Cynical Cinema

Kung-Fu Panda is not a kids movie so much as it is a kung-fu movie.  For kids.  Jack Black is the voice of the panda, Po, who is a clumsy fat oaf with a passion for kung-fu.  He is a huge fan of the Furious Five, who are the great kung-fu fighters of his little village.  Each one represents a different style of kung-fu, styles which will be very familiar to any fan of the kung-fu genre of movies.  The crane (David Cross), the viper (Lucy Liu), the mantis (Seth Rogen), the monkey (Jackie Chan) and the tigress (Angelina Jolie).  The film opens with a dream Po is having, a scene out of so many kung-fu movies, where the bad guys show up in the restaurant where the hero is quietly eating his food, and soon he is forced to kick all of their asses, causing massive property damage to the restaurant.

 Of course, this is just Po’s dream - in reality, he is not a martial arts hero, he is an employee in his father’s noodle shop.  When he lies to his dad and says he was dreaming about noodles, his dad flies into a frenzy - his son has had the noodle dream!  He is ready to take over the noodle shop from his father!  (Another wonderful theme from so many kung-fu flicks.)  In reality though, Po wants to be in the kung-fu scene.  And when there is going to be a big ceremony to annoint the next “chosen one”, the martial artist to whom ultimate enlightenment will be given, he does everything he can to go watch.  Through a series of mishaps (most of them hilarious), he ends up in the arena, and actually looks to be the “chosen one” himself.  Of course, the choice of Po sparks controversy.  How can he be the chosen one when he’s a big fat clumsy panda with no kung-fu skills at all?

The master, Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), is very annoyed at the selection of Po as the chosen one.  He believes that his master Oogway (a tortoise) has become senile and chosen the wrong person (or…animal) to be the chosen one.  Oogway, by the way, is hilarious.  He dispenses this bizarre, cubicle-wall type wisdom that is incredibly cheesy, even for a kung-fu movie.  (”The past is history, the future is a mystery, and right now is a gift.  That is why they call it the present.”)  But it’s delievered so solemnly that it’s awfully funny.  Anyway, Shifu decides that he will do everything he can to get Po to quit, so one of the other students can claim the title of “dragon warrior”, and get a chance to read the “dragon scroll” and become the greatest martial artist in history.  But Po won’t be so easily dissuaded.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Tai-Lung (voice of Ian McShane), a snow leopard, has escaped from the massive prison that holds him captive.  Tai-Lung is the former disciple of Master Shifu, a kung-fu student who surpassed even his master in skill, but then went bad.  He tried to take the dragon scroll for himself, but was driven away and imprisoned by Shifu and Oogway.  He is now bent on returning to the temple, taking the dragon scroll, and exacting horrible revenge on all those who turned against him.  Only Po, of course, stands in his way.

Kung-Fu Panda is terrific because everything in the movie rings true in terms of actual kung-fu cinema.  References to other movies abound.  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, Hero, Once Upon A Time In China, and many others.  The one film I think is most closely mirrored is Kung-Fu Hustle, a bonkers kung-fu comedy that is available on DVD now, with very similar themes.  The bad guy gets out of prison and comes to attack the good guy, who all of a sudden learns that he is the chosen one with crazy kung-fu skills…very similar movies, both extremely good.  And in terms of old classics, Kung-Fu Panda most closely resembles the Jackie Chan comedic martial arts classic Drunken Master, with the main difference being that Master Shifu is not drunk.  But substitute the booze in that movie with the food from this one, and you have many very similar scenes.

Kung-Fu Panda is definitely funny, and definitely kid-friendly, but it’s so much more than a silly kids movie.  It’s a solid, very well done kung-fu film.  And the resolution in the final scene is absolutely perfect.  I don’t think I’m giving too much away here - it is a kids’ movie after all - but Po defeats Tai-Lung in the end with a style that has been perfectly set up over the course of the rest of the film, with Master Shifu’s teachings, Oogway’s wisdom, and Po’s own proclivities.  The only difference between Kung-Fu Panda and a real kung-fu movie in this style is the fact that Master Shifu actually lives in the end.  Hey - after all, it IS a kids’ movie.

One of the phenomena from my own childhood, and that of my current family, that I have never fully understood, is Transformers. I kind of got it when my friends would play with their toys, and the thing would turn from a robot into a car, or a helicopter or a motorcycle or whatever it was. That was kind of neat. In a McDonalds toy-of-the-week sort of way. I never figured I could be entertained by something like that for more than a few hours. But then, some of my friends were into Transformers more than just for the toys. Transformers, for them, were a way of life. They watched the TV show, they eagerly anticipated the movie, they had all the characters, they wore “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts. They ate Transformers breakfast cereal and brought Bumblebee Snack Cakes to school in their Optimus Prime fire-truck-shaped lunch boxes.

