Despicable Me

Somehow I knew that Armond White was going to love this one.  The man gets predictable after awhile.  You see, he trashed "Toy Story 3" in his review, but he wasn't quite finished with pissing people off.  So when it came to him reviewing (irony of ironies) "Despicable Me", it had to be a positive review just so that he could trash "Toy Story 3" some more.  He didn't review "Coraline" last year, he just kept on pointing out how "WALL-E" sucked.  Its a "divide and conquer" strategy:  Pixar vs. everybody.  But I'm not going to fall for it.  Why can't we just love all the good animated movies for what they are?  You're allowed to love other movies after you love a Pixar one.

Honestly after seeing "Despicable Me", I really can't see much here that "Toy Story 3" didn't do equally well or better.  I don't know what he's talking about.  The only difference is that the Toy Story franchise looks at the phenomena of toys with an uncritical eye; loving the objects of childhood rather than calling them "corporate shill" like White wants.  (This man has been many things in his time, but one of them definitely was not a child.)  He rambles about commercialism and assumes that Pixar is in some way being disingenuous when they show emotions through the lens of an inanimate object.  So he refused to accept the very concept of the movie - maybe didn't even see the movie - and so his review was pointless.  Nothing he could say about this subject could ever mean anything.  Armond White, as I've said before, is a terrible critic, but he's worse than that:  he's intellectually complacent, even as he uses pretentious terms as "trompe l’oeil" (English:  an artistic illusion of depth) - even though in fact he's the trompe l’oeil.  He wants to be seen as an edgy critic who sees the emotional failures of movies that more gullible audiences miss, but actually he's just a fraud.  Its his employers and readers who are the gullible ones.

But enough about Armond White, too much has been said about him already.  Let's just review "Despicable Me".

I wasn't even going to see "Despicable Me" in the first place, but my baby cousin (the older one, not the one in the hospital) really wanted me to come.  I just couldn't say no.  I did do my best to convince him to see "The Last Airbender" instead, so that I could review what certainly will be the most abysmal movie of the year.  (When its out on DVD you guys will get that treat.)  I'll give my baby cousin's review first.  "The fart gun was funny!"  I then asked him if he would have loved any movie with a fart gun, to which he said "yes".  So there you are.  Fart guns lovers, this is the movie you've been waiting all these many years for.

"Despicable Me" takes place in a world very similar to our own, just that there are supervillains who run around all over the place, but yet its strangely lacking in superheros or law enforcement.  The supervillains are pretty harmless too, they just steal large objects in petty mischief rather than really hurting people.  Our main character is Gru (Steve Carell doing a "Dexter's Laboratory" accent), a supervillain out to fulfill his long-standing childhood goal of stealing the Moon.  However, there's a new supervillain on the block, a Mandark for Gur's Dexter, Vector, who even looks and acts a bit like an elder Mandark.  For now on Vector will be known as "Mandark"*, I command it!  Unfortunately the only shrink-ray in the world is being made by the North Koreans, and Mandark has stolen it.  Gru then adopts a trio of adorable little girls from an orphanage:  an adult-ish leader one, a rough tomboy one, and a super cute slightly insane one to trick Mandark so he can get his hands on the shrink ray.  Has he adopted the Powerpuff Girls?  Unfortunately no, though that would have made this a far better movie.

Steadily Gru starts to forget about his Moon dreams and his rivalry with Mandarks and become a father to these girls.  In an interesting point, neither Gru nor the girls have really known what being a family is like.  Gru had a Jewish mother who never cared about anything he ever did, and the Not-Powerpuff Girls grew up in a loveless orphanage run by a loveless burro-faced Southern housewife type.   So there's a good dynamic here for all four to learn to love each other, but the movie is a little too cluttered to actually deal with this issue.  The girls just seem to be regular kids given to a cold father who somehow expect to be read a story and be kissed goodnight.  (I guess burro-face wasn't such a bad guardian after all?  There seems to be a plot hole here.)

I guess the moral of the story is:  you don't have to be evil to get attention.  Just find somebody who loves you.  The moral isn't all that well presented, but it gets there eventually.  Even so, this is the movie that Osama Bin Ladin needs to see.  If we were just to send him three lovable little girls, maybe we could end this war.

Along for the ride are Gru's Minions, a group of tiny yellow pill-shaped creatures who speak their own language and generally act as adorable and silly as possible, like harmless Oompa Loompas.  I don't quite know what they are, Gru calls him "his cousins" at some point.  That's just about as good as an explanation as you'll get.  The Minions are often on the end of various experiments:  one spends the entire movie floating to the Moon, another is shrunk to bite-size and spends half the movie hanging out on another Minion's palm.  Constantly up-beat despite constant maiming, these guys are awesome.  There's a TV show in the Minions someplace I think.  They're easily my favorite bit of the movie... next to Agnes.

Agnes is the Bubbles of the trio of little girls.  She's so lovable that I would believe her existence to be just an imaginary creation of a manipulative film studio if not for the fact that she reminds me so much of my Favorite Person in the World, my other baby cousin (the one in the hospital).  He's actually several shades more lovable.  That really made me sad, and might have warped my opinion a bit.  So maybe you should read this review with a critical eye.  You'll get great lines from her such as "the pony is so fluffy I'm gonna die!".  Even though Agnes and her sisters are basically the forced emotional element into this movie (put in purely because by law movies need emotional elements), Agnes is such a well-crafted character that you can actually accept their existence here.  Illumination Entertainment didn't just throw emotional elements into a script that was just a series of comedy sketches (like ugg... "Monsters vs. Aliens"); these girls work with the movie.

Ultimately "Despicable Me" is actually a much better movie than I expected, and so I was pleasantly surprised.  Yeah, the animation is pretty much just basic 3D work without much inspiration, but it works well enough for the movie they were making.  Its the last moments of Gru putting the girls to bed that really made me think that this movie worked.  It doesn't have the emotional impact of making the entire audience break down into tears, but its still quite touching.  If you have a kid to entertain, this will succeed far more than just that tiny goal.  However, I simply cannot give this movie my highest recommendation purely for one reason:  it ends with an "ironic" disco dance number.  After I suffered terribly through the movie "Robots" I cannot ever forgive "ironic" dance numbers, no matter what the dance or how ironic.

Also, this will certainly be better than DreamWorks' upcoming rip-off movie with the same plot, "Megamind".  I won't be seeing that.

On the 3D:  I think I've uncovered my major problem with 3D films.  I don't have very good eyes and need to wear glasses in order to see distance properly.  The effect that this gives is that I can see the depth in a 3D movie, but the objects never really pop out of the screen at my face.  My baby cousin was cringing in his seat as the Minions threw ladders out of the screen, but I couldn't get anything.  I don't know.  3D remains unimpressive to me except for two areas:  the flying scenes from "How to Train Your Dragon" and the roller coaster rides in this movie.  You can feel half the emotion of a real roller coaster, its crazy!

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* Twenty minutes into this movie I decided that the world needed a feature-length "Dexter's Lab" movie.  NOW.  It also made me a little sad that the movie I was watching was so much like a "Dexter's Lab" film and yet wasn't.  I don't care if they make it in some silly 3D animation or something, but the world needs "Dexter's Lab:  The Movie".  Somebody get me on the phone with Hollywood.  We got a movie to make.