By Roger Moore


Film: The Croods (animation)
Cast: Voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Cloris Leachman, Catherine Keener
Direction: Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco

Skip past the lame title and weary Stone Age premise. The Croods is a gorgeous kids’ cartoon with heart and wit, if not exactly a firm grasp of paleontology.
It’s about a family of cave men and women who have survived, unlike their neighbours, by minimising risk. But risk is how we grow, how we better our lives and achieve great things. That’s just one of the things the Croods learn as their world turns upside down—literally. Earthquakes and volcanoes do tend to upend a neighbourhood.
Daddy Grug, hilariously and sensitively voiced by Nicolas Cage, has just one motto, one he reinforces in their cave as he tells stories and animates his lessons on the cave wall: “Never be NOT afraid”.
His athletic daughter Eep (an energetic Emma Stone) may bristle at that as she invents rock climbing, parkour and assorted other dangerous sports while exploring their limited world. But fear has kept them all — Grug, Eep, mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), lunky brother Thunk (Clark Duke), Gran (Cloris Leachman) and feral baby Sandy (Randy Thom) — alive.
They hide in their cave at night, huddled in a dogpile. They only go out to feed. An epic egg hunt (the creatures in their world have more to do with Dr Seuss than Darwin) that opens the film shows what they have to go through just to eat. They basically invent football (and the way Fox Sports covers it) with this gonzo chase through the high desert.
But Eep has slipped out at night, lured by a strange light. Let’s call it “fire”. She’s also lured by the handsome lad who has fire. Let’s call him “Guy”, given a typical wry and sarcastic turn by Ryan Reynolds.
Guy has a sloth he’s tamed and uses as a belt, named “Belt”. He cooks. You know, because he has fire.
He’s got shoes. For your feet. Eep and Ugga go all Manolo Blahnik on those.
And Guy has a message, which everybody but Grug hears.
“Our world is ending.” The earthquakes and eruptions mean they have to migrate, to move on, because “tomorrow is a place where things are better”.
The big lug Grug thinks “Ideas are for weaklings”, but he comes around, inventing the “long, slow trip across the country” that will “bring us together, as a family”. Right.
The animation is first rate, even if the cutesy critters bear the hallmarks of co-director Chris Sanders’ Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon – wide, round faces, big cuddly eyes.
Another Sanders touch? Emotion. For all the (mostly weak) wisecracks about Grug wishing his mother-in-law dead, The Croods has a warm sense of family, responsibility and letting Dad save face.
And the actors are, to a one, dazzling – getting across emotions and delivering this very visual comedy’s verbal zingers with great timing. Cage, Stone and Keener are naturals at this sort of acting.
The Croods aren’t the Flintstones. But mercifully, they aren’t living in the Ice Age, either. That makes the movie about them highly watchable. — MCT


President in jeopardy

Film: White House Down
Cast: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, James Woods, Joey King, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Direction: Roland Emmerich

