The Bourne Ultimatum

A short time back, a friend of mine opined that THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM was essentially the same movie as THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. While I agree that ULTIMATUM was nearly a remake of SUPREMACY, I didn't mind. I liked SUPREMACY, so more of that jump-cut action was fine with me.

The thing I like about the Bourne movies is that they make hard stuff look hard. The fights look like real, brutal fights for survival, not staged dances. There is no graceful parkour: running across rooftops is hard, and dangerous. People breathe heavily when they've been running or fighting, and actions have resonance. This is not a world of easy death or winking nihilism. This is a world in which real actions have real consequences, and I always enjoy visiting it.

Damon, Allen, and Strathairn are all top notch, and the filmmakers cared enough to get serious talents such as Paddy Considine, Albert Finney, and Scott Glenn for some of the smaller supporting roles. Yeah, the story doesn't go very far and the film doesn't resonate all that much, but it's a fun ride while it lasts.

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.