Despicable Me Movie Review

Starring: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig

Director: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud

Synopsis: In a happy suburban neighborhood surrounded by white picket fences with flowering rose bushes, sits a black house with a dead lawn. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, hidden beneath this home is a vast secret hideout. Surrounded by a small army of minions, we discover Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), planning the biggest heist in the history of the world. He is going to steal the moon (Yes, the moon!) in Universal's new 3-D CGI feature, Despicable Me. Gru delights in all things wicked. Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays, and battle-ready vehicles for land and air, he vanquishes all who stand in his way. Until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who look at him and see something that no one else has ever seen: a potential Dad.The world's greatest villain has just met his greatest challenge: three little girls named Margo, Edith and Agnes.
“Not despicable enough. Not cute enough. Not funny enough. At least they push the 3-D to near absurd levels. Yes, roller coaster, I'm talking about you.”




Not every supervillain can be, well, super at their job. They aspire to greatness, but may learn they aren't cut out for their ignoble profession. Maybe it's because they're not as bad as they'd like to think.Despicable Me follows Gru, who looks like a cross between Uncle Fester and Dr.. He lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, a perfect cover for his vast underground lair where his minions -- who resemble a hybrid of Twinkies and those cute little aliens from Toy Story -- and his mad scientist colleague, Dr. Nefario, build his gizmos and weaponry.


Having fallen on hard times, Gru sets out to pull off his biggest heist yet: stealing the moon! But he's competing with a younger upstart, the nerdy Vector (Jason Segel), and finds his cold heart slowly but surely melting when three adorable orphans -- Margo, Edith and Agnes -- enter his life. Suddenly finding himself responsible for something other than his own wicked schemes, Gru may just go from bad to dad.


Despicable Me is perfectly rote animated family entertainment, a familiar but fun little movie that owes more than a passing similarity to How The Grinch Stole Christmas, where a dastardly character out to steal something big has a change of heart after encountering an adorable little moppet (or, in this case, three of them). It's a formulaic tale whose outcome is evident from the get-go, but it should nevertheless win over its intended audience.


As the movie progresses ... it's clear that beyond some mildly clever sight gags, it is content to mine the same middling formulaic territory of so many other kids' films.

It's not an especially inspired film, and everything in it is calculated for maximum emotional manipulation -- and it works because, damn, if those precious little tykes and Gru's minions aren't cute and funny. But Gru and Vector feel like low-rent knock-offs of The Grinch and Syndrome from The Incredibles, respectively. Carell is simply miscast as Gru; you never believe him as a supervillain so his change of heart lacks impact.


The film is overrun with colorful characters. Gru's assistant, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), is like James Bond's Q, a genius at inventing devices. But his hearing isn't always acute. So when asked to design a dart gun, he concocts something that sounds like dart, only the word begins with an "f."


 Supervillains exploiting orphan girls is funny! At the inevitable melting of Gru's stony heart, the film turns into something else entirely. That which it turns into is sloppy and a little unsatisfying, but it is still irresistibly sweet, thanks to Agnes!!










Absolutely loved the part where Agnes exclaimed “its so flurry!” See the fluff toy is larger than her, so the imagery was pretty cute.


Cheerios!

Nike Air Force One Foamposite – A Closer Look

Originally previewed in early June, here we get an outdoors look into the upcoming Foamposite Air Force 1 for Fall 2010. This evolution sees Nike bring together the best of both worlds. Significant creative thinking and new engineering to create a three-mold process that eliminates the seams on the upper. The shoe also draws on the original Foamposite design, utilizing a midsole that allows consumers a window into the soul of the shoe. Seamless Foamposite, in an Air Force 1. Stay tuned as a release nears at select Nike accounts, including West NYC.

Bet they gonna do one for Lebron and Co. Real soon!

The ravishing Audi A7

The way Audi has been assiduously filling gaps in its model line-up, you would think the company was playing poker. After the A4, A6, and A8, Audi came up with the A3 and A5. The A7 bridges that final gap, making a straight.


Instead of occupying a medium space between the A6 and A8 models, the new A7 is closely related to the A8 in luxury, size, and technology. But unlike the A8, the A7 uses a fastback design, allowing for a rear hatch covering a cargo area. The fastback gives the roofline a coupe-like shape.



Audi announced four engines for the new A7, all V-6es, with two diesel and two gasoline, although we don't know which engines will be offered in the U.S. Horsepower ranges from 204 to 300.

A low end version will use front-wheel-drive and a standard automatic transmission, but the sporty choice gets Audi's Quattro all-wheel-drive system and dual clutch gearbox.




The A7 gets cabin tech similar to that found in the A8.
The A7 will feature a variety of new technologies, the most interesting being a GPS system that feeds data about the road ahead to the headlights, transmission, and cruise control. The adaptive headlights, which can be had as LEDs, will use that data to better illuminate the road, changing angle depending on the nature of upcoming turns. Likewise, the transmission could downshift early if it knows a hill is coming up.



Similar to what we saw in the new A8, the A7 will get a touchpad on the console that lets the driver trace letters. This input device makes it easy to enter destinations into the navigation system. There is also a head-up display, a new feature for Audi.


