Surf's Up - Review

The penguin fetish started in 2005 by the unexpected popularity of March of the Penguins comes to a screeching halt with the latest attempt at cashing in on the worn out American love for the wobbly, tuxedo wearing fowls from down south. Surf’s Up is a blizzard of filmmaking foul ups, a perfect storm of blatant pandering and studio screenwriting by committee. It plays like it was written by a third-rate marketing department as a series of happy meal advertisements. It’s barely a movie at all, much less a good one.

Surf’s Up attempts to tell the story of a penguin who wants to be a surfer by using short mockumentary clips cobbled together with surfing action sequences reported on by real life surfers animated as penguins and acting as if they’re covering MTV’s X-Games, complete with loud, annoying, music. The penguin star in question is Cody Maverick, voiced by Shia LaBeouf, whose voice work is much better than his Poochie-like (watch ‘The Simpsons’ will ya?) character deserves. Actually, that’s just about the only thing this movie has going for it. Most of the voice cast is pretty good. Jeff Bridges plays a penguin surfing guru named the Geek and Jon Heder is less talentless than usual as the voice of a surfing chicken named Chicken Joe.

Re-enacting the celebrity obsessed, American Idol fueled dreams of the lowest common denominator of America’s youth, Cody is “discovered” by a surfing promoter and travels by whale to a tropical island where a penguin media frenzy is in progress to cover an annual penguin surfing event. Cody hopes to win, and like, totally be awesome on those waves.

Surf’s Up is a movie made for people who think dogs playing poker is funny. The film’s limp attempts at humor come strictly from the animals in it acting like people. They don’t say funny things, they just say human things, which is supposed to be hilarious because, you know, it’s penguins. This movie is exactly what I and many others were scared to death Happy Feet would be and wasn’t. Happy Feet managed to tell a complicated, and epic story about intelligent penguins who were, at the end of the day, still penguins. Surf’s Up goes in the opposite, and altogether horrible direction, of putting penguins on surf boards for no other reason than, hey, wouldn’t it be funny if penguins could surf? Well no, it isn’t.

What’s most baffling thing here is that for a film so desperate to seem cool and hip, Surf’s Up is completely out of touch with pop culture. MTV character confessionals haven’t been hip and hot since 1996. It doesn’t become fresh just because they’ve got penguins doing it. Surfing stopped being a cutting edge part of youth culture when the Beach Boys turned 30. Penguins stopped being awesome last year, when everyone enjoyed Happy Feet, and then got over it.

This is the worst possible sort of kids movie. The animation is bright and colorful, so maybe very young kids who can’t understand what’s going on will like it, just because of how bright it is. But everyone else is going to be bored out of their mind. Large groups of people started walking out of the free screening I was in after about fifteen minutes, and the kids who did stick around were fidgety and disinterested. Most got up and wandered around the theater to talk to their friends. If Surf’s Up accomplishes anything, it will be to bring families together, in boredom. Take your kids and be bored together.

Blades of Glory - Review

Who would have thought that The Cutting Edge, the 1992 romantic drama starring Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney as bickering would-be Olympic figure skaters could ever provide a template for a Will Ferrell comedy? And yet it is all there in the spectacularly silly laugh riot Blades of Glory: The bitter enemies who soften when they are forced to work together, the wealthy father pushing his child to win the gold, the rival team that threatens the hopefuls' dreams, the dedicated coach, and the unprecedented maneuver that will either surely win the competition or maim or even kill one of the partners. Talk about your miracles on ice. Somehow the screenwriters have taken a drippy love story and utterly transformed it.

Not that Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder, in the rich kid role of Jimmy MacElroy, is anywhere near as snooty as Kelly. In his peacock costume, he may just cut a more delicate figure out on the rink. But Ferrell's Chazz Michael Michaels is, if anything, even fuller of machismo than Sweeney, coming across like Elvis Stojko's bad boy cousin, prone to sex addiction, alcoholism, and steroid abuse, a heavy-metal demon on skates. That Jimmy and Chazz hate each other is only natural, but when that enmity leads to a fistfight in front of a worldwide televised audience, they lose everything when each is banned from the sport for life.

Banned from individual competition that is, which is what sets the plot in motion when Jimmy discovers there is a loophole and that they can still compete in pairs skating. With only weeks to go before nationals and no female partners in sight, their only alternative is to skate with each other and become the first same-sex pair skaters in the sports' history. It is a thin joke to build a movie on, predicated on gay panic and the stereotype that somehow male figure skaters are not as masculine as athletes in other sports.

It would seem that the comedy would wear out long before the movie ended, and yet it doesn't. The writers do find a surprisingly many ways to milk laughs out of the situation, and directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck are blessed with excellent timing. Jimmy and Chazz's skating rivals Stranz (Will Arnett) and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Amy Poehler), a quasi-incestuous brother and sister act, are hilarious in their own ridiculous subplot and even funnier on ice in their ludicrous (but brilliantly conceived) routines. If Jenna Fischer as their timid sister Katie (and Jimmy's love interest) does not fare as well, it is only that her pallid character is underwritten.

But Blades of Glory lives or dies on the strength of Ferrell and Heder, and they come through like the champs that they are. The movie takes advantage of the disparities between their sizes, their ages, and perhaps most importantly, their personalities, with Chazz's outgoing and aggressive bonhomie contrasting wonderfully with the shy, timid Jimmy. Both men are superb physical comedians who don't mind looking foolish. That lack of self-consciousness is an ace in the hole, building laugh upon laugh.

Sure, no one is going to remember Blades of Glory come Oscar time, but it's not that type of movie. But as a piece of popcorn entertainment, it really is cutting edge. If there was an Olympics for purely fun movies, this would skate away with one of those pretty medals.