket adaptor powering all the consoles is here revealed to house a Game Central Station, where "homeless" Q-Bert avatars beg for change and off-duty combatants from Street Fighter go to drink. There are cameos from characters from Mario, Pac Man, Frogger and many more in these scenes, and the way flashbacks are rendered in different resolutions, and some characters flicker like older game pixels are the sorts of details that give Wreck-It Ralph a feeling of a richly textured, deeply imagined world most reminiscent of the one seen in the Toy Story films.
All of that - and the sensitive, nicely judged voice work from John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman - helps immeasurably when it comes to selling that familiar emotional arc in the somewhat overstuffed, hyper-frenetic last reel.
Feeling much more like a Pixar production than any Disney film in recent memory, Wreck-It Ralph is a an immensely entertaining family film with layers and laughs in equal measure.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
TRON: LEGACY
(Joseph Kosinski, 2010)
Narratively slight - and by slight I mean utterly predictable, its each and every beat familiar from a hundred other Joseph Campbell-borefest post-Star Wars genre films with dully one-dimensional characters and a leaden adherence to screenplay structure 101 - Kosinski's sequel to Steven Lisberger's 1982 Tron resembles that film by creating enough visual wonder to just about compensate for it's shortcomings as a piece of storytelling. For here is a fully realised world completely suited to 3D; a beautiful world of digital sheen and neon slickness, arc lit and perfectly hi-def in every frame. It is exquisite.
It makes a couple of desultory attempts at relevance; the Microsoftesque firm at the centre of the story wants to maximise profits by cheating users, while the Flynns think access to software should be free to all, yadda yadda yadda. .Luckily Kosinski can do action competently, and when his film is really pumping, when Daft Punk's exceptional soundtrack is filling the air with beams of synth and beats as fat as a sumo, when figures leap and roll away from glowing discs or fly along upon motorbikes as if they're riding hockey pucks, and that computer screen sky sucks all the light out of the frame, it is almost breathtaking. A fine visceral and sensual experience then, even if the undoubted highlight is the opening Tronification of the Disney logo.
Narratively slight - and by slight I mean utterly predictable, its each and every beat familiar from a hundred other Joseph Campbell-borefest post-Star Wars genre films with dully one-dimensional characters and a leaden adherence to screenplay structure 101 - Kosinski's sequel to Steven Lisberger's 1982 Tron resembles that film by creating enough visual wonder to just about compensate for it's shortcomings as a piece of storytelling. For here is a fully realised world completely suited to 3D; a beautiful world of digital sheen and neon slickness, arc lit and perfectly hi-def in every frame. It is exquisite.
It makes a couple of desultory attempts at relevance; the Microsoftesque firm at the centre of the story wants to maximise profits by cheating users, while the Flynns think access to software should be free to all, yadda yadda yadda. .Luckily Kosinski can do action competently, and when his film is really pumping, when Daft Punk's exceptional soundtrack is filling the air with beams of synth and beats as fat as a sumo, when figures leap and roll away from glowing discs or fly along upon motorbikes as if they're riding hockey pucks, and that computer screen sky sucks all the light out of the frame, it is almost breathtaking. A fine visceral and sensual experience then, even if the undoubted highlight is the opening Tronification of the Disney logo.
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