Video review: "Finding Dory"

If “Finding Nemo” was groundbreaking filmmaking, then the long-gestating sequel “Finding Dory” is cinematic comfort food. It’s not really necessary, and it certainly doesn’t match its predecessor, but we get a warm feeling just from having it around.

Set some time after the last adventure, the star here is Dory, the forgetful blue tang voiced by Ellen DeGeneres. We find out more about her backstory, such as the fact her funny/annoying short-term memory loss is not the result of some injurious experience, but something she grew up with as a little fishy.

My friend Ed Johnson-Ott of NUVO Newsweekly, a wonderful film critic and even better human being, correctly noted that this revelation irrevocably alters how we feel about Dory as a special-needs person, likening it to his own family.

“Dory is presented as what she is: an individual trying to work around her limitations. She assumes that most of those around her will help when they can, and most of the time she is right,” he wrote. “Individuals like Dory remind us that we are a community and, especially when one of us is a little more vulnerable, we need to behave like one.”

Dory, suddenly instilled with flashes of long-ago memories of her parents, determines to go on a quest to find them. Nebbishy clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and son Nemo (Hayden Rolence) come along, too. They end up at the fictional Marine Life Institute, which first seems like a haven for injured sea life, but has a dark shadow just beneath the surface.

Many of the critters there display odd behavior as a result of their captivity. Some want to be free, but many others are complacent about their stable existence. One is Hank, a cranky octopus lovingly voiced by Ed O’Neill. He can change colors and mold his squishy body into all sorts of shapes, even operating human gizmos like a pro. He helps Dory and the gang, but only if they first scratch his back (so to speak).

A combination of slapstick antics and empathetic storytelling, “Finding Dory” will make us remember why we adored the original film so much, and fall a little bit more in love with Dory.

Bonus materials are extravagant, though you’ll have to buy the Blu-ray version for most of them. The DVD has only the short film “Piper” and a feature-length commentary track by director Andrew Stanton, co-director Angus MacLane and producer Lindsey Collins.

The Blu-ray adds nine deleted scenes and 10 making-of featurettes, touching on everything from creating Hank, the musical team, underwater explorations of real fish who inspired the onscreen ones, interviews with inhabitants of the Marine Life Institute, and more. Personal favorite: “Casual Carpool,” in which Stanton drives some of the key voice actors around.

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Review: "Storks"

“Storks” is a better concept than final product. It’s middle-of-the-road animation for kiddies with some humor thrown in for adults that doesn’t really click. I guess we should appreciate the effort, but whether they tried to include us or not, we’re not laughing.

The setup is that storks actually were in the baby delivering business until 18 years ago, when a colossal screw-up left them in the lurch and they had to take on a lost infant themselves, who’s grown up into an annoying teen who screws everything up. The boss stork, Hunter (voice of Kelsey Grammer), came up with the idea of transforming them into Cornerstore.com, an Amazon-like outlet for all kinds of consumer junk delivered door-to-door via free bird.

(Right now somewhere, Jeff Bezos is cursing his army of expensive drones.)

Hunter’s ready to move up the chain and hand the business off to Junior (Andy Samberg), a neurotic yet ambitious young climber. Except Nate (Anton Starkman), a lonely human kid who wants a baby brother to play with, sends a letter off to the storks requesting same. (“Please include ninja skills,” he underlines.) And Tulip (Katie Crown), the storks’ pet orphan, accidentally feeds it into their dormant giant gizmo that turns the letter molecules into the DNA of a new baby, or something. Out spits an adorable tyke with cotton candy-colored hair.

The metaphysics don’t make a lick of sense, but just go with it.

…except I can’t. Leaving aside the stationary-into-infant-humans thing, does this mean people weren’t having sex prior to the storks abandoning their trade? And now they’ve been making babies the old-fashioned way? If that’s the case, I’d think the headlines wouldn’t read “Storks back to making babies” but rather “Evil birds out to ruin your sex life!”

Anyway, Junior and Tulip embark on a trip to return the little girl to her rightful place, which involves journeying across sky, land and sea. (Junior conveniently busts his wing right before, thus removing the “Why not just take the eagles to Mordor?” argument a la the “Lord of the Rings” movies.)

Along the way they encounter a wolf pack that first wants to eat, then adopt the baby for themselves. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele voice the alpha dogs. The wolves have the curious, but genuinely hilarious, ability to link their bodies together to form a bridge, a boat and more stuff. There’s also a nasty little pigeon toadie (Stephen Kramer Glickman) looking to deep-six Junior’s favored status.