OK, I’m making large portions of this up, and many of these products may never have existed. And I have to say that because there are some people out there for whom the childhood of the eighties is not yet over, who are still obsessively excited about the whole Transformers concept, who have become the type of collector who makes an excellent central figure in movies such as 40-Year-Old-Virgin. And if they read this, and thought there really was a line of “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts, they would spend the next three weeks online trying to find them, lose their jobs because they didn’t go to work, mortgage their houses in order to finance the T-Shirt purchase when they DID manage to find one, and then they would never find it and end up broken and destitute and living in an empty boxcar at the abandoned O-Train yard. And I don’t want that.

Alright, that was a lot of lead-up to this review, which will be far less interesting in substance. Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out is the first movie to come out of the Transformers Animated production. This is a TV series that was produced to capitalize on the revitalized market for Transformers watchers in the wake of the 2007 blockbuster movie. It’s produced by the Cartoon Network and involves the characters you would expect, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee chief among them. I think, although I’m not certain, that Transform and Roll Out is the first three episodes of the series crammed together in a 68-minute “movie”. There are three distinct portions to the film, the first being a battle in outer space between the Autobots (good guys) and the Decepticons (bad guys) over the All-Spark, a device that would give the Decepticons the ultimate power over the universe. The second involves the Autobots crashing into Earth, setting up in Detroit, and becoming heroes. And the third involves the Decepticons discovering the Autobots there and turning Detroit into a battle zone.

I am still not sure of a couple of things. The Autobots are the good guys, and they have the All-Spark, and must protect it at all costs against the bad guys, because if the Decepticons get their metallic hands on it they will control the world. So why don’t the Autobots simply use the device to defeat the Decepticons and institute their own benign rule over the universe? And why does Bumblebee have a name taken straight from an Earth creature, when these robots have never been to Earth and don’t even know what humans are? And why does he look vaguely like a cat? Frankly, I still, to this day, don’t understand the appeal of Transformers, to kids or to nerds. The series (and by extension this movie) is obnoxious. They take human expressions and cliches and update them with technological terms, as though that is supposed to be funny. “I’m not ready to go to the Well Of All Sparks yet”. Uuuuhhhh…

Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out has a couple of animated shorts in the special features. One is a bizarre scene where Optimus Prime gives a talk to a bunch of schoolchildren. Another is a two-minute scene where the motorcycle transformer crashes, and then punches Bumblebee. Just some bizarre pointless extras to a bizarre, pointless DVD. One thing of note on this volume - the voice of Optimus Prime is done by David Kaye, the same guy who does the Big Voice thing on CHEZ 106. You know that voice that does our promos and says “classic rock…CHEZ 106″? He’s Optimus Prime. And while I wouldn’t suggest that’s a reason to watch this, it isn’t a reason not to watch it…Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out comes out June 17th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

          When The Animation Show starts, the first character you see is Butthead.  The second is Beavis.  And while they are not involved in the show itself, and are merely hosting it, you get an idea of what the show is going to be right away.  As my Grade 8 science teacher, Mrs. Walsh, used to say - rude, crude, lewd and socially unacceptable.  The Animation Show Volume 3 is a series of sixteen short animated films, packaged together, that comes out June 3rd courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. 

          The first short film is called “rabbit”, a bizarre but about two kids who seem intent on murdering small animals.  Everything in the short is labeled.  When they pass a tree, the word “tree” appears beside it.  When they eviscerate a sheep, you see the word “sheep”.  The proceedings are presided over by a tiny little golden “idol”, who has some sort of magic powers, turning a cage into a pie and things of that nature.  He seems to be the god which these children worship, and is convincing them to perpetrate these heinous acts.  And…that’s about it.  Eventually the kids get eaten by bugs.  It’s weird and creepy, but pretty effective. 

          The second one is a strange live-action style animated bit called “City Paradise” about a Japanese swimmer living in a big American city.  The third is called “Everything Will Be OK”, about a stick drawing named Bill and his life.  Again, weird, but it is hilarious and very smart.  I’d go through all the shorts, but there are sixteen and it would be boring.  So I’ll just say this.  Not all the shorts are crude, not all of them are offensive, and not all of them make sense.  In fact, most of them make little sense, but few of them are offensive.      Some of the highlights are “one d”, where the entire world goes about it’s business in one dimension, so sticks talk to sticks and they get into other sticks to drive them to work…all this amid an alien invasion.  Also fun is “learn self defense”, a very short bit about a guy learning self-defense through cheap shots.  Not very good, but fun. 

