Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted was an unexpectedly charming addition to the summer's kiddie flick franchise pile-up, better and stranger than, honestly, it needed to be in a subgenre that is, Pixar aside, usually just about merchandising potential and providing enough bright moving objects to occupy young attention spans for 80 minutes. People hoping for the same pleasant surprise when escorting offspring to Ice Age: Continental Drift might as well pre-crush those hopes in advance before donning their 3-D glasses — the film, the fourth in the series from Blue Sky Studios, is just a sugary jumble of goofy voices, hyperkinetic action scenes and rote plot elements that rolls forward just enough to get us to the de rigueur pop song that plays over the closing credits.
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It's hard to believe it's been 13 years since Jason Biggs first made sweet, sweet love to that apple pie, but with this week's American Reunion the gang is back, three sequels and four subpar spin-off movies later, to catch up and wax nostalgic about the good old days. Marinate on where all those years went while you catch up with the American Pie gang in Movieline's Then and Now gallery and inevitably decide -- as we all do on occasion while wine-drunk, yearbook in hand -- which among them aged the best over the years.
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It ought to be no fun watching characters you came to know as randy, unruly high school students turn into grown-ups with jobs, families and crappy sex lives. That’s what happens to real-life people; why subject fictional characters to it? But somehow American Reunion — the third movie sequel to Paul and Chris Weitz’s hall-of-fame teen sex comedy 1999 American Pie — makes the harsh reality jolt almost painless.
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Michael Dowse’s hockey comedy Goon is crude, violent and deeply enjoyable. It also offers the chance to see Liev Schreiber — a guy who’s played Hamlet, ferchrissakes — living it up as a bloodthirsty minor-league thug in the kind of ’70s eight-track-guy mustache that only hockey players, bless their hearts, still try to get away with. That, to me, is catnip in the form of a hockey puck.
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Look, I'm excited to revisit American Pie, all right? Jason Biggs is hilarious, Thomas Ian Nicholas is still winsome in his hirsute state, Chris Klein has hilarious Street Fighter cred now, and Seann William Scott has apparently updated his repertoire to include Twilight jokes -- at least according to the movie's new trailer. Check it out after the jump if, like me, you're game for yet another hornball summit.
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