The movie keeps cutting away to Nate’s house, where he manages to pry his workaholic realtor parents (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell) away from their phone headsets long enough to get some overdue bonding in.

Nicholas Stoller, who wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Doug Sweetland, has a fondness for rapid-delivery dialogue that is reminiscent of classic screwball comedies. Except they overuse it to the extent it becomes just irritating. It’s almost like theyassumeverythingbecomesfunnierjustbecauseyousayitfast.

If there’s a point to the story, it’s that kids are great, and you should have kids, and hug them lots and spend time with them. I can think of better ways to accomplish that than taking them to “Storks.”

Anyway, that’s my review. Now here’s one from Joel Lloyd, age almost 6: “Omigaw I love this movie!! I liked the part where the machine made a million babies with rainbow hair. Can we get it on DVD for Christmas??”

Review: "Finding Dory"

Of course it doesn’t hold a candle to “Finding Nemo,” but that’s a pretty darn bright flame to be held up against. We’re talking “best animated film ever” territory here.

“Finding Dory” isn’t that, but it is an agreeable and welcome follow-up to the 2003 hit from Disney/Pixar. Even more than the first “Toy Story” flicks, “Nemo” showed us the boundless possibilities of computer-based animation, in terms of technical accomplishment but especially emotional engagement.

Ellen DeGeneres brought incredible empathy to her voice performance as Dory, a forgetful blue tang who befriends worrywart clownfish Marlin while searching for his fishnapped son, Nemo. A story about reaching out beyond our limits while learning to let go of fears -- and children’s apron strings -- “Nemo” took us on an emotional journey as real as the cross-ocean trek of our gilled companions.

Now it’s Dory’s turn to go on a trip of discovery. Struggling with short-term memory loss her entire life, so she forgets new experiences minute by minute, she suddenly has dim flashbacks of her parents, and sets out to find them -- with her orange-and-white pals in tow, it goes without saying.

Albert Brooks is, of course, back as the voice of nebbishy Marlin, who’s grown a lot in the year since the last story took place, though he’s still overly protective of Nemo. (Hayden Rolence takes over the role of the tyke since original actor Alexander Gould is a twentysomething now.)

This movie, again written and directed by Andrew Stanton, focuses less on the trip than the destination: the (fictional) Marine Life Institute on the California coast. A sort of sea-life utopia with a dark undertow, it’s a place where injured fish are snatched up from the ocean, rehabilitated and returned to the sea -- unless they’re needed for an aquarium in Cleveland, that is.

The human workers are rather blasé about how they treat the critters, and some of the fishies have acquired off-kilter personalities during their confinement, such as a lonely giant oyster who’ll talk your ears (if you have them) off. Sigourney Weaver provides the soothing voice of the tourist park’s narrator, lulling us into a false sense of benevolence.

Among the new characters is Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a nearsighted whale shark; Bailey (Ty Burrell), a beluga whale convinced his echolocation ability is on the fritz; and Fluke and Rudder (Idris Elba, Dominic West), a pair of lackadaisical sea lions, former residents of the marine institute who now serve as a sort of territorial Greek chorus.

Undoubtedly the film’s finest creation is Hank, a cantankerous octopus voiced by Ed O’Neill. A longtime captive of the marine center, Hank agrees to help Dory find her parents in return for a one-way ticket to a quiet life in a glass box. He can change his color and contort his slippery body to camouflage himself against virtually any object -- not to mention manipulate human tools with hilarious aplomb.

The movie’s a little too overly reliant on slapsticky action to carry the plot forward. I lost count of the number of times Dory & Co. jumped or were dunked from one body of water to another, from a sippy cup to child’s sand pail to a janitor’s mop bucket, without ill effects. You just have to roll with it.

(A former aquarium hobbyist, my brain kept screaming: “But those sudden changes in temperature, pH level and salinity would be deadly!”)

Despite the fact it’s nowhere near as accomplished as its predecessor, I wasn’t disappointed by “Finding Dory.” The second trip is rarely as exciting as the original excursion, but you can ride the current of warm feelings from the last time.

It felt nice to be back in good company, going on another adventure with the gang. Speaking of which: make sure to stay all the way through the credits.

Video review: "Morning Glory"

"Morning Glory" got pasted at the box office and stomped by critics, but I truly enjoyed it. It's sort of the inverse of "Network" and "Broadcast News," where the main character doesn't fret about how television journalism is being watered down by infotainment, but wants to turn the dial on Lite News up to 11.

