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Movies/DVD Recs, as of 7/19/10
Monday, July 19th, 2010 08:10 amAt the Movies:
The Karate Kid: Although parts of this movie look like they were put together from a China Tourism travel video (and that's not a particularly bad thing, on the big screen), the final product is entirely satisfying, if a bit predictable. Jackie Chan's performance is restrained and careful, and it fits his character, the down-on-his-luck kung fu/wushu master Mr. Han, who's been masquerading as a handyman at an apartment complex in Beijing and hiding his sorrows in pointless projects. I thought Jaden Smith was quite good, all things considered; he has an immensely appealing face and he played his role just to the point of whininess, but never over the top. (One of the criticisms I've read of this movie is that he cried too much, which is a patently cruel thing to say. If I were a 12-year-old boy dealing with culture shock, an international move, and other kids beating me up within an inch of my life, I would cry, too!) The villain is of the vaudeville school of badness; I half-expected him to show up at the final competition wearing a handlebar mustache and a black cape. All in all, it's a good story, and only stumbles a few times. Like most movies these days, judicious editing could have made the entire endeavor about 20 minutes shorter, without much detriment to the main story.
Far more entertaining in the long run has been my Dad's reaction to this movie. We coaxed him out of the house to come and see it with us, and I was very surprised that he accepted the invitation in the first place. (Lately, movies are all "too long" and "too loud" and he hates "those stupid commercials at the beginning".) But he came, and he really, really enjoyed it. To the point that he went home and did research on all the kung fu in the movie, and manages to bring up the fact that the crane stance is a difficult/dangerous position to take in a fight about once a conversation now. So, on good authority: The Karate Kid is truly fun for the whole family!
Inception: Talking about this without spoiling it will be hard, because really, this movie is one gigantic spoiler for itself. In the vaguest of terms, this is a film about industrial-level dream espionage. Agents set up a dream and trick the dreamer into sharing his/her deepest secrets, thus "extracting" the ideas and selling them to the highest bidder. But more difficult than extracting the ideas is placing them in the subject's brain, making them think that the alien idea is their own. Our hero is given the proverbial "one last job" if he can manage to accomplish this very tricky, specific task. It's a heist movie that takes places within layers of layers of dreams.
What this movie does really well is replicate the strange, arbitrary nature of dreams. One moment, our heroes are trying to escape a gunfight, the next, they're in a swanky hotel, and later on, they'll be on staircases that end abruptly, or in an Alberta ski lodge. And it all makes sense--even a freight train coming out of nowhere on a busy city street with no train tracks, because hey, it's a dream, and these things happen. This movie also captures the obsessive "need to know" that grips many of my dreams. (Despite the fact that danger lurks behind every door, Dream!Me always opens them, because I get this feeling that there's something really, really important there and if I don't find out what it is, something even worse will happen.) Numbers, facts, stories--all of these perfectly plausible in the dream-scape, no matter what's truly behind them.
But it's what truly behind this movie where some of the bad stuff starts coming up. ( Spoilers to follow, and very likely, big ones at that. )
There is some gorgeous camerawork in this movie, and a fight sequence that simply must be seen to be believed. I do think this film owes a great debt to the wonderful anime Paprika, and I wish it had had some of the same surreal imagery (although, arguably, you can do things in animation that you can't do in real life, even with special effects.) And despite any storytelling failings, I do wish that more action movies were this ambitious, intellectually. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time while I was watching this, like I do with a lot of action movies. And I loved that until the very last frame of the movie, I was guessing which part of the story was true.
On DVD:
Survivors, Series 1: Why does the BBC produce such high-quality dramas with so few episodes in a season, and then abandon them after just one or two seasons? My frustration with this title is especially keen because it's so good; nothing and no one in it is exclusively "good" or "evil". Everything is in shades of grey, some darker than others. The premise, that 90 to 95% of earth's population is wiped out by a virus in a two-week time span, is a chilling one and a lot of the first episode is dealing with this plague, and assembling the main characters into something resembling a family. What follows is at times fable, cautionary tale, and a retelling on many levels of Lord of the Flies. But I like the main characters, and I genuinely want them to succeed. And I am annoyed that even as we start Series 2, that's ALL we will get, because the BBC cancelled the whole thing this March after the last episode aired. Rats! I know I'm going to want to know what happens next!
