This ADD adventure for boys sports 13-year-old Sean (Josh Hutcherson), his geologist uncle Trevor (Brendan Fraser) and their hot Icelandic guide Hannah (Anita Briem) on an action ride. It’s an overnight roundtrip to and from the underworld where Trevor’s brother disappeared ten years ago. Visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig (“Men in Black” and “Pearl Harbor”) makes his feature debut with kid-friendly digital 3-D effects: a yo-yo, a tape measure, spit and dino-drool are among the images that leap out of the screen. The depth-free screenplay by Michael Weiss and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin adapts Jules Verne’s 1864 fantasy about a two-month trek by a German geologist, his nephew and their Icelandic guide Hans. Verne dropped the names of scientific worthies of his era, such as Blumenbach, Cuvier and Davy. Likewise, “At the Earth’s Core”—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 tale about a ten-year adventure in a land where a reptilian master race used a “sixth-sense fourth-dimensional language”—lists such beasts as labyrinthodon, plesiosaur and ramphorhynchus. But this film’s dumbed-down notion of scientific literacy is one mention of Scientific American magazine. If you’re counting qualified firsts, this is billed as “the first live-action, narrative motion picture to be shot in digital 3D.” (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

A plush cousin to “Idiocracy,” the latest humbling eyeful from Pixar, “Wall-E,” says that Americans are going to die for their consumption habits, except for a few fat fumblers shot out into space.

While less profane, “Wall-E,” directed by Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”), is more pessimistic than Mike Judge’s dark mess. Its protagonist is the titular rusty robot that no one bothered to turn off 700 years earlier when the survivors of a ruined Earth leave for a luxury cruise ship, the Axiom, deep in outer space. The tableaux of a ruined Manhattan are thrilling, drawing from myriad influences: “Blade Runner” tempered with ideas from artists like Jodorowsky, Mobius and Jacques Tardi, among other hands from the Metal Hurlant era of comics. Wall-E becomes a Sisyphus building and ascending ziggurats of consumer waste that would appeal to Philip K. Dick in this post-human Metropolis, spending each day compacting and constructing step-at-a-time towers of Babel, with the watercolor look of Bruce McCall’s inventive apocrypha atop a Breughel canvas without human figures.

For the first forty minutes or so, there’s no dialogue and the eye wanders through an inventive tapestry of the remnants of a lost civilization. Stanton et al. make the most of silence (along with Ben Burtt’s terrific sound design). No brand names are given pride of placement, only the “Buy N Large” megacorp that seems to have absorbed all before the fall, including the government. Fred Willard makes a cameo as Shelby Forthright, the cheerleader CEO, using the memorable phrase, “Stay the course.”

Wall-E’s daily routine includes collecting things he likes: he’s a dogged packrat assembling a curiosity cabinet of technology and junk. He owns a single videotape (of “Hello Dolly”!), on BetaMax, which he watches through a contraption that includes an early iPod. It’s reminiscent of Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology, as if civilization were a long-gone myth, an invented legend collated by a robot from scraps. When Wall-E’s solar panels are filled each morning, it’s signaled by the Mac start-up chime, which in one of its iterations, while rushing through the rings of Saturn, is strangely touching. (What’s he running? Mac OS MMDCCLXXV?)

Where “Cars” erred on the side of trying to make 1950s-style internal combustion engines into a thing of shiny love to dazzle the most prehensile of animation watchers, “Wall-E’”s anthropo-dwarfism goes the opposite direction, toward an eco-fable that’s more than majestic in its detailing while keeping its characters exceedingly small. (Wall-E’s sidekick is a resilient cockroach.) Stanton has said words to the effect that most of the Pixar projects to date were sketched out on a napkin over lunch more than fifteen years ago, and while the napkin has grown many terabytes larger, the idea of “the last robot” remains.

And there’s a lot of “last” to go around. After meeting a sleek female robot, EVA, that’s been dispatched to find vestiges of vegetation in the barren, windblown topsoil, further destruction ensues, including the nuking of a rank of tankers that at once is apocalypse and invokes the image of ship-cutters in India and other countries who take disused ships apart piece by piece. EVA’s intense minimalism suggests a universal remote that Apple design guru Jonathan Ive—listed in the end credits—might well have had a hand in. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (“No Country For Old Men”) was a consultant, too, and the textures of ruined Earth, including a scene between Wall-E and EVA at brick-red sunset seen from a bench on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, looking across an empty river bed to the dead lands of the island of schist and shite that Manhattan became, are haunting in their densely detailed grimness.

When EVA finds a plant that Wall-E had stowed in a Chaplin-style boot, a race to space follows. (A skyful of fallow space trash against a clean, bright star field joshes the opening of “Star Wars.”) The style shifts radically when the pair arrive on Axiom, with its thousands of blubberous passengers, grown lazy from generation upon generation of pampering in the 700 years onboard. They’re like inflatable Incredibles, ponging around on levitating air chairs. (Another keen homage: as the robots emerge into the corridors of Axiom, they’re hit with a crush of people just as the characters in Lucas’ “THX-1138″ are just outside the expanse of white infinity they believe they had been trapped in.)

