Colors Reviews Stuff Out of Boredom

Directors: Eric Darnell, Simon J. Smith

Writers: Micheal Colton, John Aboud, Brandon Sawyer, Alan Schoolcraft, Brent Simons, Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath

Voice cast: Tom McGrath, Chris Miller, Christopher Knights, Conrad Vernon, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Malkovitch.


Penguins of Madagascar is a spin off the film series Madagascar, which I'm sure majorly confused anyone going into this blind, as Madagascar is only referenced briefly in what amounts to an in-joke. The general consensus was that the penguins were the best part of the movies, and after nine years, and their own shorts and TV series, Dreamworks just completely shined the spotlight on them with a full blown movie. It...didn't work out for them, financially (if you smell desperation coming from Dreamworks in the near future, you can blame this movie). But quality wise? Well...

The movie actually has a lot going for it. It has a lot of good jokes throughout; there's not much that'll get really big, "Doubled over, out of breath" type laughter, but good laughs nonetheless (unfortunately still some toilet humor. About three counts of it). Comedy's always been the penguins' main draw, and they don't disappoint there. It's Dreamworks, so the animation's good, both in settings and characters (the villain's an octopus that has a human disguise. It's hard to watch him and not imagine animators either having a field day or pulling their hair out). Action scenes were really fun to watch. They're fast paced and varied, and also manage to be fairly unique, taking advantage of the animation medium and wacky premise that's already suspended everyone's belief to allow for some ridiculous but still fun to watch scenes you wouldn't do in live action, (or if there's another movie where the characters move between airplanes while in midair or take a gondola on land, I'd like to see it). It surprisingly managed to hit the mark and make an emotional scene work, though only one of them out of multiple attempts.

Unfortunately, the story is where the whole thing slips and bangs its head. What's wrong with it? Well it's...weird. Very weird. And that probably seems like an odd complaint for an animated movie. After all, this is the medium with things like cooking rats and kung fu pandas, and this specific movie itself is about spy penguins. You go into this actively looking for weirdness, right? Yeah, but this is a whole new level of weird, past animals doing things they shouldn't do. Just to give you a taste, a character grows a hand out of their backside. And it actually becomes important later. And I've went and checked multiple websites just to make sure that actually happened because despite seeing the film I have a hard time believing it.

Obviously, weirdness can be a good thing. It is a comedy, after all, and indeed, there are a few moments where weirdness makes everything funnier. Even action scenes can benefit from a little weirdness. But the problem is that the weird stuff doesn't slow down or go away when a dramatic moment comes up. In fact, if anything, the weirdness just amps up during attempted emotional moments (second, more slightly spoilery taste of insanity; a main penguin gets kidnapped while wearing a mermaid costume). While I'm sure it's possible to blend emotional moments and over the top weirdness, whoever was handling these scenes is not at that level of film making. The two really don't mix well, and the end result is spending chunks of the movie (especially the climax. In fact, mostly the climax) stuck in this uncomfortable middle, wondering exactly what you're supposed to be feeling. And then you then end the movie with that being your final impression.

When it's not being weird, there's a bad guy who's jealous of the good guys, the good guys have to deal with the idea they aren't as good as they thought they were, and the youngest penguin wants to prove himself. Yeah, you've seen it before. Probably multiple times. Would the movie have benefited from some more originality? Definitely. But as is, it's a basic structure they can pile jokes and action on, and as that, it works. And if nothing else, the movie at least pulls off the plot elements decently. Well, most of them.

The movie's way of making the heroes question their abilities is to create four entirely new characters and an entirely new organization just to do the job a little self assessment could have (they already use a failure on their part to make them doubt themselves, the new guys just kind of point it out). The four characters, collectively part of an organization called "The North Wind", are not very interesting in and of themselves; neither their personalities nor their organization are given much fleshing out, and only one of them gets any development. When it all comes down to it, their job is to eat up screen time and to add a well known name to the marquee (Benedict Cumberbatch's name, specifically. The guy who can't say "penguins" correctly. I'm not sure if it's a brilliant or stupid casting choice). And the screen time they take is not screen time the movie had to spare; two of the penguins don't get plots or development of their own because the movie's busy with the North Wind. There's been some theorizing Dreamworks was hoping to spin them off for their own movie, and it sounds plausible. So at least this movie's failure prevented that from happening.

Overall, with a few changes, this could have been a much better movie. It apparently finished ahead of schedule, and shouldn't have been released until very recently, and I think keeping the original date and spending a few months tweaking it could have done wonders. As is, it's not bad. Good for comedy, good for animation, good for action, not so good for story but it's not outright horrible. It's not for people who want a groundbreaking emotional roller coaster, but it's a fun popcorn movie nonetheless. It probably didn't deserve to bomb like it did, but I can understand being hesitant to tell people "Yeah, that movie was good, go see it!" and subsequently bringing "What the hell did you just send me to!?" phone calls down on yourself.

