Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Rango

Having been a very hectic weekend, I only managed to get to one film. Rango‘s a film that I never wanted to see, largely on how lame the trailer looked. But, screeners are what they are and I put it in anyway. I was mildly surprised at how good it was even when Johnny Depp was completely irritating. The story of a small desert town and the city lizard who gets lost in the desert and must come to the rescue of the town which is slowly drying up. Typical cliches of small western towns and nefarious water barons soaking up all of the available water works well for this style of animation. There are several fantastical sequences that are more engaging than the film itself, but they serve a fine purpose directing us towards a finale that, despite being predictable, is still quite enjoyable.

Depp’s vocal work is the biggest flaw in the film. Building the movie around Depp as a personality hurts the film from a creative standpoint. Of course Gore Verbinski, who led Depp to his first Oscar nomination, is at the helm, so it should come as little surprise that Depp is given free reign. Ned Beatty does fine work as the small town’s mayor and the rest of the cast blends well into the rather strange western background where dozens of desert dwellers speak in heavily affected accents and have so many bizarre quirks that they almost become parodies of themselves.