Just past forty years since the debut of “2001″ and HAL, “Wall-E’”s pastiche of Kubrick’s notions of space stations and cold computers has a few tickles, including Sigourney Weaver’s voicing of the onboard brain. Jeff Garlin’s voice work as the stupefied captain of the ship amuses, too. But nothing trumps a finely detailed apocalypse. And how do you get a happy ending from the end of the world? It is possible, and when you do, you have Peter Gabriel sing atop it, backed by the Soweto Gospel Choir.

Canadian director Patricia Rozema (“When Night Is Falling,” “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing”), South African-born screenwriter Ann Peacock (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe”) and Abigail Breslin, America’s indie sweetheart from “Nim’s Island” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” together create a genuinely wholesome adventure set in 1934. Breslin is the title Kit, a 9-year-old hoping to write for the Cincinnati Register. Before getting her first byline and penny-a-word payday, she will crack a string of thefts blamed on the unemployed. The messages are girl-empowering and hobo-embracing. “Not all hoboes are the same,” Kit observes. Her character is based on a doll born and branded to enhance female esteem: “American Girl celebrates a girl’s inner star—that little whisper inside that encourages her to stand tall, reach high and dream big.” When her car salesman dad (Chris O’Donnell) loses his job and his car, he heads to Chicago to look for work. Her mother (Julia Ormond) takes in boarders, sells eggs and sews feedsack dresses. Valerie Tripp’s 2000 book “Meet Kit,” the first in a series supplying Kit’s backstory, simplifies the Depression in 1934: “About three years ago people got nervous about their money and stopped buying as many things as they used to.” Thankfully, there’s only a whisper of corporate ka-ching on screen, although American Girl thoughtfully offers a $22 model of Kit’s typewriter “that ‘dings’ just like the real thing when she gets to the end of a line.” Kids take note: Kit reads and writes, and never plays with dolls or goes to the picture show. With Wallace Shawn, Stanley Tucci, Jane Krakowski, Joan Cusack, Max Thieriot and Willow Smith.) (Bill Stamets) 

This well-made animated kid pic opens with a clever kick-ass dream sequence where obese fanboy Po (voiced by Black) fantasizes his kung-fu destiny. Mocking verve is shelved for blander fare when he wakes up to his chores at the noodle stand run by his single parent. Why Po is a panda and his pop is a goose is anyone’s guess. Rigging fireworks to a chair, Po makes an aerial entrance to the big rite for anointing the next kung-fu defender of the kingdom. Can scripture err in making this underachiever and overeater the savior? Po will learn a secret whose secret is that there is no secret. Believe in yourself and you’ll become who you wish to be—a morsel of wisdom ingested by our erstwhile ursine hero. The daddy issues in the screenplay by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (co-writers of eleven episodes of the dad-fixated “King of the Hill”) are in sync with a Father’s Day opening. Co-directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson deliver likeable characters, with Jack Black especially in character reprising with the act that pays off time and again. With the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen. 88m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

“Pink is the navy blue of India.”

That’s one of the better-known epigrams of the late, compulsively pulse-taking fashion editor Diana Vreeland. An observation that washed over me after leaving a Thursday night preview of “Speed Racer” in IMAX: this thundering puppy is rife with cultural references and multiple languages and bursting design details that should make it appeal to a broad cross-section of the moviegoing world. (Including India, which could take the great washes of pink as more holy than girly.)

Or at least it seemed that way until the weekend, when the opening worldwide grosses seemed to suggest that all those potentially intrigued audiences would not be dragged screaming and spending into the theater. (There’s no way they could already have known about the repugnant tubby little brother and his gum-baring chimpanzee sidekick.)

In their first directorial effort since ending “The Matrix” trilogy—“V for Vendetta” was shepherded by their longtime second James McTeigue—the Chicago-born Wachowski brothers dig deep into the traditions and stylistics of anime and their own cultural toy box to create a bold yet somehow hermetic movie with fantastically intricate design and technique that somehow seems not to fall into any known demographic. (Plus, Emile Hirsch, who plays Speed in his first role since “Into the Wild,” fired his agents on Monday, a kind of review without words.) “Deliciously aggravating” would be a compliment in my devil’s dictionary, but I doubt it would send anyone to the Cineplex door. While there were jokes from the elder heights of film cricketry about sugar rushes and candy coatings and epileptic fits, “Speed Racer” is a less-than-obliterating experience. Noisy and bursting with eyeball kicks, “Speed Racer” is a Ritalin-deprived formalist treat, sort of like David LaChappelle compositions brought to asexual life. (First reviews made a lot of candy and cereal metaphors, so let’s not fail the assignment by noting that the bold color palette is often like Fruit Loops in a morphine drip. “Futurama” on a mild dose of LSD?)

But there aren’t that many formalism-oriented, technique-loving viewers, it seems, near the 3,850 locations in North America, who might appreciate, say, such iconic-unironic elements as the Wachowskis’ use of a digital “wipe” across the screen, making transitions by passing close-ups of characters from right to left, much in the way that layers of cels function in traditional sorts of film animation. (Imagine the characters in low-budget TV-made series like the original “Speed Racer” or “Johnny Quest” forever moving across planes rather than into and out of the perceived “ground” of the screen.)

