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Obviously the poor state of Scottish tourism can be attributed to the werewolf problem. That and the exceptionally dangerous characteristics of home fuel gas used for cooking in the Highlands. Given those two caveats, I'd say tagging along with the Royal Army on exercises in Glen Howling is a fine plan!
This movie promised to be SAS vs. BLAIR WITCH, but pretty quickly devolved into a semi-ALIENS kind of besieged in the farmhouse situation. Nice camera work, pretty good acting, a border collie (always extra points for a border collie) and some pretty fair lycanthrope action. Lots and lots of intestines. They missed a really, really excellent plot twist by not having Cooper and his mates turn out to be were-dogs sent to hunt down the were-wolves. That would have been cool. It would have also paid off the title of the movie... and the second intro scene where Cooper refuses to a shoot a dog... and the border collie saving him at the end... and the mutual attraction between Meagan and Cooper.
But they're not paying me to fix their movie, now are they? No.
Another film we watched while recovering from painting. Now this is a fine, fine film! Stellar cast of characters, beautiful photography, great aliens and two excellent SF images (the eclipse and the forest of bones)... stuff on a par with the city in Bladerunner, or the Imperial Star Destroyer hoving into view at the beginning of A NEW HOPE. Vin Diesel gives a solid performance as Riddick, our anti-hero, and everyone else is really first rate. Luckily, the sequel (CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK) is now underway, reuniting the same director/scriptwriter and Diesel. I pray to almight Allah that the kid and the holy man are also in the new movie, because they anchor this film's heart.
And it has heart... I've seen PB four times now and loved it each time. Even better, each time I've seen something new... and the film felt fresh. The DVD version, by the way, includes some extra footage, all re-edited back in seamlessly. Very nice.
Stupid blog tool... it's already eaten one copy of this review. Mutter.
Ok, short version. This movie, despite good performances by the actors and some cool bits, was lame. It was tension-less. It was not terribly compelling. The nuclear explosion in Baltimore was weak. You could see the filmmaker(s) backing off from their original plot/vision for fear of post-9/11 shock syndrom or something. Very weak.
If a nuke goes off in the middle of a modern city; everything is on fire. people are dying of radiation posioning. The sky is black with smoke. Cell phones will not be working! All of the cell relay towers will be dead. Same goes for Palm wireless services. Dead, I say, dead! Medical personnel are having to choose between letting hundreds of horribly burned people just expire on the floor of their triage center while they try and save one or two... hospital supplies are exhausted in hours and can't be restored because the trucks and cars with automatic transmissions are fried, and the roads are blocked with stalled vehicles and everything is on fire anyway... helicopters caught in the shockwave of the blast are reduced to scrap metal, along with their tousle-haired heroes.
Very safe this movie... neo-Nazi villains. Heroic Arab youths. A very porous Syrian/Israeli border...! A missing nuke the Israelis know is missing... and dont' look for??? Oy. Very poor. I am more dissapointed the more I think about it...
A long day of house painting gives way at last to watching a movie... but with the entire living room packed into boxes or lumped into a giant island of furniture, there's no player to watch Kurosawa's RASHOMON (finally released on dvd) or anything else from Casa Video. Luckily, I had managed to download a DIVX encoded version of someones digital camcorder recording of Miyazaki's Spirited Away playing in a movie theatre... or it could just be a bad VHS dub. Muddy picture, poor quality sound, low resolution... isn't the internet great!
Watching Miyazaki movies solely in Japanese - no subtitles, no script booklet - is a particular joy of mine. The dialog becomes part of the sound background and the visual story comes to the fore. One of the signs of Miyazaki-san's genius is that a movie like TOTORO or IL PORCO ROSSO can be perfectly understood simply from the action and visuals. There really isn't any need for dialog... sort of like watching a modern silent movie. Though MONONOKE HIME was so-plot heavy that it really couldn't be understood without the dialog, SPIRITED AWAY slides back the other direction, towards a simple story revealed from the viewpoint of a young woman, told solely by visual action.
The movie's good, though despite its huge Asian box-office it's not on a par with TOTORO or CASTLE IN THE SKY. There are three things of notable interest in this movie - First, the film is sort of like Studio Ghibli riffing, or jamming, with themes they've used before, both thematically and visually. As a result, SPIRITED AWAY makes MONONOKE HIME and TOTORO fit into the same world, though at different times. So if you watch carefully, you'll see a lot of visual elements, characters and symbols you've seen before. I'd have preferred all new stuff, but hey, I'm not the one making the movie. Second, for the first time a character is presented who is apparently not designed and animated by Miyazaki. Instead, the maid Zen(?) is obviously the work of another, younger animator, and is not in the very distinctive Miyazaki potato-head style. This is good! Studio Ghibili needs to continue to grow, and bring in new blood, and have it's style evolve. Third, there's very extensive use of CGI in AWAY, and while it's not as jarring as the mish-mash of METROPOLIS, it isn't quite as perfectly fitted as in MONONOKE. In part, this is because there is a LOT of CGI in the movie and some of it is bound to stand out.
Thomas Harlan [11:11 PM]
Too Much Dentistry for one fella...
Sometimes, artificial things are bad. Six months ago, I switched to a diet soda with aspartame. Two months ago, my dentist tells me I have ten new cavities... the diet soda is really high in acid, and my teeth are just being eaten away. Today, I had the fourth of five appointments for fillings. I gave a great dentist, but I don't want to see her every other day and have a drill whirring away in my mouth. Tonight, my head hurt too much and I was too tired to do any work... so it was time to rent some movies...
