This movie looked intriguing from the trailers I watched, but the final product was actually kind of disappointing. I guess it's still possible to make a good trailer.
The main problem here from the beginning was the pacing. It moved slowly and continued to take its time meandering through the opening plot lines. I had some difficulty following how the brothers ended up in their precarious situation and what the emperor had to do with it as well.
After about an hour, the pace picks up a little bit and it becomes somewhat interesting, but as we continue through it, too much goes on. They are in and out of the forest too much which causes it to lose its nature of being a threat. They are captured, released, and chased over and over again. The final battle throws in nearly every character we've met so far, and it becomes more of an eye roller than anything else.
The outcome to the final battle strikes me as ill-conceived and very hard to believe, even for a fairy tale.
So what began as a good idea just kind of foundered in the making of the film. I think the script has some issues as well that should have been corrected prior to filming. Terry Gilliam, the director and of Monty Python fame, has directed perfectly good films before, but it seems he missed the mark on this one with a film that is too slow and too contrived for its own good.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Must Love Dogs -- 2005 -- PG-13
Guess who got subjected to another chick flick the other night? If you said you did, then clearly we're in the same boat...just like the people in this movie were at one point.
We've reached the age of Internet dating and there's no better way to bring this into the social consciousness than to make it the backbone of a film about a divorcee who is afraid to "get back out there." Her sister places an ad for her, and she meets the love interest because his best friend responded for him...because he is also a divorcee afraid to "get back out there." The two have some good chemistry together and their scenes are really amusing and you want the best for the relationship.
This whole thing gets complicated by the "don't touch that one, he's still married" love interest which she goes after anyway. I know she has a journey to go through, but the film struggles with keeping these two plots remaining interesting as between their introductions and then the parts going, a lot of time passes as a lot of other things happen. For a time, I wondered if the one she shouldn't was out of the picture since the final love interest was in, but then he showed right back up.
Call it a personal preference, but I feel like the girl sleeping with anyone other than the final guy during the film only hurts her character and makes her less appealing. Final guy told his easy-to-bag date "no." Points for him. Must admit that cross-town condom hunt was very funny.
It has its ups and downs, but in the end everything was tied up nice and neat, and it was done as well as it could be done. I think we could have had a cleaner movie without the married (sorry, "separated") guy, but it still worked pretty well. It's no Sleepless in Seattle, though, which I'm sure I'm be watching soon...
We've reached the age of Internet dating and there's no better way to bring this into the social consciousness than to make it the backbone of a film about a divorcee who is afraid to "get back out there." Her sister places an ad for her, and she meets the love interest because his best friend responded for him...because he is also a divorcee afraid to "get back out there." The two have some good chemistry together and their scenes are really amusing and you want the best for the relationship.
This whole thing gets complicated by the "don't touch that one, he's still married" love interest which she goes after anyway. I know she has a journey to go through, but the film struggles with keeping these two plots remaining interesting as between their introductions and then the parts going, a lot of time passes as a lot of other things happen. For a time, I wondered if the one she shouldn't was out of the picture since the final love interest was in, but then he showed right back up.
Call it a personal preference, but I feel like the girl sleeping with anyone other than the final guy during the film only hurts her character and makes her less appealing. Final guy told his easy-to-bag date "no." Points for him. Must admit that cross-town condom hunt was very funny.
It has its ups and downs, but in the end everything was tied up nice and neat, and it was done as well as it could be done. I think we could have had a cleaner movie without the married (sorry, "separated") guy, but it still worked pretty well. It's no Sleepless in Seattle, though, which I'm sure I'm be watching soon...
Rent -- 2005 -- PG-13
I've been waiting years for this one. I got the cast recording of Rent in 1997, a year after it came out on Broadway.
This is a heck of a drama on screen. The relationships are engaging when watching them develop from the sweetness of Collins and Angel to the touching uncertainty of Roger and Mimi to the controlling/flirtatious rocky back and forthness of Joanne and Maureen, it seems to cover the basic types of relationship types we encounter or have even been in before. And then you have Mark who is just there giving us the tale from his vantage point, it seems, as he works to film his movie. Through Larson's wonderful music, we feel the trials these characters go through and the heartbreaks as they endure them.
The stage-to-screen translation worked very, very well and it delivers a powerful performance with nearly every main musical number intact. Some of the more recitative numbers from the show were changed into straight dialogue, and two songs were cut; Christmas Bells, which is a favorite from the show and I wish they kept and Contact, which I'm grateful was gone. I guess it was a fair trade-off.
Another bonus here is after listening to the cast recording for so long, most of the main cast in the movie was from the original Broadway cast meaning that the voices singing were exactly the same ones from the 1996 recording.
Yes, some of the subject matter deals with homosexuality, but that is not something rubbed in the face of the viewer; it's simply an element of the story such as space travel is for Star Trek...simply there and we move on. Will and Grace is 100 times more in your face than this show is about that topic.
So my bottom line is that this is still a wonderful show, and the filmmakers did a great job on the movie of it. The biggest danger is trying to make a movie out of a musical is losing some of the magic of the stage; it wasn't lost here.
This is a heck of a drama on screen. The relationships are engaging when watching them develop from the sweetness of Collins and Angel to the touching uncertainty of Roger and Mimi to the controlling/flirtatious rocky back and forthness of Joanne and Maureen, it seems to cover the basic types of relationship types we encounter or have even been in before. And then you have Mark who is just there giving us the tale from his vantage point, it seems, as he works to film his movie. Through Larson's wonderful music, we feel the trials these characters go through and the heartbreaks as they endure them.
The stage-to-screen translation worked very, very well and it delivers a powerful performance with nearly every main musical number intact. Some of the more recitative numbers from the show were changed into straight dialogue, and two songs were cut; Christmas Bells, which is a favorite from the show and I wish they kept and Contact, which I'm grateful was gone. I guess it was a fair trade-off.
Another bonus here is after listening to the cast recording for so long, most of the main cast in the movie was from the original Broadway cast meaning that the voices singing were exactly the same ones from the 1996 recording.
Yes, some of the subject matter deals with homosexuality, but that is not something rubbed in the face of the viewer; it's simply an element of the story such as space travel is for Star Trek...simply there and we move on. Will and Grace is 100 times more in your face than this show is about that topic.
So my bottom line is that this is still a wonderful show, and the filmmakers did a great job on the movie of it. The biggest danger is trying to make a movie out of a musical is losing some of the magic of the stage; it wasn't lost here.
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