Penguins: they’re slick, get the work done, and keep the audience mesmerized with their furry, cute looks. “Cute and cuddly boys, cute and cuddly.” If you ever wondered about the origin of this line or the penguin squad, the answer to your prayers is “Penguins of Madagascar.”

If you are familiar with the “Madagascar” movies, you can guess that the central arch of a penguins movie has to be completing a mission. So what mission could be unique enough to make for a movie plot? It must be big, be emotional, involve an evil villain, reflect upon penguins’ past, and be funny. “Penguins of Madagascar” is all that and more.

While on a mission to break into one of the most secure places in the U.S., the penguins meet their first nemesis: evil genius Dr. Octavius Brine, voiced by John Malkovich, who plans to terrorize the world with a newly developed serum. Their first battle with Brine sets the stage for introducing a covert operations team called the North Wind. Later, after bad luck for the penguins and North Wind, one of the penguins becomes a captive. The captive is none other than the cute, cuddly and amenable penguin, Private. With things getting personal, it’s up to the penguins to stop Brine and save Private. The story thus revolves around Private, the baby of the team. With Skipper as the leader, Kowalski as the brain, and Rico as the handyman, Private finds himself in an never-ending battle to find his calling and showing the world that he is more than just “cute and cuddly”.

There is no doubt that “Penguins of Madagascar” is here to make you laugh. It might not make you laugh so hard that your stomach hurts, but rather it offers giggles and chuckles throughout. The kids will love it. Adults, just keep an eye for Short Fuse, an arctic seal voiced by Ken Jeong, with dialogue like “...they have flippers, I have flippers. It’s flipping useless!” (Wait did they almost just use the f-word?). In addition to the laughs, you have a new team on the ground (North Wind) lead by Classified, an arctic wolf voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Egos clash when the poster-boy leader of North Wind is pitched against penguins leader, Skipper, as both teams try to prove their worth. It’s not just about the laughs and rivalry, though; the movie is likeable because it forges emotional connections, and nothing builds connection like an underdog (or an under-penguin).

With an array of fresh characters added to the “Madagascar”-verse as well as comedy, romance, rivalry and saving the world, “Penguins of Madagascar” makes for the right mix for your weekend at the multiplex. It may not be the best animated movie you’ve seen, but is sure worth checking out.

Grade: A-

If you want a movie to inspire you, go see “The Theory of Everything.” If you’re searching for one that gets under your skin and stays there, check out “Nightcrawler.” But if you’re desperate for a comedy fix, and “Dear White People” isn’t on offer, you could do worse than “Horrible Bosses 2.”

In this pumped-up sequel to the 2011 hit, Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) have sidestepped the problem of dealing with horrible bosses by becoming their own bosses and launching a product called the Shower Buddy. As the device becomes an overnight success, the trio finally seems poised to grasp fame and fortune – until they’re conned out of their business by slick investor Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz) and his sneering son (Chris Pine). Infuriated and facing financial run, the three devise a harebrained plot to kidnap the son and hold him for ransom. This being Nick, Kurt and Dale, absolutely nothing goes according to plan, and they end up in way over their heads.

So far, so familiar. Chief among the many complaints that could be lobbied at “Horrible Bosses 2” is that it never provides much justification for its own existence. The dynamic between the three leads remains essentially unchanged from last time around, and it takes some serious stretching on the writers’ parts to set up this sequel’s story. To much dismay, some of the same jokes are played out again with deservedly fewer laughs than they got the first time around.

Yet, once all the parts are successfully set into motion, there’s a certain amount of fun to be had with “Horrible Bosses 2.” Bateman, Sudeikis and Day share a fizzy, feel-good chemistry that carries the movie through its weakest plot points, and director Sean Anders (taking over from Seth Green) displays a visual elan that’s at once unexpected and refreshing.