Still, it has top-notch actors in roles they inhabit with clear enthusiasm, exchanging whip-smart banter at a breakneck pace, alternating sweet and sad moments with unhurried efficiency.

Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a young, irrepressible producer given the thankless -- and most think impossible -- task of turning around "Daybreak," the last-place network morning show. The studio is literally falling apart, the field reporters are all castoffs, and the creepy co-host welcomes Becky by asking to take photographs of her feet.

After the fetishist is given a quick heave, Becky manages to land legendary anchorman Mike Pomeroy as his replacement. Played with grizzled charm by Harrison Ford, Mike is so disenchanted by his fall from grace that he takes it out on Becky, his brittle co-host (an underused Diane Keaton) and everyone else in his path.

Mike wants the show to pursue hard news, while Becky is committed to making things friendlier and zanier. As they eventually draw closer, Mike also provides a cautionary tale on what letting work dominate your life does to personal relationships.

Like the show it chronicles, "Morning Glory" ain't Pulitzer material, but it is entertaining.

Video extras are a bit skimpy. There is a feature-length commentary track by director Roger Michell and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. But the rest of the goodies are restricted to a single deleted scene.
Features are the same for Blu-ray and DVD formats.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "Morning Glory"

"Morning Glory" is basically "Broadcast News" flipped on its head. Instead of valuing hard-edged journalism over TV showmanship, "Morning Glory" champions the fluff.

The set-up is that Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a hard-charging young executive producer brought in to turn around the moribund "Daybreak" morning show. She hires a downfallen Dan Rather-type anchorman, crustily played by Harrison Ford, to shake things up. They spend the rest of the movie battling over lightweight vs. substantive journalism.

As someone who started out covering politics and couldn't wait to jump to the features side of the newsroom, maybe I'm just a soft touch. But I found this movie delightful and often raucously funny, with sharp performances by McAdams and Ford.

McAdams draws a character as distinctive as Holly Hunter's Oscar-nominated turn in "Broadcast News," playing Becky as a borderline neurotic woman whose career consumes her whole life. After she's laid off from her job on "Good Morning, New Jersey," her mother unceremoniously dumps cold water on her dream of one day producing the "Today" show.

"At 8, it was adorable. At 18, it was inspiring. At 28, it's officially embarrassing. I just want it to stop before it becomes heartbreaking," she says.

But a harried network boss (Jeff Goldblum) gives her a shot at "Daybreak," figuring he's got nothing to lose. The show is perpetually in fourth place in the ratings, is stuck with a tiny budget and a shoddy studio where all the doorknobs fall off, and the on-air talent looks like the castoffs of every cheesy show that ever got cancelled.

Becky sends a signal by firing the creepy co-anchor (Ty Burrell) and encouraging veteran Colleen Peck to let loose a little during the cooking sessions and exotic animal segments. But she really lands her white whale when she convinces -- well, strong-arms, actually -- Mike Pomeroy into joining the show.

As Mike never fails to remind everyone, he's had one of the most storied careers in TV news: eight Peabody Awards, a Pulitzer and 16 Emmys. He only agrees to be on "Daybreak" so he can collect millions over the last two years of his contract, and oozes dripping condescension during his every interaction, on-air or off.

With his slicked-back hair and melodious grumble of a voice, Ford gives Mike some depth beneath the growl. Here's a man who's given his entire life over to his job, to the detriment of his personal relationships, and he's been rewarded by getting the boot.

When he watches his successor on the evening news, swilling pricey scotch from a tumbler, Mike glares at the screen and fumes, "That's my chair!" Ford shows us the man's bile.

Director Roger Michell ("Venus") keeps a delicate but firm hand on the film's tone, which combines generous helpings of funny and sad. The original screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna ("The Devil Wears Prada") is clever and zippy, though it apportions too much screen time to some things and not enough to others.

For example, I was disappointed that Diane Keaton has a much skimpier role than previews suggested. We only see Colleen's on-set diva act, and nothing more. There's one scene where she and Mike engage in some acid banter on the show, and we expect it to go somewhere, but it's quickly dropped.

Becky's romance with another producer (Patrick Wilson) similarly feels short-shrifted, trotted out just long enough to remind us what she's missing out on with her crazy work life.

Still, the strong far outweighs the weak in this spirited flick that, like its warring journalists, realizes that sweet and sour mix together quite nicely. See? You're reading a movie Web site right now, so obviously you enjoy a little fluff.

3.5 stars out of four