The Chipmunk Adventure

What type of film tries a weaker line than the animated children’s musical, targeting as usual to two really unequal age groups, both really easily bored? At least “The Chipmunk Adventure,” released in 1987, tires to interest both parents and children and does a really well job. Janet Maslin stated in her review, “For the parents, there are references to high finance, bored jet-setters and Pierre Cardin socks.” For the children, there are nice, colorful Chipmunks on an around-the-world tour. For everyone there is music, including a Chipmunk-style version of Wolly Bully and a nice, corny song to Mother.

“The Chipmunk Adventure” comes from Ross Bagdasarian, son of Ross Bagdasarian Sr., the Chipmunks’ original creator, and his wife, Janice Karman. It is animated in typical Saturday-morning cartoon style, so that the non-Chipmunk characters look lifeless and the backgrounds never move. However, if the way it looks is minor, it has other delights. Maslin noted, “The Chipmunks - the ringleader Alvin, the brainy Simon and the always-hungry little Theodore - are a lot less saccharine than the Care Bears, and they behave like real boys.” Their supporting cast in here, their first feature film, includes the Chipettes (all voiced by Janice Karman) and a really cute baby penguin (Frank Welker).

The Chipmunks (Ross Badgasarian, Jr. and Janice Karman) are left alone when Dave Seville, their human guardian (Badgasarian, Jr.), goes on a trip overseas. They soon are bribed by a pair of evil foreigners named Klaus (Anthony De Longis) and Claudia (Susan Tyrrell). The Chipmunks are fooled into going on an around-the-world balloon race, which is really part of Klaus and Claudia’s diamond-smuggling mission. To get the Chipmunks to do this, the stunning villains offer a $100,000 prize to the winner, and suggest that the boys compete against the girls. Maslin advised, “Parents may be surprised at the enthusiasm shown by both all-too-modern Chipmunk teams for that large cash prize.”

The balloon trip results in a lot of scenery, and children will undeniably enjoy animated versions of llamas, windmills, famous landmarks and everything else. There is also an enjoyable dance song with animated cobras, and a couple of honors to the late Badgasarian, Sr. He was the composer of some original songs as Witch Doctor and Come on a My House, and both are in this movie.

Out of all the Chipmunk movies, this one is probably the only good one. It suffers from a lack of focus, like the later live-action movies and the battle of the genders don’t really end with any sort of resolution. However, it does have the enjoyment of those who actually grew up with the Chipmunks cartoon and everything else. This one I think should be harmless for families. I don’t think it will hurt to check it out, even though it does have its own share of flaws.

Well, that ends “80s Cartoons Movie Month.” I hope everyone enjoyed all my reviews this month and…wait a minute, next month is October. You know what that means…Halloween Month!! Just a reminder, this year will be the first of shorter reviews that will not take up the entire month. I’m really excited this time around because I will be looking at a series of films that I have wanted to look at for a long time.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip

It’s been more than 50 years since Alvin and the Chipmunks and Dave Seville became adorable pop culture icons.

They’ve aged well.

The latest movie sequel, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip,” released in 2015, includes the singing trio and their loving but frustrated dad/manager Dave (Jason Lee still does an amazing job acting alongside the animated chipmunks) is cute and funny. With a handful of current references and dance numbers to new pop songs, not to mention slapstick laughs, it’s likable to both kids and adults.

“The Road Chip” is not “Frozen” or “Toy Story,” with major ambitions of being culture-changing or Oscar worthy or with big success songs and animation. It’s just a funny kids film – and that’s all.

The fourth film in what appeared to be a trilogy has Dave going to Miami to celebrate the release of a new CD from teen pop star Ashley (Bella Thorne) with his new girlfriend, Samantha (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). They decide to leave the chipmunks at home, along with her cruel son Miles (Josh Green) under the careless watch of, what Laura DeMarco describes, “Their vampy neighbor” (Jennifer Coolidge).