The movie’s real secret weapon, though, is Pine, as the alternately crazed and charismatic Rex. Someone in Hollywood needs to pay attention and stop casting this guy as dashing, pretty-boy heroes – between this and “Stretch” (side note: go see “Stretch” right now), Pine has proven that he’s much better at playing deranged psychopaths.



As for the humor itself, “Horrible Bosses 2” is as scattershot as its predecessor if not more so. Some lines fall completely flat and others land right on target, but if you found the last film to be entertaining, “Horrible Bosses 2” is certainly good for a few big laughs (especially once Jennifer Aniston, again playing randy dentist Julia, shows up to steal the spotlight for a few scenes). Just be prepared to cringe in equal measure.

Most of “Horrible Bosses 2”’s momentum comes from its heightening of the ingredients that made the first film such a winning concoction. The raunch, the action, the absurd twists – all of it is kicked up a few notches, and the resulting off-the-charts energy works to the film’s benefit. Does that make “Horrible Bosses 2” a better film than its predecessor? Not at all, though there will be those who argue that. This sequel is messier, dumber and seldom delivers punchlines with as much potency.

Still, that “Horrible Bosses 2” isn’t a total train-wreck is a pleasant surprise. Yes, it’s vulgar, inane drivel; but it’s vulgar, inane drivel made by talented people who can spin narrative muck into undemanding entertainment blindfolded. Much of “Horrible Bosses 2,” unsteadily plotted though it is, coasts on the charms of its cast and polished direction. It’s just a pity that the writers never aimed to do more than just that.

Grade: B-

A lot has changed since the first “Horrible Bosses” hit theaters in 2011. Jason Bateman went back to resurrected cult comedy “Arrested Development” for a fourth season on Netflix and directed his first feature film, the terrific “Bad Words.” Meanwhile, Jason Sudeikis got married, had a son and appeared in “We’re the Millers,” one of his biggest movies to date. Charlie Day also had a son, returned to his popular sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and fought for the survival of the human race in sci-fi spectacle “Pacific Rim.”

So it’s fitting that in “Horrible Bosses 2,” the central trio, played by Bateman, Sudeikis and Day, has also experienced some pretty huge changes. After surviving their harebrained scheme to take out their respective horrible bosses, Nick (Bateman), Kurt (Sudeikis) and Dale (Day) have opted instead to become their own bosses. Banding together, the trio launched a business and hit it big with a product called the Shower Buddy. However, when a slick investor (Christoph Waltz) cons them out of their own business, Nick, Kurt and Dale decide to kidnap the investor’s adult son (Chris Pine) and hold him for ransom. Predictably, things get out of control pretty quickly.

“It was really fun for the three of us to get back together again,” said Day in a conference call with college journalists, “because we enjoy each other’s company and we had such a great time making the first one.”

Day admits, though, that “Horrible Bosses 2” may not be quite as much fun for their characters: “It’s a terrible thing for the three of these people to get back together again because they keep getting themselves into some serious shit,” he said with a laugh. The actor isn’t kidding. Even with all the craziness that was on display in the first film, this sequel ups the ante. It won’t, the actors all agreed, simply offer fans more of the same.

“You know, it would be pressure-packed if we were doing the same material. I don’t think that we can do that first film — I don’t think that we’d be able to repeat that performance in that film again,” Bateman said. “But this is all new material, and we haven’t seen it before. Basically, we get a nice, free shot at it.”

Bateman was also enthusiastic about the amount of screen-time that he, Sudeikis and Day share this time around. We have “every scene together,” he said. “Which is a crazy notion that I couldn’t have enjoyed more. But the first movie we spent the first thirty minutes in each of our own little movie with our own horrible boss and in this one it’s just right off the bat all three sitting next to each other on a couch.”

The actor also teased a bigger budget and the perks that come with this sequel. “We also got to do a little bit of green screen work [which is] more usually relegated to the big effects movies, so it was neat to be a part of that process,” Bateman said.

Day also described Pine’s character, who is with the main trio for much of the film, as a “fourth musketeer” of sorts.
“He brought a lot to it,” Day said.
“He brought a lot of hotness,” Sudeikis added.
“Someone had to do it,” Bateman followed.

