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.

Transformers - Review

Transformers began life as a body-morphing toy before shape-shifting into a TV cartoon series. Now it has evolved once again, this time into a big, dumb, loud action movie, occasionally tasteless, far too long, yet wildly diverting most of the time. There is no denying that director Michael Bay—the man who also brought us Bad Boys, The Rock, Armaggedon, Pearl Harbor, and Bad Boys II—has a talent for brainless, over-the-top, CGI-enhanced theatrics. After misfiring with the comparatively staid The Island, Bay gets back to basics with Transformers, a high-octane symphony of machine battling machine and stuff blowing to pieces.

Transformers is at its very worst in its opening minutes when U.S. soldiers on a base in Qatar find themselves under a sudden and merciless assault. The foe is eventually revealed to be extraterrestrial, part of the murderous Decepticon robot race and the scene is effective, yet it gets the movie off on the wrong foot. At this particular time in American history, does anyone really want to see American soldiers getting blown to smithereens in the Middle East even by CGI robots?

Those early scenes threaten to sink the entire enterprise, yet it only takes the introduction of a single teenager, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) to make things right. Visiting a used car lot with his dad (Kevin Dunn), the high school nerd falls in love with a rusting Camaro. The hunk of junk has a strange quirk: its radio has a habit of turning on spontaneously to tacky old pop songs that oddly befit whatever situation Sam finds himself in. But when Sam thinks that some has stolen the heap and he tracks it to a rail yard, he discovers it has an even more bizarre kink when it transforms into a robot.

Though those soldiers in Qatar and Sam back in the 'burbs don't realize it yet, they are early unwitting recruits into the robot wars between the evil Decepticons and the benevolent Autobots. The Decepticons prefer to transform into helicopters and cop cars and things that are just as ugly, except for a small, hyperactive one that jabbers non-stop and can morph into things like CD players and cell phones. The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), have a much more refined aesthetic, preferring to transmute into items like Sam's bitchin' Camaro. They also have far more expressive personalities.

Motivation also divides the robot races. The Decepticons want to lay waste to the planet in their quest to take over the universe. Optimus Prime, on the other hand, makes pronouncements about how the Autobots, hope to "bring peace to this planet," which just goes to show how little research went into this alien invasion if he thinks merely stopping the Decepticons will bring about that. Of course, the Autobots' idea of promoting peace is to throw down with the Decepticons in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, destroying buildings, cars, and anything else that gets caught in the middle.

It is all amusing in an explosive sort of way, as it follows a formula at least as old as Godzilla and as up-to-date as the Terminator series, even if the eventual climax goes on far too long (like a rambunctious little boy with toy Transformers, Bay is not going to stop playing until he has broken every last one). It is also a little more than that, thanks mainly to LaBeouf's grounded performance. There are a lot of human characters in Transformers, but most of them are one-dimensional stereotypes, grist for the action mill. Only LaBeouf transcends that, suggesting that something really is at stake in this movie, if it is only this one kid's life.

"I bought a car and it turned out to be an alien robot," Sam complains, but that turns out to be not such a bad thing. At least, his car turns out to be entertaining and so is this movie. Just be sure to check your brain at the door; for close to two-and-half-hours, you will not need it.