Wreck-It Ralph

2012 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Jennifer: 16/20; Dylan: 12/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 20/20; Buster: 19/20)

Plot: The titular video game baddie--a bulbous-fisted bully who destroys buildings--is tired of living the life of a villain and covets the popularity of his counterpart Fix-It Felix, a guy with a hammer who scrambles around fixing Ralph's messes. Ralph decides to bolt and find a game in which he can be the hero and win both a medal and the admiration of other video game characters. Things don't go well at all.

I really wanted to like this, but it was just too much. There's some humor, and it was good seeing Q-Bert again. There are more than a few nods to video games from my childhood as well as people younger than me, an obvious attempt by the Disney people to grab everybody. There's a bunch of action, and the whole thing is animated really well. The voice work--especially Alan Tudyk as the really unlikable King Candy, but also Reilly, Silverman, the almost too-recognizable McBrayer, and Jane Lynch, the latter who might have the funniest lines--is really good. Is Jack McBrayer going to be in every animated movie from now on? That seems like the kind of thing that could happen.

Studio Executives: Ok, and we need the voice for this little pipsqueak of a character. Who should we use?
Other Studio Executive: Duh! Jack McBrayer? Heard of him?
Studio Executive: Great choice! He's right next door finishing up work on another animated movie. Let's fetch him!

That's right. Jack McBrayer is the kind of actor who is fetched. I can only recall one other animated feature film with his voice (not that I've seen them all), but I have a feeling I'm about to get really sick of the guy. Sarah Silverman stretches things a bit. I didn't recognize her voice, but Jennifer did. Anyway, the voice work is fine. The characters, however, aren't all that likable. There's really nobody to latch onto here. Ralph's not a bad character, but he just doesn't work as the emotional center for this thing. For one, we're supposed to buy that he's forced into this bad guy life but is really a hero at heart, but he acts so selfishly in this movie that I had trouble seeing that heart. He's also not very bright. Secondly, about midway through the movie, the audience is jerked from his story into Vanellope's (am I missing a pun here?) world and the conflict in that game. Like the colors, camera swoops, and barrages of sound thrown from my television screen, the clashing stories was just a little too much to take. I didn't like Vanellope's character either, and the limited amount of feeling that I could spare for these characters was stretched really thin. I liked a lot of what I saw and I really thought it was a creative idea with loads of potential. I just wish the story wasn't driven by too many modern animated movie cliches and had better characters.

This got me thinking about modern animated films that are very visually busy compared with the older, much simpler animated treats such as, say, Bambi. How do you think somebody in the 40's would react to seeing something like this? Would they vomit? Froth? Convulse? Flee in terror? A combination of those? I wonder what effect modern entertainment--especially visually with a definite shift from very simple ideas to very complex ones and the sonic barrage we get nowadays--has on children and their minds?

Hitman

2007 video game movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A bald hitman with a bar code on the back of his head to kill a guy and ends up in the middle of a political conspiracy. He meets a whore.

I guess I'd rather play the video game. For an action flick, this was really dull, so dull that I lost focus and had trouble figuring out what was even going on. The established pattern definitely grew tiresome quickly as loud and violent action scenes played leapfrog with quiet scenes that advanced the plot. The titular hitman played uninspiringly by Timothy Olyphant was as flat as flat can be, a pancake hitman. Of course, he was supposed to be a genetically-engineered assassin, more robot than guy, so I suppose he's not suppose to have a lot of color. But he's not the type of character I want to follow around for an hour and a half. Hitman's really got nothing that makes it stand out from any other movie like it, an almost offensively average movie, so it not only forces you to turn your brain off, but it isn't even much fun. At least the girl was cute, and I enjoyed watching Robert Knepper play a Russian.

eXistenZ

1999 piece of shit
Rating: 4/20
Plot: Genius video game maker Allegra Geller and some video gamers convene in what apparently is a barn to try out her newest creation--eXistenZ! A kid with a tooth gun tries to kill her, and Allegra and Ted Pikul have to travel into her game to. . .well, I'm not sure what they have to do.
Why do I keep watching David Cronenberg movies? I feel like I'm missing something every time I do. For example, was this a comedy? Parts of it were definitely funny, but I'm not sure if that was intentional. Is the acting deliberately bad? Is the really lame reality vs. fantasy theme stretched to such a degree of lameness that it in fact implodes and becomes this intelligent satire that isn't lame at all? Was it Cronenberg's intention to create a movie that made me wish I could shoot myself in the face with a tooth gun and end it all rather than finish the movie? I was left with questions other than "Why do I keep watching David Cronenberg movies?" Why were Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law allowed to act in other movies after this one? Why did the studio allow a movie to have such a stupid name? eXistenZ? That costs it a few rating points right there. Is Canada to blame for this? This is as bad as that Mario Brothers movie and manages to make the script for Tron look like Othello. There's very little in this movie that looks or feels normal--tooth guns, writhing and throbbing fleshy video game systems, two-headed insects, Willem Dafoe--and the onslaught of weirdness makes the experience entirely unpleasant. I always feel really dirty after watching a David Cronenberg movie, and a shower was even required after this one.

Super Mario Bros.

1993 action adventure

Rating: 4/20 (Jen: 1/20 [She couldn't make it all the way through though. "If you'd let me give a movie a zero, I would. I'd even go into the negatives with this one."], Dylan: 2/20, Emma 9/20, Abbey 15/20)

Plot: Mario Mario and Luigi Mario (no, I'm not kidding) have to save the world from the nearly-sinister Dennis Hopper and his devolving (like, reverse evolving) machine. They also have to save their girlfriends. There's a subplot that involves Luigi attempting to lose his virginity.

It's a sensory overload. Everything is so big and loud here that it actually becomes repulsive. Power Rangers-esque effects, terrible acting, a story that makes little sense and barely resembles the video game at all, and a bad bad script featuring humor from the 80's combine forces to make a four and a half hour film that makes you wish you were watching somebody play the video game instead. In fact, I would have rather watched somebody play the first level of the video game over and over again (having the first menacing turtle thing kill Mario in the exact same way every time) while having somebody else hit me in the back of the head repeatedly with a plastic pipe. This should have ruined careers. John Leguizamo...ok, maybe his career was just starting out. But what the hell were Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper thinking involving themselves in this? Or Mojo Nixon. If your movie don't got Mojo Nixon than your movie could use a fixin'? Hoskins, at least, acknowledges that this is the worst thing he's ever done. I'm more embarrassed for Hopper. Hearing him recite lines like "You know what I like about mud? It's clean and it's dirty at the same time" was painful. This was the first movie based on a video game, and it probably should have been the last. The 90's weren't great for movies anyway, and this is one of the worst of the decade.

Note: I did doze off once during this movie, but I don't think I missed anything important.

Here we are. Jen may be a little mad at me here. Goomba shoe!