Rango (2011)
Mar. 11th, 2011 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSaw this at the Majestic Bay with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
holyoutlaw last night. Fun movie. It's a pretty standard kids story about a lizard who ends up in an Old West town where all the other funny animals come to believe he's a hero, when he's not, really, but he proves himself heroic in the end. What's fun about this one is the bizarre non sequitur humor, the anarchic slapstick, the playful references to other movies and books (Chinatown, Star Wars, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Quick and the Dead), and just a general level of weirdness and outrageousness that's unusual in a kids movie.
Some of the wisecracks are so off-color and sophisticated that I wondered, as other reviewers have, whether this was really suitable for kids. I sat next to two young girls, both under ten, and their father, and he was constantly having to explain things to them. The line "I once found a human spine in my fecal matter" totally stumped him. He finally said it was something disgusting that they didn't need to understand. The adults in the theater definitely laughed more frequently than the kids. But then, watching the face of the one little girl as she struggled to understand what she was seeing, I realized that it's going to be fun in fifteen or twenty years to read about the people who saw this as kids and had their minds totally warped and pulled into new shapes. One of the fun things about following![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
film_stills is reading comments on movies that I saw as an adult by people who saw them as kids and are now looking back on them as adults. To have seen Velvet Goldmine (1998) as a teenager!
Rango does not strike me as a great movie. It sags in the middle, for one thing. But the opening and the ending are both pretty great, and some of the one-liners are zingers, by grab. It has a fine whiff of madness about it.
holyoutlaw last night. Fun movie. It's a pretty standard kids story about a lizard who ends up in an Old West town where all the other funny animals come to believe he's a hero, when he's not, really, but he proves himself heroic in the end. What's fun about this one is the bizarre non sequitur humor, the anarchic slapstick, the playful references to other movies and books (Chinatown, Star Wars, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Quick and the Dead), and just a general level of weirdness and outrageousness that's unusual in a kids movie. Some of the wisecracks are so off-color and sophisticated that I wondered, as other reviewers have, whether this was really suitable for kids. I sat next to two young girls, both under ten, and their father, and he was constantly having to explain things to them. The line "I once found a human spine in my fecal matter" totally stumped him. He finally said it was something disgusting that they didn't need to understand. The adults in the theater definitely laughed more frequently than the kids. But then, watching the face of the one little girl as she struggled to understand what she was seeing, I realized that it's going to be fun in fifteen or twenty years to read about the people who saw this as kids and had their minds totally warped and pulled into new shapes. One of the fun things about following
film_stills is reading comments on movies that I saw as an adult by people who saw them as kids and are now looking back on them as adults. To have seen Velvet Goldmine (1998) as a teenager!Rango does not strike me as a great movie. It sags in the middle, for one thing. But the opening and the ending are both pretty great, and some of the one-liners are zingers, by grab. It has a fine whiff of madness about it.
