Author: David Medsker

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, along with partner Don Simpson, went from in-demand talent to persona non grata in a nanosecond (as is the way in Hollywood), but in the mid ‘90s they experienced a phoenix-like resurrection – well, Bruckheimer did anyway; Simpson died in 1996 – thanks to a (terrible) little movie called “Bad Boys.” Over the next four years, Bruckheimer was bulletproof; “Crimson Tide,” “Dangerous Minds,” “The Rock,” “Armageddon” and “Enemy of the State” were all huge hits, action movies that dealt with matters from an underwater nuclear standoff to the end of the world as we know it. Surprisingly heady stuff for what is supposed to be a fluff-filled genre.

Which is precisely why “Con Air,” the silly little convicts-on-a-plane flick that hit the multiplexes in the summer of 1997, is the most enjoyable movie Bruckheimer produced during that time. The cast is spectacular, nabbing an Oscar winner (Nicolas Cage), a Gen-X heartthrob (John Cusack), two indie darlings/Quentin Tarantino regulars (Steve Buscemi and Ving Rhames) and the ultimate actor’s actor, John Malkovich. What attracted them to such a ridiculous premise? A script from Scott Rosenberg that is both clever and stupid, appealing to the Spinal Tap fan in us all. You can keep the Michael Bay crane shots (he was responsible for “Bad Boys,” “The Rock” and “Armageddon,” ugh) that defined this part of Bruckheimer’s career: Bay never made a movie as undeniably fun as this.

The setup, admittedly, is flimsier than flimsy: Army Ranger Cameron Poe (Cage) gets in a fight with a drunken redneck on his first night back from service, and kills the man in self-defense. Poe’s lawyer, who was clearly roommates with Lionel Hutz at law school, tells him to plead guilty, and the remorseless judge gives Poe seven to ten years. Even worse, Poe is sent to the clink before he ever sets eyes on his daughter Casey, who is still in the womb of his wife Tricia (Monica Potter, and no, they don’t explain how Poe is capable of impregnating his wife while on duty). Eight years later, Poe is paroled, and thrown on a cargo plane with the worst criminals the system’s ever seen, from Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (Malkovich) to serial killer Garland Greene (Buscemi), who scares the daylights out of even the cons. Poe is slated to get off on the one stop the plane had scheduled, but after the cons take over the plane, Poe stays onboard in order to save his buddy Baby-O (Mykelti Williamson) and the police guard Bishop (Rachel Ticotin). US Marshal Vince Larkin (Cusack), who’s supervised the entire flight, realizes he has an ally on the plane, and tries to work with Poe to sort everything out.

Of course, I’ve told you too much, and not remotely enough. This is the kind of movie that you or I could have directed, and it would have turned out the same way, which is why it was the perfect directorial debut for Simon West, who has done nothing, and I mean nothing, of merit since (“The General’s Daughter,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” and that god-awful remake of “When a Stranger Calls”). The guitar-heavy rock score, by Trevor Rabin (of Yes fame, natch), adds the perfect dose of kitsch to the goings-on. And then there is Cage’s laughable Alabama accent, which is odd given his magnificent accent work as H.I. McDunnough in “Raising Arizona.” Gosh, it seems that there’s nothing but faults with this movie…

…and yet, for all its flaws, “Con Air” is giddy, crazy fun. Malkovich has to utter some of the worst lines in his acting career – “If your dick jumps out of your pants, you jump out of this plane” springs to mind – and Dave Chappelle has to make a terribly dated Ebonics joke. But Rosenberg’s dialogue is by and large snappy and funny. (When Cyrus jokingly asks the guard what the in-flight movie is, the guard says, “You’ll love it, Cyrus. It’s called, ‘I’ll Never Make Love to a Woman on the Beach Again,’ followed by ‘No More Steak for Me, Ever.’”) Cage is the rock of the movie, with a performance that is both sober and sly, the straight man amidst all the chaos that dutifully dodges fireball after fireball in order to “save the fuckin’ day.” Cusack and Malkovich are clearly having fun, and one wonders why they didn’t do another action movie, like Cage, Rhames and Buscemi did. “Con Air” also has one of the most solid supporting casts you will find, from Williamson and Ticotin to Danny Trejo as rapist Johnny 23 and Tom Waits soundalike Nick Chinlund as Billy Bedlam. And let us not forget M.C. Gainey, who would find success later in his career as the naked guy in “Sideways” and the sometimes bearded Other on “Lost,” as the gonzo pilot Swamp Thing.

