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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
 Posted - 06/10/2006 : 2:52:23 PM
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The wife and I rented two DVD's today. I selected Alone In the Dark because I had yet to see an Uwe Boll film and decided today wasy the day to remedy this. Although, truth be told, a decentchunk of the criticism against Boll is meaningless to me because he makes movies out of video games I had never heard of and when I Google them, they don't seem all that appealing. Which means that I will be judging this movie on its own merits, or the lack thereof.
I haven't screened this film yet because I had just finished watching the wife's selection and I simply had to post before moving on to my selection. She rented Doogal and as strange as it may seem, I think she may have picked the worse movie.
Sweet. Merciful. Crap. What a horrible movie! I cannot believe this movie got made. No, scratch that. I can believe it got made. What I can't believe is that it's as bad as it is. With all of the people involved in a production, the amount of talent, experience, etc. You'd think that somehow this film would have settled into a rut of mediocrity, but no, NO. It was not to be. It reached down into the depths of true awfulness. Awfulness on that plain of hell where we see Ruchard burton making love to a child-sized doll.
The main problem is that as a family film it is supposed to be a comedy. Bad comedies are just painful to watch. Let me put it this way, if a regular bad comedy like, say Joe Verus the Volcanoor hudson Hawk are like getting smashed in the face by a brick, then Doogal is like being crushed by the moon when it plumets from orbit. Joke after joke completely fails until you start to feel a numbness in your forehead and at the base of your skull. Then jokes that would normally be pretty lame in a better movie start to seem amusing. You laugh at them when normally you'd half-chuckle, so starved are you for actual humor.
Further to the core of the problem is the cast of characters. Never have I seen character so unappealing. The main character, Doogal the dog who looks like a talking dust mop, is just a dick. There. I said it. The main character of a family film is a rootin' tootin' DICK!!! I hated him. I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated ,hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated him and I hoped he would die. All of his actions were shamelessly selfish. As the film progressed, he continued to be selfish, thus making himself even less appealing in each successive scene. I haven't hated a character this much since I saw Derailed. Doogal it further undercut by the voice actor, Daniel Tay, who is a child actor. Far be it from me to sling mud at a kid, but his acting is about on par with your typical child actor. That is, not very good. They usually use kids in movies because they are cute and the audience sort of mentally lets it slide because they can see the actor is just a kid and for a kid he's not doing that bad (which means terrible). In animation, they recognize they won't have that factor, so they usually use women with high, squeeky voices to do kids voices. Why the makers of Doogal eschewed conventional wisdom is anyone's guess.
Say what you will about Doogal, at least his unappealing character was somewhat fleshed out. The rest of the characters are fairly one-dimensional. I would say they needed to flesh out Doogal's rag-tag band of friends, but what little they give them is so unappealing that I fail to believe that any additional flesh would have done any good.
There is Ermintrude the cow (Whoopi Goldberg) who fancies herself a singer and a star. She generally doesn't harp on her aspirations to be a star all that much, but it's the only character element she has. I'm not sure if the filmmakers realized the constant diva attitude was annoying and therefore cut it but replaced it with nothing or not. But if they did, wise choice, guys.
Brian the snail (William H Macy... What the hell is he doing here???) is in love with Ermintrude. This is just plain creepy. Unfortunately, he has little to do except moon over the cow.
Dylan the rabbit is voiced by Jimmy Fallon. As a general rule, I hate Jimmy Fallon. That I found his character the less obxious character should say something.
All of these characters are fairly unappealing. I might buy a kid a stuffed Doogal doll if they were bad and I wanted to punish them.
Kevin Smith as the Moose and Chevy Chase as the Train round out the heroes. I lump these two together because neither of them get much to do and both talk without moving their lips. At least train doesn't have lips, so it kind of makes sense.
The reason why their lips don't move is probably because the animation is second rate. For a completely CGI film, the digital compositing was horrible. Elements did not appear to be in the same room under the same lighting. Some even have dark lines, like matte or blue screen lines, which is preposterous as, again, this movie was all CGI. Anyone who tries to tell me how much better CGI is from older effects techniques should watch this movie and then try to explain that. It proves that it isn't the technology, it's the people using it. In this case, I assume it was being used by chimps.
So, now I'm gonna go watch Alone In the Dark and I suspect, after watching Doogal that the Uwe Boll magnum opus won't seem all that bad.
I'll keep you posted. |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2006 : 4:55:03 PM
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| Okay. I just finished Alone In the Dark. As I had predicted, it didn't seem that bad after watching Doogal. At least until the gratuitous love scene. Then it started sucking. Hard. However, while it was a bad movie, it was also unremarkably bad. I found little in the movie that would stand out in my mind. I have seen it. In a few days I will have forgotten it. Pity. |
Edited by - jackspencerjr on 06/10/2006 6:33:21 PM |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2006 : 7:23:46 PM
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After having several hours to cool off, (and return these pieces of crap to the video store) I am amazed how much I still hate Doogal. It is simply incredible how bad this movie was. I could literally feel life being sucked out of me as I watched it. At one point, I got up and slammed my head in the bathroom door. The resultant headache was a welcome distraction. At another point, I was trying to convince the cat to eat me. He's a very bad kitty. He wouldn't do it. I find it interesting that this movie may have been the worst cinematic experience I have had or ever will have, yet it rates 5% on Rotten Tomatoes while Alone In the Dark rates 1%. However, Alone In the Dark has 109 reviews (one fresh) or so while Doogal has only 49 (two fresh). I think the tomatometer might be slightly skewed by the lack of reviews.
I would like to point out that anyone who suggests that kids will like this movie hates children. I mean that. They might as well run over kids on a playground with an industrial lawnmower or something if they hate kids that much. 'Kids will like this movie' PFEH! Of course kids will like it. They're kids. They don't have taste of what's good or bad developed yet. They will like a good movie if you show it to them. They will like a bad movie if your show it to them. What the kids like or not doesn't matter since they'll like it either way. All that does matter is what you choose to show them. If you choose Doogal, you simply hate children.
However, it has come to my attention that Doogal is based on a children's TV show from the UK. I can only guess that the show is lightyears better than the movie. In fact, the film was released in the UK as The Magic Roundabout with a largely different cast and a much different script. In other words, those idiots in Hollywood thought American audiences wouldn't like the movie with an all British cast, so had a bunch of z-shelf American actors re-record the dialogue with a script they punched up. "Punched up." More like punched in the groin. It would be interesting to watch this movie again with the original dialogue and see if it's better. Chances are, it is. This is just frickin' amazing that the same movie could be better or worse only with different dialogue. Too bad I'd already returned the DVD or I would see if it had the UK track on it.
Doogal is a movie experience I shall recall for a long, long time. After all,how many times will I attempt to get my cat to eat me? |
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Movie rental weekend...
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