Author Topic: The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn; USA Release Date December 23  (Read 42904 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8830386/The-Adventures-Of-Tintin-The-Secret-Of-The-Unicorn-review.html

The Adventures Of Tintin:
The Secret Of The Unicorn

Steven Spielberg's 3D adaptation of the Hergé classic
lacks a twinkle in the eye

By Robbie Collin
6:43PM BST 16 Oct 2011



Cert: PG, 106 min. Dir: Steven Spielberg; Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost


It’s testament to either the genius of Hergé or the limitations of computer graphics – or more probably both – that two dots of ink from a Belgian cartoonist’s pen can express more wit and artistry than £82 million of the best 3D special effects Hollywood can conjure.
 
The difference, you see, is in the eyes. And in this first of three planned Tintin films by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the eyes do not have it – ‘it’ being that vital, twinkling difference that separates a character worth caring about from a dummy in a Debenhams’ shop window.
 
The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn (actually a mishmash of Unicorn  and The Crab With The Golden Claws,  with dashes of Red Rackham’s Treasure  and other Hergé works thrown in) is a perfectly decent animated adventure, comparable to the better output of DreamWorks if perhaps not Pixar.
 
Using The Secret Of The Unicorn’ s hunt for three scrolls as its starting point, the film hares from the cobbled streets of ... well, wherever it is Tintin lives, to the fictional Moroccan port of Bagghar and back, via the high seas and the Sahara desert, without ever pausing for breath. Hot on the tail of the young reporter and his faithful (and very well-animated) dog Snowy, is Sakharine (Daniel Craig), whose role has been expanded here from model ship-collecting oddball to ruthless international crook.

While Tintin’s breakneck pace is totally at odds with the spellbinding logic of Hergé’s books and the irresistible bounce and flow of Spielberg’s own Indiana Jones movies, it often works in the film’s favour. A terrific motorbike chase through a Moroccan marketplace, presented in one impossible, continuous take, should impress the stuffiest 3D refuseniks and capture even the shortest attention spans. Likewise, an hallucinatory sequence that brings galleons crashing through the moonlit Saharan dunes is pure blockbusting spectacle.

But there’s a mechanistic quality to Spielberg’s craft that’s undoubtedly disappointing: a film directed by one such distinctive artist and based on the work of another shouldn’t feel like it could have been made by almost anyone.
 
The main personality-stifler is the film’s use of performance capture; the method by which the cast’s movements and expressions have been translated into computer-generated visuals. However much more successful the technique is here than it has been elsewhere, crucially it’s not successful enough: even if Jamie Bell wasn’t so monotonously earnest as Tintin, he’d still look about as conscious as a bollard with a quiff.
 
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost also disappoint as the inept sleuths Thomson and Thompson, but through no fault of their own: the soupy physicality of the CG world and Spielberg’s restive camerawork saps their slapstick of rhythm and impact. Only Andy Serkis, a performance capture veteran, convincingly breathes life into his character’s pixels, delivering a full-blooded and frequently hilarious turn as Tintin’s sozzled ally Captain Haddock.
 
The script, co-written by Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat and British filmmakers Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, is well-intentioned but misjudged, occasionally falling back on facile screenwriter-ese (“The bad news is we’ve only got one bullet!” “What’s the good news?” “We’ve got one bullet!”) and some very English here’s-one-for-the-dads innuendo. Both sit uneasily with the wry humanism and neat satire of the books: this is less an adaptation of Hergé’s writing than a kind of airless pastiche of it.
 
On its own terms, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn  is a success, although it’s debatable whether these are the terms on which every audience member will approach it. As a family-friendly adventure romp it ticks every box, but the unique appeal of the Tintin  books does not lie in seeing boxes being ticked.
 
