96 - The Muppets

    Encouraged by an outsider muppet named Walter, the Muppets reunite in an effort to prevent an evil developer from demolishing their old studio.
    I had put off watching this for a long time.  I didn't have specific fears about it, except that it might just not be remarkable.  Luckily, it's actually pretty good.  I certainly enjoyed it, and even felt a little more accepting of some of the more modern elements.  If I had one complaint, it's that I have no idea how modern parents would feel about letting their kids see it.
    Strangely, this movie seems to be aimed more firmly at the adult audience that grew up with the Muppets during the 80s.  I'd be curious as to what a modern kid would think of it.
    There's some odd humor in the movie that seems out of place.  Notably, the farting shoes gag that showed up in trailers.  Luckily, in the context of the movie, that joke plays much better.  There's also a strange sequence of the chickens, led by Henrietta, clucking along with Cee Lo Green's Fuck You.  While some people are more familiar with the edit of the song, Forget You, it seemed like a strange reference for the movie to make.  Of course, I enjoyed that sequence quite a bit.
    The writing was incredibly unusual.  There's a lot of self-aware type humor, but they also don't seem to notice when their story mirrored the original movie (not all the time - in particular, the character arc for Kermit mirrors the original movie.)
    The music is interesting.  It's written by Bret McKenzie, and it fits his style very clearly.  It's a pleasure to have his work on this project, since he's a bit more refreshing from the amount of time that the original movie put into the songs.  I have some reservations about the use of popular music in the picture.  There are sequences that use Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard, Gary Numan's Cars, Back in Black, Bad to the Bone, We Built This City, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Fuck You, and a few pieces of incidental music.  Most of these I don't mind, but something feels wrong when the Muppets perform the songs.  I suppose I'm wrong about this - I think they did this all the time during the Muppet Show.

95 - Cemetery Man

    The caretaker of a cemetery has been dealing with the problem of the dead returning a few days after their burial.  He encounters a woman that he falls madly in love with, who returns after her death a few times.
    The movie doesn't lend itself to summary well, because it's a strange, philosophical horror movie.  Actually, I don't know if it's horror.  There are some horror elements, but most of the picture is devoted to an exploration of the main character's relationship to the living, the dead, and love.
    There's a lot of strangeness in this movie.  The girl he loves appears three times, under different identities.  His assistant falls develops a relationship with the decapitated head of a girl.
    While the story can be hard to get into, it's still shot wonderfully.  There's a look to the picture that is unlike most American productions, especially given how much material is shot in the dark.
    I like this movie quite a bit, but I have a hard time suggesting it to anyone but horror fans who want something unexpected.

94 - Futurama: Bender's Game

    There is a shortage (artificial) of dark matter.  Bender is bothered by his lack of an imagination.  These plots collide as the Professor runs his crew on a mission to make all of the dark matter in the universe inert, forcing the universe to work with a less cruel substance.
    This is one of the features that was released when Futurama had been cancelled on Fox.  The result is a collection of strange feature-length releases.  They're all created to function as both a feature, and as a trio of episodes.  This makes some of the editing and the scripting a little awkward.
    As a feature, this plays a little light on the comedy, and a little more heavy on the action.  There are still some great jokes, like the Morks being killed off.  There's also less of a stringent time requirement on these scripts, which gives them an opportunity to spread out.  The jokes don't come as fast as they would normally, which gives the illusion of this being less funny than normal episodes.
    There are a few themes being played around with, and what stood out more is the idea of the dark matter being unethical.  This makes this seem a little more like a precursor to what they were doing with Into the Wild Green Yonder.
    It's hard to write up about this feature as a movie.

93 - Safe

    Jason Statham is a former cop who has run afoul of the Russian mob.  There's a young asian girl who is used by the Chinese mob to courier numbers in a more secure way.  When the Russian try to kill the girl, Statham gets involved in protecting her, which leads him into conflict with the Russians, the Chinese, and a group of crooked cops.
    I was pleased with this one.  I like Statham.  What made this movie stand out was the complexity of the plot.  It's easy to point out how unlikely most of the premise is, (the AV Club was remarkably picky about this) but I found the more important aspect was how hard it is to think of a way for Statham to get out each situation.
    When the story first picked up, I expected something a little softer.  The fact that one of the main characters is a girl who is about 11 years old would imply that the action would be a little more tame.  Since we know how ruthless the mob she's being used by is, I expected that Statham's character would be a little more merciful.  Instead, he's brutal.  While he doesn't linger on his actions, he does kill more people than I anticipated.
    The action is a little unusual.  The direction is good.  It allows you to understand exactly what happens.  But the direction isn't flashy at all, and the choreography isn't over-the-top either.  This is a little unusual for a modern movie.
    I'm not sure if I would return to this one, but I was pleased, especially since it was available on Netflix streaming.

