Film Review: "The Adventures of Tintin"

Let it be known, that the Spielbergian adventure flick has not gone out of style. Three years after he stained his career image permanently with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", Spielberg puts out two films this year. One of them is the Oscar play, as much expected and maligned by myself. But to be perfectly honest, it's always been his more commercial plays that caught my attention, which is an ironic reversal of how things usually work. It's when he's not searching for meaning, and rather searching for thrills, that he strikes his strongest films, and also his weakest, but they are anything but banal. How is he the exception to the rule? An experience in cinema that is both his gift and his bane.

"The Adventures of Tintin" isn't an explosive return to greatness for Steven Spielberg, but it is a rollicking ride of a film. Based on the Herge comic series, the first film in Spielberg and Peter Jackson's co-operative film trilogy spends no immense amount of time establishing the Tintin character. From the first minute after the uppity animated opening, he's shown as eager, ambitious, and pretty much your zero qualms protagonist. Does he need to be a lot more? No, but we would damn sure like him to be. If Herge never gave him ample dimension, writers Steve Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish could have taken a bit of license with this one. But it's never really distracting, so there's that.

For Your Anticipation: Why Do You Ask?

It's a touch of irony that Spielberg's strongest film this year is the commercial play, but also well in keeping with the times. "The Adventures of Tintin" is a far cry from Spielberg's opposing film "War Horse", as well as an hour shorter. It's big. It's adventurous. And it's using the emotion diluting efforts of motion capture, which still don't quite work. All the same, I don't think I ever said that this was going to be anything other than fun, which it still seems to be.

AWARDS 2011: DC Critics go for the odd nods

With the awards season in full swing, it's expected for things to start to form in unexpected manners. The DC critics have continued that trend which started at NBR, and we're really starting to consider which films are genuinely the main players of the season. Until "War Horse" garners a genuine win, I think it's becoming more and more plain that maybe it's not the frontrunner we all thought it would be. Perhaps it's just a lower tier player, as it wasn't able to even scratch past "Win Win" or "Drive" in the DC circuit. It's odd enough that Nicolas Refn's film was in there, and that alone sparks another fire in this awards season that's in much need of some personality.

"Win Win", on the other hand, I wouldn't give too much attention based on this nomination alone. If AWARDSit's a trend that continues on to other awards, we'll definitely take it into consideration. After all, if "The Help" is getting buzz, then we can more than expect to see more light indie flicks like this to rise up. You could categorize "Win Win" right along with "50/50" in that respect. A few more pleasant notes are that Fassbender made it into his first Best Actor field for his performance in "Shame", Elizabeth Olsen and Tilda Swinton continue to be of strong presence in Best Actress, and Andy Serkis and Melissa McCarthy are genuinely getting buzz for the supporting categories. In review, we need more critics awards to tell if DC is not completely off their rocker.

BEST FILM

- "The Artist"

- "The Descendants"

- "Drive"

- "Hugo"

- "Win Win"

Film Review: "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (**)

Well, I guess it was a bit silly to get my hopes up for something that is inherently silly in the first place. I should have stuck to my guns from my initial gut impact of the first trailer, because then this film might have been more of a revelation. As it is, I will say that "Evolution becomes Revolution" is an appropriate tagline for the film. After all, it's only truly world-changing in the fact of how much the technology has changed since its inception. It wasn't quite as awful as I had envisioned it to be previously, but the sudden jolt of positive buzz was very misleading heading into it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, whose title is the only one this year that needs to be grossly trimmed (outside Harry Potter perhaps), kicks off by immediately taking you out of the experience. It opens to a shot of the real jungle where the apes live, but the apes are quite obviously fake CG apes. This is perhaps the only moment in the film where you get a complete idea for how fake and silly it is, at least in a literal context. It tends to be less evident in later sequences, but things still remain kind of stupid and obviously fake.

For Your Anticipation: We call it enrichment.

There's a lot in place to make me want to like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and that's sadly just not going to happen. It could be attributed to the silliness of the plot, the lack of psychological resonance in the execution, or the obviousness of it all. However, that can all be boiled down to the fact that it's a part of this particular series which has never been truly spectacular, even when it was headed by Charles Heston. I'll see the film this weekend, but I don't expect it to be anything special.