A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Madagascar

Date Viewed: 5/31/05

Details:

Voice talent: Ben Stiller (Alex the Lion)

Chris Rock (Marty the Zebra)

David Schwimmer (Melman the Giraffe)

Jada Pinkett Smith (Gloria the Hippo)

Sacha Baron Cohen (King Julian the Lemur)

Cedric the Entertainer (Maurice the Lemur)

Tom McGrath (Skipper the Penguin)

Written & directed by: Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath

Score: 1/2

The Review: The penguins are psychotic.

A manic animated romp with several erstwhile denizens of the Central Park zoo -- a zebra (Rock), lion (Stiller), hippo (Smith), hypochondriac giraffe (Schwimmer) and those crazed penguins (McGrath et al.). They're comfortably lodged in the zoo until the zebra decides to visit the wilds of Connecticut (don't ask), and things go downhill (or at least down-latitude) from there. There's enough physical comedy for the young'uns, and more than enough not-so-subtle in-jokes, musical themes and amusements for the adults -- snippets from the Twilight Zone, Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance," a Busby Berkeley musical parody, Chariots of Fire (Vangelis), haunting tunes from the 60's and National Geographic specials, and others I'm sure I missed.

The Dreamworks animation quality was reasonable, but it fell (literally) flat in a few places, where all of a sudden (and for no obvious reason) the illusion of dimensionality totally failed.

Surprisingly, the (not terribly interesting) score is from Hans Zimmer, who gave us Gladiator.

(18-Jun-05)

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