The Karate Kid: Although parts of this movie look like they were put together from a China Tourism travel video (and that's not a particularly bad thing, on the big screen), the final product is entirely satisfying, if a bit predictable. Jackie Chan's performance is restrained and careful, and it fits his character, the down-on-his-luck kung fu/wushu master Mr. Han, who's been masquerading as a handyman at an apartment complex in Beijing and hiding his sorrows in pointless projects. I thought Jaden Smith was quite good, all things considered; he has an immensely appealing face and he played his role just to the point of whininess, but never over the top. (One of the criticisms I've read of this movie is that he cried too much, which is a patently cruel thing to say. If I were a 12-year-old boy dealing with culture shock, an international move, and other kids beating me up within an inch of my life, I would cry, too!) The villain is of the vaudeville school of badness; I half-expected him to show up at the final competition wearing a handlebar mustache and a black cape. All in all, it's a good story, and only stumbles a few times. Like most movies these days, judicious editing could have made the entire endeavor about 20 minutes shorter, without much detriment to the main story.
Far more entertaining in the long run has been my Dad's reaction to this movie. We coaxed him out of the house to come and see it with us, and I was very surprised that he accepted the invitation in the first place. (Lately, movies are all "too long" and "too loud" and he hates "those stupid commercials at the beginning".) But he came, and he really, really enjoyed it. To the point that he went home and did research on all the kung fu in the movie, and manages to bring up the fact that the crane stance is a difficult/dangerous position to take in a fight about once a conversation now. So, on good authority: The Karate Kid is truly fun for the whole family!
Inception: Talking about this without spoiling it will be hard, because really, this movie is one gigantic spoiler for itself. In the vaguest of terms, this is a film about industrial-level dream espionage. Agents set up a dream and trick the dreamer into sharing his/her deepest secrets, thus "extracting" the ideas and selling them to the highest bidder. But more difficult than extracting the ideas is placing them in the subject's brain, making them think that the alien idea is their own. Our hero is given the proverbial "one last job" if he can manage to accomplish this very tricky, specific task. It's a heist movie that takes places within layers of layers of dreams.
What this movie does really well is replicate the strange, arbitrary nature of dreams. One moment, our heroes are trying to escape a gunfight, the next, they're in a swanky hotel, and later on, they'll be on staircases that end abruptly, or in an Alberta ski lodge. And it all makes sense--even a freight train coming out of nowhere on a busy city street with no train tracks, because hey, it's a dream, and these things happen. This movie also captures the obsessive "need to know" that grips many of my dreams. (Despite the fact that danger lurks behind every door, Dream!Me always opens them, because I get this feeling that there's something really, really important there and if I don't find out what it is, something even worse will happen.) Numbers, facts, stories--all of these perfectly plausible in the dream-scape, no matter what's truly behind them.
But it's what truly behind this movie where some of the bad stuff starts coming up. ( Spoilers to follow, and very likely, big ones at that. )
There is some gorgeous camerawork in this movie, and a fight sequence that simply must be seen to be believed. I do think this film owes a great debt to the wonderful anime Paprika, and I wish it had had some of the same surreal imagery (although, arguably, you can do things in animation that you can't do in real life, even with special effects.) And despite any storytelling failings, I do wish that more action movies were this ambitious, intellectually. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time while I was watching this, like I do with a lot of action movies. And I loved that until the very last frame of the movie, I was guessing which part of the story was true.
On DVD:
Survivors, Series 1: Why does the BBC produce such high-quality dramas with so few episodes in a season, and then abandon them after just one or two seasons? My frustration with this title is especially keen because it's so good; nothing and no one in it is exclusively "good" or "evil". Everything is in shades of grey, some darker than others. The premise, that 90 to 95% of earth's population is wiped out by a virus in a two-week time span, is a chilling one and a lot of the first episode is dealing with this plague, and assembling the main characters into something resembling a family. What follows is at times fable, cautionary tale, and a retelling on many levels of Lord of the Flies. But I like the main characters, and I genuinely want them to succeed. And I am annoyed that even as we start Series 2, that's ALL we will get, because the BBC cancelled the whole thing this March after the last episode aired. Rats! I know I'm going to want to know what happens next!
