I didn't want to close the year with the last month's entry, but I'm still not in the mood to restart the usual blog reviews. However, a short preview entry was the usual choice for this period, and that I can do, but I won't split it in two this time. There's not much to choose from anyway...
Now, in December, I won't stop on Matrix Resurrections and neither on the third iteration of the third reincarnation of Spider-Man. By far the most interesting title in the upcoming weeks seems to be "Nightmare Alley". Guillermo del Toro is one of the directors who still has a personal touch, and you can spot it already from the trailer. Besides that, lately I tend to have more confidence in movies based on books than on productions with an original script. Even though that doesn't guarantee for which characters is decided that's more "correct" to be changed, or what action or dialogue to be adjusted to fit the current tendencies. After all, well.. that's more important than what the writer had in mind. But let's not get lost now in examples.. Hopefully this won't join the list.
For January I'll indulge myself to be subjective (nope, I wasn't earlier). Wes Craven might be long gone to other planes of universe, but I still have hope for the fifth "Scream". We have the same directors couple as we did in "Ready or Not", which was refreshing in a horror genre that's haunted for too long by too many ghosts and spirits. Besides that, most important, Sidney (Neve Campbell) is back ;) As I said, I'm subjective on this one.
In February, what got my eye is "The Outfit". I have a vague feeling that it's gonne be built on the same lines with "Bad Times at the El Royale" or with (the less inspired) "The Hateful Eight" of Tarantino, but different from these both. We'll see...
Starting from March the options reduce a lot (at least looking at released trailers), but from everything in the super-here genre there's one I'd rather not ignore completely - "The Batman" - at least for its cinematic experience potential that it had since Tim Burton to this day. Whatever reincarnation number it might have reached...
There's nothing to mentionf for April, at least not now, and in May the only title to catch some attention is another reboot - "Top Gun: Maverick". Honestly... it always seemed a miracle the fact that the '86 "Top Gun" got so popular. The script was at best mediocre. What saved that movie was the director's genius, but Tony Scott is unfortunately gone. We'll see if the army of screenwriters hired by Tom Cruise can compensate for that now.
Well, this was sort of bitter, I guess :).. But that's pretty much how I felt 2021 in general. Maybe it will change next year. Until then, all I can say is: Happy Holidays! :)
I took a break from blogging a month or so ago, and the motivation from my last entry is still valid. However... I never left a year from the "origins" of this without an anniversary entry, so I told myself I could force a short one. The problem is that I don't have a movie subject for year 14.
Normally, for this kind of entry, I would've looked for some production that I could recommend with all my heart (not that I could find that every year until now). So, it crossed my mind to write about "Dune" - Villeneuve version 2021, but I'm not in the right mood for that, and I can't really recommend it with all my heart. One phrase is enough: as visual experience (ignoring the 3D) and audio one too is superb and it really deserves watching it, and fortunately that covers well the less positive trends you can sense in Hollywood lately, although these might still be visible to somebody who's not at the first experience with the "Dune" universe, but I'm really not in the mood to talk about that. Done, subject checked. What about the rabbits...
Since my first year of blogging (the Romanian version) I've had a series of entries tagged as "chasing rabbits", where I allowed myself some off-topic writing once per year. And, as a series, I usually had a connection between the current entry and the previous. There's been a while since I wrote one, and I almost forgot about these. But not completely. So, I did something that really dislike, to read my old blog posts, just to see where I left my "chase". In the last one from 2017 (didn't have the patience to move even more back than that) I was rambling about my time machine obsession. Surprisingly, even though I was more naive back than, my thoughts about this didn't fundamentally change. Maybe just that the random stuff in life is not always so random. The idea to fix the issue by moving back still stands, but because we don't have yet a more concrete solution for time travel maybe we can use the "classic" simulation = reset the context now and restart. In other words sometimes you can try to be the rabbit, if you want to catch the rabbit. Eh, cheap philosophy :)...
As it seems, I'm back to old movies not having a better subject. "The Morning After" is not the best of the '80s, but it has some certain charm (+ obviously I've watched it more recently than the '80s so I can still remember what I've seen).
An alcoholic actress, beyond her prime, wakes up one morning, somewhere in a penthouse, near a dead body with a knife in his chest. Completely amnesic and with no recollection of meeting the late fellow, she decides to run away. Where running = flying out of town, but the whole thing happens to coincide with Thanksgiving so the plan fails due to lack of room in scheduled flights. So, having also her car picked up by the police, the only escape she finds seems to be a guy who struggles to start his wreck's engine in the airport parking lot and who's nice enough to offer her a ride back to the city. Leaving out the details, "the plot thickens" the second morning after another drinking night, when the dead body gets mysteriously teleported in the shower of her own house. Fortunately, the guy she met earlier, who we find out to be a former cop, offers to help the apparent murderer to find out how dead men can walk.
Probably half the movie's charm is given by the acting of Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges in the lead roles, and the totally atypical romance story. For the rest, you can feel the direction of Sidney Lumet building up the suspense, even though it's not really among his best. Also, we don't actually have a perfect crime novel resolution, the last part becoming predictable enough about the solution of the mystery. Even so, the script with the comic nuances it has it's nice, and makes a watchable movie despite the age it shows sometimes.
I don't remember writing any blog entry that could be labeled as "paying tributes", and I doubt the current one would fit something like this. But my subject for this week was not that good anyway, so I thought it might be a better call to shortly point out at least one movie starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, IMHO the most versatile actor France had in the last 100 years. And I think "Les miserables", the '95 version, is eloquent of this versatility. There are many years since I've last seen the movie, so I won't try any detailed summary because my memory won't help me. It's not a classic adaptation of the novel. The story is set during WW2, instead of the French Revolution. It's actually a parallel over time that probably could be extended more. So, even my last viewing of this is far from fresh, I think I've seen the movie like three times or so, enough to stick in my reference book as the best adaptation of Hugo's novel, although it's not an adaption of Hugo's novel. The credit for this is shared by both Belmondo in the lead role - a character built as a replica of Jean Valjean, as well as by Claude Lelouch as director and writer. And that's pretty much all I had to say.
I had a theory that Guy Ritchie makes one-two good movies followed by a bad one, and the most recent, "The Gentlement" was one I liked. So, I had my second thoughts about "Wrath of Man". After I finally watched, I'm wondering if I got too picky, or if it wouldn't have been better to merge it in the same entry I wrote last month with "Pig" and "Nobody"...
Yet another revenge movie. It's actually a remake of a French film from 2004. It starts with an intro where an armored van is robbed, the guards are killed during the incident, as well as a kid in the area, a collateral victim. Fast-forward to the moment when a mysterious fellow is hired as a guard by the same security firm. It becomes obvious fast enough that the guy has his own agenda. After that, we're slowly getting more details, leading to the motivation, revenge for his son, the collateral victim above. There are other background elements of the man in the title that we're given one by one as the action evolves, but as usual I won't spoil the most engaging part of the story.
The problem with "Wrath of Man" is probably in the script, which.. I don't know... it's a bit too "theatrical". I can't find a better term now. The density of lines that are surpass the realistic level in the dialogue seemed too high for me, some exchanges being close too stupid. Maybe there's some intention for that, as a relief for the darkness we have in the rest, but it still feels exaggerated. Especially since the dark feeling is probably the plus side of the movie; both visually and mostly the audio support very well the tension we get from the story development. It's like having one of David Ayer's movies ("Harsh Times", "Street Kings", "End of Watch", etc.), which are usually very harsh, over which you're getting the the typical English humor of Guy Ritchie. The result is fine, but there's still something that doesn't fit well there.