          Most of these short films are good, and although you get a certain amount of the violent and the belligerent and the profane, that isn’t really what the Animation Show is about.  Really, it’s about art.  Short films, almost by definition, are artsy.  Simply because people make them solely with the intention of creating something cool.  No one ever sees a short film, so you can do whatever you want with it - it isn’t like some major studio is backing you and you need to turn a profit.  I’d be surprised if any short, ever, turned a profit.  But I’m also too lazy to look it up and see if one has.  So this means that when watching The Animation Show, you’re watching stuff that was made by a film maker with the sole intention of doing what he or she wanted, not what he or she thought you wanted to watch.  And if you like actual art, and you’re interested in short bursts of artistic expression, that makes it a wonderful collection.  If not, you can skip this.  And go rent The Lion King again.

Alright Focus on the Family and like-minded Christians, I’m calling you out. You’re getting lazy. You spend so much time fighting against ambiguously gay television characters like Spongebob and Tinky-Winky, that you don’t have time for your own children. And why do you need to complain about these TV characters and movies like The Golden Compass? Because the only thing left to raise your children, what with all that time spent complaining, is the television. And you want to make sure that while being raised by that TV, your young impressionable boys don’t happen across the Teletubbies and all of a sudden start liking showtunes, lusting after Skeet Ulrich, and planning for a career as an interior decorator, or Kevin Fededline’s backup dancer. I know, I know, you COULD just spend time with them, making sure they watched only Christian-approved programming and maybe reading with them, but that seems like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? Better to write angry letters and volunteer at the latest Fred Phelps or anti-abortion rally, leaving your children in the care of (you hope) the VeggieTales.

So then what happens? Your kids are now addicted to cartoons and television. The only way to get through to them now is through other cartoons or possibly video games. And you want the to learn the bible, but they’re not going to be reading on their own or anything. So now, what, NOW what? Well, you hope that biblical stories get made into cartoons, so your kids can watch these cartoons and grow up to be just like you, and join you at the next Pat Robertson seminar. And lo and behold, here comes The Ten Commandments, the story of Moses, in cartoon form! And sure, you could always wait until Easter for the Charlton Heston movie to come on public access television, but then you would have to strap your children down with bungee cords and tape their eyelids open, because there’s no way they’re sitting through that one on their own.

Well, thank God for Christian Slater, Elliott Gould, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley, who have all provided their vocal talents to The Ten Commandments, (cartoon version), which came out May 13th courtesy of Alliance Films. This is one of those computer-generated “animated” movies where people kind of look like people, and kind of move like people, but they are mostly bald because animating hair would be that much more difficult. Again - lazy! Just because Yul Brynner was bald in 1956 doesn’t mean all ancient Egyptians were hairless, OK? Lazy, lazy, lazy. With The Ten Commandments, the story is already there. All you have to do is tell it in a cool, new way. But this movie hasn’t even done that. It’s just a cartoon remake, almost scene-for-scene, of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic! Down to the scene with the staffs and the snakes, and the slave labourers doing their thing, and the parting of the red sea while Moses stands facing it. That one is pretty much shot-for shot the same.

Which means that what we’re doing, in watching this film, is comparing it with Charlton Heston. And it comes up pretty darn short. Cheap, easy animation vs. a cast of thousands, with massive cinematography and epic storytelling? No contest. And Heston vs. Christian Slater? Come ON. Heston had the Moses voice. The deep, booming Moses voice. Christian Slater does not have that voice. In fact, he has a pretty sissy, weenie voice. Can you imagine, in a live action movie, Woody Allen playing Moses? That’s how this movie feels.

“Let my people go!”

“Umm…no.”

“OK, I’ll take my staff and I’ll leave.”

“Yeah, you’d best be going.”

And then there’s Alfred Molina, as Ramses, who calls for Moses like he’s William Shatner in The Wrath Of Khan. “Moooooosseeees!” “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” And Elliott Gould as God may as well be…well…Woody Allen also.

So what it comes down to for me is this - why? Why make this movie at all? I wracked my brain long and hard before coming up with the laziness explanation. And I am fully aware, so don’t bother pointing it out, that the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments is more of a Jewish story than a Christian one. But I don’t see Jewish lobby groups complaining about Patrick Starfish. When I do, I will make fun of them as well. And this might not be the right forum for this, but…isn’t what Moses (and of course God) did to the Egyptian people…terrorism? The plagues - you can’t drink the water, it’s unsafe. The locusts have eaten your crops, so you can’t eat. Your civilians will die if you don’t…let God’s people go. We will kill all of the first born sons of Egypt. Yes. We will murder your innocent citizens if you don’t give us our independence. Umm…sound familiar? Perhaps in Palestine, the people might…OK. I was right, this is not the right forum for this. The Ten Commandments, stupid cartoon version, comes out tomorrow, May 13th, from Alliance Films.

