Happy Feet with Elijah Wood, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and Robin Williams

Dance Your Way to the Theater for This Fun.. er.. Movie

Earlier in my career I remember sitting in a video edit suite editing a video for Merck or someone similarly corporate. We had a series of images… no talking head at all… and we were cutting the video to the beats of a driving soundtrack. And I realized, my golly, I’m editing a music video!

I had much the same feeling as I was watching Happy Feet, the Oscar-winning penguin-powered cute-fest finally at dollar theaters. Happy Feet is a 109-minute music video.

Oh there’s spoken dialogue and a sort of quest-for-redemption plotline that links the musical numbers. But the movie frequently bogs down whenever the characters are talking.

Moreover because the sound editors put the soundtrack so far in front of everything else the dialog is frequently hard to hear.

So like any music video the real question is, do you like the music?

Happy Feet has quite a potpourri including: The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Chicago, Rodgers and Hart, Elvis, Earth, Wind and Fire, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Queen, and Xavier Cugat; but the music of Prince and Stevie Wonder figure especially prominently.

The movie concerns one Mumble (Elijah Wood) and emperor penguin and son of Memphis (Hugh Jackman doing Elvis) and Norma Rae (Nicole Kidman doing Marilyn Monroe). Robin Williams performs almost every other voice. In Mumble’s colony, every penguin must find his heartsong and then share it with a mate, but Mumble’s heartsong is a fiercely unpleasant squawk.

His heartsong, as it turns out, is that he can dance like Savion Glover (who performed Mumble’s motion capture dancing). Mumble loves the honeyed-voice Gloria (Brittany Murphy, who can really sing) but the colony, and indeed the whole of the Antarctic is suffering from a chronic lack of fish.

The colony elders blame the song-less Mumble. But Mumble suspects there’s more to it than that and pursues a fleet of factory fishing vessels so as to communicate the colony’s needs to the aliens.

There are several song and dance scenes that are so precious you want to pinch the penguin’s little cheeks. Indeed, it’s said that Prince wasn’t going to allow the use of his song “Kiss,” but was shown an early preview and was so charmed that he wrote an original song for the movie that runs during the credits.

The environmental message is very clear, but director George Miller takes a spoonful of sugar approach that softens the enviro-moralizing.

Special kudos goes to John Powell who composed the soundtrack and made the transitions between the various rock songs so seamless. Many of his arrangements should find their way to the concert hall.

Happy Feet is rated PG for some mild peril and rude humor.

DMR grades Happy Feet a B+.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Happy Feet was upgraded. Otherwise, I would have graded it as a B.

The Fountain with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz

An Art-House Movie at a Dollar Price

I heard Jerry Herman, who composed Hello Dolly, say that the best day of his life was when Louis Armstrong agreed to sing the title track. It made a hit of the song and the play.

Likewise for Nick Wechsler, the executive producer of The Fountain, the best day producing the movie had to be when Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz agreed to star in this would-be art-house film. Otherwise this headscratcher of a movie would not have been made by Warner Brothers.

Jackman and Weisz bring not only star power but real acting chops to The Fountain. They play star-crossed lovers in three different timeframes; Spain at the time of a Torquemada-like Grand Inquisitor; in the present day; and another time in space (literally).

The non-linear editing whipsaws between each timeframe so fluidly that I don’t think I ever caught up. Normally you would call this kind of time shifting science fiction. But it reminded me of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman, too.

Opera or science fiction, I sympathized with the woman who left at the same time I did asking aloud, “Do we get an explanation now?” People smarter than me have taken The Fountain as a romantic poem on themes of mortality. (Like I need to spend any more time thinking about the shortness of life!)

The movie isn’t unwatchable... by any stretch... but I found it unfathomable rather than “deep.” By all means go see it if you like the stars or if you fancy yourself a patron of enigmas. That said, there are some very bloody sequences and the PG-13 rating is well-earned. The Fountain’s not for kids.

The Fountain is rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and language.

DMR grades The Fountain a C+.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. The Fountain was downgraded a half-grade because it was bloody.

Flushed Away with Hugh Jackman & Kate Winslet

Sushi Without the Fish

There was something especially wonderful about Aardman Animations and their stop-action clay animation movies like Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies and shorts, produced by Nick Park.

The stories were inventive and affecting and the characters were handmade; you could literally see the artist’s fingerprints in the clay.

The problem with Flushed Away, the latest CGI release from Aardman and Dreamworks may be that there are too many fingerprints on it. There are four credited story writers and six screenplay writers, none of them Nick Park.

The movie ends up being a kind of California Roll; you know, sushi without the fish.

There’s the makings a good movie here. The cast is dynamite. The storyline is out or the ordinary and the animations are shiny as a newly-minted penny. It's just missing a soul; or maybe just Nick Park.

Flushed Away is about the longstanding enmity between the class amphibia and the order rodentia, which plays out in the sewers beneath London.

Roddy (Hugh Jackman) is a lonely if pampered pet mouse in a posh Kensington apartment who finds himself flushed into a shadow-London with bustling streets, Big Ben, a mini-Thames, even the London Bridge.

There he falls in with lovely Rita (Kate Winslet), a riverboat captain from a family of scavengers who is on a collision coarse with The Toad (Ian McKellen), a grandiose crime kingpin with a scheme for ridding the sewers of mice.

Roddy is horribly clumsy physically and socially in this lower world, but he’s quite taken with Rita and her extended family of seemingly hundreds of mice. Roddy and Rita openly disdain one another, but we no where that relationship is headed. They throw in together to stop The Toad from fully flushing London's sewers.

McKellen plays The Toad the way Sidney Greenstreet might have; big and broad. McKellen's way over the top and having fun. He's joined by Da Vinci Code co-star Jean Reno, who plays The Toad's French cousin Le Frog. A Frog playing a frog. Funny, eh? The versatile Jackman also gets to sing a few numbers.

Flushed Away is rated PG for "crude humor and language."

The DMR grades Flushed Away a B-.

The Dollar Movie Review Grading System: The Dollar Movie Review grades on a curve. Movies that make choices to be course or vulgar are downgraded a full to a half grade or more. Likewise, movies that don’t gross out or offend too much can be upgraded as a ‘thanks for trying’ attaboy. Flushed Away was downgraded a half-grade because it was a hair too crude.