This new release of “Con Air” is called the unrated extended edition, but don’t let ‘unrated’ make you think ‘more violent.’ The added scenes, about seven minutes’ worth, are all dialogue, but they’re good ones, especially Ticotin’s justification for choosing her cat over her husband. We also get to see Garland Greene satisfy his blood lust, something that’s only talked about in the original. These extras are probably not worth upgrading an older DVD of the movie, since there are no other extras to speak of (really, is Simon West so busy that he couldn’t have done a commentary on the only good movie he’ll ever make?), but if you have been blowing off buying the DVD, the extra scenes actually improve the movie by, surprise, giving the characters some extra depth. Or, in some cases, depth.

“Con Air” is movie escapism at its finest; the setup is preposterous, and the characters have no basis in reality, but the sheer joy exuded by all concerned is wildly contagious. It’s okay for a movie to be a little dumb, as long as it’s smart about the right things, and few movies demonstrate that better than “Con Air.” Don’t forget to put the bunny back in the box.

While “Cloverfield’s” approach to monster movies is indeed unique – it’s “Godzilla” from the point of view of the guy on the street who points and yells, “Oh nooooooooo!” – the truth is that there isn’t a single technique employed here that you haven’t seen before. That, however, does not stop “Cloverfield” from delivering some legitimate thrills and downright creepy moments. The “Blair Witch Project”-style camerawork is effective in terms of revealing as little or as much as the movie wants you to see, but it’s also nauseating, like Paul Greengrass hopped up on Red Bull and NoDoz.

The movie opens with a title card informing us that the following video is evidence into a government case called Cloverfield, shot in the area “formerly known as Central Park.” The video begins with a clip of Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth (Odette Yustman) planning a trip to Coney Island. The tape then jumps six weeks in time to Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) hastily putting together a going –away party for Rob, who has taken a job in Japan. Jason cons best friend Hud (T.J. Platt) to handle video duties during the party, which Hud uses as a chance to talk to longtime crush Marlena (Lizzy Caplan). As Rob, Jason and Hud are having some deep boy talk on the stairwell the entire apartment building shakes with earthquake velocity. They hit the roof to investigate, and see complete chaos taking place in downtown Manhattan. When they get down to the street, the chaos is at their front door, in the form of a giant monster of undeterminable size and origin. And it’s just left the head of the Statue of Liberty in the street as a greeting card.

The most unsettling part of “Cloverfield” is that no one in the movie knows more about what is going on than anyone else, including the military personnel. There is no long-winded story about the monster being some military experiment gone horribly awry; they’re just as much in the dark as the rest of us, and that lack of information gives the action an extra level of tension, yet is strangely comforting. It also makes the movie’s money shots during the climax even sweeter, because you still don’t know what kind of monster the characters are up against.

The catch to doing a movie like this is that there are times when it’s damned for its realism, and there are times when it’s damned for not being realistic enough. The dialogue gets grating in a hurry with its innumerable exclamations of “Oh my God” and shouts of “Rob! Rob!,” even though any actual tape of the events here would sound almost exactly like that. On the flip side, when director Matt Reeves grants the audience a pardon and lets up on the queasy-cam, it yields some improbable moments of camera dexterity, especially when T.J. jumps from one building to the roof of another. Lastly, does anyone ever survive a helicopter crash? Just curious.

