ftorresgamez

Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: Teen Titans GO! is not a reboot of the older and more mature TV show of the early 2000's. Instead, TTG is a very entertaining mixture of usual superhero romp (with the gratuitous violence) and self-deprecating humor, with characters that represent several human foibles, especially when it comes to how Robin is portrayed: as the power-mad leader of the Titans who is capricious, eccentric, jealous, paranoid and spoiled rotten. Most of the humor is the type of pie-in-the-face you find in cartoons like Spongebob, but there are also plenty of jokes for us adults, especially for those of us who grew up in the 80s. I also perceive a libertarian streak in some of the writing; for instance the episode "Nose Mouth" clearly shows the dangers of abusing a great power (Raven's black magic) to fix apparent minor personality flaws in some of the team members, with things getting out of hand the moment Raven started to see problems to 'fix' around her which turns her into an evil entity quite rapidly. That has to be one of the best analogies about government abuse of power I have seen on a TV show.

Now I haven't seen the original show except in passing. I did read some of the comments from what I gather are very serious fans of the original talking trash about Teen Titans GO! These fans are taking things a little too seriously. Teen Titans GO! is obviously a comedy show which lampoons the original TT in particular and superheroes in general. In my view, if there was a bunch of superheroes that screamed for lampooning, it was the Teen Titans; the original characters themselves are quite ridiculous, especially the non-human Starfire and Raven which were invented back in the 80s as sensual überfrauen. In fact I think the new characters are much more attractive and endearing that the original characters precisely because of how each lampoons the older and ostensibly more serious characters. There is an obvious sexual innuendo in the way the original characters in Teen Titans were drawn and portrayed, and in Teen Titans GO! they simply make it obvious in order to make fun of this sensuality (for instance, watch episode "Legs" and "Mr. Butt".)

I do recommend the show and recommend you buy the DVDs. The comedy is very entertaining and funny - not always, but most of the time. The inside jokes are hilarious. The writers have much more creative freedom, thus the jokes and situations tend to push the envelope at many times.

You know you're watching an European movie when the director is trying to make a point in the most convoluted way. While I was watching Coco avec Chanel, I had the impression the director was trying to tell me "This woman broke into a man's world and succeeded! See? She suffers! Now, she enters their world! See? See?" What director Anne Fontaine tries to say and what she actually puts in the screen are, unfortunately, totally different things. I get to see that Gabrielle ("Coco"), who was left in an orphanage in her childhood by a father who was poor as dirt, along with her sister, later become lounge singers; and then Coco was able to break into a rich man's world by simple whoring. I only received hints and instances of Coco's design genius in between the parts where she arrives uninvited to her eventual lover's house, as drab a person as a chambermaid, makes love to him, and then to Arthur 'Boy' Chapel, and so on. She was (apparently) so much the mold breaker for feminists all over that she started her business by being bankrolled by her lover, who by the way, decided to marry an Englishwoman for money. Well, nobody said this was a moral story, only a feminist one.

But besides all of this, the movie is unremarkable and boring. It paces itself in such a way you can go to the kitchen to fix yourself a Dagwood sandwich and still not miss anything. As a chick flick it does not have the attractiveness of a straight love story, since one does not see exactly what Boy or Balsan sees in this wretch.

5 stars for me.

Utterly pointless thriller about a group of oil explorers working in the Arctic (Alaska), looking for new drill sites, when an unknown force is released and starts affecting the minds of each.

Ron Perlman gives a good performance as Ed Pollack, the unit's leader and supervisor. He is trying to obtain favorable environmental reports that will allow the oil company to place several wells and a pipe line. Unfortunately, several incidents puts the schedule in jeopardy.

This movie feels more like The Happening, except with a Global Warming backdrop. Instead of trees making people kill themselves, here it was the ghosts of animals past - pretty preposterous. It was clear the movie has the intention of scaring people into believing "we must do something about Global Warming", maybe to have the Cap and Tax bill passed in Congress. While the situations were genuinely creepy, the movie was spoiled by the obnoxiousness of the underlying political message. The situations were rendered risible by by the whole artificiality and the shoehorning of the message into the story. If only the director had refrained himself from letting us know what he REALLY felt about Global Warning, the movie could have had a chance, although it would not have added anything new to the genre of isolation thrillers.

I do NOT recommend this movie for the story. Maybe for the acting and the creepiness of the situations, but there is little to absorb, like gnawing at a T-Bone with almost no meat.