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Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

Two Lions, Two Winters

Posted in Movies, tagged , , , , , , , , on 20 Aug 2012| Leave a Comment »

Full disclosure: The 1968 O’Toole/Hepburn version of “The Lion in Winter” is one of my all-time favorite films.

Last night my wife and I screened the 2003 remake, starring Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close as part of a fine ensemble cast. This movie is a very fine production in every way, and to be honest, it is even better than the 1968 version in several ways, but for my money, it still falls a little short of its predecessor.

This version was made-for-TV, and that hurts it right off the bat. The 4:3 ratio is jarring these days, when everything comes across to us widescreen. When such high quality color and filming gets crammed into the restrictive ratio, it’s just confining. You know what you’re missing here.

The 2003 version has an outstanding supporting cast and this is one area in which it surpasses the 1968 version. The three sons and the princess-pawn Alais are far away superior performances, and I truly wish I could pick them up and CGI them into the older movie. Richard is less whiny, Geoffrey is more cunning, John is more believably dunderheaded, and Alais is much less innocent.

Unfortunately, while the Stewart/Close pair at the top of the bill are excellent, they do not meet the gold standard set by O’Toole/Hepburn. Stewart can rage as well as O’Toole, but he lacks chemistry with Close, and while Close was stunning in her own tirades, she just lacked the ease with which Hepburn switched from tumult to tease, from vengeful to loving, layering each emotion one atop the other like a pastry, whereas Close merely shifted gears.

This newer version was filmed at Spiš Castle in Slovakia, and though neither you nor I can probably tell the difference between a 12th century castle and one from the 15th, this one just seemed too “new.” The walls were too clean, and the wooden doors were so fresh and yellow you could practically smell the sap. The dogs were too clean, the lighting too bright, and while most of the costuming was grand and suitable to the Christmas in a stone castle setting, someone decided to put Alais in a slinky polyester velvet sheath with a Viginia-Mayo-esque zipper line up the back. I mean, the gal looked great in blue, but come on!

Thus, I must say that the 2003 version ranks second to the one from 1968. It is good, especially for a television production, but comes up lacking in comparison. Worth watching? Definitely. After all, it had stiff competition.

k

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A Korean Dish

Posted in Movies, tagged , , , , , , , on 17 Aug 2012| 2 Comments »

I haven’t watched a lot of Korean movies. I think “The Host” was the last one, in fact, so when I pulled up “My Scary Girl” to watch during my workout, I didn’t have a lot on which to gauge my expectations.

What I found was a little gem of a movie—it’s not perfect, but it consistently surprised me which, these days, is frankly a little hard to do.

“My Scary Girl” starts out like a rom-com, but with a twist. The guy is the main character and he’s incredibly shy and even a little backward when it comes to social interaction. An English lecturer at a university, he’s out of is element when it comes to real, live people and as for women, well, it’s just painful to watch. But he realizes his life of loneliness is not a happy one, and when he spies a new girl in his building, he’s trapped between his shyness and his desire for love and happiness.

Thus, the setup.

What happens from there I won’t divulge, except to say that this is one of the blackest rom-coms I’ve ever seen. It is by turns laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, and totally puzzling. The plot is far from the standard American rom-com model, and yet I’d have to put it in that category since it is essentially a comedic boy-meets-girl-boy-wants-girl-boy-can’t have-girl-boy-gets-girl story. There’s more before, during, and after that tried-and-true scaffolding, and “My Scary Girl” goes places I truly, truly didn’t expect it to. But with each twist and turn, I found myself nodding, having seen the clues, and chiding myself for not having seen it coming.

It’s also a venue for a very competent performance by Park Yong-woo as the near-terminally shy professor. His expressions of anxiety are exquisite, and the character’s wild swings of emotion, in exploration of first love and in reaction to unfolding events, are portrayed with seamless aplomb.

In all, the movie is, as I said, a gem, albeit with a few flaws (though these flaws may be solely due to my American expectations and perceptions). Despite these, it succeeds on every level, a thing that’s very hard for a rom-com to do.

k

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Apropos of Apocalypse

Posted in Culture, Movies, Television, tagged , , , , , on 14 Aug 2012| 2 Comments »

And speaking of the Apocalypse, what is it with zombies, anyway?

We all know that the Apocalypse begins with zombies, (You all did know that, didn’t you? I mean, Rev. 11:11 is pretty clear on the subject; if Revelation can be clear on anything, that is) so I understand why the faithful are always alert to the sudden appearance of the shambling undead. I mean, they’re sort of an End of Days Early Warning System (EDAWS). See a zombie? Better pack your spiritual bags. (more…)

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Déjà vu, en français

Posted in Movies, tagged , , , on 07 Aug 2012| 2 Comments »

I got a severe case of déjà vu today. It lasted 89 minutes.

I was getting ready for my workout. I pulled up a “Anthony Zimmer” from my Instant Queue and got going.

A woman goes into a restaurant. She waits. She’s being stood up. A messenger enters, sees her, and gives her an envelope. She reads it, crumples it, burns it, and leaves.

I knew I’d seen this movie before. I knew what she was going to do next, I knew where it was going, but I also knew that I’d never seen this movie before. And it wasn’t just the Bernard Hermann inspired score (equal parts “North By Northwest” and “Vertigo”) or the scenes of Paris and the Riviera that I’d seen in a dozen movies from “To Catch a Thief” to “Ronin”. No, I’d have remembered Sophie Marceau in this movie. I remember Sophie Marceau in every movie I’ve seen her in (call me crazy). The damned thing was…I couldn’t remember how it ended. (more…)

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Vertigo On Top

Posted in Movies, tagged , , , , , , on 01 Aug 2012| Leave a Comment »

This just in from the “Are You Freaking Kidding Me?” column…

A recent poll conducted by the British Film Institute has placed Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” on top, as the “greatest film of all time.” The classic thriller unseats the long-reigning “Citizen Kane” from the #1 spot it virtually owned for the past 50 years.