Would you recommend the movie Penguins of Madagascar for someone who liked all the Madagascar movies, but hasn't seen the Penguins of Madagascar TV series?

Not completely sure if I can answer that, unfortunately. I only ever saw the first Madagascar, and that was way back when it was in theaters (and I ditched near the end. My eight year old self was a wimp). So if you're asking in the "If I liked that will I like this?" way, I can't answer (though, one of the directors was a director on every movie). If you're asking from a "Is it confusing if you haven't seen the show?" standpoint, the cartoon is meant to take place in a separate canon from the movies, including this one.

I was asking from the "Is it confusing if you haven't seen the show?" standpoint. It's a kids animated movie, so I'll probably see it at some point no matter what anyone says about it.

You don't know me yet, but my movie tastes are so strange that whether or not someone thinks I'll like it wouldn't stop me from seeing it. I was just wondering if I should watch some episodes of the TV series first.

Ah, okay. Well, yeah, no need to watch anything from the show. The movie actually kicks off (after a quick prologue) right where the last Madagascar left off. Complete with jokes about how annoying Afro Circus is.

So what's your next review going to be Colors?

Don't really know, honestly. Don't really have plans to see anything new for a while. I'll probably go for something kind of old sitting around my house. Might end up being something there's already a review for, but I see there are like six for Jurassic Park, so I presume it wouldn't be a problem.



By the way, guys, I notice the little intro at the top is in the review when it's in the review section. Should I delete that? Or will that not change anything now?

that's a good big review for someone who's reviewing out of boredom! Sounds like an ok film, I'll probably see it at some point with ,y little nieces

I recently review Penguins of Medagascar in my diary thread as well, and I definitely agree of how wild and batsh*t crazy it was, with a story that seemed pretty much non-existent.

But somehow I enjoy it quite a lot for all its weird craziness, the jokes were fun and the visuals all over the place, and oh by the way... Benedict Cumberbatch is in it, and he can't pronounce penguins, which always gives me a laugh! "Where are those pengwings!?" Hahah

Nice review Colors. Nice layout aswell.

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The little intro is probably OK. Generally reviews are mainly about the movie. I guess it's up to you if you want the intro to stay or go. That's what is nice about this site, you can edit your post at any time. Nicely written review. I've wrote a few myself and they ain't always easy to do

Thanks, guys.

Heh, I was going to use that baby penguins pick. Guess it's a good thing I didn't.

And yeah, the weirdness is very entertaining most of the time.

Director: David Soren

Writers: Darren Lemke, Robert D. Seigal, David Soren

Voice cast: Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Micheal Pena, Luis Guzman, Bill Hader.


Turbo is...well, probably the most notable thing about Turbo is that it's generally agreed to be a knockoff of Pixar's Ratatouille. In both, a tiny creature wants to do something he's good at because of a special trait unique to him, but his species doesn't do said thing, so he teams up with a human loser he can't actually talk to to accomplish both their goals despite the wishes of a pessimistic, older family member. And Turbo wastes absolutely no time cementing that even a lot of its details are the same as that movie (protagonists have bad jobs within their groups, protagonists like to sneak into human house to watch TV, both get lectures on how nature intends for them to be miserable, etc.). If it wasn't on purpose, then it's a pretty amazing coincidence.





To the movie's credit, if it was on purpose, it gets notably less blatant as the movie goes on. There are still a few questionable elements (Theo's hero has an uplifting phrase they repeat, for example) but it does get better, and in fact the ending feels more like Cars than anything, so I'll be making my best attempt to review this as if's an original work, starting now.

Turbo is a Dreamworks movie, so it is well made on a technical level. It's all well rendered, it actually does a decent job of making the snails distinct from each other and expressive with only heads to work with, and the humans are also distinct from one another, save a pair of brothers. The action scenes are decently done, as well, though there's nothing particularly of note. If there's anything wrong with the art in this movie, it's that a lot (not all) of the sets are really dull. Realistic, but dull, and not very fun to look at.

Though the most dull thing in the movie is the characters. As mentioned, they're well designed, but just really forgettable. And probably the reason for this is how many there are. The movie really only needed four or five characters, but there are like twelve. There are three humans whose job seems to be to stand there and occasionally toss out a comedic line or action, and only one has a clear personality. The human's motivation is to liven up a strip mall where they all own businesses, and they lend the main human, Tito, money so he can enter the race to begin with, but it really doesn't justify these guys doing nothing for pretty much the whole movie. What's wrong with trying to save just one business (other than it being another Ratatouille similarity)? Tito already took he and his brother's life savings, is it really that big of a stretch to just say there's enough there? Why do we need three other business owners?

