Year 7, Day 289 - 10/16/15 - Movie #2,175
BEFORE: It's really a thematic link from "Dragonfly" to "White Noise", two films with men receiving messages from their dead wives. But let's see if I can find an actor link anyway, because I know I had one in mind when I set up this chain. First try - Kevin Costner links to Michael Keaton through "Night Shift", because Costner had a small cameo as a frat boy in that film. I'm not sure that counts, because that was even before "The Big Chill" and nobody knew who Kevin Costner even was. Ron Rifkin links to Keaton through a 1978 film called "Rabbit Test", so let's just say there's a link to Michael Keaton (last seen in "Birdman") in there somewhere.
THE PLOT: An architect's desire to speak with his wife from beyond the grave, becomes an obsession with supernatural repercussions.
AFTER: Apparently this EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) is a real thing - people scan through static from TV and radio signals, looking for messages from beyond. I can think of many, many better ways to spend my time - but we've got another widower main character in this film, and he gets obsessed with the possibility of receiving a message from his dead wife. So he buys a bunch of TVs, and he spends all of his late-night hours watching random things, hoping to discern some kind of pattern to it all. Man, I know that feeling...
But, really, isn't this just more junk science? While some might regard this as some kind of paranormal science (which should really count as an oxymoron), others believe that people listening to static or white noise hear the messages that they want to hear, which really just puts this on a level with old-timey seances and that Long Island Medium. Harry Houdini famously stated that if it were truly possible to send a message back to the living after his death that he would, and he and his wife agreed on a secret coded message. Many seances were performed any many people claimed to have received messages from the magician, but none of the messages contained the proper code words.
Of course, we have to wonder, if there is an afterlife, and if dead people can send messages to the living, why aren't the messages more clear? Why are they hard to decipher, or hard to understand, or why are they sent on that weird frequency between TV stations, the one I used to tune into as a young teen, hoping to catch a glimpse of something lurid on scrambled porn stations? I probably ruined a few TVs, messing with the horizontal hold just to make those images a little less jumpy - I had no idea that by the time I became an adult, we'd have this internet thing and smut would be a lot easier to find.
Anyway, our protagonist tonight starts believing that messages are coming to him from his dead wife, and that she is giving him information to help other people, who are about to die. Again, one wonders why she can tell him who to save, but can't just give him exact addresses or anything. And sometimes he gets the messages from the dead people before they're even dead, and that doesn't even seem to make any sense. Why didn't they just call him on the phone, if they were still alive? Or are the messages from the other side going back in time somehow, so they can be more effective? It's all very unclear.
It's also junk science, once again. What frequency is he tuned to? What software is he using to remove the static and hear the voices? How did he even figure out how to do that? And with everyone these days having access to cable TV and satellite, how does he even GET static in the first place? When I was a kid we had the UHF dial with like 50 channels, but only three or four of them had shows on them (25, 38, 56 and 64 in the Boston area) and the rest were static - but with cable this isn't even a thing any more.
There's a whole wave of these "found footage" films, like the "Paranormal Activity" series, and a bunch of TV shows about ghost hunting, and I don't believe a bit of it. Like how do all these video-cameras and devices record sights and sounds that we're not seeing? It's all a bunch of contrivances to use special effects to try and scare the bejeesus out of people. And then you've got this film, which tries to tie EVP to ghosts, serial killers, missing people and using predictions to change fate. That's a lot to expect from a bunch of static.
But yes, there are positive messages that come in through the TV, along with a lot of negative ones. Evil forces are at work - in the form of infomercials, reality TV stars, televangelists and Kardashians. Those all scare me much more than dead people. I've got two more weeks of horror movies to go, and I'm hoping that they'll start getting better soon. There are three or four that appear on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", so I've got high hopes that things will improve next week. If they don't, well at least I'll have cleared this category, so maybe I won't have to watch horror films any more.
Also starring Deborah Kara Unger (last seen in "Payback"), Ian McNeice (last seen in "A Life Less Ordinary"), Chandra West (last seen in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"), Sarah Strange, Mitchell Kosterman, Keegan Connor Tracy.
