Early Man movie review: primordial goop
A huge disappointment, crude and simple compared to Aardman’s earlier, more sophisticated and multilayered work. No satire or subversion, just a bog-standard triumph-of-the-underdog story.
Wallace and Gromit
Shaun the Sheep Movie movie review: sheep in the city
Charming in that gloriously detailed Aardman way, but with its simple slapstick humor, it’s strictly for the littlest tykes.
The Boxtrolls movie review: avert your eyes
There’s a fine line between baroque and grotesque… and The Boxtrolls crosses it. Here is a film that actively makes you want to look away.
Zac Efron to star in ‘Akira’?; another Indiana Jones flick?; more ‘Spooks’?; more: leftover links
Plus: Walking Dead renewed; Sally Hawkins, action star?; Netflix streaming is superpopular; more…
‘Doctor Who’ thing of the day: an homage to Kylie Minogue’s sacrifice in “Voyage of the Damned”?
Reader Jo writes to suggest that a moment from the latest Wallace and Gromit short, ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death,’ may well be an homage to Kylie Minogue driving a forklift over the edge of a very long drop in ‘Voyage of the Damned’…
Fantastic Mr. Fox (review)
Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach looked at a sweet-and-sour children’s story through a peculiarly skewed eye and said, This can be so much more. And they turned it into something touching and funny, and magically absurd and at the same time pointedly real. They turned it into something genius.
question of the day: What’s your favorite childhood memory of ‘Sesame Street’ (or ‘Wallace and Gromit’)?
They’re not quite analogous, but a confluence of anniversaries this week resulted in dueling Google doodles on either side of the Atlantic, for the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street: and the 20th anniversary of Wallace and Gromit: Today, both Google.com and Google.co.uk share this doodle: What’s your favorite childhood memory of Sesame Street (or Wallace … more…
my week at the movies: ‘Gentlemen Broncos,’ ‘Michael Jackson’s This Is It,’ ‘Creation,’ ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox,’ ‘The Fourth Kind,’ ‘Pirate Radio’ (aka ‘The Boat That Rocked’), ‘Collapse’
Busy, busy week. And awards season hasn’t quite hit yet (though screeners are starting to come). It’s gonna be a crazy couple months… Most hilarious title ever? Gentlemen Broncos (opens in the U.S. on October 30; no U.K. release date has been announced) looks to be a hoot… and I do really like Jared Hess’s … more…
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
