Loo.me

Little Miss Sunshine is a lovely little film that will undoubtedly bring a smile to your face. From the very first moment when you see a 9 year old girl watching a beauty pageant, you know this movie is about dreams and desires. And by the second scene where a failed suicide victim is forced to room with a 15 year-old teenage boy who’s refuses to speak and writes “Please don’t kill yourself. Welcome to Hell” on his notepad before turning out the light, you know that most characters will be fairly eccentric and their dreams will be revealed, dealt with, shattered and reassembled by the end of the film.

Throughout the movie we are introduced to all six family members and their respective dreams. One wants to be in the Air Force, another to sell a self-help book, another to do drugs and have sex with as many people as possible before he dies, and so on and so forth. With each character’s dreams on display and with 6 characters, that’s a lot of storytelling. Thankfully, each story is fairly entertaining and well acted – each actor absolutely nails their scenes.

All the characters are interesting, but none of them are extremely captivating (except Arkin) so works that there is no main character and we can jump from one storyline to the next. Ultimately we realize that each character’s dream is a great setup for some good comedy and not much else.

I believe the movie dreams to be nothing else other than quirky and really funny. Towards this goal, it completely succeeds. The movie does not have much depth nor will resonate very long. It is like a beautiful summer day of sunshine – great to experience and fun to enjoy if you have the time, but not necessarily memorable.

Overall: 8 out of 10

Some notes:

• The film is very similar to Chevy Chase’s National Lampoon’s Vacation. Both are about a family roadtrip where generations, siblings and ambitions are thrown into a “family trickster” and shaken up. Grandma in Vacation and Grandpa in Sunshine serve a similar purpose and Greg Kinnear does a good job playing the Clarke Griswold roll – especially when things start going south. Luckily though, this movie does not hinge on Greg Kinnear’s performance the way Vacation relied on Chevy. No, this movie relies on the complete ensemble and they flat out deliver.

• 

  My one complaint is the development on Kinnear’s character. Throughout most of the movie he is selfish, patronizing and oblivious. Come the end of the movie, his 180 U-turn seems unbelievable. However, the climax was heart-warming enough that I was easily able to gloss over this issue

(this is also posted at the movie site: doubler.wordpress.com)

Watching Pirates of the Carribean this past weekend, i was stunned about how much of it was lifted from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Let me count the ways…

1. The beginning of Jedi has a desert monster that did the bidding of Jabba. This happens to look exactly like The Krackin – the sea monster that does Davy Jones’ bidding. You may recongnize the same little pointy teeth that they both have. (it was called a Sarlacc in ROTJ)
2. The Ewoks are a cute little bunch of animals in the jungle. Pirates has a group of cannibals on an island who have a similarly cute little language. Just as they confuse Jack Sparrow as a god, the Ewoks confuse C3PO to be their god and place him in command
3. The Ewoks are cannibals too – seriously, it says so on Wikipedia (although we all know how accurate that is)
4. The Ewoks decide to burn Han Solo alive above a big fire pit that looks very similar to the fire where the cannibals try to burn Captain Jack. (Have to give credit to my friend Justin for this one). So basically Pirates took the Ewok scece and instead of having Luke, Leia, Chewy, and RD2 tied up and C3P0 as God, they used Jack for all it.
5. Luke Skywalker is a lame, painful-to-watch guy with a lightsaber who is upstaged by the more manly Princess Leia. Similarly, Orlando Bloom is (as always) a lame, painful-to-watch guy with a sword who is upstaged by the more manly Keira Knightly
6. Both Luke and Orlando try to save their dads who have aligned themselves with the main villian (Emperor and Davy) – the main villians who are both trying to kill Luke/Orlando or convince him to join the bad guy army of troops.
7. Comic relief is provided by Han Solo – a renegade that is temporarily trying to do the right thing to land a gal (Leia) – just as funny-man Jack Sparrow, a renegade pirate has a brief spell of integrity to impress Kiera.
8. There are many other character similarities i could make such as between Lando and Cutler, R2D2 and CP30 are the same as the two funny guys with bad teeth who steal the chest and tried to steal the Black Pearl, and the Millenium Falcon is very similar to the Black Pearl.

Can you think of any others?

I’ve been pretty pumped for the theatrical release of Miami Vice ever since i read about it 6 months ago.  So, in preparation of the movie’s release this weekend, i had been watching episodes of the first season of the Miami Vice TV show. That, and listening to Jay-Z’s and Linkin Park’s Numb/Encore every chance i could get (that’s the song playing in the movie’s trailer).  Watching the tv shows this past week, two episodes stick out in my memory from that first season, 1) the 2 hour pilot and 2) an episode called “Smuggler’s Blues.”