Drawn Together is a show I’ve never cared to watch. Oh, I see the ads for it during the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and that Lewis Black Root of All Evil show. (Which are the only three shows I ever pay any attention on the Comedy Network.) But when I received Season 3 of Drawn Together on DVD from Paramount on May 13th, I felt that if they went to the trouble of sending it to me, I ought at the very least to give it a shot, and check it out. So it was with a little reluctance that I sat down to watch. This is a show about 8 cartoon characters who live together in a Big-Brother style show. The commercials show clips of the characters saying filthy things to each other and doing gay and lesbian stuff. But those commercials drastically undersell this show. They make it seem like there’s nothing to the show except penis and fart and gay sex jokes. And frankly, I have no interest in watching something like that. But this show is much, much better than just being politically incorrect. Saying swear words and showing creepy sex is not funny in and of itself.

But this show IS funny. Very funny. The addition of the gay jokes and lesbian jokes in this show, unlike those in The Big Gay Sketch Show, are added only to enhance comedic effect, and are thrown off merely as added political incorrectness. The sex jokes and swear words add terrific comedic effect to what is actually a very good show. The eight characters are each very funny in their own way, especially Ling Ling, the little Pokemon-looking guy who is always animated in the Japanese animation style, and wants to battle everyone and speaks Japanese.

It’s the references to pop culture, however, which make this show so funny. There are a lot of nerdy, predictable references, like Star Wars, The Terminator, and Transformers. And there are also a lot of nerdy, unpredictable references. Like the Cronenberg movie Crash, Rocky III, Charlie’s Angels, and of course, Big Brother itself. Big Brother, the incredibly painful and horrible bottom-of-the-cultural-barrel TV reality show, provides a surprising amount of material and great moments for Drawn Together. Moments where the characters address the camera directly are some of the best. And the scene where the disembodied Big Brother House Voice comes over the loudspeaker and tells the characters that today’s challenge is to compete against the Peanuts gang in a spelling bee for the chance to win…an Applebee’s gift certificate! Very funny stuff.

Season Three of Drawn Together is hilarious. I can’t, unfortunately, compare it to Seasons One and Two. I have not seen those. Because I have been put off by the irritating commercials. It’s too bad a show that is actually good puts all the childish and lousy and stupid bits into their commercials. And then, the worst movies in the world put the best moments and three good jokes they have into their trailers. Don’t be deceived by trailers. Most of the summer “blockbusters” this year will likely suck. And don’t pay too much attention to the ones on TV either. And check out Drawn Together. Season Three comes out on DVD tomorrow, Tuesday May 13th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.

There is a conventional wisdom surrounding movies, music and art in general that states certain people are not cut out to make that art. Traditionally, those who suck at making movies and music and the rest of it are from two areas. Either the hard-core Republican-type right wingers, or the hard-core Christian evangelist types. Of course, very often these people are one and the same. Of course there are exceptions, and please don’t write in listing every one of those exceptions. I am aware of them. Alice Cooper, for example, is a Republican. One way to look at this is documentary movies - compare right-wing biased documentaries with left-wing biased documentaries. Michael Moore stuff, ant-war in Iraq stuff, pro-pot stuff. Now, name me one right-wing documentary you know of. Just one. GO ahead, name it. Well, they’ve been made, but they are not well done, and no one has heard of them. Perhaps the most famous is FahrenHype 9/11, a movie seen by fully 3 percent of the number of people who have seen Fahreheit 9/11.

Perhaps the man who proves this rule best, Republican-wise, is Jack Abramoff. As a movie producer in the 80s, he managed to get a neo-con, anti-commie, ridiculous film made. It was called Red Scorpion, and it starred Dolph Lundgren, and it was staggeringly bad. He followed this up with Red Scorpion 2, released in 1994. Then, he joined the George W. Bush team, and along with Tom DeLay, he managed to extort, steal, embezzle and misappropriate millions and millions of dollars from, among other groups, the native American tribes of the U.S. He also inspired dozens of jokes, both good ones and bad ones. If Abram helped you off a horse, would you help Jack Abramoff? And so forth.

And the Christians? Two words. Christian rock. Does that make you cringe just a little? Yeah, me too. Scott Stapp, why have you forsaken us? However, rules were made to be broken, and there is at least one Christian production team that does good work. They are called Big Idea Productions, and they are the fiercely pro-Christian, pro-God company behind the Veggie Tales. And you know what? They are good. In some cases, they are absolutely great! I grabbed the Veggie Tales series from Alliance Atlantis because our eight-year-old loves them. At first, I was awfully leery about this stuff - evangelical, pro-God songs? Christian values crammed into the faces of kids? It scared me a bit. Then I started watching. And I found myself laughing. Actually laughing. So much so that when the latest shipment of DVDs arrived, our 8-year-old was not even here, and I still opened them up and started watching them. By myself.

