Monday 25 August 2008

Space Chimps, The Fox and the Child and College Road Trip Review

In honour of Mr. Paul Francis Gadd coming home (there's a sentence that should never have been typed) and the end of the school holidays (coincidence?!?!) here is a run down of the kids flicks I had to watch to keep up with the silly 'Lets watch every film ever challenge'. They include me seeing no good reason why the Lord God should take Bernie Mac when Martin Lawrence still walks the earth, the worst CGI movie since The Ugly Ducking and some of the most horrific animal abuse masquerading as family friendly fare ever cut to film.

First up the animal abuse in The Fox and The Child. A twee pseudo-wildlife documentary following a small child annoying a fox. Not happy with just loving/tormenting this fox (whats the difference? ooo cynicism) the small child feels the need to trap it in her bedroom where it promptly spazzes out in the most realistic 'fox spazzes out in a bedroom' scene I've seen all year. Its all narrated by Kate Winslet and, having just re-watched Extras, I was really hoping she might surreptitiously drop in the phrase 'purple headed womb ferret' one last time. She didn't. Still I like foxes, especially that clever one from The Little Prince, so this was all quite tolerable.

Not so tolerable was Space Chimps. A reasonable idea made crappy crap crap by some awful animation and the complete non-existence of jokes for adults. Or jokes for kids. Basically its Apollo 13 with monkeys which doesn't sound too bad until you replace every other word in the script for some pun on the word chimp. The worst of these was Chimpmarshalled instead of courtmarshalled which doesn't even chimping work. To all the 'scriptwriters' - Suck my greasy Chimp and lick my Chimpy balls. See what I did there?

While its the screenwriters that get the worst telling off for Space Chimps there isn't a single cast or crew member from College Road Trip that deserves to stay alive for what they put me through for 90 minutes. Essentially, a remake of Ice Cubes Are We There Yet? with a slightly older family. And Martin Lawrence instead of Ice Cube. This is in no way a good thing. When I watch films as bad as this I sometimes stay for the whole credits picking names at random like Ralph Fiennes in Schindlers List in the hope that one day I will wield enough power to end those that I was unfortunate enough to pick out. Not even the catering staff and grips will be pardoned. The excuse I was just following orders will not stand.

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