Ed's Review Dot Com

Blue Sky Studios, Twentieth Century Fox Animation

Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Tracy Morgan, Rodrigo Santoro, George Lopez, Jake T. Austin, Carlos Ponce, Bernardo De Paula, Wanda Sykes, Jane Lynch, Will i Am

Blu(Jesse Eisenberg) is a Blue Macaw who lives in Minnesota behind a force field called “glass” that protects him from the ice and snow outside. He lives with a book merchant and his owner, Linda (Leslie Mann) who has loved him since he was a tiny baby. Then she’s visited by a famous orthonogist who informs her that Blu is the last of his species and except for one lovely lady called Jewell (Anne Hathaway). He convinces Linda to come with him to Rio and to accompany Blu to meet Jewell and perpetuate the species. Once in Rio, Blu and Jewell don’t hit it off very well, especially since Blu has never learned to fly. There are bad guys who capture and sell for export, exotic birds of all kinds who can’t wait to get their hands on Blu and Jewell. Blu meets a few friends who help, but things go very badly and it will take all thier efforts together to try to survive.

RIo is an awesome animated film with great music and beautiful colors. The carnivale in Rio is going on, and the sights and sounds are beautiful. The voice characters are awesome. Wanda Sykes, Jane Lynch, Will I Am, Jamie Foxx, George Lopez and others fill the screen with delightful characters. An evil cockatoo, Nigel (Jemaine Clement) is one of the best villians in an animated movie in years. He’s awsomely bad!

All in all this is a great movie for kids, but does very good by the adults in the audience with many jokes and gags that adults will find very funny. It’s a very good animated film, and one of the best I’ve seen since “Toy Story 3“.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

Movie Rentals Releasing Tuesday April 19, 2011

• The King’s Speech
• Gulliver’s Travels
• The Way Back
• The Rabbit Hole
• Somewhere
• How Do You Know (Netflix)
• Skyline (Netflix)

Focus Features, Wayfare Entertainment, Misher Films

Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, Emma Roberts, Viola Davis, Lauren Graham, Jim Gaffigan, Zoë Kravitz, Aasif Mandvi

Craig (Keir Gilchrist) is an overachieving teenager in the gifted program at a special high school. He’s in love with his best friend’s girl, and under a lot of pressure. He keeps dreaming of committing suicide. He calls the suicide hotline and they recommend he admit himself to the mental hospital. He somehow thinks they’ll give him a pill and send him home so he can go to school the following day, but they admit him for a week at least, instead. To top it off, the youth ward is closed and he’s put in the adult ward. His biggest job now is to make sure his friends from school never find out where his is until he works this out.

This is an odd little movie. It’s pretty decent, but it’s hard to tell why. Craig thinks his life sucks because he has so many decisions and so many deadlines and so many expectations of others to fulfill. He is about to apply to a special college and the deadline is approaching, and he’s not sure he wants to go there. But Dad has been assisting, and if for some reason he doesn’t get in, he knows his Dad will be disappointed. So this is the main challenge that put him over the edge. He’s looking at going to the hospital to talk to someone to be relief from the deadline for a little while, but it gets out of hand. In the process he finds out that all the other kids pretty much feel the same. But he also learns a little compassion for the others have much bigger problems than he does.

This is the most understated role I’ve ever seen Zach Galifianakis take on as one of Craig’s fellow crazy people Bobby. As time goes by Craig learns to help him as well. Craig also is looking at the unobtainable girl who is his best friends girl, only to pass up Noelle (Emma Roberts) who is also in the hospital and obviously really likes him. During the film we learn a lot of the pressures and stress of being a teen. It’s a hard time. It’s also obvious that Craig thinks he’s the only one, when all the other kids have the same pressures and problems.

So the bottom line is that it’s a small indie type film, but it’s got good characters and a lot of heart. It wasn’t outstanding, but it was a very solid little film and well worth taking the time to watch it.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

DreamWorks Animation, Mad Hatter Entertainment, Mad Hatter Films

Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, Kristen Wiig, Robin Atkin Downes, David Tennant

On the Island of Berk, the young Viking, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) wants to join his town’s fight against the dragons that continually raid their town. Hiccup is a Viking and Vikings kill dragons. However, his macho father and village leader, Stoik the Vast (Gerrard Butler) , will not allow his small, clumsy, son to do so. Hiccup is an inventor not really a fighter, but regardless, Hiccup ventures out into battle and downs a mysterious Night Fury dragon with his invention, but when he tracks down the injured, very dangerous Night Fury, he can’t bring himself to kill it. Instead, Hiccup and the dragon, whom he dubs Toothless, begin a friendship that teaches him that dragons only defend themselves. Toothless teaches him that dragons have problems of their own and only fight humans because they are hunted and slaughtered by people. But now that he knows this, can he convince his “dragon killing teacher and class”, let alone the rest of the village. But most of all, will his father ever believe him?

