Paramount Pictures and Sega of America
MOVIE REVIEW
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
It’s easy to get cynical about “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” sequel to a live-action movie based on a Sega video game character (voiced by Ben Schwartz) that travels at supersonic speeds. You may recall the original’s disastrous, universally loathed first trailer, which prompted the studio to postpone the release many months to overhaul the CGI, finally delivering it just before the global pandemic hit in 2020. Yet it’s already getting the sequel treatment, and ahead of 2019’s “Detective Pikachu,” the live-action movie based on a more contemporary Nintendo video game character.
Continue reading “Game Boy” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)
Barry Wetcher/20th Century Fox
“Mr. Popper’s Penguins” is one of the rather regrettable updated adaptations of classic children’s books that come around every so often. “Stuart Little” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” are among those that come to mind.
Richard and Florence Atwater, authors of the Newbery Honor-winning 1938 book upon which this film is based, would doubtfully be pleased with this standard-issue slapstick-with-sentimentality family production.
Continue reading “March Hare of the Penguins” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009)
ImageMovers Digital
If there’s one definitive conclusion to be drawn from “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” it’s this: Motion-capture animation, as practiced by Robert Zemeckis, doesn’t work. This is the third film in the director’s continuing experiment with the technology and — five years after “The Polar Express” — he and his team still haven’t figured out how to preserve the human qualities of the actors beneath the deadened mannequin demeanor forced upon them by the technology.
Continue reading “The Last of All, Hopefully” »