The Good Dinosaur

Jurassic Lark

Grade: C –

Director: Peter Sohn

Starring the voices of: Raymond Ochoa, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Marcus Scribner, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin and Sam Elliott

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

The Good Dinosaur imagines a world where dinosaurs didn’t become extinct. Unfortunately, the resulting butterfly effect produces an alternate Pixar Animation Studios that makes lazy, unoriginal movies. After reclaiming its reputation with Inside Out earlier this year, this is arguably Pixar’s poorest production to date.

The film conceives a backstory in which the asteroid that wiped out the dinos veers away from Earth. Rather than merely lending dinosaurs anthropomorphic features (as Pixar has done with nonhuman protagonists in nearly all their animated films), here they evolve over millions of years into English-speaking frontiersman. Poppa Henry (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) and Momma Ida (Frances McDormand) are rearing three apatosaurus kids to eventually take over the family farm. However, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), their youngest, is kind-hearted but weak and fearful.

Henry tasks Arlo with killing the critter stealing their winter corn in order to earn his familial bona fides. But as Henry and Arlo track the culprit, a snarling prehistoric caveboy, Henry is swept away and killed by a flash flood. When Arlo next chases the caveboy, it also ends with Arlos being carried away by raging rapids and deposited far from home. Arlo and the feral Neanderthal boy, who Arlo names Spot, join together to traverse treacherous terrain and find their way home.

The Good Dinosaur quickly transitions into Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, if re-imagined by a focus group of fourth graders. Arlo and Spot—seemingly patterned after Chris Kattan’s old Mr. Peepers character from “Saturday Night Live”—encounter a surreal setting that includes a disturbingly dimwitted styracosaurus and psychotic, predatory pterodactylus. For some reason, this dino evolution mirrors human culture, so we also have an American West complete with redneck dialect spouted by yokels with names like Bubbha and Lurleane. Arlo and Spot join up with a trio of T. rex ranchers (including one voiced by Sam Elliott, natch) to thwart a herd of velociraptor rustlers. Cue the fiddle and harmonica.

The lurching mood fluctuates from syrupy to trippy to dark. Likewise, gorgeous animated renderings of the high Sierra landscape contrast with the reductive representation of Arlo’s Dino the Dinosaur look. Characters intone feel-good bromides like, “Sometimes you gotta get through your fear to see the beauty on the other side.” Huh?

Initial production on The Good Dinosaur began in 2009, and this final product betrays the project’s troubled history, which includes several changes of director, writer and cast. What’s left is sweet but boring, a film that’s visually stimulating but thematically slight. In other words, it’s more Disney than Pixar, resulting in the latter’s first mediocre effort (yes, even worse than Cars 2).

That said, it’s almost worth enduring the rest of the film just to hear Sam Elliott growl, “If you ain’t afraid of a crock biting you on the face, then you’re not alive.” Almost.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Welcome to the fourth film of

The Hunger Gamezzzzzzz

Grade: C

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

The career path of Jennifer Lawrence parallels the character arc of Katniss Everdeen, from reluctant combatant to reluctant heroine to reluctant messiah. Lawrence, fresh off an unlikely Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone when she debuted in the first Hunger Games, is now a three-time nominee and winner for Silver Linings Playbook. At just age 25, she’s outgrown this franchise, and the weariness shows.

Mockingjay – Part 2 is the monotonous end to an elongated finale marching towards inevitability. The only change that came from splitting author Suzanne Collins’ final book in the Hunger Games trilogy into two films is the unfortunate subtext now accompanying talk of enemies that “do not share our values,” and its depiction of war refugees amassing on the Capitol, embedded with assassins bent on killing the nation’s president. And the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman over 21 months after his death.

Still the PR face of the revolution against President Snow (Donald Sutherland, the only actor who “gets” the inanity), Katniss is charged with wandering into war zones after the battles have been fought to film propos to motivate the rebels. She inexplicably pines for poor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), last seen trying to strangle Katniss due to Snow’s brutal brainwashing, which we don’t see. Team Gayle (Liam Hemsworth) is summarily disbanded, and a bunch of characters get their curtain calls, like Effie (Elizabeth Banks), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci). Meanwhile, rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) isn’t above bombing civilians in order to liberate the 13 Districts of Panem.

It’s a two-hour-plus tedium of “shoot-yammer-kiss-rinse-repeat.” The dialogue is stilted and still stuck to the page, while the action sequences are sporadic and narratively inconsequential—it’s a movie about a war without the war. Instead, Mockingjay – Part 2 is about the ethicality of war, about the corrupting belief that the ends justify any means. But these messages are conveyed here in the most mundane, least imaginative terms.

