ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH

Rainmaker Entertainment

Rated PG

Running time: 89 minutes




Click below to watch the Escape From Planet Earth trailer.

 

In The Weinstein Company's animated film Escape From Planet Earth, egotistical astronaut Brendan Fraser is sent to investigate an SOS from the Dark Planet - Earth.

The Dark Planet is the place where representatives of famous alien races have disappeared, including the Roswell aliens. National hero astronaut Fraser, with his media attention and his marketing, reminds me of an egotistical version of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, while his nerdy Mission Control brother Rob Corddry at BASA wants nothing to do with any kind of adventure. Actually the running joke in the movie was how nerdy Corddry got hot Sarah Jessica Parker to be his wife. When BASA's no-nonsense chief Jessica Alba sends Fraser into deep space to the Dark Planet, Fraser winds up at a 7-Eleven in the middle of nowhere and gets captured by William Shatner - and gets sent to Area 51. Now Corddry must leave his home planet of Baab to go rescue his brother on this strange dark planet called Earth.

This is a nice family film. The film has an impressive celebrity cast for an animated film, although I could barely tell their distinctive voices as I was too caught up in the characters themselves. I was expecting Ricky Gervais, as the computer, to have a larger computer role in the movie and was disappointed in that. 7-Eleven actually had a larger role in the movie than I would have thought. I was expecting just a simple product placement with 7-Eleven, but it actually had several scenes in the movie, with one of those fan-blown balloons becoming one of my favorite characters in the movie. It was rather sad to learn how and why Shatner became a bad guy who wants to wipe out all the aliens. The aliens at Area 51,  Craig Robinson, Jane Lynch, and George Lopez were great as Corddry's friends.

Rated PG for violence. Running time: 89 Minutes.

Pancho 
All people smile in the same language.
 

Little Fockers

Universal Pictures

Rated PG-13

Running time: 98 minutes
















Click below to watch the Little Fockers trailer.



Universal Pictures Little Fockers has male nurse Ben Stiller being reluctantly made the family Godfocker by the family patriarch, ex-CIA man Robert De Niro. De Niro soon regrets this decision when, after using the Google search engine, he suspects Stiller of cheating on his daughter Teri Polo with medicinal drug representative Jessica Alba.

A sequel to Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, Little Fockers is a cute, but uneven film. Considering the title, you would think that Little Fockers would be more about the kids Daisy Tahan and Colin Baiocchi interacting more with Stiller and De Niro -  especially interacting with grandfather De Niro. It was great to see a scene with De Niro and Harvey Keitel, even if it is a short scene. I am surprised I have not seen these two actors together in a movie before. While De Niro is still a tough guy, it is hard to compare Little Fockers to the 30th anniversary Blue-ray edition of Raging Bull which had just come out. This is especially true with all the ED jokes with De Niro from Jessica Alba's new impotence drug, the treatment for which is quite traumatic. While Jessica Alba is hot, I also miss Alba doing the serious roles as well - like Dark Angel, the role which had made Alba famous. Laura Dern is interesting as the head of the school that Stiller and De Niro want to put the children in. As Dern says, "there are a lot of family dynamics at play here" when she Meets the Parents. New age guru Owen Wilson can get annoying as he horns in on Stiller's family. A cameo by self-improvement guru Deepak Chopra is cute although you wish the cameos by Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand, as well as the cat Jinxie, would have been more. 

Rated PG-13 for violence and sexual situations. Running time: 98 minutes.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

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