Pixar’s trippy ‘Good Dinosaur’ stumbles – Clooney, Depp, Efron movies among biggest Hollywood flops of 2015

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LOS ANGELES, Nov 27, (Agencies): “The Good Dinosaur” is Pixar’s most trippy and tripped-up film: a wayward tale, uncertain of its steps, about a Gumby-green young dinosaur lost in prehistoric forests that are rendered in lushly sensory detail and populated by bug-eyed animations.

Any animated movie worth its salt usually has something hallucinogenic about it. More often than not, Pixar has honored that tradition, whether in the day-glow head trips of “Inside Out” or the ooo-ing aliens of “Toy Story 2” who, trapped all their lives in a vending machine, worship “The Claw.”

But in “The Good Dinosaur,” director Peter Sohn and Pixar have, for the first time, wandered out into the wilderness. As if exhilarated by the open air, Sohn and his animators create such dazzling imagery of flowing water and mountainous landscapes that “The Good Dinosaur” might be most attractive to mushroom-eating hikers.

Swept far down a river, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), a timid Apatosaurus runt born to a family of farming dinosaurs, attempts to trek home with a young caveman companion Spot (Jack Bright). Their encounters in the wild are bizarre, like a kind of prehistoric “Alice in Wonderland.”

There’s a googly-eyed Styracosaurus with small animals living on his horns and a pack of Pterodactyl storm-chasers addicted to the “higher elevation” of a hurricane. There’s even a psychedelic sequence when Arlo and Spot accidentally eat some bad fruit: Fear and Loathing in the Mesozoic.

The screenplay, by Meg LeFauve from a story conceived by Bob Peterson (who was replaced as director by Sohn, a Pixar veteran making his feature debut), is actually set in a parallel time. In the movie’s opening moments, the asteroid meant to spell doom for the dinosaurs whizzes past the Earth.

It’s a concept that could have meant all kinds of interesting possibilities, but “The Good Dinosaur” makes surprisingly little use of most of them. Here, the dinosaurs have developed into a partly agrarian society (Arlo’s family harvests corn) and the first homo sapiens are pesky critters. As his name suggests, Spot is more like a dog than a human; he resembles a two-foot tall, tongue-wagging Zac Efron.

But he is also more adept in the woods than the fearful Arlo, and the film’s most tender moments are in the wordless bonding between the pair of orphans as they navigate their way through terrain that appears modeled on the Rockies, somewhere near the geysers of Yellowstone.

If the story is uneven, the scenery is consistently pristine. Surely the reason Pixar pushed forward with the long-delayed “The Good Dinosaur” was so that its outdoor animations for the film would see the light of day. Water — whether in pebbly shallows, luminously reflected on stone walls or welling up in the eyes of a homesick dinosaur — has never been more beautifully captured.

Exalted

And though a host of films from “127 Hours” to “Wild” have in recent years exalted life on the trail, no film will better spur nature-lovers to head for the hills.

But the best part of “The Good Dinosaur” may well be the short that precedes it: “Sanjay’s Super Team,” by Sanjay Patel. In it, a boy and father sit on opposite sides of a room, each crouched in solemn devotion to boxes before them: a TV blaring a superhero cartoon for the boy, a cabinet for Hindu meditation for the father. In a few tender minutes, the short bridges two worlds more sweetly than the dinosaur-human pairing to follow.

“The Good Dinosaur,” a Walt Disney Co. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for “peril, action and thematic elements.” Running time: 92 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

Driving into debuts from Gallic directors, and also acquiring with an eye on future VOD markets, Wide Management, the Paris-based sales-production-distribution house, has acquired world sales rights to “Pseudonym,” produced by France’s Diabolo Films and La Petite Reine, the Academy Award-winning producer of “The Artist.”

Paris-based Diabolo, run by Gilles Podesta, teamed with Thomas Langmann’s La Petite Reine, which won five Oscars for “The Artist,” including best picture, on toon musical “The Suicide Shop,” from Patrice Leconte (“Ridicule,” “The Hairdresser’s Husband”) that opened France’s Annecy Animation Festival in 2011. Destiny Distribution releases “Pseudonym” in France on March 9.