In the unimaginative hands of director Francis Lawrence, any intrigue and emotion are drained away in deference to dutiful adaptation—the most emotion Jennifer Lawrence displays is while yelling at a cat. The entire film exists to service a 10-minute twist you could see coming an entire movie ago, and the heroine who ultimately embraces the bucolic benefits of motherhood. This is how The Hunger Games end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

The people have spoken: how many 

"Hunger Games" movies should have been made.

Grade: Incomplete

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

During the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (hereinafter Mockingjay – Part 1), Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and her fellow rebels flee underground to escape an aerial bombardment by the Capitol’s forces. Holed up in a dark bunker, Katniss passes the time by shining a flashlight at her pet cat Buttercup and watching with amusement as the feline futilely follows the darting but insubstantial luminescence.

The scene is couched as a metaphor for the manner President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and the all-powerful Capitol is toying with the insurgents. It’s equally applicable to the band of moviegoers huddled in darkened theaters, entranced by the incandescent glow of a silver screen sequel that portends promise but delivers precious little. Mockingjay – Part 1 is almost entirely centered around the marketing of a rebellion, which is oddly appropriate for the film adaptation of a book that’s split in two in order to wring out every cent of box-office potential.

It’s The Matrix: Revolutions of The Hunger Games film series. There’s Zion, in the form of an underground city housing the rebel inhabitants of District 13. Like Neo, Katniss is in full messianic mode after her defiant arrow in the Quarter Quell triggered widespread arisings throughout Panem. Moreover, the film is a tedious progenitor that exclusively subsists on its already strip-mined mythology.

When Katniss awakes in District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, borrowing Meryl Streep’s wig from “The Giver”), PR flack Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the other leaders of the rebellion ask her to serve as the symbol for their cause, the “Mockingjay.” The totalitarian Capitol is suppressing freedoms. The Mockingjay emblem has been banned. Summary executions are being carried out throughout the districts. And District 12, Katniss’ home, lies in ruin, littered with the charred remains of its 10,000 citizens.

“But where’s my motivation!?” Katniss seems to ask. Sadly, that requires a District 8 hospital full of wounded, which is promptly destroyed by Snow as soon as Katniss and a camera crew pay it a visit looking for inspiring verite footage for their war promo. Done and done. Plutarch and Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) produce the “propos,” Cressida (Natalie Dormer) is brought on to put Katniss through her paces, and Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) is in charge of wardrobe.

On the opposite side of the propaganda war is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is being held inside the Capitol and, perhaps against his will, beaming out disinformation about Katniss and the rebellion during a series of televised interviews. Katniss wants Peeta rescued, but she also pines for Gale (Liam Hemsworth). And while the Team Gale/Team Peeta narrative goes nowhere fast, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) is unwisely relegated to sporadic court jester.

“Moves and countermoves,” Snow mutters at one point, and nothing better describes the entirety of the film’s plodding plotline. The true misstep of Mockingjay – Part 1 is the obvious padding it fashions around a two-hour movie about half of Suzanne Collins’ YA novel. Katniss and Gale go hunting and sit by a river, for no purpose. Katniss croons “The Hanging Tree” for the cameras, again while sitting by a river. Katniss kills a few minutes chasing after her sister Primrose (Willow Shields) after she decides to save Buttercup just as the blast doors are closing before a bombing attack. “I just couldn’t live with myself,” Willow whimpers without any apparent sense of context.

But mostly it’s endless speechifying from Katniss, from Snow, from Peeta, from Finnick (Sam Claflin) and especially Coin, shrewdly cast as far less monstrous as Snow but no less dictatorial. There’s a moment late in the film that conveys the film’s apparent aim when, as the rebel leader is delivering one of her innumerable pep talks, we glimpse Plutarch in the background, mouthing along the words to his speech. It’s a Wag the Dog moment that conveys how selling a war is an integral part of winning one. But it’s also a point that could have been established in a couple of scenes, not the entire feature-length film. After all, the previous Hunger Games attacked reality television and economic inequality, but not at the expense of a storyline.