I've had enough "red flags" for "Reminiscence" to skip it, but I didn't do it. 46 on Metascore, 37 on RT and a puny 6.0 on IMDb didn't convince me. I thought that it couldn't be that bad with such a promising trailer. A SciFi packed with time travel, as it looked like, it already scored some winning points from start. But, finally yes, it is that bad...
First, we don't have any time travel. In a future that seems a prequel for "Waterworld" (we can add an extra red flag) = in a semi-flooded Miami sem, an advanced tech (pretty much the only advanced tech actually) allows re-living memories while some stasis is induced to the body. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) is a private contractor that offers this kind of service, offering his experience accumulated during the latest war, when the memory machine was used for interogations. One day, Mae - "la femme fatale" - enters his shop as a client needing to figure out where she lost her keys, and from that point we also enter into a deeply entangled neo-noir romance, with even more deep plot holes. It's a waste of time to write more about it...
The most frustrating part is that the story in "Reminiscence" has potential. But it's ruined by the directing and the writing. It might look like something between "Inception" and "Blade Runner" but it doesn't get close to any of these two. Probably a more appropriate comparison would be with "Strange Days", an older, less known movie, but much much better than what we have here. The actors are struggling, but you can't do much with cliche lines or ridiculous parts of talking with yourself to tell the viewer what can be seen already on the screen. Besides this, the whole plot is bound weirdly as a whole - my feeling was of some series episodes that are shortened and just edited together to rush out a two hour movie without much polishing. Add to that also a sound mixing that normally doesn't stand out, or if it does it's in a positive way. Rarely it happened to watch a movie that catched my ear for how bad the tracks are mixed together, even if it happened in one or two scenes. The only part that's ok-ish are the visuals... and the trailer. Too bad for what it promised.
Rating: 1.75 out of 5 (with a reminiscence of 0.25 for what could've been)
The story of "The Green Knight" is part of the Arthur and the knights of the round table lore. In essence is a typical "quest for glory" fantasy tale, and not a very complex one. That's why I didn't expect much potential for a movie made out of this. After watching it I stick to this opinion, however limiting it to the narrative side. Besides that, "The Green Knight" can be a lesson of what can be achieved visually in a movie, even one with a somewhat simple subject.
I think that the director, David Lowery, was quite happy with the space offered by the vague context of the legends, which gives indeed quite some freedom of expression. On the other hand that's probably exactly what will confuse somebody who doesn't know much about the subject. It's probably one of the few situations where is actually recommended to know the story in advance in order to figure out what the movie wants to say. Pretty much the same as in the case of a known play you see the n-th time, when you'll probably focus mostly on how it's stage, and not on what's about.
A while ago I've read a written version of the legend, and from what I still remember probably mixed up with what the movie reminded me, the story went something like this. "The Green Knight", a mysterious character shows up during the Christmas day before king Arthur's table and proposes a game: he offers to be hit by anyone who wants to do it given that who does it has the guts to receive the same strike after one year. Gawain, the youngest of the knights, and also the one lacking any acts of courage, accepts the challenge, confident that this will be done by beheading his opponent. To everybody's surprise the green knight picks up his head from the bloody floor and leaves not before reminding Gawain that within a year he'll wait for him at the Green Chapel to close the game. The year passes, and Gawain is pressed to honor his word, starting his journey towards the meeting place. When he's about to end it, Gawain stops at some castle where another mysterious knight and his wife offer him shelter for a couple days. This knight proposes another game - for the time of Gawain's stay, his host will go hunting and will provide Gawain with what he's catching given that Gawain gives him whatever he will receive while staying in the castle. From that point on, I don't remember that well how the legend moved on, except the fact that Gawain respects the deal up to the end when the wife of his host trying to seduce Gawain kisses him and offers a sash to protect him from any physical harm. Gawain offers to the master of the castle the kiss back as agreed, but keeps the sash for himself hoping it'll protect him in his final confrontation. It all ends with the showdown, when the green knight just makes a scratch on Gawain's neck, after which he discloses his identity as his former host and the scratch being the punishment for hiding the sash, but also harming him so little as a reward for honoring the rest of the deal.
The movie deviates a bit towards the end, but anyway the differences aren't that far from the above version. Initially I was surprised by the turn it took, just to understand where it wanted to get at the final scene. But to figure it out you probably need to know the story from start. The adaptation has anyway lots of symbolism integrated in it, but unfortunately I didn't have patience to properly digest that. I couldn't say it did bore me, but clearly, it's not a movie with a typical action development. The main attraction remain its visuals. In brief, "The Green Knight" really deserves a watch for that only. The rest depends on your mood.
I've had "The Orville" on my "to watch" list for quite a while. There aren't many new SciFi series and it didn't have many episodes released, so I finally found some time for it. The verdict after is similar to most of the other opinions I found online - it's probably what you'd expect to see in a "Star Trek" series (well, at least if your "first contact" with ST was with TNG, DS9, Voyager, or even with Enterprise or the original series, and not with the more recent ones). I don't think that limits though the potential audience. And that's because "The Orville" has something of its own: the humor.
It stands clear from the first episode that "The Orville" starts as a parody of the classic recipe for a SciFi series, where we have an exploratory ship going bold into space "where no one has gone before". It's probably something to expect given that it's a series created + partially also written by Seth MacFarlane, in whose CV you won't find much stuff beyond the comic genre. Moreover, here he's also taking the part of captain Ed Mercer, leading a crew who seems more fit for a sequel of "Galaxy Quest" (another parody following the same pattern, for who still remembers it). It takes a while to get the interesting part, which gets more obvious as you advance in season 2 = the themes of the episodes start becoming more seriouse, even philosophical sometimes. If my first impression was of some easy comedy set in outer space, I definitely can't say that anymore after two seasons.
Indeed "The Orville" has its own specific humor, which you have to like. Otherwise, it might seem that it disregards some subjects. Actually, it's probably the perfect way to avoid getting into the area where life is seen either in white, or in black, sometimes derailing into some wannabe lessons of right and wrong. Unfortunately that seems to be a common trend lately, and "The Orville" has its own share of episodes trying to teach you some morals, but stil it doesn't dismiss the grey area. Even if sometimes it's present only as a discreet nuance, it's there, and the humor somehow helps keeping it.
Not long ago I wrote about the first season of "Star Trek: Picard" and I was saying it's much better than "Discovery" (at least compared to the first five episodes, because I couldn't handle more). Still, not even "Picard", for its first season at least, wasn't a Star Trek in it's "classic" sense, where the majority of the episodes were focused on a separate subject, even if we had elements of a global story arc. From that perspective "The Orville" is much closer to what Star Trek once was, possibly also due to including in the production team some ST veterans (Brannon Braga - one of the main writers from TNG to Enterprise, Jonathan Frakes - Riker from TNG, directing here some episodes, and others).
To conclude, I don't think I've seen a SciFi series structured like that since "Stargate: Atlantis" incoace, and even though in general I prefer a series that follows a more complex and continuous narrative line, which is obviously more engaging than stand-alone episodes, I still felt the need for something more "light". And what I can say until now is that "The Orville" seems to fill perfectly the place of that.
If I would've watched only one of the two movies, either "Pig" or "Nobody", probably I wouldn't have written anything. By chance though, I've seen them both recently, and I think this context deserves a blog entry.
"Pig" starts as a low budget John Wick. Some guy (Nicolas Cage) lives like a hermit deep in the forest, with his truffle pig, his only contact with the outside world being the distributor who sells the mushrooms. All nice and well until one night when two thieves beat him up and steal the animal. From here on, it looks like what you would expect - the payback - the guy wants his pig back. What you would not expect is how this moves on. I didn't see the trailer before the movie, and I think it tells too much already. "Pig" deserves watching mostly for the surprise you'll get, delivered piece by piece. It starts with some minor details about the guy in the woods: a name that still seems to open doors in the city he had left 15 years back, a beating taken in the some sort of an "underground fight club" in the basement of a former hotel just to receive a clue for his search, after which at some point his former job comes up, moving further on with a confrontation with an "underboss" and finally "the showdown" with "the big boss". It looks like a typical template for a revenge story :) Well, it's not.. We don't get guns and explosions, what we have here is.. knives and forks. And I won't say more.
"Nobody" is a John Wick, or better said a retired John Wick (Bob Odenkirk), working a management job in a company owned by his father-in-law, and living a monotonous life. All nice and well though until one night when two thieves break his home, steal his change from the living room and his wristwatch, give a black eye to his son, and leave our guy being asked by cops, relatives and his kid why he didn't use his golf cross. From here on is what you would expect - the payback - but this ends quickly. So quickly that being already in the kick-ass mood, "the nobody" breaks the bones of a five member gang harassing a lone girl in a bus. One of them, unfortunately, being the brother of the local Russian mafia kingpin. Obviously, now the bad guy wants revenge. And now, we're getting here too some details about our "nobody": again somebody who's identity is blurry but freaks everybody out, again somebody who retired a long ago, having his basement secured as a nuclear bunker that not even his kids seem to know about, and again at some point we're given more info on his former job, and we move further on to fighting the Russian army an finally "the big boss". From its half onward the movie gets very similar to John Wick (first), which can be explained by having the same screenwriter who didn't even bother to use, I don't know.. yakuza, or some other mob organization as bad guys (it's probably more politically correct to be the Russians lately in this position). What else to say... Obviously we have lots of guns and explosions. Practically, the only original part of the movie is the main character - who indeed at a first sight is in a total contract with the classic image of an action hero.
"Pig" is a movie that's a bit too pretentious for what's left in the end, and there are parts where it's a bit exaggerated, but it gets as much as possible from a surprise character, and not a "surprise" like a former secret agent/assassin/etc who, wow, we find out what army skills possesses. Objectively, that's the impression I was left with after my initial view. Which, unfortunately was before "Nobody". Because if it would have been after, probably I would have seen it more positively in the above comparison. It's too much to say that "Pig" is a "thriller" as IMDB labels it, but that completes well the subliminal irony towards the typical action movie. We don't have any gratuitous violence in "Pig", where we could draw statistics on shot bullets vs. "Rambo III". Such as we could do for "Nobody", which even if it tries in its first part to make fun of some cliches, finally it ends up with the ususal liniar development of the genre, where bad guys are taken out one by one until the last who obviously needs the "boss fight". For its first part that seems promising, it's probably acceptable as an average popcorn movie, but that's all of it. So, "Pig" wins :)
In a genre that seemed obsolete at some point = cold war spy thrillers, surprisingly we still get new releases, not very frequent, but I think more often than for instance SciFi movies, Last year I was writing about "Jack Strong" inspired from a real case. We could say that "The Courier" is its prequel. The subject here is pretty much the same - a high ranking officer from the Eastern block decides that's more healthy for the good of the international politics of the time to start leaking classified info to the CIA. In "Jack Strong" the main character was a Polish officer, who in the beginning of the movie was attending the execution of colonel Penkovsky, an example given by KGB for the risks of collaborating with the capitalist enemy. Well (mega spoiler), here it's where the movies connect - Oleg Penkovsky is another real character, whose career as a spy is presented in "The Courier".
Now that we know the ending, what's left to be said is that the title character here is not Penkovsky, but the "courier" - Greville Wynne, an average businessman residing in London, unfortunately for him having plenty of customers in Eastern Europe, but fortunately perfect to be recruited by the British intelligence to provide a connection with the Eastern source. The action follows the more or less romanticized history (let's be fair - more) from recruiting Greville to the not so fortunate ending, but where Mr. Wynne's nationality provides hime a chance to survive.
What saves the movie is probably the fact that's based on true events. What drags it down is that the true events are a bit too "filmic". "The Courier" feels based on actual facts as much as "Titanic" feels to be a hystorical movie. The aproach is just too.. light - very theatrical and filled with stereotypes, clearly less realistic than "Jack Strong", but still acceptable if you're looking for something lighter. Anyway, coincidence or not - the two movies not being related production wise - at some point in the first part of "The Courier", we have a "deja vu" scene where colonel Penkovsky attends the execution of major Popov, yet another real spy discovered by the KGB. So we have a subject for the prequel's prequel.. :)
My first reaction when I heard about "Cruella", was not a reaction. It was an "ignore" for yet another recycled production stemming from the more and more present lack of imagination at Hollywood. And to give an argument for that, at a quick count, in 2019 - the last pre-pandemic year, the top box-office stats show a score of 26-to-7 (if I didn't miss something) for sequels/reboots/spin-offs/etc vs fresh stuff = featuring a new subject. So, the idea to squeeze out a villain origin story from the "101 Dalmatians" didn't catch my attention. Especially since I don't really like prequels. So, how did I end up watching this: 1) I was looking for something more recent, and I actually found a couple titles, but 2) at 2 AM before going to sleep, knowing that probably it won't work in one view, Id didn't want to fragment watching something else. So, I told myself, ok, let's see how Disney managed to get something that was received better than the previous attempts for a live-action version of the classic animation. Obviously, as in many situations where my expectations were rock bottom, the final impression is way higher, but I'll try to be objective.
I must say that my first surprise after watching this was the complexity of the story - not that it is very complex, but I was expecting.. nothing. I didn't read "101 Dalmatians" the book, but I can assume that it doesn't get too deep into Cruella's origins, so in that case, we can give a plus to the writing. I also don't want to get too deep into the story, but in brief we're starting with the childhood of the character, who from start manifests a split personality between Estella and Cruella, something like a light version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. It doesn't take long, and the girl loses her mother in tragic conditions, ending up as member of a pickpocket gang with Horace & Jasper, who we know from the animated version. Years pass, and by some fortunate series of events Estella manages to make a career shift from thief to her dreamjob: a designer hired by the most select fashion brand in London, owned by The Baroness - the negative character in the movie. And from here we have a bit of a soap opera, and as in any soap if we tell who, how and when met the path with somebody else, we'll spoil too much.
What the movie tries, especially in its first part is to humanize a character who we know it's a bad one from the classic story. And it's not just Cruella, it does it even more with Horace & Jasper. That's something that for me seemed a bit too forced. Especially since, in its second part, it doesn't go that far in the opposite direction, up to where you would expect seeing how Estella is turned into Cruella. In the end it's a Disney movie in 2021 - let's get real, seeing dalmatians as fur coats nowadays, a bit too sensitive. In any case, the movie rolls as a light comedy from start to its end, which probably helps in all this character development, in the sense that you can't take it very serious neither when Cruella is Estella, nor when Estella is Cruella. In general, I like such an approach, because when the light storyline gets broken for inserting the drama, that has an impact that's much more clear and strong (I can only think at "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" now as an example). We have something pretty similar here, at the climactic point of the soap part, about two thirds in the movie, which gives the whole thing some force, but it's still too little. You would expect to hit you harder with something at the end, but, well... it's a Disney movie.