“Cloverfield” may have monster movie origins, but the movie is really the ripple effect of “gimmick” movies like “Memento.” It may seem clever now, but this is not a movie for the ages. It is worth seeing once, but that one viewing will be plenty

This year’s most anticipated adaptation of a much-loved children’s book is…well, “Where the Wild Things Are,” Spike Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s largely word-free story of one ornery boy. And if the pressure wasn’t already on Jonze to knock “Wild Things” out of the park, it certainly will be after people get a glimpse of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” the season’s other adaptation of a much-loved children’s book. “Cloudy” takes the basic premise of the book to insane extremes, like a Roland Emmerich movie with self-awareness and a finely tuned sense of humor. It’s not every day that we see an animated movie that features kittens singing a Public Enemy song, but man, what a wonderful world it would be if we did.

The story takes place in Swallow Falls – a word of caution to fans of the book: extreme liberties were taken with the source material – a small island town in the Atlantic Ocean. Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) is an enthusiastic but largely unsuccessful inventor, and has spent his life trying to come up with something that will make life better for the struggling town. (Their main export is sardines.) His latest idea involves turning water into food, but he doesn’t have enough power to complete the conversion, so he steals some juice from the power plant for his final test, and inadvertently shoots his food maker into the clouds, where it begins raining hamburgers on the town. Flint is suddenly the town’s golden child, but his desire to be liked gets the best of him as he pushes the machine past its capabilities and the machine begins fighting back, unleashing a fury of food storms on the town and, eventually, the world.

The filmmakers were very careful to make sure all departments stepped up, rather than coast on star power or gimmicky 3-D effects. The character design is rich and varied (three words: Flint’s father’s unibrow), the set pieces, especially in the movie’s “Armageddon”-ish climax, are beautiful, the casting was straight from Pixar’s playbook – getting the right voice is always more important than getting the famous voice – and some of the movie’s funniest moments come on the downbeat, a testament to good screenwriting. The 3-D work is subtle (no one playing with paddle balls, in other words), and serves to accentuate the story rather than distract the viewer from the absence of one. Lastly, there are the elaborate action sequences, the best of which is a twister scene where Flint takes a Buster Keaton-type trip from one object to another in mid-air. They’re thrilling to watch, and the filmmakers poke fun at disaster movie conventions while paying them loving tribute at the same time.

If there is one downside to “Cloudy,” it is the fact that we are reminded with nearly every second of running time that there are Serious Life Lessons for Flint to learn. And while children will benefit from these morals (the most important of which is that it’s better to do the right thing than it is to do the popular thing), the manufactured conflict gets in the way at times. But it’s a small price to pay for a movie with so much personality, especially when it goes to great lengths to comment on the fickle nature of celebrity and the desperate, pathetic things people will do in order to maintain it. For the first time in ages, someone has beaten Pixar at their own game.

It makes sense, in a ‘Hollywood out of ideas’ kind of way, that someone would come up with the bright idea to remake the beloved, but by no means classic, stop-motion-assisted action adventure “Clash of the Titans,” what with the light-year advancements that have been made in the field of special effects. However, not even the best effects can save a weak story, and this version of “Titans” doesn’t even have good effects. In fact, they’re pretty terrible. By the time the money shots of the Kraken arrive, it’s difficult to care about the gods or the humans. Indeed, this might be the most godless movie ever made. As if society weren’t self-centered enough, along comes a movie whose moral appears to be “Be your own god.” Swell.

The Greek army has declared war on the gods, tearing down all monuments built in their name and refusing to strengthen the gods with prayer. Hades (Ralph Fiennes), god of the underworld, is insulted by man’s insolence, but uses this conflict as leverage to get even with his brother Zeus (Liam Neeson) for making him god of the underworld in the first place. Hades threatens to unleash the horrific Kraken on the Greek city of Argos unless the king sacrifices his daughter Andromeda (Alexa Davolos). Man’s greatest chance of surviving is reluctant warrior Hades’ wrath is Perseus (Sam Worthington), the orphan child of a fisherman who just happens to be Zeus’ son. But to save Andromeda, he must travel to the underworld and conquer the one thing capable of stopping the Kraken: Medusa, the snake-like beast that turns men to stone with a single gaze.