Like Katniss, Lawrence puts gumption behind her cause—aside from one crying scene too many, she does nothing here to tarnish her acting luster playing a character that now feels suddenly stagnant. It’s the leaden messaging that weighs down this perfunctory placeholder. Maybe Katniss will shoot more than one arrow in Mockingjay – Part 2. Let’s hope so, because the lethargic Part 1 wildly misses the mark.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

This Stormtrooper doesn't mean I'm in

the new Star Wars sequel ... I think

Grade: C +

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Sam Claflin and Jena Malone

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 26 min.

For proof positive of the critical capital that Jennifer Lawrence has already amassed, look no further than the early plaudits being heaped on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second installment of the Suzanne Collins-penned trilogy. This otherwise banal actioner, with its darker-than-average themes, rests firmly on the able shoulders of its 23-year-old Oscar-winning star.

And while Lawrence’s presence saites critics, her role as Katniss Everdeen is cobbled from a Whitman’s Sampler of pop cultural influences. She shoots arrows like Legolas. She’s embroiled in her very own love triangle—Team Gale or Team Peeta? And, her rise in status to societal savior from a totalitarian overlord is Neo-esque. Indeed, for all the Battle Royale and The Running Man allusions in the premise to The Hunger Games, its sequel is more akin to The Matrix Reloaded: a bridge film that laces its protagonist’s messianic maturation into a middling, muddled plotline.

Fresh off their Hunger Games win, Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are conscripted by President Snow (Donald Sutherland) into a victory tour to quell rising restlessness throughout the 12 districts. While Katniss and Peeta are able to mask their mutual antipathy for the cameras, they aren’t so good at hiding their distaste for Snow’s oppressive regime. Of course, the fact that Snow oscillates between entertainment diversions and public executions and floggings doesn’t really instill a sense of stability amongst the masses.

So, Snow declares that the 75th Annual Hunger Games, aka the Quarter Quell, will feature tributes (players) who are reaped (chosen) from the existing pool of past victors. Snow confides in new game master Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) that this format is designed to purge the districts of tributes who have gotten too uppity, a concern that doesn’t appear to actually exist until Snow breaks the pledge of lifelong financial security made to those who previously survived the gauntlet of the Games.

Although this Hunger Games: All-Star Edition promises a cunning competition like none before, the way the narrative eventually unfolds—culminating with an abrupt cliffhanger—utterly undercuts this construct. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Jennifer Lawrence in the spotlight, Catching Fire is essentially two-thirds fashion show and one-third recycled action sequences. And amid the dourness, only Stanley Tucci—all ponytail and pearly caps—provides any perceptible energy as TV emcee Caesar Flickerman.

Indeed, whatever profundity is in Catching Fire concerns the manner a co-opted media is a powerful, dangerous weapon in the hands of a government trying to tame its populace. Still, this hardly revelatory concept isn’t enough to fill the 146-minute running time—indeed, The Hunger Games is what viewers play who watch this film on an empty stomach. And if that’s still not enough Katniss and Co. for you, take heart that Collins’ final book, Mockingjay, is going to be split into two films. You know, like Twilight: Breaking Dawn and the entire Hobbit series. What could go wrong with that?

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

You can say that again, Max

Grade: C –

Director: Stephen Daldry

Starring: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 9 min.

I am not one of those who believe that certain tragic events should be shielded from artistic examination. The acute emotions that emanate from publicly shared grief can be a catalyst for creative studies of the human ethos. But, while the line separating exploration from exploitation is one an artist should not shirk, it is also one that can be easily and perilously crossed.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close tackles 9/11, a cinematic third-rail used as the milieu for films both brilliant (United 93) and inept (World Trade Center; Remember Me). Its bare premise is apposite and affecting – a 10-year-old boy coping with the loss of his father, who perished on the 105^th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. However, the problems with this pious adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oprah-approved 2005 novel are both extreme and incredible.

Before his untimely death, Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks, Joe Versus the Volcano) and his son Oskar (newcomer Thomas Horn, Jeopardy! Kids Week) are an inseparable duo, mixing trips to Thomas’ jewelry shop and Central Park with their ongoing game of “Reconnaissance Mission,” which would send Oskar out in search of clues to solve make-believe mysteries (such as the fate of a fabled “sixth borough”). Their inexhaustible quality time appears to have the more fundamental aim of coaxing the socially awkward Oskar out of his shell.

Those familiar with high-functioning autism and other behavioral disorders will recognize some telltale signs of Oskar’s affect – of course, some might also object to Oskar’s more caricatural tics, such as the tambourine he constantly carries around and rattles to calm himself. For some reason, however, director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader) remains vague about Oskar’s condition – all we get, in one of the boy’s typically precocious moments, is an offhand remark that he was once tested for Asperger’s, but “the results were inconclusive.” In so doing, Daldry squanders the opportunity for an informed, respectful look at families coping with this issue.

