Black (James Spader), a humourless mogul whose all-in-one techno-gadget is sweeping the nation.
The wishing stone movie 2009 plus#
Shorts unfolds in a suburban community, Black Falls, where all the adults (including married couple Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann, plus germaphobic single dad William H. Home video replay value may well be strong, allowing children to freeze-frame their favorite silly segments.
Lacking the intriguing hook of that series, Shorts is more in line with Rodriguez’s other family film, 2005’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, and should pull in solid family audiences for a couple of weeks until school resumes. With his Spy Kids films, Rodriguez translated his indie cachet into commercial lucre (the trilogy grossed $465 million worldwide).
The wishing stone movie 2009 series#
Featuring a shuffled-up series of stories built around the havoc created by a magical wishing rock, Shorts connects best when taken as a live-action cartoon, an exercise in childlike wish fulfillment.Īlthough Shorts doesn’t have much narrative appeal for older viewers, neither does it attempt to pander to parents with coded jokes. Parents will, no doubt, be renting this electronic babysitter for a long time to come.A colourful, noisy, slapstick romp along the lines of his imaginative Spy Kids franchise, Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts robustly embodies an age-old principle familiar to most parents: that a certain slice of adolescent entertainment is primarily about an all-out assault on the senses. Rodriguez’s technical wizardry is less showy here than in his other recent outings, which helps Shorts connect with kids on a basic human level. (None of that Pixar kind of humor that appeals to kids on one level and adults on another for Rodriguez.) Vanier makes a stunning film debut as Toe’s nemesis, Helvetica Black, a Veruca Salt type of spoiled rich girl who stuffs Toe into garbage cans. The action never pauses long enough to become tiresome, though most of the film’s rude humor is directed squarely at young viewers’ sensibilities. The story structure is kiddie postmodern, as the film cuts forward and backward in chapters as events rewind or fast-forward as though controlled by a digital switch (hence the title Shorts). The story follows tweener Toe (Bennett), who finds a multicolored stone that can grant every wish – a wishing rock that creates havoc as it passes from hand to hand. The suburban setting of Black Falls is a company town where everyone’s family works for Black Box Industries, the makers of the ubiquitous gadgets that have an endless array of functions and shape-shifting abilities (something like Transformers). There are also some cultural gibes at our ever-growing dependence on impersonal technological gadgets featuring applications designed to master every aspect of life while dampening our native creativity and imagination. The moral lesson is no more complicated than “be careful what you wish for.” The story belongs completely to the kids, with the adult talent all capably doing their thing while letting the spotlight shine primarily on their young castmates. In Shorts, that includes a booger monster, crocodiles running upright, plastic-encased germophobes, and more. Filmmaking has turned into a family business for this father of five (from a family of 10 siblings), and that’s a good thing in his kid pics because Rodriguez really does seem to have a direct line into what makes the little rascals laugh and relate. A look through the cast and crew list will find several other members of the extended Rodriguez family peppered among its ranks. Here, son Rebel Rodriguez supplied many of the film’s ideas, as did son Racer for 2005’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D. (In Shorts, Rodriguez is listed as the film’s writer, director, co-producer, cinematographer, co-editor, and contributing music composer.) Additionally, the kid-oriented films are usually family outings. All are comedic action romps highlighted by their homegrown flavor of technological wizardry and Rodriguez’s near-total creative control. This time around it’s another family film for Rodriguez, whose filmmaking career at this point has two modes: kid pics and grisly adult fare.
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