Tim Hill
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Russell Brand's rise as a star has been fairly swift and unconventional, sure, but usually the broad children's film comes far later in the career-- Tim Allen made The Santa Clause when he already had a hit network TV show, and Eddie Murphy had given us nearly a dozen edgy comedies before moving on to voice Donkey in Shrek.
With a plot that combines pieces from just about every Christmas fantasy movie, most notably "The Santa Clause", director Tim Hill ("Alvin And The Chipmunks") doesn't reveal anything really new or different.
The plot is uneven and forced at times, giving a mix of “The Santa Clause” and the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” films.
While the world's desperate cries for more sequels to "The Santa Clause" go unanswered, Universal Pictures brings us the next best thing: the same basic concept, changed to the Easter Bunny, mixed with "Alvin and the Chipmunks," and executed without distinction.
Hop appears to have been conceived in the minds of studio executives contemplating The Santa Clause and its dismal ilk and concluding that if it worked for Christmas, it will work for Easter too.
Actually the live-action-animation hybrid owes more to The Santa Clause and Alvin and the Chipmunks (Hop director Tim Hill was also responsible for the singing-rodent flick).
Yes, that film was "Home Alone," the 1990 Christmas comedy where he played Kevin McCallister who created fairly ingenious booby-traps to ward off the intruders played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.
Based on Robert Kimmel Smith's novel of the same name, the screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember dives quickly into "Home Alone" territory.
Little kids might find the slapstick amusing, but Home Alone did it a lot better with more warmth and some valuable life lessons about family along the way.
His punishment is a series of high jinks that “Home Alone” would balk at.
There’s a vague Home Alone vibe, although the familial relationship at the movie’s center makes it difficult to go the full Macaulay Culkin on poor De Niro.
The antics in The War with Grandpa draw along similar lines to Home Alone.
The genre, which has produced such classics as 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit and 2009’s Avatar , reaches its lowest point in quite some time with Hop , however, as director Tim Hill has crafted a dull and aggressively mediocre comedy that seems to have been designed to appeal solely to small children.
As a combination of animation and live action, it can’t help but recall Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but where Roger managed to be almost enjoyably irritating, Brand’s EB is something you’d unrepentantly fling into the fast lane of the M6.
Deranged references to "Fatal Attraction," an exposé of where jelly beans really come from, and sight gags involving blues legends the Blind Boys of Alabama counteract a lot of treacle.
Hop also evokes other, better movies with its Wonka-like candy factory, Danny Elfman-esque score and odd nod to Fatal Attraction's bunny-boiling scene.
The Muppets (2011)
Directed by James Bobin
influenced by Muppets from Space (1999), Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)
It's awfully easier to wish that the film could be a bit more of its own thing and a bit less "wow, isn't it wonderful how we all came into the theater already loving the Muppets so much?", but it is a far better thing than their last theatrical vehicle, 1999's Muppets from Space (though it's hard to imagine what wouldn't be, outside of a feature-length video of Segel lighting the puppets on fire and then urinating on the ashes), and that's worth at least a little bit of something.
There's some truth in that observation; this is the first Muppet movie since " Muppets From Space " (1999), and there wasn't exactly a clamor for a revival.
The first bigscreen outing for the colorful crew since Muppets from Space in 1999 and since Disney acquired the franchise from the Jim Henson estate in 2004, this perfectly enjoyable family comedy is disarmingly upfront about its raison d'etre—to reboot the Muppets for a new generation of moppets.
While some viewers had probably been expecting non-Muppet Segel to hog the spotlight, like other children-show-turned-modern-movies (such as Neil Patrick Harris in The Smurfs or Jason Lee in Alvin and the Chipmunks), the “humans” are all portrayed with campy tongue-in-cheek fun that serves to let the Muppets shine.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Directed by John Hughes
influenced Max Keeble's Big Move (2001)
Themes
Part "Wonder Years," part "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" with a bit of "Recess: School's Out," "Animal House" and "My Bodyguard" thrown in for good measure, the film is rather unwieldy in concept and final execution, with director Tim Hill ("Muppets From Space") and novice screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein & Mark Blackwell & James Greer (all making their collective feature film writing debut) never quite pulling in the reins and/or deciding on a tone or style for the film.
Because while Sonic the Hedgehog is cut from the same bland mold as Garfield (2004), Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007), and The Smurfs (2011), the one thing besides the little blue fur ball that feels most like a relic of the Clinton years is Jim Carrey.
Scriptwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller breezily steer Sonic down well-mapped odd-couple and chase-movie highways, with Alvin and the Chipmunks and Easter comedy Hop (also starring Marsden) as signposts.
Live-action comedies which rely overtly on pint-sized CGI mascots don’t exactly have a great standing among audiences or critics – just look at Alvin and the Chipmunks or The Smurfs – but Sonic the Hedgehog is aided enormously by the charmingly daft personality of Sonic himself.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)
Directed by Thor Freudenthal
influenced by Max Keeble's Big Move (2001), The War with Grandpa (2020)
Plot
Indeed, it is the bond between these two that helps the film stand out from the crowd of lesser, more stereotypical middle school-set pictures like 2001's " Max Keeble's Big Move ."
And that tactic might have worked had the movie been cast in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” mold.
Director Tim Hill (nephew of George Roy Hill, who helmed The Sting among other classics of the 1960's & 70's) progresses naturally from Alvin and the Chipmunks to rabbits.
Hey, isn’t this The Jazz Singer?
(The same most definitely cannot be said of the truly awful end credits "update" of the classic "Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do)," however.) Brand can also be heard but not seen in the live-action/animated holiday family film Hop, which plays like the movie mating product of The Santa Clause and The Nightmare Before Christmas that somehow ended up with an Easter bent.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
Directed by Jeff Fowler
influenced by Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)
Plot
And although the final product was essentially just a riff on the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks , it appealed enough to audiences (or, more likely, children in the audience) that it made more than $300m (£228m) at the global box office.
These high jinks more closely resemble Michael Bay’s Transformers, the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks, or live-action Scooby-Doo films.
Grabbing then gagging motor-mouth English comic Russell Brand as the voice of the slacker bunny EB is just one of the many misfires made by director Tim Hill and producer Christopher Meledandri’s usually reliable production company, Illumination Entertainment (Ice Age, 2002; Robots, 2005; Despicable Me, 2010).
Though the endearingly rendered animated characters designed by Peter De Sève ( Finding Nemo , Ice Age ) show care, every other aspect of the film feels like an afterthought, a lazy collection of easy-even-for-a-kid-movie jokes loosely organized to tell the origin story of the “first human Easter Bunny,” a tale that never feels as if it needed to be told.
As my mind wandered in the theater, I imagined Hasselhoff teaming up with Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze to make a funky sort of Easter version of “Being John Malkovich.”
And most of those Easter movies have some obvious and relevant religious overtones to them, such as “The Passion of the Christ,” “King of Kings” and even “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Russell Brand's rise as a star has been fairly swift and unconventional, sure, but usually the broad children's film comes far later in the career-- Tim Allen made The Santa Clause when he already had a hit network TV show, and Eddie Murphy had given us nearly a dozen edgy comedies before moving on to voice Donkey in Shrek.
What puts this film in the same league with "Elf," "Tangled" and "School of Rock" is its breathless comic momentum.
And most of those Easter movies have some obvious and relevant religious overtones to them, such as “The Passion of the Christ,” “King of Kings” and even “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
The movie features self-consciously cute protagonists who already have a presence on toy shelves (just like the Smurfs), trying to escape an ogre-like presence who wants to eat them (also the Smurfs), while trying to help a seemingly hopeless humanoid figure show her true greatness (“Ratatouille,” “Shrek,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” etc).
Screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger may have been writing for the kiddie circuit a little too long with multiple Kung Fu Pandas and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies under their belt, because this one feels a little too stale and formulaic.
And not helping is the movie being written by Jon Vitti, who penned two of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies.
They simply keep eating and dancing and engaging in scenes that allow the film’s screenwriter—Jon Vitti, who is best known for his work on The Simpsons but is also responsible for Alvin and the Chipmunks —to make many, many pig-and-bird puns.
If you like puns, the script by Jon Vitti (Alvin and the Chipmunks) has a million groaners.
At a bare minimum, you’d expect the script to try to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy anger, but screenwriter Jon Vitti (who also wrote the first two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies) doesn’t see the need to bother.
Jon Vitti, who has written for The Simpsons (good) and Alvin and the Chipmunks (bad), The Angry Birds Movie takes a lot of familiar genre elements (outsider/loner forced to come good), and does very little that’s new with them.