How to Train Your Dragon
(Voices of Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson)
Nordic mythology meets high flying computer graphics in this animated adventure by the team that created Lilo & Stitch and the studio that produced Shrek. It’s a thrilling story with no massive plot surprises, but Dragon is filled with a lot of nice smaller touches, making it a solid flick for the entire family.
The unfortunately named Hiccup (Baruchel) is a wimpy geek, the son of the great dragon-slaying Viking Stoic (Butler). Accepting his own lack of physical prowess, Hiccup engineers dragon-fighting machines. One night he actually succeeds in bringing down a legendary Night Fury, a dragon no one has ever actually seen. After hunting and finding his prey, Hiccup discovers that he’s damaged the creature’s tail, making the reptile handicapped. However, Hiccup cannot bring himself to kill the beast; instead, he fixes and trains the dragon to fly with him as rider. In the process, Hiccup comes to understand his enemy, making a friend and finding a solution to his village’s problem.
There are a lot of nice messages here: mainly one of attempting peace instead of resorting to slaughter. Hiccup also comes to understand that his science-oriented solutions may actually be a gift and not a hindrance to the otherwise violence-prone Vikings. (This message of diversity is especially nice to LGBT audiences. Dean DeBlois, one-half of the directing team, is gay.
Co-director Chris Sanders is better known as the voice of Stitch.) Finally, Dragon contains subtle and unique messages about physical handicaps and the price of life’s experiences.
More importantly, the film is just plain fun. The effects are exciting, whipping through the clouds on flying reptiles, racing through fiery battle sequences. The Nordic setting allows for some nifty art direction. The dragons are mostly goofy, not really scary at all. The dreaded Night Fury, in fact, looks like a cross between a winged Gila monster and a particularly lovable housecat.
The film does have a few small hiccups, so to speak. The adult characters have rich Scottish brogues, yet the kids speak like American mall brats. Also, there are no outright shocks or surprises in the plot. None of this will matter, though, to most family viewers, especially the youngsters who will soar with this Viking hero, and later debate on what they would do if they had their own pet dragons.
Official trailer for How to Train Your Dragon:
Remember Me
(Starring Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan)
This Emo weeper will be superdeep to teenagers who already think Pattinson (Twilight) is superdreamy. For the rest of us, this is an ineffective romance with a gut-punch ending you keep hoping and praying they won’t resort to. You can keep repeating, “Please don’t go there,” all you want. They go there.
It summer 2001 in NYC: Pattinson is a tortured little rich boy—a rebel and a budding author who loathes his frigid executive dad (Brosnan). After Pattinson recklessly breaks up a Manhattan bar fight, he mouths off to a cop (Cooper) who smacks the boy around a bit. Then Pattinson finds the cop has a daughter (de Ravin) and goes about to date her, a’la a bad 1980s teen comedy.
Except for suffering horrible things like sibling suicide, violent crimes, and teenaged angst, everyone here is a little flat and dull. Even the acting is one-dimensional. Both Cooper and Brosnan are stereotypical evil dads. When he’s not throwing hissy-fits, Pattinson poses and pouts; when he tells de Ravin he thinks she’s amazing, he stares at the pavement instead of looking at her. In fact, he is so lacking in maturity, you may want Cooper to knock him around a bit more.
It’s OK to make a youth-oriented melodrama that heaps on the misery, even if the characters are a little shallow. However, that insensitive ending—which is impossible not to expect—makes me want to say, “Remember Me? Forget it.”
