TheRetroCritic

That The Nutcracker 3D lost about $70M at the box-office (ouch!) shouldn't cloud our judgment of it as a film, I feel. Jumping on every bandwagon that comes along is hardly productive so let's take a look at Andrei Konchalovsky's take on Tchaikovsky's ballet (and E.T.A. Hoffman's story) as objectively as we possibly can. The film seems to want to distance itself from what it's based on as much as possible to allow for new creative input, which is fine because often that can mean that directors can allow their unique style to merge with a familiar story to create something fresh and interesting. Unfortunately what's added here just doesn't make sense with everything else. You've got Albert Einstein in some kind of Geppetto role played, oddly enough, by Nathan Lane who once again gives us a cartoon accent we could have done without (also see The Addams Family musical). You've also got a lot of weird Nazi imagery linked to rats and the Rat Kin

J.J. Abrams: clever, sometimes great writer, good filmmaker but most importantly genius promoter. The man could make you want to watch anything with a single poster or a teaser/promo. When it comes to marketing a gimmicky concept, you can't beat J.J.. Look at Lost : amazing build-up, uninspired first season. Cloverfield ? Brilliant promo, pedestrian film. Star Trek ? Huge expectations, decent-enough silly romp. There seems to be a pattern of disappointment following every great build-up and I'm sorry to say Super 8 is no exception. Some of the blame for Super 8's failure to impress could be put on Steven Spielberg who might have influenced the film positively (the kids are great and the film definitely has a lot of heart) but also doomed it to being just an E.T. B movie, nothing more. I'm not saying it's Mac & Me but still. Abrams himself should have known better. With a film like this, in which the main "attraction", in this case an alien, is

I wonder how many kids growing up reading Dr Seuss' Cat In The Hat ever pictured an overweight Alec Baldwin holding a six-pack of beer in the story let alone Mike Myers in cat drag! Oh well... Initially the film looks appropriately quirky and cartoonish but soon we realise that the story mostly takes place in a living room so goodbye slick CGI suburbia, hello boring pastel-coloured...indoors. Because that's what kids enjoy: Indoors. Anyway, you remember everything that didn't work in Ron Howard's The Grinch ? The noisy, chaotic direction, the messy musical numbers, the intrusive score, the erratic editing, the overacting... Yeah that's all back. The Grinch could be forgiven for being a Christmas movie and for having an ever entertaining Jim Carrey as the titular green grump. Here, however, we're given a rushed, dumb, predictable mess of a kids film with Mike Myers desperately trying to insert some jokes here and there and there's really no re