The double feature DVD is Very Silly Songs, and the Ultimate Silly Songs. Which is the best part of Veggie Tales. Their songs are very, very good. Although the wisdom of creating a 2-DVD package, each DVD being song-related, is debatable when there are five songs repeated from one disc to the next. Why bother? Couldn’t you fit all that on one disc, rather than making two? In the end, you get about fifteen songs. Which brings me to complaint number two. MY favourite Veggie Tales song is not on here! The one about the ball that was kicked into the tree, and it bounced in to the gated community? Hilarious. Gated community. Haha. There are still some comedic gems here though, that kids will love and adults will, hopefully, with an open mind, find quite amusing. Songs like I Love My Lips and The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.

Yes, some of the Veggie Tales songs are preachy and irritating. But most of them are well done and not crazy God-centric, and those are very good. It proves that rules are made to be broken, and Christian producers can be just as good as atheist Golden Compass-type producers. Also out on DVD are actual Veggie Tales episodes such as Larry-Boy and the Rumour Weed, and Madame Blueberry, of which Madame Blueberry is the superior DVD. But the silly songs are the way to go. Christian movies can be good (the Ten Commandments), Christian music can be good (Handel’s Messiah) and Republicans can be cool too (Alice Cooper). I am leaving out Ted Nugent here, because although he has made some great music in his life, he is a class-one, Grade-A nutjob.

There is a video that hit stores on Tuesday - it is the first Family Guy episode of the year, the hour-long Star Wars episode, and it is great. Now, of course, an hour-long episode really means 48 minutes, but with the bonus features on the disc, it is well over an hour in total, most of it terrific. The bonus features include a conversation between Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and George Lucas, who is clearly one of his idols. Also, there is a featurette that plays every Family Guy Star Wars reference from the TV show up until this point. Also hilarious stuff. Clearly, the guys who do this TV show are bigger Star Wars nerds than anyone I know. Except for Dave Taylor, who has forty-one different copies of the trilogy, on DVD, VHS, Beta, reel-to-reel, slide show, and laser disc, among other formats. He also has eleven copies of the John Williams soundtrack, on CD, tape, 8-track, vinyl, and some formats I was not even aware had been invented yet.

But although I make fun of Dave every time I visit his place and sit among the shelves of Bob Fett action figures and Millenium Falcon commemorative cereal boxes, he is not alone. Not by a long shot. These people are out there. And they are otherwise normal in the rest of their lives, unlike the Star Trek geeks and the Lord of the Rings wackjobs and the Mr. Belvedere afficionados. This is because Star Wars holds a certain place in the hearts and minds (ooh, went all George W for a second there) of just about every single human being born after 1957. I, for one, was born about a year after the release of Star Wars. And yet it was still an integral part of my pop culture innundation throughout my life, so much so that even as a half-assed fan of the original series, I still know many lines, names, scenarios and moments from that original trilogy. In fact, the first movie has to be more familiar to the general population of the world than any other movie by far.

Which is why it’s the perfect pop culture spoof for a show such as Family Guy. For the purposes of this review, I will go ahead and assume that everyone, by now, is at least aware of Family Guy. (If not, watch it. It is the best comedy show on TV.) And Family Guy Presents Blue Harvest is what they do at their best. It is basically the entire Star Wars movie, condensed (easily, I might add) to 48 minutes, and featuring the cast of Family Guy in place of the characters in the film. The lines are basically lifted straight from the dialogue of the original movie, which seems lazy at first, but when the dialogue spins off, it becomes brilliant. The scenes where they poke fun of holes in the Star Wars plot are dead-on. The best one comes when Darth Vader is advised that the Death Star is 99.99 percent impregnable, except for this one two-metre wide hole which, if you fire a torpedo into it, would blow up the entire space station. He suggests perhaps covering that hole with plywood or something, but is voted down on the grounds of aesthetics.

Not content to simply lampoon the Star Wars phenomenon itself, Seth MacFarlane manages to get numerous other fantastic pop culture references into the movie - Judd Nelson shows up to deliver one line from The Breakfast Club. Rush Limbaugh voices himself as a right-wing bigot on Tatooine talk radio. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo show up to deliver two lines from National Lampoon’s vacation. There are also references to Simply Red, Tupac Shakur, Redd Foxx, and dozens more, almost all of them fantastic. In the end, the familiarity we all have with Star Wars gives Family Guy license to do whatever they want within that framework, and that works beautifully. Blue Harvest is well worth purchasing, for the Family Guy fan, the Star Wars fan, or anyone who enjoys a 40-minute belly laugh.

