The Book of Life

2014 - 4.2/5

So I intended to see this before halloween and before the Mexican Day of the Dead... well, that didn't happen, but I still wanted to see it. Fyi: I didn’t see this in 3D.

I’ve waiting 11 months, but finally, I have a favourite movie of 2014. It was only 5 minutes in and I loved it and already knew I was going to buy it.

Where else would I start but the obvious: the animation. By just watching the trailer, you can tell that this movie will be visually fantastic. Now that I’ve seen all 95 minutes of it, I will say that it was amazing! I loved the animation and I loved that they were wooden people; that was done SO well. All the little details added, all the great colours… this was a beautiful movie to watch.

As for the plot, you’d think its one that’s been done a million times over, but for whatever reason, it seemed different than others. It didn’t come off as a movie about 2 guys after the same girl. It was just different in a way that I can’t seem to put my finger on, but I really liked it.

The music was so fun. The “remix’ish” versions of Mumford & Sons, “I Will Wait”, Radiohead’s “Creep”, Freddie Scott's “You Got What I Need” and Rod Stewart's “Do Ya Think I'm Sexy” were so well done. They changed the songs just enough to make it fit into the movies vibe and its Mexican style.

The only name I recognized on the movie poster was Channing Tatum’s and he did a good job with the voice over. I liked how he fully embodied the character Joaquin, but Tatum himself was present in the character (him saying “come at me bro”).

The moment the Candle Maker opened his mouth, I knew it was Ice Cube. After having seen him Ride Along this year, I felt as if his voice was a perfect fit for this character. I’d say that Ice Cube has a better movie presence with his voice than he does with his own self. While I’m on this character, I also want to mention that I really liked the idea of the Candle Maker and what it stood for. It was a neat way to present it.

As for the main character Manolo, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Diego Luna or heard his voice. Not a clue who this guy is, but wow, he had a great singing voice (if it was actually him). He had a very smooth voice and it suited the character.

All the other characters had good voice over’s as well, the grandma was funny, Mary Beth looked spectacular and about half way through the movie, it finally hit me that Xibalba looked like Jafar from Aladdin!

Overall, this was a great movie, and even though it’s an animated movie, it doesn’t mean an adult won’t enjoy it. I am so happy I got to see this. 20th Century Fox is defiantly giving Disney a run for its money!

Dumb & Dumber To

2014 - 3/5

I was pretty excited to see this and from what I saw in the trailer, this has got to be good! And to call it Dumb & Dumber TO, was a good touch as well.

My friend and I were actually planning on seeing St. Vincent (2014), but because of traffic, we were a bit later than we wanted to be, so we ended up watching this. We did miss about the first 5 minutes of it, but it was just what we had already seen in the trailer with Harry visiting Lloyd and the whole catatonic prank.

The way I see it, there is no elephant in the room – you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. You can’t go into this movie not expecting it to have a shaky plot, which it did. It had a decent enough storyline to allow the viewer follow Harry and Lloyd on their second road trip.

When you see the trailer, neither Jim Carey or Jeff Daniels have aged a bit; they look exactly like they did in the first one. I love that 20 years later, they're both still wearing pretty much the same thing. I also love that it has been 20 years since the first one came out, and its also been 20 years in the movie. The movie did have some well placed throwbacks to the original, for example, the blind kid with the bird being the same kid!

There were a few parts that could have been left out completely and you could tell they were all added in order to get just-one-more-laugh. They didn’t fit into the storyline 100%, but the director, for whatever reason, really wanted that line/joke in there. That’s not to say that there weren’t any good jokes. There were, but considering I saw this movie only a few hours ago, I can’t say I remember specifics. Unlike the first one, there wasn’t anything that was truly memorable.

In the first, both Harry and Lloyd were just naively stupid, like they so innocent they were dumb. But in this one, I found that they were more purposely immature. They weren’t as naïve, so at times they came off as mean.

Because this movie had so much to prove in the sense that it had big shoes to fill, a lot of it was overly done (which I was expecting). For me, this was a nostalgically fun movie to watch.