Tag: Jay Baruchel

How to Train Your Dragon 2

The sequel to “How to Train Your Dragon” is a bit more action heavy and less charming, but it still captures the original’s spirit.

How does the saying go? You can’t teach an old dragon new tricks? That’s the actuality behind “How to Train Your Dragon 2”, which models off the original “How to Train Your Dragon” in many ways and yet does so without losing any of the original’s surprising quality.

Dreamworks’s film was the first since “Shrek” that had both real humor and heart. It was a gorgeous example of what 3-D could do, it captured some of the breathtaking spectacle behind “Avatar” and put it into a kids’ film and it even included an adorable wordless montage that could plausibly be talked about in the same breath as the one from “Up.” Those more tranquil moments made the epic dragon battle in its finale more significant and tolerable.

“HTTYD 2” is a bit more action heavy and a bit lighter on the charm that made the first film a hit. All the training has been done, and now a bigger fight is about to begin. And yet Dean DeBlois’s film (he co-directed the original) uses the same structure that slowly brought out the original’s best qualities. Continue reading “How to Train Your Dragon 2”

This is the End

More so than a scathing look at Hollywood, “This is the End” is Seth Rogen and Company taking the piss, lampooning their screen selves for yucks all around.

There might be a few people disappointed that “This is the End” effectively closes the door on a “Pineapple Express” sequel in one quick, hilarious scene. The “Superbad” reunion is even shorter. And for what it’s worth, “This is the End” might just be the last time you see any of these actors make a movie this silly and outrageous again.

But I guess that’s appropriate for a comedy about the end of the world. If Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were going to make a movie that allows Seth, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride and all their other assorted friends the chance to play the fool one last time, they’d better do so in the most spectacularly destructive way possible.

Although they’re all playing themselves, this time officially, Rogen and Company have effectively driven the stake in their on-screen personas that have followed them through so many films since the “Knocked Up” days. They’ve been impaled by street lamps, sucked into sinkholes, eaten by cannibals and raped by demons, and maybe now they can usher in a new era of comedies from the ashes of their hilariously vulgar corpses.

More so than a scathing look at Hollywood, “This is the End” is the crew taking the piss, lampooning their screen selves for yucks all around. The film begins with Jay visiting Seth in L.A., in which the two have an epic weekend of pot and video games ahead of them. Is this their lifestyle? Perhaps not, but we as an audience can’t truly see them any other way. Continue reading “This is the End”

How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks’ “How to Train Your Dragon” is a welcome surprise with beautifully animated flight sequences.

Advertisers may think they know what “How to Train Your Dragon” is about. They see the cute dragon, they see the fat one, the scary, ugly one, and they see Gerard Butler’s name stapled onto the credits and they assume a madcap adventure made to be coupled in with trailers about movies with talking, live action cats and dogs. Thank goodness someone saw how elegant the flying sequences were in “Up” and “Avatar.”

“How to Train Your Dragon” is a welcome surprise, a charming film that can stage a moment of the utmost beauty and tranquility through marvelous animation and the right pacing and tone. It has the same markings of any Dreamworks movie as well, but I became invested in the characters and enchanted by the visuals to even appreciate the longer, manic ending of action and fire breathing explosions.

The film takes place in a Viking village overrun by dragons on a regular basis. The tribe is fully concerned with killing and eliminating dragons of any kind, but after a scrawny boy named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has an encounter with a rare dragon he successfully harmed, he finds he has a change of heart towards the creatures when he looks into the eyes of this particular dark blue dragon and can’t bring himself to kill it. Continue reading “How to Train Your Dragon”