In Israeli-American director Joseph Cedar’s masterful film, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, a ridiculously expensive pair of shoes given as a gift leads to a friendship between rising Israeli politician Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi, “Encirclements”) and Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere, “Time Out of Mind”), an American businessman, consultant…
When we last left our intrepid tiny blue friends, they had just . . . oh, why bother explaining the plot of this film’s predecessor, “The Smurfs,” when it’s going to be difficult enough to write about this sequel’s ridiculous storyline? And, unless one is either under the age of four or in a drug-induced…
Someone poke my smurfing eyes out. Please. That’s really all I have to say after watching the, putting it nicely, lackluster full trailer for Sony Pictures Animation’s The Smurfs 2. In it Gargamel, now a famous magician in Paris, conjures up two “Naughties” to corrupt the wholesome Smurfette in an effort to get back home….
In 2006 George Miller, Warren Coleman, Judy Morris, and John Collee brought us “Happy Feet,” which proved that despite being confined to the barren, icy wasteland of Antarctica, penguins can have fun too (usually by singing radio hits). Despite mild controversy over the film’s environmentalist stance and its supposed polar reconstruction of an urban environment…
Ah, those lovable, enchanted, small blue creatures known as the Smurfs — many of us Generation Xers grew up with Peyo’s creation on Saturday morning with a bowl of cereal. Our children have not, and seeing a vast untapped resource, Sony Pictures decided to do a remake of the classic cartoon. Now some critics have…
A second trailer for Happy Feet Two has been made available by Warner Bros, giving us more of the same — singing and dancing penguins. Animation-wise the movie gets high marks but from a watchabilty standpoint, this one looks like a bitterer pill to swallow than its predecessor. Children, however, will gobble this up like…
You can’t keep a good penguin down (especially one that saved the Emperor penguin population and made Warner Bros. Pictures a lot of money in the process). In Happy Feet Two the savior in “Happy Feet,” Mumbles, is all grown up with a wife and son. The issue at hand this time around isn’t that…