I am now officially the last person in America to see this film. I rented it via Netflix’s “Very Long Wait” program. That’s where if the movie is any good, and if you don’t get it on the day it is released, it will go into indefinite “Very long wait” for 6-8 months. So yeah, I should have visited Redbox, or gone to any of my kid’s house to see it, but I decided to wait until Netflix got around to sending it to me. It was worth the wait.

This was an animated film that I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of by now, but it’s one of the best Dreamworks animated film since the original Shrek! The characters are very good and believable. The animation is crisp and clear, and the story is very good. Hiccup is a great kid. He’s dorky, and not very buff for a Viking, but at the same time he’s got a big heart and is a really good guy.

The dragons are funny and each one has its own special characteristics. The story is somewhat predictable and has been done before, but it’s still interesting and unique in many ways. I really enjoyed it, and I recommend it for the kids and for families wanting to watch something together. Nicely done.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

River Road Entertainment, Participant Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ

Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly, Ty Burrell, Noah Emmerich, David Andrews, Sam Shepard, Tim Griffin, Jessica Hecht

NOTE: WARNING. THIS FILM MADE ME VERY ANGRY AND THIS IS NOT REALLY A REVIEW BUT MORE OF A RANT. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK, AND I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS IN ADVANCE.

This is a very one sided somewhat documentary film that discusses the “outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts)” and the anger and frustration felt by her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). I can understand why Sean Penn is in this, as this is what we would expect from him, but Naomi Watts dropped a lot in my eyes from taking on this one sided propaganda film. This is nothing less than an attempt to attack the Bush administration based upon their side of the story without really having much in the way of facts. It is a fact that someone published the information that Valerie was a CIA agent. This is not nice, and it is a crime. And whoever did it should have been punished. But these guys take A=B and C=D, therefore A=D and make a huge jump in who’s to blame. They come out and say things that have no evidence other than they “feel it must have been like that”. For example, someone at a lower level claimed that they leaked the information, and that they saw it in a memo at the white house. Now I’m sure this was a good topic to be discussing in top secret memos at the White House, “Who is this woman and why does her husband now claim that it is false information?”. Valerie goes to her management and recommends her husband is the right person to fly to Africa to investigate aluminum tubes that are used to enrich materials to make nuclear weapons which were being shipped to Iraq. Turns out that Joe later decides there is no evidence, but that information has been sent over to the White House and compiled with other evidence that Sadaam has WMD’s or is close to making them. The largest of this evidence is the fact that he will not allow UN inspectors to do their job of checking, and is constantly defiantly marching around threatening everyone, (especially other Muslim leader) that he is willing and able to take them out in an instant. (A guy walking around with his hand in his pocket and bragging to the police that he has a gun and is ready to use it cannot be surprised if a cop shoots him. You put your hands up and follow the directions and you’ll be fine. If Sadaam had let the UN inspectors see that his WMD program was kaput, he’d still be in power there. I can still remember Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine captain who has been a frequent military expert for the media and who is a frequent Hollywood consultant to make films about the military realistic and credible, saying the he was positively certain that the military WOULD find WMD in Iraq based upon Sadaam’s threats and posturing and past history. Basically everyone was certain that it was true, and it was a surprise to find out that though he was living in a golden palace, his WMD program had been destroyed in the first gulf war.

Then Valerie protests that she did NOT send her husband to Africa. Well, of course not, she didn’t have that authority, but she recommended to her superiors that he be sent. And for what that’s worth, we don’t really care whether she sent him or not. The problem that I have with this film is that it’s about as reliable as a film made by Michael Moore. His distorted view on the world ruins his message because he has proved that he will say ANYTHING whether true or not, to prove his view of things. Therefore, though he may have a valid message, it is lost because of his whacked out view on everything makes us unwilling to trust anything he says.

They tried to make a decent spy story here, but the fact this is a biased one sided view makes me doubt what is true and what is their hopes and wishes that are true. I understand that Valerie is mad as hell, and wants to fight for the rest of her life to put George W Bush in jail for being on the other side of the political spectrum and to have the evil Dick Cheney beheaded, but this movie would have been much more useful if it was not simply one side of the story. It’s possible that most of the stuff in this film may have happened the way they described it, but at the same time, it could just as easily be true that very little of it is what actually happened.

That is why I can’t recommend a propaganda film that is told from an extremist point of view. If they had tried in the least to balance the story with some of the other side it might be worth something, but at this point it’s useless. I watched this DVD a while ago, and I expected a fair dramatization of the story and wanted to know more about it. It made me very angry with it’s one sided viewpoint and I wanted to wait a while before trying to write a review. I have still failed, as I’m still angry that they are trying to pull this, and I really wished I had deleted this from my queue before I wasted my time watching it.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog