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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A slightly above-average weekend at the box office abated further talks of a moviegoing slump (for now), with a proven star and a buffed-out Disney classic teaming up in the top two. Mission: Impossible continued its formidable hold, meanwhile, barely suppressing a certain Joyful Noise. Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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The idea of seeing Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton in a movie together, not to mention a movie about a gospel choir, is a particular kind of heaven. Latifah is a radiant performer capable of elevating even the most mundane material to a level of charm and grace unachievable by most mere mortals. And Parton, aside from having one of the sweetest and most haunting voices in all of country music, is a firecracker presence by herself -- if you could bottle force of will in a perfume bottle, you couldn’t name it anything but Dolly. But whatever Latifah and Parton might have achieved together in that mythical heavenly ideal, it’s just not coming together in this lifetime – or at least not in Joyful Noise, a well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.
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