RATING: 4 out of 10 blueprints
Year 7, Day 288 - 10/15/15 - Movie #2,174
BEFORE: October's nearly half over, and by now it seems like every channel has switched over to round-the-clock horror programming. So there are a wealth of choices for me out there as I sift through the daily movie listings. Everything from "The Conjuring" and "The Purge" to "The House on Haunted Hill" and "What Lies Beneath" - but I'm going to stay the course and take care of what's already on my list, because I've got a chance at clearing out this whole category, and I'll worry about next October later on.
Blair Brown from "Altered States" was also in "The Astronaut's Wife", which I watched earlier this year, with Joe Morton. And I'm back to doctors getting messages from beyond the grave, which was also the theme (sort of) in "Flatliners".
THE PLOT: A grieving doctor is being contacted by his late wife through his patients' near-death experiences.
AFTER: While not overtly religious, this film is about a non-believer coming to terms with the possibility of life after death, once he starts receiving messages that could only be coming from his dead wife. She collected things with dragonflies on them, so every time he sees that insect, or an object with that thing on it appears to have moved across the room, he takes that as a sign. And then there's the mysterious closet that packs itself. But rather than a blatant creepy ghost story, there are symbols and messages that he needs to decode.
He even tells a woman who attempted suicide that she shouldn't try it again, because there's no world after this one, so she'd be wasting her time trying to get there. Which I think is an interesting point - if so many people think heaven is so fantastic, why aren't they all trying to get there as soon as they can? I suspect that the Christian religion (and other faiths as well) wanted to use heaven as a motivator to influence behavior, but also wanted its followers to stick around and keep supporting the church. And there's that sticking point about suicide being a sin, so if you try to cheat the system and get to heaven early, then you won't deserve to get in.
But there are a lot of contrivances here - the main character's job as a doctor puts him in touch with a lot of dead bodies, plus kids in a cancer ward who have had near-death experiences, and these are the conduits for the messages from his late wife. If his character had been a lawyer or a plumber, no doubt she would have had a much more difficult time contacting him. And it just so happens that there's a nun who also visited the sick kids, who seems to know a lot more about human unconsciousness than even medical people do, another contrivance. Don't even get me started on his plans for the whitewater rafting trip, or the medical situation at the beginning that foreshadows the ending.
An ending which you may see coming from miles away - all of the details are important, and when you put them together that's really the only way the film could have ended. If you expected more, or even less, than you didn't put the pieces together properly.
NITPICK POINT: The vast majority of airlines would never allow a woman who's seven months pregnant to get on a plane in the first place. I appreciate that she wanted to bring medical aid to the natives of South America, but this plan was ill-advised. Another huge contrivance, but also way out of line with practical medical advice.
Also starring Kevin Costner (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Pursuit"), Susanna Thompson (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "Failure to Launch"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "Keeping the Faith"), Linda Hunt (last heard in "Pocahontas"), Jay Thomas (last seen in "Legal Eagles"), Matt Craven (last seen in "White House Down"), Justina Machado (last seen in "The Call"), Jacob Vargas (last seen in "Jarhead").
RATING: 4 out of 10 wiggly crosses
Year 7, Day 287 - 10/14/15 - Movie #2,173
BEFORE: I set up this order months ago, and now I have to remember what the linking justification was for putting this film after "Flatliners" - I think it was that Julia Roberts was in "The Mexican" with Bob Balaban (last seen in "The Monuments Men"). This one may not be that Halloween-ish - at least "Flatliners" showed kids trick-or-treating - but I'll get there soon enough.
I also could have gone from Kiefer Sutherland through "Dark City" to William Hurt, or from Kevin Bacon through "Loverboy" to Blair Brown - I had options, anyway. I sure don't want to break the chain now after so much time.
THE PLOT: A Harvard scientist conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug and an isolation chamber that may be causing him to regress genetically.
AFTER: Well, if you thought it was weird that college kids in the 1990's got together and played their little suicide games, wait until you hear what the fads were in the 1980's. I swear this is true, there used to be these things called sensory deprivation tanks, which were these metal tanks full of water, and people would go in there and float in darkness, removing all sensory input so they could meditate or whatever. I think this film really kicked that practice into high gear, but I doubt that the average person had any type of experience that came close to unlocking the secrets of the universe - more likely everyone just got really pruney.
