Driss-A-Blog

Flushed Away
★★★★☆

It's the curse of the successful. Having a solid history of amazing films (the Wallace & Gromit movies and Chicken Run) means that Aardman has to work that much harder to keep up their streak. Perhaps it was the absence of Nick Park, but Flushed Away just didn't pull it off. It's a good movie, don't get me wrong, but just not a great one.

Hugh Jackman voices Roddy, an upper-class rat who finds himself in the sewers. He quickly runs into Rita (Kate Winslet, voicing probably the best-looking rat you'll ever see on screen) and betrays her to The Toad (Ian McKellen). But soon alliances shift, and Rita braves the treacherous waters of the rapids to take Roddy home for a payout while being chased by henchmen of The Toad, bent on carrying out an evil master plan.

Why can't modern romantic comedies play like this film did? Rita is, like the standard modern movie heroine, pretty and smart and adventurous. But while Roddy starts out bumbling and standoffish, he quickly turns resourceful and ends up being much more clever than most rom-coms ever allow their male leads to be. About the only thing I can complain about is one sequence with an almost never-ending series of crotch impacts. Why movie makers find this funny is beyond me.

But as much as this film excels in the story and in the small details, it just doesn't quite gel. Perhaps it's the one-off cultural in-jokes that don't quite fit; I can't say. But even the lesser films from Aardman still surpass the average film. While not quite to the level of Chicken Run, Flushed Away is definitely worth a view.

I went to dinner, and then decided to cross off another movie on my list. While I liked Flushed Away, that's far more than I can say for

For Your Consideration
★☆☆☆☆

“Oh, that was... an interesting waste of an hour and a half,” was what I muttered aloud after the abrupt ending of the film. What ever happened to Christopher Guest? Spinal Tap was hilarious, Best In Show was good, and so was A Mighty Wind. But this...

While his previous movies pretended to be documentaries, For Your Consideration doesn't even try. It's a purported look inside the filming of a movie. This has been done before a zillion times. The problem with the maxim of “write what you know” is that the Hollywood crowd says, “Oh, I know the process of filmmaking; let's write something about the making of movies!” Some are great, like Sunset Boulevard. Some are decent, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. But being a movie about making a movie doesn't excuse the filmmaker from the requirement of having characters we give a damn about.

Everyone is playing a stereotype. Catherine O'Hara plays the stereotypical aging glamorous actress, Harry Shearer plays the stereotypical glib actor taking what roles he can get, and so on. The stereotypical producer (whose job is the usual unknown), the stereotypical intellectual writers, and so on. The only thing worse than the characters who are stereotyped are the ones who don't even have that depth. Who's the guy who plays the “son” in the movie-in-the-movie? (I can't even pick him out from the IMDB cast lineup from the movie, it's that bad.) Without a stereotype to stick to, all the script does is give him lines to read. By the time that he ends up winning the Oscar nomination (a plot point that is a spoiler, true, but one that is obvious long before it happens), we simply don't care.

The film redeems itself slightly with some laughs, but there are better ways to be amused. Go tickle a stranger in the subway; you'll both have a better time than if you'd seen this movie.