As the familiar Columbia Pictures logo is stamped with a smiley face, it’s clear that nobody thought THE EMOJI MOVIE through beyond the title. Reportedly inspired by Toy Story, as was everything from The Secret Life of Pets to Boss Baby, director Tony Leondis aims for parody but winds up becoming the very empty vessel that it is trying to skewer
The screenplay is very much an amalgam of other recent animated films. Inside our phones, there’s a complex unseen society (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life etc). Emoji Gene (voiced by T.J. Miller) lives in Textopolis, where every emoji is taught to only be one thing (Inside Out, Smurfs: The Lost Village). Labelled a malfunction due to his many emotions, he and Hi-5 (James Corden) leave their own app (Wreck-It Ralph) in order to find mysterious hacker Jailbreak (Anna Faris) who has a mastery of the phone’s code (The LEGO Movie).
On the surface the film is cleanly animated and filled with sporadic laughs, especially from Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge as Gene’s apathetic parents, Mel and Mary Meh. Indeed, it would have been a far improved film if they’d focused entirely on their non-plussed personas. On the other hand, Sir Patrick Stewart’s Poop starts with the rally cry of “We’re Number Two!” and goes downhill from there.
Few films have been as cynical in their shameless advertising and product placement as this. Indeed, much of the plot sees the emoji having to navigate through Candy Crush, the Just Dance app, and Spotify in order to reach Dropbox and be uploaded to the cloud. They aren’t simply plot devices either, with logos hanging prominently in the centre of the screen while the scene is established.
Yet an even bigger crime is the lack of internal consistency, perhaps unsurprising for a film that has based itself around emoji. If the message of the film is to be true to yourself, it is something that the light script has trouble doing itself. The character of Alex (Jake T. Austin), the human teenager owner of the phone, is fully animated. Yet we also see live action footage on YouTube. Even simple technical information about phones is erroneous, insulting the intelligence of all but the youngest fans.
On the scale of 😒 to 💩, THE EMOJI MOVIE falls somewhere in the disengaged middle. There’s so many missed opportunities in the film, including a brief foray into the lives behind Instagram photos that could have sustained a deeper narrative. As the film wraps up into the seemingly obligatory dance scene finale, it’s hard to mustre much emotion beyond an old-school ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2017 | US | DIR: Tony Leondis | WRITER: Tony Leondis, Eric Siegel, Mike White | CAST: T. J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Sean Hayes, Patrick Stewart | RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures (AUS) | RELEASE DATE: 14 September 2017 (AUS)
Comedy Central has released the first red band trailer to the intriguing Movie 43, a film with a cast so big that we were surprised Garry Marshall wasn’t attached. The anthology sketch comedy (see: Kentucky Fried Movie) is directed by (deep breath) Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, Patrik Forsberg, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk and Brett Ratner. It is released in Australia on 31 January 2013 from Roadshow.
The cast list is even bigger with (gasp) Gerard Butler, Anna Faris, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Hugh Jackman, Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Kate Bosworth, Kate Winslet, Terrence Howard, Liev Schreiber, Justin Long, Kristen Bell, Patrick Warburton, Josh Duhamel, Jason Sudeikis, Chloe Grace Moretz, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jack McBrayer, Kieran Culkin and Chris Pratt.
At The Reel Bits, we don’t just post trailers now, we review them too. This is Trailer Talk. Check out our thoughts after viewing the trailer below.
Trailer Talk:
Trying too hard much? While it is true that we get to see Gerard Butler playing a gnome of some kind, on the evidence of this trailer it will be another in an endless series of films that run together as many bodily function jokes as humanly possible in a short period of time. While this might be a step up for Anna Faris from Scary Movie, What’s Your Number? and The Dictator, she begins the clip by asking someone to “poop on her”. Outrageous!