METROPOLIS 2001
Big concept ... Katsuhiro Otomo (writer and artist of AKIRA) writes a revamped version of Fritz Lang's classic. Unfortunately, a horrible clash of production styles deadends this movie (for me, after about a half hour). All of the sets and backgrounds and mechanical objects are superdetailed, CGI. The human and robot characters are traditional anime in a big-nose, huge-eye way... doesn't work. Makes the head hurt worse! Bad!
BANGKOK DANGEROUS
Deaf and mute contract killer finds true love with cutie pharmacist in 21st-century Bangkok. Ah, now that's high concept!
Very Hong-Kong style - slow motion, rain, decaying city, everyone is 20 and living life way too hard. Great hair on the girls, the boys are dangerous and so-pretty. It's not GEN-X-COPS, but it does show a cool slice into Bangkok, which makes Hong Kong look clean and fresh and positively Scandanavian!
The director didn't even do all the of deaf-mute-killer cliches you might expect... but it does end badly, with a wonderful pan shot of a very, very scared crime boss and a man accepting his own justice. There's also a lot of product placement... excuse me, I must go purchase a SANGHA BEER.
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS
Now this is a fine, fine film... all the girls have dark hair and are very fine looking. Our hero is tall, blonde and from Tucson, Arizona. Yeah! Plus, he can kind of drive. Unfortunately the actor seems to be Keanu Reeves in a blonde suit... voice is the same, acting is on a par... Vin Diesel, though, he rocks pretty hard - in anything he does. The racing is pretty good and there's a lot of car talk pitched at 100mph to try and satisfy the gearheads. Sadly, it does not beat out a Frankenheimer movie with car chases. A very pretty movie.
Thomas Harlan [10:32 PM]
SPIDERMAN
Ah now... this is a film made especially for my man Bill Murphy. Kirsten Dunst in a mini-skirt, in a tight sweater, in not much at all... he's very happy.
I am midly happy. I used to read Spider-Man all the time. I was there for the whole Death of Gwen Stacy thing, and for her return from the dead. Sam Raimi is one of my favorite directors. There's even Bruce Campbell in the movie! How could that be bad? The effects, I thought, were fine. The acting was pretty good. Spidy got the snot beat out of him. He did not get the girl at the end. The actor playing Jameson did a fab job. All good things. And I'm very happy that Sam Raimi finally got a blockbuster, so he can turn around and spend a dollar and fifteen cents making EVIL DEAD 4: ASH OF THE APOCALYPSE.
I'm not happy, as usual, about the little lapses which make the whole less than it could be. Mary Jane's house being right next door to Peter's. She should have lived down the street, situated so that Peter had to pass by her house on the way to school. Gives you the same effect in the story, but doesn't make you wonder why they weren't friends before... Where did the 'good' Spidey-suit come from? Why don't we get to see Peter using that smart brain of his to make the new suit? Why no Gwen Stacy? You could have had Kirsten play Gwen with blonde hair, then come back in the next movie as MJ with red hair. Then Spiderman's choice between saving her and saving the children on the skycar would be real, with real consequences. Then you have huge dramatic tension in the next movie when MJ comes into Peter's life and he's afraid to be with her, since he could cause her death...
Thank god there was only one villain, though! It was cool of them to get Anakin Skywalker for the part of Harry. Double the brooding!
Thomas Harlan [3:23 PM]
STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES
Two hours, twenty-plus minutes. Stunning visuals, some brilliant moments, far too much bad dialog. A movie of a thousand homages. A dizzying variety of very skimpy costumes for Padme. A young, gruff Alec Guiness playing Ewan McGregor playing Alec Guiness. As Colin Dunnigan would say, "George Lucas knows how to make one kind of movie; American Graffiti." And so he's made another young men and their cars movie... people chasing people in cars, getting in and out of cars, fixing cars, comparing their cars. Cars blowing up...
Only one thing truly impressed me about CLONES - Yoda.
Not Yoda fighting Saruman... I mean, Count Duku, but Yoda engaged in a sly, controlled, generations-long battle with the Emperor, with Sidious and his mask Palpatine.
Now that was a thing of beauty. All conveyed in... two, three scenes? Narrowed eyes. A regretful voice. One master watching another across a crowded room. A suggestion to send a young man off with a young woman. For the treachery of decades to be undone not by love - Anakin's desire for Padme is in no way noble - but by base desire, turned by the hand of a master to transform gold from base metal.
Sidious has been spinning his web of deciet and intrigue around the failing, sunset-painted Republic for at least fifty years (long enough to design and grow Shmi Skywalker, long enough for her to concieve the engineered Midichlorian-enhanced vessel which is Anakin, long enough for the Jedi to grow complacent and for the Dark Side to obscure the future enough to cloud the minds of the lesser Jedi). Yet he does not understand that Yoda has lived for nearly eight hundred years. The little master can wait - is waiting - for as long as necessary to win. Sidious is bound by a human body, one which will inevtiably (even with the assistance of the Force) fall to decay and death. Three generations of human lives are nothing to him. The veil of darkness is not a barrier to him, not in this thing. Because Yoda knows his enemy without the Force.
I am fairly shocked that George Lucas, whose hand seems so heavy in some many aspects of both this movie and the previous one, can deliver a subtle interplay like this. And I have some hope for the next movie, that it will deliver on the promise of greatness laid by this one.
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