Hope everyone's enjoying their weekend so far. I've had a little time to write, so I thought I'd log on and post a few reviews. We got a couple new movies and one that is available only on DVD. My inbox is slowly getting whittled down, but I have plenty in my "to see" box to keep me plenty busy. Keep checking back. Enjoy.



Madagascar
Review by Jon Waterman

*1/2

It’s Marty the Zebra’s tenth birthday. All his life he’s been cooped up in Central Park Zoo with his animal pals. He’s starting to wonder what it might be like to live out in the wild. So, because of this midlife crisis, he ventures out into the city to find his way to the closest thing to the wild he can find: Connecticut. His friends, a sassy hippo, a hypochondriac giraffe and a superstar lion, wake up to see that he’s left them and thus search after him. Will any of them ever really find what they’re looking for?

Dreamworks’ latest entry into the animation field really fails to capture the same atmosphere or liveliness of movies past. The big problem is that the story just isn’t there, and neither are the jokes. Mark Burton, a relatively accomplished British TV writer and Billy Frolick, who’s done virtually nothing, wrote the dry, uninteresting script. This movie would have been a lot better were it not for the main characters.
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+++++++++++


Torremolinos 73
Review by Jon Waterman

***

Alfredo is a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman – a dying breed. In fact, his job is actually being removed from the organization, because television based mail-in and newsstand offers are bringing in the majority of revenue. The only way he can stay with the company is to take a job as a filmmaker for a brand new series starting up in Scandinavia. The catch is that he has to film his wife and himself making love. They reluctantly accept and inadvertently find that his wife has become a sex symbol in a foreign land, while he has immersed himself in filmmaking. Alfredo now dreams of making his narrative feature debut thus transitioning himself into a serious artist. Will anyone buy into it?

Considering this was written and directed by virgin filmmaker Pablo Berger, the movie performs quite well. Who said your first time always sucks? But everyone could use some experience, and Berger is no exception. The movie walks a fine line between comedy and drama, and actually makes it all the way across. The only problem is that it sacrifices quality on both sides of the equation in order to accomplish this.
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++++++++++


Anchorman: Wake Up Ron Burgundy
Review by Jon Waterman

*1/2

San Diego’s most popular nightly news anchor, Ron Burgundy, has a lot to deal with lately. To start, a woman – previously thought to be incapable of reading the news on television – has been hired as a reporter/co-anchor for the broadcast. So, to compete he has to learn to be an investigative reporter, which isn’t easy, considering his intelligence level (let’s just say he’s coasting on charm). But the kicker is that there’s a terrorist organization called The Alarm Clock, which keeps robbing banks and appears to have plans to do much worse.

This isn’t so much a sequel to “The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” or even a companion piece as it is a rehash. Bill Kurtis narrates our way through a long string out of deleted scenes loosely slapped together to become feature length. Anyone who has seen the theatrical release will quickly realize where most of these scenes would have gone, especially early on. But without the proper build up or exposition, the jokes don’t quite hit as hard.
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