92 - World War Z

     After a zombie-like virus spreads around the world, the surviving government/military recruit a man, played by Brad Pitt, to investigate the cause of the outbreak, and hopefully find a solution to the problem.
     I had really low hopes for this one, since I had read the book years ago.  It's possible to film, but it wasn't possible to do it in a way that was commercially viable.  This movie is the result of one of the most awkward efforts to film a book that I've seen.  First, they wanted a huge budget.  They wound up with around 200M.  Second, because of that budget, they needed a bankable star.  So they cast Brad Pitt.  Third, since they have a major star, they don't want to waste that.  They rewrote the story to center around him.
     This chain of events leads to a movie that only distantly has anything to do with the book.

     I think I'll start with where this movie went right.
     The opening act is really enjoyable.  We start off in Philadelphia, a traffic jam, an escape from the city, which is falling apart.  They stop by a grocery store.  Then we get to stay the night in an apartment building.  We get a nice, tense escape from that situation.  Right around that point, the movie starts to unravel.
     There are still some good sequences.  I actually liked the material in Jerusalem, and I found that much more interesting than the material around it.  And I suppose I liked the airplane stuff too.
     The dead are strange.  In some ways, I really liked the approach they used.  They're fast, but they don't seem to have any sense of self-preservation.  None of the dead get a personality, even less so than the infected get in 28 Days Later.  This does help to externalize the threat, and the hordes of dead we see are very intimidating.  The numbers, and the long shots of the dead running amok are effective in making things seem hopeless.

     But this leads me to one of the weirdest problems with this movie.  The dead are unintentionally hilarious.  They make a variety of noises, and many of them are birdlike.  It wasn't just me - other people would occasionally laugh at these.
      The plot is strange, in that the movie would actually be better without it.  Brad Pitt travels around the world to try to find an origin to the virus.  Then he observes some odd things about the dead's behavior, and comes up with a hypothesis.  This entire plot actually hurts the movie.  The longer it goes on, the more it makes me cringe.
     There are emotional moments that try to make Pitt and his family have some kind of arc.  It doesn't work, and it felt like wasted time.

     I still came out of this movie not as disappointed as I expected.  But it certainly doesn't end at the right point.
     Not especially worth it, especially in theaters.  Still, some very impressive overhead shots really make for some very scary images.

91 - Cherry Tree Lane

     A couple is held hostage by a trio of teenage gang members, who are waiting for the couple's son to return home so they can perform some retribution on him.
     This is a feature from the UK, which seems to be living under a very different atmosphere than the US.  I had a similar feeling when I watched Eden Lake, which reflects different set of anxieties than the US.  I suppose it would be similar to someone raised in the UK watching movies like I Spit on Your Grave or the Wrong Turn movies, and not quite understanding the way that other parts of the US feel about the south.
     This movie is not as brutal as Eden Lake was, which is good.  Most of this movie takes place in one room, with four characters.  A few other characters show up, but most of them don't play as big a part.  With a bit of polish, this could easily be turned into a stage play, which could be very interesting.
     Since most of the movie is just the couple being held captive, gagged and bound, most of the characters development happens in small bits of dialogue from the captors.  We get a sense of the power structure between the gang members.  But we also don't get a clear sense of their motivation.  We know that something happened that resulted in a relative of the lead gang member going to jail.  They seem to get angry whenever anyone tries to ask what happened.

     What I found more puzzling was how little planning the gang members put into their actions.  A home invasion usually has a goal in mind - robbery, mostly.  The gang has no particular interest in their victim's parents, so it seems dumb to involve them.  It's more work, a more stressful situation, and more loose ends to tie up.  They could have easily just waited across the street for their victim to return home.
     The movie is pretty vague about the violence that happens.  We know that the mother is raped.  We know some of the minor parts of the beatings that happen.  We never find out exactly what happens to their victim, if he lives or not, or what the gang member was planning on doing with the axe.

