Horton Hears a Who!

by Gary Sundt

As Printed in The Lumberjack on March 27, 2008 

Readers rejoice! After the streak of negative reviews, which have included Rambo, The Eye, Vantage Point, Bachelor Party 2 and the remarkably bad 10,000 BC, a film has come to save us from the horrors of January through March movie-going. The title is Horton Hears a Who!, and it’s an animated, G-rated flick inspired by the classic childrens book by Dr. Seuss. 

I want to start off by simply stating that I liked this movie a whole lot. The flick is rated G, and thus has none of the things that made up those aforementioned titles. No explosions, no blood, no guts, no guns, no ghosts, no blind chicks, no naked chicks and no prehistoric mascara. What Horton has is a good story, a phenomenal cast, an amazingly original world and a huge heart. It even has a good message, which is strikingly absent from those other films. 

Horton tells the tale of Horton (Jim Carrey), an elephant who lives in the Jungle of Noob. While teaching some young animals about jungle life, our hero hears a cry for help coming from a speck of dust. He decides he must save this world he cannot see, which drives his neighbors to torment him. Leading the pack is Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), who fears Horton’s ranting will inspire the young ones in the jungle to start using their imaginations. Horton must fight through the forces of nature and his fellow animals to get this speck to safety, because “after all, a person’s a person, no matter how small.” 

The microscopic community that lives on this speck is none other than Dr. Seuss’ very favorite town, Who-ville. The voice of panic heard by Horton belongs to The Mayor of Who-ville (Steve Carrell), who has enough troubles with his 96 daughters and one emo son Jo-Jo (Jesse McCartney) without having to worry about his world being a speck in constant peril.When Horton informs him of his predicament, our littler hero goes on his own mission to keep the town safe. But his wife Sally O’Malley (Amy Poehler) and rest of the community don’t believe the wild claims of a guy who talks to an invisible elephant in the sky, so its Horton and The Mayor against the worlds trying to keep the town of Who-ville intact. 

In hindsight, the plot seems pretty complicated. But worlds-within-worlds will obscure even the most simple of tales. That said, Horton Hears a Who! is a remarkably easy story to follow for kids, adults, stoners and everyone in between. The film is incredibly sweet, and never becomes a sugar-rush due its remarkable sense of humor. And this movie is funny. I laughed a lot. The cast includes many current greats in comedy, including Carrell, Carrey, Burnett and Poehler, as well as Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill of Superbad fame. They all work at the best of their voice abilities, and bring sugar-coated fun to the kids and solid laughs to adults. 

However, the funniest player in the movie is a 9-year-old girl named Joey King, who plays an Awesome Little Yellow Thing (ALYT) named Katie. I don’t know what ALYT was supposed to be, but it sure was funny. Describing its behavior is impossible, but I offer a line of dialogue: “In my world, everybody’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies!” If that isn’t genius, I don’t know what is. 

ALYT is only one of the many strange creations in Horton Hears a Who! In fact, the sheer originality of the project’s design makes it the most Seussian of the author’s film interpretations. Everything in this flick looks and feels like it came out of famous word-maker-upper’s head. After the lackluster How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the abysmal Cat in the Hat, Horton hits the loopy and strange nail on the twisted and wild head. 

Horton still has some interesting flaws, all of which are a result of extreme deviations from Seuss’ original text. The emo-kid story line didn’t really do it for me, simply because it was underdeveloped and convoluted. The script by Ken Dario and Cinco Paul goes out of its way to make some political statements that mostly fall on deaf ears. Also, the cast’s random rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Stop This Feeling” seemed random and perhaps a bit too Shrek-like. 

However glaring these problems may be, they don’t really detract much from the overall experience. Directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino have crafted a flick worth watching, and have shed a hopeful light on future Seussian interpretations (c’mon Lorax!). 

