Movie Review The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) 

Directed by Steven Spielberg 

Written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright

Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg

Release Date December 21st, 2011 

Published December 20th, 2011

The Adventures of Tintin is a remarkable technical achievement. Every moment of The Adventures of Tintin looks like a beautiful comic book come to life. There is no doubting the technical mastery involved in bringing 'Tintin' to the big screen; it does after all have the names Steven Speilberg and Peter Jackson over the title.

So, why am I not completely sold on 'Tintin?'

Who's Tintin?

Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a boyish newspaper reporter with a great nose for a story. Tintin stumbles on what may be the biggest scoop of his career when he buys a model ship at a flea market. The ship is highly coveted and Tintin is warned by one strange man while another man, Ivan Ivanovich (Daniel Craig) offers him a suspicious amount of money for the ship.

Having been intrigued by the warning and the bidding war over the ship, Tintin gets into investigation mode. When he returns home he finds his flat ransacked and the ship missing. After another encounter with Mr. Ivanovich, Tintin stumbles over another important clue; one that Ivanovich will kill to get his hands on.

A Voyage to India

Tintin's clue leads to his kidnapping and a trip to India via ship during which Tintin makes a daring escape with the ship's former Captain, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). Haddock's connection to the model ships, there are more than one, is the key to a remarkable adventure that, of course, includes a fabulous treasure.

The Adventures of Tintin is a remarkable technical achievement that delivers fun with terrific visuals and some dazzling adventure scenes. Especially fun is a chase scene set in India involving a crumbling dam, a rocket launcher and an incredibly shrinking motorcycle and sidecar.

Motion Capture Animation

I am very resistant to motion capture animation; I have yet to see it rendered in truly spectacular fashion. Tintin is, in fact, the closest any filmmaker has come to making the form palatable, at least to me. The attempt to make animation look more and more realistic is a fool's errand. Speilberg and Jackson's 'Tintin' teeters on the brink of the 'uncanny valley' , the sweet spot between animated cute and animated creepy.

The adventure of "The Adventure of Tintin" helped me in getting over a little of my resistance to motion capture animation but not completely. 'Tintin' doesn't have that joyous, Pixar quality that inspires me to write love poems about the beauty of modern animation.

Nor does 'Tintin' have the ability to make me care for and worry for the characters; not in the way I might have for a live action character. Take Indiana Jones for instance; you know Indy is in no danger of death but you worry for him nevertheless. There is less worry for Tintin; the animation gives us distance from the characters that live action 'Indy' is able to bridge.

'Worth Seeing if'

That said, I still recommend "The Adventures of Tintin." Kids and parents alike will love the film's bright colors and colorful characters. Tintin as a character is a terrific role model and Captain Haddock's story of redemption from drunk to hero is a terrifically well played arc.

"The Adventures of Tintin" doesn't reach the heights of great animated movies and falls well short of the best live action movies. Instead, "The Adventures of Tintin" rates a 'worth seeing if' rating. It's worth seeing if you have already seen "We Bought a Zoo," "The Muppets," or "Hugo."

Movie Review Hot Fuzz

Hot Fuzz (2007) 

Directed by Edgar Wright 

Written by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg

Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Timothy Dalton, Cate Blanchett, Jim Broadbent 

Release Date April 20th, 2007 

Published April 19th, 2007 

The buzz has been building for months around the action comedy Hot Fuzz. It comes from the creators of the cult hit Shaun Of the Dead, a film that was both a send up of classic zombie flicks and a reinvention. Now the Shaun team takes aim at the classically American action movie. With nods toward Point Break, Bad Boys 2 and even a glance at Chinatown, Hot Fuzz fires bullets in many different directions, blows up any number of locales and is often quite funny while doing it.

If it were just about 30 minutes shorter, Hot Fuzz would be a very cool movie.

Nicolas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the best cop in London. His arrest rate is 400 percent higher than every other cop in the city and he is making the other cops look bad. In order to lower the bar for the rest of London's finest, Nicolas is given a transfer. Sent to the tiny village of Sandford, the big city cop finds himself in the place known as the safest village in all of England.

Left busting underage drinkers and tracking down a swan on the loose on mainstreet, Nicolas is bored to tears. Lucky for him, the exciting stuff is just about to begin. As the town prepares for the annual village of the year contest a strange series of accidents kills off some of the more troublesome residents of Sandford and Nicolas begins to wonder if all of these accidents could really be just a coincidence.

That is the set up to a story that takes absolutely forever to really get going. Written and directed by Edgar Wright, with his team from Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz tries to have it both ways and be taken seriously in an action thriller vein and be funny in sending up American action cliches. The tone of the film is fuzzy, even employing some horror film style violence among the mystery and action elements, and this causes the film to drag through the first 90 minutes or so.

Simon Pegg never really looks like an action hero but throughout Hot Fuzz, in what I'm sure was meant as parody, Pegg becomes so taciturn and earnestly tough that he becomes nearly convincing. Pegg gets really into the role of a badass, by the book cop and his performance is yet another confused piece of satire in Hot Fuzz. Don't be mistaken, Pegg is often quite funny but the character is at times too convincing which undercuts the humor in many scenes.