Famously, Spielberg only discovered Hergé’s work when a French critic called the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders Of The Lost Ark,  an obvious homage to it. Even more famously, Hergé later said that Spielberg was the only director capable of successfully bringing it to the big screen. That probably remains true. But this film hasn’t done it.
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Offline Meryl

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Quote
even if Jamie Bell wasn’t so monotonously earnest as Tintin, he’d still look about as conscious as a bollard with a quiff.

Hunh  ???
Ich bin ein Brokie...

Offline southendmd

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Quote
even if Jamie Bell wasn’t so monotonously earnest as Tintin, he’d still look about as conscious as a bollard with a quiff.

Quote
Hunh  ???

I think it's an insult.   :laugh:


bollard


quiff

Offline Meryl

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Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Hunh  ???

Bollard: a wooden or metal post

Quiff: (Brit) a prominent forelock

So he's about as lively as a post with a curl on his forehead.

I'd consider that an insult, too.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Quiffs!





Tin Tin

Sir Alex Ferguson, CBE, Manager, Manchester United

Random Model

Suzy Menkes, OBE, head fashion reporter and Editor for the International Herald Tribune  since 1988

Janelle Monáe Robinson, singer

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


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and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Meryl

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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/the_adventures_of_tintin_spielbergs_weird_action_cartoon/

 
“The Adventures of Tintin”
Spielberg’s weird action cartoon
A exciting animated adventure tries to update the classic tale
of the Belgian boy reporter. Should Americans care?


By Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Dec 20, 2011 3:11 PM 21:51:25 EST





Frankly, the life and work of Belgian comics artist and writer Georges Remi, better known to the world as Hergé, is much more interesting than Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” an expensive, ambitious and relentless animated film that struggles to drag Hergé’s aesthetics and worldview into the 21st century. (It’s also, bizarrely, the first of two Spielberg films to open this Christmas, just before “War Horse.”) I’m not saying the movie isn’t worth seeing for Tintin fans, animation buffs and other interested parties; far from it. A collaboration between Spielberg and Peter Jackson (who serves as producer) with a reported $130 million budget, this first installment of a proposed Tintin trilogy breaks new ground in 3-D performance capture animation, in an effort to split the difference between live-action filmmaking and Hergé’s clean and colorful “ligne claire” cartooning. Although I personally still find the rubber-faced, pseudo-human figures produced by this technique unsettling, the work done by Spielberg and Jackson’s animation teams here is exquisite.

As you’d expect, Spielberg’s characterization is lively, with Jamie Bell voicing the intrepid, if almost personality-free boy reporter Tintin (who never actually seems to write anything) and Andy Serkis, aka The Man With No Face, as his alcoholic sidekick Captain Haddock. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are perfectly cast as the comic-relief duo of Thomson and Thompson, a pair of inept but indistinguishable bowler-hatted detectives. (Sadly, Prof. Cuthbert Calculus, along with his hearing impediment and his ludicrous inventions, do not appear in this chapter.) Some of the numerous action set-pieces are absolutely spectacular, such as a memorable chase through the streets of a Middle Eastern port city (pre-modern Dubai or Bahrain, perhaps) involving a motorcycle, a grenade launcher, a jeep, a rushing canal, a falcon, a tank, a moving hotel and a clothesline.

That scene, mind you, does not appear in any of the three Tintin graphic novels from the 1940s — “The Crab With the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” — from which screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish (along with uncredited collaborators, one suspects) have cobbled together this film’s story. Perhaps understandably, Spielberg has sought to translate the naïve, idealistic and distinctively European colonial-era worldview of Hergé’s hero into a more familiar idiom — pretty much that of Indiana Jones. How well that works for viewers around the world is very much an open question, but it’s certainly no accident that “The Adventures of Tintin” opened more than a month ago in Europe, and is only now reaching American theaters. Hergé’s books are enormous cultural landmarks both on the Continent and in Britain, but have never been more than a marginal, Europhile eccentricity in the United States. If the movie succeeds here, it’ll be in spite of its source material, not because of it.

