Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - 1/2*

Crises pop up everywhere in Legend of the Guardians, crises that are solved almost immediately. It's actually astonishing that the film made it to feature length. Honestly it's surprising. There is about three minutes of character introduction and development: two young owl brothers who can't fly yet practice floating between a few branches. One can do it, the other can't. Guess who the jealous one is... bingo. One night he pushes his brother out of the tree and they land on the ground and are swept up by mean owls bent on owl-world domination and flown to a mountain where a "pure" army is being assembled and slaves are being "moon-blinked" into a zombie-like state after staring at the moon before they go to sleep. Or something like that. Bad Brother betrays Good Brother and joins the evil army, while Good Brother avoids a moon-blinking and vows in a rousing inspirational monologue to spend every unwatched minute learning to fly, even if it takes him the rest of his life, so that he can escape and bring help to the others. Luckily this happens the next day.

Nonsense this pure and narrative convenience this extreme are rare, especially in combination, but poorly thought-out easy plot resolutions permeate the entirety of Clumsily-Titled Owl Movie. In addition, the human expressions put on the owls' faces are creepy, the movie is pretty ugly to look at, all of the voices sound exactly the same, and the soundtrack is obnoxious to its core.

And when I wasn't preoccupied with any of that, all I could do was wonder why this story was told with owls. There is no reason I can come up with to explain it. I don't even understand the world in which it is set. There are no natural predators of owls, just other owls, who have somehow fashioned helmets and sword-claws for themselves. It lacks creativity of any kind, not to mention cinematic craftsmanship, coherence, and fun. It's an epic adventure story that completely skips over the journey, or characters bonding, or even characters at all. And other than talking animals, there's really nothing in it that even a kid would enjoy. Anything positive that I may have taken from this film I have already forgotten. Hopefully I can do the same for the rest of this bullshit.

Toy Story 3 - ****

A great film doesn't concern itself with what happens, so much as how it happens. You probably know the broad strokes of how Toy Story 3 will play out before you're too far into it, but the way it actually comes together is really a thing of beauty... and Pixar isn't about broad strokes at all. They have always been great at finding a way of telling a unique story using elements of its natural environment, unlike, say, Shark Tale, the story of fish who inhabit an underwater Times Square and have an Italian mafia. They have not yet put this skill to better use than they do in Toy Story 3, in which they actually come up with a story worth telling, and a way worth telling it. You could focus a viewing of this film alone on looking at all of the old toys they've included, or seeing how they've integrated the functions of these toys into the narrative, like using a bookworm as a librarian who keeps the instruction manuals for different toys.

It seems crazy that a handful of animated plastic toys act in ways more human than most of the characters in any film so far this year, but there you have it. Crazier still is that, amid these incredibly genuine moments, the film also delivers consistent laughs and some of the best executed sight gags I've seen in a long time, a few stand-outs being Spanish Buzz, Mr. Tortilla Head, and Ken riding the rickety elevator of Barbie's Dream House. To pull all of this off in a G-rated story about friendship and loss, and the need to have a purpose in life is really pretty phenomenal.

If you have eyes, ears, and a heart, you'll certainly shed a tear or two in the final sequences of the film as you watch two of the most iconic characters in all of cinema walk off into the sunset for the last time... Its bittersweet ending (though far more sweet than bitter) actually conveys a sense of loss that other animated films lack the ambition and imagination to even strive for, and you, and your kids, need to experience it. That isn't to say that this is one of those sequels that banks on your pre-established feelings for its characters, though growing up watching Buzz and Woody does land them a special place in my cinema-going heart. No, Toy Story 3 more than succeeds on its own merits.