Jakers is something that appears to have been delivered to me by accident. I may well have ordered it by mistake, in fact. You see, I order movies from a few companies so that I can watch them and review them before they come out on DVD. And sometimes I will order something I have never heard of, in the hopes of finding a hidden gem. Like, King of Kong. Or The City of Violence. And sometimes I find something much worse than a “gem”, like Dragon Heat. In this case, I was simply completely wrong about what it might be. However, since Paramount had sent me the DVD, I felt obligated to watch it and review it anyway. Jakers! Treasure Hunt on Raloo Farm will be released on Tuesday, February 19th. So here goes:

Jakers is a series about a small pig named Piggly-winks, and his friends, which are a very small cow and a very large duck. (They are all the same size. I am assuming that as the main character, the pig is drawn to scale, and the sheep are about the same size as he is, but he is not yet a full-grown pig, so I will assume that he is merely a pig the size of a sheep, and therefore the cow is smaller than usual, and the duck is larger. Got it so far?) I have no idea what Jakers means. But every now and then it is something Piggly Winks says, so I think it is the equivalent of Shaggy’s “zoiks” on Scooby Doo. The set-up of each episode is an old man pig talking to his grandchildren piglets, reminiscing about the times when he was their age. Only, when he was their age, he looked very cute as a piglet, and his own grandchildren are comparatively unattractive. Piggly-Winks is not the only character with a catch-phrase. The cow, whose name escapes me, has a catch phrase that escapes me too. But that’s because I can’t understand what he’s saying. It sounds like “jerry-mac”. But that doesn’t make much sense, so I think I’m hearing it wrong.

Jakers is an Irish kids series, which means the characters all have Irish accents, and that’s pretty funny. This particular DVD, Treasure Hunt on Raloo Farm, features four episodes. The first episode concerns a treasure hunt. You see, Piggly-Winks father wants Piggly-Winks to do the chores, so he sets up a treasure hunt. Piggly-Winks is so excited at this treasure hunt that he doesn’t even realize he’s doing the chores until he’s done! And the duck says “that’s a right bonny pa you got there”, or something to that effect. But I beg to differ. If the father was willing to spend that much time laying out a treasure hunt for his son, he could very easily have done the chores himself in that time. So the son doing the chores is unnecessary, and therefore cruel. I mean, Piggly-Winks could have just been left alone to play his space-alien game, and all this could have been avoided. Furthermore, this is psychologically abusive to the child-pig. It’s kind of a Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence scenario, where you trick someone into doing your own work. Work you yourself could easily have done. A bonny father? Hardly. A cruel and deceitful taskmaster, perhaps.

The second episode is called Our Dragon’s Egg. The kids find an egg. It is bigger than the chicken eggs. So they assume it is the egg of a dragon. Spoiler alert - it’s a swan. I hope I gave you enough warning with that spoiler alert. I don’t want to ruin the end of this thing for anyone. Well, I’m going to assume very few four-year-olds read my blog, but you never can tell. I am also going to assume that most people who read my blog have totally lost interest in the adventures of Piggly-Winks at this time, and they have stopped reading by now. So I am going to include a list of people I don’t like right here, because no one is likely to ever read it. Karl Rove, Julia Stiles, Keanu Reeves, Dick Chaney, Pierre Polievre, Patrick Swayze, Michael Buble, Michael Irvin, Fred Phelps, and Colonel Sanders. And that concludes my review of Piggly Winks and his livestock-related adventures. Jakers!

I am giving Beowulf the benefit of the doubt here. It is a movie that relies mainly on visuals, and the only TV I have where I can actually see the picture and hear the full sound is in the shop. I guess when I bought it, it had a faulty screen, and the warranty does indeed cover it. I sent it into this shop a week and a half ago. I called them yesterday to find out when I could have it back, and they said they thought perhaps, with some good luck, they might just have the parts they need to fix it within a month. Good thing I have that Blu-Ray player and pay for those HD cable channels. So, I had to watch Beowulf on a TV with a shaky, tiny screen and only one channel of sound. Which means that I will give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that the visuals ARE amazing and that the sound is impressive. Hey - anyone who has seen this film - can you tell me something? Angelina Jolie comes out of the water naked in the middle of the film, right? And she is all metallic or something, and there is no definition and no nipples. But at the end when she comes out of the water, there are nipples. Right? I couldn’t really tell.

But the animation seems strange to me. This movie is done sort of like 300, where it is live action actors which then have animation done over them. This worked with A Scanner Darkly, because it was constantly obvious. Right now, I’m not terribly certain why these movies are doing this. At least in 300, you forget the technique about halfway through the film. And then you just let the mindless entertainment wash over you. With Beowulf, it seems to come and go. Sometimes the actors look like real-life actors, and other times they look like computer animations from a kids’ movie. Which is bizarre. It also means that those computer-generated characters walk like the characters in Shrek. Shouldn’t they walk like, well, real people? Because they ARE real people? Again, I will assume that I thought this simply because of the lousy TV. Although I doubt it.

