5 posts tagged “movies”
The movie 300 is reprehensible, knuckle-headed, ridiculous, completely wrong, and totally awesome.
It's a movie you either go with completely and have a great time, or don't and find yourself continually amazed at how terrible it is. The second was my experience, but maybe I can offer some pointers about how to enjoy this movie.
1. Don't think deeply about it. Especially, don't try to link it to the politics of our day. The Spartans don't represent the United States, and neither do the Persians.
2. To the extent there is a message, it's a celebration of a grim, relentless warrior's code. The movie admires the Spartans' dedication and intensity, while trying not to concentrate on the evidence that they're, kinda, completely insane psychopaths.
3. Much of my lack of enjoyment came from the fact that the film celebrates values that are repellent to me. But they're supposed to be alien, extreme values. Keep in mind that nobody's going to come out of the theater and become a Spartan.
4. Every frame in the movie looks like it came from a heavy metal video. Similarly, the dialogue, characterizations, acting are as broad and unsubtle as a heavy metal song. It's a heavy metal movie. You could enjoy it on that level.
5. Cool fight scenes. Except for the final, everyone-dies battle, the fight scenes are kind of like Jackie Chan fights - each good guy has dozens of bad guys flung at him, but somehow manages to fight them one at a time, and only the bad guys get hurt. The relentless slow motion annoyed me, but at least it wasn't Michael-Bay-style fast cutting, my pet peeve.
6. Xerxes - awesome. The bad guy of the year.
7. Whatever its flaws, at least it's not boring.
8. The movie founders on the contradiction between how seriously it takes itself and how ridiculous it is. Maybe you could see that as funny. There's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode here.
Here's an interesting analysis from film-and-comic writer John Rogers, who blogs as Kung Fu Monkey. And below is a video my son Evan showed me, which (and this rarely happens) we both think is hilarious.
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TMNT is a missed opportunity. The filmmakers have come up with a great CG visual style - terrific cityscapes, a great bad guy's lair, good character design - it's a style that one can imagine carrying the Ninja Turtles for a whole slew of movies. Then they have a script that wouldn't pass muster as a made-for-Cartoon-Network movie.
My son Andrew had been looking forward to this movie for weeks, and his first reaction was "That was awesome!", but later, he said "Dad, I was kind of disappointed in the movie." He had 2 complaints - there wasn't much of a part for Michaelangelo, his favorite turtle, and the bad guy turns out to be not all that bad. Andrew's a perceptive critic. Both complaints get to real problems with the movie.
When you've got a group of heroes, everyone needs some screen time and a story point. It's a sign of the writer's incompetence that he ignores Michaelangelo and Donatello to waste an enormous amount of time on the tense relationship between Raphael and Leonardo, a ridiculous subplot that too often pushes aside the main plot. Seems R. is angry that L. abandoned the group for a year to train in South America, despite the fact that he was ordered to do that by their master. Makes no sense, and something's wrong when your best, most carefully choreographed fight scene is between two of your friggin' heroes.
And the main plot? Well, it steals from about a dozen better movies, but it has its points. Billionaire Max Winter, who is really a three thousand year old warrior-king, is waiting for the stars to line up for some sort of power vortex to emerge; first he must capture 13 monsters, hire a ninja army to do his bidding, and bring 4 stone statues of his former generals to life. But when it turns out that Max has no evil plan, he only wants to restore balance to the universe, and the 4 generals are the only real bad guys, the tension goes right out of the film. To win, the Turtles don't have to defeat all those monsters, or the ninja army, or Max - they just have to beat the stone warriors, and not beat them so much as just push them into the vortex. Easy. Too easy.
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So are there any good movies around, besides these CG crapfests? Well, if Breach, is still playing your neck of the woods, I recommend checking that out. Chris Cooper is terrific as FBI agent and traitor Robert Hanssen, and the film gets up a good deal of suspense despite the fact that we all know how it turns out.
Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial for the new movie Premonition. It contained this phrase: "Critics say, Premonition is a sensational supernatural thriller. Four stars." It didn't name the critics who said these things, I couldn't find them at the page for this movie at Rotten Tomatoes, though I did find phrases like "some sort of record for dreary ridiculousness" and "senseless, incoherent thriller." Since only 6% of critics give Premonition a positive rating, I'm skeptical that anyone, anywhere, gave it four stars, unless it was out of 100. Sony Pictures, which made Premonition, got in trouble once before for making up a movie critic; I'm thinking it's time for them to get in trouble again.
A larger question here is, what's this movie about? And I don't mean the plot - woman wakes up to find her husband killed in a car crash, wakes up next day to find him alive, realizes something has gone wrong with space and time and tries to save husband from the inevitable - I mean what's it really about? It's part of a trend - last fall's Deja Vu was also about preventing a death which had already happened, the upcoming film Next has Nicolas Cage seeing visions of a disaster he must prevent, the short-lived tv series Day Break worked the same theme, and one of the heroes on Heroes can change the space-time continuum to avoid tragedy. We're beyond coincidence here, and taking a peek at the zeitgeist. It looks to me like people are scared. They're looking at the tragic disaster in Iraq, at global warming and other ecological turning points, at how ill-prepared America was for Katrina, at the fact that Osama is still out there, and it becomes pretty clear that this is all not going to shake out well for us. And what some people, at any rate, want to hear is that the disaster that is clearly out there for us, isn't really out there for us.
