June and July Short Movie Reviews

Obligatory Vanuatu reference: We did go to a series of increasingly bad movies at Namawan Cafe’s free moonlight cinema, but I did not review those here (everyone agreed Total Recall was better the first time). Still, for being away for three weeks, I still managed to see a fair few shows. And if you do have any questions about Vanuatu, or things you want me to talk about, feel free to let me know!

The Painted Veil: Should have been called “Love in the time of Cholera”, and did a very good job of making me lose all sympathy for Norton’s character over the course of the movie. Good acting, nice touching on some issues of colonialism, gorgeous opening credits.

Sex and the City: Actually a very good movie-of-a-show. But I dislike the show.

Turner to Monet - exhibition at the National Gallery: Landscape art exhibition. I did not know Monet painted snowscapes. Forget the waterlillies - the snowscapes are where it’s happening!

Prince Caspian: Way better than TLtW&tW, and though not perfect, I really liked that they didn’t need to resort to flashbacks and that they showed the children having some difficulties with having been grown up and powerful and now being children again, and especially the effect on Susan. Caspian was great, although I kept wanting him to say “You killed my father, prepare to die”, but I think Edmund was the best character.

Hulk: Better than the last rendition, in that the Hulk fit a bit better into his world. Still problematic, especially the end (but the showdown scene in Superhero movies usually is) but I think those problems are in the nature of the story, and Norton does damaged well. I loved the beginning - science from scratch, first principles, making do, what I probably erroneously think of as a steampunk aesthetic (or at least what attracts me to steampunk, do-it-yourself, Antarctic exploration and self-sufficiency handbooks).

Meet Dave: Ow. Um - not the worst Eddie Murphy has made?

Red Tree - Australian Chamber Orchestra: The first half was Shostakovich’s “String Quartet No. 15″ with images from Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, the second Yezerski and Tognetti’s “Red Tree” with Gondwana Voices and images from The Red Tree. The first half was alright. I wasn’t particularly stirred by the music and the images chosen were disjointed and statically presented. The second half, however, was brilliant - soaring voices, incredible close-ups of paint strokes and images so that I felt like falling into paintings and going home to read The Red Tree with a magnifying glass.

Dark Knight: I feel I was expected to like this more than I did. It was very good, and I can’t fault too many things (those I picked up on the first time bore out the second). Ledger and Oldman were both brilliant and I admired how the story kept rolling relentlessly forward. But the ethical dilemmas and mature philosophical questions occasionally tilted a little too far into angst for my taste. I’m more a fan of Commissioner Gordon (the true hero of Gotham) and of other characters who just get the job done.

Hancock: First half: brilliant riff on superhero genre. Second half: okay superhero movie.

Mamma Mia: My parents and Aimee and I saw this (my dad’s choice) and it was just fun. No, the story isn’t blindingly brilliant, no the singing isn’t mindboggling. But it’s all about roaming over Greek islands singing “Dancing Queen” and having a good and carefree time, and we did. My dad sang along. My mother and I cried. I found Shapely Prose’s review very lively and entertaining and it points out many of the reasons the movie does work (but I must include a language warning).

Scheherezade: A Middle Eastern cultural day as part of the festival of Brisbane. Small but colourful and with good food and Balkan dancing, and I sketched and Aimee danced and I sat on a carpet which was wet from the grass beneath and spent the rest of the day wearing my jacket around my waist instead of my arms which were cold.

X-Files - I want to believe: that this could have been a good movie. But it was a very B movie and unrelieved by almost everything that endeared me to the series, and even Skinner’s appearance didn’t help (much). Pretending it bears no relation to the show, it was an alright B movie, if you like groaning every time your predictions are correct.

 

April Short Movie Reviews - this time with footnotes

Horton Hears a Who - Not good. It was full of pop-culture allusions and while I really, really like heavily allusive works (from Pratchett to T. S. Eliot to Brothers Grimm), these were so pointless it felt as if the movie existed to enhance the allusions and not the other way around (also, it didn’t enhance them and did more disservice to the things alluded to - alludees? - than it did to Horton). Except for the Emo-Who, which still cracks me up. It was ugly and ungainly (especially the kangaroo who freaked me out) and pretty much ignored anyone potentially interesting (the kids, Morton, the Mayor’s 99 daughters). Oh yes, and only boys can save the world. Things I liked: Morton, the character design of JoJo, the bits Shaun Tan did. Something I found written in my notebook later: Was Men In Black a reworking of Horton Hears a Who? Think it over.*

Supanova - First time. Had fun. Jewel Stait was interesting and amusing, Michael Winslow was very funny and had a polished performance with amazing vocal sound effects. Some great costumes (heavy on the anime repeats, but the less-replicated steampunk pieces were very cool, as was the individual in Star Wars camouflage hiding in the bushes). I might dress up next year but most fun was drawing the other attendees.

