http://filmjournal.net/mike/2007/07/08/i-couldnt-wait-for-it-to-be-ogre/ Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:46:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=wordpress-mu-1.0 http://filmjournal.net/mike/2007/07/08/i-couldnt-wait-for-it-to-be-ogre/#comment-17546 Sat, 03 May 2008 18:06:28 +0000 http://filmjournal.net/mike/2007/07/08/i-couldnt-wait-for-it-to-be-ogre/#comment-17546 [...] Spidey was an entertainment tour de force next to Shrek the Third (my review), a horrible bit of business that took fun characters and a treasure trove of plotting possibilities and somehow turned out to be an unfunny, awful mess. Saddled with a stack of people and narrative strands from the first two chapters, the writers of St3 apparently couldn’t decide what to do with them, and came up with a yarn that produced no sense of development. The film has the barest excuse for a story, and instead exists to splice in any number of cheap sight gags and unfunny sitcom moments. Take, for instance, the characters of Donkey and Puss in Boots, the scene-stealers from Episodes One and Two respectively. Criminally underused here, the movie contrives to switch their personalities (I can’t remember how, but it doesn’t matter), so that the Donkey is inside Puss in Boots, and vice versa. This had the potential to be witty, but instead nothing happened, the moment wasted as we were whisked from their predicament to something else. How they managed to waste the obvious voice talents of Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas is beyond me, yet somehow they did. That aside, the film continues to satirise other movies, with diminishing returns (surely comedy has moved on from movie parodies, especially after the people behind Epic/Date/Scary Movie ploughed that furrow so frequently and recklessly), and churn out endless bawdy jokes that will mean nothing to younger audiences. You deserve more. Pixar Studios might not always be perfect, but Ratatouille had enough class and charm to leave this shambles standing. [...] […] Spidey was an entertainment tour de force next to Shrek the Third (my review), a horrible bit of business that took fun characters and a treasure trove of plotting possibilities and somehow turned out to be an unfunny, awful mess. Saddled with a stack of people and narrative strands from the first two chapters, the writers of St3 apparently couldn’t decide what to do with them, and came up with a yarn that produced no sense of development. The film has the barest excuse for a story, and instead exists to splice in any number of cheap sight gags and unfunny sitcom moments. Take, for instance, the characters of Donkey and Puss in Boots, the scene-stealers from Episodes One and Two respectively. Criminally underused here, the movie contrives to switch their personalities (I can’t remember how, but it doesn’t matter), so that the Donkey is inside Puss in Boots, and vice versa. This had the potential to be witty, but instead nothing happened, the moment wasted as we were whisked from their predicament to something else. How they managed to waste the obvious voice talents of Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas is beyond me, yet somehow they did. That aside, the film continues to satirise other movies, with diminishing returns (surely comedy has moved on from movie parodies, especially after the people behind Epic/Date/Scary Movie ploughed that furrow so frequently and recklessly), and churn out endless bawdy jokes that will mean nothing to younger audiences. You deserve more. Pixar Studios might not always be perfect, but Ratatouille had enough class and charm to leave this shambles standing. […]

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