So this Paranormal Activity business.

I always think it’s cool when a movie becomes a success in a genuinely grassroots way, especially when it climbs the top box office list over the course of several weeks. It almost never happens anymore, when positive word-of-mouth fuels a movie’s success rather than a “trick millions into going to see it the first weekend” marketing blitz. And as much as Paranormal Activity isn’t really my thing – I more appreciated it than liked it, and I thought it was very well-made and effective, but I wouldn’t really call it “scary,” but that’s just me – Paramount clearly has something special on their hands. The film was made for a pittance ($15,000!) a few years ago, and is currently nearing the $100-million mark. (It was also the horror film that finally broke the Saw franchise’s grip on the Halloween box office, and for that I am thankful.)

The ‘Demand It’ campaign, which prompted people who watched the trailer online to go to the movie’s website and demand that the film be released in their city too – Paranormal Activity only opened in a handful of theaters initially – eventually got millions of votes, and directly led to the film now being in just about every cinema in North America. I remember when it opened here in Toronto at one theater just for midnight showings, and now it’s everywhere. And to thank fans, Paramount is allowing anyone to register at

Labels: DVD, horror movies

I found G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra to be one of the more pleasant surprises of this past summer. It’s not going to be in my year-end top 10 list or anything, but it’s a solid popcorn blockbuster that entertained the hell out of my inner 12-year-old. It’s big and dumb enough to be fun, but not so much so that it insults viewers’ intelligence. It’s the sort of movie I tend to enjoy on repeat viewings, so I dutifully picked up the Blu-ray when it came out (I actually appreciated it a bit more the second time, though the film obviously has its flaws; Citizen Kane this ain’t).

That sense of fun carries through to just about the entire cast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a great young actor, is clearly having a ball as a scarred scientist who evolves into Cobra Commander (one of the DVD featurettes opens with him in full costume reciting Hamlet with the aid of his plastic Cobra Commander mask), and Dennis Quaid is having the time of his life channeling John Wayne to play General Hawk. I even found Marlon Wayans tolerable, and I usually hate that guy. The only real problem in the cast is, unfortunately, the lead: Channing Tatum, who I’ve been told more than once is actually quite a good actor, is wooden and mush-mouthed as Duke, as if he’s the only one in the cast unaware of what kind of movie he’s meant to be in. Hopefully in the sequels (which are coming, as this thing made some pretty decent coin at the box office), he’ll get with the program. The other guy who deserves a shout-out is Ray Park as Snake Eyes; there isn’t really much “acting” here, as Snake Eyes doesn’t talk, but Park, who will be a geek icon forever and ever after playing Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I, is a lot of fun to watch in the fight sequences. Snake Eyes gets a lot of the “wow” moments in the movie, and it was the only real aspect of The Rise of Cobra that turned my nostalgia crank (everyone who grew up with G.I. Joe knows that Snake Eyes is the coolest one; its an immutable rule of G.I. Joe.)

The Rise of Cobra looks pretty sweet on Blu-ray; movies with a lot of fast action and quick edits, I find, tend benefit from high-definition, as the sharper images make it a bit easier to follow all the on-screen motion. (Unfortunately, HD is not as kind to some of G.I. Joe’s frequent green-screen shots; some of the scenes look like they're from a movie made in 1997.) And given that the appeal of this movie is essentially purely visual, that counts for quite a bit.

But as much as I dug The Rise of Cobra, it wasn’t even the best G.I. Joe DVD I bought that day. That honor goes to the animated G.I. Joe: Resolute, which began as a web series of five-minute episodes, assembled here on DVD into an hour-long story. The angle of Resolute is that it’s basically the more grown-up interpretation of G.I. Joe geared more towards the hardcore fans of the cartoon and comic series, who are now, like me, in their 30s. Guns fire real bullets, not lasers, and people – including the Joes – die. It's the version of G.I. Joe that grown-up geeks have been waiting for.

G.I. Joe: Resolute was written by British comic writer Warren Ellis (a personal favorite of mine), and he gives the proceedings a sense of near-future realism he injects into a lot of his comics. Ellis is big on research, regularly drawing inspiration from magazines like Scientific American, and Resolute feels far more like it’s set in the real world than Rise of Cobra in terms of the technology used. Resolute still has a sci-fi edge, but nothing here is as out-there as the wacky stuff seen in the feature film. Ellis is great at writing smart, capable, clever characters, and the dialogue in Resolute run circles around the Rise of Cobra script. And Ellis’ take on Cobra Commander, who manages to be both funny and scary at the same time, is probably the best version of that character I’ve seen in any incarnation of G.I. Joe.

It’s a bit odd that the actual cartoon version of G.I. Joe is more realistic and hard-edged – and just all-around better – than the live-action movie, but there you have it. The world of movies (particularly movies based on a cartoon based on a toy line) can be a strange place.

GRADES

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: B
G.I. Joe: Resolute: A

Labels: animation, Blu-ray review, geek alert

THE MOVIE

One of the central ironies of my movie-geek existence is that I love animation but have no patience for kids’ movies. Sometimes this means I’m pleasantly surprised by the animated children’s movies I do end up reviewing; nobody was more shocked than I was that I picked Kung Fu Panda as one of the best movies I saw last year (check out my original review here). But on the whole, I try to avoid kiddie comedies about animals with celebrity voices; I’m not their target audience, and I haven’t had the patience to wade through a movie’s worth of flatulence-related jokes and tired pop-culture references for one or two gags actually aimed at people old enough to shave since I suffered through the original Shrek in theaters (the last time I went to see something “to see what all the fuss is about”). So I was sort of dreading reviewing Monsters vs. Aliens. And while it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it might be, it also wasn’t anything special.