There are some cool scenes in the film, and it is fairly easy to make some decent entertainment out of the story. Not, of course, by following the original classic story line, but simply by pitting a mythic hero, Beowulf, against an indestructible monster, Grendel. After that, I guess people assume they can just do whatever they like. Much like 300, this involves a lot of yelling and flexing. The giant Grendel shows up first, and rips people apart in a Dansih banquet hall. As far as monsters go, he is more reminiscent of The Elephant Man or that kid in Mask than he is of any truly frightening creature. We watch him slink back to his lair to be comforted by his mother after his rampages, and I guess we’re supposed to feel some kind of sympathy for him? I guess. Then Beowulf shows up. For about half an hour after his arrival, I was expecting the punchline. I mean, this guy couldn’t possibly be for real, or played straight. He kicks open every door, flexes, screams “Beowulf!” at people…he’s like that kid on your high school football team who has permanently screwed up his brain with steroids, and can’t control the volume of his own voice, and the only word he really has command over is his own name. So he yells his own name over and over to get pumped up for that big football game. Then gets ejected for fighting on the first play. Don’t do ‘roids, kids. I’ve actually known this guy. He is now in prison.

Beowulf decides that since Grendel is unarmed and has no armour, that in order to make things fair, he will have to face him completely naked. This leads to an incredibly comical series of camera shots that cover up his wang with various objects, a la Austin Powers. I really don’t think it is meant to be funny. I think it is meant to suggest that Beowulf is hung like a telephone pole. The objects obscuring his junk are a sword, a spear, a mace…anything mean-looking and long. God, I hope it was done for comedic effect. Otherwise, it was the dumbest thing in the whole movie. So the woman looks at his wang and almost faints, he lies down naked among his men while they drink and carouse, and he waits for the monster. Then defeats Grendel, rather easily, while still being naked and still having those crotch-obscuring shots. Which makes the fight rather implausible. Grendel could possibly have won the fight had he not spent so much time putting his arms and legs in the right places so we can’t see Ray Winstone’s computer-generated penis. Poor Grendel. And I’m still waiting for the punchline.

Then we have naked Angelina Jolie. Only, she’s a cartoon. A very obvious cartoon. And there are no nipples or any kind of definition whatsoever, because that allowed Beowulf to keep it’s PG-13 rating. You see, in movies such as this one, all kinds of blood and gore are OK, because it is basically a cartoon. (In Kill Bill, Tarantino changed some scenes to black-and-white, and others to anime cartoons, so that the film would still be R-rated and not NC-17.) So you can show Grendel ripping guys in half, drinking their blood, chewing off their heads, and it is still PG-13. However, if you put nipples into the mix, this film would have been slapped with an R. So Angelina Jolie looks like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Well, in it’s metal form, not it’s Robert Patrick form. Completely smooth, with no features at all, except for her face, which is a cartoon, and therefore not nearly as hot as she ought to be. And that’s the scene everyone seemed to be raving about.

There are many scenes that made me laugh out loud because they really did look like a set-up to a punchline. Ray Winstone’s Beowulf is a character begging to be mocked, yelling his own name at anyone who will listen, bragging about himself at every turn - this is the guy who, in any other movie, would be exposed for the fraud he is, and would receive his comeuppance. But in this movie, it just means he’s that much more heroic. If this was all it took to be a hero, Terrell Owens would be Superman. TERRELL! And while his performance is consistently laughable, so too is the monster Grendel. He rips a body in half, and then he cries, he drinks some blood and then covers his ears because the shrieks drive him nuts…apparently he was “played” in the film by Crispin Glover, but he’s just a giant computer-generated freak, and as such could have been “played” by me, my grandmother, a six-year-old, or Terrell Owens. And during the final, climactic battle scene, there is a dragon incinerating the world. It gets to the Danish castle where Beowulf’s wife and young concubine are hiding, for some reason, on a bridge. When the dragon appears, it pops it’s head up over the bridge in the same manner one would use to attempt to scare one’s younger sister by thrusting a sock puppet up from behind the couch upon which she’s asleep. Boo! It then tilts it’s head comically for some reason, before burning up the place with it’s fire-breath.

And John Malkovich is there too, apparently to provide some kind of human face to evil. He is set up, through the whole movie, as the dastardly back-room dealer who will usurp the king and take power himself through some kind of unscrupulous deed. But then he and Beowulf have a very laughable confrontation, he admits Beowulf’s superiority, and they bond. But we’re still given the feeling that this show of good faith is insidious and devious on Malkovich’s part, that he doesn’t mean a word of it. And then…he just keeps showing up through the movie, and nothing happens. He still looks and talks evil, and in this cartoon world of characters that must obviously mean he IS evil…but he stops doing stuff. Maybe his talk with Beowulf convinced him? Or maybe the film crew forgot he was evil. My money is on the latter. Based on what I saw, Beowulf gets 3 stars out of ten. but I’m giving it an extra two assuming that it would be far more visually brilliant were I to have my good TV back. If I could truly believe that the intention of Robert Zemeckis and his people was to make us laugh, that the intent of the movie was satirical, it would get 7 stars. Which means it’s campy enough for the bad-movie fans out there to really enjoy it.

