There’s a lot of pressure on me here. You know that, right? The five or six people who bother visiting the SteelFrogBlog have made it clear they only go when I review something they might see. Well, gee, I’ll just save all my quality material for the $100 M box office stuff, ok? How’s that sound? Another of those imports where I’ve parenthetically included the original Mandarin title? I get to phone those in.
That’s not quite how I work. So, dilemma. Dammit. Rrrrrr. Fine, here, have a bit of special material for the increased readership. Some things you didn’t know about pandas:
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- The name “panda?” Derived from “propaganda” because of the black & white coloring more commonly found in newsprint. Coincidentally, the original name for penguin was “op-ed.”
- Most people think pandas are members of the raccoon family. This isn’t quite right. The panda bear (“fattus fuchus”) is more closely related to the American desert coyote (“carnivorous vulgaris”), the common fichus (“deathicus byvacationus”), and sand.
- Similarly, panda bears are often promoted as lovable morons. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pandas are the most intelligent non-human animals on the planet and thus subject to great depression from all the bamboo. A “playful” panda is no such thing; pandas fight their internal demons with great quantities of alcohol. A panda rollicking in the snow, say, is almost certainly drunk.
- Every panda litter contains twins, but only one survives because panda elders sacrifice the lesser sibling to Baal, the underworld god of tourism.
- Pandas hate you.
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There. Wasn’t that fun? Now, lets’ discuss Kung Fu Panda 3. When we last checked on Po (voice of Jack Black), he was the Dragon Warrior and having issues with stairs. That, gun powder and Gary Oldman voicing the bad guy is all I remember of Panda 2: The Bam in the Boo. So, this time to keep the action a little more memorable, the script called for a return to the original Kung Fu Panda: a single all-powerful enemy, Po doubting his own identity, a little soul-searching, a disgusting amount of cute, and a lot of silly involving dumplings. I can’t ever fault anybody for leaning on a winning formula. Well, I can … and I do. Yeah, that’s all I want to say there.
Kai (J.K. Simmons) is a chained-knife
wielding musk-ox villain from the astral plane. When he isn’t entertaining crowds at Chicago Bulls games, he enjoys long transcendental vacations, intraplanar battles and stealing ch’i. That’s right; this episode is about ch’i, or mystical life force. The concept of ch’i is tossed around in KF3 like a beach ball at a rock concert … and that idea might just float a tad above the heads of the target audience – “Next up, a rendition of Animal Farm performed by Muppet Babies.” – But no matter.
A multi-world villain, Kai collects the ch’i of all the spiritual warriors, turning them essentially into jade pogs he can manipulate. After capturing Oogway… does “Oogway” sound like Pig Latin to you? I’m just gonna call him “Woog,” ok? After collecting Woog, Kai has earned a trip to the living world and it is eventually up to Po to stop him.
Does anybody here think that the animals in the Kung Fu Panda world should better reflect the exclusive club in the Chinese zodiac? Must be me.
Is Po up for the Kai challenge? First, Po must discover who he really is. Just Po’ (black &) white trash, perhaps? Or something more? And who shows up, but his long lost genetic father (Bryan Cranston) to take him back to Pandaland, home of the Whopper. Pandas are adorable, lessons are learned, villains are confronted. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.
So … do you like sugar? I love sugar. What’s your favorite dessert? The Kung Fu Panda franchise ain’t that. Name
your fifty favorite sugary items. Kung Fu Panda isn’t them, either. Somewhere in between #150 and #200 is where the franchise lies. For me, that’s between, hmmm, Sweet Tarts and 2-day-old macaroons. As movie food goes, it’s fine. Perfect even. But when you’re out at a fancy restaurant … or even, I dunno, Cheescake Factory, you’ll be fairly disappointed if the dessert cart came around and all it had were Sweet Tarts and 2-day-old macaroons. I’ve enjoyed the Pandaring, more-or-less, but if this franchise dies, that’s not a bad thing.
♪You’re better off stout
Don’t even ask why
Gotta have girth,
Cuz here comes that guy
Panda Flaws is coming to town
He’s makin’ his lunch
He’s eating it twice
Hope it’s more filling
Than sushi and rice
Panda Flaws is coming to town
He sleeps when you are seeing
It’s hard to make him wake
He knows kung fu and eating
Where he walks the ground will quake
O, you needn’t have clout
You can live in a sty
He came for a ‘bout
And maybe a pie
Panda Flaws is coming to town♫
Rated PG, 95 Minutes
D: Alessandro Carloni, Jennifer Yuh
W: Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger (Two people wrote this and two completely different people directed it … not sure I’ve seen that before)
Genre: Nutter Butters
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Your five-year-old ch’i guru
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Panda haters
♪ Parody inspired by “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
