An animated family film centering around a snail magically gifted with super-speed, Turbo is marked by a rather bewildering chasm between its area of chosen focus and other, more exciting possibilities its conceit suggests. Imagine a superhero movie where Peter Parker just took up high school sports, Superman the Olympic shot-put, or Hal Jordan metalworking and fabrication. In a nutshell that’s Turbo, an inoffensively affable but unmemorable offering that showcases a bit of wily imagination but quickly ducks back into its shell, opting for a safe, all-too-familiar athletic story of underdog triumph.
With The Croods ($578 million worldwide) and Epic ($236 million worldwide), distributor 20th Century Fox already has two animated hits this year that have rung up $100 million apiece in domestic receipts, and Turbo seems a sure bet to make it a third. The movie’s catchy, simple marketing campaign (“He’s fast, they’re furious”) sells its concept in canny fashion and attaches itself to another popular franchise to boot, further boosting its overseas commercial prospects. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 95 minutes)
Daily Archives: July 11, 2013
Gaby Hoffmann Talks Crystal Fairy, Pubic Wigs
She was a child star of some note, with roles in Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, This Is My Life, Now and Then and Sleepless in Seattle, as well as a TV series and small screen version of Freaky Friday. But the Hollywood rat race wasn’t for Gaby Hoffmann. She went to college, became a doula (a person who helps home-birthing women when they’re in labor) and otherwise indulged her intellectual curiosity (“I spent most of the last 10 years doing very little,” she jokes). This summer she’s back on screen, in the first of a quartet of indie films, playing the free-spirited title character opposite Michael Cera in Sebastián Silva’s Chilean travelogue Crystal Fairy, which opens wide in July after receiving a World Cinema Directing Award following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Recently, I spoke with Hoffmann one-on-one about the movie, the hallucinogenic effects of the San Pedro cactus and, ahem, pubic wigs. The conversation is excerpted over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the read.