There was also this belief in past lives back then, Buddhists and Shirley MacLaine sort of got together and figured out that if people underwent hypnosis or had some dream or vision where they were Napoleon, that meant that they were the reincarnation of Napoleon. And it was always someone like Napoleon or George Washington that people remembered being, nobody ever remembered being the person who cleaned up after George Washington's horse.
The film "Altered States" sort of stuck these two bits of junk science together, since scientifically you can't create or destroy matter, that means there are just as many atoms in the universe as they were millions of years ago, so the atoms that make up your body were once part of stars, then rocks and then maybe like a fish or a lizard or something. And your body is constantly creating cells from the food you eat and, umm, disposing of cells in various ways, so logically we're all part of the vast ecosystem of the cosmos. What if, by floating in a sensory deprivation tank, and ingesting various, umm, let's say herbal substances, one could get in touch with the "memory" of one's DNA? What could possibly go wrong?
A whole hell of a lot, it turns out. Once again, a scientist uses himself as a test subject, testing the limits of his own body. (But where's the control in the experiment?) He hangs out with a bunch of Native Americans in Mexico, and drinks or smokes something that makes him go a little cuckoo, and then once he gets in the tank again, there are signs that he's devolving into some kind of simian. Or, is he just imagining it? It's difficult to tell. Perhaps the whole second half of this film is not meant to be taken at face value, and it's all just one big acid trip.
How else do you explain that a man goes into the tank, and a caveman comes out? And is he responsible for the damage he does, running around the streets of Boston at night, breaking into the zoo and getting all freaky with the animals? What about the people who try to catch him, and he knocks them out while defending himself? Is this all really happening?
The main problem, as with "Unforgettable" and "Flatliners", is that no real science was applied to the situations seen in the film. Atoms don't have memories, they just form molecules and stuff. And DNA doesn't have a memory either, it just knows how to replicate itself, and occasionally mutate. Memories are a bunch of neurons firing in the brain, the truth is that we don't really know much about how the brain stores memories, except that when the brain dies, those memories are gone.
The special effects used near the end of the film were ground-breaking at the time, but 35 years later, they just don't hold up - they toggle between terrible and laughable. But this might be a great movie to watch while on psychedelic drugs, much like "Naked Lunch", otherwise, I say give it a pass. And I can assure you, absolutely nobody in the 1980's was involved in recreational mutation like this.
Also starring William Hurt (last seen in "Eyewitness"), Blair Brown (last seen in "The Astronaut's Wife"), Charles Haid (last seen in "Pollock"), Thaao Penghlis, with cameos from Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Cat's Eye"), George Gaynes, John Larroquette.
RATING: 2 out of 10 eyes on a goat-headed Jesus
Year 7, Day 286 - 10/13/15 - Movie #2,172
BEFORE: Well, I'm back from New York Comic-Con. I didn't really go anywhere, I stayed in New York, but since it took up 5 days of my time, nearly sun-up to sundown, it feels a bit like I was away. When you factor in the load-in, a lot of walking around, a lot of sitting in a booth, and then the load-out, I got enough of a workout that I'm now worn out. I feel like I need to sleep for three days straight, but I'm not going to get a chance to do that. Instead I allowed myself two nights just to relax and catch up on some TV, but I've got to get back to starting the Halloween chain, because there are just 19 days left in October, and I've got 19 films, so there's no more room for slacking off. OK, maybe one, because I think I can go one day into November and still be culturally appropriate - I'll explain on November 1.
It's also my wife's birthday today, so we're going out to dinner tomorrow and seeing a Broadway show on Friday, so maybe I'll take Friday off from movie-watching as well. It'll be a late night when we get back from the theatre.
Kiefer Sutherland carries over from "Pompeii" - I could have gone with "The Lost Boys", I suppose, but I don't have a copy of that film. Maybe next year. "Pompeii" is a good lead-in, because nearly everyone in that city died from volcano-related injuries, and my first few horror films are about death or death-like states. Later I'll get into gremlins, zombies, vampires and demons, and sort of a more general category about things invading our bodies, and not in a good way. Let the countdown to Halloween begin...