The story isn’t the only thing different this time around. “That’s My Boy” director Sean Anders stepped in for previous director Seth Gordon, and “Horrible Bosses” scribes John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were joined by Anders and his co-writer John Morris.

Sudeikis called the experience of working with Anders and Morris “great,” adding that they “are two of the best script writers in Hollywood right now. At least I think so. They did a great job with the re-writing of ‘We’re the Millers’ so it was like having two other writers on set with us,” he said.

Visually, Anders did his own thing on the sequel. “There’s a whole chunk in the middle where it almost looks like a gosh darn Steven Soderbergh film that he had in his head,” Sudeikis said. “And then even the stuff of us starting the business, all the visual elements to it that feel like a Fincher movie, it’s like something right out of ‘Fight Club.’”

Adding an acclaimed actor like Waltz and bringing back Kevin Spacey improved the atmosphere on set, Bateman said.  “It was pretty cool. When you can, this is a big kind of silly commercial studio comedy, and when you can class it up with some Oscar winners, it’s a really nice balanced cocktail,” he said.

“Everyone loves a properly mixed cocktail... Don’t want anything too straight. It was really cool to work with all those people. Everyone really seemed to understand what we were making and that made for a good time,” Bateman said.
Co-stars like Keegan-Michael Key and Jonathan Banks also added to the stars’ anticipation for the sequel.

“It’s really flattering to make the first one and have it exist and then when you’re making the second one to have people say, ‘Oh yeah, I want to be a part of that,’” Sudeikis said. Sudeikis added that, “I’ve known Keegan forever, there’s a lot of Second City people in this movie and you love the fact that they want to come on board.”

Though this sequel and its predecessor have both found the stars grappling with truly despicable overseers, the actors couldn’t think of any horrible bosses they’ve personally experienced. “I started acting so young that I never really had a traditional boss but I’ve certainly worked for some prickly directors, movie stars, producers [and] studio heads. I have no horror stories that I can think of,” Bateman said. “But my knees are bent - I’m waiting for a real son-of-a-bitch to come my way. I’m prepped.”

The actor added that, to one little girl in particular, he himself may be a horrible boss. “I tossed my two-year-old into the car pretty quickly this morning. I think she’d probably tell you that I’m a real asshole, but we were late for school goddamnit,” he joked.

Will audiences respond to “Horrible Bosses 2” with as much enthusiasm as they did the first film? The jury’s still out, but Bateman certainly thinks so.  “I’m pretty good about being objective, and I really enjoyed the first one as a viewer,” the actor said. “I watched this one with that same perspective and I genuinely liked it even more than the first. So I’m actually feeling kind of bullish. If people see it the way I see it, they’re going to be very happy with this one. I’m feeling good.”

Added Day: “I expect people to be skeptical, and I hope that they’re pleasantly surprised.”

Typically, it’s a rare occurrence for a film adaptation to be better than the book it is based on. But director Francis Lawrence has managed to improve upon his source material, the wildly popular Hunger Games novels, twice now: first with Catching Fire, and now with the franchise’s penultimate installment. Here’s the thing, though; Catching Fire was a great movie based on a good book. Mockingjay is a good movie based on a… well, not-so-great book.

I’ll put the disclaimer out there now: my undying girl crush on Jennifer Lawrence might mean I’m just a little bit biased in saying that, once again, she is absolutely stunning as the series’ heroine, Katniss Everdeen. After having escaped the Hunger Games a second time, Katniss is tasked with becoming the face of the rebellion of the oppressed, impoverished Districts of Panem against the Capitol. With her friend and lover Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) held captive by President Snow in the Capitol, Katniss must lead the rebels under the guidance of District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and former head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his final role).

