The Good Dinosaur (a movie review post)

Dinosaurs were my first great love, from the moment I saw my very first one sometime around the age of four. Maybe three. I was instantly fascinated with them, and it was my goal for about 10 years to be a paleontologist when I grew up. But that's a story for another time.

Dinosaur movies, though, are not that fascinating. Inevitably, like in The Land Before Time, dinosaur movies deal with the dinosaur apocalypse and one small group trying to get to safety. So it was that The Good Dinosaur promised to be something different. A movie where the dinosaurs don't suffer an apocalypse. A movie where they live. A movie about what might have happened if they had not become extinct.

Unfortunately, that moment from the trailer, that moment when the asteroid misses Earth and the dinosaurs don't die, that moment happens with the opening credits and is over in a few minutes. The movie goes downhill from there. Downhill into being nothing original or new at all. It's just a weird hybrid of Ice Age (deliver the human baby to other humans), The Lion King, and a bunch of other stuff you've already seen.

That said, the animation, the background animation, is amazing. It's so amazing that at times I questioned whether it was CGI or not. The dinosaurs, though, are cartoony, and don't really fit their environment. They stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The other good thing is Sam Elliot as Butch, the cowboy T-Rex. The whole thing with the T-Rexes as cowboys and the Raptors as rustlers was fairly amusing, and Elliot is the cowboy. I mean, you can't really get more cowboy than Elliot. It just oozes out of his voice.

But that's about it for the good.

The problem is that Pixar should have just let this movie die. When you have to, essentially, fire the guy who came up with the idea because he can't put the story together, you should start to re-think whether you should be making that movie. When, after doing the voice recording for the entire movie, you decide to re-write the script and re-record everything, you need to be re-thinking whether this is a movie you should be doing. Then, when you decide to dump virtually all of the voice actors and replace them, you really need to be thinking about whether this is a movie you should be doing. The Good Dinosaur was not a movie Pixar should have been doing.

I suppose I'm glad I saw the movie. Well, I am. It is a Pixar movie, and I wouldn't have been able to deal with just not seeing it, but, then, I wish I hadn't seen it. I certainly won't be buying it. It's the first legitimate failure from Pixar. There's no "Pixar" quality to it at all. It's mediocre at best, just as a movie, but, from Pixar, it's a disappointment. Completely.

The Ice Age Campaign

You ever have one of those days where you're trying to do something nice for someone, or a group of someones, and it just doesn't work out the way you want it to? The nice thing that you do, the person gets upset about? Or it messes up? Or whatever? I feel like I have those all the time, although I know that's not really true. However, it was true last Friday. The last Friday of summer...

As it is with many couples, my wife and I don't get out together very often.It's a combination of kids and money. I'll leave that to you to figure out. But I knew my wife wanted to go see The Campaign, and, with our oldest off in Maine, we didn't have free babysitting available. However, I also knew that my younger two kids wanted to go see Ice Age: Continental Drift (I wanted to see that, too, but I can eventually catch it on DVD). It just so happens that the movies are virtually the same length, and it just so happened that our theater was starting them Friday afternoon just five minutes apart. I figured it was the perfect opportunity for my wife and I to catch Campaign while the younger two watched Ice Age.

The problem was that I didn't tell anyone my plan.

What can I say? I wanted it to be a surprise. So my wife got home from work, lunch waiting for her, and I told her we were leaving in 30 minutes or so but didn't tell her what we were doing other than going to the bank, which I needed to do, and dropping something by the post office. She assumed I was taking her to see  with the kids some movie (Ice Age) she didn't want to see. Plus, according to everyone else, it was hot, and there were complaints about driving around in  the hot car. But, see, I grew up in the south where it's not just hot but about 80% humidity all the time, so it really has to get over 100 before I feel the heat out here.

By the time we got to the theater, everyone was cranky, and my wife was more and more assuming that we were taking the kids to a movie that she didn't want to go see. Basically, she'd rather been at home. But I bought the tickets, and my wife realized that she didn't have to go see Ice Age, but, then, my daughter freaked out because she realized that we weren't going to see the movie with them. So I went from being in trouble for one thing to getting in trouble for something else.

>sigh<

I bought them (the kids) popcorn, and that (mostly) made everything better.

My kids loved the new Ice Age, just by the way for any of you out there with kids. They came out wanting to tell us all about it, which is not something they're prone to doing, so it must have been really good. I'm looking forward to actually watching it with them once it hits DVD.

As for The Campaign, well, my wife laughed all the way through it. And with good reason, too. This is the best straight up comedy Will Ferrell has made since, probably, Anchorman. Yeah, sure, some (a lot) of the humor is beyond belief, but, when you look at politics these days, maybe not too much beyond belief (especially when you have a man named Weiner texting pictures of his weiner).

I didn't realize the movie was set in the south going into it, so I was worried about the whole accent thing as the movie started up, but all of the actors did a great job. There was none of the over exaggeratedness you sometimes get with actors trying to do southern accents, so that was a pleasant surprise. And, speaking of accents, Karen Maruyama was amazing! Seriously amazing.

Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow were excellent as the Motch brothers. But, then, both of them are long time favorites of mine, so I could be a bit biased. However, I would say they complemented each other nicely. Jason Sudeikis was great, and Dylan McDermott was rather chilling as the campaign manager. And funny.

Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis were gold.

The most interesting bits of the film were the various political statements, the most telling of which was the statement that we have or are making legal all these horrible things that businesses do, and we're doing it because of money. That's the real message behind the movie, that everything is run by money, but, then, I think we all know that. As Cam Brady says (or something very close to this), "I'm a great politician, but I'm a bad congressman."

If you like Ferrell, this movie should be a must see. Even if you don't like Ferrell, it may be worth seeing. There is actually a core of content, real content, in this movie that is not always present in Ferrell's movies.