To wrap this thing up, here’s some lousy Seussian rhymes: There are lots of bad movies, of that I am sure, and watching them causes my stomach to stir. Vantage Point sucks, 10,000 BC does too, so what is a moviegoer to do? If you want a movie that’s funny and neat, Horton Hears a Who! is pretty freakin’ sweet. Horton is awesome, with that there’s no doubt, so stop reading this review, and go check it out.

That’s it. I’m done. I promise.Never again.

10,000 BC

by Gary Sundt 

As Printed in The Lumberjack on March 12, 2008

Note from the author: I know it seems that every movie I’ve reviewed recently has recieved a negative spin. Understand, dear reader, this is simply the nature of January thru March movie-going. Most of it is going to be bad, because the studios have to unload their trash somewhere. With that in mind, the 10,000 BC rant:

Hate is such a strong word. Some people throw this word around, saying “I hate that person,” when they really don’t, or “I hate Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which is a complete impossibility. I am not one to use the word “hate” loosely. I mention this because I hated 10,000 BC. I mean really hated it.

This is the latest film from director Roland Emmerich, the mind behind the good Independence Day and the less-good The Day After Tomorrow. The trailer for 10,000 BC curiously left 1998’s Godzilla off his list of credentials, which I can understand. Godzilla was universally despised, and it is best to pretend things like that never happened. However, I didn’t hate Godzilla. The movie was stupid, but had charm I could admire. A really stupid charm.

10,000 BC doesn’t have any charm. It’s just stupid. Charmless stupidity.

The film begins with narration from an individual we never meet (Omar Sharif). He explains that D’Leh (Steven Strait), our hero, loves Evolet (Camilla Belle), a gorgeous, blue-eyed, mascara-wearing chick with really straight teeth. Where do you find mascara 10,000 years before recorded history? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s…crap.

Anyway, our hero can only be with his true love if he kills a woolly mammoth. Well, he does, and feels weird about it, so he decides they can’t be together. Evolet is heart-broken, but not for long, as some slave traders (referred to as four-legged demons) invade their little village and kidnap her. So, with the help of Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) and others, D’Leh quests Lord of the Rings-style to get back his beloved Evolet.

On this week-long journey, D’Leh and Co. come across more woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, velociraptor-ostriches, snowy mountains, jungle, desert, grasslands, the Sahara and pyramids… what? I mean, seriously, WTF?

This stuff couldn’t have happened 12,008 years ago, or during any period of time for that matter. Mammoths went extinct during the Ice Age. Saber-toothed cat versus people is plausible, but I don’t even know what the weird über-ostriches are, so no comment there.And what’s with the leisurely stroll from one distinct terrain to another? On what continent do these guys live where the deep jungle is within walking distance from the snowy mountains? And pyramids? The first stone structures at Jericho did not happen until 1,000 years after this point in history. Again, I pose the qustion: WTF?

Perhaps I’m getting too hung-up on logic here. This is supposed just be a fun popcorn movie, and I get that. Emmeric has stated publicly that this flick was never supposed to be a history lesson. But my gripes with 10,000 BC don’t end with anthropology.

This movie fails on a cinematic level as well, so much so that it insults the audience. The script presumes people don’t want logic or character development. It assumes we know little or nothing about history, and have never seen a well-made film. This flick thinks we’re 6 years old.

Because most of the audience is not in first grade, the obvious problems hit all the harder. The actors are mostly unknowns, and their performances are clear indications why. Furthermore, they spend the running time subjecting us to some of the worst dialogue ever in an Emmerich film. And that’s saying something.

Worst of all is the cinematography, which is an earth-shattering disaster. The camera work is dizzying, and not in a good way. We can’t see what’s happening half the time.

My other issue with the picture is either an issue of lighting or the print (the individual copy) I was watching. During the movies’ night sequences, the film quality had a tendency to turn noticeably grainy. 10,000 BC cost an estimated $75 million to make, and either the lighting is bad or the print’s quality is shoddy. Whatever the case, I wonder: Where did the money go? Mascara? I’m going with mascara.