The last half hour of Hot Fuzz nearly rescues the picture. Taking cues from Bad Boys 2, Point Break and Rambo, Hot Fuzz starts blowing up anything and everything, firing copious amounts of bullets and celebrating the goofball quipfests that are the hallmark of the 80's and 90's style American action movie. When the trailer says "from the guys who saw every action movie, ever made" they aren't kidding.

Though multiple homages to Point Break seem a little curious and out of date, fans of that Keanu Reeves-Patrick Swayze campfest will be rolling on the floor laughing. That film, for all its cheese-tastic goodness, did feature one of the best foot chases in any movie I've ever seen and Hot Fuzz provides a loving and hysterical send up of that scene.

Another great popcorn aspect of Hot Fuzz is the filmmaker's Where's Waldo approach to celebrity cameos. A pair of big name international stars, an Academy Award nominated actress and an Academy Award winning Director, are hidden in plain sight in Hot Fuzz. You may have to see the film more than once to catch both cameos.

As a movie geek myself I was looking forward to Hot Fuzz. I loved Shaun of the Dead and that film definitely showed Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's brilliant talent for sending up conventions of genre. They are just slightly off the beat in Hot Fuzz. Taking themselves just a tad too seriously, the team behind Hot Fuzz manages to make a real action movie early on and then flex their parody skills at the very end. These are some big laughs but the more than 90 minutes it takes to get there are deathly dull at times.

Movie Review Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)

Directed by Edgar Wright 

Written by Edgar Wright, Michael Bacall 

Starring Michael Cera, Ellen Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Anna Kendrick

Edgar Wright has done something few directors will ever accomplish; he created his own visual language. In Scott Pilgrim Vs the World' Edgar Wright brought together the worlds of video games, comic books, and movies in a way that many have dreamed of but no one else has achieved. It is a blindingly entertaining combination. Even more than a decade later Scott Pilgrim vs the World remains the ultimate uniting of the movie, comic book and video game genres. 

Michael Cera stars as Scott Pilgrim, a bassist in a Toronto pop rock group whose name is some incomprehensible combination of Sex and Bob and something. They are awesome. Scott's real story however is that he is dating a teenager, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), to the endless mocking delight of his band mates (Allison Pill, Mark Webber and Johnny Simmons) and his sister, Stacy (Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick).

The relationship is doomed however, not by the derision of his friends and family but rather by Scott's encounter with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) an American girl with pink hair, a punk sensibility, and no apparent interest in him. This does not stop Scott from pining for her and eventually getting a chance to hang with her. That Scott is a genuinely good guy keeps this from being one of those creepy, nice guy irritates a girl into dating him stories. 

Naturally, this new relationship comes with obstacles. Emotional scars from our past almost always affect our current relationships but for Ramona, her emotional past comes in the physical form of seven evil exes. Scott must fight and defeat all 7 of Ramona's evil exes including former Superman Brandon Routh, the current Captain America, Chris Evans, a pair of twins, one bisexual surprise, a pair of DJ'ing twins, and Jason Schwartzman as the ultimate d-bag.

Plucky and in love as Scott is, he is a bit taken aback by the challenges involved in dating Ramona but he's also up for a fight and Scott Pilgrim Vs the World flies on Michael Cera's laconic neurotic approach to being a comic/video game superhero. Cera is at his best when he can relax and react as opposed to having to manufacture the laughs as he did in the abysmal Year One. He's very relaxed in Scott Pilgrim and it allows his natural comic instincts and charisma to shine through.

The supporting cast is top notch especially Kieran Culkin as Scott's gay roommate, Wallace, who shares a bed with Scott and his boyfriend who he calls Other Scott. Culkin matches Cera's energy perfectly and his gags register big laughs whether he's texting in his sleep or adding a second boyfriend to his stable of bedmates. Scott Pilgrim vs The World was ahead of its time in giving time to omni-sexual characters who aren’t defined by their sexual identity. 

Mary Elizabeth Winstead does a remarkable job of making Ramona more than merely the motivation for Scott. She has a presence that holds the center of the movie together and is believable as a woman who could inspire people to fight to the death for her. Until her role in Scott Pilgrim vs the World Winstead had struggled to stand out amid a bevy of young stars appearing teen horror movies. Scott Pilgrim may not have broken her out into superstardom but it did help her establish a place where she could grow up and find better roles. 

And, of course, there is Chris Evans. Scott Pilgrim vs the World provided Evans with the best role of his pre-Captain America career. Spoofing blow dried, doofus action heroes, Evans earns some of the biggest laughs in the movie and demonstrates range and charm that was missing from his vacant, lummox roles as teenage morons. I wholeheartedly believe that Captain America would not be possible for Evans if he hadn’t shown so much talent in Scott Pilgrim vs the World. 

Scott Pilgrim vs the World is hilarious from beginning to end while also having a big romantic heart. Michael Cera is just so much fun in this role and paired with Edgar Wright's incredible visual sensibilities, we have a can't miss pairing. Then there is that supporting cast. It's not hard to imagine the cast of Scott Pilgrim vs The World as part of the future of Hollywood.