I recently saw both of these movies on the same day, and surprisingly liked them both. Live Free Or Die Hard is ridiculous action. That is, none of it is believable, and if you accept that going in you’ll have a heck of a fun time. Bruce Willis spends the entire movie Bruce Willising around, which means that he cracks wise and gets 10 million bullets shot at him that all miss somehow. The stuff with computers is ridiculous - apparently hacking into FBI computers and pulling up NSA schematics is as easy as doing a Google search for Jessica Alba pictures. But it’s fun. Stupid summer fun, and the kind of action movie I enjoy when I feel like an action flick.
It also has Maggie Q, who played the similar role of “badass chick” in Mission Impossible 3 and I think she ought to be cast as the lead in an action movie sometime soon. There aren’t enough cool action movies, and certainly not any with plausible yet attractive female leads. Get on that, Hollywood.
Live Free or Die Hard: 3.5 /5
Ratatouille is the best Pixar film in a while, and shows once again that the magic is not in making a 3D computer animated movie but in making a movie with A GOOD STORY. Disney abandoned 2D apparently thinking that today’s kids are too sophisticated for it, but its because they produced absolute swill like Lilo & Stitch instead of magnificent stuff like Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty & The Beast. Ratatiouille is the good stuff - great voices, characters you care about, and humor that doesn’t stick out like a too-hip thumb like in Shrek 3. It’s a classic, and a rebound from Cars, which I found very disappointing.
As far as Pixar films go, I think I would have to say I rank them in order as: The Incredibles (which I thought should have been nominated as Best Picture - not animated, just overall best picture), Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Monsters Inc., A Bugs Life, Cars.
Ratatouille: 4/5
I liked Ratatouille, but its story is by far its weakest element. It’s all over the place, the pacing is wretched, plot threads are picked up and dropped nearly at random, Linguini’s essential conflicts are glossed over for the first half of the film, Skinner makes a very abrupt disappearance 4/5ths of the way through… It was a terribly confused mess IMO.
Lilo and Stitch was good.
Lilo and Stitch was _very_ good.
Add me to the Lilo and Stitch camp.
Brad Bird is good. He’s done the Rat movie and the Incredible movie for Pixar but before that he did Iron Giant, which was also an animated Highly underrated in my opinion. And all that that implies.
If you’re going to make a movie about a cooking rat it better be good or you will never make another. How the hell did he sell that premise?
I agree 100% about the importance of the story, but add me to the objectively pro-Lili-and-Stitch commentary insurgency.
Ironically for Disney, they knew the importance of story at one time.
Dude, in the same week you take potshots at Howard Zinn and Lilo and Stitch? What sort of man are you?
Oliver, I’m with you on Lilo & Stitch. I hated it.
How the hell did he sell that premise?
He didn’t. Ratatouille was conceived of, and initiated by another director at Pixar, who (as far as I know) voluntarily stepped down partway through production.
transformers ftw!
ArC - The question remains, then…how did the original director sell that premise?
A recent CNN article on PIxar implied that the original director stepped down, but did so in part due to pressure from above.
“…making a movie with A GOOD STORY.”
Yes! Yes! again.
That delicate point keeps getting lost in todays world of filmaking.
More producers should study the art of storytelling. If they did they’d make more money and I’d have more movies I want to see.
My own take, SpiderJ, is that Bird’s previous work (consulting on the Simpsons, Iron Giant, Incredibles) shows he has terrific storytelling instincts, so if he was called in to perform surgery on the patient it was probably necessary surgery. I wouldn’t say it was an unqualified success, but the movie almost works.
As for how they sold it, well, I guess Pixar was riding high enough to make some gamples and the “rat wants to be a cook” concept, with its inherent conflicts, certainly has promise.
Strangely enough, Oliver (who can’t get enough news about the Bush twins, and was positively salivating over Mary Cheney’s lesbianism) has not a word to say about Alber Gore III demonstrating the skills he learned at the Ted Kennedy School Of Driving.
Double standard much?
J.
Just gotta say that Bruce Willis is the most overrated actor in Hollywood, and that is saying a Helluva lot for a town built on falsehoods.
But more power to him; if he can convince people that a guy close to sixty can take on an entire army of criminala by himself, and do it all barefoot while tons of shards of glass fall all around him, maybe he has more chops than I thought.
Uhhhhh…….no.
Last I checked the Gores and the party to which they are a member do not launch wars on a whim their families could sign up for, or lecture us on their supposedly superior morality. My site is not a news service or a water-carrier for Republican propaganda.
Bruce Willis can be a terrific actor when he wants to be — when he chooses material which gets his tongue out of his cheek. Unfortunately, he chooses to do so only rarely. Anybody remember “Shatterday” from the mid-80’s Twilight Zone? Bruce Willis was fabulous.
Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorites — good characters, with development. Along with Mulan, it was the best of the post-Lion King Disney animated movies, most of which I’ll agree were pretty bad. Mulan features the most kick-ass Donny Osmond song EVER, which must mean something, though I am not sure what…
My ranking would go
THE INCREDIBLES
FINDING NEMO
TOY STORY
RATATOUILLE
TOY STORY 2
BUG’S LIFE
CARS
As for the Lilo & Stitch controversy…I thought it was “aight.”
Oooops, I forgot MONSTERS INC.
Probably put it ahead of TOY STORY 2 but behind RATATOUILLE. They are pretty close, in my mind.
“Double standard much?”
It’s called hypocrisy, you idiot.
When the Bush administration says lesbians are a threat to American families, then their sexual orientation becomes an issue.
Why is this so hard for right-wingers to understand?
And not to offer Gore III any slack, but it’s worth noting that he was driving a hybrid Prius. So for as dumb and irresponsible as he has behaved, he wasn’t behaving counter to his father’s environmental ideals.
Mary Cheney’s lesbianism…and, for that matter, her motherhood…is relevant because the base she helped whip up in support of her father would like nothing more than for Mary Cheney to go away, convert to heterosexuality, die, or some righteous combination of all three. They would love to forcibly remove that child from her custody because Michael Savage thinks having gay parents is “child abuse.”
Re: Mulan, do you mean I’ll Make A Man Out Of You? If so, yes, that song is kickass.
We are men!
Really enjoyed Die Hard. Something about watching the indestructible John McClane in action again just brings a big fat smile to my face. Like that they take full advantage of the fact that he’s getting older. Fun, loud and unapolegetically ridiculous. Just odd watching Timothy Olyphant without that giant-ass Deadwood mustache.
Now, as far as the Pixar goes…I generally dig their stuff, but Cars. Yeesh. Is it me, or was there something very unnerving about a world full of sentient machines and nothing else? Felt like the Terminators won and discovered old Smurf VHS collections.
Heard there’s a possibility of an Incredibles 2. Anything to hear more of that retro-Bond-ish score from the first flick.
Yes, I was referring to “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You,” sung by Donny Osmond.
I was perturbed by the adverting from Mulan, though. The commercials and trailers always said that she “impersonated a warrior,” instead to the more accurate, and more empowered, she “became a warrior.”