How to Train Your Dragon

Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve pretty much spent my entire, brief review-writing career tearing apart movies that most people enjoy and bitching about every little contrivance, blowing it up far bigger than it needs to be in the sake of comedy. When I went to see How to Train Your Dragon last night in 3D, I wasn’t expecting any different. Like Wesley Snipes before he met Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump, I was ready to pounce on Dreamworks’ newest foray into animation, a studio that’s essentially still suckling the last drops of milk from the Shrek franchise, and write an entire article dismantling it like everything else that’s come my way.

Unfortunately for me, however, HTTYD is actually one of the bigger surprise movies I’ve seen this year that…gasp…doesn’t suck.

Well nuts to me. Thanks a lot HTTYD, now I have to write a whole article praising you instead of overanalyzing every little detail and dragging what’s probably a decent movie into an abyss of putridity. Prick.

HTTYD is the story of Hiccup, a skinny ginger wannabe Viking who’s about a tenth the size of everyone else in his Viking village and is voiced by the dork in She’s Out of My League. His father is voiced by Gerard Butler, an actor who needs to take a look in the mirror and realize he needs to skip out on the chick flicks and stick to things he’s good at (being a badass) and his classmates in dragon killing class are voiced by the fat kid from Superbad (Jonah Hill) and McLovin, also from Superbad. Craig Ferguson voices Gerard Butler’s assistant and apparently this is a huge deal according to the promos but I’ve never heard of Craig Ferguson so I don’t fucking care. Anyway, Hiccup as it turns out, is actually a hippy and can’t kill a dragon, which he befriends and names Toothless, despite the fact that it clearly has teeth. He could’ve named it Godzilla Junior or Raven or something badass, especially considering that it’s the most badass dragon in the world (despite the actual Godzilla-Dragon ripoff that appears at the film’s climax). Hiccup starts to figure out that dragons aren’t in fact evil, well at least not that evil, and are essentially just giant reptilian cats. Seriously. They like scratches behind the ears, fish, and catnip. Not joking.

Telling you any more of the plot would probably ruin what is, dare I say, a very enjoyable experience. The 3D is, and I say this with absolutely no bias in opposition of James “Douchebag” Cameron, better than Avatar. That’s right, James Cameron; you’re half-billion dollar epic science fiction fantasy that was meant to revolutionize cinema as we know it and bring you a boatload of Oscars was beat out at your own game by a tiny Dreamworks cartoon that had all the promotion of my facebook statuses (not a lot). The 3D in Avatar was often more distracting than entertaining and immersive and Cameron spent every moment he could slapping our faces with it, whether it was with those little jellyfish-seed things or bows and arrows flying towards the camera. It also only worked on three planes; there was a foreground, middle, and background. HTTYD, however, is better. The 3D isn’t distracting and feels far more natural than Avatar’s ever did. Yes, there are your occasional moments where it gets a little blurry but the depth is incredibly convincing, the flying sequences are far more engaging and, unlike in Avatar, don’t stay on screen so long that you get bored and start glancing at your watch and lovingly eyeing the “exit” signs.

Suck it, Cameron.

Unfortunately this is a critique, and though I can’t find anything glaringly wrong with the picture (it’s f*cking perfect), I feel obligated to complain about something in the name of entertainment. I guess if I had to dig deep, I’d bitch about the accents. Why do the kids have clearly American accents while all the adults are running around with deep Scottish accents? You develop accents based on your surroundings, I was raised by my grandparents who were both from New Zealand and as a result I have trouble pronouncing “er” suffixes without them sounding like “ah” (no, it doesn’t get me laid). Though I guess I can forgive the film’s inadequacy to provide the right accents considering it’s a movie about fucking dragons.

Fine, here it goes: How to Train Your Dragon is good. It’s well-written, the voice actors are perfectly cast, and the 3D is the best I’ve seen so far, even better than Douchebag’s (Cameron’s) “epic.” It really isn’t that funny but has a surprisingly high level of emotional depth that makes it so immersive that by the time it ends your actually disappointed that it’s over despite how badly you have to go to the bathroom after your $8 small soda. It’s probably the best film of the year, particularly out of animated films, thus far in 2010.

That is, of course, until Toy Story 3 comes out this summer to piss all over everyone else while laughing all the way to the bank.

Score: 9.5

The Wolfman

I promised myself after Joe Johnston single-handedly destroyed the Jurassic Park trilogy with the worst dinosaur movie ever made (Jurassic Park III), that I’d make one of my many goals in life never contribute to his box office gross ever again. Luckily, Jurassic Park III was so utterly bad and a slap in the face to anyone who ever enjoyed the trilogy that I didn’t think I’d ever have to worry about it again. Johnston had sucked all of the intelligence and philosophical debate out of the series previous installments, and replaced them with 82 minutes of random people running through the jungle, and a plot about as dense and emotionally resonant as an episode of Barney. So, I’ve rested easy the past decade or so, knowing that Joe Johnston would never rise again to pollute movie screens.