     Incidentally, this is the first movie I watched on Netflix streaming.  At our new house, we moved up to a faster internet connection, and I plan on watching more streaming movies.  Right now... I'm not too impressed.  The selection seems to be hit and miss, and the quality of the image seems to vary.  At one point, the picture completely stopped, but the sound and subtitles continued.  When I tried to get it sync up again, it just got worse.  I had to close the application, kill it off, then restart the whole thing.  We'll see if it can do better with a faster connection.

90 - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, part 2

    Picking up where the last one ended, this portion ties off Batman's relationship with the Joker, followed by his rivalry with Superman, and his eventual death.
    This was far better than the first half.  In part, because seeing Batman dealing with the Joker is very satisfying.  But it wasn't just that.  It was that this portion had the resolution for the story set up by the first half.  The only way to make both halves work as independent movies would be to restructure the entire story, which could be done, but it would make it less faithful an adaptation.
    The Joker storyline is interesting.  I don't really care about the stories that focus on how the Joker is a response to the existence of Batman (although this is a key point made in their storyline).  What makes this one pay off is how violent the Joker is.  He gasses a studio audience.  Then he runs amok in a fairground.  He escapes from Batman into the Tunnel of Love, during which he runs down the path, casually shooting everyone he sees.  The comics are a little more restrained in showing the deaths, and they usually restrict it to gas-related deaths.
    The showdown between Batman and Superman isn't something that I care too much about.  They're interesting stories, since they rely on Batman going through a lot of planning.  I don't care about their fight too much, but it leads directly into the ending, which is very pleasing.
    What makes this story special is that Batman works as a leader during the second half.  He rallies the gang that has taken his name, and gets them to help out in controlling a crisis.  It seems responsible, and it's good to see Batman inspiring admirable behavior.
    The one storyline that I wish had played out better was the relationship between Batman and Robin.  There was one moment that was very nice, when Batman praises her performance.  But then there was the problem of this Robin not having much of a motivation to become Robin, except for being impressed by Batman.
    Still, the pair is worth watching.  The animation is still cheap, but it isn't terrible.

89 - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, part 1

    It's been about ten years since Batman was last seen.  He's roughly 70 years old, as well as Commissioner Gordon (I think they're around the same age, who knows).  A large gang called the Mutants has been terrorizing Gotham, and Batman comes out of retirement to deal with them.    I like this story.  I've read the comic, and I remember liking the atmosphere of it.  The future version of Gotham is not exactly darker, but it seems more dangerous, in an unpredictable way.  Seeing the story played out is a little different.  One of the weaknesses that the story has is the villain.  The leader of the Mutants would be a decent mini-boss, but he's just not that interesting.
    Where the story does a good job is with the ending.  It isn't clear that it will end the way it does, but it feels cathartic, like Batman's overall mission has been accomplished.

    While I liked Robin in the comic, here, she seems a little more annoying than I expected.

    The animation is decent, and the character designs are appropriate, although they're still cutting corners more than I would like.  I suppose there isn't much I can expect from straight-to-video releases.

88 - Westworld

    A company offers a variety of amusement parks, where participants can live, and act, consequence-free for a period of time in either a wild west setting, a roman setting, or a medieval setting, all populated by a variety of robots.  A pair of friends go to the Westworld vacation.  Unfortunately, there is some sort of problem with the programming.
    While this movie was a pretty huge hit when it came out, it faded into obscurity pretty quickly.  I remember catching a short bit of it on TV during my childhood, but I think I found it boring.
    It's written and directed by Michael Crichton, and it's easy to view this as being a dry run for Jurassic Park.  I actually found this one much more interesting though.  Not much time is dedicated to it, but the idea of this type of complete freedom, and how people are willing to use it, is interesting.  Clearly, a lot of time is devoted to sex, although the movie only implies that.  Westworld itself seems to be about indulging violent fantasies.  And the medieval setting is a cross between the others.  It's fascinating that the three fantasy choices are just different balances between sex and violence.
    This raised another issue to my mind.  How satisfying would it be, knowing that you're spending your time with a bunch of robots?  As nice as it might be to have someone talk to you, and feign interest perfectly, I would probably be kind of sad.