As you may have guessed, our protagonists do not like being let at home, so they start their cross-country “road chip.” Many comedic moments start as the chipmunks and Miles run to Miami in planes and cars to try to stop Dave and Samantha from getting engaged. DeMarco said, “Not too give too much away, but two of the funniest include 1) a bunch of squirrels in Chipmunks T-shirts; and 2) John Waters. Yes, "Pink Flamingos" John Waters.” In their travel, they raise the temper of a TSA agent, played by Buster Bluth from “Arrested Development,” Tony Hale, crash a Mardi Gras parade and start trouble in a country-western bar.

Do they stop Dave? Does it really matter? DeMarco mentioned, “Plot is secondary to easy laughs in "Road Chip," which has some potty humor but is less vulgar than many contemporary kids movies.”

The ending does teach an inevitable happy message, but it’s the travel that’s more than half the fun in this likable movie which was perfect for the kids winter break.

Now I know that I have mentioned this after every review of these movies, but I know that these are far from perfect. However, children will not mind them at all. They will love these movies because they will love to see three singing chipmunks putting on some song numbers and doing some funny stuff throughout the runtime of the movie. I don’t think they will be bored by them. Parents probably will, depending on who it is, because these movies are not meant for everybody. However, I still enjoyed them and thought they were practically harmless entertainment for everyone. There’s nothing in it that I would find atrocious about them. This one is the best of the franchise, since the pacing is done better and probably because there aren’t that many songs, but it depends on the viewer. This is the only Chipmunks film that I saw in the theaters and it was because my cousins wanted to see it.

Well, that ends “Alvin and the Chipmunks Month.” I hope that everyone enjoyed them and hopefully everyone thought nicely of these movies. Like I have mentioned before, I won’t recommend them, but I will say that the decision is up to you if you want to watch these movies. If you can get through the first movie just fine, then you can watch the sequels. If not, then don’t watch the sequels.

Check in next month, which will be a series of reviews that I am really looking forward to.

Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

If you are feeling annoyed about everything from the election to your job, don’t worry.

Alvin and his chipmunks team are back to have you not worry anymore – and make you laugh at silly moments.

Originally made for a 1958 Christmas novelty record by Ross Badgasarian Sr, the trio’s three movies have overall will be soon worth $1 billion globally.

How about that for another entry in some squeaks?

It’s the way of thinking which makes these movies innocuous and enjoyable as a guilty pleasures for children particularly.

The previous movies depended on older songs like Funky Town and I Want To Know What Love Is.

Now it has caught up with more pop hits including Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem, Katy Perry’s Firework and Flo Rida’s Club Can’t Handle Me featuring disk jockey David Guetta.

Graham Young stated in his review, “And they alone make the film more exciting than this year’s X Factor final.” In this entry, “Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked,” released in 2011, Alvin, Simon and Theodore are joined on an extravagant cruise liner by the Chipettes: Britney, Eleanor and Jeanette.

Looking after them is songwriter Dave, while their former manager Ian is put in a pelican suit as the ship’s entertainer.

Young stated, “The sweeping shots of the liner and the on-board fun would have done me for the whole movie.”

However, our protagonists are soon on a remote island where Young states, “Dante’s Peak is set to meet Cast Away, thanks to an active volcano putting in danger to a stranded DHL worker Zoe, played by the voice of the online character “Marcel the Shell with Shoes on,” the hot Jenny Slate.

Young admitted, “Chipwrecked is derivative and predictable and not for anyone who’d rather be watching Schindler’s List.”

However, this is good, clean old-fashioned family entertainment, innocently relaxing and a current vision into the shallow nonsense of modern celebrity. Children will love it.

Like I have stated before in the other reviews, I know that these movies aren’t technically good movies, but they are harmless movies for kids. Similar to how the Nostalgia Critic said about the “Care Bears” movies (which I have never seen), if you have children, they will be entertained by them. I actually enjoyed them through the eyes of the child. We rented this film from Netflix back when they would mail you DVDs for a certain period when the film was not streaming on their website, and I saw it and enjoyed it.

