Shrek

Post by **ShyViolet** » June 13th, 2007, 8:36 pm

Hey Ben, make sure to say how you feel about Shrek the Third when you see it!

(I liked James' review, just wondered what you thought is all. Or, what you will think.)

Post by **Ben** » June 14th, 2007, 6:49 am

Surely!

Post by **Ben** » June 24th, 2007, 9:34 am

Comments have been asked for, and comments ye shall get. I was lucky enough to catch Shrek ahead of its UK opening thanks to my friends at the local theater where I am running my Film Festival this week. He got the print in from Paramount with Raiders, which we are showing, and he wanted to run it before the first public screening, so I sat in on Thursday night.

Hmmm...

Afraid I didn't like it. It wasn't badly made, but nothing happened!

Mike Myers wasn't Shrek for the first half...he was doing an impression of Shrek. The story, which promised Shrek getting to grips with being King and having to deal with babies, didn't do that at all. He was off on the same kind of road movie journey as the first film and, baby nightmare aside, they didn't come into it until five minutes at the end.

The babies themselves freaked me out. I already thought this, but seeing them move I couldn't get this image out of my head:
http://www.olgabaclanova.com/picture_ga ... eaks_6.jpg

Check out the kid in the middle hugging the man and the two sitting next to him on the steps, from Tod Bowning's Freaks...was this an in-joke of some kind, or just a sick-joke?

Donkey and Puss swapping voices/bodies...why?

Eric Idle getting upset at a gag that was NOTHING like the Monty Python joke, which itself only borrows from years and years of radio plays where coconuts were used to convey galloping hooves. Lame, Eric...I hope he loses any court action and has cut off his DreamWorks ties...the guy is majorly up his own behind.

The villains were awful...no reason for Charming to get them all together...would have been MUCH better if Shrek had really had to deal with being a king and they'd drafted in Charming to give him lessons in manners, only for him to sabotage the efforts.

There was no story. Period.

Bright spot: Gingerbread Man's life flashing before his eyes - genius. Some of the one liners. But not much and nowhere near the repeatability of Shrek 2.

The Princesses going hard core at the end? Where were the jokes? Where was the danger of Fiona being pregnant and having to protect the baby? Why didn't Lilian head butt them out of the jail immediately? Where did THAT come from?

Shrek turning up at the end and, um, making a speech for the film's climax? Drab. This film had no spirit.

I liked Timberlake...he wasn't bad, and the college sequence was pretty fun, bu there wasn't anything special in the whole film. I'd like to see it again on DVD to see if it works for a second time, but I didn't "enjoy it".

Some of the animation was, frankly, not on par, especially the horse cycles, which were SO GOOD in the second one. Characters were stiff here and anyone getting up to go into a move were not keyframed correctly and they just bounded into action without much thought.

They say they always had four...no five...films planned. Baloney! This one wasn't dreamed up as part of an overall series...you can plainly see that from the lackluster story and flat situations. This seems to be a filler before going on to Shrek 4 and having the kids.

It was bland and, dare I say, boring, DWs' worst film yet. Andrew Adamson was missed, and the original concept of Shrek taking on the Arthurian legend was wasted...it wasn't about that at all. And it wasn't about what the promos have been going on about.

In the end, it wasn't about anything.

Post by **ShyViolet** » June 24th, 2007, 1:20 pm

The babies themselves freaked me out. I already thought this, but seeing them move I couldn't get this image out of my head: http://www.olgabaclanova.com/picture_ga ... eaks_6.jpg

That's so weird Ben.

I actually thought the EXACT same thing the first time I saw them. (When the pics came out I mean.)

They freaked me out a bit too, but I kinda got more used to them as time went on. I definetely see where you're coming from, however.

I do see your points...you make a lot of sense. I enjoyed the film a lot but it's lacking when you put it up to hard scrutiny....*sighs*

I guess I'm biased as a DW mega-fan, but even I see that it needed more...ESPECIALLY the Mike Meyers not really "doing Shrek" thing.

