Review: Gulliver's Travels

I attended a preview screening of Gulliver's Travels about a week prior to it opening nationally. Most film screenings are theaters full of families who have scored free tickets through newspaper advertisements, radio promotions or similar, with a small number of seats reserved for us critics. The more base and crude the film, the more this can feel like the studio manipulating us reviewers: critics generally prefer complex, sophisticated films that tap into the rich language of cinema, but jam a theater full of people seeing a movie for free and it's date night, paid by Paramount, Universal, Fox, Miramax, or similar.

Gulliver's Travels was exactly the kind of film where this proved important, because there were many times during the screening of this sophomoric movie that I cringed, even as the majority of the audience laughed or cheered. The example that stands out is when Gulliver (Jack Black) first arrives at the miniature kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging palace fire by dropping his shorts and urinating. That's the level of sophistication that scriptwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller targeted in this crude adaptation of the splendid Swiftian story from the early 1700s.

Black is mailroom clerk and general shlub Lemuel Gulliver, the least important employee at the New York Tribune. He's in love with travel section editor Darcy Silverman (Amanda Peet). After straight-arrow new hire Dan (local Denver comedian T.J. Miller) goes from Gulliver's sole employee to his boss in a single day, Gulliver fumbles an attempt to ask Darcy out by instead applying for a travel writing assignment. His assignment? Head down to the Bermuda Triangle and unearth its secrets.

Thus begins a ridiculously improbable sequence of events that lands him on the island of Lilliput, a place where everything is 1/12th normal size, including the daft love triangle of Princess Mary (Emily Blunt), pompous General Edward (Chris O'Dowd) and imprisoned commoner Horatio (Jason Segel). The story is so predictable that the only pleasure in the film is the special visual effects, and they are impressive, done by the effects team that created the far more entertaining Night At the Museum movies.

I'll be blunt: Gulliver's Travels isn't worth your time unless you're a fan of either Jack Black or computer graphics. I wouldn't even rent this unless you're entertaining a basement full of teen boys. Black has the ability to make smart, thoughtful comedies, but it's been a painfully long time since Be Kind Rewind and King Kong.

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By Dave Taylor on December 25, 2010 12:00 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Review: How to Train your Dragon

How to Train your Dragon, the latest film from Dreamworks Animation, tells the story of Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a young Viking and the only son of village chief, blacksmith and single dad Stoick The Vast (Gerard Butler).

Hiccup is a disappointment to his father because he's a klutz and not interested in slaying the dragons that constantly attack their village and steal their livestock.

Hiccup is also attracted to Astrid (America Ferrera) but, a tough Viking girl, she's only interested in boys who want to kill dragons. The story begins in earnest when Hiccup is thrown into dragon training class with Astrid and other town children, while he is secretly befriending an injured Night Fury dragon he names "Toothless".

Cute and predictable, there's nothing exceptional about How to Train your Dragon, but it's still a good diversion. There's also a dry sarcasm throughout the film that I found appealing and amusing, helping adults alleviate boredom while escorting their younger charges. For example, at the beginning of the film Hiccup explains "We're Vikings, we have stubbornness issues" and later, one of the kids in dragon training insists "it's only fun if you get a scar!" Worth seeing in the theater? Probably, especially if you like 3D, but it'll be on DVD soon enough too.

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By Dave Taylor on March 26, 2010 12:00 AM | 9 Comments | No TrackBacks

The Best Films of 2009

I've spent the time to rant about the films I saw last year that I thought were the worst of the bunch, not just middling experiences, but genuinely "how on Earth did they ever raise the money to make this abomination?" movies where they either started out okay and slowly collapsed on their own weight (like Knowing) or were daft from the get-go (like Transformers 2).

The worst of the bunch, though, must have been Land of the Lost. When it was rewritten as a so-called star vehicle for Will Ferrell, the writing team managed to take a sweet if shlocky TV series about a Dad, older son and younger girl mysteriously thrust back to a parallel world that included both dinosaurs and the mysterious Sleestaks and turn it into a modern drug and sex innuendo laced mess that not only failed with critics but also turned out to be a failure at the box office too.

Okay, okay, you can read more of my worst films here: The Worst Films of 2009.

So what about the flip side of the coin? What films did I think exemplified the best of cinema, either as pure entertainment, as thought-provoking narrative, or simply as something that captured my imagination or piqued my curiosity?

Let's see...

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By Dave Taylor on January 2, 2010 9:25 AM | 6 Comments | No TrackBacks

Review: Avatar

Avatar is a movie about manifest destiny and second thoughts, a sweeping epic retelling of a classic theme about a soldier "going native" as he learns that the enemy isn't a faceless monster, but an intelligent race. The most obvious parallel is Dances with Wolves, but director James Cameron has taken the basic storyline and created a visual masterpiece that's almost a perfect sci-fi film.