I say again: Are you freaking kidding me?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of the Hitch, but “Vertigo”? How can any film be deemed the greatest of all time when it has Kim Novak somnambulating across the screen like a Valium-popping golem. It’s ridiculous. There are plenty of Hitch’s movies I’d put up there with “Kane”—”Rear Window” to name the first that comes to mind—but never in a thousand years would I have put “Vertigo” up there.

How could “846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors” have gotten it so desperately wrong? It has to be mentioned that “Vertigo” has rated highly in the BFI’s poll for a while, climbing from 7th, to 4th, to 2nd, and finally, now, to 1st place over the past 20 years. So, if nothing else, at least these misguided muppets are consistent. Though why “Vertigo” should be the only one of Hitch’s 45 opera to break the top ten is a complete and utter mystery (“Psycho” rests down at #35, and no other title of his is to be found on the list).

Blimey!

I will say this, though: taken as a whole, the BFI list is much more interesting than the AFI’s, and I would recommend any fan of film to pop on over and jot down a few of the more esoteric titles. Take a chance on Lang’s “Metropolis” (one of my personal favorites) or Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” or De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves,” which took the top spot back in the poll’s early days.

k

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A Tale of Two Tattoos

Posted in Movies, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 25 Jul 2012| 3 Comments »

Last night we screened the American version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” I was disappointed, but not unexpectedly so.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the movie already, skip this post.

We read the books (in hardcopy, of course) years ago, burning through the trilogy in record time (for me…I’m a slow reader). While I didn’t find them flawless, I found them much more entertaining than Dan Brown or any of the other modern “thriller” genre. Personally, I found the whole Blomkvist-as-Babe-Magnet a bit tiresome, and felt Larsson intruding into the story with every conquest his hero made.

We did enjoy them, though, and when the Swedish movies came out, we snapped them up, screened them, and loved them.

In adapting a novel to the screen, you have to change something; you have to. Many people just don’t get this, and they’re angry when the screen version doesn’t match up with the novel, point for point, like a DNA profile. Every adaptation has to drop some elements, combine others, and sometimes insert new elements in translating from word to picture.

The Swedish versions did this perfectly. They dropped everything that was unnecessary (like the Blomkvist-as-Babe-Magnet wish-fulfillment), collapsed time, merged some ancillary characters, and told a story that was tighter, leaner, meaner, and more compelling than the original. Not bad.

Then, because Americans can’t be bothered to read subtitles, we made a version of the same movie, in English. It wasn’t atrocious, and if I’d seen it first, I’d have been less disappointed, but here were my complaints:

  • The opening credit sequence looked more like the start of a Bond film. It had nothing to do with the imagery of the film, a soundtrack that was jarring and out-of-place, and seemed so off-target that we wondered if they’d sent us the right DVD.
  • Why was Duck Lips (aka Daniel Craig) the only person in the movie who didn’t have a Swedish accent? Hell, even Robin Wright (great casting, BTW) did a passable job.
  • It was clear that someone in the Hollywood machine felt that the American version of Lizbeth had to be a bit more…sociable. While Rooney Mara did a very good job of acting, the writing and direction weakened the character. If you haven’t seen Noomi Rapace’s portrayal, rent the Swedish version and compare them. That is the Lizbeth Salander from the book.
  • Why change the end of the Harriet mystery? Why collapse the Anita/Harriet characters? The movie hit this point and it was like hitting a cobblestone road in run-flat tires. Bumpity-bump-thump, a few clumsy lines of dialogue, and Poof! Anita is gone. Where? Who knows, and it was so clunky I didn’t even scan back to parse the ham-handed expository block.

Not all was less than the original. Some of the Kubrik-esque rolling shots were quite effective, the soundtrack (apart from the opening credits) was effective, and Duck Li…I mean Daniel Craig was a more animated, less cryptic Blomkvist.

k

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Moonrise Kingdom is Brilliant

Posted in Movies, tagged , , on 23 Jun 2012| Leave a Comment »

One look at the cast list and we knew we had to see it, but I have to say, this is probably not a movie everyone will love as much as we did. And no matter how many superlatives I throw its way, for some folks (like many with us in the theater today) this movie will somehow, for some reason, miss the mark, fall flat, or just make them go “Hunh?”

For my money, though, it was brilliant. It was a perfect piece of craftsmanship. The acting, the writing, the cinematography, the art, the direction, it was all superb, absurd, and totally hilarious.

But humor is such a subjective thing. Ilene and I were laughing out loud through the whole movie–every shot, every scene, every performance was…just…a little bit…off center, over the top, surreal, comic. Every shot had some little bit of business in the background. Every scene had just a little bit of business as an aside. Every line, every angle, every bit of costume and set design was thoroughly thought out, and it was all both spot on for the period (1965) and subtly heightened, exaggerated, and lampooned.

This is, I think it fair to say, a movie goer’s movie. You have to have an appreciation for the craft to get many of the jokes, whether it’s the nearly clumsy camera work (each tracking and pan shot started with a little jerk and went a little wide of the mark at the end) or the nods to other movies (I dare you to watch the flood and not think of “The Shining”).

But even if you aren’t a devotee of the cinema, I still recommend it. The deadpan performances, the stiff-limbed gestures, all evocative of a school play or church pageant, are there for laughs, and the characters that populate the story are unique, memorable, and priceless. When Bill Murray comes into the room, half naked, bottle of wine in hand, goes into the closet, takes out an axe, and announces, “I’ll be out back,” it’s a marvel of understated comedy. And the movie is chock-a-block with moments like that.

See it.

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