I guess the film did tug on my heartstrings here and there though. Also, I thought Charming's character was well fleshed out, (much more so than in S2) but TOTALLY not evil enough.

************************************

Artie ruled though!!

Post by **Jeroen** » June 24th, 2007, 2:06 pm

I saw it on Friday (just released over here as well)

I pretty much agree with everything Ben just wrote.

The movie was seriously flawed plotwise, boring and that speech at the end had my eyes rolling at a million miles an hour.
An I've learned speech with a slowly building applause at the end of the movie? This isn't 1995 is it?

I disliked the way they put jokes even in King Harold's funeral.
The death bed scene was "funny":roll: enough.

And they even threw away the fairytale book opening!!
Andrew Adamson was missed indeed!!

Post by **ShyViolet** » June 26th, 2007, 9:46 pm

Really neat interview:

http://arts.independent.co.uk/film/feat ... 690115.ece

JK on: critical reactions to Shrek, DreamWorks, and that whole Aardman thing.

(Tiny blurb on Kung-Fu Panda too!!

)

Interview: Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks founder and Shrek producer
There's a bit of ogre in all of us'
Published: 22 June 2007

Just a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg jumped off a building, testing out a publicity stunt. At 4.30am, in Cannes, the head honcho of DreamWorks animation did a dry run of a promotion for their Christmas offering, Bee Movie. The next day, Jerry Seinfeld – dressed as a giant bee – would do it in front of the world's press, while Katzenberg slid down a wire running from the top of Carlton hotel to the beach opposite.

Today, Katzenberg reflects on his daredevil antics: "It's a weird sensation to lean out over a building eight storeys high, but it was exhilarating."

Katzenberg, 56, is a man who makes calculated risks for living. He is in animation, he says, because "the failure rate... is infinitesimal compared to live action". After all, he quit his job at Disney to help set up Dream Works SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, remortgaging his house to do so.

Katzenberg is the ultimate bean-counter, "Mr Bottom Line" as Tom Hanks called him, overseeing an operation that owes much of its success to the Shrek franchise, which has so far grossed $1.4bn (£700m).

Katzenberg spends the first 60 seconds of our encounter tapping furiously into his BlackBerry. I'm assuming he's checking the numbers for Shrek The Third, but apparently not. "There are few surprises by Monday morning," he says. The film took $122m (£61m) on its first weekend in the US. The third-biggest opening in North America, it has now grossed $297m (£148m). Not bad for a film that was chided by most reviewers for lacking the originality of its predecessors.

Katzenberg can't resist having a poke. "I think the critics have lost touch with the audience," he says. "The critics that I work for are the paying customers that come into the theatres. They're my boss." I ask Katzenberg why he thinks the Shrek films, which take irreverent swipes at classic fairy tales, have endured. "People actually relate to the character of Shrek," he says. "I think they identify with many of the issues that he's had to deal with. Even though he may be a big green stinky ogre, there's a little bit of ogre in all of us."

Hearing this, I can't help but wonder where the ogre is in Katzenberg. He certainly doesn't have a reputation for tantrums. "What I've learned most in my elder years is to be a bit more tolerant and be more forgiving," he says. Rather, Katzenberg simply, quietly, exudes the will to win. A ruthless operator, after the Wallace & Gromit film under-performed, taking $56m (£28m) in the US, he cut his ties with the film's creators at Aardman Animation. "We were trying to make them into a bigger outfit and they liked being who they were – a cottage industry," he says.

Katzenberg began his working life in politics, volunteering for far-right Republican John Lindsay's successful mayoral campaign when he was just 14. The son of a stockbroker, Katzenberg declined to follow his father to Wall Street and left politics for showbusiness. After a brief spell as an agent, in 1974 Katzenberg was offered a job at Paramount as assistant to chairman Barry Diller. Soon after, a young executive named Michael Eisner was signed from ABC; thus began a key relationship in Katzenberg's career. Promoted to the marketing department, then Paramount's TV division, Katzenburg's first task was to steer the first Star Trek movie into dock. Despite it being over budget, Katzenberg helped turn the film into a hit. He was on his way.

