Tag: George Takei

Technically, yes, I have a few biases going into watching Kubo and the Two Strings. But for plenty of good reasons.

Laika, the makers of this film, have a pretty damn solid track record. Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, these guys are stop motion geniuses and their name means quality.

The Boxtrolls also had the best trailers of any film that year. Kubo and the Two Strings? The first and only trailer I watched was decent. It wasn’t as creatively done, but the story itself felt original, large scaled, and awesome awesome.

So yeah, I’ve been excited to see this movie for over a year. This has been my most anticipated animated film all year, even more so than Moana. I am only human, let me be excited.

Shit, this kid is so bad ass he only needs one eye.

Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a 10 or 11 year old boy, and yeah, he is missing an eye. He lives with his mother (Brenda Vaccaro) in a cave by a village. She is out of it, as she had a head injury when Kubo was just a baby, escaping from a threat. A lot of her day is spent staring out in the sea, but sometimes she remembers and tells him stories of his father, a great samurai.

His dad apparently died when he was a baby protecting him. From who? From his grandfather (mom’s dad), the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) and her sisters (Rooney Mara). The Moon King took Kubo’s eye for reasons and he wanted the other eye as well. So they have been in hiding, Kubo has not been allowed out at night or else he would be discovered. During the day he would love to tell stories in the village, using a magical shamisen to bring origami and paper to life to create wonderful visuals.

Well, as we all know, eventually he is discovered. And a lot of bad things happen. But now Kubo finds himself in the middle of nowhere, with a talking monkey by his side. A talking monkey?! Yes, a toy he always carried was brought to life to protect him, named Monkey (Charlize Theron). And eventually, also a great samurai turned beetle samurai named Beetle (Matthew McConaughey). Kubo can tell a tale, but he is not a namer.

Kubo and the gang have to find three parts of a legendary armor, heard only in stories. They are the only things that might be able to protect him from his grandfather and protect his remaining eye. Oh, and sure, George Takei voices a villager, and I am 90% certain he says “Oh My” at some point.

Holy shit, the moon sisters are straight out of my nightmares.

Kubo and the Two Strings exceeded all of my expectations and gave me a tale for the ages. Laika, known for their stop animation films, still keep up with the design, but also use a lot of CGI for building backgrounds and certain special effects. Despite the CGI, the world is still incredibly immersive and easy to get lost in.

I unfortunately didn’t get to see the movie in 3D, but even without it, I felt like I was almost a part of their world with the large movie screen. Every character was rich and unique, the colors vivid, and of course the dialogue was amusing and dark intertwined.

Kubo goes to some scary places and deals with a lot of real and scary situations. They deal with death, being alone, mystery, and more death. They really went hard on those “thematic elements” in its PG rating. But it of course also deals with friendship, family (in the positive way), memories, and coping with loss. Some more heavy subjects, but more positive.

The voice acting was also better than I expected. Seeing the big names, I rolled my eyes, but McConaughey, Theron, and Fiennes all did amazing jobs.

Do yourself a favor. See Kubo and see him in theaters. Go on the adventure to hear and see his story. I for one want to see the adventure again and again.

I will admit, when I first saw the trailer for Free Birds, I chuckled at a few spots. The nameless government entities making a pun and laughing throughout the trailer was great. A movie about a dumb animal trying to save the world with other dumb animals might lead to a lot of just tongue in cheek situations or rampant fourth wall breaking or who knows what. The possibilities are limitless.

But they also are including time travel, a known killer of many movies, if they define a version that doesn’t make much sense. None of this “its a kids movie!” bullshit either. No, the story has to be somewhat coherent, or else shit is going down.

“Down like a Tom covered in poults.”
“Hey, that’s not a joke, witty, or remotely funny.”
“It would be if we were dealing with chickens, not turkeys!”

Reggie (Owen Wilson) is a freak. He is a smarter than your average turkey, which isn’t hard, because turkeys are dumb. But he is too smart, and refuses to eat and get fattened up for Thanksgiving, which causes the flock to throw him out. Luckily for him, he gets pardoned by the President, which apparently means he can sit around all day, not worry about getting eaten, and just watch TV and eat pizza.

