Monthly Archives: September 2010

Monsters

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by Jonas Kyratzes

Every once in a while there is a movie that can only be described as awesome. Awesome in the original sense of the word: “Inspiring awe or admiration or wonder.” A movie so full of truth, executed with such skill and such belief in the work, that experiencing it is like being transported to another reality and coming back a different person. Monsters is such a movie.

The setting is simple enough: in the very near future, alien life forms have accidentally been set free on Earth, and have spread in what is called the “infected zone,” which is a large part of Mexico. The United States have responded by building a gigantic wall and by regularly bombing the creatures. Shortly before the borders are to be locked down for several months, a journalist is tasked by his rich boss to accompany the boss’s daughter back home. The trip eventually takes them through the infected zone.

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

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by Verena Kyratzes

Somehow, it seems to me, the news need people that they can hate. M. Night Shyamalan. Tom Cruise. And of course Nicolas Cage. All of them hated, and frankly all of them hated unjustly. Nicolas Cage is the most incomprehensible hate on that list. I see M. Night Shyamalan, although it is really not his fault that the studios decided to market every single one of his movies as horror flicks with twist endings. And I see Tom Cruise, although I think that whom he loves or what he believes has nothing to do with his work whatsoever. [I also think that Scientology is silly, but a) not much more silly than, say, Christianity and b) even if it's silly, it's none of my business who believes in it and who doesn't.]

Then there is Nicolas Cage, and here I really can’t figure out what he did wrong. Sure, he somehow managed to lose all those ridiculous millions that he made with movies such as National Treasure or Windtalkers or Gone in 60 Seconds, something that I find puzzling and strange, but then again he was hated long before his financial troubles began. Neither has he made one of those movies that really, really stink, like Gigli (allegedly – I haven’t seen it, and I have to wonder what came first: the movie or the hate?). So what is it that makes people hate Nick Cage so much?

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A Little Project

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The Monsters review isn’t done yet, so here’s something else I’ve been thinking about for a while.

As you may or may not know, I am not a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. It’s not that I have a problem with adaptations per se – I don’t – or that I think The Lord of the Rings is unadaptable. I just think Jackson’s adaptations are not even remotely true to the spirit of the novel, even if so many geeks think that the presence of elves and dwarves (or rather caricatures thereof) somehow counts as faithfulness. But precisely because of the blind adoration of so many geeks and critics, the movies get praise for aspects that are crappy by even the most objective of standards, like the shoddy CGI (while movies that actually look good and consistent get shouted down for not using “bigatures”).

But it’s not really the CGI that bothers me. What bothers me is the ineptness of the presentation and the way the writers have gone out of their way to invert the meaning and values of the original story, in some cases making the false accusations of racism the books are often slandered with actually come true.

Now, good things have been written about this subject. Not as many as I’d like, but I’ve seen some excellent essays and articles – one series of essays in particular, hosted in some subsection of a now-gone website called Odd Lots, was particularly excellent. But, as the previous sentence implies, some of these essays are now being lost, or are getting harder to find. This should not be. So what I’d like to do is to put together lots of links in one place, and more importantly host copies of those essays that are in danger of disappearing from the net forever.

It is quite likely an archive of links already exists, and if I find one that is particularly great, I won’t make another one. But I’d certainly love to create a place for keeping alive some of the wonderful contributions that will otherwise fall prey to Time and his Hounds.

If you have any links or suggestions to share, please let me know!

The Last Airbender

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by Jonas Kyratzes

I think I can safely say that M. Night Shyamalan is the most unfairly-treated director in the history of the medium. After The Sixth Sense turned into a giant hit, he was basically doomed. Despite the fact that the movie’s twist ending was never its point (or the reason it was good), every single one of his subsequent movies was seen only in terms of twists, even when there weren’t any. And his every single movie gets trashed, no matter what it’s like. Remember when it was fashionable to bash Ben Affleck, no matter whether his performances were good or not? That’s what it’s been like for Shyamalan, movie after movie after movie.

Not that all of them were equally good – The Happening was a good B-movie, with some truly excellent scenes, but it was certainly a lesser film. It does tell you something about the irrational hatred people are carrying in them these days, though, that the most derided scene from that movie (“talking to a plant”) is actually a fairly clever joke about the entire premise of the movie - something which people, in their desire to bash Shyamalan, seem to completely miss.

The Last Airbender was also trashed to within an inch of its life, and I don’t really see why. It’s not a great movie by any means, but it’s also not the garbage reviewers make it out to be. It has some major flaws: the female protagonist is played by an unbearably bad actress, the story is so obsessed with keeping as much plot from the TV series as possible that it becomes episodic and slightly incoherent, and the voiceover narration is extremely amateurish. There are also writing problems, many of which stem directly from the TV series.  But there are also good actors of refreshingly diverse cultural backgrounds (the people accusing this movie of being racist are insane), beautiful photography, great music, and a couple of really nice fight scenes. It’s an enjoyable couple of hours, especially for children.

The Last Airbender may not be as brilliant as The Village or Lady in the Water, but it’s a decent little fantasy movie that does not deserve the critical scorn it got. Certainly not in a world where Solomon Kane and its army of bald stormtroopers are praised to the heavens and there’s another Transformers sequel coming. Even when The Last Airbender fails, at least it’s trying to do something good, something a little more meaningful and elegant. That it doesn’t always work is a shame, but let’s keep things in perspective here.

