MegaMind_________________________________________________________________

MegaMind
2010 Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt, Tina Fey
PG

Fantastic animated film!  Very funny.  Constantly funny in fact.  I was laughing so hard at some of the fast and furious humor, that I had to keep interrupting the last laugh with the newest one.  But one thing troubled me.  I was laughing and my kids mostly were not.  I mean there is no way that they were getting the jokes.  They were caught up in the action and the characters, and being kids, all goo-eyed at the huge figures on the screen.  They were taking so much of it seriously.  That’s just kids for you now isn’t it?  They are wonderfully and seriously made.

But there is no way they were going to get the humor of our villain changing into a mock character of Ed Kennedy, lisping away his directives, or the other tie-ins to characters past.  This is expert filmmaking, however.  Everyone knows that us adults are going with our kids to see these movies.  Like Toy Story 3, there was so much for us adults to be delighted with, mixed masterfully with the action and adventure.  It’s a no-lose scenario.

What I found most delightful about MegaMind was the consistent playing against type and the story twists that also went against convention, making it a truly amazing and original story that was fun to follow, and almost always unexpected.  This fairly short feature film is filled constantly with non-stop action and twists aplenty.  A bonus for us all is the light ending that is uplifting and fun.  Good clean fun.

5 stars

Agitatus

Persepolis   10/21/09

Wow, this was a great animated film.  And it was a full-length feature, filled with anxiety, joy, fun, sadness; the life of an Iranian girl.  The music and sounds were great.  Following in the long-ago footsteps of Dorothy on the yellow brick road, only in reverse, the majority of the film is in black and white, and we end with the color scene in the airport.  All of the scenes in the airport, in fact, are in the present and done in color.  They are a well-done pivot point for the bulk of the story.  The animation never lets up with the different creative angles, the darks/lights, movement and layers.  Reviewing the film now by memory, it did not feel flat at all, as some black and white animated films have seemed.  The humor will floor you at times.  The comedic timing was perfect, exemplifying the meaning of "comedy relief".  If it were not for the judicially dispersed comic moments the remainder would have been drear.  Very wise.  This scores a big hit for animation.

The politics: I will need to think them over, as I'm sure the director intended.  Everyone loves to hate the West right now.  It's popular to attribute the world's ills to the Western world and to attach blame to the big gorilla on the block as contributing directly to the hatred in the rest of the world.  I'm just not so sure that's accurate.  After all, you can give a person a gun, but that doesn't mean they have to shoot.  I'll come back to this.