Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Junebug

by Jay Kerr on March 27, 2007

in DVD

Junebug

Junebug (Director: Phil Morrison, USA, 2005): Brilliant! An instant favourite. How did I miss such a per­fect film?

Director Phil Morrison has cre­ated an incred­ible piece of art with writer Angus MacLachlan. Everything from the dia­logue, casting, cine­ma­to­graphy, music and dir­ec­tion is so care­fully put together and magic­ally real. You can’t help but believe in the char­ac­ters and the story that unfolds before you.

Junebug requires a cer­tain amount of patience from the viewer. Some of the shots might be unusu­ally long and ‘artsy’ for some audi­ences but it sets a tone for cer­tain scenes. At times the dialog is sparse but the acting speaks volumes.

The story is fairly simple but the char­ac­ters are com­plex and very inter­esting. Newlyweds, Madeleine and George live in Chicago. They take a road trip to North Carolina so that Madeleine can meet George’s family and hope­fully sign up an eccentric painter to Madeleine’s art gallery.

The artist in North Carolina is like a char­acter right out of the Civil War. The film is worth watching just to hear his accent. George’s family are an inter­esting bunch. I don’t want to give too much away because I think the less you know, the more you’ll like the film. If you want a plot sum­mary then check out IMDB.

I really wish there was a dir­ector com­mentary for this film because it raises a lot of ques­tions and I’d love to know some of the intended mean­ings behind cer­tain shots and some of the dialogue.

This is a film that I’ll be adding to my DVD lib­rary so that I can watch it again and again. It’s that good and I highly recom­mend it if you haven’t seen it.

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TMNT

by Jay Kerr on March 27, 2007

in Theatrical Release

TMNT

TMNT (Director: Kevin Munroe, USA/Hong Kong, 2007): If you’re over the age of ten, you might not know that TMNT stands for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If you’re under the age of ten, you might not know that TMNT was the top weekend flick with $25.45 mil­lion in ticket sales.

I found myself sit­ting in the a theatre with my 7-year-old son Daniel, waiting for TMNT to start. Like most 7-year-olds, he has a fas­cin­a­tion with ninja turtles. I don’t. All I could think about were the really bad one-star reviews I had read about the film.

By the time the credits rolled, I was relieved. The movie wasn’t that bad. It’s basic­ally a 3D ver­sion of the TV show but with really good pro­duc­tion values. The anim­a­tion by Imagi Entertainment is impressive and gave me some­thing to admire while the turtles ate pizza and bickered.

The anim­a­tion and the ren­dering don’t live up to Pixar stand­ards, but so what. A 7-year-old kid isn’t going to notice or care about how real­istic the fab­rics are rendered or if the inverse-kinematics in the char­acter anim­a­tion is incred­ibly realistic.

It made me wonder who Pixar is really making their incred­ible films for. Why not crank out a bunch of mediocre movies like everyone else? Why raise the 3D bar with every film? The kids won’t care or really notice so long as the story is solid. Will they?

I tried to get Daniel to write a review but he thought that would be too boring. So I asked him what he thought about the film. “It was good” was the only response I could get at first. I asked him what he hated about the film and he responded with, “the long talking parts.” Hmm, okay.

I asked which movie he thought was better, Superman Returns or TMNT. I was sure he would pick Superman Returns but he quickly replied with, “TMNT. It had way more action.” My shoulders slumped for­ward and my chin col­lapsed into my chest. When I recovered, Daniel asked me if we could get the TMNT video game for PS2.

Official Film Site
Official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Site

Tagged as: animation, children, pixar

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