Bill's Movie Reviews: Ice Age

If you liked "Monsters, Inc". and "Shrek" you’ll detest "Ice Age"

This movie truly marks a new era in movie-making. Now computer-generated movies have joined the ranks of C-movie film-crap.

This movie moved at a glacial speed and felt like an ice age had passed before it thankfully ended. What a total bore. Ice Age is a perfect example of backwards movie-making wherein it’s not about art or trying to get a good movie made, it’s about making a quick buck. "Hey, we’re able to create CGI characters at cut-throat prices." "Wow, let’s make a movie! Got any ideas?" "No, but that’s easy. We’ll just whip something up and get some big name actors to do voice-overs." "Cool, the CGI is so cheap we don’t need to take the time and effort to make a quality film." I can’t help but think of the phrase "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Ice Age clearly was not someone’s vision that, through blood, sweat, and persistence was turned into a visual expression of a dream. Hell no. It was slapped together to glue together the visual effects house Blue Sky’s 90 minute demo reel. And I might add that the CGI was not even close to the quality of the CGI in any of the PIXAR or PDI movies. Obviously, Blue Sky has now lowered the bar on CGI films. Up until now, these movies took lots of money, lots of talent, and even years in the making. But now it’s obviously become so inexpensive to make them that you can throw the money away on bad "C" movie concepts.
PIXAR with Disney (Toy Story, Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc.) and PDI with Dreamworks SKG (Antz, Shrek) created brilliant, ingenious, fun, funny, clever, beautiful, well executed films…perhaps because they had to. There was too much at stake. But also because they had good stories. There’s an idea, when making a movie, have a good story.

Here’s another concept: animated characters should be animated- have animated voices. Ray Romano is about as dead-pan as you can get. It’s as if he put minus ten effort into his role (which for some odd reason works on his TV show Everybody Loves Ramond. Hey, wait a minute! I don’t love Ramond. I don’t even like him.) The other two lead voices by Dennis Leary and John Leguizamo were at least energetic, even if Leguizamo’s lisp got particularly annoying. The trouble with casting popular actors is they have familiar voices. Each time a character spoke, I recognized it as the actor behind the character.

It should have been illegal for the marketing department of Ice Age to promote the movie with the phrase "if you liked Monsters, Inc. and Shrek you’ll love Ice Age." Why? Because it’s CGI? We loved those films because they had stories with interesting dialogue, plot, ideas, and characters. How about: "If you loved Casablanca and Gone with the Wind you’ll love Wild Wild West?" "If you love puppies and kitties you’ll love dung beetles." Huh? Insanity!

Sure, it was a perfectly fine Saturday morning cartoon. Have you seen what passes for cartoons on Saturday morning these days? When I was a kid, those too were works of art from Warner Brothers, Disney, Harvey Cartoons, and the like. But now those too are just as empty in calories as the sugar riddled kid’s breakfast cereals that sponsor those cheap, void-of-content, K-mart knock-offs.

Most of Ice age is a cheap knock-off: They blatantly stole side-kick characters from what worked in Disney films. Example: The "wacky/retarded" tiger in the movie was a knock-off of "ED," the "wacky/retarded" Hyena in Disney’s Lion King. It even resembled it for God’s sake.

"But the children liked it!" Yes. Children also like to fling their poop and pick up gum from the sidewalk and stick it in their mouth. As a parent, don’t you monitor what’s worthy of being stuck in the child, whether it go in the kid’s head or stomach? I’m not saying Ice Age is mean (although there certainly was plenty of death…it’s like Bambi on acid) but it’s just dull. It’s not surprising that its lead character was a sloth: clearly a reflection of the film-makers themselves.

Every time these film-makers needed a giggle (which was every 20 seconds in this flat, boring flick) they had some character do the Macaully Culkin scream from Home Alone 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 & 8. It was nauseating. I found myself chiming in with the screams before too long.