Leaving the story aside, I don't know... it seemed to me that the rest of the departments that got involved in the movie had pretty much the same expectations as I did from the subject, and gave everything to counterbalance it. Let's not spend much on the acting, where Emma Stone confirms me again that she's probably currently the best actress in the Hollywood generation born in the '80s. For the technical side, pretty much everything from production design to VFX has a shot to whatever awards will be given next year, although typically the movies targeting that get a release during the fall-winter season. I'm reserving a bit more space to mention the soundtrack. I don't remember another situation where I've heard such a good mixing between arrangements of known songs and an original score. Actually.. I don't remember any other case like that. At Tarantino for instance, where we find quite often the first approach, I don't know for instance if in "Kill Bill" was any piece of original score. Well, here we have both - again, I don't know who should get more credit for that - the composer, Nicholas Britell, or the sound mixing department, but the result is probably enough as a reason to clearly recommend you to watch this movie.
To conclude, I'm probably not the only one who sees "Cruella" as a sort of "Joker" made by Disney. That's my final impression. Which probably loses something from the drama, but also even more probable is more appropriate for a period when the reality around is dark enough, so you won't feel the need to see that so poignant also in a movie :)
It's been a while since I'm counting the length when selecting a movie for watching. It's probably not the best criteria, but it's practical when the allocated time for this starts after 1 AM. "Till Death" is a short movie, otherwise I probably wouldn't have watched it. It would've been a loss. Not that we're talking about a masterpiece, but it was surprisingly original.
What we have here is a more peculiar revenge story, which rapidly turns into a survival movie. Moving 10 years back, we find Emma (Megan Fox) as victim of a violent robbery attempt, ending up marrying the young attorney who's sending the attacker behind bars. Years pass, and he's advancing his career to owning a successful law firm, but their relation gets cold. The movie actually starts when Emma's ending an extramarital affair, just before her marriage anniversary. Her husband organizes a "gift" for this occasion in the form of a romantic evening in a vacation house by a lake, but that's just a prequel for what follows. He decides to put a bullet to his head the following morning, after handcuffing himself to his wife. Well, I already said something you don't get from the trailer :) Something else we don't see there is how elaborate is the sick payback plan. Light spoiler - eventually we find that the deceased probably experienced some "remorse" after sending his wife's attacker to jail and decides to end his life only after the guy's release, leaving him some diamonds as compensation. The clause for getting into possession of these, however, is not that simple.
All the context and whatever else the trailer provides might seem a bit unrealistic, but the the movie slowly delivers small parts that add sense, turning the action in a tensed race for survival. That's actually the catchy factor here - the action is unpredictable enough, although you might not expect that. Emma must deal with the isolated house during a cold winter, carrying a dead heavy husband, who's brain was passed before the bullet by all kinds of thoughts on how to make the "separation" from his wife harder to accomplish. And I can say that either Megan Fox fits perfectly to the role, or she took some acting lessons since last time I saw her in a movie ( I know I'm mean :-) ). Not the last thing: although we clearly have a macabre element, and despite what the trailer might suggest, the violence level in the movie is probably at a third of the average "The Walking Dead" episode. So, to conclude, I think the movie is quite underrated. It's not so easy these days to find a complex enough story, starting from a complicated idea - how to survive a post-mortem revenge - within a thriller that respects its genre = more tension, less VFX.
The first thing to say after watching "A Quiet Place Part II" is that you need the first "A Quiet Place" to understand everything. You're offered some sort of a prequel intro, which is probably the minimum required to get the context: a totaly unfriendly alien invasion of some creatures relying exclusively on their hearing to decimate the human race. However, I don't think this minimum helps much somebody who would prefer skipping the first movie. I obviously didn't have time to re-watch it, but fortunately I still remembered enough of it to make sense of some references. And also to say that I think I like the sequel better.
The movie is quite short, especially if we're also cutting the intro I was mentioning. Basically, it follows where we were left with the four surviving Abbott's - a mother with three children (including a newborn), and presents us their path after abandoning the former shelter. We first get a scene where we're reminded the essential of the last movie = the hearing device of the older daughter is the ultimate weapon (and pretty much the only one) against the monsters, after which we're stopping at an abandoned factory where we meet Emmett, apparently a former neighbour from before the apocalypse. Then, the group splits. The girl runs away towards an island where she thinks there might be survivors being followed by Emmett sent to get her back, while the rest tries to resist somewhere in a basement providing some level of acoustic insulation. I think it's best to stop here with the details, otherwise there won't be much left to discover from the story.
The narrative is as it seems - very simple. What's to appreciate in the movie is how this narrative is "dressed". In brief, the production level is very good, both at technical level, and as well as the directing and the acting. I'll just detail more on the editing. We have two brief parts where the tension is on a growing path, one sometime at two thirds of the movie, and one at the ending. I won't spoil more besides that in both we have a critical development in each of the two locations - on the path to the island, respectively at the abandoned factory. For me it seems very hard to make a paralel cut such that you'll get a simultaneous development towards the climax - in each of the two places, without one of the sequences to "lose" in front of the other. I think I've seen attempts like that, which didn't end well - that's why I don't remember one in particular. Well, here it works - twice, with the "advantage" let's say that the second time, the climactic point is a common one ending the movie, but that makes it even better. Besides this, to finally give some light spoiler :), I can say that the ending leaves again plenty of room for a "Part III", but now we don't have so much to remember, so you don't need to wait for it ;)
I don't remember exactly when I've seen "The Invisible" for the first time, but it probably was more than 13 years ago, before writing my first blog entry. At that moment I liked it a lot. My memory is not so good though to write based on that impression, but I've refound it on TV recently, by chance. What I can say after my 2nd watch is that either my standards went up a lot, or it's harder for me to get impressed by drama, but even so I still find a movie a bit underrated.
What we have here is a mix-up between a teen romance and a thriller, with drama accents that you can feel (spoiler) in not the most happy ending ever. Nick Powell is a fresh high-school graduate, coming from a wealthy family, aspiring towards a career as a writer, and willing to escape from his mother's close watch to continue his studies in London. At the same school, Annie Newton has the complete opposite profile: poor disfunctional family, a bunch of unorthodox activities in order to make some money: from loan sharking to stealing cars and others, and a future that most likely looks to lead behind bars. The paths of the two intersect after Annie is denounced by her boyfriend pissed of being cut off from the spoils of a jewelery robbery, but somehow Nick ends up as the one suspected of informing the police. So, Annie decides to pay the "bill" helped by her partners in crime, and Nick ends up in a coma, thrown at the bottom of a sewer and becoming "the invisible". Precisely, he's trapped somewhere between life and death, giving him the opportunity to walk among the living and to observe what he left behind, until he becomes aware that he's still alive. After that we're getting in a race to save his life, where, predictable enough, the role of who brought him to this state shifts completely.