The snails fair slightly better. They at least are shown doing things, though most of those things aren't really necessary. Their job is to give the main snail a generic group of friends so he doesn't need to hang out only with his brother, and near the end they do a sort of snail-specific pit-stop, and one of them gives a pep talk and some advice. Once again, things that could have been done with one character, or even by the human. For characterization, pretty much all of them have a sort of thrill junkie thing going on, with slight tweaks for some of them.

The main characters are probably done the best. The main snail's named, Theo, who was surprisingly likable, if somewhat stupid, at least in the beginning. After a while all character seems to wear off and he starts to feel more like a plot element, but when he has time to actually act like someone he's not hard to root or feel bad for. The only time the movie actually pulls off emotion is when it's making you feel bad for the guy. His brother's named Chet, and there's nothing particularly wrong with him either. Tito and his brother, Angelo, have basically the same, at least passable personalities as the snails, which is interesting for a parallel but not really good when it comes to making everyone distinct.

Plot wise, it's passable. On Theo's side, he wants to race, and getting sucked into a car engine gives him super speed. Well, actually, it's more like it turns him into a car, complete with blinkers and a radio, but he (understandably) doesn't use the other abilities often. On Tito's side, he tries to enter Theo into the Indie 500 to get publicity for the characters' shops. Obviously there are some problems in that it's hard to really care about what happens if you never get to know who it effects, but the climax focuses on Theo, so that's not much of a problem.

The plot probably could have been better if they'd actually used their premise. The humans are ridiculously nonchalant about an intelligent, super smart snail racing in the Indie 500, and in general you probably could have replaced Theo with a young kid who happened to really rock at driving and you wouldn't need to change much. It actually kind of lessens the climax's impact; why care if he wins? Everyone's okay with letting a snail race! Come back next year! The human's shops aren't going to be shunned just because they only have the snail that got second place at the Indie 500! Admittedly, the climax does a decent job at building some tension despite this, but, still, just come back. The movie raises the question of what will happen if he loses his powers, so maybe that was supposed to be the idea, that they don't know if he can, but they have absolutely no reason to believe it'll actually happen, it was just something Chet brought up.

Oh, and this movie has product placement. A lot. It's actually really jarring.

Overall...not good. Even with the possible rip off, it could have been a genuinely interesting look into a twisted familiar story; sort of a butterfly effect kind of thing, "What if you took this story and just changed this, subsequently changing everything?". But it doesn't do that. And it bombed. And it deserved to. Yet it still got a Netflix series, somehow.

Turbo looked pretty awful in the trailers, not surprised by this review.

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Didn't really like Turbo. My little lad does, but he'l likes anything animated so.

Not something I'd think of watching, but good interesting review

Yeah, I doubt many people here'd think to watch it. I just kind of insulted it in the first review (deleted it cause I figured it was kind of confusing) and figured that wasn't really fair since I hadn't seen it, and then I remembered it was on Netflix and I had nothing better to do.

And then after I did I thought I might as well get a review out of it to try and make it less of a waste of my time. I should have done more work on the review, but the movie's kind of in a limbo where it's not good enough to gush, not bad enough to rant, and not interesting enough to think about, so even writing this was boring.

Director: Jennifer Kent

Writer: Jennifer Kent

Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Tim Purcell, Barbara West, Hayley McEhlinney, Benjamin Winspear.

The Babadook is an Australian horror film based on a 2005 Australian short film. A widow who's been grieving for seven years lives with a crazy son who's obsessed with defending himself against monsters. His fears are then validated when a monster with a weird name (it's either an anagram for "a bad book" or based off Serbian for boogeyman. Or both) shows up.

It's easy to root for the mother. The movie spends time at its beginning showing just how miserable everything is for the mom; still a wreck from her husband's death seven years ago, working a boring job, and dealing with the kid, who's taking things so far he's started bringing darts to school. You can understand when she gets angry, so it doesn't hurt her likability much. The kid tends to go back and forth; there are moments when he gets really annoying, and even though this was probably intentional to make us identify with the mother more, it still presents the problem that one of the main characters is irritating. Though these moments tend to be near the beginning of the movie, and he has his own assortment of problems to justify them; once things really go down hill he's fine. The movie even manages to get some tears shed for him. They both live in a house that's very well designed to look like the most depressing place on Earth, which is pretty much coated in grey to set it apart from outside.

The Babadook had a budget of two million dollars (and it made it back fifty fold, so don't be surprised if "The Babadook 2" comes out in the near future), and you don't need to look it up to guess it was low. There's a brief use of CGI that's really bad, and the monster itself is animated in blatant stop motion, which to be fair was probably intentional but still can end up steering your thoughts away from the movie. And stock sound effects are sprinkled around. The monster's given the ability to either turn invisible or move things without touching them so the kid can just pretend it's jerking him around, and it follows the usual low budget film tactic of keeping the monster in the shadows for most of the movie.