Individually, these gags work as a series of one-liners (barely), but like all sketch comedy, we imagine this will be hit and miss. In a ideal world, they would just stop writing the ‘misses’, and concentrate solely on the hits, but comedy is incredibly subjective. It’s an interesting experiment nonetheless, and there are certainly a decent amount of laugh-out-loud moments in this short trailer. Yet if they can’t maintain a consistency across 2½ minutes, we doubt their hilarity over 90 minutes. Even the heydey of the sketch comedy movies (which we haven’t seen since the late 1970s) struggled with this.
Bottom Line? If the film can keep above the bottom line, there looks like a decent amount of giggles to be had. Let’s hope we are laughing with the film and not at it.
It will take more than an oversized fake beard to patch up the gaping hole Sacha Baron Cohen has punched through the boundaries of taste in his latest outing.
Sacha Baron Cohen‘s singular quest to deride and belittle his targets has earned him accolades around the globe, and has become known for portraying a variety of fictional characters who set up real-world people to fall in front of the cameras. Just as Gary McDonald’s Norman Gunston satirised Australian culture and show business, Baron Cohen’s Ali G, Brüno and, most infamously, Borat set out to challenge what people thought of cultural stereotypes and expose general ignorance. Yet there is a fine line between mocking bigotry and simply being offensive.
In The Dictator, Baron Cohen portrays Admiral General Aladeen of the fictional Republic of Wadiya, said to be based loosely on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. One of the most tyrannical dictators in the world’s history, he visits New York to address the United Nations. However, forgotten heir Tamir (Ben Kingsley) betrays him, replacing him with a decoy intending to bring democracy to Wadiya. Aladeen is set adrift in the Big Apple, taken in by do-gooder Zoey (Anna Faris), but is determined to ensure democracy is kept away from the country he has lovingly enslaved.
Baron Cohen’s schtick has to date been a straightforward one, employing tried-and-true candid camera techniques to catch his unsuspecting targets behaving more like themselves than they would care to admit. With The Dictator, the co-writer and star tries on a narrative structure for size. On one hand, the move shows a progression in a career that was beginning to become stagnant, with each character effectively a variation on previous incarnations, with turns in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Hugo notable exceptions. However, it is not the form of the film that betrays Baron Cohen’s weaknesses, but rather the character(s) he chooses to continually portray. It also means he no longer has the excuse of using bigotry for the purpose of catching people off guard.
Stripped of his beard and identifiable accent, Aladeen is the basest of racist humans, sparing nobody in his tirades. With Borat, he played off his own Jewish heritage with the anti-Semitic character. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Baron Cohen explained “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice”. Yet nobody is spared in The Dictator, with the character of Aladeen being against women (and feminism generally), various races and religions and implicitly a parody of Arabic stereotypes. Which begs the question of who or what Baron Cohen is actually targeting in this very broad slapstick farce, except perhaps deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, to whom the film is ‘dedicated’.
There are moments when Baron Cohen’s point is almost visible, including the perception of an American couple who assume Aladeen and his colleague are terrorist. In a final speech, perhaps designed to mirror Charlie Chaplin’s seminal monologue in The Great Dictator (1940), Baron Cohen comes closest to making a point about the hypocrisy of the United States on a global scale. Yet he squanders every other chance at comedy on slapstick, and cheap shots that would have seemed dated in the days of Ayatollah t-shirts. In the end, Baron Cohen doesn’t so much hold up a mirror to bigotry, but seems to have finally become one himself, providing an easily imitable cartoon to be misused by the masses.
‘Romantic comedy’ has become a bit of a misleading label of late, with the romance being synonymous with foreplay as the focal point of the story. Gone are the days in which a romantic encounter atop the Empire State Building would suffice, or a cross-country trip between two mismatched soul-mates would result in true love, with everything from No Strings Attached to the identical Friends With Benefits attempting to stick a square peg into the mainstream’s all-too-willing hole. Not for nothing either: the success of risqué comedies Knocked Up and Bridesmaids have established the public’s craving for something they can enjoy with their best mates and their favourite squeeze equally.
