TMNT - Review

Was wandering through Leicester Square on Saturday, trying to avoid the roving bands of Drunken Idiots wearing their best Guinness hats, and I spotted a theater that was showing a preview the new TMNT movie before it opens officially next week.

It was certainly cute and a movie built for kids. The computer animation was reminiscent of Pixar's "The Incredibles". I hadn't seen the trailers, but I had thought that it would be darker based more on the original Eastman and Laird work than the cartoons and previous movies. They played it fairly straight with cartoon violence and martial arts mayhem, but it was of the bloodless kid friendly sort.

That's not to say that there were characters and situations that could scare the hell out of children. Some of the secondary villains, etc... were serious SOBs.

The jokes ranged from adult to childish, but as usual in today's animated fare, nothing that reached to the peaks of the best of Chuck Jones or Jay Ward.

It was a pleasant romp, largely kid-safe and certainly worth the price of a matinee showing. (I don't think it was worth the price of the additional popcorn, but I'm a harsh judge, I guess.)

You Miss Everything Good, When You Sleep...

I got to work this morning and found that Kevin Smith will be in London next month.
This was posted at 7:58p EST (2:58am here). I got the message at 8am GMT (5 hours later) or so and tried to buy a ticket. They were all sold out.

Damn rabid fans.

Update: Woo! They added another show and I scored a ticket to the next one. I'm going on 5-Apr. Will post more after the event.

Hot Fuzz

"Hot Fuzz" is absolutely hilarious. Definitely worth full price in a first-run theater.

Parody films are tough. They're usually done one of two ways: the "Epic Movie" route, where the film is a tenuous connection of gags thrown at the screen in the hope that enough jokes would work; the other route, seen in this film is to understand the genre well enough to keep to the tropes, yet still inventive enough to subvert them. Of the later, I felt that "Scream" did a similar job, though that film for all of it's humor, was primarily a horror film, even as it skewered the genre.

This film was clearly a comedy with just enough of a nod to the action movies to check off the various genres involved: the cop movie, the mismatched buddy film, the fish out of water film, and a bit of a mystery.

A brief plot synopsis for anyone interested: Simon Peeg is Nick Angel, London's Metropolitan Police's top cop. Within the first few minutes, he's reassigned to Sandford, an English country village. Once there, he becomes intrigued by a series of curious events that may prove to be foul play. He's partnered with the Chief's oafish son, Danny Butterworth, played by Nick Frost.