If you must see this movie – and I cannot stress enough that you shouldn’t – then by all means opt for the 2D version. This is one of many movies set to be released in the next year that retrofitted their movie for 3D once the craze caught on. It looks poor, and arriving in the shadow of “Avatar,” it looks exceptionally poor. Save yourself some money, and go 2D.

Ideally, though, you’ll skip this entirely. The action sequences are incoherent, the expository dialogue is informative but pointless, and some of the CGI is flat-out awful. The anaconda in “Anaconda” looks better than Medusa does here. Don’t get us started on the accents, or the ham-fisted callback to the 1981 original. And God love them, they even threw in the Greek equivalent of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen.

Director Louis Teterrier impressed a lot of people with his debut, “Danny the Dog” (released as “Unleashed” here in the States), but while he has made much bigger movies since then, his artistic growth is not exactly increasing in proportion to his budgets. Indeed, “Clash of the Titans” doesn’t have much of a voice, but rather a work-by-committee feel to it. The sad truth of the matter, though, is that “Titans” and Teterrier deserve each other; he’s a second-tier director, and “Titans” is a second-tier property. Set your expectations accordingly

“City of Ember” feels like a live-action version the video game “Myst,” with George Orwell at the helm. It’s a series of riddles and hiding-in-plain-sight clues, covered in a suffocating layer of totalitarianism. Pretty heavy material for a movie aimed at ‘tweens, yes, but the “Harry Potter” movies have proven that the kids can handle heavy. Besides, the movie’s adults-never-listen-to-kids angle is catnip to a teenager.

The movie begins by explaining the origins of the Builders, who have created the underground city of Ember in order to preserve mankind after a natural disaster has made life on the surface uninhabitable, and given its citizens instructions to return above ground in 200 years’ time. The plans are contained in a time-locked case, handed down from mayor to mayor, though none of the mayors knows what’s in the box. One of the mayors dies before he hands off the case, however, and it is lost in what ultimately becomes the closet of 12-year-old mayoral descendant Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan). By this time, the 200-year window has long passed, the city’s supplies are dwindling and its hydro-electric generator is on the verge of breakdown. Lina teams up with her friend Doon (Harry Treadaway) to find a way to save the city of Ember, but the treacherous, and surprisingly well-fed Mayor Cole (Bill Murray) would prefer that the citizens of Ember remain in the dark, as it were.

If this doesn’t get accolades for its art direction, it would be a crime; the set pieces are both gorgeous (the overhead lights throughout the city) and a tad creepy (everything else), and as cliché as it sounds, the city is as integral a character to the story as any of the citizens that live in it. If only screenwriter Caroline Thompson had paid as much attention to the details in the story as director Gil Kenan (he directed the super-creepy “Monster House”) did to the set design, we’d have something truly special. Much time is spent on larger-than-life creatures that live in the Unknown Regions, and in the end it means…absolutely nothing. Maybe they’re saving it for the DVD.

Ronan is turning out to be quite the actress; she nails her American accent, and has one of those faces where you can see her looking through whatever problem she’s facing. Expect the “next Jodie Foster” talk to start any minute now. It’s hilarious, though, that they cast Harry Treadaway as her friend Doon. I last saw him playing Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris in “Control,” and a quick IMDb search confirms that he’s twice the age that he’s playing here. (Insert your own Gabrielle Carteris joke here.) Murray was a good choice for Mayor Cole, since Cole is more conniving than physically intimidating (though his gut will get more laughs than his words). Tim Robbins doesn’t get much to work with as Doon’s father, but Martin Landau is a hoot as the narcoleptic pipe worker Sul.

After years of wallowing in the lowest common denominator, children’s movies – live-action children’s movies, at least – are slowly but surely improving. Last year’s “The Seeker” and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” were not great, but they were a step in the right direction. This year, between “City of Ember” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” the bar is raised even higher. How refreshing to see standards going up for a change.