Shrek Forever After - Zero Stars

It's kind of ironic that the two stars of the Shrek series are notoriously known as comedians who "used to be funny." Could there be a better parallel for the series itself? Though I'm not a fan, I'll admit that the first film had it's merits, but these sequels, of which I've seen two and four, are absolute brutality for audiences. A few years ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that the series was always imagined to be four films... Let's hope that there's some truth in that lie and cross our fingers that the shamelessness of these cash-grab sequels stops here. The only evidence I see that this was all planned is that each of the titles of the sequels can easily be modified into a reference to shit. Or maybe that's just more irony.

Shrek Forever Afturd has direct-to-video written all over it, not even concerning itself with any kind of timeline that coincides with the other films in the series. Instead we see him unhappy and despairing in married life, hoping he could have a day to himself, which some unfunny character grants him. But blah blah blah it all goes wrong and Shrek ends up in a parallel universe where he didn't save the world and everything is bleak, and nobody knows who he is, and he has to reclaim his wife's love. So it's basically just a rip-off of It's a Wonderful Life, or to be more qualitatively accurate, a rip-off of Mr. Destiny with James Belushi. The jokes are flat, focusing mainly on pointing out boring, nonsensical incongruities between the real world and the fictitious Far Far Away where the film takes place, interspersed with some poorly executed bathroom humor and some bad music cues that are supposed to be funny.

Anyone who finds anything in this film entertaining is too young to understand the poignance of the message, and anyone who does understand the poignance of the message is too old to find anything in the film to be entertaining. I'd highly recommend this film, but only if you like ugly animation, shameless sequels, boring characters, awkward music cues, or The Love Guru.

A Town Called Panic - **1/2

A Town Called Panic is a wacky adventure story animated in stop-motion using plastic toys. It follows a cowboy, an indian, and a horse through a series of bizarre mischievous events, from trying to hide 50 million accidentally-ordered-bricks on the roof that end up crushing their house, to the bottom of the ocean where weird fish-people have stolen the walls of the house that they've been trying to rebuild.

It's funny... sometimes.

How to Train Your Dragon - ****

How to Train Your Dragon made me feel something movies so rarely do: elation. It's beautiful, funny, exciting, and has a Hell of a lot of heart. I went into it thinking that it was directed by the guys responsible for the Madagascar (ugh) films, so I already had a bias against it, but it won me over in about twenty minutes, after which I gave in and started loving it. It is actually directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the team behind Lilo and Stitch, and Sanders was also a writer on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, and his talent shows through wonderfully in this film. Though there isn't much of a story, the characters are pretty fantastic, and there is enough wit and intelligence to overcome what could be considered a formulaic narrative arc.

I saw this film in 3-D, a format which I am not very enthusiastic about. I'm one of those guys who, in advance, is already hating on all of the movies lining up to cash in on it (Fuck you Spider-Man 4), but Dragon kind of nails it. Maybe it's the fantastic flying sequences, which cover maybe twenty minutes, and are truly amazing, maybe it's the crisp animation, or maybe it's the fact that the great cinematographer Roger Deakins was a visual consultant that makes it work... I don't know what it is, but the 3-D is spectacular.

I should also mention that the voice-cast is superb, featuring a few guys from the Apatow family, like Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who are always pretty reliable in any shape or form. And then there is also Gerard Butler, who contributed to that negative bias when I walked into this, coming only a week after seeing The Bounty Hunter, but he pulls is it off brilliantly. He helps turn what could have been, and usually is, a boring character, the stubborn father who refuses to accept his son for who he is until the big finale where the son is the hero, into someone who seems real, given that you accept the reality of the film. His gruff, warrior voice in the beginning gradually fades to understanding tenderness by the end.

Though Dreamworks Animation normally produces bottom-of-the-barrel dreck and misery, like Shrek, Shark Tale, and Skrek the Turd, How to Train Your Dragon is nothing short of animation magic and, like some of the best Pixar films, it's enjoyable for viewers of all ages. After Kung Fu Panda and this, maybe I'll even give Shrek Forever Afturd a pass. Okay, probably not, but I couldn't give this film a higher recommendation. See it. Love it. See it again.