Panda-monium

Dreamworks is not exactly the cartoon capital of the world, but when they get something right, there’s little to complain about. Kung Fu Panda fires on all cylinders, fueled by Jack Black’s spirited voicing of Po, a Chinese panda who works in his (adoptive) dad’s noodle shop, but dreams of becoming a kung fu master (he even has little action figures of the Furious Five dragon warriors on his shelf — talk about built-in merchandising opportunities!).

Yes, this has all the earmarks of a crass commercial sellout; but Kung Fu Panda split-kicks itself above the bar of most kiddie movies, and could even save the Hollywood summer from a string of disappointing flop-doodle. 

It’s impossible not to like Po, as he struggles up the thousand steps to the kung fu hall of Master Oogway  — an aged turtle who inadvertently picks Po over the Furious Five to defeat the dangerous leopard Tai Lung who’s escaped prison. Tai Lung trained under Master Shifu (an exasperated Dustin Hoffman), and now Shifu must train a tubby, motormouthed panda who eats when’s upset. This does not go over well with the Furious Five (Angelina Jolie as Tigress; David Cross as Crane; Jackie Chan as Monkey; Lucy Lui as Viper; Seth Rogen as Mantis) who understand that discipline and training are much more effective than simply spazzing out with kung-fu chopping motions.

It is a lesson that Po eventually learns well, which is not exactly a spoiler, because this is the plot of every single kung fu movie ever made (more or less). Training sequences between Po and Shifu culminate in a brilliant mountaintop dash — with chopsticks — for the final dumpling. The final showdown between Po and Tai Lung is also a gas.

We saw Kung Fu Panda courtesy of Robinsons Movie World, with our five-year-old daughter in tow, and though the lighting and fight scenes are effectively scary and brutal at some points, it won’t induce nightmares, or fake karate chops, at least among little girls.

Black is in School of Rock mode, which is to say the sensibility of his Po (and the pop-cultural references) are aimed squarely at a young audience, not wink-winking slyly at the parents like most cartoons do nowadays. This air of innocence serves the character and story well.

Only complaints are that Jolie, Lui, Rogen and Cross are largely wasted in supporting roles, adding little to the story line. That’s because, as in most kung fu epics (and the TV series starring David Carradine), the focus is on master and pupil. There are nods to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (in the bending bamboo trees) and Bruce Lee movies (in the trademark Dreamworks slo-mo action shots wherein faces stretch and contort like pizza dough) and it’s a nice touch that the only animals living in the Valley of Peace come straight from a Chinese New Year calendar. You could say Hollywood is offering a gracious bow to China, but it’s more China’s export — kung fu movies — that is being served up with a touch of deference.

Jack Black is actually in two movies paying homage to Chinese martial arts movies this summer. The other is Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind,       in which he plays Jerry, a homeless guy who hangs out in Passaic, New Jersey’s last surviving video tape rental store, killing time with the owner’s assistant, Mike (Mos Def). Nobody rents tapes in the age of DVDs, so business is slow. Anyway, Jerry somehow gets magnetized and manages to erase the store’s stock while storeowner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is away on a business trip. Unable to find another video store in town to replace their supplies, Jerry and Mike scramble to re-shoot on video every movie title their customers request. Jerry garbs himself in assorted car parts and becomes Robo-Cop, the crude video camera running while toy guns throw sparks at him; it’s exactly the kind of low-budge playground production that kids would stage, pretending to be this movie character or that.

What makes Be Kind Rewind watchable is the inspired homegrown versions of Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Carrie, Lion King and, yes, Rush Hour 2, among others. Black and Def do a killer homage to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, dangling from a slim reed of “bamboo” (actually an unyielding stick) when Black’s Chan character says, “Don’t worry… Chinese bamboo… very strong!” The “bamboo” is supposed to snap, of course, but Black struggles to make the sturdy prop comply with the shot. Funny.

Gondry is not so much in love with classic (and not-so-classic) movies as he is enchanted by the idea of our memories of those movies. Black and Def’s home movies become a surprise hit with local customers, and they are encouraged to abandon the actual plots of the source movies and simply improvise amid the most amateurish special effects and sets yet devised by Gondry.

Gondry’s love of cardboard props is well-known from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. As in those films, logic is not exactly a guiding principle. Jerry and Mike even come up with an excuse for why their videos take so long to rent (customers leave their request, and the cast and crew shoot the flick the next morning, releasing it to the shelves by 4 p.m.): the videos must go through a special process to get “Sweded.” (“Sweded? That’s not a verb, it’s a country,” points out one customer.) Things proceed in typical Gondry fashion, which is to say much smarter than the stumblebum antics might suggest. When asked for The Lion King, Jerry and Mike simply move around two crayon-drawn puppets on flat paper in front of the lens — voilà! There’s a hilarious cameo by Ghostbusters gal Sigourney Weaver as a Hollywood exec with a court order to destroy the pile of Sweded videotapes on the street with a bulldozer (hello, Manila!).

Gondry’s message seems to be that handmade is better. An additional thesis is that if we make our own movies, with our own ideas, it can’t be labeled piracy. Even a “documentary” on Fats Waller gets the “Sweded” treatment, full of hyperbole and fake-B&W footage. Ironically, I saw Be Kind Rewind on pirate DVD, which I guess Gondry would either love or hate, depending on his sense of humor.