Critics are raving…
Over the last two weeks, I went to the movies for a grand total of five times, and watched five diverse movies, one of them twice and another for the second and last time.
I rewatched Rio with a bud for the second time on Wednesday, and it looked just as awesome in 2D on a smaller screen. I’ll post a detailed review if I have the time, but this is simply my favourite film of the year, mainly because it appealed to my ‘inner child’ and every character is utterly lovable. Rango is just as good, only it is more daring and less sentimental. As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, if Rango is a technical masterpiece in the likes of Legend of the Guardians, then Rio is a storytelling charmer in the vein of How to Train Your Dragon.
I also had a similar sensation comparing Source Code with Fast Five. Source Code is very intellectual, and you have to pay attention or you won’t understand the ending. Fast Five is just a ‘put your brain on cruise control and just let it rip’ kind of movie, and it is a very well-done genre picture (by genre, I mean action racing movies). But both movies have very emphatic characters that you will care about; Source Code being a ‘love story across time’ like Deja Vu (one of my favourite movies) and Fast Five being a tale about family, trust, and friendship, much like Rio (except with plenty more explosions). Both also have equally exciting action setpieces; Source Code literally being Speed on a train-meets-Groundhog Day, and Fast Five boasting the most spectacular vehicular destruction I have ever seen in my entire life (it’s even better than The Bourne Supremacy and Bad Boys 2 in gutwrenching carnage).
Hoodwinked is a passable spy spoof, but we already have another one by a more well-known studio coming out in June, so why bother with this one? For starters, it’s a decent sequel, if a little underwhelming in comparison to its superior predecessor, which had a clever ‘Rashomon’ narrative of multiple perspectives and subjective truth. Here, the espionage genre is sent up mercilessly, as well as various movies that you won’t know about unless you were born before the 90s or you’re a film buff. I chuckled many more times than my less pop-culturally aware friends, but I didn’t experience as much pathos or emotional connection as I had for the other movies I’ve seen lately. Pixar fans, though, would be delighted to know that there is a Ratatouille cameo in there. Yes, I’m not kidding, pay attention during an antagonists’ flashback sequence and you might just spot one of the characters in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.
I watched Thor for the first time with my bro the Saturday before last, and a second time with two of my mates when we snuck into another theatre after Source Code on Sunday (shh… it’s illegal, you know). Thor’s also a pretty good alternative, but it tries to be grand and kitsch at the same time, instead of going for all-out cuteness like Rio or all-out drama like Rango. And that kinda threw me off a bit. You see Thor throwing ice giants around and smashing them with his hammer, and then in the second act, he’s eating cornflakes and walking around topless. It makes for nice contrast between his world and ours, but I just felt they could’ve grounded his realm in more believability instead of making it a spotless, right-angled, not-a-single-trash-piece in sight Utopia. It’s like they sent a platoon of M-Os to clean up Asgard.
Needless to say, I spent my two-week school holiday fruitfully in terms of cinematic outings. In fact, I think this might have been the most number of movies I’ve seen in theatres in a fortnight.
Rio (rewatch) - 9/10
Source Code - 8/10
Fast Five - 8/10
Hoodwinked Too! - 4/10
Thor - 6/10
