And I really, really love the steampunk look of the movie. Steampunk means that there are wheels and ratchets and all sorts of "steam" driven paraphenalia to do the stuff that one simple microchip could do. For example an ordinary gun is... well, an ordinary gun. Gru pulls out his gun and immediately 6 or 7 additional barrels pop into being.
His couch was in the center of what looked like a dinosaur or other large reptilian thing - I loved that couch.
But, there were some problems with it.
The movie is made for young kids. Why, then, in the scene with Vector, is he talking about "a geometric entity endowed with both length and direction" and when he talks about "length" he does some pelvic thrusts, so the adults in the audience knew exactly what he was saying - but really, every little kid there must have gotten some idea too, and that was so unneccesary. Thank God none of the males in the movie were drawn such that the mounds that would their genitalia were shown, but still, it was so classless.
But, it continued.
One of the current methods of showing your lack of respect for someone is to angle your butt at them and pretend to fart, or to rub something several times on your butt (as the ping pong nemesis did in Balls of Fury) and as Vector does here.
Totally classless, and no need to pander to the lowest common denominator by showing it.
But it gets worse.
Throughout the movie, Gru's mother is shown as a real bitch. No other word for it - a verbally-abusive bitch. When Gru tells her his dream is to fly to the moon, she very casually says, "You're too late. NASA doesn't send monkeys to the moon anymore." How cruel, and on a par with everything else she says.
So what I want to know is, when Gru finally grows up, why is this woman still in his life? Why did't he shoot her to the moon a long time ago? [This is a mystery fiction trope that I really dislike. There are at least a couple of authors, probably more - or perhaps it's the same one using a multitude of pen names) who always has a woman detective, her husband or boyfriend, and a live-in mother who can't stand the man and is always saying rude things about him. Again, if I were in this situation in real life, I'd give the woman an ultimatum. Stop saying rude things or get out. And I hate reading in fiction books where this type of rude behavior is tolerated.
Finally, I found the ending of the movie particularly distasteful. Again, this movie is meant for little children, and the three girls in the movie are pre-pubescent and shouldn't even know what pelvic thrusts look like, let alone what they are.
So at the end, since Gru had missed the girl's recital, they're putting on a recital just for him and his minions. Three girls, dancing to Swan Lake, while mom, Gru and the minions look on. Could have been a sweet ending.
But no. Instead one of the Minions decides to turn into a DJ and puts Staying Alive onto the record player. So Gru gets up on stage, and all of a sudden he's doing the pelvic thrusts, and the clapping his butt with one hand and then the other while he looks out at the audience, and its just so inappopriate. Then we get the Vector character on the moon, who can apparently hear the music as well, and he shoves his butt out and starts slapping it like he's riding a horse (or having sex) and it was just unpleasant.)
(Previous to going into the movie, I had walked down the long line of magazines at my local Books-a-Million, and there was a whole rack dedicated to "Men's Interest" that had magazines with covers that featured nothing but women in bikinis, facing away from the camera, posing so their very large butts tilted upward and were just "in your face", while they look over their shoulders at the viewer with a seductive look. One model looked like she was in a pool, and she and her breasts were facing the camera, but you could tell she had her hips angled so that her buttocks were perked up a little, just ready for a man to start "riding" her. Disgusting. I'm all for consenting adults doing whatever they want to do in the privacy of their own home, but it is sad to see women pandering to their own degredation like this, in magazines in plain view for little kids - and big kids with their cellphones, of course - to see.)
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