But then The Wolfman was announced, with Joe Johnston directing. All I’ve heard about since the first trailer is the grittiness, the depth of character that Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins will bring to the screen, and how this will not only be Johnston’s best movie (which really isn’t hard to do), but one of the best werewolf movies ever (which, also, isn’t hard to do). Well, the definition of insanity (according to Wikipedia) is repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome, so clearly whoever hired Johnston to recreate one of Universal’s most legendary monsters was, well, insane.

Why? Because it isn’t different. Sure, it’s not the kid-friendly, action-packed spectacle of stupidity that Jurassic Park III was. No, instead, it’s a non-kid friendly, boring spectacle of stupidity.

The Wolfman is about a guy who turns into a werewolf. There’s no need to explain anything more than that. If you don’t know the basic plot, then you’re blind and deaf, or you just awoke from a coma you’ve been in since birth. We follow Benicio Del Toro, who has been in hiding for the last decade, as he struggles through the everyday issues of dealing with an estranged father, boning his dead brother’s girlfriend and turning into a wolf Hulk-style, using CGI transformations that take up a good majority of the movie. Seriously, by the third or fourth time we get to watch him transform into a wolf we just don’t care anymore. I’ve been more entertained watching my Squirtle evolve into Blastoise. Yes, the first time around it’s pretty cool but we get the f*cking point, you don’t need to show us every single time.

The overlong transformations essentially epitomize everything wrong with The Wolfman: it’s dumb, and the special effects, which grow tedious after awhile, make futile attempts to cover it up like an idiot who uses big words he just looked up on Google. Johnston’s thought process, I suspect, involves covering the screen with so much spectacle that we forget that the writing sucks. “You’re a monster hunter, sometimes monsters hunt you.” Brilliant.

Overreliance on CGI has become somewhat of a pet peeve with me, and though it can sometimes look pretty cool, you can’t deny the fact that it always looks fake. Even the world’s (arguably) best CGI, “Avatar,” looks more like an Xbox game than a movie at times. We’ve kind of become bored with the whole thing; thanks to CGI, saying a movie has good special effects is like saying it was filmed with a camera. Good special effects are pretty much a given, so they can’t really be used to cover up flaws in storytelling (I’m looking at you, Michael Bay). Hell, even most of the Victorian city in The Wolfman is computer-generated and looks more like it belongs in World of Warcraft rather than a big-budget Hollywood movie. However, the main werewolf probably could've used the CGI treatment in more action scenes, considering the makeup effects make him look like an oversized Ewok.

As far as acting goes, nobody really goes over the top, but nobody really entertains, either. Del Toro has about as much personality as that girl passed out on the couch at a party, and it’s difficult to empathize with his situation, especially considering he’s trading sexy looks with his dead brother’s sister the whole movie. Honestly, I’d rather hang out with the wolf he turns into, at least he’s somewhat entertaining. Anthony Hopkins is supposed to be the voice of wisdom, the good guy, but it’s hard to see him as such since he built his film career on eating peoples’ brains. The only actor who really does a serviceable job is Megatron…err…I mean Hugo Weaving, who will hereafter be referred to as Agent Smith…I mean Megatron. Anyway, Megatron’s the primary antagonist, or I think Johnston intended him to be. Or, well, would be if the film’s actual protagonist wasn’t so damn unlikable.

The Wolfman as a whole, seems like a wasted opportunity. It makes a good trailer but so did Jurassic Park III. Megatron does the best he can as far as characters go; the only other actor who does a decent job is the CGI wolf. There’s some good makeup effects when the wolfman isn’t computer generated and they somehow made Megatron look like a 6-foot tall human, so that’s some top-notch work. Between the painfully long transformations, and the relatively entertaining murder sequences (that sounds slightly sociopathic out of context), it’s boring and just plain dumb, with dialogue that’s as painful to listen to as the jerks who play Call of Duty all night in the apartment below me with their bass turned all the way up (seriously, on the off-chance you guys learn to read one day and end up coming across this article, I want you to know that I hate you).

It seems that Johnston, in an effort to avoid the mistake he made in Jurassic Park III of not having any character development, created brand new mistakes in trying to have character development and failing miserably. All in all, The Wolfman is the product of Johnston trying too hard to not seem stupid. The movie isn’t bad, as this relatively negative review may suggest. It’s just there. It’s nothing. A flash in the pan that you’ll watch, then forget about it 10 minutes later.

But trust me, that’s probably for the best.