What a criminal shame this film was. And the fact that it’s been a success means two things: 1) The McDonalds-going, TV-watching, K-mart-shopping, high-school-maybe American Public is still setting new all-time low standards for entertainment. 2) We’re just going to see more and more really bad, artless, storyless, conceptless CGI films. Gone is the day……



		Ice Age If you liked "Monsters, Inc". and "Shrek" you’ll detest "Ice Age" This movie truly marks a new era in movie-making. Now computer-generated movies have joined the ranks of C-movie film-crap. This movie moved at a glacial speed and felt like an ice age had passed before it thankfully ended. What a total bore. Ice Age is a perfect example of backwards movie-making wherein it’s not about art or trying to get a good movie made, it’s about making a quick buck. "Hey, we’re able to create CGI characters at cut-throat prices." "Wow, let’s make a movie! Got any ideas?" "No, but that’s easy. We’ll just whip something up and get some big name actors to do voice-overs." "Cool, the CGI is so cheap we don’t need to take the time and effort to make a quality film." I can’t help but think of the phrase "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Ice Age clearly was not someone’s vision that, through blood, sweat, and persistence was turned into a visual expression of a dream. Hell no. It was slapped together to glue together the visual effects house Blue Sky’s 90 minute demo reel. And I might add that the CGI was not even close to the quality of the CGI in any of the PIXAR or PDI movies. Obviously, Blue Sky has now lowered the bar on CGI films. Up until now, these movies took lots of money, lots of talent, and even years in the making. But now it’s obviously become so inexpensive to make them that you can throw the money away on bad "C" movie concepts. PIXAR with Disney (Toy Story, Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc.) and PDI with Dreamworks SKG (Antz, Shrek) created brilliant, ingenious, fun, funny, clever, beautiful, well executed films…perhaps because they had to. There was too much at stake. But also because they had good stories. There’s an idea, when making a movie, have a good story. Here’s another concept: animated characters should be animated- have animated voices. Ray Romano is about as dead-pan as you can get. It’s as if he put minus ten effort into his role (which for some odd reason works on his TV show Everybody Loves Ramond. Hey, wait a minute! I don’t love Ramond. I don’t even like him.) The other two lead voices by Dennis Leary and John Leguizamo were at least energetic, even if Leguizamo’s lisp got particularly annoying. The trouble with casting popular actors is they have familiar voices. Each time a character spoke, I recognized it as the actor behind the character. It should have been illegal for the marketing department of Ice Age to promote the movie with the phrase "if you liked Monsters, Inc. and Shrek you’ll love Ice Age." Why? Because it’s CGI? We loved those films because they had stories with interesting dialogue, plot, ideas, and characters. How about: "If you loved Casablanca and Gone with the Wind you’ll love Wild Wild West?" "If you love puppies and kitties you’ll love dung beetles." Huh? Insanity! Sure, it was a perfectly fine Saturday morning cartoon. Have you seen what passes for cartoons on Saturday morning these days? When I was a kid, those too were works of art from Warner Brothers, Disney, Harvey Cartoons, and the like. But now those too are just as empty in calories as the sugar riddled kid’s breakfast cereals that sponsor those cheap, void-of-content, K-mart knock-offs. Most of Ice age is a cheap knock-off: They blatantly stole side-kick characters from what worked in Disney films. Example: The "wacky/retarded" tiger in the movie was a knock-off of "ED," the "wacky/retarded" Hyena in Disney’s Lion King. It even resembled it for God’s sake. "But the children liked it!" Yes. Children also like to fling their poop and pick up gum from the sidewalk and stick it in their mouth. As a parent, don’t you monitor what’s worthy of being stuck in the child, whether it go in the kid’s head or stomach? I’m not saying Ice Age is mean (although there certainly was plenty of death…it’s like Bambi on acid) but it’s just dull. It’s not surprising that its lead character was a sloth: clearly a reflection of the film-makers themselves. Every time these film-makers needed a giggle (which was every 20 seconds in this flat, boring flick) they had some character do the Macaully Culkin scream from Home Alone 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 & 8. It was nauseating. I found myself chiming in with the screams before too long. What a criminal shame this film was. And the fact that it’s been a success means two things: 1) The McDonalds-going, TV-watching, K-mart-shopping, high-school-maybe American Public is still setting new all-time low standards for entertainment. 2) We’re just going to see more and more really bad, artless, storyless, conceptless CGI films. Gone is the day……