THE PLOT: Four medical students experiment on "near death" experiences that involve past tragedies until the dark consequences begin to jeopardize their lives.
AFTER: Well, if "Pompeii" was clearly pitched as "Titanic" meets "Braveheart", you can almost assume that this one was pitched as a revamp of "Frankenstein", only there are 5 young Dr. Frankensteins, and they all play the monster as well. In "Frankenstein", a doctor took dead bodies, spliced them together, added chemicals and electricity, and brought the dead back to life. In this film, 5 doctors allow themselves to die, then add chemicals and electricity (in the form of a defibrillator) to bring themselves back. The point of the experiment is slightly different, here these five brave souls are attempting to answer the eternal question over whether there is anything after death, hoping to experience it, come back, and remember what they've seen.
The trouble is, we don't know a lot about what happens when people die - those who've had near-death experiences, or who have been clinically dead for a period, tend to talk about seeing that long tunnel with the bright light at the end, but couldn't that just be a result of the brain or the optic nerve shutting down? People talk about their lives flashing before their eyes, or seeing deceased loved ones again, or experiencing a feeling of warmth, peace or acceptance - again, all possible side effects of the human brain getting ready to close up shop. Anything experienced during that period should perhaps not be taken at face value.
In this film, the five - no, wait, it's really four because one guy never gets to undergo the procedure, so really, he's a completely superfluous character - people who flirt with the big dirt-nap have dreams (or visions, or after-life experiences) that are connected to their pasts, reminding them of their misdeeds. The first guy remembers a boy who he bullied in grade school, the second has visions of the women he's been secretly taping during sexual encounters, and the third remembers a girl he bullied in school, because clearly someone couldn't think of a third thing, so they just put a spin on the first one. The lady doctor who insists on also undergoing the procedure, because it worked out SO well for the first three who tried it, has memories of her father's suicide - yeah, good times. I bet she's glad she demanded to be part of the experiment.
Once brought back to life, the doctors start experiencing hallucinations of the kids they bullied or the women they've wronged, and it becomes harder and harder for them to tell what's real. One gets beat up by the kid he bullied so badly that it causes him real injuries - but wait, how is that possible? Did they really bring evil entities back into the world with them when they came back from the afterlife? Do they feel so guilty over their sins that they're inflicting damage on themselves while hallucinating? It's really not clear - so I guess you can take it whichever way you want, but that's sort of a narrative cop-out, isn't it?
What's most annoying is that they spend the first third of the film arguing over how much of a bad idea this is, allowing each other to die, even under medical supervision. OK, well if you think it's such a bad idea, then don't do it, don't even argue about it, just leave the room! And then even once the experiments have started, all they do is bicker. And whisper. And bicker-whisper. Why are you all whispering, there's no one else in the lab, or the cafeteria, or whatever strange campus meeting hall you're essentially killing each other in.
There are rumblings about plans for a remake of this film, because everything from the 80's and 90's is fair game now, but they could probably find a film that's less silly to update. Because playing around with near-death experience was one of the worst fads of the early 1990's, along with Furbys and Tamagotchis and listening to Hanson.
Also starring Kevin Bacon (last seen in "Novocaine"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "My Best Friend's Wedding"), William Baldwin, Oliver Platt (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Kimberly Scott.
RATING: 3 out of 10 refrigerated blankets
Year 7, Day 279 - 10/6/15 - Movie #2,171
BEFORE: I was sure that I'd be able to find a connection between "300: Rise of an Empire" and this film - surely the two films produced in the same year that were about ancient Greece and ancient Rome would share at least one actor, right? Nope, not one. It took a while, but I finally found an indirect link - David Wenham was also in "Dark City" with Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "Melancholia"), who appears in "Pompeii". That'll have to do, especially since Kiefer is my link to the start of the Halloween chain next week.
THE PLOT: A slave-turned-gladiator finds himself in a race against time to save his true love, who has been betrothed to a corrupt Roman Senator. As Mount Vesuvius erupts, he must fight to save his beloved as Pompeii crumbles around him.
