It's been a while since I've watched "Kundun", and unfortunately I didn't have time to write a fresh entry. So, we'll deal with one a bit more stale, but somethin' is better than nothin'.
The movie, directed by Martin Scorsese, relates the history of the last living Dalai Lama since his early childhood up o the exile in India forced by the Chinese troops invading Tibet. It's debatable how well the movie presents the main points of Dalai Lama's ruling as the de facto leader of the second largest Chinese province. It's also debatable what connection you can draw, in the sense of "history repeats itself", between what happened more than 60 years ago in the far east and what happens now in the closer east. But this is not a blog for politics :) So, thinking on some of the latest more or less controversial positions expressed by a man that got through most of his life, probably it's more important to get to live in peace and harmony with the people around you indiferent of their urge for singing whatever national anthem. So, let's keep things peaceful and get back to the movie.
It's neither the best, nor the worst film made by Scorsese. It's definitely not on par with Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor", but it has its own merits and some distinct nuances still raising it to the level of a classic epic movie. First of all, I don't know if there's any known name in the entire cast. On the contrary, there are quite a few actors for whom this was their only movie in their cinematographic career. I'm not sure how Scorsese worked here = how many are amateurs, how many are stage actors, etc - but there's nothing to complain in the end. Besides Dalai Lama, we have some other characters with relatively consistent parts, like the chancellor for example, an excellent actor who in his real life is actually a tibetan painter. The cinematography of Roger Deakins and the minimalistic score of Philip Glass transform the movie in a visually-audible jewel. There are movie with a good subject, but where you have moments when you just drop out of the story, just to better sense some seconds or minutes of camera work mixed with sound. That's what I like to call "cinema movies", because there you get the max effect out of this. Well, getting over all the small issues in the story, maybe some lightness in dealing with a heavy subject here and there, and an ending that's a bit abrupt, for me "Kundun" remains a "cinema movie" - and there are less and less that provide this feeling.
When I first watched the trailer of "Lightyear" I've asked myself how entangled can the subject be to get from "Toy Story" to a space oddisey. I've got my answer in the first 5 seconds of the film: “In 1995 Andy got a toy. That toy was based on a movie. This is that movie.” I must say I admire this as the simplest, elegant and most open way to create a spin-off that I've ever seen on screen. Unfortunately it's pretty much the only thing I can admire here.
I've never been to drawn into the "Toy Story" universe, and probably that's why the last iteration left me with the best opinion, contrary to the general appreciation. I guess that's also the reason why I had high expectations from something announcing itself quite different from the usual "Toy Story" contexts. In "Lightyear", Buzz - the guy on the poster - is an astronaut on a ship carrying several thousand people, apparently during an exploration mission meant to find a habitable planet. When stopping on a potential candidate that finally proves unfriendly due to the indigenous fauna, Buzz damages the ship so badly that discovering a new fuel is required for flying back to "infinity and beyond". Feeling guilty for the situation, our astronaut dedicates his time for testing diverse variations of space fuel. However, each flight of several minutes costs him several years on the planet time. And the life on the planet moves on, finally getting to a fully organized colony, where people moving to the next generation start forgetting that they want to leave. Exactly when, finally, the last tried formul for the space-propelling cocktail seems to be the right one. The problem gets more acute when Buzz, after the first successful test, lands back in the middle of an alien invasion led by the evil Zurg, who somehow seems strangely interested exactly in the newly found space fuel. Well, up to this point the movie was fine. From here onward, it's somehow predictable what happens = Mortal Kombat: Buzz vs Zurg - where finally - big spoiler, we find out that Zurg is actually an older Buzz who discovered also the time travel and wants to "fix the past", but ran out of gas. Even that is relatively fine in the economy of the story, nevermind my debatable and ethically questionable decision to support Zurg's side in this case. And on top of everything the whole SciFi universe created by Pixar, despite the logical flaws, is actually really immersive due to the amount of details. So, what's wrong with this picture?
Warning: my thoughts might get a bit off the rail from here on. The wrong part I've seen in this movie is the "dream team" that sticks to Buzz for helping him to get the planet free from Zurg. The team is formed of three characters who Buzz finds quickly after his last landing, apparently the only who escaped capture by the enemy, and also enrolled as cadets in the space rangers training programme. In brief, the three seem to be in a continuous competition on who's messing things up more often and showing how unprepared they are for their "job". And all this stuff is supposed to be funny. Well, it's not. Also, all this stuff should appear as having a minimum importance in reaching the obvious happy end - keeping the politically correct spirit of "anybody can be a space ranger" no matter of how persistent you are in doing the same mistakes. I might agree witht the first part, but only if you're striving to succeed. Here, at least for one of the characters, it's obvious that placing him under quarantine would considerably increase the probability that the rest of the team survives. But of course that won't be an acceptable course of action - the movie getting quite explicit in a scene where it teaches us that's intolerable to not tolerate the mistake. So... no matter how light the context is in an animation, and as weird as it may be that I'm giving so much importance, I find disturbing to see in a movie that finally targets mostly children that the idea of tolerable mistake is always valid and that "rocket science" could be your path in life, no restrictions set, even though you might be alergic to space dust - but well, let's not discriminate. Even the subliminal supports the same direction by changing the purpose of Lightyear's actions, finally giving up on the goal of fixing his initial mistake and preventing also Zurg to fix it, ending up accepting the planet as it is. I can understand the educational reasoning of introducing even in animations elements of equality and tolerance - concerning gender, race, human behavior, whatever. But it finally depends on where all this stops. Leading such "accept anything" policies so far that you get to prioritize an idea of equity over other aspects as competences, and presenting the triumph of mediocrity as a success... well, that's dangerous. And maybe I wouldn't have written so much about this, but I can spot this tendency too often lately... and sometime during a sunny day, it might bite back, and hard.
Rating: 3 out of 5 - because if you can ignore the last paragraph above, it's actually nice as a SciFi animation
IMDb double tags "Secrets & Lies": comedy + drama. Unfortunately IMDb doesn't also mention how much of the one or the other you get, and I assume the ordering is alphabetical. So, a warning - what we have here is about 95% drama, a maybe a 5% of bitter comedy. Fortunately, that doesn't spoil the movie (well, at least if you're not looking for a comedy).
The development is a bit long, even though it somehow follows two lines of action. We're introduced in the life of a family living in the London suburbs of the '90s. On one side we have a single mother of modest condition, a factory worker, close to depression and in constant conflict with her soon-to-be 21 years old daughter. Give the occasion, the uncle, a photographer somewhat more successful in life, at least financially, tries to plan a barbecue reunion. Meanwhile, an adopted optometrist, decides after the death of both her parents to search for her natural mother. Probably it won't be a great surprise where the investigation leads.
The movie is built on top of this story, maintaining a slowly but steadily increasing tension level up to the climactic meeting in the end. The risk is to get you bored if you're not patient enough to digest all the symbolic elements - for example, the photo sessions that insist on the idea that there aren't any ordinary people free of troubles. All this slow development is meant to also define in more detail the characters, the actors doing an amazing job. The characters are relatively diverse, so until the end there is a chance to start relating with one or the other. That's probably the main strength of the movie, because otherwise it doesn't excel technically. Probably the screenplay could be easily adapted to a stage play. The finale comes with a predictable climax, but is also somehow cathartic, which, depending on the person, could exert a strong impact. Not necessarily concerning the family situation in the movie, but the generally entangled family situations where it's sometimes awfully hard to maintain a balance. But well, as someone told me once, "families are always getting complicated" :)...
Posts