As Katniss, Lawrence believably portrays the traumatic stress of someone constantly forced to choose between killing or being killed, while living with the constant fear of those she loves being taken from her. The supporting cast is rounded out by Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks as Katniss’s mentors (who give the film some much-needed comic relief), Natalie Dormer (speaking of girl crushes…) as the director of the propaganda videos Katniss must star in, and Sam Claflin as one of Katniss’s fellow rebels and former Hunger Games victor. They’re all great, but other characters were a bit lacking: it seems like Katniss’s best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) only serves to further the cliche love triangle plotline involving him, Peeta and Katniss. And it still seems like Katniss lacks chemistry with her younger sister Prim (Willow Shields), even though their relationship is central to the entire story.

The film does an excellent job of portraying the desolation of the districts and contrasting it with the extravagance of the Capitol. The shots of District 13 are dark and feel claustrophobic, matching the desperation of the District’s citizens. But the movie falters with its pacing--the great performances and cinematography don’t quite make up for the lack of action. A lot of time is spent setting things up for the finale, and by the time things really start picking up, it’s cut to black and the credits are rolling. Of course, this has a lot to do with the nature of splitting one book into two movies- only the second one is going to have the exciting climax and ultimate conclusion. But the other issue is that Mockingjay just isn’t that great a book; it’s slow-moving and overlong. Considering that, at the very least Francis Lawrence was able to improve upon the source material: what few actions scenes the film has are compelling, mostly thanks to the leading lady.

Even though Mockingjay: Part 1 is probably the weakest entry in the series so far, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing (the first two films set the standard pretty darn high). This film takes the time necessary to set everything up for what should be a very satisfying conclusion.


Grade: B+

As I detailed in a previous entry of this series, my favorite anime film (and one of my top three films ever) is 5 Centimeters Per Second. It’s the only film I know that brings tears to my eyes every single time I watch it. Its creator, Makoto Shinkai, has an unnerving talent for creating heartbreakingly beautiful films. While 5 Centimeters is definitely my favorite, I am also a major fan of his first full-length film, The Place Promised in Our Early Days. While it deals with some of the same themes as 5 Centimeters, it possesses its own unique blend of romance and science fiction influences, which set the film apart from the crowd.

In 1974, Japan was split in two in “The Separation”: the southern islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu were occupied by the United States, while the northern island of Hokkaido (or Ezo, the old name that is used in the film) comes under the control of the Soviet Union. In the same year, The Soviet Union begins construction of a massive tower in the center of Ezo. The tower eventually reaches so tall that it can be seen from Tokyo, over 700 miles away.

Fast forward to the late 1990s, and our story begins with three friends living in the shadow of the Tower: Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri. Hiroki and Takuya, both child geniuses, have been working to build their own airplane from the wreckage of a crashed military drone. Their dream is to finish the plane so they can fly to the Tower, with which they have always been fascinated. After becoming friends with Sayuri, they agree to bring her along as well; however, she mysteriously disappears before they can finish the plane. Years pass and the two friends drift apart; Takuya becomes a researcher investigating parallel universes and gets involved with a terrorist group intent on reunifying Japan. As the specter of war looms across the country, events conspire to reunify him with Hiroki. Little do they know that all of the mysteries concerning the parallel universes and the Tower lead back to their lost friend, Sayuri.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days combines all of Makoto Shinkai’s trademarks. To start, the film is absolutely beautifully animated. As this was the first time Shinkai had a studio backing him, The Place Promised was the first time he was able to really cut loose with visuals; this is the film that really established his reputation for dazzling animation. It also includes magnificent music which always plays at just right the moment. Although piano music most frequently appears in Shinkai’s works, this time violin takes center stage.

Like all of Shinkai’s works, The Place Promised in Our Early Days is partly a love story; however, for his feature film debut he decided to combine the romance elements with science fiction themes. The idea of parallel universes plays a major role in the story, but the film does not focus at all on the actual science and physics. Rather, it looks at the concept from a philosophical and human perspective. In addition, the themes of love, dreams, and promises are all vital to the story, and they interweave with the alternate dimension ideas to create a highly personal and human science fiction story.