The movie is a remake of a Swedish production, which I didn't see and it might be better. Here, the target is clearly set somewhere similar to "Twilight", released during the same years. Probably this age range contributed also to why I liked it better when I've seen it first, despite being already older than this target. Indeed, I can't deny now that are many parts where the story is at least hardly believable. Besides that, the approach for the SciFi part is very... "economic" let's call it, in the sense that pretty much all Nick's interactions with the environment in his "ectoplasmic" state are presented as effectively taking place, with a sort of flashback succession where nothing really happened. Given the potential confusion degree of the approach, I'd say that the movie is very well edited. Still, you can't deny that some VFX might have been more.. natural in this context. Probably all these lead to the low rating it has on pretty much all the movie sites it's indexed on. However, the movie has something in how it's put together so that if you can ignore the above, it builds up an emotional load that grows on you until the end. It's either that, or the fact that when I've watched it for the first time I had an instant crush for Margarita Levieva who has the leading part of Annie :), or it just has a nostalgia effect for years with less stress, but for me it's still something like a...
I didn't see a movie for about three weeks. And three weeks ago I've chosen a short one - recommended somewhere as the most non-Woody Allen movie by Woody Allen: "The Purple Rose of Cairo". I've said a couple times already that I was never very attracted by Allen's typical genre of light comedy alternatic with drama and romance, but I've also had surprises from time to time. And this was on my list since long ago... but there was something telling me that's not as non-Woody Allen as advertised.
Indeed, the subject leaves a bit the space of the typical group of family/friends/relations/discussions mostly central in Woody Allen's work. We have a "SciFi" element - a character from a '30s movie reacts unexpectedly when he gets a crush for a woman in the attendance, who, unhappily married, finds repeatedly refuge at the cinema - precisely, he steps out from the screen with a clear intention to spend the rest of his life near his new found love. Which leads to a surreal situation advancing in cascade, the studio starts getting trouble with the movie also in other cinemas, the rest of the characters are annoyed by not advancing with the action in the movie, the real actor in the role finds his career endangered, and so on.
I won't say where this goes - all I can tell is that we're moving back evetually to a sort of triangle of relations with a typical script by Woody Allen, and with an ending that drags us out from the SciFi, turning the tide to the cold reality. This is less disconcerting though. My main disappointment was that up to some point, the movie actually creates a context original enough to have potential for much more than it finally offers. But, as I said... it's short :)
About four years ago, I was quite happy to hear about a new Star Trek series: Discovery, after a 10+ year break from the former, Enterprise. However, I turned unhappy only after 5 episodes - that's the amount I beared watching, given the senseless development and the bunch of cliches typical to the latest years trend to turn pretty much each production into a manifest for current social issues (but it mainly was the lack of sense). That's why I didn't expect much last year from the release of Star Trek: Picard. Now, I finally decided to give it a chance...
I'll try to be brief - the first season is too after all. You can feel the same trend as above, but here is kept within some decent limits in comparison to the SciFi contents, which is probably the main reason to choose watching Star Trek (unlike for instance the latest nominees list for Oscar best picture). The subject revolves around a secret plot of exterminating an entire "race" of androids, starting from a pair of twins seemingly spawned from the "genes" of Data, a familiar character for anybody old enough to know about "The Next Generation", or the Star Trek movies of the 90s. Actually the current series seems to be a tribute for the TNG fans, bringing back to screen many of the original crew members on that Enterprise, besides obviously Patrick Steward, acting again as Picard, ready to come back from retirement for a last mission. Add to that also Seven-of-Nine from Star Trek Voyager, and we have a clear homage to the ST period before year 2000.
To move also a bit beyond the above, what ST: Picard tries, is probably to make the chronological step to the next Next Generation. We have a new crew, this time with a longer mission, about 10 episodes time, but, spoiler alert - apparently ready to take new steps to "where no one has gone before" in the next season. Somehow this blending between the old and new formula works this time, mostly because the new cast, or actually the characters seem much more... "Star Trek" then the Discovery attempt (just looking at the new ship captain, a guy with multiple virtual clones as crew members it's already enough to catch your attention). Another good point about ST: Picard is that the writers of the first season seemed to know from start how the whole thing should end, which brings a certain coherence in the action development, not like other cases where it's obvious that the script struggles to move on by adding new random stuff from episode to episode, just to make it somehow to the end. Anyway, there are parts here too that are far fetched, but still safely far from ridiculous. In any case, after watching "The Expanse" it became quite hard for me to accept the attention (or lack of it) given to details in other SciFi series, so probably I'm not objective enough.
Overall, ST: Picard is not a masterpiece, but it's quite refreshing in the Star Trek universe, despite the contradiction with recycling old characters. As production value, it has enough budget to satisfy the most exigent expectations. And also the nicest score I've heard in a series for quite a while (not that I'm watching too many). Hopefully it won't go bad during season 2... Fingers crossed.
I avoided last time to mention future box-office hits, favoring some titles that seemed more entitled to steal a couple of hours from the viewer's life. Lately, at least for me, it became harder to allocate time for watching a movie, so I care more if it's worth doing it. Therefore, despite the "classic" preview split = part 1 - summer, part 2 - fall, I decided to ignore what's currently announced for September = "Shang-Chi" (yet another Marvel movie), "Venom" the second (still featuring Marvel in its credits) and "No Time to Die" aka Bond the 25th, and instead to move back to August. Because, since my last entry, there's a new trailer out for this month - "Reminiscence" - which looks more promising than all the three above (and yep, I know I'm biased :P).
Risking to contradict the initial idea above, in October we have "Dune". Honestly, most of the cast seems miscasted to me, and my feel is that this won't surpass my preference for the mini-series produced in 2000 + mostly its sequel in 2003, which completes that adaptation so well that any other version limited to the first part only probably won't feel complete. I couldn't skip though mentioning one of the biggest "SciFi" events of the year. Besides that, Denis Villeneuve as director might count in this equation, although both "Arrival" and "Blade Runner 2049" were below my expectations.
"Ghostbusters: Afterlife" is scheduled for a November release. I've never been to fond of this series, and I skipped the latest reboot. The trailer here, however, has a more retro feeling, which resembles a bit the feel of "Super 8", another production that can make you nostalgic of the '80s. Besides that, it's probably interesting from the direction perspective - Jason Reitman, the son of Ivan Reitman, who was behind the original "Ghostbusters".
With that I'm closing the series of titles that seem worthy of attention for the next half of the year (at least what has a trailer out). I'd say it already looks better than the previous half ;)
I didn't watch any movie for something like three weeks, and I doubt I'll have time during next one. Which already doesn't look good, lacking other "drug" to bring balance to the mind while alternating between a critical deadline + some neverending dental issues. So I told myself to at least deal with the mid-year traditional entries, short format, and check what looks promising for this summer-fall season.
In June, "Monuments" is a release that seems to get a bit out from the box-office summer hits area, where typically we have lots of actions and explosions and the subject is very thin. I'm not really fond of comedies either, especially when there's a romantic angle, but apparently my subconscious won this round...
"The Green Knight" is telling an episode from the Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table saga. It's an episode that in its original version, unlike others, has a less dramatic ending, which makes it somehow less promissing for screen if you stick to the classic story. But, as in many other cases, the movie might change the story a bit... We'll see in July.
