RE: The Last Movie You Watched
February 20, 2019 at 12:33 am
(This post was last modified: February 20, 2019 at 12:43 am by Rev. Rye.)
This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Life's a Jungle: Africa's Most Wanted. It's basically a mockbuster of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and you can tell how much care they put into the film when you look at the box and it says it's a paltry 70 minutes long, the disc says it's 88 minutes long, and the actual movie is 100.
It's basically a riff on Call of the Wild, the story of a beloved and pampered family dog who gets lost on safari and becomes a wild animal. Instead of a St. Bernard/Collie mix, it's a Jack Russell terrier with a cardigan who's built like a bodybuilder, for some reason. His name is Pip, and, for some reason, his family pronounces it strange. IHE said it sounded like his name was Poop, but it's more like they think there's an umlaut in the name. I was willing to chalk it down to them being South African, but apparently, they're from Cambridge, Massachussets. Which doesn't explain why they seem to live in a mansion overnight distance from the Serengheti. The CGI is terrible, like something the Veggietales guys tried before they figured out they're better off trying to anthropomorphise vegetables. The motion is often uncanny and the backgrounds often look like they've been bleach bypassed.
The strangest thing of all is the sound: it's pretty clear they're relying on stock sound effects [seriously, I'm pretty sure I've heard the panther's roar in some old MGM commercials; and it's the same two over and over again], and it's clear they're not even trying to make it sound natural. They can vary widely in sound quality and volume, to the extent that one scene of a cat's meow's is a lot softer, tinnier, and boxier than the sound of the baseball it throws at Pip. The music is barely utilised, and it's often just stock classical music (to their credit, they do put an excruciating amount of detail in crediting everything about it, from the standard details to its recording date, the YouTube channel they ripped it off of, and even its unedited length, down to the millisecond. When it's not used, which is a lot of the time, well, you know how Jan Svankmajer's movies often lack dialogue and music, and, to compensate, the sound effects are really loud, to make it all the more unnerving?
Well, a lot of the time, it manages to feel like the same, except they put shitty dialogue and voice acting into the mix.
The pacing is very slow, but, at least, unlike The Disappointments Room, at least they know something about pacing and structure. Still, there's a lot of dead air, and I think if they cut out some of it, it might not only actually match one of the runtimes on the packaging, it might also be more entertaining. Also, I just watched a scene where they introduced a three-toed sloth and Pip points out that they're South American, not Africa. The fuck?
Overall, I think it's the best film I've seen for The Deep Hurting Project so far. It's not quite as entertaining as the Bratz movie or Battlefield Earth (bear in mind, they're not officially part of The Project until I re-watch them, which will be during my trip to Door County) but at least it's tolerable in a way that the other films I've seen for it have utterly failed to be.
It's basically a riff on Call of the Wild, the story of a beloved and pampered family dog who gets lost on safari and becomes a wild animal. Instead of a St. Bernard/Collie mix, it's a Jack Russell terrier with a cardigan who's built like a bodybuilder, for some reason. His name is Pip, and, for some reason, his family pronounces it strange. IHE said it sounded like his name was Poop, but it's more like they think there's an umlaut in the name. I was willing to chalk it down to them being South African, but apparently, they're from Cambridge, Massachussets. Which doesn't explain why they seem to live in a mansion overnight distance from the Serengheti. The CGI is terrible, like something the Veggietales guys tried before they figured out they're better off trying to anthropomorphise vegetables. The motion is often uncanny and the backgrounds often look like they've been bleach bypassed.
The strangest thing of all is the sound: it's pretty clear they're relying on stock sound effects [seriously, I'm pretty sure I've heard the panther's roar in some old MGM commercials; and it's the same two over and over again], and it's clear they're not even trying to make it sound natural. They can vary widely in sound quality and volume, to the extent that one scene of a cat's meow's is a lot softer, tinnier, and boxier than the sound of the baseball it throws at Pip. The music is barely utilised, and it's often just stock classical music (to their credit, they do put an excruciating amount of detail in crediting everything about it, from the standard details to its recording date, the YouTube channel they ripped it off of, and even its unedited length, down to the millisecond. When it's not used, which is a lot of the time, well, you know how Jan Svankmajer's movies often lack dialogue and music, and, to compensate, the sound effects are really loud, to make it all the more unnerving?
Well, a lot of the time, it manages to feel like the same, except they put shitty dialogue and voice acting into the mix.
The pacing is very slow, but, at least, unlike The Disappointments Room, at least they know something about pacing and structure. Still, there's a lot of dead air, and I think if they cut out some of it, it might not only actually match one of the runtimes on the packaging, it might also be more entertaining. Also, I just watched a scene where they introduced a three-toed sloth and Pip points out that they're South American, not Africa. The fuck?
Overall, I think it's the best film I've seen for The Deep Hurting Project so far. It's not quite as entertaining as the Bratz movie or Battlefield Earth (bear in mind, they're not officially part of The Project until I re-watch them, which will be during my trip to Door County) but at least it's tolerable in a way that the other films I've seen for it have utterly failed to be.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.