Let’s talk about the pilot for a moment. The pilot is a great beginning to a great series. It establishes Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) as an ex-football superstar from U. of Miami – a boozing, emotionally-crippled, undercover agent whose marriage has fallen apart and has him living on a sailboat with an alligator named Elvis. He also drives a Ferrari and a cigarette boat to keep up his high-roller profile so he can easily co-mingle with the corrupt players of the Miami drug scene. His partner, fellow officer Ricardo Tubbs, is a NY officer (not detective) who has followed a drug lord to Florida to bring him to justice for murdering his brother. After initial friction between Crockett and Tubbs, the two decide to work together to bring down the drug lord and in the process they establish some good chemistry and eventually become partners.

Leaving the theater after viewing the movie version of Miami Vice this weekend, i had a strange feeling in my gut. The movie was incredibly cool: the fight scenes, the women, the cars, the music – all very slick. But, something wasn’t sitting right with me. And it was Colin Farrell. In the TV show, you buy into Crockett as an authentic southerner and a conflicted man who is torn between his job and the people he loves (co-workers, women, family). He is cold, distant and entirely dedicated to his job, yet at the same time has a warm heart and is making progress in dealing with his demons. He’s slowly becoming emotionally available to those who love him.

In the movie, you have no idea who Colin Farrell is. There’s no back-story provided. Because he has the same name (Sonny Crockett) as the TV show, you have to assume he’s the same guy. But he doesn’t act like Don Johnson’s Crockett. There’s no mention of him as an ex-football player, he doesn’t seem southern. In fact, he seems Irish. Like the TV-show Crockett he drives a sweet Ferrari but without any explanation you assume he’s either extremely wealthy like Will Smith’s Mike Lowery in Bad Boys or dirty like Michael Douglas in Black Rain.

Another problem i have about the movie is Crocket’s relationship with Tubbs (Jamie Foxx). In the TV-show, there is always a scene where Tubbs is helping Crockett open up and they have a genuine friendship who have each other’s back. In the film, Crockett basically does whatever he wants to do and leaves Tubbs to handle most of the details. There’s no love shown between the two. From the very first scene when Crockett was hitting on the bartender at a club, writer/director Michael Mann makes Crockett look like a complete cad. I was pretty confident that movie-Crockett would leave Tubbs hanging anywhere at any time for a hot chick. TV-Crockett would never have done that. He was older and not looking to just hook-up with any hot piece of ass that strolled by – all his romances were pretty serious (Gina and Brenda). For example, there’s a scene in the movie where Tubbs and Crockett go to the drug lord’s house in the middle of the Latin American jungle to set up the deal and Crockett asks the financial broker of the drug lord (the beautiful Gong Li) to go for a drink and then just takes off with her on the boat to Cuba. Way to strand your partner. How is Tubbs supposed to get home? Is he going to bum a ride from another drug lord at the house, “um, yeah, hey any of you guys doing a deal downtown? Any chance you can drop me off at my hideout?”

Given my Crockett and Crockett & Tubss issues, i still really liked the movie. It was very cool. In fact, if you haven’t seen the TV show lately, you’d probably enjoy it more. As for the plot, similar to the TV episodes, it is a) totally ridiculous, b) rarely makes sense, c) is never really quite resolved, d) involves a shipyard for the final drug exchange, e) unfortunately does not include the phrase “it’s going down” (which appears in each TV episode roughly 3 times), and doesn’t matter b/c the movie is cool enough without it. Even though the film is not up to Mann’s other classics Heat or Collateral, it is still worthy of a viewing.

The plot happened to be the exact same plot of the “Smuggler’s Blues” episode from the first season. In that episode, Crockett & Tubbs are recruited by DEA to pose as drug smugglers in an effort to expose someone in law enforcement who is murdering drug dealers and their families and ends with Trudy being held and bound to a bomb in a trailer. In the movie, they again pose as drug smugglers in an effort to expose a leak in some law enforcement agency and ends with Trudy being held and bound to a bomb in a trailer. While this plot is entertaining enough, I think they would have been better off remaking the pilot episode which introduces a Miami police detective James “Sonny” Crockett who reluctantly teams with New York bred newcomer to the Miami scene Ricardo Tubbs to solve several murders connected to a mysterious Colombian drug lord (and connected to Tubb’s brother death). This is a much better story that could re-create a twenty-first century version of the Crockett and Tubbs characters and perhaps even start a movie franchise. This could have been the Batman Begins (Christian Bale) of the series instead of Batman Return (Michael Keaton and Danny Devito).

So, bottom line – if you’re looking to get yourself in deep, so deep you don’t know which way is up (a line used in both tv show and the movie), i’d recommend you take a trip to the 80’s and rent the DVD’s rather than turning on Netflix.