If you see just one terrorists-take-over-the-White-House thriller this year, make it White House Down. Even if you saw the dour and bloody Olympus Has Fallen, which has a lot in common with White House Down, you owe it to yourself to check out Roland 2012 Emmerich’s preachy, goofy, over-the-top take on Die Hard at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
From the earnest but earnestly funny president in jeopardy (Jamie Foxx) who doesn’t like bad guys yanking on his sneakers (“Take your hands OFF my Jordans!”) to the eye-rolling image of a child having a “Les Miz” big-flag-on-the-barricades moment, White House Down is a corker.
Channing Tatum is Cale, the war vet/DC cop who can’t convince Maggie Gyllenhaal to let him in the Secret Service. Cale has to content himself with guarding the speaker of the House (Richard Jenkins) and calling in favours to get his daughter (Joey King) a White House tour.
Then we see who Emmerich cast as the head of the White House Secret Service detail — James Woods. There’s “on-the-nose” casting, and then there’s casting Woods as a potentially volatile villain — TOO on the nose.
We go through the same Olympus has Fallen hyper-professional mercenary assault on the various security agencies that allows bad guys to crash into the White House. And we see Cale, the guy not good enough to get into the Secret Service, charge to the rescue — of his daughter, the president and the world.
These terrorists, who never miss until they start shooting at Cale, are glib.
“You just killed the secretary of defence!”
“Well, he wasn’t doing a very good job.”
Nicolas Wright plays a scene-stealing White House tour guide who sometimes interrupts the mayhem to share a little White House lore, or lecture the bad guys on the priceless artifacts they’re wrecking. Emmerich makes sure there’s an Independence Day joke, and if that’s too subtle, he blows up the Capitol. Shared plot aside, White House Down does stuff Olympus Has Fallen couldn’t afford to.
All of which undercuts the script’s lectures about the “military industrial complex”, the militia movement, the turf wars over presidential succession and the like.
Whatever messages they want to shoehorn in tumble aside in a blizzard of bullets, bombs, missiles and jokes. This is a popcorn movie, with an adequate hero, a comical presidential sidekick, a passable villain and too many deadlines, plotlines and punchlines to ever allow it to turn giddy.
But at least they were going for giddy.
As Olympus taught us, playing this sort of assault with a straight face is downright dispiriting. You kind of need terrorists offering their buzzcut leader a slice of his retirement cake to set the tone: “No, I don’t want cake! I’m diabetic!” — By Roger Moore/MCT

All about perils and obstacles

By Michael Phillips


Film: After Earth
Cast: Jaden Smith, Will Smith
Direction: M Night Shyamalan

Director and screenwriter M Night Shyamalan has gone from being Mr Twist, thanks to The Sixth Sense, to the most doggedly straightforward storyteller on the planet, judging from the modestly-entertaining After Earth. It’s essentially a two-hander showcasing the Smiths, Will and Jaden. Smith the Younger has entered that phase of not-quite-this-not-quite-thatness, which is the hallmark of being 14. He receives top billing; Smith the Elder, of I Am Legend and (with his son) The Pursuit of Happyness, makes do with second.
Co-written by Gary Whitta and the director, After Earth is an Outward Bound sort of adventure set 1,000-plus years hence. The usual dire scenario: humanity’s cavalier treatment of Earth has led to a mass exodus. The planet is overrun by animals, birds, bugs and digital effects genetically evolved to kill humans, should they return.
Jaden S plays Kitai, whose father, Cypher (Smith, W), is a “prime commander” in the interplanetary security force. Cypher’s ability to “ghost” makes him invisible and fiendishly effective against the drooling alien beastie known as the Ursa. The Ursa may sound either like a US governmental agency acronym or a Bond girl from the Sean Connery years, but it’s neither.
Pop takes junior on patrol with him (“Go and make some good memories together,” coos mom, played by Sophie Okonedo), but one meteor shower and crash landing later, father and son are back on Earth, and Elder’s dealing with two broken legs and Skyping his advice to Younger while the Younger must:
a) locate the emergency beacon lost in the crash 100km away, and b) ...
Surprise! There is no b).
After Earth is what it is: a linear series of perils and obstacles. Questing for the beacon, Kitai contends with baboons, leeches, birds of prey, tigers and the Ursa. The picture has very little humour, but it doesn’t go in for the typical digital assault on the eyes.
Shyamalan recovers rather well here, after the wobbly series of pictures he made after Signs: The Village; Lady in the Water; The Happening; and The Last Airbender.
Shot in Switzerland, northern California redwood country and Costa Rica, among other locales, After Earth won’t change your world, but it’s attractive (Airbender looked like pure crud) and Smith the Elder, lowering his voice to subterranean James Earl Jones levels, delivers a shrewd minimalist performance. His son may get there yet.
The script, for the record, answers an important question. The answer is yes. A thousand years from now, tough guys will still say “I’m good to go” when they’re good to go. — Chicago Tribune/MCT

(DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)