items tagged with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

COYOTE UGLY and THE REPLACEMENTS

Most genre flicks in the ’80s were pretty crummy, but what absolutely terrifies me is that now, on the verge of a new millennium, we’re actually being presented with homages to the crummy movies of that decade: Coyote Ugly, from uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, is a nod to the Jerry-produced smash Flashdance, and The Replacements is a paean to professional-doofus sports movies like Major League and Necessary Roughness, with Gene Hackman on hand to remind us of the coach he played in 1986’s Hoosiers.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY & BULLWINKLE

One of the happier surprises of last summer was the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, a marvelously written musical comedy that transcended its source material and shot off into a madcap animated universe all its own, raising the bar for all future TV-show-turned-feature-film projects. And while it would be great to report that the film version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle approached South Park's level of cinematic exuberance, the filmmakers are facing an uphill battle: The animated series this one is based on is already such a whirligig of action, cliffhangers, and verbal and visual puns that raising the ante on it as a movie seems kinda pointless. (Clever and funny though it often is, the South Park TV series has nothing on the brilliance of the original R & B series.)