The rest of the audience is placed in the innocent position of recoiling, if not outright disliking the garrulous, hyper-emotional preteen. When not self-inflicting bruises on himself or repeatedly listening to the voice messages Thomas left once his death seemed imminent, Oskar screams at all the adults in his life and tells his mother (Sandra Bullock) that she’s “an absentee parent” (no proof provided) and should have been the one who died in the Twin Towers instead of dad.

A year after 9/11, Oskar breaks a vase while rummaging through his father’s closet and discovers a key inside a small packet with the word “Black” written on it. Believing this to be one final quest, he canvas the phone book to categorize, map and then visit all 472 people with the surname Black in hopes of matching the key with its corresponding lock. This fairy tale of an unsupervised 10-year-old child roaming the streets of New York City conveniently allows Daldry to foist a greeting card cross-section of the five boroughs under the guise of communal uplift.

In a panoply of cloying cardboard cutouts, the lone, all-too-brief standout is Max van Sydow as an elderly, mysteriously mute neighbor who communicates using a notepad and, as Oskar somehow knows and relays via incessant voiceovers, hails from Dresden and lived through "some really bad stuff." That description, in essence, sums up the function of 9/11 in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – a stage prop of sorrow unbothered by context or consequences, present only to help personal anguish masquerade as something profound, little different than the love triangle in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. As the plot threads coagulate, one of the Blacks (Jeffrey Wright) solemnly and with a straight face laments the fact that the post-9/11 proliferation of missing-persons flyers hampered his search for a family heirloom. Some really bad stuff, indeed.

Neil Morris

Source Code

Mass time transit is so romantic

Grade: B

Director: Duncan Jones

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

Pop quiz, hot shot: A madman has blown-up a Chicago commuter train and has aims on annihilating the Windy City’s downtown district. You’re armed only with a group of military physicists and the disembodied psyche of an Air Force helicopter pilot. What do you do?

If you answered teleport the pilot’s consciousness across dimensions into the body of an unknown, alt-reality rail passenger in order to ID the terrorist, allowing authorities to thwart the actual bombing, then you’re primed to watch Source Code. On the other hand, if you want your movies to be logical or, at the very least, not tie your brain into a pretzel, then you probably want to check your disbelief at the theater door.

As the film opens, Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) – whose last memory was a firefight in the middle of Afghanistan – suddenly awakes aboard a Chi-town rail in the body of a teacher named Sean Fentress and seated across from Christina (Michelle Monaghan), Sean’s pretty, garrulous girlfriend.

Eight minutes later, Colter’s – and our – confusion is suddenly interrupted by the train incinerating, and Colter again awakes inside a claustrophobic, techno-pod to discover he is part of the titular government experiment that allows him to cross over into another person’s identity in the last eight minutes of their life.

Carol Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) and her boss Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) are the military minders who repeatedly whoosh Colter through a CG algebraic haze across time and space so he can re-live the same eight-minute incident, each time gathering more clues.

What’s refreshing about Source Code is that it doesn’t try to be more than it is. No misbegotten bloviating about terrorism or our Middle Eastern intermeddling. There is an emotional phone conversation between Colter and his dad, but it serves as character development and not some wider statement about the high cost of war.

Still, that’s not to say the film doesn’t break its metaphysical moorings, capped by an ending that’s as bewildering as it is tidy. Farmiga is a fine actress given little to do other than stare/speak into a computer monitor, and Wright method-mumbles his way through an underwritten role. Why exactly does the raspy Rutledge ambulate with the aid of a one-arm crutch? To borrow from Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian, “Acting!”

Thankfully, director Duncan Jones (Moon) spackles over the copious cracks in writer Ben Ripley’s quantum claptrap. The dimension-jumping, mystery-within-a-mystery construct keeps the audience suitably engaged until Source Code deploys its most unlikeable devices: a compassionate core and durable romantic subplot developed over variations of the same eight-minute span of time. Much of the credit belongs to Gyllenhaal – steady throughout as the everyman– and Monaghan’s nimble, likeable performances.

This film’s own source code is best defined as 12 Monkeys meets Groundhog Day. The greater function of Source Code, however, is a welcome break from this year’s early movie doldrums. Common sense sold separately.

Neil Morris

Quantum of Solace

Worst first date ever...