The fusion of science fiction, romance, exquisite music, and magnificent animation creates a film which is at once otherworldly and deeply personable. It manages to tackle big science fiction themes with a delicate touch, keeping its big ideas firmly grounded in believable and compelling characters. Finally, it is a joy to both watch and listen to, thanks to CoMix Wave’s amazing visual and audio work. While his subsequent film 5 Centimeters Per Second surpassed it, The Place Promised in Our Early Days is one of the best anime films of the previous decade. Once again, it is a showpiece of Makoto Shinkai’s mastery of filmmaking.

I highly value and respect the creative process required to create nuanced, multi-dimensional, realistic characters as well as determine how they navigate a fictional situation; however, films conveying real stories about real people consistently connect with me more than purely fictional accounts. This may seem counterintuitive, but my respect for creativity still accounts for the fact that fictional characters are much more forgiving than real people. Those who lived the stories worth being told on film have personality nuances and character traits that cannot be altered at the whim of the author or actor, making their portrayal much less about creating a character in a screenwriter’s head and much more about researching and understanding an authentic subject. I say all that to say that I knew A Theory of Everything was going to be more meaningful to me than any fictional account of an ailing but brilliant astrophysicist; however, I wasn’t prepared to both covet and furrow my brow at the film’s connection to a real background story.

The year is 1963, and Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a brilliant but quite awkward cosmology student at the University of Cambridge. Determined to find a “simple, eloquent explanation” for the universe, he charms and becomes enamored with an arts major and fellow Cambridge student named Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). The 21-year-old’s always-present clumsiness worsens over a few months until it finally leads to a fall in the middle of his university quad; he is hospitalized and soon diagnosed with motor neuron disease. He is told the disease will not deteriorate his brain, but will leave him with limited speech and movement before taking his life within two years. Undaunted, Jane insists that they can fight the disease together. The couple soon weds and begins a family, despite Stephen’s continued physical decline. Stephen goes on to finish his doctorate, detailing his initial theory on the creation of the universe and continuing on to study the concept of time.

Let me be totally upfront about this: I am a fan of the original Dumb and Dumber. It’s slapstick and gross-out humor at its best, and Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels have fantastic chemistry together. Now, 20 years later, there’s a sequel… for some reason. (I want to know whose genius idea it was to put this movie into production. “Hey, I know what the people want! A sequel to a decent comedy from two decades ago!” Really, who asked for this? WHO ASKED FOR THIS?! Ugh. Anyway.)

The one redeeming quality about this movie is seeing Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey inhabiting these old characters again. It really is nice to see Lloyd and Harry back to their old shenanigans, even if they’re a bit worse for wear. The two just work so well together and are so good at physical slapstick comedy. They clearly had a ball filming it, and at the very least the scenes where it’s just the two of them are entertaining to watch.

There’s just one problem: it’s not funny.

Seriously. It’s just not funny. The original film is crass and rude and gross and disgusting in all the best ways. Dumb and Dumber To is crass and rude and gross and disgusting in all the worst ways. The one time I can remember laughing out loud was at a line said by a parrot. A parrot. And the jokes that do manage to be funny keep going for way too long to the point where they’re not funny anymore. And then there’s the plot. I don’t remember most of the plot from the original Dumb and Dumber, and that’s not a bad thing. You don’t watch Dumb and Dumber for the plot. But Dumb and Dumber To just feels like a rehashing of the original with jokes and supporting characters that aren’t funny.

 Is Dumb and Dumber To funny most of the time? No. Is it great seeing two hilarious characters back on the big screen again? Sure. Does that make the movie worth seeing? Probably not.

Grade: C-

Rosewater is the directorial debut of The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, and it’s an appropriate directorial debut at that. The story of Maziar Bahari, a real-life Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested and tortured by the Iranian government, has very direct ties to Stewart himself: Bahari was interviewed on The Daily Show while correspondent Jason Jones was in Iran, and that interview was used as evidence against Bahari during his incarceration. Spoiler alert for a real life event that happened five years ago: He returned to The Daily Show for an interview soon after he was released from prison. Bahari’s exceptional story—and Stewart’s own personal connection to him—turned into something of a passion project.

