nilanna999

I was at work this morning and during a lull, my boss put on this movie. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to it but I eventually had to ask him to watch the rest of it at home.

I'll be the first to admit that parody films are not my forte. I don't like gross out humor and I find a lot of them to be completely immature. But I'd seen The Hunger Games so I figured I could just glance over every once in a while if a joke was funny. I like the 5 minute parody videos on youtube (you know, How It Should Have Ended and such) so I figured it would be like that.

I was wrong.

Some of the jokes were nonsensical. And by that I mean I was trying to figure out what the joke was and why it was supposed to be funny. Jokes that make me wonder if the writers just threw in random inside jokes without explaining them are not jokes at all. They're just random events the movie treats like jokes.

Some of the jokes were needlessly gross. I will never understand how anyone finds this kind of humor funny but I thought surely professional writers would know how to actually write something that could be funny to someone other than themselves in their addled state of mind. I was wrong. The ridiculous sound effects made it all the more difficult to tune out by the time I knew this wasn't going to be funny. Even the jokes that did have punchlines that pertained to the actual movie it was parodying were so predictable, I literally said "called it" at one of them after it was said.

No one in this movie looks like they care at all about what they're doing. This is such an obvious attempt to cash in on a popular franchise, it's shameful. I get that movie studios are businesses and they need to make money to keep afloat but at what cost? Nothing about this movie showed any effort whatsoever. I would have thought, for a movie parodying The Hunger Games, that they would have at least made fun of the dim lighting of that movie instead of just making everything brightly colored. Was this so you could see every disgusting physical joke more clearly? It doesn't come off as a parody if you can't even make fun of things that actually lend themselves to humor.

I hate movies like this. 4.5 million dollars and there was no talent or effort in this movie. I'd seen the actress who played the Katniss mockery in other things so I know she can act. I felt a bit sorry for her that she actually thought this would be anything but embarrassing. As someone who would love nothing more than to be a screenwriter, it's an insult to people who put real thought into their writing when these kinds of movies get made. There's Hunger Games fanfiction better than this. And anyone can write fanfiction.

I know what you're thinking, how dare you judge this movie when you didn't even finish it. But have you ever watched a movie that started out badly and finished as a masterpiece? Because I haven't. And if there was clearly no effort in the beginning, there's no way there was suddenly effort at the end.

I really hope Hollywood learns from movies like this and the genre dies out. In the meantime, I'm hoping this review dissuades anyone with a sense of humor and any class whatsoever from watching this terrible, terrible movie. Or even listening to someone else watching it.

I'll be honest here: I'm not a DreamWorks fan. I loved How to Train Your Dragon and Prince of Egypt but the other DreamWorks movies don't really do anything for me. So my hopes weren't too high when I saw the previews for this but I like Jim Parsons and I wanted to support the Dragons franchise so I saw it anyway.

This movie was more or less what I expected. And that's not a bad thing. Jim Parsons was fantastic as Oh and really carried the movie, even through some of the slower parts. I personally think the script was clever enough to get some laughs out of adults and kids. The jokes that didn't work weren't painful and the ones that did were quite good. The animation is bright and colorful. The Boov change color when having a strong emotion and the variety of colors was fun to look at and even added a surprising depth to some of the characters toward the end. If you pay attention to Oh in particular, his reactions to certain events can be more entertaining than the events themselves! The amount of detail that went into this movie was impressive.

As I said before, Jim Parsons stood out as one of the best things about this film. The passion he puts into the character and the obvious fun he's having shines through. Steve Martin does a great job as well for a lot of the same reasons. I have no complaints about either of them; their performances were pretty much spot on. Unfortunately, Rihanna was a poor choice for Tip, as she simply doesn't sound like she's in her early teens. Her acting is okay but it still felt strange to see her voice coming out of such a young character. I honestly thought Tip was in her early 20s until halfway through the movie! But this is more of a nitpick on my part.

The only real complaint I have with this film is the music. The instrumental sections are fantastic and capture the feel of the movie perfectly. But the pop songs are poorly placed and not very interesting. Some of them play in the background of scenes with dialogue, which does nothing to add to the atmosphere and comes off as distracting. Fortunately, such scenes aren't common enough to detract from the story or the acting but I still would have replaced them with instrumental pieces. The biggest problem I have with the music is one scene toward the end in which the dialogue is drowned out so the pop song adds atmosphere. The problem is that this technique rarely works with pop songs. Even then, I would rather have heard the dialogue than Rihanna's attempt to force me to have an emotion.

To close, this is one of my favorite DreamWorks movies. Its humor is far less gross or immature than a lot of its predecessors and the voice talents of Jim Parsons and Steve Martin are fantastic. The animation looks beautiful and though it has its flaws, I think that this is a good addition to the DreamWorks library. It knows what it is and it conveys the messages it wants to convey quite well. It's definitely not the best animated movie of the year but considering what DreamWorks has done in the past, it could have been a lot worse. I think 7/10 is more than fair and I would not object to seeing a sequel if it ever gets made.

Okay first off, Left Behind is no perfect film. There are flaws that I'll get into at the end. But talk about some biased critiquing! There is such an anti-God movement in this country, I'm surprised this movie was even made. I was expecting it to be hated... but there's really no reason for the hate.

Let me explain: I am a Christian but I am deeply ashamed of the Christian films of the past. The original Left Behind movie is fine. I'm talking about the really awful, cheesy, ridiculous movies like God's Not Dead, a movie so out of touch with reality that it depicts all non-Christians as total jerks and who are completely deserving of the hardships they go through. But Left Behind doesn't do this.

There is no unrealistically corny conversion at the end. The spirituality of the film isn't shoved in your face. Emphasis is put on the struggle of the characters as opposed to their spiritual journey. Judgmental Christians are depicted negatively.

The biggest miracle of this film by far, however, is the subtle Nicolas Cage performance. Fans of his freakouts will be disappointed because his acting is great.

My only complaints are in some of the actors. The kid who played Raymie was the worst of the bunch but he was also pretty young so I'm not going to judge him too harshly. There were a few small scenes that were unnecessary. Some of the special effects looked kind of dumb, particularly the green screen work. Fans of the book will be disappointed because it deviates a lot but I think it does that so it will appeal to all audiences instead of just Christians.

I thought there could have been more spirituality but I'm glad that it was kept at a minimum because I think non-Christians can see this without being offended. Why would a loving God put people through something like this? The question is never fully answered and, honestly, I like that a lot. It allows people to make their own decision about how to see this film.

I've seen plenty of awful movies. This wasn't an awful movie. The only reason Christians hate it is because it doesn't talk about the Bible as much as most would probably want. And the only reasons non- Christians hate it is because they hate anything having to do with Christianity.

Get over your bias and watch this movie as a movie. I highly recommend it because it's well made and it asks a lot of good questions that can lead to some great discussions. I think if people see this with an open mind, this movie would be more positively received.

And this is coming from someone who fully expected to point at it and laugh.