Lightening It Up

After many months of depressing but nonetheless Important Oscar films, it's time to take a minute and catch a breath. It's that time of year when days are longer, outside seems brighter, I wake to birds outside my window, baseball is ALMOST official, and I want to lighten up.

It's also catch up time. This is the time between Oscar and the Box Office Bonanza known as the Summer Movie Season. Plus, since I'm about to be out of work for awhile and resting often, I need to start updating my plethora of lists and getting back into a movie mood.

This week's column is brought to you by the letter "R" - as in "Red" and "Rango". Both have star power and lots of laughs. Coincidentally, neither film is particularly kid-friendly.

If "Red" was a kids movie, it would be called "Fun with Frank, Friends and Firearms". This is the perfect Oscar-summer segue movie. It includes Oscar winners (Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman) and has as its lead a huge action star (Bruce Willis). That these people (and don't forget Mary Louise Parker) have kick ass, finely honed comedic timing is enhanced by the ubiquitous one liners scattered all over the script. I felt like a little kid watching an animated movie. I giggled alot and felt really upbeat when it was over.

"Rango" is a much more difficult film to describe. It's an animated movie which was treated as a live action movie. The actors didn't just read their lines into a microphone. The movie was actually acted out, and then animated. I think that's an original idea. Plus, there's also Johnny Depp. Given that the director was the same guy who gave birth to Jack Sparrow, this should be a match made in heaven.

Unfortunately, it's not. The film itself is erratic. I did act like a kid though. Sometimes I giggled a bit, and most of the time I squirmed in my seat, thinking it was too long. (Ironically enough, the kids in my screening did the same thing.) Is it funny? Sure. But it's not cute. The one-liners went over the head of the kids and I didn't really hear any adults laughing, just chuckling.
The biggest problem I have is that I can't figure out the target audience.

I think "Rango" is either a semi-successful experiment, or a very lengthy ad for the new "Pirates" film. (Yes I know one is Nickelodeon and the other is the D-word.) Now that I remember how funny and deadpan Depp is, I may actually re-evaluate that film.

March and April are always good cinematic months. I can watch all the DVDs I've missed (a rather long list now that video stores are gone), and I'm missing nothing at the theaters. There's nothing there to see. I can be a very patient person, so I'll just wait. There's an awful lot to see in the meantime.