Now I thought that this movie was the last and they would leave it as a trilogy, but they recently came out with a fourth entry. That will be looked at next week in the finale of “Alvin & the Chipmunks Month.”

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” released in 2009, starts exactly where the first movie left off. The three CGI chipmunks – Alvin, Simon and Theodore – have started their singing careers after leaving their horrible manager Ian Hawke, and are going to have a concert in Paris. Their friend, who is also their “dad,” “keeper,” and “manager,” Dave Deville has an accident, has some bones broken, and is sent to a Paris hospital. (Stuff like this happens a lot with the Chipmunks. They normally leave a path of destruction wherever they go.)

The chipmunks fly home to Los Angeles and are in the care with Dave’s lazy brother, Toby, played by Zachary Levi, who sends our three friends off to West Eastman High School to start learning. Two problems arrive to the Chipmunks: their ex-manager Ian shows up again, who is a classic Hollywood hustler, and they have competition with a female chipmunk trio called the Chipettes, who have actually signed on with Ian.

The Chipettes, voiced by the hot Anna Faris, Christina Applegate (who you might remember as Kelly from the Fox sitcom “Married…with Children”) and SNL star Amy Poehler are the female versions of the Chipmunks and they become the boys love interests. However, before any hint of chipmunks love, there’s a chaos involving a lot of snack foods, a single fart joke, a football game, a battle at the zoo, a talent contest, and the school principal, Dr. Rubin, played by Wendie Malick, who despite her strict outer appearance is a huge fan of the Chipmunks.

Kelly Vance stated in her review, “Like the Three Stooges, McHale's Navy, and the Brides of Funkenstein, the Chipmunks are a true pop-cultural sleeper sensation.” Not even you or anyone you know likes the Chipmunks, and they have ninety million fans who remember the entire lyrics to Christmas Don’t Be Late and Alvin’s Harmonica and who’ll watch this movie with their children who love Alvin as well. Vance goes on to say, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel will undoubtedly sell more tickets than Brothers, Up in the Air, and A Single Man combined. Remind yourself that while watching the boys sing "You Really Got Me," "Stayin' Alive," and "We Are Family." They should have made Pirate Radio with the Chipmunks instead of live actors.”

This movie was directed by Betty Thomas, a former actress who went to directing ordinary crowd-pleasers like “The Brady Bunch Movie,” “Doctor Dolittle,” “28 Days,” and “I Spy.” Vance mentioned, “Sometime in the Eighties, she guest-starred on SCTV in an extended skit with John Candy called "South Sea Sinner," set in a dive called Cognac's Bottom of the Barrel Club. The club's host, a mock-sinister, white-suited fugitive named Cognac (Candy), books the all-time loser acts — washed-up showbiz refugees from the States: Paul Revere from Paul Revere and the Raiders featuring Mark Lindsey, Sandler and Young, etc. Moral of this story: Alvin and the Chipmunks will never join the Bottom of the Barrel Club.” Even though we have heard them for 51 years, they’re still just as popular as they were back then.

If you have seen the first movie and you didn’t like it, than chances are that you will not like this one, so don’t watch it. However, if you liked the first movie, I would say check this movie out. You might like it, but if you don’t, I completely understand. I won’t try and force you to like this movie because it’s not meant for everyone. I, on the other hand, did enjoy this movie and am glad I saw it. I think one of my cousin’s owned this movie, so he brought it over, but I didn’t get to see this with him. I rented it later from the library, but I don’t think it was a bad idea, but if someone didn’t like this film, I understand.

Check in next week when I look at the third in the series, which I actually thought was going to be the last movie.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Every week of this month I will be looking at a certain film series that is harmless for children, but I don’t see the point in them keep making, especially since it’s one of those franchises that is based on a cartoon from the 80s. Plus, there was an animated movie that was released in 1987, which I never saw, so I will skip that. This adaptation is titled “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” released in 2007, which is based on that cartoon, some fans are saying, but not quite: it centers around three chipmunks from the 1950s. MaryAnn Johanson said in her review, “It’s hardcore evidence of what should have been a pop culture novelty gone disturbingly mainstream. Isn’t that enough?”

