Gru will win you.By John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
Gru: "We are going to pull of the TRUE crime of the century... we are going to steal the MOON!"
Although Despicable Me winks at behemoth Pixar with a little robot like the Pixar desk lamp before the titles, Despicable Me does one better in the cynical category.
A villain of major contradictions and the cutest orphans since Annie help create a world of kid fantasy that still tries to deal with crazy parents and malign technology. It does so, not in Pixar's full color wonderland, but rather in a dim dream like state where the villain Gru (voice of Steve Carell) is vulnerable in a laboratory of worthless weapons with an assistant, Dr Nefario (Russell Brand), like Bond's Q, but with worse hearing (he responds to making a dart gun by crafting one that begins with an "f").
But the real gift of this little animation gem o is homely Gru, the world's best villain but financially least productive. His plan to steal the moon is about the cleverest comment on how much we have stolen, innocence among the treasures; the moon is all we have left to lose. But there is also something else to be stolen?Gru's heart?and that's easily filched by Agnes, Margo, and Edith, orphans selling the equivalent of girl scout cookies but sub textually a heart for a villain who doesn't know yet it's a loving parent's.
You'll have to see how he steals the moon and the girls' affection because these improbable actions come straight from a child's sense of how the universe is really run. As in the sequences of Gru reading bad kiddy lit to the girls, the screenplay could have been an insult to child intelligence?it's not.
It's so good that so far two of the best films of the summer and maybe the year have been 3-D animations from Pixar and Universal, its first and I hope not its last.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain