BEFORE: Well, it's the start of the first full work week of 2014, so I've had my usual Monday bagel for breakfast and my usual Monday salad for lunch, so I'm starting to feel like I'm back into my routine. No more holiday overeating and sleeping at weird times, I'm back to regular overeating and staying up too late. And tomorrow my co-worker comes back from maternity leave, so things are slowly getting back to what passes for normal.
I'd also been on a weird movie-watching schedule, watching the Friday film late on Friday night, for example - this weekend I watched two films within a 24-hour period, so that I'm watching the Monday film shortly after midnight (Sun/Mon) so I can feel like I'm ahead of the count. Linking from "Hugo", Ray Winstone conveniently carries over and provides the voice of a villain tonight. Johnny Depp was also a producer on "Hugo" and does the voice of Rango, but that hardly counts.
THE PLOT: Rango is an ordinary chameleon who accidentally winds up in the town of Dirt, a lawless outpost in the Wild West in desperate need of a new sheriff.
AFTER: I was a little worried about bouncing around the map, between Paris, China, Monte Carlo and now the American West, but thematically I'm right on target - tonight's film is also about identity and purpose, as a regular lizard adopts the persona of Rango, a Western hero, and in so doing, finds his purpose in defending a frontier town.
I should point out that this film is set in the present day, but since it portrays a society made up of lizards, mice, moles, and a turtle, and none of these creatures can drive a car or use modern technology, they're portrayed in the manner of the Old West, and this is a very clever motif. Of course, this allows the film to riff on the Sergio Leone "Fistful of Dollars" trilogy, "High Noon", "True Grit", and I'm sure many others. Someone also did an incredible voice imitation of Western actor Pat Buttram, who also played Mr. Haney on "Green Acres" - I know he's deceased, but someone's keeping his memory alive. (There's even a cameo from a CGI Raoul Duke/Hunter S. Thompson-looking dude, speeding to (from?) Las Vegas, with his "attorney" Dr. Gonzo in the back seat, and probably stoned out of his mind. Nice touch.)
Rango has a modern sensibility because he's an actor at heart, searching for his role, then slipping quite easily into the trappings of an Old West sheriff. It's maybe not his ideal situation, but he's prepared to make a go of it until he can get back to civilization. But thanks to his encounter with an old armadillo, and eventually "The Spirit of the West", he finds that perhaps he's got the makings of a hero after all. This is a much better message for kids than those seen earlier in the week, because it encourages everyone to take action and become the hero of their own story, whatever that may mean, so that gives it a universal nature.
It's also quite action-packed, and in a way that's not just in your typical "Ha ha, look, the animal fell down!" sort of way. There are gunfights, chase scenes - and animals get squashed, but in sort of a Road Runner/Coyote way.
There are maybe a couple of dead ends in the plot, and the mystery of the town's missing water was either over-explained or perhaps not explained at all, I'm not sure. But I'd wager that if I watched it again things might sort themselves out.
Also starring the voices of Johnny Depp (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Isla Fisher (last heard in "Rise of the Guardians"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "The Incredible Shrinking Woman"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time"), Bill Nighy (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Abigail Breslin (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Stephen Root (last seen in "The Ladykillers"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Repo Man"), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "I Am Number Four"), Charles Fleischer, Vincent Kartheiser.
RATING: 7 out of 10 pill bugs
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