The first in this series is a reboot story, as we movie addicts say: it stars from the beginning, acting out the story that all of us are completely familiar with like it’s innovative. We meet Alvin (Justin Long, who played Warren Cheswick on “Ed”), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler, who plays Dr. Spencer Reid on “Criminal Minds”) and Theodore (singer Jesse McCartney, who played JR Chandler in “All My Children”), child chipmunks who are orphans because their parents are hippies, and they are using Charles Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” saying in order to make it on their own in the woods – they have not met up with Dave Seville yet, who will strangely decide to raise this trip as his adopted children and make them work singing to make a living, almost literally. Johanson stated, “It’s pretty indescribably adorable, actually, as the boys — CGI in a live-action world, “CGI” being a fancy 21st-century way of saying “cartoon” — croon that “You Had a Bad Day” song in their rodential falsetto while stashing nuts in their tree home for the incipient winter.” For a movie with large potential for scaring kids over the age of three and making you run from your TV screen, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” starts off on a strongly not bad start. The chipmunks try to make you happy with song which is surprisingly upbeat.

The movie sticks to that, for the most part, which is a huge surprise. The trio’s tree is chopped to become the lobby Christmas decoration for a Los Angeles office building, and through troubles very complicated to go into but that work out believably well (as movies about singing chipmunks are told), the three end up under the roof of aspiring songwriter Dave Deville, who writes good-humored music with low-spirited lyrics that no one wants to listen to. Kevin Smith company player Jason Lee makes the entire attempt work because he believes in the chipmunks. Johanson mentioned that, “Lee’s primary costars — who never showed up on the set and only became anything approaching “real” via computer wizardry in the postproduction stage — gave him nothing to work with, but that doesn’t faze him.” He accepts the chipmunks as real, and we do as well.

The little denial they see as emotional, intelligent creatures that just happen to be chipmunks is, in fact, park of what makes this movie work so well. Dave connects their childlike excitement and musical talents to write a song for them… that Christmas Don’t Be Late song we all know verbatim (just act like it’s new). Then they’re off as the most popular singers, and lucky enough to have Dave as their manager in the urban jungle of Los Angeles – he looks out for them in this cruel world of corporate music they find themselves up to their little shoulders in. David Cross is a magnificent disturbance as the sycophantic record-label executive, who becomes the antagonist in this picture – Cross, too, believes in the chipmunks, if in a somewhat more unkind way.

Johanson admits, “Still, satire on packaged pop culture takes a back seat to family melo-comedy, as Lee learns to love the little monsters as his own flesh and fur.” That’s strange, but just seeing Theodore snuggled into Dave’s neck to sleep, getting comfort because he had a nightmare, is cuteness to the max. The boys turn out to be less helpful to Dave than he is to them: their efforts to get him back together with his ex-girlfriend, played by Cameron Richardson, are very unsuccessful, both inside the story and outside. We could have been better without the romantic side-story, in fact, which feels exactly like the padding-out it is.

Still, by restricting itself to exactly one fart joke and exactly one defecation joke, “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” how Johanson describes it, “is positively high-brow in today’s kiddie-flick environment. (Even the romantic stuff doesn’t get anywhere near the icky-squishy stuff some so-called children’s movies do these days.)” This could have been a whole lot worse.

I didn’t see this in theaters, but I did get a chance to see it over at my cousin’s house after he rented it from RedBox. I enjoyed it, so I could call this a guilty pleasure, since there are some good things about it. The choice is up to you if you want to check it out. If not, I completely understand, but if you do and you don’t like it, I get it. This isn’t a movie for everyone.

How does the first sequel do? Check in next week to find out in the next installment of “Alvin and the Chipmunks Month.”