So, I'm not the first blogger to discover how easy it is to get out of the blogging habit. Let me try to get back in with a couple of movie reviews - both must-sees, both by Mexican directors, both about finding hope and something to live for in a messed-up, war-torn world.
Pan's Labyrinth, which will surely win the foreign-language film Oscar, is a rare example of using state-of-the-art special effects to tell a story more concerned with serious philosophical themes than with action scenes. It's the end of the Spanish Civil War - the Francoists have taken over, but some Loyalists still carry on the fight. A ten-year-old girl travels with her pregnant mother to join their stepfather, a sinister army captain commanding a military base. As her daily life becomes brutal and fearful, the girl discovers a labyrinth which takes her to a wonderland beneath the earth - a faun tells her that she is a reincarnated princess, and she can return to her fantasy kingdom by completing three mysterious tasks. Giant frogs, fairies and monsters share screen time with interrogations, espionage and battles. Writer/Director Guillermo del Toro finds the right balance between his art side ( Cronos, The Devil's Backbone) and his pulp scifi/fantasy side (Hellboy, Blade II). Pan's Labyrinth is a hugely entertaining movie, and, it seems to me, a deeply spiritual one, pondering the elements of humanity that, despite the madness of everyday life, go on forever.
Children of Men takes place in another time of madness - the near future, when a plague of infertility means that no children have been born on earth for 18 years. Most of the world has dissolved into chaos, but England hangs onto sanity by becoming a dictatorship, sternly cracking down on immigrants from other parts of the world trying to find safety in England. Clive Owen is a disillusioned bureaucrat who finds himself with the job of accompanying the first newly pregnant woman through a dangerous land to safety. Like much science fiction, Children of Men talks about the future in order to slyly talk about today.
Director Alfonso Cuaron did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but I think he should have - in fact, I think he should have won (Sorry Marty). Cuaron is the anti-Michael Bay - as the action scenes heat up, he doesn't increase cutting; he uses long, long takes that required an massive amount of preparation, and the result is an immediacy and intimacy with the characters that modern action scenes rarely have. There's one scene about midway through, shot mainly from inside a car, that involves fire, shooting, motorcycles, stuntwork, high speed and, in the middle of it, outstanding acting from Owen. It evokes a question rarely heard in this digital age - how the hell did they do that?
I hereby give the First Annual Michael Bay Award for Most Irritatingly Edited Action Movie to Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Too often, action movie set pieces have become flurries of quick cuts, showing the scene from every conceivable angle. It's meant to build up excitement, but to me, the result is a loss of clarity (in an action sequence, you need to know where everyone is in relation to the others) and a reminder that what you're watching is, in fact, a movie, taking the viewer out of the story and making the scene, ironically, less compelling. Michael Bay is the popularizer of this technique, but the blame for its spread isn't his alone. It's spread because of editing software that makes fast-cutting easier, and the fact that new directors often cut their teeth on commercials and music videos, where such cutting is par for the course. Stormbreaker (which is the movie's title everywhere but the U.S., where I guess they're trying to grow the Alex Rider brand) had this in spades - scenes which were decently staged and could have been exciting were cut as if the filmmakers assumed the audience members all had ADHD.
Aside from that, how was the movie? Cliched, very much James Bond for kids, but watchable. Had a sense of humor, but could've used more. All you need to know about it is that my son who likes the Alex Rider books liked the movie, and my son who doesn't like Alex Rider didn't.
Went to see Eragon this past weekend, with two of the boys, both of whom had read the book and liked it. The 14 year old was bored, the 12-year-old thought it was cool. I found it a compendium of cliches, in setting, characters, plot and art direction, without a single witty line of dialogue, or interesting bit of character business, or unforseen plot twist to spark a moment of interest and make the movie memorable. Cool-looking dragon, though.
I wondered who was more responsible for this mess, the original teen novelist, or the screenwriter, so I asked my sons how the book differred from the movie. All I got was "The book wasn't boring." I had the distinct sense that much streamlining had gone on, as happens with the Harry Potter movies, when every scene that does not directly advance the plot gets tossed by the wayside. When that happens, characterization and setting can get left behind. It seemed to me that several characters who got short shrift in the movie probably had large parts in the book, like the character Murtagh, who probably was meant to be the Han Solo to Eragon's Luke Skywalker.
When we got home from the movies, I found a copy of the book Eldest, which is the sequel to Eragon. To my delight, the first five pages of Eldest recap the first book, so I didn't have to read the whole damn thing to see where the screenwriter went wrong. The book Eragon is ridden with all the tiresome sword & sorcery cliches, but the storyline is much more emotionally complex. The book has elves, which were only mentioned in passing in the movie. Normally, I think any movie is better without elves, but when a major character is an elf, and that elfness is central to who this character is and how she acts in the story, well, you need to make her an elf. The movie's storyline has been compared to Star Wars, but the synopsis make it clear that the screenwriters deliberately made certain incidents in the book much more like Star Wars, like when Eragon invades the Death Star (sorry, Castle) to rescue the princess (sorry, elf ...er, dragon girl... uh, whatever she was supposed to be). To sum up - the filmmakers wanted to make a family friendly epic like Narnia or Harry Potter, but lacked the will to make a faithful movie or the talent to make the right changes to the material. What a waste.
And what the hell was Joss Stone doing in this? She has one scene as a fortune teller, and has no luck with the script's pompous mock-medieval dialogue. To be fair, nobody else does either, except Jeremy Irons. But from what I've seen, she should stick to singing.