AFTER: I watched this film on Tuesday, but as I write this it's Wednesday (correction, Thursday), and I've already completed the load-in for New York Comic-Con. After the work was done, my team and I celebrated with a few beers (provided by Brooklyn Brewery, makers of Defender, the event's official beer). Then I went out with some friends to an Oktoberfest dinner at Brooklyn Brewery, so that meant I had a few more beers, came home, watched a little TV and fell asleep. This was a critical error in terms of time management, because when the beer wore off I woke up, and now it's 3 am and I need to be back at the Javits Convention at 9 am to put the booth together, and I'm afraid that if I go to bed, I'll oversleep. But if I stay up all night, I'll be exhausted at the convention and I may not make it through the day. So I'm screwed. Anyway, back to "Pompeii".
When you see that a film is directed by Paul Anderson, it's a good idea to find out which one - is it the one who directed "Boogie Nights", "Magnolia" and "There Will Be Blood", or the other one, who directed those "Resident Evil" films. In this case, it's the latter, Paul W.S. Anderson. Sorry, but to me that's a bad sign right from the start.
Because it turns out that you can't just take the love story from "Titanic" (rich girl falls in love with poor boy) and the action scenes from "Gladiator" and fuse them together under the backdrop of the danger from "Volcano". Sure, on paper it seems like it will work, just combine two Best Picture winners, what could go wrong - but it so damn obvious that's what they did. The "elevator pitch" for this was "Titanic meets Gladiator" or I'm a monkey's uncle.
The tagline for the film reads "No Warning, No Escape", but that's not really true, is it? I mean, when you put a city next to an active volcano, you're sort of asking for trouble - and there were prior earthquakes around Vesuvius, notably in 62 A.D., prior to the eruption depicted here, which was in 79 A.D. And the film shows several rumblings right before the eruption, how is that not a warning?
Oh, yeah, SPOILER ALERT, the volcano erupts. But you knew that, right? Or you saw it on the poster, or pretty much figured that the volcano would erupt, because if it doesn't, then we don't really have a story here. And after an hour or so of bad acting and even worse line-reading (there were several times where I had to rewind to figure out what someone said, and times where I eventually gave up) I couldn't wait for the volcano to take these people out.
But if you read about the real destruction of Pompeii, you'll learn how inaccurate this film was. They placed the city in the wrong location relative to the ocean, plus there was no lava expelled from Mount Vesuvius, merely stones, ash and hot gas - but I guess that doesn't look so exciting on film, does it?
Then we've got the contrivances, in both the "Titanic"-like and the "Gladiator"-like storylines. What a coincidence that the Senator visiting Pompeii is also interested in the same lady as our Celtic slave hero, no? I mean, there are a lot of women in town, but we have to have a love triangle? And what a coincidence that our slave's only friend in the gladiator camps turns out to be the man that he has to fight in a death match. Come on...
Also starring Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "Red Planet"), Emily Browning (last seen in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"), Jared Harris (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World"), Joe Pingue, Currie Graham, Jessica Lucas (last seen in "Cloverfield").
RATING: 3 out of 10 pyroclastic flows
Year 7, Day 278 - 10/5/15 - Movie #2,170
BEFORE: Two days to go until New York Comic-Con (for me, it starts on Wednesday with the load-in, not Thursday) and I've started to have the stress dreams. Like I had a dream a couple nights ago that I got a job on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and I had an office on the 6th floor of their building, but I couldn't seem to get to the 6th floor. The elevator wouldn't stop on that floor, so I went to the stairwell and the stairs were gone, it was an empty stairwell - how is that even possible? Then I passed by the green room and saw Jon Bon Jovi in it, so I had to step outside and text my wife that I just saw Jon Bon Jovi, and I never really got to my desk, which was very frustrating. This is really a variation of my standard Comic-Con dream, where I'm wandering through a convention center and I can't find my booth.