Some of that mascara cash was definitely thrown in the direction of the CGI monsters. They aren’t bad, but when put next to the pain-staking detail Peter Jackson’s crew put into 2005’s King Kong, these creations, much like everything else here, just seem silly. Not as silly as Tic’Tic and pyramids, but they are silly enough.

Here’s a thought: maybe it’s supposed be silly (I’m grasping here, okay). Perhaps Emmerich wanted us to laugh. If this was his aim, he succeeded, because I laughed a lot. I laughed when Evolet’s mascara smeared, and when D’Leh nursed inner turmoil over killing the mammoth he was supposed to kill. But when the credits rolled, I didn’t think it was very funny anymore. In fact, the more I thought about it, the angrier I became.

So, as I mentioned before, I hated 10,000 BC. I hated every stupid frame of it. Every performance, every line of dialogue, every stupid impossibility. I hate the fact that this flick insults the audience on every fundamental level. I hate that there are better movies that don’t come to Flagstaff, like the well-reviewed The Bank Job. The movie studios and our sole theater tend to overlook quality filmmaking in favor of box-office dollars, and I might just hate that most of all.

Halloween (2007)

By Gary Sundt

As Printed in The Lumberjack on September 6, 2007

Roger Ebert suggested in his review of the original 1978 Halloween that John Carpenter, much like Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to play the audience like a piano.

Director Rob Zombie wants to play his audience like an electric guitar that he smashes to pieces at the end of the show. While his 2007 Halloween is a violent, macabre, redneck retelling of an old story, he does something that will polarize audiences: he made it his own.

In the retelling of Carpenter’s classic, Zombie does something special by taking the first 10 minutes of the original and stretching it out to about half an hour. The desired result is to have the answer to the question everyone asked after they saw the original, “Why is he a monster?” Michael Myers lives in Whitetrash County, America: he likes to cut up animals, his mother is a stripper, his sister is a slut, he gets picked on by the other kids and his only father figure is convinced that he is a homosexual.

It is at this point when critics need to put the 1978 classic to bed. The original was not a white trash weekend, but was instead simply a trip into hick town, middle class suburbia. Zombie makes his a different Halloween by adding a touch of deep Southern Comfort.

Beyond the necessary plot elements and some lines of dialogue, the film is not a Carpenter-inspired Halloween movie, but a true Rob Zombie film. It was made clear in the impressive if not exceptionally vicious 2005 horror road trip The Devil’s Rejects that this filmmaker was going to be bringing a high level of violence to his horror films. And he delivers in full with his Halloween.

Halloween is utterly brutal, and never pretends to be anything different. From the gut-wrenching first kill, Zombie wants to paint Michael Myers as a violent killer of circumstance, using the Laurie-Strode-is-Michael-Myers’-baby-sister storyline created in the original film’s sequel. He attempts, and succeeds, in turning a ridiculous plot element into a coherent story, giving his Myers the “all about the family” feel that Halloween II failed to pull off.

Zombie’s usual cast of C and B-List horror icons show up for Halloween, along with the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, who gives a particularly impressive performance as young Michael’s tortured mother. Daeg Faerch makes his theatrical debut as the young Michael, and does an incredible job with his task. And our new Laurie Strode is the cute Scout Taylor-Compton, who gives a solid performance as a young, ripe teenage girl, and who definitely has the pipes for the necessary screams.

The truth is, however, that Zombie’s Halloween suffers quite a bit from the very same factor that caused the other sequels so much grief. With the baby sister plot, this film wants you to be afraid of Michael Myers the man instead of “The Shape” of the original. The situation of being stalked and, for lack of a better word, hunted by an unknown force is what struck a chord in 1978. Zombie’s goal is to put an identity into a mask that, for all intents and purposes, was never supposed to have a true identity.

Regardless, Zombie’s film is a success. It provides scares and horror, which is something we haven’t gotten from Halloween films in a long time. No matter what you think of the 2007 Halloween next to the 1978 original, it can’t be ignored that somebody finally put some energy and fear into that old Bill Shatner mask again.

Note: There is currently a director’s cut available. I implore you not to watch it. It’s a very different, very bad movie.