Happy Feet

HAPPY FEET is an animated movie about a tap-dancing penguin who teaches the other penguins in his flock how to dance along with their already excellent, if derivative, singing.

Compare this to SURF'S UP, an animated movie about a surfing penguin who travels to a tropical island to compete in a surfing competition.

Why compare the two? Because for some reason, animated surfing penguins are more interesting and exciting than animated dancing penguins. I don't know why. I find live-action surfing movies to be remarkably dull (and I surf), but I can watch Astair and Kelly movies all day long. All the excitement of dance vanishes when it's animated, however, even if I know that someone, somewhere, actually did those tap routines so they could get recorded and animated.

So if HAPPY FEET's big draw is the dance numbers, and the dance numbers are flat, what else has it got? Well it has excellent singing (Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, and Nicole Kidman all lend their voices), and yet another tiresome performance from Robin Williams, who is at a point in his career in which he just has to scale things back a little. But those singing performances are hampered by the fact that they're all covers of popular songs, which subtracts from the spell the movie is ostensibly trying to cast.

My 7-yr-old liked HAPPY FEET, but I think it's no SURF'S UP. Give me surfing penguins over dancing penguins any day of the week.

The Apple

I’m having trouble getting a handle on THE APPLE.

It’s a rock opera telling of the end time story of the Book of Revelations. It was produced by Yorum Globus and Menachem Goldman (who later made a great deal of money producing cheesy ‘80s action films under their Cannon shingle) and directed by Goldman, with George Clinton helping out with musical duties. It equates David Bowie’s classic glam rock, gender-bending schtick with the Devil, and makes hippies the 144,000 (The same actor plays both the hippie leader and God, who manifests himself to the flower children as the driver of a pimped out Cadillac.). I can only assume that nearly everyone involved with the film was coked out of their minds during the entire production cycle.

Here’s your synopsis: a couple of really sappy ‘70s balladeers (basically The Carpenters, but with less talent. A lot less talent.), get noticed by the Devil, who owns a music company so powerful that it actually controls the government. Mr. Boogaloo (who would later go on to electrify the world of break dancing) tries to seduce the wholesome songsters into the evil world of glam rock, but only one of them bites the (literal and figurative) apple. You can guess which one. From there, it’s a short hop to everyone but the hippies wearing the Mark of the Beast, the fallen seeking forgiveness, God rolling in in that ghastly, tacky Cadillac.

That’s your story, but this is a rock opera. How are the songs? They’re horrible. Unlistenable. Ghastly. Um, really, really bad. The folkies suck. The glammers embarrass themselves. There isn’t a single hummable tune in the whole thing. In fact, the production numbers are so bad that even though they’re the reason for the film’s existence, they feel like interruptions.

But what is THE APPLE trying to tell us? Here’s a movie about Revelation, made by a couple of Jewish guys, that feels like an unholy alliance between the Christian Coalition and the Chicago Seven. It’s the product of a metropolitan film and music industry that feels more at home in Early-‘70s Middle American sexual discomfiture than the free love ethos of the hippies it sanctifies. It stands for nothing that I can see, leaving it a weird mishmash of messages, images, and bad music.

THE APPLE has absolutely nothing to recommend it, whatsoever. Nevertheless, I respect a movie like this more than EVAN ALMIGHTY, my current example of the archetypical mass market product. Golan and Globus failed, but they failed greatly.
There’s some honor in that, at least.

Flushed Away

Poor Hugh Jackman. The guy's trying to be a movie star: he really is. He made a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan, an action movie with Stephen Sommers, even a prestige picture with Christopher Nolan. What does he have to show for it? More flops than a skid row hotel. FLUSHED AWAY, with Jackman voicing the lead, was another in the long list of studio loss-makers. Check off "kid's film," Hugh. Perhaps you'll have better luck in a zombie movie.

FLUSHED AWAY looks like a successful kid's movie. It's structured like one, with all the beats, gags, and character moments we'd expect, and it's a perfectly fine entry in the genre. It's lacking something, however - that heart, that hook, that special something that makes it the kind of picture you don't mind seeing again and again. Here's the setup: Roddy (our hapless Hugh) lives the sweet life in Kensington, which, I infer, is a posh London borough. He's a housepet, and a happy one, until circumstance conspires against him and he's literally flushed away into the London sewers. There, he discovers Rat Culture, finds a place in it, and even defeats the evil Mr. Toad (whose toadies include Le Frog, whose henchmen respond to the command, "Fight like Frenchmen!" by raising their hands in surrender).

The movie's visually rich, it has gags galore, it features character design in the beloved Aardman style, and it feels like the kind of thing that went through committee after committee until every cog in a soulles creative machine was happy with the output, right down to the musical number that closed things out. There's no "there" there and, compared with a masterpiece like RATATOUILLE, FLUSHED AWAY is merely a trifle, something to sedate the kids while you mow the lawn.

Better luck next time, Hugh. And really, think about that zombie movie. It might finally put you over the top.