Then last night I had a dream I was in a production of "Les Miserables" that starred Leonardo DiCaprio (for some reason) and someone was murdering the performers, and it might have been Leo, because he was really drunk and blacking out from time to time, so maybe he was killing them while blacked out, or perhaps someone was framing him for the murders, I couldn't tell. But the killings were all pretty violent. I must be more stressed out than I care to admit.
Rodrigo Santoro carries over from "Rio 2", he voiced the male bird scientist Tulio in that film, and he played Persian leader Xerxes in "300" and this sequel.
THE PLOT: Greek general Themistokles leads the charge against invading Persian forces led by mortal-turned-god Xerxes and Artemisia, vengeful commander of the Persian navy.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "300" (Movie #300)
AFTER: Sure, it might seem weird to go from a CGI children's animated film to a very violent adult film about Greek soldiers - but that's where my movie-watching process is at these days. If I follow the connections provided by themes, then I lose the actor connections. But if I follow the actor linking, then my subject matter careens all over the place.
Or, does it? "Rio 2" featured a turf war between the blue macaws and the scarlet macaws. It was like a war between races of birds (though it looked a lot like an aerial soccer game) and tonight's film features a similar turf war between the Greeks and Persians. There's also a red army (Spartans) and a blue army (Athenians), but they happen to be fighting on the same side here.
The film starts shortly after the first "300" film leaves off, when the 300 Spartans faced off against the Persians - apparently it did not go well, because Queen Gorgo is talking to her troops about the sacrifice that the 300 made, and then she tells a story, so we snap back to the Battle of Marathon, 10 years before, where this whole rivalry with the Persians started. That battle went a little better for the Greeks, with Themistokles taking out King Darius, but also setting up his son Xerxes to come back for revenge with a whole load of ships. The story stays with Themistokles and his men until it catches up with the original film - one assumes that it runs parallel with the last stand of the Spartans for a while.
But when does the Queen STOP telling the story? There's an opening narration that leads into the flashback, but when the flashback catches up with the present (not our present, the present of the past, the present of the opening sequence) we should come out of the flashback, but we never do. Was there a shot missing, with the Queen telling her troops "The Athenians should be here shortly to help us in our battle." Maybe I'm not really understanding how this timeline thing works. Once you start jumping around, it's hard to make any sense of it all - there are even flashbacks within the main flashback, which shouldn't be possible.
Still, I found this slightly easier to follow than the first "300" film, but it similarly suffered from "too many characters" syndrome". And if this was like a "10" in the level of violence, there's simply no reason why it couldn't have been at level "8" instead. But maybe I'm supposed to take solace in the fact that I wasn't born back then, and I don't have to get stabbed or decapitated as part of the Greek army - I only have to fight the battle of Comic-Con, again and again.
Also starring Sullivan Stapleton (last seen in "Gangster Squad"), Eva Green (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Dredd"), Hans Matheson (last seen in "Les Miserables (1998)"), Callan Mulvey (last seen in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), David Wenham (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Jack O'Connell, Andrew Tiernan (last seen in "The Pianist"), Igal Naor (last seen in "Green Zone"), Andrew Pleavin, Peter Mensah (last seen in "Hidalgo")
RATING: 6 out of 10 flaming arrows
Year 7, Day 277 - 10/4/15 - Movie #2,169
BEFORE: I've had a good run in the last two weeks, chipping away at the films of 2014, also a few from 2013 and 2012. That's largely because my watchlist now largely consists of films from the last couple of years, it's a great sign that I'm finally catching up. I still have some films from previous decades on the list, some of which I use as linking material, like I did with "Unforgettable" and "Masked and Anonymous". But for the theme months of October and February, it's (mostly) back to older horror films and romance films.
I'm going to finish this week out with three more films from 2014, and then I'll take a week's break for New York Comic Con. When I come back next Monday I'll start the horror chain, with films ranging from 1973 to 2014, only not in that order. I tried to do the best ordering of horror films I could, given a particular set of 19 films, but there are bound to be some gaps, and I'll just have to deal with that.
For tonight's linking, "Kermit's Swamp Years" was a bit of a dead end, but since several Muppet performers were in "Muppets Most Wanted" with Jemaine Clement, I'm going to follow that thread, as he's the voice of Nigel the evil cockatoo in the "Rio" franchise. (God, there were so many stars making cameos in "Muppets Most Wanted" I could have gone in any of a dozen directions - but there's not much point in second guessing it now, with just a few days left in regular season play.)