Also produced by Paris’ Lorette Productions, “Pseudonym” will be talked up to buyers by Wide’s Frederic Gentet at next week’s Ventana Sur where Wide will also screen one of its highest-profile titles, “2 Nights Till Morning,” which plays in Ventana Sur’s European Screenings.

A cautionary thriller for the Internet age, “Pseudonym” marks the first feature from French actor-turned-director Thierry Sebban.

Also written by Sebban, it turns on Alex, a divorced father and stressed executive whose blind date with a beautiful young stranger, who contacted him by Internet, soon spirals out of control. He suddenly becomes the victim of a manhunt. then abduction by a Internet predator whose violence, per Sebban, “is linked to extreme perversion and overwhelming power.”

Key cast introduces French theater actress Perrine Tourneux and stars Sebban, Simon Abkarian (“Casino Royale”) and Igor Skreblin, the last three seen together in long-running Canal Plus Original Series “Pigalle, La Nuit.”

“Pseudonym” won a Worldfest Huston 2015 Special Jury Award, an honorable mention, first feature film, at the 2015 European Independent Film Festival, and the Critics’ Award at the 2015 Fantasporto Oporto Festival.

According to Wide founder-president Loic Magneron, acquiring “Pseudonym” is “in line with our creating themed collections. This film falls perfectly into the European thriller genre. We can then later sell these themed collections to TV and VOD platforms around the world.”

“’Pseudonym’ is very suspenseful, sexy, original and modern, dealing with online dating. Wide aims to promote new French auteurs whose films have unique, interesting concepts,” added Wide’s Georgia Poivre.

Wide is now shopping a new director’s cut – shorter, better structured – of “North Angel,” Sophie Blondy’s second feature. It stars Denis Lavant (“Holy Motors”) and Iggy Pop in a tale of sexual jealousy and intrigue tensing a circus troupe attempting to turn a buck at a brooding location by the North Sea.

Wide’s slate also features the slightly absurdist, low-fi sci-fi “Cosmodrama” the second feature from France’s Philippe Fernandez (“A Faint Trembling of the Landscape”), which has seven French astronauts wake up on a spaceship and muse on the meaning of life, and “Cruel,” the feature debut of crime novelist and short-filmmaker Eric Cherriere. A film noir, according to Cherriere, “Cruel” plumbs the dark crevasses of the mind of a serial killer (and loving son).

Starring Canada’s Marie-Josee Croze, a Cannes 2003 best actress winner for Denys Arcand’s “Barbarian Invasions,” and a highlight in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “2 Nights Till Morning” is the English-language debut of Helsinki-based Mikko Kuparinen. Finland’s Mikko Nousiainen, seen in Renny Harlin’s “5 Days of War,” co-stars.

Winning best director at Montreal and receiving its market premiere at Toronto, it has Croze as a French architect on a business trip who meets Nousiainen’s D.J. in Vilnius, Lithuania. They end up spending the night together. But what they expected to be a casual encounter takes an unexpected turn when volcanic ash cloud grounds all flights out of Vilnius.

Also:

NEW YORK: George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Zac Efron may be among the brightest stars in Hollywood, but in 2015 they also appeared in some of its biggest movie flops.

All three joined Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn and Bill Murray in headlining what Forbes called Hollywood’s biggest turkeys of the year, based on the percentage of their budgets they earned back at the theater as of Nov 18.

Leading the pile was Murray’s critically panned October comedy “Rock the Kasbah,” which grossed $2.9 million on an estimated $15 million production, Forbes said.

Penn’s $40 million budget thriller “The Gunman” failed to bring in the crowds in March, collecting $10.7 million in box office receipts and coming in second.

Clooney couldn’t save futuristic summer offering “Tomorrowland.” Although the film grossed $209 million, Forbes noted that the production budget was estimated at $190 million, not including marketing costs. It was placed 14th on the list.

Despite an all-star line-up including Cooper and Emma Stone, Hawaii-based romantic comedy “Aloha” was among the year’s most- publicized misfires, with a $37 million return on an estimated $26.3 million production budget.

Efron’s electronic dance music movie “We Are Your Friends” was listed in 8th place and Depp’s quirky action caper “Mortdecai” was placed 10th.

Forbes compiled the list based on box office takings and estimated production budgets for films that were widely released in North America from January-October 2015.

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