Avatar takes place 150 years in the future, on the far distant planet of Pandora, where everything on the planet and all its inhabitants are connected through energy fields. The local inhabitants, the Na'vi, are a race of ten-foot tall hunter/gatherers modeled after Native American tribes. The Na'vi commune with nature, honor the spirit of animals they kill and worship the great Home Tree.

The film follows Jake Sulley (Sam Worthington), a Marine with a disabling spinal injury that's left him wheelchair-bound. He is shanghied into replacing his recently killed scientist brother on a mission to Pandora: he's a perfect genetic match, though he's clearly not any sort of scientist. Pandora is of great interest to humans not because it's a lush, gorgeous planet but because it's the primary source of the fantastically valuable Unobtanium: if the planet has to be destroyed to successfully mine this substance, well, so be it. Human need is more important than the rights of the natives.

Jake is given an avatar, a Na'vi body that is a mix of Na'vi and his own DNA, a ten foot tall creature within which his consciousness resides, a new, alien, but thrillingly functional body. His mission: to get the Na'vi to relocate their home before the company destroys it to access the richest vein of Unobtanium on the planet. Problem is, he meets Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and falls in love...

Avatar is not a masterpiece of cinema, the story is entirely too predictable. But it's still well worth seeing because visually, Cameron has created an entirely new type of film, a completely immersive alien world that is both magical and frightening, along with an alien race that's sufficiently humanoid that we can empathize with their passions while being repelled by their primitive instincts. It's one of the few films where I'll strongly recommend you see it in the movie theater, in 3D. You'll be amazed.

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By Dave Taylor on December 18, 2009 12:00 AM | 10 Comments | No TrackBacks

Review: Delgo vs Avatar

There's been a lot of buzz in the geek world about how James Cameron's upcoming film Avatar looks like it's a rip-off of a 2008 animated film release called Delgo, from Electric Eye Entertainment. I grabbed a copy of Delgo and watched it, both looking at the storyline and comparing it as I went with the fifteen minutes of Avatar footage I've seen (see my review of Avatar Day footage for details).

To be honest, there are a number of superficial similarities between the alien world of Pandora that Cameron has created for Avatar and the world of Delgo. But that's about it.

The film Delgo is a highly predictable story of two races of people who have an uneasy truce, and how the pure love of a Lockni boy (Delgo, voiced by Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and a Nohrin princess (Kyle, voiced by Jennifer Love Hewitt) overcomes a potential war and produces a long-lasting peace between the races.

The story is so banal that it's barely worth reviewing, but I will admit that the visual style of the animated feature was quite delightful, and, as you'll see, the rendering of textures, including rocks, wood, plantlife and skin, was almost flawless. Beautiful.

There was quite a voice cast in Delgo too, including Anne Bancroft, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Eric Idle, Burt Reynolds and even Sally Kellerman. Problem was, none of their voices actually sounded familiar so the production company - which appears to have completely skipped any sort of advertising campaign anyway - could have saved a lot of money and hired other voice talent.

Delgo is a 2008 release, so it's available on DVD. is it worth a rental? Maybe. It's too violent and intense for younger children, rather startlingly so, but it's worth a watch if you're a fan of animation in all its variations.

But is Cameron ripping off Delgo for his creative ideas for Avatar? Well...

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By Dave Taylor on September 1, 2009 10:07 PM | 4 Comments | No TrackBacks

Review: Avatar (Avatar Day footage)

Note: My full Avatar review can be found in a different entry, this is just a writeup from when I saw the 15-minute preview of the film in mid-2009. For the full review of the movie, please go here: Dave On Film Review: Avatar

Along with what was apparently a smaller number of film geeks than was expected, I dutifully showed up at the local RealIMAX "quasi-IMAX" screen (see my earlier article on RealIMAX versus IMAX) to see 16 minutes of James Cameron's much discussed, ultra-expensive Avatar footage unveiled, in all of its 3D glory.

I'm going to include a number of stills from the Avatar trailer to illustrate some of what I'll talk about in this review, but I'll start out by saying WOW, the footage was breathtaking in its crisp, alien realism and sporadically terrific with its 3D effectiveness.

What I was most interested in was the story because, after all, even amazing digital effects can't make a great movie: if there's not an engaging story to tie it around, no-one is going to care and it's going to be a boring demo reel, not a movie.

From the footage screened, however, it's clear that there's an interesting story - albeit one that's been told and retold dozens of times in modern cinema....

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