More bits: the opening credits for Warner Bros., co-financier Village Roadshow and Silver Pictures are festooned with Oskar Fischinger-style bursts of geometric animation (the sprightliest logo-damage since the neon bars slashing the logos at the front of “Oceans 13.”) The impossibly blue skies in the early flashbacks are the blue of a Benadryl commercial in CGI heaven. The detestable boy-tubby little brother, Spritle, is seen in Paul Frank monkey pajamas while the one-note chimpanzee, Chim-Chim, wears similar flannel pjs with a boy’s head on them. The blend of hyper-saturated green against red, impossible in strictly photochemical terms, is as lush as that contrast in “Amelie.” A brassy exclamation of “Omigod! Was that a ninja?!” matches the self-consciously unselfconscious “Oh, that kid is wily.” (And I would like to visit the unlikely “Aqueducts of Sassicaia” to find how intoxicating its waters might be.)

As in “Fight Club” and a few other recent pictures, “Speed Racer” is also a deca-million-dollar fable about how corporations can stifle creativity—“That’s because the sponsors control the media!” The mixed message has its charm; while Motorola walkie-talkies and Cheerios get overt product placement, most of the brands on view are keening gibberish, towering neon monuments in more alphabets and languages than I could recognize, and there are myriad appearances by announcers and characters speaking languages other than English. It seems less a commercial strategy by the Wachowskis as a philosophical one: to incorporate as many forms of communication and color-blind ethnicity as possible, much as they did with the “Matrix” pictures. There are other oddities, including a bribe-by-plushie interlude that seems more adult than some of the movie’s dispensable bumbling gangster caricatures. The Racer X character is also given an eccentric late passage of explaining the positive aspects of his radical identity-assignment surgery to his younger brother.

“It’s a whole new world, baby, it’s a whole new world,” sounds self-congratulatory out of the mouth of a character after the gravitationally impossible yet beautifully stitched final race, yet there are elements of technique here that will be as influential, to the right crew members of future films, as the infernal “bullet time” effect of “The Matrix.” Whether or not “Speed Racer” makes its financiers’ money back, it’s still going to be more influential than any undiscerning reviewer realizes.

“Speed Racer” is now playing in 35mm and IMAX. 

Made for boys who like watching kung-fu movies, this fantasy action-adventure is about a boy who loves his kung-fu movies. South Boston teen Jason (Michael Angarano, “Snow Angels”) fantasizes about a martial-arts adventure of his own. He’s a regular at Lu Yan’s Pawn Shop in Chinatown, where he seeks out rare kung-fu videos. In the back room there’s an ancient fighting stick the old proprietor says was entrusted to his grandfather. Defending the ornate staff from thieves one night, Jason falls from a roof and lands in the Forbidden Kingdom. Legend foretells a stranger coming to restore the staff to its rightful owner, although the prophecy does not relate that this stranger’s favorite adjective is “sick.” Jackie Chan and Jet Li play Jason’s mentors on a quest leading through the Gate of No Gate. Jason meets a funny drunk, an impish monkey-faced man and an embittered butt-kicking musician who hurls a mean jade dart. Rob Minkoff (“The Lion King,” “Stuart Little”) directs and John Fusco (“Young Guns,” “Hidalgo”) writes an exercise in juvenile escapism with nothing to say about kung-fu fandom. Aside from a few jokes for insiders, “Forbidden Kingdom” has no lineage in its genre. With Yifei Liu, Morgan Benoit, Deshun Wang, and Collin Chou. 113m. Anamorhpic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

Nim (Abigail Breslin from “Little Miss Sunshine”) lives with her marine biologist dad Jack (Gerard Butler) on their own private island. Since her mom was swallowed by a whale, Nim’s pals in the South Pacific are a seal, a lizard and a pelican. She talks to them and thinks they can do amazing things like understand her. Across the ocean in San Francisco, adventure novelist Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster) has a best friend that is more imaginary. That would be Alex Rover (also played by Gerard Butler). He’s the hero of her best-selling stories who’s always saying, “Be the hero of your own story.” Alex may be Alexandra’s muse and brand, but her real best friends are Purell Hand Sanitizer and Progresso Soup. Let’s interrupt this review for kudos to product placement consultant Julie A. Keller. Nice work there. You got those brands into a lot of dialogue and close-ups. So much for seamlessness. Alexandra is neurotically dependent on both products and packs them on her trip to Nim’s island when her biggest fan gets in a big jam. Alex will later exit Alexandra’s imagination by walking into the same ocean from which Jack is rescued. In the end, Jack, Nim and Alexandra hold hands to the tune of U2′s “Beautiful Day.” Ahhh. Adapting Australian author Wendy Orr’s 2002 novel, co-directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin co-wrote this sunny, uplifting kids adventure with Joseph Kwong and Paula Mazur. With Michael Carman, Mark Brady, Anthony Simcoe, Christopher Baker, Peter Callan and Rhonda Doyle. 96m. (Bill Stamets)

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