In What’s Your Number?, based on Karyn Bosnak’s novel 20 Times a Lady, Ally Darling (Anna Faris, Yogi Bear) breaks with the latest in a long line of bad relationships and discovers, in the pages of a women’s glossy magazine, that she has slept with more men than double the national average. Concerned she will exceed twenty lovers without ever finding “the one”, she enlists the help of the promiscuous Colin (Chris Evans, Captain America: The First Avenger), who lives in the apartment across the hall. In exchange for using her apartment to hide out from his endless string of morning after girls, he aids her in tracking down past lovers in the hope that one of them will be what she has been looking for.
Every romantic comedy has a conceit that needs to be overcome. Without these arbitrary rules, there would be no conflict and the two people on the poster would probably get together in the first reel. What’s Your Number? has the particularly obnoxious setup of using the number of sexual partners a woman is “supposed” to have before finding the true man. The aim appears to be to present Ally Darling as a modern woman, fully in control of her destiny, but just blind to the fact that she has always been best when beating her own drum. That’s not the euphemism you think it is. Instead, before Ally comes to her final and inevitable realisation, it is almost as though the film is punishing its lead for having a less than “virtuous” history. Is that really the message behind this film? Too much sex might stop you from bagging a man? Indeed, several gags about worn-out vaginas seem to subtly suggest so.
Anna Faris continues her trend of spotty film role selections, despite the fact that we know she is capable of so much more from Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation and her appearances on TV’s Entourage. Here she does nothing to redeem the endless parade of Scary Movie films or rom-coms that someone in her talent agency needs to be shot out of a canon for. Meanwhile, genuine megastar Chris Evans, fresh from Captain America and soon to return to the role in The Avengers, is too good for this slender material. Is he still paying penance to Fox for the Fantastic Four films? That said, his previous experience doesn’t go entirely to waste. Shots in which he wears little more than a hand-towel are sure to please all the right demographics.
It’s not a complete disaster, with a handful of genuinely funny lines throughout. One of the best Twitter jokes to grace the screen comes in Ally’s enquiry to Colin as to the location of her coffee pot. “I broke it. If you were on Twitter you would know that already,” comes the knowing reply. Of course, this is all ruined by Ed Begley Jr’s role as a Twitter obsessed father, who perpetuates the bad rep that Tweeters get. It’s the dick jokes that are the real zingers, including a bit from Anthony Mackie as a closeted ex with political aspirations, but as with many recent rom-coms, it falls short of genuine edge with its reliance on coy winks over outrageous zingers.
[stextbox id=”custom”]What’s Your Number? is a question that should be answered in single digits, although if nudge-nudge-wink-wink references and naked Avengers are a thing, this is your movie.[/stextbox]
Whether it is all some kind of marketing ploy or a genuine wave of nostalgia triggered by their sudden availability on DVD and retro-themed television channels, everything old is suddenly cool again. From the big-budget blockbusters of the Transformers films and the bafflingly successful Alvin and the Chipmunks films, through to the forthcoming revivals of The Smurfs and The Muppets in 2011, no stone is being left unturned in the quest to relive our collective childhoods and spike t-shirt sales all over the world. Yogi Bear was a character that first appeared on The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958, but after gaining his own show in 1961 (The Yogi Bear Show), he and his little pal Boo Boo haven’t looked back. An iconic coupling in the Hanna Barbera stable, Yogi joined the likes of The Wacky Races and The Flintstones, often crossing over in Laff-A-Lympics, Yogi’s Space Race and Yogi Bear & Friends. Despite a few outings here and there, Yogi has remained fairly quiet for several decades…until now.