I was thinking to let the summer pass without referring to anything in the comics/super-hero area that moved, for a while already, from overrated to hyperrated, or whatever's worse than that. There are though some small exceptions, and the most notable is James Gunn who managed to make "Guardians of the Galaxy" (both 1 and 2) to stand out, comparing with the classic Marvel pattern. It's just something different. Maybe we'll see this in August also for DC Comics in the reboot of "The Suicide Squad".
It's been a while since a I posted at such short intervals, but that will compensate a longer pause following this entry. Besides, for some time the interval between watching the movie and writing about it got longer and longer, and I start forgetting what I want to say. "Boss Level" was also too "motivating" too lose it among the messed up neurons and lack of lecithin.
Roy is a guy in his 40s, an ex member of the special forces, with an ex wife working in a super-secret lab for another ex military. A dude who fits very well the arch-villain pattern with a wish for world domination. In all this context we have a phenomenon going on that resembles Groundhog Day = each morning Roy wakes up at the same time, in the same place, and spends his day with an army of assassins chasing him and trying to shorten his suffering of non-stop repeating the same activity. Obviously this happens just for Roy, who struggles to advance in his last 24 hours as much as to be able to understand how the visit he paid his ex wife a day before fits in all this story. And I won't say more about it. The trailer reveals already enough, and I was inspired not to watch it before the movie.
From start I probably had a positive subjective approach on this, knowing from the two lines describing it on IMDb (very underrated there by the way) that's a time travel movie, subgenre on which I have an obvious thing for. In a different context I might've been bothered by the lack of rigor, and I would've looked for loopholes. It's however obvious from the first scene that the movie doesn't take itself too seriously, and you shouldn't to it either. It's built as the title suggests, like it's video game adaptation, although it's not. It's very very fresh though, and the script construction is just simplistic in appearance. Indeed, it won't tell you much about the time technology behind the Osiris spindle that creates the phenomenon and which looks as a new Stargate. But it will take enough time to build a solid puzzle that Roy has to solve in order to reach the "boss level". And the twist there, which you might not feel as a twist, so I'll endulge myself a spoiler, is that the "boss level" it's actually a different one. "The secret level" :-) - for which Roy needs even more repeats to figure it out. Moment where the movie does what I was complaining last time that "Love and Monsters" doesn't - a short exit from the light area more towards drama, but with enough force here to feel it. Or, well, being about passed time, turning points, and what could you do with a time machine, I might be subjective again ;-)
I won't try getting too philosophical and extracting some hidden message from "Love and Monsters" to fit the late context, because I probably wouldn't agree with what message might send. I just simply took the movie as it is - a light SciFi with a consistent comedy part.
We have a dystopian context, where after humanity successfully avoided a cataclismic disaster by bombing an asteroid on its way to Earth, fount itself in a different problem = the radioactive waste landing on the planet created mutations causing various species to dangerously grow overnight. Lots of times I thought that we're lucky that pidgeons aren't 10-15 times bigger, otherwise we would be extinct. That's pretty much the conclusion the movie reaches, although I didn't see any pidgeon there, but we have others - the "monsters" in the title.
In this situation, pretty much everybody retired in various shelters, periodically going out for food. Some kind of "Zombieland", but with mutated creatures instead of zombies. In a group of survivors we find Joel, who after many years finds his former girlfriend, in some other shelter on the seaside at something like seven days of walking - and so we get the "love" in the title. That leads to the main part in the movie - the travel to meet her again. Only that Joel has a small big problem, zero experience in fighting what awaits him outside, or better said a "freeze panic" effect when encountering anything with more legs, tentacles, or other types of members, larger than himself.
Obviously the subject described above has lots of potential. The movie delivers withn an "ok" margin. I guess it could've been better, or better said I felt something missing. Maybe it was just the comic side and the drama exits from that don't have enough force to have the same effect as for example "Guardians of the Galaxy". Maybe there are some action threads that seemed unfinished. Or maybe I did expect too much. Anyway, bottom line, the movie was fun.
I'm moving on in the same trend, probably already boring, to complain that I'm definitely not in the best mood for writing. Also when finding about "Soul", the title + description led immediately to the idea of a musical - the only movies area that I'm completely avoiding, with minor exceptions. On top of everything, "soul" is not among my favorite music, so I decided to ignore this. However, after repeatedly hearing that's the best animation of last year, I decided to move it in the minor exceptions category above. The first thing to say about it - "Frozen" fits probably much better with the musical genre than what we have here. And about soul music, that's really secondary behind the concept of a soul in the context of the movie.
In brief, we have a music teacher, who dreams of being part of a jazz band, and when finally the opportunity arises he fells into a manhole and he dies. Well, not really... because we're moving somewhere in an intermediate afterlife space, where the souls either move towards "the great beyond" after living, or towards "the great before" to find a new place on Earth. Well, our guy definitely dislikes the beyond option, and wants to get back to his piano in New York. And the only path seems to be through "the great before". Now, given my writing mood, I guess I said enough about the story.
Obviously the target of the movie is not in the range of PhD students in psychology for analyzing the perspectives of the afterlife concepts. Nevertheless, "Soul" is complex enough to not be labeled "childrens only". Moreover it's fresh - I didn't feel bored by material recycled from other movies (not that the idea of human soul inside of a cat is new, but I said I'm stopping with the spoilers :P). In a word, I'd qualify it as "nice". Maybe even too "nice" in the end, but these days that's actually good.
Unfortunately, struggling somewhere between Ketorol and Nurofen for some dental issues that seem to contest my incapacitation record dating from my ankle fracture two and a half years ago, I'm not in the best mood for writing. Therefore, I'll move quickly over "WolfWalkers", although it probably deserves more.
The animation we're talking about is made by the same Irish team as "The Secret of Kells" and "Song of the Sea", reason why I didn't expect much from it. Not that the above aren't good (I guess), but... it's just a matter of taste - in brief, each of the previous movies seemed to me as a sort of Miyazaki made in Europe = lots of senses way too hidden that get lost in an Irish fantasy instead of a Japanese one, and which had the effect of a sleeping pill on me when I've seen it. We have here too an idea that probably has its origin in the local folklore - a variant of the werewolf myth, with the difference from the above that "WolfWalkers" is much more coherent in its narrative, and didn't get me bored. Everything starts with a hunter's daughter, who gets bit by another girl of about the same age, but having a wolf shape. Worse, a wolf leading a pack in the nearby forrest, considered a great danger for the town where our action is settled. The result, the hunter's daughter gets, as in any "werewolf story", the same transformation capabilities, stuff that completely incompatible with her father's job taked by the ruthless lord protector to erradicate the menace in the woods.
The way this whole story complicates can be seen in the movie. What I can say is that despite its lack of twists, what we see here is sufficiently complex to worth the time, and somehow the mix between myth, folklore and the relatively alert action, succeeds this time = it's neither too pretentios in its meanings to put the age target too high, neither too childish to make it too low.
I had in mind to write an entry on "Nomadland". Before watching the movie. After I did, I changed my plan. There are a couple days since seeing this and I already don't know what I've watched, so I don't have anything to write about. In brief, "Nomadland" is a movie that if you cut in pieces of ~10-20 minute, and watch these in random order you'll probably get pretty much the same thing, whatever that might be. It would be interesting if the experienced critics could do a simple exercise before throwing too much praise on a movie: just to ask themselves what is so memorable about it that they can punctually reference in three years from viewing it. Well, there's some stuff in "Remo Williams" :)...
