Blogfromthebarn

Third time unlucky ... again

So dear readers, the third Spiderman was messy and weak, and the third Pirates... was a plank too far. Mrs S and I had the joy of visiting our local cinematic field of dreams to enjoy a bag of sweets apiece and hopefully the final chapter in the Shrek franchise.

There was a chap in the cinema laughing uproariously at pretty much every gag, I was tempted to go over and see what film he was watching. The animation was, as expected amazing, but the things that I most enjoyed in Shrek 1 and to a lesser extent in Shrek 2, the visual gags seemed weak and strained. In the first film there was a real interplay twixt Donkey and the ogre, the target was Disney, and you could appreciate that someone who really cared about poking fun at the Saccharine Kingdom was in the driving seat.

In the second film Jennifer Saunders, John Cleese, Julie Andrews and Antonio Banderas injected new interesting characters and the poking fun at Hollywood worked well. In this current outing we were left with Prince Charming, (bland) and various princesses, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinders, presumably intended to target Disney once more but missing by a mile. And here's a tough target for a film to parody, American high schools, ooh how original, sorry, I've never been to one but surely it's a genre that's had more than enough celluloid exposure, there was nothing new or amusing in this episode. The characters introduced including Eric Idle and Squeaky Timberlake were shallow and poorly crafted (with the exception of the enchanted trees who got the best lines).

And here's the kicker, music can make a film, the offbeat choices made in 1&2 were inspired and sent me into a frenzy of i-tuning after each film, I didn't remember one song (bar the frogs singing 'live and let die') once I'd left my seat.
Did Mrs Stuffy award it three snores? No, but only 'cos the nutter at the back kept reviving her with yet another hysterical guffaw at yet another imagined moment of hallucinatory on-screen hilarity.

posted by Stuffy @ 11:00 pm