Well, his new awesome reality comes crashing down when Jake (Woody Harrelson) takes him from his home! Oh no! Another Turkey, not some random dude named Jake.

He wants to infiltrate a secret base in Camp David where there is apparently a time machine. He wants to use that time machine to travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving, to take turkeys off the menu. Err okay. Well they do that. And the time machine named S.T.E.V.E. (George Takei), which was built for humans, can somehow understand the gobbles from turkeys.

Then they get there. The turkeys are just extremely obvious metaphors for American Indians, being hunted by the colonists, for this important feasts in a few days. Except these turkeys are all smart. That is right, they are saying turkeys became dumb due to domestication and Thanksgiving. So we have a bunch of smart turkeys and really only one dumb one, Jake. CAN THE TIME TRAVELING TURKEYS SAVE THEIR RACE FROM DESTRUCTION? Will he be able to score with Jenny (Amy Poehler), a smart enough turkey to not believe he is from the future? WILL HUMANS BE CAST AS THE BAD GUYS?

Or you know, will anything really cool happen? Eh.

Does this turkey look high to you?

Man, Owen Wilson I tend to hate at voice acting. Aka Cars and Cars 2. But he was able to show some emotion this time. Well done. Woody Harrelson sounded nothing like himself, so I want to assume that means he put effort into his lines. Having George Takei as navigator of sorts was a “I see what you did there” moment.

But enough about that, lets talk about the plot and other things I disliked. The beginning of the movie is very fast, so much that I’d be willing to bet that 85% or more of the movie takes place in the past, whereas the trailer had mostly set just getting to the time machine. A little misleading. Most of the best jokes were also in the trailer, including jokes that weren’t actually in the movie (due to splicing of the trailer into new jokes, not taking them out of the movie). Meh. I don’t think I would have liked it more if I didn’t see the trailer, however.

Making the turkeys in the past smart is lame. That leaves only one stupid character, and not the hordes of them that they implied in the trailer. That would allow it to have a lot more zany shenanigans! So, overall, the humor in this film isn’t really existent. The theater was practically silent for the most part.

The time travel itself is super sloppy. It was fine early on, but they went back to the present, and all sorts of stuff started to occur that don’t make sense based on how they defined time travel earlier in the film.

The ending is horrible. It just…it just isn’t good. The conflict doesn’t happen, despite a resolution. The resolution leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

So we got an unfunny movie, that breaks its own definitions of time travel, and has a shitty ending. Yawn. Let’s just wait for Frozen at the end of this month.

Of course when I first heard of the movie Larry Crowne, I thought of The Thomas Crown Affair and was for some reason disturbed. How dare a main character have a name that is spelled the same and spelled differently. There is no room for that in my movie world. But I haven’t ever seen the latter, just Larry Crowne now. So I guess Larry Crowne is better on that merit alone.

That other movie was a remake? I don’t believe it.

Tom Hanks plays the titular character and he just got fired from his big box store. Why? No college education, can’t advance. Well shit. There is only one solution. Sell a bunch of your valuables, switch to a Scooter, and go to a local college. Take economics, speech, computer classes to get far in the business world, and TAKE BACK THE NIGHT! He can thank Cedric the Entertainer, his lotto rich neighbor the help.

He meets people in school too. Including a scooter gang he gets to join, run by Fez. His teacher for 8am Speech, Julia Roberts, hates her life. Because she is married to Bryan Cranston, and as we know he makes meth. Well, that wasn’t addressed in the movie, but he did like them big titties.

More or less, this is a story of how a guy can start his life over. Getting that knowledge, meeting knew friends, and seducing his college teacher. What? For shame Tom Hanks. She is married.

Half of the reason people take college classes is if their teacher is cool. It is a bonus if that teacher has a good voice to listen to. I think that also explains why so many people are in George Takei‘s Economics class.

If anyone can take Tom Hanks phone away, it is George Takei.

It was an interesting movie. Kind of a feel good ish flick. Happy ending. But nothing in particular was that spectacular about the whole thing. Disappointing in that regard, cause its Tom Hanks! I need some more epic, sir.