THE PLOT: Blu, Jewel and their three kids are hurtled from Rio de Janeiro to the wilds of the Amazon. As Blu tries to fit in, he goes beak-to-beak with the vengeful Nigel and meets his father-in-law.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rio" (Movie #1,293)
AFTER: This is a continuation of the "fish out of water" story seen in the first "Rio" film, but for me placing it after "Kermit's Swamp Years" has additional meaning. From a swamp to the Amazon jungle, get it? But also, I've lucked out because they focus on some of the same issues - what constitutes a wild animal and what constitutes a pet? Is it right to take frogs or birds or snakes out of the wild and make them live in a persons' house? The first "Rio" film took on exotic bird smugglers, but also sort of gave the impression that all Brazilian people want to do is dance at Carnival.
It seems like every animated film these days needs to champion a cause, even "Kermit's Swamp Years" took a stand against killing frogs in biology class, and tonight of course it's the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest. Which seems like an easy cause to champion, if you ask me - I mean, of COURSE we should be working to save the rainforest. But haven't we been hearing about this for a couple of decades now? Plus, exactly what action would you like me to take to save it? I can't influence the Brazilian government from where I am, and I doubt that a lot of kids who see this movie would be able to do anything constructive either. OK, great, we've raised awareness of a thing that most people were already aware of - by the time the kids who see this movie become adults and are able to donate money or take political action, I figure either the problem will be solved, or it will be too late to do anything.
A quick bit of research tells me that Amazon deforestation is actually down significantly since 2004, and that the more the rainforest gets logged, the less precipitation reaches crops, so there's really no more economic advantage to converting rainforest to fields. It's like what the paper industry in the U.S. went through a few years ago, after they figured out it was more economical to replace trees than to just cut them down, they started to do the right thing and renew their own resource. I'd imagine the farmers in Brazil have started to see the light, and Wikipedia confirms that the amount of conserved land in Brazil tripled between 2002 and 2006. Should we remain on guard in the name of future conservation? Of course, but there's less of a reason to stick an environmental message into an animated film.
As an animated film, it just feels like this one had too many characters. How are kids supposed to keep track of them all? Did Blu and Jewel really need to have three kids, wouldn't two have been enough? There really wasn't time to develop them all with different personalities, so why did they all need to be there? Then we've got the toucan, the canary, the bulldog - they don't bring much to the table, the bulldog was even absent from most of the film because they didn't have anything for him to do.
The storyline with Blu trying to fit in with the tribe of blue macaws was fine, but why did their enemies have to be the scarlet macaws? Doesn't this teach kids to think along color lines, suggesting that people should only associate with others of the same race? Why couldn't all the birds share the grove from the start, wouldn't that send a better message out to the kids?
Another NITPICK POINT - why did the birds need to cross Brazil 17 times, just to find the Amazon? Isn't the Amazon River the largest in the world, isn't the Amazon basin just plain huge? Seems to me they should have been able to find the Amazon a lot quicker. OK, so they were looking for one specific point in the Amazon, I get that. But one bird had a phone with GPS, and the other was a bird using typical bird-flying techniques - am I to understand that neither system worked well? I understand that Rio de Janeiro may be 2,000 miles away from the Amazon, but it's a straight shot, isn't it?
Also starring the voices of Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Now You See Me"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Interstellar"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), George Lopez (last heard in "The Smurfs"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Will.I.am (last heard in "Rio"), Tracy Morgan (ditto), Rita Moreno (last seen in "Slums of Beverly Hills"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "Bewitched"), Bruno Mars (last seen in "Honeymoon in Vegas"), Miguel Ferrer (last seen in "Another Stakeout"), Leslie Mann (last seen in "Big Daddy"), Sergio Mendes (last heard in "Rio"), Kate MiCucci, Janelle Monae, Rodrigo Santoro (last seen in "Love Actually"), Rachel Crow.
RATING: 5 out of 10 chainsaws