As is usually the case, the movie works better because of the monster staying out of sight. In fact, if anything it probably should have stayed in the shadows more; the brief times we see the entirety of it (and there are posters showing it) it just looks like a guy in a trench coat who ate too much black licorice. So all the more reason to come up with a bunch of ways to keep it in the shadows, the best of which being a story books filled with black and white images, which is well built up from genuinely kind of cute to creepy, then later comes back even worse (though when it comes back you may find yourself wondering if it moves on its own or the mother is bothering to pull its tabs while she freaks out). The other methods they use are all pretty effective. None are really as unique as the book, but the movie deserves some props for having this thing call them on the phone and making it not come off as stupid. All in all, it delivers a good amount of scary scenes, and builds good tension, especially during one scene when the monster gets very close to the mother, and all she can really do is just get under the covers and hope she's imagining things.

If there's anything particularly...off in the movie it's the ending.

Of course if anything in the movie is hard to swallow you can just take it as an allegory for grief and anxiety, or as a story of a woman and her kid going completely insane and imagining a monster running around the house. Other people do. In fact it probably makes more sense that way.

The movie seems specifically engineered to leave you paranoid after viewing (is that noise outside the door the Babadook!?), but doesn't leave enough of an impression for that. But while it's playing it gives you some good scary scenes, and a good story line unfolding around those scenes.

Director: Levan Gabriadze

Writer: Nelson Greaves

Cast: Heather Sossaman, Matthrew Bohrer, Courtney Halverson, Shelley Henning, Moses Storm, Will Peltz, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki

Unfriended is a movie you've seen, with a new gimmick. On the anniversary of the suicide of an acquaintance (it's not really clear how much interaction most of them had with her beforehand) six friends meet on a Skype call. And that's the gimmick; all interaction (aside from some phone calls) takes places on some form of online social network. Skype, Facebook, Chat Roulette, Youtube (by the way, apparently Youtube thinks plating food is somehow related to a suicide video), etc. I can't wait to watch this movie with some teen in a decade or two. "Hey, hey, what the hell are these?".

Aside from dating the movie, is there anything obnoxious about the gimmick? Well, there are a few bumps. Some have to do with logic, like fact that the characters could have very easily ignored the problems in the beginning but don't for some reason. Some things are shown working in ways they just don't, like a Google search's first result being something that blatantly had nothing to do with the search. Some things just completely kill the mood, like them using common internet acronyms ("She finally STFU!"), and either it's a coincidence or they actually put memes in the dialogue.

With that said, the problems aren't particularly movie breaking, most of them are fairly minor things. That's not to say the gimmick actually works well, because it doesn't. It could have worked well, if the movie wasn't so completely intent on hammering into your head "YES! GHOSTS! IT IS A GHOST!". If it hadn't done that, it could have made for an interesting movie that kept you guessing on the culprit since you can't really see what anyone's doing. Doing it that way probably would have required less gory deaths or none at all, though, and there was no way this movie was doing something like that. So instead you get the typical "Killed off one by one" plot.

It can keep your attention, if nothing else. Despite the rather limiting gimmick, it doesn't really become boring at any point, with the exception of a beginning that consists of "Who's this guy on Skype? Let's keep trying to get rid of it. It is vitally important we video chat right now for some reason!". There's at least some entertainment to be had figuring out who'll die next.

Said deaths are the closest the movie gets to scary (aside from one effective shock moment), and they aren't really scary, just gross. Points for creativity for some of them, but that's all they get. And watching the characters die feels like ticks on a little counter, "Kay, three down, we gotta be halfway through the movie". It's kind of hard to figure out if the movie wants us to care about them or not; it seems to follows the common "jerk victim" routine, which of course opens up the problem of why we should care if the movie thinks they deserved it. If the movie did want us to feel bad for them, it kind of failed. There's not really any impact from their deaths, probably because most of them don't get much characterization. At best, the movie manages to squeeze out one moment of pity for one of the characters.

It should be noted that apparently the ghost is an amateur sound designer who thinks certain dramatic moments of the film would be better underscored by stupid, unfitting music from the main girl's computer. It's probably supposed to be her taunting them. It just wrecks the scenes.

Unfriended is better than most probably expected, but it's not as good as it could have been. It's a slasher movie online, and the novelty of that is all it really has going for it.



Bit of a warning; do not go into this movie if you have vision problems. Lots of fairly small print, most of it plot related.

Nice thread. Never heard of any of the movies reviewed here as well.