By 1984, Diller had moved to 20th Century Fox and Eisner had jumped to Disney, installing Katzenberg as chairman of a company whose animated division was in dire straits. "I'd never paid attention to animation until I arrived on the Disney lot," he says. "Even then, Michael Eisner brought me into his office, and said, 'You see that building over there? That's where they make animated movies. It's your problem!' That was my introduction to animation, when they were at their lowest. But I'm a good lieutenant – if somebody says, 'Go fix it', I'd do that."

That's putting it mildly. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to such hits as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, which roared to $312m (£156m) in the US, he restored belief in Disney's "heart and soul", as he puts it.

Yet his departure from Disney left a bitter taste in his mouth. Resigning shortly after being denied the top job there, he later took the company to court – reputedly suing for $250m (£125m). Now, he's all smiles. "I had 10 great years at Disney. I worked for Michael for 19 years and did very, very well with him. I don't even have any bad feelings. I don't feel any resentment. Nothing."

As he talks, without a shred of emotion in his voice, it strikes me that Katzenberg long ago developed the formula for success in Hollywood: total detachment. I wonder if leaving Disney for DreamWorks played on his nerves. "I think it was exciting. It was full of uncertainty but at the same time full of promise. I can't remember a time in which I had a strong sense of fear... the notion of fear and failure were things that were always OK. It was never going to be fatal to me."

While there have been flops in his time at DreamWorks – such as The Road to El Dorado – there haven't been many.

In a nod to Walt Disney, Katzenberg lays out the DreamWorks approach: "He [Disney] would make the movies for the children and then he worked really hard to make sure that they had a level of appeal for adults... What we've been trying to do at DreamWorks is to make movies for adults and for the adult that exists in every child."

Citing "sophisticated" titles such as Antz, Prince of Egypt and Shrek, he's less clear on where infantile cartoons like the zoo-set Madagascar fit into this remit. Still, it's easy to believe Katzenberg when he claims never to think about his days at Disney. "I don't actually look back," he says. Ever the salesman, he mentions a forthcoming DreamWorks project, Kung Fu Panda. "There's this wonderful saying that this very wise character, a 1,000-year-old turtle, the wisest being in all of China, says: 'Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it's called the present.'"

Katzenberg seems quite taken with this fortune-cookie aphorism: "I don't think I'd ever heard what I think, or how I try to live my life, said better."

'Shrek the Third' opens on 29 June

Post by **Ben** » June 27th, 2007, 9:09 am

But we are the audience, and we thought it was lame!

"That is why it's called the present" - I like that, though!

Post by **PatrickvD** » July 2nd, 2007, 6:32 am

Finally saw this yesterday.

It was pretty lame. The human animation continues to be pretty awkward. Dreamworks, it's 2007. Get with the time.

Story was lame. Justin Timberlake was awful beyond words. His character was also an ugly design. It was just... awful.

Post by **Dacey** » July 2nd, 2007, 2:00 pm

Bright spot: Gingerbread Man's life flashing before his eyes - genius.

Everyone liked that part.

Post by **ShyViolet** » July 2nd, 2007, 2:39 pm

Ditto. That and Merlin.

Post by **Ben** » July 2nd, 2007, 4:55 pm

Merl was predictable.

Post by **Jeroen** » July 2nd, 2007, 5:38 pm

The thing that cracked me up with Merlin were his "organic" rocks, but yeah really predictable on the whole.

Post by **Dacey** » July 4th, 2007, 2:14 pm

What I can't understand is why some of you guys like Artie.

Vi: Nice Avatar.

Post by **Jeroen** » July 4th, 2007, 4:02 pm

Who likes Artie?? I personally think as lame as his character may be,
Timberlake did a descent job at it.

Post by **Daniel** » July 4th, 2007, 4:19 pm

Vi does!