School holidays: it must be family-friendly movie time. We went and saw Kung Fu Panda yesterday. It's good but not great. The animation itself is often lovely, but the fights are a bit too frenetic for my taste. It all seems to be over in a flash. Of Dreamworks animation, I would rate the first Shrek and Madagascar as better.
Speaking of Madagascar, they showed a trailer for a sequel that I had forgotten was coming. Here's hoping it can overcome the inevitable challenge of loss of novelty. (The penguins seem to have a lot of screen time in the preview, which is a good sign.)
The cinema also showed the shorts for Mamma Mia. It's amazing how long flakey, vacuous Euro pop can last, isn't it? I didn't rush out to see the stage show, so the movie is the first time I knew what the plot was about. Something about "free spirited" mother with adult daughter whose father could have been any one of 3 different men. The kids in the audience seemed to like the music, but this plot line may be a little hard to explain to any under 10 year old who still has a firm connection in his or her mind between marriage and having babies. Still, Tony Abbott could be accused of causing the same difficulty a couple of years ago, I suppose.
No matter how strong the reviews might be, it's not going to revive the romantic musical as an art form.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the cinema also showed the preview for The Love Guru. It made the film look fairly innocuous, and raised some laughs, so let's hope parents actually read reviews and know how badly it has performed in the States before they send their kids off to see it.
5 comments:
You could argue that the romantic musical was itself a revival of the great opera tradition. (And opera itself was a revival; when it was effectively 'reinvented' by Monteverdi during the Italian renaissance, he was essentially attempting to reinvent the Ancient Greek drama.)
Large-scale stage or even cinema musical shows will perhaps never be as popular as they once were, but now, come the television, DVD and CD era, they're not dying out, but giving birth to a new generation of idiosyncratic and occasionally brilliant musical dramas.
I really enjoyed Kung Fu Panda, though - a little unusually for me - I found the product placement and constant referencing of other films unoriginal and offputting.
Product placement in Kung Fu Panda? What product was placed there?
And references to other films: not sure I even noticed that (other than in a generic sense) either.
I thought it started well and some of the animation itself was witty in a classic Warner Brothers cartoon sort of way (I liked the ducks in particular.) But the story got less interesting as it went on.
It may be a case where a sequel with a better story might be better, despite the loss of character novelty.
Maybe it's the sort of film where the sequel beats the prequel. There's a few films like that.
There were a few references to Jackie Chan movies and even (God help us) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As for product placement, I was thinking about the way the Snake/Tigress/Mantis/Crane/Turtle characters were quite obviously scripted with action figures in mind. (It seems like ads for KFC Kung Fu Panda deals have been going on for ages.) Though maybe that doesn't fit the definition of product placement?
Nah, that's not product placement, just rapacious marketing. By the way, McDonalds has Kung Fu Panda toys too!
I will now sound out of character and admit that it does often cross my mind that such toys are probably exploiting poor Chinese factory workers. They are often (although not always) of such quality that I feel much guiltier about it than if they were smaller and crappier, like the stuff that used to come in cereal boxes, for example.
Despite often having batteries and microchips in them, they usually only get played with for about one week until the next visit to Macca's and the next new toy. They train kids to be the ideal capitalist consumer, if your ideal is for them to get bored fast and demand new rubbish to entertain them.
Come my appointment as benevolent dictator, (remember my coronation that will take place on the top sail of the Sydney Opera House after my ascent by robot mule?) I would decree that free toys must be crappier.
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