7 august - The Reykjavik Grapevine
7 august - The Reykjavik Grapevine
7 august - The Reykjavik Grapevine
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
46<br />
Movie Reviews<br />
Okay, Madagascar came to Iceland late,<br />
so we had already heard earfuls of “it’s too<br />
superficial” and “just a bunch of CGI”<br />
before the movie got here. This is how it<br />
goes with Dreamworks movies, viewed<br />
as the slow cousin of Pixar, producers of<br />
<strong>The</strong> Incredibles, Toy Story and Finding<br />
Nemo.<br />
Lucky for us, those who import<br />
movies to Iceland seem to only take on<br />
movies that get abysmal reviews: yes, last<br />
summer we got Punisher, Cat Woman<br />
and Alexander on as many screens as<br />
possible.<br />
But Madagascar has been done<br />
wrong, just as Ice Age, and Shark Tale<br />
were done wrong before that. First, let’s<br />
take the intelligence of a film named<br />
Madagascar. True, the film’s writers<br />
act on the unusual assumption that<br />
Madagascar, a country of 15 million<br />
with a remarkable archaeological history<br />
going back 2000 years, is uninhabited by<br />
humans. But on the bright side, they get<br />
this key point: they identify that there is<br />
a place called Madagascar, that it is an<br />
island, and that it contains lemurs and<br />
fossae—the amazing localized fauna that<br />
prove so useful in an evolution discussion.<br />
Getting a child to talk about lemurs is a<br />
step in the right direction. Along those<br />
lines, if the child is a little older, you<br />
pique the young one’s interest by telling<br />
him that courtesy of the BBC, you can<br />
watch fossae eat lemurs online, or you can<br />
watch fossae have screaming wild fossae<br />
sex. (We found archives of both at www.<br />
arkive.org.)<br />
Have we sold you on the intelligence<br />
thing? No? Well how about the other<br />
aspect that Dreamworks does right: they<br />
keep their references entirely in the low<br />
brow—a possible exception was a Tom<br />
Wolfe reference in Madagascar. But<br />
that was evened out by the context. Two<br />
monkeys escape the zoo, and they discuss<br />
seeing Tom Wolfe do a reading. <strong>The</strong><br />
one monkey, interpreting the other’s sign<br />
language, says, “Are we going to throw<br />
poop at him? Of course.” Sheer comic<br />
brilliance.<br />
<strong>The</strong> favourite low brow reference<br />
includes Saturday morning cartoons--<br />
Hanna Barbera’s Help! It’s the Hair Bear<br />
Hour -- is all over Madagascar’s opening<br />
half hour, just as Shark Tale owed a lot to<br />
that the high point of Saturday morning<br />
cartoons, Jabberjaw. And kudos go to<br />
Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G). Playing<br />
a party-animal king of the lemurs,<br />
Mr. Cohen pulls a direct imitation of<br />
Peter Sellers’ vilest, and funniest, comic<br />
moment—his role as Indian stereotype<br />
Hrundi V. Bakshi in Blake Edward’s <strong>The</strong><br />
Alex the Lion will eat you, but his instincts are to blame.<br />
Come On, People. How Deep Do Your<br />
Cartoons Have to Be?<br />
MADAGASCAR<br />
Party (1968).<br />
One reason for strongly<br />
recommending Madagascar comes from<br />
our perusal of Screen It! (www.screenit.<br />
com) a website dedicated to providing<br />
information for concerned parents, (with<br />
sponsorship from Zoloft and Propel<br />
Fitness Water). Screen It! warns parents<br />
of “Disrespectful/ Bad Attitude” in the<br />
film: “Alex [the lion] develops a bad<br />
attitude toward Marty [the Zebra] and<br />
the others when they don’t follow his<br />
idea… He also tries to eat Marty, but<br />
that’s more out of nearly uncontrollable<br />
instincts/ urges rather than purposeful<br />
malevolence.” <strong>The</strong> website also warns of<br />
20 acts of violence, which qualifies it for a<br />
“moderate” rating.<br />
And of course the biggest reason for<br />
recommending Madagascar is really the<br />
use of poop jokes. <strong>The</strong>re are two of them<br />
in the film, and we are proud to state<br />
that we have just progressed in emotional<br />
maturity to Freud’s anal stage.<br />
By Bart Cameron