DVD review - Smurfs: The Lost Village

Tim here. 2017 is shaping up to be a less-than-inspired year for movies in general, but particularly dire for animation (apologies to the Cars 3 superfans, I'm sure there's at least a couple of you in this world). The bar has fallen low enough that I even managed to convince myself that there might be some merit to checking out Smurfs: The Lost Village, which arrived on DVD this week. The first of three Sony Picture Animation features to come out in 2017 (the second, The Emoji Movie, is mere weeks away, and boy does it look like it will be bad), The Lost Village is the latest attempt to keep the small blue woodland homunculi called Smurfs in English, Schtroumpfs in the original French, viable as a marketable brand.

In an astonishing twist, it is not very good.

At least we can say this in favor of the film: it's entirely animated. The last two Smurfs features made by Sony (otherwise unrelated to The Lost Village) were live-action hybrids, in which little animated Smurfs came out to horrifyingly deal with the real New York City. Now, they're where they belong, in a busily designed magic forest, facing a proper cartoon villain and his cartoon cat. So far as that goes, honestly, The Lost Village is even a pretty nice film to look at...

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Natty the Link Slayer

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Alyson Hannigan is pregnant again. Congratulations to Mommy Willow! 

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Cinema Blend Leonardo DiCaprio has two villain roles coming up and The Devil in the White City just hired its screenwriter Graham Moore
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The Playlist Jessica Chastain to star in The Darling... which is about 4 or 5 movies from now on her schedule. At some point girlfriend's going to have to come up for air! Maybe she'll take a break in 2015?

For what its worth The Academy has disqualified The Smurfs from the Animated Feature race. No one expected it to be nominated but it's still important to note. 18 films were submitted and the category requires 16 qualifying entries for five-wise "Best" category. If more are disqualified before the nomination ballots go out, the shortlist may get, well, shorter. It's a curious and quite competitive category this year given the rarity of a Pixar fumble and a frontrunner (Rango) that is not quite beloved. That said, Pixar's Cars 2 could still well be nominated from force of habit. The Golden Globes went there despite several more acclaimed option and so did the Annies though they select ten nominees so it was practically a gimme. It's kind of a nail biter, isn't it? Do you think Pixar will manage a nod?

Box Office: Cowboys, Smurfs, Soldiers, Aliens, Beginners

Confession: I loved The Smurfs when I was young though I knew that they drew scorn from many corners. I would sing "la la laLALALA la la la la la" loudly whenever I wanted to annoy my older brother. That said, the movie looked a-tro-cious so I felt roughly zero in the way of nostalgic pull. I don't know how you cast talents as comedically strong as Hank Azaria and Neil Patrick Harris and then rely on fart jokes but apparently they did since "Who smurfed?" is supposed to be a joke therein. I was discussing this on Twitter last night with strangers lamenting that their kids liked it and Miyazaki would have to wait. I just returned from a vacation week with close friends and their children (including my goddaughter) and I'm happy to report that Miyazaki is well loved by the tween / early teen set. So there's hope for all disheartened parents of toddlers out there! Some of your children will grow out of their bad taste. Some of them won't and will grow up to rush to movies like Zookeeper wtih Kevin James on opening weekend. It's not the end of the world. It only feels like it to the devoted cinephile.

Weekend Showdown. Cowboys vs. Tiny Blue Aliens

box office top ten
01 COWBOYS AND ALIENS new $36.4
02 THE SMURFS new $35.6
03 CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER [review] $25.5 (cumulative $117.4)
04 HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART TWO [review] $21.9 (cum $318.5)
05 CRAZY STUPID LOVE [your take] new $19.1
06 FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS $9.2 (cum $38.1)
07 HORRIBLE BOSSES $7.1 (cum $96.2)
08 TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON $6 (cum $338)
09 ZOOKEEPER $4.3 (cum $68.8)
10 CARS 2  $2.3 (cum $182.1)

Items of Note: HP 7.2 passed the difficult $300 million barrier domestically and the even rarer billion mark globally placing it at the #2 position for 2011 just behind #1s Transformers 3 (domestic) and Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (global). Given that "It All Ends!" has only been in release for two weeks, it'll easy defeat both of those films any day now. In ten days Captain America has earned about $116 here in its home country which means its already falling behind Thor despite a similar opening weekend draw. Thor was an even bigger hit across the Atlantic which doesn't seem likely for Cappy due to his homeland hero specificity. Cars 2 is running out of fuel, and may become the first Pixar release since A Bug's Life to fall short of $200 million domestically. Ah well, they'll always have their merchandising bonanza. Wasn't that the whole point of the sorry film to begin with?

poll by twiigs.com

other films we thought we'd check in on...
18 SARAH'S KEY $.3 (cum. $.5)
20 THE TREE OF LIFE [overheard / thoughts] $.3 (cum. $11.6)
25 BEGINNERS [review]  $.2 (cum. $5)
39 THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE new $.09
53 THE FUTURE new $.02 

Sarah's Key a Holocaust drama starring TFE favorite Kristin Scott Thomas has been surprisingly robust with ticket sales thus far at only 33 theaters. Should we have been considering this one long ago?

I included The Devil's Double and The Future because I missed critics screenings but I'm totally curious about both (would love to hear your thoughts if you've seen them). Plus, we hadn't checked in on the lower ranks of the charts in some time. Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, keeps puttering along in arthouses (widest release peaked at 237 theaters) and it might even eventually gross as much as the first two days of Zookeeper (!) which, as one friend soberly notes, '...is why we can't have nice things.'

'Sarah's Key' and 'Beginners' are arthouse hits

Beginners has been a small and sturdy arthouse attraction itself, roughly akin to Winter's Bone at this point in its life (2 months) in terms of both gross and theater count. But can a 5 million grosser summon up enough energy to grow legs and stride through the often brutal precursor awards season without, one presumes, a lead performance and director with similar awards hopeful traction? Do you think Christopher Plummer has a good shot still or did the film need to catch on with more fervor for what might be a lone supporting bid?