We've seen very rich 3D maps in recent Audi models, and we can expect this trend to continue with the A7's standard navigation system. This system will use a data connection to download useful information about destinations and map points.


A top audio system from Bang & Olufsen will be available for the A7. It comes with 15 speakers and 1,300 watts of amplification.

Audi also brings in a parking assist feature for the A7, which handles the steering during parallel parking.

Deliveries start this Fall in Europe, with a quoted price of 51,650 euro ($67,135).
 
Wow. Wow. Wow.
 

Street Artist Stepping it up with 3D artworks!!

It was sooooooo facinating and mesmerizing, I had to put it up once more...




You don't need special glasses to view these eye-popping works of 3D street painting, also called anamorphic or illusionistic art. But you will need to approach them from just the right angle to get the full effect.


Cursors meet the classics in this Czech installation by Italian artist Kurt Wenner, who draws with handmade pastels and generally paints between 4 and 6 square yards a day.

Related article: "Street artists step it up with 3D"

Photo credit: Kurt Wenner
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
Boom shakalala Boom!
 
Steppping it up ... 3D style!!!
 
 

Inception Movie Review

 









Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy
Director: Christopher Nolan


‘Visually stunning Inception trips on its own cleverness, sacrificing character development in the pursuit of ingenuity. One can forgive its hubris and give it credit for being a thinking man's action movie.’








Synopsis: The Big Idea here is dream invasion. Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, specialist-for-hire in the art of “extracting” information from sleeping subjects. He and his crew hook themselves up with wires to the drugged targets and infiltrate their subconscious, as they’re caught doing in the opening bit with a Japanese businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe). Their job is to sneak about inside the palace of your mind like stealthy cat burglars of the id. Dropping us in mid-mission and giving only just enough to go on, it’s a nifty, show-don’t-tell introduction – one of the reasons why the tell-tell-tell policy from here on in feels overly didactic, like a yammering maths lecturer afraid he’s about to lose you.










In fairness, the labyrinths that open up when Cobb and his team attempt “inception” – that’s to say, the implanting of an idea in the mind rather than its theft – do require a hefty ball of twine to navigate. A dream team is assembled: newbie world-designer Ariadne (Ellen Page), identity forger Eames (Tom Hardy, a dry gift here), pharmacist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Cobb’s regular point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Their target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy, precise and valuable), the son of an ailing energy tycoon (Pete Postlethwaite) whose business empire Saito wants broken up after his death.










Nolan has spun an elegantly cerebral story that is primal, compelling, and as visually disconcerting as it is completely captivating. He is having the time of his life in his own personal playground and, for all its heavy technical and narrative machinery, Inception remains one of his lightest films.




Nolan has a vast budget to play with, and play with it he does, folding Parisian streets back on themselves just because he can. The real novelty of the concept is the layering of dreams within dreams, yielding addictively vertiginous sequences of parallel action. The physics of each level get destabilised by what’s happening above: when Cobb is dunked in a bath to wake him up, a flash-flood hits him in his dream world.








When the movie builds up a head of steam, it’s dazzling and protean, and almost anything seems possible. But Nolan’s skill at basic action choreography hasn’t improved since Batman’s fisticuffs, and his attempts at puncturing an otherwise poker-faced exercise with the odd goofy gag feel forced. Marion Cotillard is scary and beautiful as the bitter shade in Leo’s mental basement, threatening to contort every mission into a Solaris-style marital guilt trip.












The film has a dark, sad emotional puzzle at its core, and the suspense of this held me as much as the planning of the ultimate caper. DiCaprio and Cotillard between them resonable grief.




In all honesty, Marion looked really hot, much unlike any other 34-year old French babe you see walking around huh?
But DiCaprio, in a frazzled and unhelpfully humourless performance, gives the impression he never got the boat off Shutter Island. The concept is cool and all, but think about how dreams really function for a second, and it teeters on the brink of wrongheadedness. Don’t we dream of sex, at all? Why are these mindscapes like sterile set pieces in a middling Bond movie? Inception’s not the deep wow we might have hoped for, just the big one we needed.








It is irritating for an hour, being so gloomily lit that you need fog lights, then it opens up into a marvellously inventive, somewhat silly but enjoyable heist movie, with a good cast doing things I doubt even they could explain.


The performances are excellent, but with this cast, that's not surprising. The lone weak spot seems to be Ellen Page, whose dry-wit delivery is wasted here. Even then, it's not a matter of her turning in a bad performance; it's just one that any actress could have done.







Inception features one of the best fight scenes of all-time. Take a moment to consider that: in the entire history of cinema, of every fight scene that has ever taken place, the one in this movie is among the best. Watching a fight without gravity is incredible. It’s not like in The Matrix where a character can defy gravity if they choose.

The fight scene in Inception has no gravity to defy and Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the team’s point man, has to figure out how to achieve his objective while fending off projections. I can only hope that someday in the distant future, when people with free time are on a space station in zero-gravity, they will re-enact this scene. In the meantime, Nolan’s spectacular visual effects will have to suffice.

Nolan has planted the idea that his film is the most brilliant, original and smart film in years, and strangely everyone thinks they realized this on their own.

Enjoy.