The premise of Monsters vs. Aliens will pique the interest of any other kid who used to fill spiral notebooks with drawings of, well, monsters fighting aliens. It opens with Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), a normal gal who’s irradiated by a mysterious meteor on the day she’s supposed to marry a buffoonish local weatherman (Paul Rudd). Needless to say, spontaneously glowing green and growing to 50 feet in height while at the altar puts a kibosh on her nuptials. She wakes up in a mysterious U.S. government prison built in the 1950s to contain what was then an increasing number of freakish monsters sprouting up on American soil. There Susan meets Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a brilliant scientist who accidentally crossed himself with a cockroach, à la The Fly; B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a sentient (if technically brainless) blob of blue goop accidentally created by an attempt to combine a genetically-engineered tomato and a desert topping; The Missing Link (Will Arnett), a merman believed to be the missing link between humans and fish; and Insectosaurus, a Godzilla-sized insect grub that was the result of some Godzilla-style atomic testing.

Monsters vs. Aliens is a light-hearted superhero-style movie (maybe it’s because I’m a comic fan, but I got a heavy X-Men vibe from the concept of a group of freaks with amazing powers protecting a world that hates and fears them) with a nice message for kids to be yourself. Susan’s personal journey through the film, learning to accept her situation and to stop looking for her own self-worth through other peoples’ acceptance of her, makes her particularly positive role model for girls.

There’s a little less for adults to latch on to, but there are some really clever references to classic ‘50s monster movies (Link is obviously patterned off of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Ginormica/Susan is a riff on the 50 Foot Woman; the recording booth glimpsed in the extras shows some really cool, retro-style movie posters for each of the monsters as if they actually were featured in films of that period).

My problem with Monsters vs. Aliens was that it never quite gelled the way the better movies of its kind does. The action, while there’s a considerable amount of it, is largely unspectacular, and the best setpiece in the whole movie comes at the mid-point (a pretty cool sequence set on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge), and even then it doesn’t hold a candle to anything in, say, Kung Fu Panda. The character designs are passable, if a little generic, and the voice work is solid but unspectacular (as a devoted Arrested Development fan, I kept waiting for Arnett to cut loose and crack me up, but he never quite gets there).

Sometimes I feel bad about ragging too hard on a kids’ movie – I’m the first to admit I’m hardly the target audience for Monsters vs. Aliens – but then I think about movies that I really genuinely like that also happen to be aimed at younger audiences, like the aforementioned Kung Fu Panda and The Incredibles (which I realize I mention as the gold standard just about every time I discuss animated movies, but I happen to think it is the gold standard for movies like this). Movies like that, as well as WALL-E and 9 (read my review of that cool little movie here), prove that a movie can be entertaining for kids and not be bland and unimaginative.

Which sounds a bit harsh for a movie like Monsters vs. Aliens; it’s not a terrible movie, it’s just very content to aim for the middle of the road (one of the directors helmed the second Shrek movie, and I hate that franchise with a white-hot passion; it represents exactly the kind of garbage that I rail against whenever I talk about animated movies), and I think kids deserve better. The premise of Monsters vs. Aliens is perfect for a fun adventure movie for children, but there’s a strange hollowness to the proceedings. I didn’t hate Monsters vs. Aliens, and it’s certainly decent enough to hold a parent’s attention as they watch it with their child, but given the standards set by superior movies in this genre, it’s a bit of a letdown.

GRADE: C

THE EXTRAS

Monsters vs. Aliens is the first Blu-ray Disc I’ve reviewed, and it looks fantastic. Pretty much everything looks great in hi-def, but I find animation in particular looks really fantastic. (I’ve only picked up a few BDs since I got a Blu-ray player – well, technically, a PlayStation 3 – but roughly half of them are animation of some form or another.) The level of detail in the characters, from Link’s scales to Insectosaurus’ hair to Susan’s skin, is remarkable, and the bright colors in the movie’s palette (this is a kid’s movie after all) really pop from the screen.

Blu-ray, of course, also allows for even more special features, and the Monsters vs. Aliens disc is no exception. There’s a standard commentary track from co-directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon and producer Lisa Stewart that’s actually quite dry, but the ‘Animators’ Corner’ Blu-ray-exclusive feature is far superior, basically a video commentary track that showcases storyboards and rough animation, cast and crew interviews and footage of the actors recording their lines. It’s pretty cool stuff, combining what are now standard DVD bonus material like commentary and making-of featurettes into something even cooler.

The other main extra feature is the new short film, B.O.B.’s Big Break, which is in 3D (the disc includes four pairs of old-fashioned, two-color 3D glasses). It’s not much different than the proper film in terms of its tone and style, but in the past these sorts of extras have sometimes been packaged as separate discs, so its inclusion on the disc is a nice touch. As great as this new 3D technology is in theaters (I didn’t see Monsters vs. Aliens in the cinema, but I have a friend who did, and while he really didn’t care for the movie, he said the 3D was amazing), it doesn’t seem to have evolved much in terms of the home experience. Like a lot of similar recent home-video 3D releases, like My Bloody Valentine 3D, the 3D in B.O.B.’s Big Break is sort of hit-and-miss; sometimes it really seems to work, and other times I just got a minor headache from looking at everything through green-and-red glasses.

There’s also a pile of standard DVD extras (albeit in HD), including some deleted scenes, a character-specific karaoke game, a look at other DreamWorks animated properties, including the Shrek Broadway musical. Overall this is a disc filled with stuff to keep the kids amused for hours.

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Labels: animation, Blu-ray review