Interesting links:

The Royal Tenenbaums

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by Jonas Kyratzes

The Royal Tenenbaums is better than Rushmore. That’s not saying much, but it is true. Somewhere in this mess of insufferable clichés and forced eccentricity are the sparks of talent that eventually led to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Despite all the postmodern nonsense, the stereotypical characters and the lack of connection to any kind of reality, there are moments when the film is actually good. Short moments, granted, but short moments are better than no moments.

Mostly, though, it’s insufferable bullshit.

The problem with the movie is that it’s a character-oriented story with no characters. Instead of characters, it has a cast of caricatures; few of them are likeable, and none of them are realistic in any sense of the word. Where it has potential to be touching, it destroys any real emotions by making its characters into jokes; where it has potential to be intelligent, it is simply too affected and too lazy to give any real depth.

Particularly offensive is the character of Margot Tenenbaum, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Here we have someone who is supposedly an artist, a playwright – a genius, in fact. And yet all we see is a self-involved, pointlessly promiscuous “quirky” depressive with no vision, no passion and no real reason to be that way other than superficial “daddy issues.” One generally does have to wonder at the depiction of women, both here and in Rushmore, as entirely passive figures, either saints or sluts.

And let’s not even get into the weirdness that is Pagoda, Royal Tenenbaum’s handy Indian servant, who apparently has no life of his own.

The Royal Tenenbaums is simply too far removed from reality to be good. Not because of its subject matter, or even because of its aesthetics, but simply because it’s not about real people or real emotions. There are glimpses of reality in some scenes, especially the ones with Gene Hackman and Anjelica Houston, but to some degree that is simply because these two actors are fantastically skilled. (Though even if the characters were more realistic, it would take a very talented and perceptive writer to make these rich people’s problems interesting.)

When Wes Anderson makes movies that aren’t yelling “look at me! look at me! I’m so quirky!” all the time, and starts portraying some adult emotions, he can be a very good filmmaker. The Royal Tenenbaums, unfortunately, is not one of those movies.

Interesting links:

The Dark Tower to be filmed

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The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s magnum opus: a stunning seven-part series that cannot really be compared to anything else. You could call it a literary epic, a western, a fantasy story, a science fiction story, a character drama, a philosophical journey… but none of those terms do it justice. It’s beautiful, thoughtful, exciting, and intensely heartbreaking. And of course people want to adapt it, as if its original form wasn’t good enough.

The previous people to sign up for a Dark Tower movie were the people behind Lost; that seemed like a combination with a lot of potential. But ultimately, it seems, they felt the project was too big, and they were afraid of mucking it up; a commendable sentiment, and one I wish Peter Jackson had had years ago.

Now a new team has taken over:

(via Slashdot)

“Universal Pictures and NBC Universal Television Entertainment have closed a deal to turn Stephen King’s mammoth novel series The Dark Tower into a feature film trilogy and a network TV series, both of which will be creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. ‘The plan is to start with the feature film, and then create a bridge to the second feature with a season of TV episodes. That means the feature cast — and the big star who’ll play Deschain — also has to appear in the TV series before returning to the second film. After that sequel is done, the TV series picks up again, this time focusing on Deschain as a young gunslinger.’”

Not only is A Beautiful Mind massively overrated and The DaVinci Code a piece of utter tripe, but this seems like the worst possible approach to take. Will we have to suffer through another kitschy, bowdlerized version of a great story?

Going Postal

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by Verena Kyratzes

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are the staple food of most fantasy readers. Almost everyone has read at least a few of them, and those who haven’t will have heard of them. I personally love the Disc and the characters that inhabit it.

There have been many attempts to adapt Discworld for both television and the big screen. Soul Music and Weird Sisters, both from 1997, are unknown to me, but the reviews seem to be mostly favorable. Then Hogfather, in 2006, the first live-action adaptation. A true gem that manages to make up for a slow beginning by later being very funny and also on occasion very, very touching. The movie was produced for TV by Sky One and I can’t fault it either in terms of production values or casting. And the script wasn’t too shabby either. Hogfather is also one of my favorite Discworld novels, so I had reason to be pleased.

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Solomon Kane

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by Verena Kyratzes

James Purefoy is one of the most talented and at the same time underrated actors of his generation. If you’ve ever seen the disaster that is A Knight’s Tale, you’ll know what I mean. A lot of actors bled for that movie, and only he manages to shine.

I’ve been watching both his career and his movies ever since, and with the short, beautiful exception of playing Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, the world’s casting agents haven’t been very kind to him. Resident Evil. George And The Dragon. Vanity Fair. He didn’t get Bond and the two TV shows that he was involved with either didn’t even go into production (The Saint) or got cancelled after one season (The Philanthropist). So all in all things didn’t look good for him at the closing of the first decade of the new millennium.

Then along came Solomon Kane. It sounded good, I’ll admit that. James Purefoy as Robert E. Howard’s puritan superhero. Okay, that sentence contains the word puritan and I don’t think that goes very well with superhero. Still, the initial reviews from France, Spain and the UK sounded good and I hoped, oh how I hoped, that Purefoy would for once star in a good movie, one with franchise hopes. But it was not to be.

(Warning: extensive spoilers for a bad movie!)

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