So how does Stewart do in the director’s chair? Admirably. The pace is brisk but never breakneck, and it’s well shot with a few especially memorable scenes. Interestingly, the first act falls halfway between a drama and a documentary in its presentation. It's a dramatic movie, fiction, that tells a real life story. Rather than recreating scenes of riots and the like, Stewart just uses actual archival footage of the actual events to set context. While some may consider it lazy to just reuse existing footage rather than going through the trouble of reconstructing those scenes, I think it adds to the realism of the whole thing. Yes, this really happened, and yes, events like this continue to happen. The film does tend to over-explain itself, however, and leaves very little to subtext. There’s more than one particularly egregious example of that tendency, with hashtags and tweets flying around the screen in one sequence and unnecessary bits of narration in others.

This shouldn’t be surprising given the director, but Rosewater is also very funny. Bahari’s torture is grueling, even without necessarily showing everything in graphic detail, and Stewart takes any opportunity he can to alleviate the psychological torture with brief spots of humor. And, Jon Stewart being Jon Stewart, those moments of humor are laugh-out-loud humor, so much so that Rosewater nearly turns into a black comedy in its third act. Gael García Bernal also turns in a fine performance as Bahari, a man who is cautious to engage in the political conflict in Iran both because he’s aware of the clear lines in the sand drawn by the regime and because he has a loving wife and a baby on the way.

Rosewater is a solid political drama. While it doesn’t innovate in any notable way or add anything new, it tells an important story and shows that Jon Stewart certainly has a knack for feature filmmaking.

Grade: B

Film at-a-glance:
Genre: Science Fiction
Creators: The Wachowskis, Andy Jones, Mahiro Maeda, Shinichirō Watanabe, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koeke, Koji Morimoto, Peter Chung
Studios: Studio 4°C, Madhouse, DNA, Square Pictures
Length: 8 short films, 101 minutes total
Year: 2003
Highlights: What The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions should have been.


When a studio commissions an anime series, most commonly its writers and artists adapt it from an already-existing manga work. Less frequently, they make an original series (which in turn often inspires manga of its own). Rarely, an anime work is adapted from a foreign franchise. One example of this is an anthology of short films called The Animatrix. It is based on The Matrix trilogy of films by the Wachowskis; created by a collection of studios, writers, and directors; takes place within and outside the Matrix; and shows stories and people the films never get a chance to. In my opinion, it is better than both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

The first film, Final Flight of the Osiris, details the crew of the ship Osiris as they race to warn Zion, the last bastion of humanity in the Machine-controlled world, of a threat that could wipe out the last trace of free humanity. The Second Renaissance takes the form of a historical archive in the Zion mainframe, telling the story of man’s creation of the Machines, their subsequent enslavement, and eventual revolt against their human masters. Kid’s Story shows how Kid (a character from The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions) came to free himself from the Matrix. Program is set in the training session of a rebel named Cis, who discovers that her sparring partner Duo wants to return to the Matrix. World Record is about an Olympic athlete named Dan, who runs so fast that he literally breaks the Matrix. Within the Matrix, a young girl named Yoko comes across a “haunted” house full of glitches in the system in Beyond. Our old friend Shinichirō Watanabe is at his genre-mashing ways again with A Detective Story, a black and white film noir-influenced piece about a private investigator named Ash who is hired to track down the elusive hacker Trinity. Finally, Matriculated is a bizarre psychedelic trip concerning the nature of free will from the perspective of a Machine.

