There’s a nuttier, generally more diverting entertainment creeping, crawling and waddling along the edges of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa than the larger one lollygagging on screen. This central story of this new animated movie, written by Etan Cohen and the directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, involves Alex (Ben Stiller in low gear), a lion who in 2005 journeyed from New York captivity (ie, a zoo) to the jungle in the first Madagascar with the usual mix of celebrity-voiced racial and ethnic stereotypes: a motor-mouthed zebra, Marty (Chris Rock); a nice if woefully neurotic giraffe, Melman (David Schwimmer); and the token girl, a hippo with a sizeable caboose named Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith).
Three years later Alex and company are literally ejected from Madagascar in a rickety plane operated by a penguin crew that’s led by the supremely confident, quite possibly insane Skipper (McGrath), a sleek ball of feathers and fat who simultaneously brings to mind Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, John Wayne and a cue ball. Along with his two sidekicks, a couple of stooges called Kowalski and Private (Chris Miller and Christopher Knights), Skipper keeps first the plane and then — after crash-landing on an African savannah — the movie moving with his deadpan delivery and with some surrealistic nonsense involving a barrel of laughing monkeys. (I see a big future for Mason and his silent partner, Phil, the two-chimp team whose lah-di-dah manners and sartorial flair recall that of the 1970s television ape, Lancelot Link.)
With King Julien, a deranged lemur whose daft non sequiturs and bon mots are dropped and dribbled with dexterity and control by an unrecognizable Sacha Baron Cohen (at times sounding like a less frantic Robin Williams), the penguins and chimps could have skittered into something memorable. Alas, the filmmakers, who clearly are having as much fun visually with these scene stealers as they are aurally, stick by the contemporary American animation playbook: Alex has a dream (gotta dance), father issues (with Bernie Mac as the pride of the pride) and a requisite baddie rival (Alec Baldwin, who else?). There’s also an unfunny old lady with a Jackie Mason accent who deserves a violently cruel end, but this is a PG movie.
Darnell and McGrath don’t appear especially committed to these stale conceits and character dynamics, which may explain why they spend so much time playing with the penguins, chimps and King Julien, who may not roar but certainly rules. There’s true playfulness here whenever this wacky animal pack takes over, a suggestion of delirium echoed by the zippy, at times overly zooming camerawork with its roller-coaster dips and swoops. And while the filmmakers throw the camera around almost as much as Brian de Palma does, every so often they slow down, giving you a chance to scan the softly muted colors of the landscapes and explore how the exaggerated character designs create a nice visual contrast with the photorealistic details and flourishes.
It’s unsurprising that Alex’s mane registers as more realistic than any of his words or emotions, but it’s also a bummer. Escape 2 Africa is good enough in patches to make its distracting star turns, storybook cliches and stereotypes harder to take than they would be in a less enjoyable movie. Casting Stiller and Schwimmer may sear their brands onto under-age cerebral cortices but does nothing for the movie. And, really, did the hippo (voiced by will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas) who courts Gloria with a low rumble and a suggestive shimmy have to sound like Barry White rather than, say, Marc Anthony or Justin Timberlake? I laughed, but honestly, if this country can vote colorblind surely its movie studios can animate colorblind too. (Can’t they?)
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su