Enchanting Enchanted

The delight of the night! Squirrels and Bunnies and Bumble Bees and Balloons and Bubbles and Song and Dance! Sound like a gay pride parade? Well it is! All the exuberant, merry and happily enchanting fun one could ask for!

By far the most pleasurable experience that Disney has offered up in some time. The cleverest of them all. Throwing the fairytale creatures into the heart of the real world. “People sure aren’t very nice here.” “Welcome to New York.” “Aww, thank you.” It doesn’t get any better than that.

For a laugh and a smile, it’s time to be enchanted. ~ M

Eastern Blah

Throw my favoritest director coming off my favoritest movie into another exciting adventure about rape and drugs and mobsters and you have a recipe for success, in my book. Or do I mean blah? Wait. Yes. That’s it!

Eastern Promises. While coming no where close to the suck factor of History of Violence, this movie definitely had its moments where it was struggling to stoop to that depth. From Naomi Watts going off on tangents where she sounded like a six year old. To voicing over journal entries from a diary that no one has been taken the time to translate. To having Viggo Mortensen fight a bunch of thugs while naked in the bath house (which happened to be a completely lame and pathetic fight – And if making someone naked while fighting overwrites the fact that the fight is lame and pathetic, I missed that memo.). To shocking us all with the big reveal that Viggo Mortensen isn’t actually a thug but an undercover KGB agent (Wow. I’m surprised. What a shock. No. Really. I’m overwhelmingly overwhelmed. What an amazing twist. Never saw precisely that coming. Never in a million, billion years.). It was all just… Not good. Not overtly bad. Just... Blah.

Unless seeing some guy get his neck slit, or another getting his fingers cut off, or another getting stabbed in the eye is what you’re in for. If these types of events, when presented in unmotivated, lame fashions, are what optimize “Awesome!” to you, then this is definitely one to queue up.

~ M

Lust, Caution, Awesome!

World War II. Japanese occupied China. A group of politically charged high school students set out to assassinate a well placed Chinese traitor, diving under cover to infiltrate his life and discover the perfect opportunity to circumvent his tight security.

Lies. Seduction. Love. Treachery. Talk about awesome! Nothing at all of what I was expecting. I’d heard it was mediocre. I’d heard it was long. I’d heard it was graphic. What was it about? I had no clue – maybe some kind of love story. But, a group of friends convince an innocent girl to partake in their assassination plot by befriending a traitor’s wife and later, inadvertently seducing the very man they’re setting out to kill? That’s nuts!

It wasn’t slow, it wasn’t boring, it was freakin tense. Every scene that she is undercover, you can’t help but wonder how much longer until he sees through the deceit. How much longer until she slips up and he kills her. How much longer until the world around her comes crumbling down. And the longer she lives the lie, the more that lie becomes her real identity.

All I can say is that I was captivated. Sure, there weren’t big explosions or extravagant hit men or snappy dialog. There were characters. Characters I actually believed in all of their strengths, weaknesses and flaws. Simply sitting in a room in silence, they were saying more than many characters are capable of saying in an entire movie. What a novel concept.

Ang Lee knows what he’s doing. And he isn’t afraid to step into dangerous territory to do it. That, I have the utmost respect for.

~ M

Percepo-What?

Admittedly, it never helps to walk into a movie and be completely blindsided by the subject matter. Sometimes it works for the better, but other times… This time… It works for the worse. That’s not to say that the historical endeavors of Iran from the 1960s to 1990s are not an incredibly interesting topic, especially when presented from the perspective of an Iranian youth. But when it is presented in such a disillusioned and disjointed manner, it strips away any coherence that would make it engaging.

The movie was like forty or more short vignettes all strung together into one. Not because they made sense together, but merely because they represented different events that happened during this person’s life. Unfortunately, just because they happened doesn’t mean they all belong on the screen. As much as the life shaping event of sleeping with a guy and then finding out that you’ve proven that he is gay might be for someone, I’m not quite sure how it ties in with Iranian national turmoil. Maybe everyone in the country was dealing with gay French dudes, or the sequence was representative of everyone struggling with their sexual desires, I’m not sure. But lacking serious plot points, lingering in a strange back and forth, color and black and white flashback structure, and utilizing an Eye of the Tiger montage to carry the second to third act break, I just can’t say that I got what this one was all about.

In this case: Unique ≠ Good. Informative. Engaging. Entertaining.

One vote for a movie that I can laugh with instead of at. ~ M

PS: And how glad I was to not find a story about a waitress gone postal this morning in the paper. ;O)

10,000 BC – So Bad, It’s… Bad.

It’s time for a new game… Take the audio track from a movie (such as 10,000 BC) and fill in video clips from all the other movies that it jacked sequences from. Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2, Apocolyptico, 300, The 13^th Warrior, Lawrence of Arabia, and so on, and so forth. Really now, it’s one thing to be inspired by movies, but it’s something completely different to actually shoot and structure sequences in the exact same way. And by exact same way, I mean the exact same way. Though in all fairness to the filmmaker, I do have to give him credit that he didn’t execute all the sequences in a photocopy fashion… Admittedly, the spear actually hits the flaming gay king in the end of 10,000 BC, making it completely different than 300… Though I must say, now that I type it, the titles do appear to be vaguely similar.

But I consider myself fortunate to have learned an invaluable tidbit from this film… Ancient people speak perfectly perfunctory English… Albeit with selectively bad grammar. It’s fortunate that when they are giving a blazing speech to inspire and enliven the mass of soldiers who are ready to fight to the death, their diction is impeccable (if only all the African natives [out of the Middle East???] could understand The Hunter’s “foreign” tongue). So I have realized it’s a trait that falls upon all great leaders; when under pressure, when the whole world is watching, public speaking comes easy and true as language barriers disappear. So I consider myself lucky to now know that G.W. is one of the best in history, for he draws all of his skills from the ancients of our great past. No… Not the monkeys. The great wooly mammoth hunters! … Who couldn’t catch a wooly mammoth to save their lives.

Though, admittedly, in spite of all the great qualities that this film mashed onto the screen, I did leave the theater with some questions that will cloud my thoughts for days to come. The most poignant of those follow:

• How do ancient people whose livelihood depends on hunting wooly mammoths… Completely suck at hunting wooly mammoths?
• How do a couple dudes from the Himalayas hike for a couple days and reach Egypt?
• How do you have a huge saber tooth tiger in a movie and not have it eat anyone?
• How are Africans… In Pakistan or Iraq perhaps… Cultivating corn as their crop of choice?
• How do pre-ancient Egyptians have modern maps of the world?
• Where does a slave girl acquire mascara while busy slaving in pre-ancient Egypt so that her tears of death will add a dramatic makeup runs to her cheeks?

I’ll be pondering these questions for days to come as my mind continues to go back to this movie. Because I cannot lie… This movie was so bad… It was abysmal.

I highly recommend it! … With a five drink minimum before the opening title fills the screen. ~ M

It's Time To Begin

It’s time to bring Nicole’s great vision to fruition in some way, shape or form. It’s a blog! On which we can all post our thoughts on the great movies that we have seen, or perhaps others that we want to warn each other away from. Whatever the case, post on any and all that you wish, as there’s no better way to remember just how much a movie sucked, or how loudly you cheered as you watched Javier Bardem kicked everyone’s ass. Happy Blogging! ~ M