I just received a DVD called Turok: Son Of Stone from Alliance Films. I watched it with my step-son, who is 13 and has played these “Turok” video games in the past. I was not even aware that the video game existed, but he insisted that it was gory and bloody and that the main character in the video game was a caveman who fought dinosaurs and such. In the video game, you were equipped (he tells me) with circular saw blades that return to you like boomerangs, grenade launchers and heat seeking missiles, machine guns, and so forth. In this new cartoon from Alliance Films, Turok appears to be aboriginal. This is indicated by the teepees in the village, the feathers on the heads of the characters, and the tomahawks they use to kill each other. Which is fine at first. The main problem here is that every single character in the movie - the bad guys, the good guys, the women - all look exactly the same. This led my step-son to call me a racist. Which I thought was a hilariously perceptive remark. But they do! The only distinction one can make between people is men and women. And only then because the men are all gigantic steroid cases and the women look normal. As far as facial features go - no difference.

So, Turok is a warrior for his tribe, who kills some enemies to save the woman he loves. In his blinding fury and bloodlust, he also attacks and almost kills his own brother. He is banished from his tribe, where he lives for twenty years alone, apparently just two miles away, but in a barren wasteland where he kills and eats deer. And works out. Because when he returns, he is massive in a way even Schwarzennegger never could have been in real life. The woman he loved has now married Turok’s brother, who is the chief of the tribe now. They have a son, who is now twenty or so. The rival tribe, the one who was the “enemy” twenty years earlier, attacks this noble group and slaughters them - using guns! Turok’s tribe is stunned, having never seen guns before. What ARE these instruments of death? So with just this woman and her son left alive, Turok returns from exile to avenge his brother. Which leads to more flexing and steroid use. And these battles are definitely bloody. For a cartoon, there is a massive amount of blood, arms severed, heads chopped off. There is even a scene where a giant bird creature bites the head off a horse. But I’ll get to that later.

So far so good. I figure the year is about 1650, and guns are relatively new to this part of the world. They are still the rifle musket type, which appeared many years later, about 1800. But that is a minor detail, and everything else makes sense. Until he pulls out an automatic pistol. Then the dinosaurs and cavemen show up. Now I really have no idea what year it is, and I have no interest in putting a date on the movie. More warriors show up, having clearly also subsisted on a diet, lo these many years, of steroidosaurus. I understand that people in this era, whatever it may be, would be in shape. They have to walk and run a lot, and hunting can’t be easy. But I find it hard to believe they would look like this. There was no HGH and no Nautilus around. And yet, ever since the days of He-Man, this has been the way lazy animators choose to show how tough someone is. The bigger their muscles, the tougher they are. Fine. It is kind of funny. Also funny is the tyrannosaurus-like creature (it IS a T-Rex, only with horns and bug eyes). It attacks all the people, when it is fifty times the size of their horses. This bugs me in movies a lot. Why do these massive creatures chase the three little humans that are central to the story when there are other gigantic dinosaurs and horses around? As I said while watching, if I had to choose between chasing three peas around my plate, and having a steak delivered to me, I think I know where I’m going. Straight to the steak.

Then there is the giant bird (we figure a Moa of some sort) that bites the head off a horse. At least it went for the biggest, tastiest thing first. Then there are tons of familiar dinosaurs - dimetrodon, plesiosaurus, brontosaurus, and others. But they just exist in passing, like part of a nature show. The creatures that actually attack our heroes have never existed. Anyway, it all boils down to more and more preposterous situations, and bloodier and bloodier battles, until finally the bad guy is dead and the good guy rides a Tyrannosaurus with the eyes of a house fly into battle and lives, and the woman is alive and the boy is alive, and everyone lives happily ever after, quickly forgetting the three thousand fellow tribesmen they have lost in a fight over an axe. Oh yeah, this whole evil-guy good-guy battle is over an axe.

At any rate, my step-son assures me that this movie was very much unlike the video game, in that there were no giant saw blades and ridiculous weapons. I think he liked it enough anyway, it was full of blood and fighting and monsters. But I figure why not be true to the original game? If you are going to have guns of all kinds and dinosaurs of all kinds and American natives and also cavemen, how much more implausible would it have been with saw blades and machine guns and grenade launchers? Come on, Turok. Go all out here.