items tagged with animated movies

CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what director Tim Burton was trying to accomplish with Charlie & the Chocolate Factory that wasn’t previously accomplished by Roald Dahl’s book or the beloved 1971 film.

MADAGASCAR

See enough movies, especially ones geared to the younger set, and you all but stop expecting to be surprised by the arc of the plot; our heroes will learn valuable Life Lessons, generally while embarking on A Perilous Journey, good will triumph over evil, the comforts of home, family, and friends will prove more beguiling than any possible adventure, yada yada yada. The joy – the shock – of the new computer-animated comedy Madagascar is that, from scene to scene, you might find yourself having no clue where events will lead, yet you’re laughing too hard to pay the matter much mind.

THE PACIFIER

There’s a moment in the Vin Diesel family comedy The Pacifier that should have really pissed me off, but instead it made me almost unaccountably happy: About midway through the film, Diesel, playing a former Navy SEAL entrusted with the safety of five fatherless youths (you’ve seen the trailers, you get the idea), enters their suburban digs covered in raw sewage, the victim of a practical joke pulled by the family’s oldest siblings.

CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS

Christmas with the Kranks is terrible. (Big surprise, huh?) What more needs to be said? As it turns out, a lot more.

BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON

I have a friend who does a bit based on a seminal Laverne & Shirley gag. In nearly every episode of that sitcom, one of the titular characters would say, “There’s no way this situation could get worse!” or “What’s that smell?” and Lenny and Squiggy would cluelessly burst through Laverne’s and Shirley’s door; if someone around us says something like “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen!” my friend will mime a door opening and exclaim, with perfect greaser-nerd cadence, “Hello!” That gag is pure sitcom-honed irony – that is, obvious irony – and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the follow-up to 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, is like a continuous loop of that Lenny and Squiggy routine.