It seems laughably apologetic to give a studio credit for not royally screwing something up – hey now, that wasn’t completely awful! Well done, gents – but to be fair, there are a number of ways that the live action “Cinderella” could have gone horribly wrong. It could have been directed by one of those ‘that guy’ directors, rather than Kenneth Branagh, who made sure the movie had style and class, by jove. The script, by Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”), could have painted with a broad brush, rendering the wicked Tremaine women cardboard cutouts, and the prince a brain-dead trophy husband. “Cinderella” does none of these things, but more importantly, the movie reinforces the idea that kindness is always the better option, even when it’s not the easiest one. This may still be a fairy tale, but that is a great message for young girls and boys, and even better, the story is crafted in such a way that makes Cinderella not so much a lottery winner as a young woman making smart choices, honoring her family, and taking responsibility for her fate, by being kind. I can’t stress that last part enough.

Ella (Lily James) lives a simple but happy life with her loving, modest parents. Following the death of her mother (Hayley Atwell), though, Ella’s life takes a dreadful turn when her father (Ben Chaplin) marries the widow Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett), and must share the house with her and her awful daughters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drisella (Sophie McShera). The aspiring social climbers treat Ella like a servant when her father travels, and when Ella receives word that her father has fallen ill and died on his most recent trip, Ella – now dubbed Cinderella by the stepsisters when they see her with soot on her face (cinders on Ella, ha ha) – rides to the forest to escape her misery.

While in the forest, she happens upon a group of royalty hunting an elk, and she shames one of them, a handsome young man named Kit (Richard Madden) for doing so, unaware that Kit is a prince, and heir to the throne. The two do that period’s version of the Meet Cute (circling each other on horses, apparently) and are clearly attracted to each other – both mind and body – but Ella doesn’t tell Kit her name or anything about her, out of fear that he will be disappointed once he discovers that she’s a commoner. On the contrary, Kit is so smitten with Ella that he refuses the king’s (Derek Jacobi) insistence that he marry “up” (read: a princess in a larger empire) in order to grow their kingdom. Kit decides to throw a royal ball, and opens it to the public with the hope that Ella will attend. Ella plans to, but the Tremaine women see to it that she cannot. Good thing Ella has a fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) to save the day, especially considering that up to that moment, she didn’t know she had one.

The casting of this movie was genius, at times in unconventional ways. Blanchett has played villains before (“Hanna,” for one), but more often than not it is Carter playing the baddie, which is what makes her appearance here as the fairy godmother such a pleasant surprise. (It sure beats the hell out of her reprising her role as the Mad Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.”) Blanchett is more than capable of wringing every last drop of cruelty out of Lady Tremaine’s words – even if her daughters look like they were cast with Carter in mind as their mother – and she does just that. James, meanwhile, has a harder job here than it may seem; she has to play nice in the face of the boorish vanity of her stepfamily, and even when they’re at their most appalling, she keeps her cool. Ella is steadfast and hopeful, but shattered. James strikes the perfect balance between the two extremes.

And the dress she wears to the ball – wow. It’s ridiculously early, but I’m confident that this movie will win next year’s Academy Award for Best Costume Design for that dress alone. It is simply stunning.

The truly terrifying thing about Anastasia and Drisella is how relatable they are. There are millions of girls in the country right now who act just like them (delusional, fame-obsessed, overblown sense of self-importance, completely lacking in empathy), and indeed one wonders if Weitz wrote them that way to serve as a warning to young girls that they will run into Anastasia and Drisella several times in their lives, and that this is how to break them. Weitz also handled Ella’s relationship with the mice perfectly. They can’t talk – because that would be silly – but they can almost talk, and they clearly understand her. Some early exposition even explains how that’s possible.

The movie hangs around longer than it should – they introduce a sub-villain and a Sinister Plan just when the movie should be hitting the finish line – and there is a fair amount of death, which may upset some younger kids (like, say, my 7-year-old son). Still, for a movie with a bulls-eye on its back the size of Canada—it’s a live action (1) remake (2) of a Disney princess movie (3), making it the Holy Trinity of ‘Hollywood is out of ideas’ projects, and therefore subject to terabytes of snark – “Cinderella” practices what it preaches by having courage, being kind, and exceeding all expectations.

