Word: po
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...When Po hears that the thousand-year-old turtle Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) is to anoint a Dragon Warrior that day, he schleps his dumpling wagon to the ceremony. In a crowded courtyard, the greatest fighters of their time, the Furious Five - the Crane (David Cross), Viper (Lucy Liu), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Tigress (Angelina Jolie) and Monkey (Jackie Chan) - are showily displaying the fabulous skills they have honed under the stern eye of their teacher Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). Then, through plot contortions even more acrobatic than anything the Furious Five have demonstrated, Po is declared the new kung fu hero...
...ancient China, a pudgy young panda named Po (voiced by Jack Black) dreams of "legends full of legendary warriors whose exploits are the stuff of legends." In these Technicolor daydreams, even the legendary Furious Five are no match for a panda's bodacity. In real life, or as real as a cartoon fantasy gets, Po is a clumsy doofus, for whom rising from a supine position can take all morning. He has the doughy shape, the domineering amiability and, ultimately, the demented perseverance of an ursine Michael Moore. And Po's job is not to defeat mythical miscreants...
...Directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne may have an unhealthy fondness for humiliating physical humor - there are more sight gags of fat creatures hurting themselves than in an entire run of Super Bowl commercials. The movie finds its footing once Po stops tripping over things and devotes himself to the exhausting curriculum devised by his master. Shifu's exact species is a matter of some dispute among early reviewers of the film ( Entertainment Weekly describes him as a raccoon, The Seattle Times as a mouse and the McClatchy newspapers as a "tiny red panda"). But no one can debate...
...with equal finesse. Many of the fights - Tai Lung vs. the Five Furies, or vs. Shifu or, finally, against a certain panda - are so smartly thought out and spectacularly executed that they might have been designed by an ace stunt coordinator like Yuen Wo-ping. One scene, which has Po and Shifu dueling with chopsticks, stilts and tree branches to grab the last available dumpling, is an instant classic...
...Richmond, with the smell of overstuffed po'boys wafting through the air, the threat of agricultural apocalypse still seems a long way off. But if the entomophagists have yet to win many converts, they've definitely earned the curiosity of the crowd, which huddles beneath a tent to watch Gordon and Gracer in a bug cook-off. Gordon serves his crickets orzo with tarantula tempura, which he makes by frying a fist-size arachnid. (I skip the spider. I like my job, but not that much.) It's Gracer who takes first prize, however, with a series of dishes, including...