Yogi (voiced by Dan Aykroyd, Ghostbusters) and Boo Boo (voiced by Justin Timberlake, The Social Network) are two unusual brown bears living in Jellystone National Park. Spending their days concocting elaborate schemes to steal picnic baskets from park guests and testing the patience of park Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanaugh,TV’s Ed), they are soon joined by a documentary filmmaker (Anna Faris, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) who loves the park as much as Ranger Smith. When the corrupt Mayor Brown (Andrew Daly, Eastbound & Down) threatens to close down the park and hand it over to developers, it is up to Ranger Smith, Yogi and Boo Boo to come up with the ultimate plan to save the park.
The marketing for Yogi Bear did not get off to a good start, with the dubious tagline of “Good things come in bears”. The unintentionally suggestive advertising fail may attract a whole new audience to the film, but the target audience here is both the kiddies and those with fond memories of the pic-a-nic basket thief. For all the cries of outrage over updating a beloved childhood classic, it is easy to forget that the original Yogi Bear had a very simple premise of Yogi and Boo Boo trying to steal picnic baskets while evading Ranger Smith. In the feature-length update of Yogi Bear, very little has changed except for the attempt to expand this concept out to 82 minutes. Indeed, the original appearances in The Yogi Bear Show were merely segments of a longer show, that also contained Snagglepuss and the more forgettable Yakky Doodle. So you don’t have to be smarter than the average bear to realise that a movie-length version is going to be a bit of a stretch. Yet in many ways, it is by maintaining these traditional elements is what gives this new film version much of the charm that it does have.
The casting is a little bit bizarre, and while seeing Dan Aykroyd’s name above the title may not turn any heads, the appearance of Justin Timberlake as Boo Boo is initially mind-bending. However, in an age when celebrities simply turn up and play themselves in animated roles, this kind of voice acting is actually quite refreshing. Aykroyd completely captures Daws Butler’s original voice, which in turn was aping Art Carney. Timberlake, who has been going from strength to strength on-screen lately, does a dead-on Boo Boo. Why use such big names when any voice actor probably could have sufficed? It’s a money-making exercise, of course, but their performances actually give real life to the characters. Similarly, the casting of seasoned comic actors Cavanaugh, Faris and Gulliver’s Travels T.J Miller gives a sense of comic timing often missing from kiddie fare such as this. Andrew Daly’s villain, however, looks and acts remarkably like former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. His evil scheme even involves giving $1000 to each of the town’s citizens, mirroring Rudd’s own economic stimulus package. It is probably all coincidence…or is it?
Yogi Bear is reasonably fun and inoffensive, although many of the jokes – not to mention the tacked on environmentalism and romance used to pad out the plot – will whoosh over the kiddie’s heads. Quite talky in parts, possibly to justify the expensive price tags at least one of the headliners would have commanded, the film could have used more hijinks. From some of these crazy schemes at least one of the great gags of the film, a safety instruction manual that is just a picture of Yogi and Boo Boo screaming, emerges. Yogi Bear ultimately could have been so much more: in the attempt to update it for modern audiences, it lost sight of those things that made it great for kids and adults alike. However, if the screams of delight at the physical gags from this reviewer’s audience are anything to go by, the kids are going to love it.
Rabid Rider
It is also worth mentioning that a short film, a new 3D Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon titled Rabid Rider, accompanies the screening. As with the Coyote Falls Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote short that ran before Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, the short film ahead of the feature is a welcome return to the classic theatrical tradition that Pixar have been keeping alive for the last few years. Much like the feature itself, it gives a modern update to the classic archetypes that could be found in the chases of the original cartoons. Here Wile E. Coyote battles with a Segway people mover, and the physical comedy cleverly plays on the expectations of the audience. For example, when we fully expect the Coyote to get hit by one object, he’ll cleverly avoid it – only to be hit by a truck instead. The use of 3D is also quite splendid, making full use of the stretching and flying objects that have always characterised Chuck Jones-inspired animation. Anybody looking to update classic cartoons would do well to look at director Matthew O’Callaghan’s (Open Season 2, Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas) work on these shorts, which also included Fur of Flying in front of Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole.
Yogi Bear was released by Warner Bros. in Australia on January 13, 2011