After taking his groundbreaking motion capture technology to insane extremes in 2007’s “Beowulf,” it made sense that Robert Zemeckis would up the ante in his retelling of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” However, to say that he upped the ante here would be a grand understatement. The effects work here is far beyond a tech wizard showing off; it’s more like watching Zemeckis lose his mind. He seems so obsessed with what he can do with the FX that he doesn’t stop to consider whether he should.

Jim Carrey, in one of several roles, is Ebenezer Scrooge, a penny-pinching miser who lives a joyless existence until one Christmas Eve, when he receives a visit from his deceased business partner Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman). Marley warns him that he will be visited by three spirits representing Christmases from the past, present and future. They give Scrooge some long-overdue perspective on his selfish ways, and scare the bejeezus out of him in the process.

There is nothing wrong with the movie being a little menacing, of course. It’s a cautionary tale designed to inspire the reader to be a better person, and death is one heck of a motivator. This movie should be a little scary. (Take the horses of the Ghost of Christmases to Come. Red eyes, yikes.) However, what Zemeckis does with the ghost of Jacob Marley isn’t just scary; it’s disturbing, and for no good reason. Indeed, there are a lot of for-no-good-reason moments here, including a downhill skiing bit that is completely out of place with the movie’s overall tone.

There is also the issue of the motion capture technology itself. It still looks a little odd, and when Zemeckis has his characters do something extraordinary (the dance sequence featuring Bob Hoskins’ Mr. Fezziwig and his wife, for example), it looks glitchy. Carrey is relatively subdued as Scrooge, but completely unhinged as the Ghost of Christmas Present, who looks a little like Carrey when he dressed as Jim Morrison for the MTV Movie Awards. Oldman and Colin Firth, who plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred, fare better, but they don’t get enough screen time to make much of a difference. This is Carrey and Zemeckis’ show, sometimes for better but ultimately for worse.

You can see what Zemeckis likes about motion capture technology; if only he knew when to stop. With “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol,” he got so drunk with the possibilities that he wound up putting the cart before the horse, and story took a back seat to visuals. No good will ever come of that, and this movie is no exception.

Little-known fact: Alfonso Cuarón is The Man. And chances are, no matter what kinds of movies you prefer, you’ve seen The Man’s work. When he’s not making a Mexican road movie (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”) or reinterpreting Dickens (1998’s “Great Expectations”), you might find him making a movie about some British boy wizard “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” this writer’s personal favorite in the series to date). Amazingly, Cuarón walked away from the “Potter” series after making just one movie, though you’ll forgive him for doing so once you’ve seen the dazzling “Children of Men,” a brutal futuristic tale of life, interrupted.

The story takes place in London in the year 2027. The human race has become infertile, and the resulting effect on society has led to worldwide chaos. England, if the media is to be believed, is the last nation standing thanks to its being an island, but they are now faced with an overwhelming immigration problem. The country is a police state, and refugee camps abound. Ironically, none of this means anything to former activist Theo (Clive Owen), until his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), who now works with one of the many underground immigrant movements, needs help in transporting a Jamaican girl named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitley) out of the country and to the group the Human Project, which may or may not exist (their headquarters is on a boat in the ocean), without drawing attention. Julian’s reason: Kee is pregnant, and Julian fears that the government will dispose of her rather than use her to look for a way to cure mankind.

This is a special kind of futuristic sci-fi, one that is both modern (the billboards on the buses are digital video, and new technology still flourishes) and decimated (the streets look like Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII), which stands in stark contrast to the slick but dreary backdrops in movies like “Blade Runner” and “V for Vendetta.” Cuarón seems to be at home in both worlds, and proves it with a couple of massive one-take shots that are nothing short of spellbinding (to say more would spoil the fun).