Charles de Gaulle supposedly once said that Tintin was his only rival for supremacy in the French-speaking world, and the more you know about the history of those two, the funnier that is. There’s considerable debate over how to interpret the Tintin books in social and political terms, but let’s start with the fact that Hergé began as an illustrator for Belgian Boy Scout manuals and a right-wing Catholic magazine, and those origins are clearly encoded in the fearless boy reporter and his globetrotting adventures. If Hergé wasn’t quite a Nazi collaborator during the occupation of Belgium, he certainly wasn’t a resister either. All three of the books incorporated into Spielberg’s film were deliberately apolitical works originally published in a pro-German newspaper. Early Tintin books contain both grotesque racist stereotypes and disturbing anti-Semitic caricatures, which Hergé later disavowed and/or redrew. In the original version of “Tintin in the Congo,” we see our hero at the blackboard, delivering a lecture to a class of benighted natives: “My dear friends, today I’m going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!” (I’ve never read Hergé’s overtly propagandistic “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” in which the boy reporter discovers Lenin and Trotsky’s secret cave of stolen treasure, but that one turned out to be ahead of its time.)

What point am I making about Spielberg’s movie? I don’t know, maybe none, except that I think the original Tintin adventures, in all their Hardy Boys  Go to Fascist Europe sinister innocence, strongly resist contemporary translation. For good or ill, they remain defiantly themselves. Furthermore, as impressive as the Spielberg-Jackson motion-capture technology is, it’s only a vague approximation of the blinding color palette and richly detailed cartoon panels of Hergé, who pioneered the graphic novel before the term was invented and became a major influence on Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. (Warhol said he thought Hergé was as important as Walt Disney.)

“The Adventures of Tintin” takes us from an unnamed European capital — it isn’t quite Brussels and isn’t quite London — to rip-roaring shootouts on the high seas and a small-plane crash in the sands of the Arabian peninsula, as Tintin and Captain Haddock strive to beat a sinister collector named Sakharine (voiced by Daniel Craig) to a treasure hidden by Haddock’s 17th-century ancestor after his defeat of the legendary pirate Red Rackham. Taken on its own terms, the movie offers plenty of excitement — but the thing is, I’m not quite sure about those terms. Serkis gives a terrific performance, but do we really need a disturbing, quasi-naturalistic portrait of Haddock as a sweaty, red-faced loser battling a lifelong addiction? (In the books, his drinking is strictly played for laughs, “Thin Man” style, and I recognize that you can’t and shouldn’t get away with that today.)

I’m a lifelong fan of Hergé’s work (within certain obvious limits) and I’ve now seen the movie twice, the second time in the company of a seven-year-old who’s inherited my Tintin collection. We found it alternately thrilling, baffling and eventually exhausting; it’s as if Spielberg gets frustrated with his inability to capture Tintin’s true spirit, or worried that viewers are getting bored. He keeps ramping up the violence, speed and pace of the action sequences, which are plenty of fun at first but conclude with a chaotic dockland duel between Haddock and Sakharine, using giant cranes, which my son found terrifying and incomprehensible. (Again, it’s an invention not found in Hergé.) I recognize that “The Adventures of Tintin” is a labor of love, a work by two important filmmakers in tribute to a unique and peculiar artist. That doesn’t mean it was worth doing, in the end, or that it rises above the level of intriguing technical curiosity.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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At least in some pictures I've seen, I think Captain Haddock looks like Walter Matthau.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Uhhh--in the trailer, they call him Tintin, pronounced like 'tin can.'

 :-\ :-\ :-\ :-\ :-\


Thank  you! Whew!!

(Great little video, by the way!)



Arts
Tintin, Boy Reporter
Charles McGrath looks at Hergé‘s graphic novels.

By Gabe Johnson and Charles McGrath
Wednesday, December 21, 2011




http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/12/21/movies/100000001238011/tintin-boy-reporter.html
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"