    When things start breaking down, everything happens pretty quickly.  I was surprised by how quickly the violence hits, and how it immediately escalates into some really dark places.  It's not explicit violence, for the most part, but it seems like it went further than I was expecting.
    There is a sense of horror to the last act, and it makes me think of a few other things.  Night of the Living Dead may have influenced this one, with the unstoppable nature of the threat.  The other thing is that The Terminator probably used this as an influence.

    Still, a good movie, and entirely worth seeing.  I probably wouldn't show it to kids, since they'd be alternately bored, or scared.

87 - Lincoln

    Set against the Civil War, Lincoln applies his political will to getting the 13th amendment passed.
    I know it's heresy, but I don't care for Spielberg.  He makes some quality movies, but most of them I have mixed feelings about.  Many of them are worth a viewing, and have some carefully directed sequences that have captured the public's imagination.  But there's something that feels like his movies are about less than art.  They seem like an effort to manipulate audiences into feeling emotions that don't feel earned.
    (Of his director credits, I've seen the episodes of Night Gallery he directed, at least part of Duel, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., the Twilight Zone movie, Temple of Doom, his episodes of Amazing Stories, Last Crusade, Hook, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, Crystal Skull, and now Lincoln.)
    Lincoln benefits from having a pretty incredible cast.  And he clearly took his time with the project.  The sets, the costuming, everything look comprehensively great.  But the movie has something that I don't like.
    It's not that there's so much corruption in the House at this point.  I know that's to be expected.  I think it has to do with the way that historical fiction is written and presented.  I have a hard time feeling like every line isn't written for the audience, rather than being an accurate representation.  And the coloring on the movie is a little less vivid than I would expect (although, I suppose most of the movie takes place around January/February).
    There's one other thing that seems wrong to me, but it's a big one.  The movie uses Lincoln as a primary character, but I don't think the movie is about it.  It's mostly a political set piece, focusing on the 13th Amendment.  It's actually strange how little insight I feel into Lincoln as a person.  If anything, I think I like him less because of this movie.  Anyone who spends their time telling anecdotes instead of answering directly isn't being a useful person.  (Sorry, Jesus)
    The movie continues past a natural ending point, and includes an awkward sequence after the passage of the Amendment.  It feels like there's nothing left to talk about.  If the focus had been on Lincoln as a character, that may have worked.

86 - Amadeus

    Salieri is disgusted that God would use Mozart as his instrument for music, so he works on a large, circuitous plan to ruin, and destroy Mozart.
    Man, I watch this movie every now and then (last year, probably) and it still keeps a sense of excitement, even though I know what happens in each scene.  The performances are perfect.  They're simple enough to easily understand, but also complex enough to be rewarding on multiple viewings.
    Oddly, I don't come out of the movie liking Mozart's music any more than I normally would.  I still like some of his melodies, but I find a remarkable amount of it to be overdone.  Loads of arpeggios, swelling strings and so forth.  It's fun, but it gets weary.
    What's remarkable is how well drawn many of the ancillary characters are.  Jeffrey Jones steals every scene he's in, but his court is fantastic.  For characters with so few lines, those characters are clearly defined.
    This time, I show Cathy the movie.  She had a poor impression of it from when she was younger, and I understand.  I think the first time I saw part of it, it seemed really dull.

85 - Taken

    A retired government agent goes on a personal mission to rescue his daughter after she is kidnapped in Europe by a slavery ring.
    This has a remarkable following for a straight-ahead action movie.  Liam Neeson seems like an interesting choice to lead this type of movie, so I had to give it a shot.  It's not bad, but it's not as fantastic as the fans have made it out to be.
    Most of the first 25 minutes are spent on setting the plot up, and establishing that Neeson is kind of obsessed with his daughter.  This is fine, but it doesn't come across as being a normal type of fatherly interest.  He's already focused in a way that seems pathological, and that might be intentional.
    Once the story is set, Neeson travels to Paris to pick up her trail.  He winds up taking on an Albanian mob, with their fingers in drugs, prostitution, slavery, and so forth.  Since this is the meat of the movie, it's fairly entertaining.   But it has this strange feeling to a lot of it.  Like Neeson is not making the smartest moves that he could.  In particular, the first person that he finds in Paris is the person who could easily have helped him the most.  The first thing he does is try to beat the information out of him.  He does this in public, without any concern that he might be calling attention to his help.
    There's a point later in the movie when he is willing to shoot (not to kill, of course) an innocent person in an effort to get information out of another person.  This is an unusual move, and it makes us a bit less sympathetic to his mission.