I shifted 180 degrees with the movie genre - but I really felt the need for a popcorn movie in its more obvious shape as an antidote to the pretentious "artistic" production named above. And not so long ago I've watched "Remo Williams" as part of my '80s detour, and I actually wanted to write a couple words about it but I didn't have the time. Remo Williams is pretty much like a "Commando", but for the super-hero niche, before it became so popular as it is today. Meaning that's funny enough to not be bad, although clearly far from masterpiece level. The main character origin is in some series of pulp novels, being some kind of a super-agent for a super-secret organization, who fights all kinds of super-villains. The movie takes a bit more light the "super" part, our agent being nothing more than a hamburger eating cop, trained in a "Karate Kid" fashion by a Korean master, in order to dismantle the unlawful profits plan of an arms dealer (without other super-powers than money and relations).
What stands out in Remo Williams, to support my claim above, are the script lines: from "Your reflexes are pitiful. The seasons move faster." to "You know why Americans call it fast food? Because it speeds them on the way to the grave.", such stuff makes you remember it as quotes source. It's probably one of the most witty scripts I've seen lately. There are also plenty of action scenes, which for the '80s are comparable with what you can find in "Mission Impossible" - in particular one is filmed on top of the Statue of Liberty and sticks as a reference beyond the poster. Not last about it, the characters, or more precisely the actors, is something you'll probably remember. It was hard for me to imagine Fred Ward as a wannabe super-hero, and such casting is so weird that after seeing the movie, it's still hard to imagine. The most memorable part is though the Korean's master, Chiun (the one delivering the witty lines above), where the actor is... Joel Grey. Without ant Asian genes, it would probably make the movie to be labeled today as non-ethical, stereotypical, even rasist, despite the fact that the acting is so good that at the time got a nomination for a Golden Globe. Objectively I have to admit that I found myself the casting to be a bit unnatural, but again objectively the actor did his job close to perfection.
Long story short: it's a popcorn movie. A bit old, but enough funny and with more substance than what we have in today's Marvel productions.
I wanted to write this entry immediately after watching "Promising Young Woman", about a week ago, but unfortunately I didn't have enough time. Not that I have now... But probably if I postpone more I'll forget everything I had in mind. There's not much left anyway...
First of all, I avoided for a while to add the movie in my "to watch list" for two reasons: 1) I don't like Carey Mulligan (and I still believe that her act in "Drive" was a big minus for that movie, although after watching the current one my opinion on her acting skills changed dramatically) and 2) I'm fed up with movies carrying a tag related to some social issue, social movement, whatever, no matter what that might be, and I'm literally struggling lately to avoid productions that don't miss the chance to touch such issues. I'ts hard in such cases to make an objective comment that doesn't get twisted by the context. I said it before - when I watch a movie I want something to get me out of the "current real life", or if not, at least to get my attention for its cinematic value. For everything else there are news, documentaries, and other stuff. Fortunately, despite it's labeling in many reviews with a feminist bias - on which I won't comment, "Promising Young Woman" really has a cinematic value. And that's the main reason to watch it for.
The subject is a "revenge story". And as any "revenge story", since Monte Cristo or even older, it's catchy. Casey is a lonely young woman spending her days at a coffee counter, after dropping out of college years before and giving up to a medical carrer. The reason - an incident where the victim was a good friend, on which incident we don't get precise details in the movie (and that's a nuance we'll get back to). However, you can easily assume a rape during a party that went out of control. The result - the perpetrators getting away with it and the girl committing suicide. The trauma however moves forward, and we get to the present day, when the main nocturnal activity of Casey is playing a role of a vulnerable drunk bait, visiting the city's night clubs, up to the moment when somebody trying to take advantage out of her gets to far and is hit by the shock of dealing with a very lucid woman. Again, we don't get an explicit ending to some scenes like that (the same fine nuance), but you can easily assume that the revenge is soft, keeping it at the level of making the potential aggressors to consider carefully any future attempt like that. The context of the action becomes more complicated when Casey meets a former colleague. The way it complicates, you'll see in the movie...
As I said, I probably forgot most of what I wanted to write when this was fresh in my head. To finish the idea started above, the script is excellent as well as the directing - the fine nuance I mentioned is that throughout the whole movie you might get an uneasy feeling that some Tarantinoesque violence will burst out, but this doesn't happen. There is one exception, for which the contrast makes is very hard to watch (and probably that's the whole point), but despite you might expect, all the rest you'll see is a revenge story that's completely non-violent from start to finish, which stands out in the genre and actually makes it memorable. Carey Mulligan is perfect in her character, or better said she's way different from other bland acts I've seen her in - as I mentioned in the beginning, this completely changed my view on her acting skills. Technically, the movie scores on two accounts - editing, it's been a while since I watched something this good (true, there wasn't much to watch lately) and on soundtrack - I don't refer only to the score, but mostly to the songs/covers selection and the way these are used. There are movies (many by Tarantino, "Drive", "Baby Driver", "Atomic Blonde", "A Simple Favor", and other) where this parts counts at least as 10% of the final feeling. "Promising Young Woman" fits perfectly in the same list.
I'll end up with a spoiler (sort of). The ending here is probably comparable shock-wise with the one in "Uncut Gems" (the difference here being that it gives you a bit of time to digest it - because the story is not over). Unfortunately, as in "Uncut Gems", it's quite bitter - much more bitter actually. In some sense it turns the whole thing into an anti-revenge movie, because in the end you can see it like that. On the other hand an outcome of "let it go" would have cancelled the subject, and something more like "John Wick" style would have been totally unrealistic. I remember though that last year I wrote about "A Good Woman Is Hard to Find", so it's possible to have something in between, but I guess the actual intention is explicitly for an ending bitter enough to not forget it. And a criteria for a good movie, is that you'll remember it :) ...
"Raya and the Last Dragon" is a Disney movie, like most of the late Disney movies, and that says all about it = don't expect something to challenge your IQ here. Yup, I didn't forget we're talking about an animation where the main target is below 15 years old, but somehow I was expecting more. At least it runs decently: short and not boring.
The subject is a story set somewhere in a imaginary land on the Asian continent, divided in 5 regions, and brought to a dystopian state by a sort of demon resembling a purple tornado turning into stone every living creature it touches. 500 years ago the demon was banished by a dragon who produced a magic globe to keep the evil away. All nice and well, but unfortunately one piece magic globe doesn't divide equally to 5, and the rulers of 4 of the 5 regions grew envious of the one possessing the artifact, where the water seemed more clear, the grass greener, and so on. Like that, predictable enough, we reach a moment when the globe shatters exactly in 5 pieces (what a coincidence), the purple tornado rises again, and the grass loses it's green shade almost everywhere. Fast-forward a couple years, when we find each piece of the globe in possession of each region ruler, struggling to keep away the demon, just as much to not turn all the inhabitants into a giant terracotta army. Except Raya, the daughter of the former owner of the globe, who's trying what her father failed to do - to unite everybody. But for that she also needs to awake the dragon...
I've already told pretty much everything that takes place during the first 15 minutes, so let's stop the spoilers here. As I was saying, the advantage of the movie is its relatively alert action, moving you across the whole fantasy world in search of the globe pieces. So, the movie is not that bad, but unfortunately is utterly predictible and filled with cliche sequences. Probably it's ok for the age it targets, all the story being nothing more than a easy to understand allegory. At the end of 2016 I wrote an entry about "Kubo and the Two Strings". Also an animation, also a fairytale, also set in Asia, also a quest on gathering more pieces, also an allegory. One with much more depth than what we have here. But well, it wasn't also Disney...
