Forget crouching tigers and hidden dragons—meet Kung Fu Panda.
What’s black and white and may get a film studio out of the red? Answer: the martial-arts-obsessed mammalian star of
Kung Fu Panda
the latest bid for computer-animation supremacy from DreamWorks. The production company’s track record has been spotty, and the next installment of its cash cow
Shrek isn’t dropping until 2010, so all hopes are pinned on a corpulent panda with black-belt dreams and Jack Black’s voice. While this tale of a nobody who’s got to find his inner Bruce Lee probably won’t cause anyone at Pixar to lose sleep, the movie’s surprising amount of quality action suggests that DreamWorks may have found its next mascot.
The story is a textbook ’toon narrative: An obese bear named Po works at his pop’s noodle stand, though he really wants to train alongside the agile animal warriors known as the Furious Five (voiced by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, David Cross, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen). A twist of fate reveals Po as an unlikely kung fu master, and it’s up to a Yoda-like red panda to get him in fighting shape before a vengeful snow leopard attacks the town. The fact that the latter two characters are played by Dustin Hoffman and Ian McShane, respectively, only adds to the pop-cultural alt-universe feeling:
Dude, the Tenacious D guy is fighting Deadwood’s
Al Swearengen to save Rain Man’s life!Given the movie’s celebrity wattage and the financial gamble involved, there would be every reason to assume this is just another big-budget, dumbed-down distraction for bored kids. But though the script sticks to a basic theme—the schlubbiest guy can still be a hero—
Kung Fu Panda never stoops to the gratuitous grossness of most animated features; the fact that there’s not a fart joke in sight (or sound) is a minor miracle. More impressive is how the animators give every sequence a sense of beauty and kinetics, nailing the flowing movement of Shaolin fighting styles against backgrounds that look like Chinese watercolor paintings. It’s the rare flick that kids
and members of the Wu-Tang Clan are likely to enjoy in equal measure.
You won’t be inspired to sprint down to your local taekwondo academy and sign up, however, after seeing
The Foot Fist Way (2 stars). As Fred Simmons, a spectacularly inept teacher who bullies his students and fancies himself the second coming of Chuck Norris, actor Danny McBride (
Hot Rod) makes the most of his admittedly funny every-redneck persona. The problem is that cowriter-director Jody Hill assumes that merely showcasing McBride’s Southern-fried dumb-ass shtick is a substitute for an actual plot, which means we’re subjected to endless riffs on macho stupidity that go nowhere. Even when a semblance of a story starts to form—Simmons must regain his honor by fighting a Steven Seagal–esque action-movie hero—this comedy still plays like a five-minute sketch stretched well past the breaking point.
Sometimes to get ahead, you have to step on a few toes, stab a few backs and, er, dope yourself up with rage-inducing hormones.
The Promotion (2.5 stars) and
Bigger, Stronger, Faster (2.5 stars) filter by-any-means-necessary parables through, respectively, a prototypical Indiewood comedy and a pop documentary.
The Promotion is a breezy story of two chain-grocery-store assistant managers (played by Seann “Stifler” William Scott and John C. Reilly) undermining each other for a step up on the corporate ladder, and given the comic talent involved, you wish their one-upmanship had way more bite. Christopher Bell’s
Bigger is a first-person doc about the stigmas of steroid use, which fails to register as a piece of in-depth journalism but will satisfy your curiosity if you’ve ever wanted to see a man with watermelon-size biceps. Both movies revolve around having what it takes to be No. 1, yet settle for mediocrity themselves.
If you can’t be a genuine mover and shaker, you can always just imitate one. Harmony Korine’s
Mister Lonely (3 stars) follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who joins a commune populated entirely by other faux-famous people—a Marilyn Monroe, a Sammy Davis Jr., an Abe Lincoln. Nothing if not an iconoclast, the bad-boy director returns from a drug-addled exile with another unique collection of odd, cryptic sequences that double as riffs on the pitfalls of celebrity obsession. Like Korine’s
Gummo, things don’t always make sense—damned if we know exactly what Lincoln rapping the Gettysburg Address or a skydiving nun on a BMX bike means—yet the movie leaves you with the feeling that you’ve seen a filmmaker sort through his own ambivalence about the need for attention.