    After watching this, Cathy brought up the lack of development.  This is true.  There aren't any character-building moments.  But this made me think of similar parent-revenge stories.  First, I thought of Hardcore, which of course, makes me think of 8MM.  Then Last House on the Left.  which goes back to The Virgin Spring.  Of course, Last House and The Virgin Spring both deal with a child who has clearly been killed, while Hardcore and 8MM leave the viewer with an uncertain status.  I wonder how this difference changes the audience perception of the story.  Or if the death is left uncertain for most of the story, then is revealed at the end, does that justify prior actions that would have been in bad taste?

    There's one aspect to this movie that leaves a bad impression.  Neesom doesn't seem to care much about freeing, or helping, the other girls in captivity.  He isn't interest in breaking up their ring, only in getting his daughter.  In fact, he states this explicitly on a few occasions.  This doesn't feel right.

84 - Run, Fatboy, Run

    Years after leaving his pregnant fiancé at the altar, an out-of-shape security guard is threatened by a new beau in her life.  The guard makes an effort to better himself by running a marathon.
    I love seeing Simon Pegg.  This is one of his lesser movies, but it's a great example.  Despite having some weaker material to work with, he does a great job with his part.  In a strange way, this movie is a companion to High Fidelity, which took similar subject matter, and played it straight.  Here, the story is wedged into a romantic comedy format.  We get a handful of wacky characters delivering punchlines.  If anything, there's one main difference, and that's the lack of exploration of Libby, the girl.  She seems like she keeps her feelings under wraps most of the time.
    When I think back on this movie, I realize that I actually feel pretty poor about it.  I still like some of the elements, but for the most part, what saves this movie is the leads.  Simon Pegg is always great, and it's always good to see Hank Azaria.  The rest of the cast is decent, but unremarkable.

83 - The Day the Earth Stood Still

    Klaatu, an alien, lands on Earth.  He wants to assemble world leaders in an effort to explain his message to them.  That doesn't work out, so he winds up hanging around, and tries to coordinate a meeting through other means.  In the meantime, the military is getting nervous, and they're trying to deal with the robot guardian that Klaatu has brought along, Gort.
    This movie seems to have defined the sci-fi genre pretty solidly.  What's remarkable is how many big names are in this.  Robert Wise directed it!  A score by Bernard Herrmann!
    The first thing I noticed is how little time is wasted.  The story jumps right into the main event.  There's no introduction to characters, no time spent setting up secondary stories.  Straight to the main event.  There are montages going on pretty often in this, which makes the whole thing seem like it races along faster than normal.  They do a pretty good job of avoiding using stock footage, too!
    The main thing that the movie has to offer is a much more peaceful, and philosophical approach to mankind's place in the universe.  We already have a big aggression problem between nations.  This is an early cold war perspective, but we see a lot of this still going on.  Pre-emptive military action is pretty commonplace now.  The fact that we have a hard time arguing against it is a bad sign too.
    But as we extend our abilities out into space, it becomes more likely that we would find ourselves in conflict with other beings.  It's not a good idea to extend the cold war to aliens, especially if we have no hope of outclassing them.

    What I found distracting as I watched this was how much it seemed like Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space.  While there's the horror/reanimated corpses angle to Plan 9, the primary message is the same - we need to keep you from making mistakes with weapons, or else we have to wipe you out.