Grade: B

Director: Marc Forster

Starring: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Theaters: Spring Lane Cinemas in Sanford; Sand Hills Cinemas in Southern Pines; Crossroads 20 in Cary

A woman lies prone on a bed, her naked, post-coitus body facedown and completely coated with a precious natural substance suffocating her skin, killing her in the process. This scene from Goldfinger is among the most recognizable in the James Bond canon, and, interestingly, it is replicated meticulously in the latest Bond entry, Quantum of Solace. But, instead of Jill Masterson being lacquered in gold paint, today a British agent named Strawberry Fields is soaked cap-a-pie in black gold.

The recycled image is obviously nostalgic, but it also speaks to the passage of time rather than just a rewind of it. Today’s wars are fought over oil, and enemies of Western civilization are funded by oil revenues paid by the very governments they detest. Still, like much in Quantum of Solace, the episode is iconic without triggering the requisite level of iconography.

Still smarting from the betrayal by the late Vesper Lynd at the end of Casino Royale, Bond (Daniel Craig) throws himself headlong into rooting out those responsible for corrupting and killing her, a shadowy global terrorist conglomerate named QUANTUM. While dismantling QUANTUM is also the aim of British Intelligence, this sets the stage for the “Don’t make this personal” lecture M has been giving 007 since the Sean Connery days. When Bond goes rogue to escape the strictures of his MI6 minders, it recalls the defrocked Bond in Licence to Kill.

One can adore Bond lore while also recognizing the need to conjure a new paradigm. And, after its heralded reboot in Casino Royale, the Bond franchise seemed poised to reclaim its cinematic spy thriller crown. But, inside its opening 10 minutes, QOS reverts to some of the atrophy that plagued the Pierce Brosnan and latter Roger Moore eras. The pre-credits sequence – filmed with a neo-Bourne, camera-in-a-blender flair – is a car chase that goes nowhere. From there, it’s onto the regrettable return of the shopworn title sequence with its bevy of silhouetted dancing girls and phallic gunfire.

The rest of the remarkably short (106 minutes) film is a rather truncated affair filled with conservative fodder. Evoking the Red Scare fears of the 1950s, QUANTUM converts infiltrate the highest levels government worldwide, including the inner circle of M (Judi Dench). The CIA gets in bed with one arm of the terrorist organization in hopes of securing oil rights in the countries they disrupt, to the consternation of agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, still channeling the righteous indignity of his Colin Powell in W.). And, the villain du jour is Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a QUANTUM appendage masquerading as an environmentalist who specializes in hijacking the water supplies of Third World countries and then exacting hefty ransoms out of the despots he props up.

One significant area where this Bond film wisely distinguishes itself from its predecessors is adopting a continuity of storyline back to Casino Royale. However, only once does a new Bond order really manifest itself. Against the stunning backdrop of a production of Puccini’s “Tosca” taking place on the floating Seebühne along Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria, Bond manages to unmask members of QUANTUM as they carry on a furtive meeting in plain sight among the throng of regular opera-goers. It is one of the most sublime sequences in the entirety of Bond films, both in its Hitchcockian execution and the choice of “Tosca,” an opera dealing with deception and revenge.

That said, director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland; Monster’s Ball) fails to fully realize the film’s thematic potential before Bond and gal pal Camille (Olga Kurylenko, Hitman but memorable – at least for me – as the sexy vampiress in Paris, je t’aime), herself on a related revenge mission, veer into the proverbial climactic showdown inside the villain’s lair (here, a giant eco-hotel in the desert powered by hydrogen fuel cells). The script is the product of 5 screenwriters and multiple rewrites, which generates several showcase scenes that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

What elevates even this middling Bond chapter is Craig, making his sophomore appearance in the series. His 007 is taciturn and seemingly emotionally cold, but he is actually a more human Bond, one who bleeds when injured and constantly does silent battle with his stifling neuroses. Quantum of Solace draws its name from the third short story in Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only compilation. Although its narrative bears no relation to the film, the crux of the simple story rests on Bond’s sudden recognition that his adventure-filled life lacks even the smallest unit of compassion and pales in comparison to everyday human drama. Moreover, Bond implicitly realizes that no one has a “quantum of solace” for him, either.

In essence, the ongoing charge to revive the Bond films is a search for its own quantum of solace beneath the patina of glitz and brand marketing. For all its strengths, this latest effort tries to have it both ways. Instead, Quantum of Solace is further proof that oil and water just don’t mix.

Neil Morris