I'm not done with the '80s, and since I still don't have anything new that seems better, I'm back to that period. Or, you could also say that "karma strikes back" after my last entry against the new eligibility criteria for best picture Oscar. Because one of the nominations of more than 35 years ago, "A Passage to India", actually passes all the new requirements, and I can't deny it's the best movie I've seen this year by now. Not that it would change in any way my previous opinion, on the contrary... If something deserves to get there, this is proof that it can do it without adding restrictions.
The last movie of David Lean is based on a book that tracks two British women's visit in the colonial India, a mother of a local judge together with her future daughter-in-law. The first part of the movie doesn't tell you much of where it's heading. Besides the discrimination shown by the white minority in charge towards the local people, plus the boiling conflict that stems of this, which seem to play a role in the movie's resolution, the rest looks like a background soft romance from a Woody Allen movie, but bland and humourless. At some point, Aziz, a local physician, admirer of the British civilization, gets into the story, and following a series of events he finds himself in the position of a local guide for two women. Embarassed by his own house, to avoid their visit, he proposes a trip he's paying for himself, to some caves, one of the touristic objectives in the area, asking also a teacher, pretty much the only Englishman that doesn't seem to dislike Indians, to join them. Well, if the movie doesn't do much to keep you watching up to this part, from here on it starts to deliver... What? I won't spoil it.
In its first half, "A Passage to India" seems to be part of the same age as "Lawrence of Arabia" - if there's something that might annoy you is the feeling that the production year is sometime in the '60s, not in the '80s. There are plenty of typical elements, from a cinematography rich in close-ups, with long transitions to the actors who tend to overact from time to time, and the initially slow development, which gets close to become boring at some point. Probably there's nothing intentional about it, after all that's David Lean's movie school, but it somehow makes what's following in the second part to look a bit surreal. In this '60s movie setting, which is typically quite pragmatic and clear, we're getting some discrete parts of reflection over life of so much depth that it somehow either can surprise the viewer if he manages to decrypt these, or it might leave you in a dense confusion. In any case, Nolan can take lessons about "hidden meanings" from here. I'm not saying more than that it mixes very nicely the ideas of karma, life and the Hindi conception on reincarcation, all over a background of racial conflict, where it gives equal credit for what "too far" would mean for both sides. Just to conclude in perfect balance, good as a lesson also for the current times, maybe even more than for 1984.
No panic. The Oscars weren't cancelled and neither went unnoticed. They've just been postponed for April I think, from the usual date which normally was about now. A good time to write a blog entry I hesitated about for a long time, but I finally decided for it. Long story short - after a lengthy series - 2008-2020 - during which I provided some coverage of the nominations in the time prior to the awards, I decided to stop doing that starting this year. The reason, with all the risks to be misinterpreted, is that I think the level of "political correctness" went a bit too far.
I said it more than once in the introductory entries I wrote when the nominations were announced, that a reason why I chose to allocate some blog space to the Oscars was the statistical correctness, theoretically speaking, by comparison with other awards. In the sense that the votes expressed by AMPAS = the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for determining the nominations and the awards are considerably in larger numbers as in other cases such as the Golden Globes, or Cannes where the jury is limited to about 10 people. Obviously, any art appreciation has a degree of subjectivity, but again as I said it more than once, more important than the awards were always the movies in the nominations list - a very good opportunity to discover something worth watching that otherwise I might have missed. Actually, I always made my predictions mostly for fun and I rarely commented post-Oscar about the results. This, despite the fact that in the last decade the award winners indicate quite clearly an interference of the sociopolitical factor somewhere where it doesn't have a place to be - in a selection supposedly based on criteria of artistic value, as subjective these might be, but not other criteria.
I'm referring specifically to the "best picture award" where you can already notice lately some unwritten rule that the winning movie is less in line with the critics opinion and more with the speculations on the social media on which production has more elements intersecting with a social issue. Last fall, the AMPAS officially decided to make mandatory in the near future a set of eligibility rules regarding representation and inclusion standards, starting from the nominations phase.
I understand the idea of promoting some criteria to favor the involvement in the cinema industry of some categories maybe less represented until now. But if some of the introduced rules have some sense for that (like paid internships or trainings as part of the production crew, although there's also debatable what an indie movie could do with a limited budget and lots of work done on volunteering basis), other rules are completely absurd. To pretend for a nomination to have at least a lead actor from an underrepresented race/ethnic group, or at least 30% of the secondary cast of the movie to be from two of the underrepresented categories, or the cherry on top - the main subject of the movie to be centered on an underrepresented group, is something that I can't see fit for the criteria of selecting a best picture. Or better said, something that could lead to excluding a possible nomination - because if I quickly make a selection out of the best picture nominations list during last decade: "1917", "Vice", "Dunkirk", "Arrival", "The Revenant", "The Martian", "The Big Short", "Boyhood", "The Theory of Everything", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "Gravity", "Argo", "The Descendants", "127 Hours", "Inception" - I'm not sure how many of these would pass this rule. Indeed, this criteria can be bypassed by complying with others, but the idea itself of excluding a movie from being nominated motivated like that seems so wrong in a context where artistic and subject freedom should prevail that it somehow makes ironical the title of "inclusion standards".
Anyway, there's no surprise for the above, not in a world where guides are published for dismantling racism in the teaching of mathematics, where one of the main suggestions is that objectivity and the idea of a "right solution" for a problem are dangerous notions, and such problems should be practically excluded in favor of some with multiple answers (I'm wondering what results would have had the NASA engineers in the Perseverance team if somebody would have cut all single solution calculations from their math). But well... if we're going towards such a radical trend, I'm gonna also do a step in that direction and give up on my Oscar entries - after all it's not the only solution as a reference for cinema excellence. And I might do this in favor of blogging about the awards in a much less represented movie industry - the Asian one.
I know that "Parasite" took the glory of the latest Academy Awards from "1917" - not that "Parasite" isn't a good movie, but that was not the moment for the Academy to realize that the Asian film has a place in the ranks of best pictures. Let's not ignore the hypocrisy of a singular case that showed up in a year where the desire for being as politically correct as possible reached new heights - "Infernal Affairs" at its time, but still in this century didn't even make the list of Foreign Best Picture, just to raise "The Departed", Scorsese's remake, a couple years later to the highest ranks. Therefore, I'm considering instead of the Oscars, to start blogging about either the nominations for the Hong Kong Film Awards, or for the Grand Bell Awards (South Korea), or for the Asian Film Awards. All these three are awards given in the Asian cinema, where during last years I found the lists of nominations to be a good reference for the movies released there, and I have to say, with a "dangerous objectivity", that what I've managed to watch from these lists is actually on average better than what Hollywood releases lately. Unfortunately, as many productions from Asia, the accessibility is not the best, so we'll see...
To end this, I'm wondering how a Nobel prize for literature would look like if some mandatory condition would be enforced on the percentage of social matters covered in the writings or on the race/ethnicity of the chosen winner. In any case, I will definitely blog about movies that reach the Oscar list, as long as I'm still writing. I'll just leave out the reference to the awards, at least until "the inclusion standards" won't include exclusions anymore :-) Let's try to keep the absurdity within some limits, I say.
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