82 - Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

    After a mission goes bad, with another party bombing the Kremlin, the IMF is disavowed by the US Government.  Ethan Hunt pulls together what team he has to go after the real perpetrators, in an effort to clear his name, and prevent nuclear war.
    I remember having some positive, but slightly mixed feelings about this one when I first saw it.  I picked it up on Blu-ray for a cheap price, knowing that I'd come back to it.  I decided to show it to Cathy.
    I'm sad to say that it didn't play as well the second time.  The action is still satisfying, but the weaknesses in the script seem more glaring.  There's one thing in particular that bugs me, and it's common enough that it's hard to pin this movie with being especially bad.  I hate having punchlines to sequences.  A little gag to end a scene with just makes me cringe.  I've brought it up as my primary complaint about Batman Begins.  When I see it in this, I see it coming, and my hopes aren't as high, but I still feel like leaving the room every time I hear one of these lines.
    They aren't funny.  They seem obligatory.  Maybe they're funny for younger viewers.  I seem to remember thinking that some of the punchlines in other movies were funny.  The "no ticket" joke in Last Crusade was hilarious when I first saw it… when I was about 8 years old.
    What stuck out on this viewing was the personal story arc for Cruise's Hunt.  I kind of like the mystery about why he's in the prison at the start of the movie, and having the backstory revealed throughout the picture is a nice way of making it keep moving forward.  But having his backstory tie into Jeremy Renner's background just made it feel too convenient.  Mission: Impossible is never about convenience.  It's about impeccable planning, sorting out every possible contingency, so that the plan can't fail.
    Anyway, the thing that I got annoyed about was the way that this movie seems to serve one purpose in a larger narrative - to undo the steps taken in the third movie.  It seemed a little silly to have Hunt get married in the third one, but I was so distracted by Philip Seymour Hoffman's work that I was willing to ignore the main character arc.  This story seems to exist only to correct the storytelling limits that the third movie placed on the franchise.
    I don't think this means that I won't watch it again.  I like it.  I especially love seeing Simon Pegg.  I realized part of why I enjoy seeing him.  It's because he's so enthusiastic, he seems like a genuine fan of whatever movie he's in.

81 - The Perfect Host

    A bank robber weasels his way into hiding in a man's house, as he expects guests coming to his dinner party.  After the deception is up, the robber finds that his host is not entirely sane.
    Stars David Hyde Pierce, who is the absolute perfect person for the role.  He gets to play an incredible part that is simultaneously an extension of his persona from Frasier, and a dark parody of it.
    There will probably be spoilers in this, since I don't seem to be able to talk about the meat of the picture without it.
    We don't quite understand exactly what the deal is with Pierce's character.  He's clearly crazy, but he seems to be strongly in control of himself.  He imagines plenty of party guests, but their relationship to him - and to reality - is uncertain.  I immediately thought that his imaginary guests were prior victims that he had killed.  Then at another point, I thought that maybe all the guests were figments of his imagination, and that they were just present whenever he was going to murder a single real person.
    None of these ideas are confirmed or denied by the events of the movie.

    What makes the movie interesting is how far beyond the premise the story goes.  Once the situation has been set up, it's easy to assume that the story will culminate in a fight between the two of them, at which point one of them will be killed.  But that never happens.  Once we think that their situation has been resolved, we find that there was another layer that we didn't understand.  Then we learn what Pierce's character is like outside of this situation.  Then we learn that things with the guest weren't what was expected.
    The movie ends on an ambiguous note.  We know approximately how that situation will play out, but we have no idea how it will resolve.
    I wish I could be more specific, but… it's just too complicated.
    This is a movie that could never be a hit, but it's smart.  It's smart enough that it will have an audience that will be pleasantly surprised by how interesting it is.

80 - Silent Running

    Sometime in the future, a few spaceships carry the remaining plants around in space.  After they're ordered to blow up their gardens, one guy decides to defy orders.
    The premise, as I had read it, seemed especially puzzling.  So I decided to watch it.  And it's a strange movie.  It's kind of poor.  I have no objection to environmental messages, except that this movie seems to promote that message at the expense of a straw man argument.  It relies on the idea that for no reason at all, there are no longer any plants on Earth.  And that mankind somehow has contempt for plants.  Without further information, I find this idea laughable.
    To make the environmental angle even more pushy, Joan Baez sings two songs - Silent Running and Rejoice in the Sun.
    The story creeps along incredibly slow.  There are a few nice moments, but they're spread out, and they don't make up for the miserable pacing.
    Despite my clear dislike for the movie, it probably was much better when it came out.  It pre-dates Star Wars, and most of the space effects are probably spectacular for the time period.  The message is likely to play well with younger viewers who don't need as much firm content to their arguments.
    Lots of the reviews I've read focus on how spectacular the lead is.  While he does well, I find the quality of the story so distracting that it's hard to feel like the performance has much to offer.

    How is it that the last man acting as a gardener doesn't know that plants need sunlight?

    Also, the tagline that's used on the movie poster is ridiculous - "Amazing companions on an incredible adventure…that journeys beyond imagination!"