Perhaps the most shocking thing about “Children of Men” is how the story morphs from a “Vendetta”-style fable about oppressive government to a startlingly anti-political (and possibly pro-religious; I haven’t read P.D. James’ book, so I’m not exactly sure) parable about loving thy neighbor. The subject matter may be bleak, but it is not without hope, which is rather timely given the book debuted 14 years ago. But perhaps these are just the words of a man who laughed at Michael Caine playing an aging drug dealer (“Can you taste the strawberry?”) who’s listening to either “Ruby Tuesday” or raucous hip-hop. While we’re on the subject, monster propers go to the supervisor of the soundtrack, which features King Crimson, Jarvis Cocker, Deep Purple and, God help me for missing this one during the movie, Junior Parker covering the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

My Best of 2006 list would look a hell of a lot different had I seen “Children of Men” before now (now being January 3, 2007). The movie was meticulously shot and, while not as emotionally engrossing as I would have liked, it is still wildly compelling. Perhaps most importantly, it raises the stakes for all concerned, including the Spielbergs of the world, in terms of what a drama, a sci-fi flick, and a period piece can and should be. Like I said, Alfonso Cuarón is The Man.

If there was a spectrum of animated films, where the witty, high brow Pixar movies were on one end and the broad, stunt-casted DreamWorks Animation films were on the other, “Chicken Little” would fall dead in the center. It has a fresh visual style and keeps the bodily function jokes to a minimum (like Pixar), but they also stuffed the movie to the gills with pop song after pop song (a la “Shrek”), as well as recruiting voice talent from “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, and even a couple of Pixar veterans. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is an awful lot of fun, and an encouraging first CGI step for a studio that’s been eating cartoon dust of late.

Zach Braff voices the title character (which technically makes him Rooster Little, but we digress), an extremely resourceful young chicken who sends the town into a panic when he rings the bell in the school tower and tells everyone the sky is falling. When he is unable to find the piece of the sky that he saw fall, his father Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall) is naturally mortified, and tries to tell Chicken Little to lay low for a while. Chicken tries to abide by his father’s wishes, and even joins the baseball team (Buck was a star player in his day). But just when it seems that things are okay between father and son, another piece of the sky falls (on Chicken’s head, no less), and Chicken Little soon discovers something far more sinister is afoot. The problem is that aside from best buds Abby Mallard, a.k.a. Ugly Duckling (Joan Cusack) and Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), no one believes him, including his father. In traditional Disney fashion, Chicken Little’s mother, who surely would believe her only son, is dead.

Their choice of subject matter, as old as it may be, is a wise one from an animation standpoint, because it allowed them to fill the supporting cast with every animal you can think of, led by female bully Foxy Loxy (Amy Sedaris). This gives the movie a truly unique feel, even though the town that these animals call home looks like any other human city (except for the cars, which have a boxy, Warner Brothers feel to them). The alien chase sequences (don’t ask; the less you know, the better) are pretty thrilling for G-rated fare; kids under 5 will probably be a little spooked by them, but it’s resolved in a pretty friendly way. The dialogue isn’t going to put Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino out of a job – in fact, the number of people who received story and dialogue credits is in the double digits – but at least the humor isn’t loaded with sexual innuendo. There are other ways to keep the adults interested, and the writers here, thankfully, knew that (ahem, DreamWorks).

But what on earth possessed them to stuff this movie with so many pop songs? Sure, music is one of Runt’s defining characteristics (one long stretch of his dialogue is the entire chorus to a Carole King song), but is the scene that’s scored by REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” actually better off because of the song’s presence? Is the dodgeball scene (which is laugh-out-loud funny) improved by the inclusion of “Gonna Make You Sweat”? It should also be written in stone that the only good use of a Spice Girls song is an ironic one, like when the bad guys in “Small Soldiers” used “Wannabe” to torture the protagonists.

In the end, though, Disney gets the right things right. The movie is alternately funny, exciting, and sweet, and the cast, while somewhat overexposed in the world of animation (Wallace Shawn, Harry Shearer, Adam freaking West), is well chosen just the same. Sure, they made some very calculated moves to ensure that the movie would appeal to as many people as possible, but for the most part their decisions were good ones. One can only hope that they attack their next project with a little more confidence, instead of second guessing what would make a successful animated movie. Come on, guys, you’re Disney. Don’t you remember how to do this?