Horton Hears a Who! - Review

Dr. Seuss’s stories are simple, and their length is not long. His stories are short, yet their message is strong. They’re also spectacularly unsuited for any Hollywood adaptation, as unsuited as I am for Dr. Seuss rhyming and alliteration. They’ve tried it before with live action, and with Horton at least they’ve finally learned that lesson and left the prosthetics abandoned. To make a Seuss story work as a film you’ve got to stuff it with filler, and there’s plenty of that to be found in this new animated attempt at filming his masterful work. It’s a success as a movie, but it still isn’t quite perfect as a Seuss adaptation.

The fact that the movie is freed from the bounds of human actors and props helps though, and Horton Hears a Who! is nearly as visually creative and fun as the Seuss drawings it’s based on. It’s the story that occasionally misses, since they’re building a 90 minute film out of a book that’s really only a few pages. The core of Seuss’s world is there though. This is still the story of an elephant named Horton who discovers a spec. On the spec is a town called Whoville, and its mayor can hear Horton when he talks. Horton vows to protect the tiny spec and its inhabitants, and finds himself harangued and ostracized by the other animals of his jungle who can’t hear the Whos’ voices and so insist he’s a dangerous kook.

Jim Carrey, who achieved dubious success doing a live action version of The Grinch a few years ago, voices Horton. It’s a strange choice really, I thought the reason we liked Jim was for his facial contortions, not his vocal veracity. But he’s capable as Horton, sort of sappy and silly, which plays into the film’s mostly cartoony vibe. Funny is the name of the game here, and Horton Hears a Who! sometimes pushes the moral center of Seuss’s story to the background in favor of being wacky. At least though, it really is funny. The visual gags are entertaining and Steve Carell, as the voice of The Mayor of Whoville is both touching and hilarious. That balances out a lot of the unnecessary pop culture references, MySpace jokes, and Jim Carrey riffing which in a lesser film, might have sent the whole thing straight to the bottom.

In the end, they hang on to enough of Seuss’s smart, sweet message about the importance of life, tolerance, and standing up for what you believe in to leave the movie something substantive to wrap all that silliness around. Horton Hears a Who is fun and enthusiastic, but also sweet and affecting in all the right moments. If you can forgive it for a momentary lapse in the last thirty seconds which turns the whole thing into a bizarre, rock opera musical number, you’ll find a lot to like in Horton Hears a Who!. Dr. Seuss will always be better in book form, but Hollywood has found a way to turn his work into a movie without falling flat.

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.