What is so interesting about The Animatrix is the variety and contrast of each of the shorts. Final Flight of the Osiris is an action packed piece highly reminiscent of the original movie, complete with murderous machines, a race against time, and lots of slow-motion action. Beyond is a slice-of-life short about a girl living an ordinary life in the Matrix and how she reacts when presented with evidence that there is something wrong with her world. A Detective Story is both an homage to and a unique twist on old private eye films, depicting a world which looks like the cyberpunk tendencies of The Matrix series were transplanted to 1940s New York. The shorts are also visually highly distinct. Although this is expected when multiple studios, animators, and directors collaborate on the same work, the diversity of The Animatrix is simply remarkable. On the one hand, Beyond and The Second Renaissance use pretty normal anime art styles. Final Flight of the Osiris, by contrast, is fully CGI; it was made by Square Pictures, the now-defunct subsidiary of Square Enix responsible for the cut-scenes of their Final Fantasy games. Shinichirō Watanabe’s two shorts, Kid’s Story and A Detective Story, are both highly unusual; the former animated in a manner meant to evoke pencil sketches and the latter being black and white and extremely influenced by film noir. Matriculated was created by Korean animator Peter Chung, and looks like it was fueled by a lot of LSD. It is also very similar in both tone and bizarre visual style to his influential animated series Æon Flux.

But possibly the greatest thing about The Animatrix is how true it stays to the original film. I was personally very disappointed in both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions; the former because its focus on action above all else hurt the plot and character development (even if the action was really good), and the latter for being an anticlimactic ending to an epic series. The Animatrix possesses the ideal balance of plot, action, and visual appeal that both the second and third entries in the trilogy lack. It is exciting, but not overly focused on bloodshed. It is unique, but not pretentious. It is frequently ambiguous, but never totally incomprehensible. In short, the Wachowskis and all of their collaborators on this project achieved the balance they were unable to in Reloaded and Revolutions.

The Animatrix was what those movies should have been, but, in a way, almost better. Its nature as an anthology provides it with a diversity that any single film could never possess. The inclusion of many disparate talents in its production helped create something that could never exist otherwise. And considering that The Matrix was heavily inspired by anime (most specifically the cyberpunk film Ghost in the Shell), it is only fitting that it should receive an anime adaption. The Animatrix would go on to inspire several similar anthologies (which may be covered in the future by this series) and remains one of the foremost examples of an anime adaption of a Western franchise.

By the way, would you prefer the red pill or the blue pill?

“Every soul is on a journey.”

Awake: The Life of Yogananda delves deep into the world of yoga, Hinduism, and ultimate introspection. Directors Paola di Florio and Lisa Leeman tell the story of Yogananda, one of the most famous faces of yoga and meditation of the past century. 

Told through a healthy mixture of reenactments, interviews, and testimonials, Awake takes us through Yogananda’s life starting in utero. His younger years saw him develop an expanded consciousness which led him to make a life changing journey to the Western world, interacting with notable scientists and fellow meditators. Moving across the U.S., from Boston all the way to Hollywood, his teachings made waves in Los Angeles, feeding a hungry people yearning for truth and meaning.

His effect on those searching for deeper meaning was profound. Yogananda’s ideas on the power of yoga ultimately sparked a bigger conversation about divine connectivity, catapulting yoga into the twentieth century. Blending the worlds of meditation and science, he opened the door for the discussion of rechanneling energy in the human mind and body.

Narration is a rather important aspect of the film, as it contains narration from multiple off-screen sources; recordings of Yogananda’s voice, an impersonator, scholars, influential artists and thinkers all come together to thread the piece along – ranging from George Harrison to Deepak Chopra.

The visuals aren’t necessarily mind-blowing here, but that’s not really the point. Reenactments and image montages are di Florio and Leeman’s primary lifelines, which is understandable; most of Yogananda’s impactful years were in the early 1900s.

Awake is definitely one for the yogis, Hindus, and any human interested in finding deeper meaning. Though this reviewer isn’t necessarily one for meditation, yoga, or deep introspection, Yogananda’s teachings offer a wholesome approach to spirituality that certainly resonate with people across the globe, opening the doors of perception to modern times.

Grade: B