Spiderwick (twice) - Not perfect, but not bad. I liked the flawed characters, the actors, and Mallory, the overbearing, strong-minded, sword-wielding older sister was pretty cool. Unfortunately it did get a little too sentimental at times (out of keeping with the rest of the film) and was another victim of the inexplicable genre of wanton destruction of beautiful houses.

One Man Star Wars - Fun for the nostalgia** and to watch anyone do this. It was a bit pricey for what it was, but too long to have been a comedy club act, so I won’t complain. It is certainly worth seeing and I hope he tours One Man Lord of the Rings here.

The Other Boleyn Girl - Pretty, pretty dresses. Pretty scenes. Pretty light. Pretty much a tudor-inspired soap opera. And very, very heavy on the foreshadowing (oh please - is this the third chicken we have seen having its head chopped off in preparation for dinner while the King arrives, in case we didn’t get it the first time?)***. Still, Deb and I had gone on purpose to mock and we didn’t much, so it was better than we expected. Highlight: In the first scene in the King’s chambers Deb started singing “Love shack” and at the end of the credits that was the song which came over the cinema radio!

Matchbox 20 (with Thirsty Merc supporting) - My sister lent me her Matchbox 20 CDs a while ago and to my surprise I knew every song on them. In order. Turns out they were big when I was at boarding school and, along with Sarah McLachlan were part of my first exposure to popular music****. And since they have some memorable, iconic, singable songs and I knew the words (which usually makes concerts better) I enjoyed it very much. My favourite part was when they covered ‘Under the Milky Way Tonight’. Thirsty Merc opened and they were… oh, I like their sound and their hair, both of which is a bit old-rock, but most of their songs are just too sentimental. Also, we were near the front and drinks and finger food at the bar were included in our tickets and we drew pictures of each other, so it was a pretty good night all up. Thanks for the tickets, M&J, sorry you had to go on a cruise:)

The Truth - Brisbane Arts Theatre’s annual play based on a Pratchett Novel. This year it was The Truth^. Otto Chriek stole the scene hands-down. Although so did Sacharissa and Otto (”Please! Not to breath like that!”) and Gaspode and Foul Ole Ron… and I fell for William^^ just a little bit. The theatre is small and the sets are basic (well, they were. Now the one set is quite elaborate). Yes there is a person dressed as a dog with a cigarette in his mouth and, at one point, a tutu. Yes, the opening music was ‘Good News Week’. And it rocked and was hilarious and caught the book brilliantly. Moveable type is now my new hero^^^, maybe even up there with the Rule of Law. I did wonder if they would cut Otto Chriek’s periodic evaporations (he is a vampire photographer with an unfortunate reaction to bright lights) but they changed it for the stage and his histrionics were effective and regularly startling. And Pratchett Does Allusions Well.

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*And while you do, check out these reviews for some interesting angles on the movie: Gender inequity in Whoville, and Horton hears a racist.

**Even if mine doesn’t go back that far. In year 11 I had a weekly “gifted and talented” class. The teacher asked me what I wanted to do and I said (1) use the internet and (2) “Watch Star Wars”, so she showed me how to use the computer in the library, and borrowed the original trilogy from the video store. I got to watch them back at the boarding house because it was, technically, homework :) Unfortunately, she borrowed the last two out of order.^^^^

***Confession: I had to ask Deb which number this queen was just to double-check her fate. I can’t remember the names, just the fates: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”. It’s a bit like Dubček. I could never remember his name, so I used to walk around in year 12 saying “How much dub could a dubček ček ček if a dubček could ček dub,” and now that’s all I remember about him.

****Also Pauline Pantsdown. Oh, and Alannis Morissette, but that was a really, really bad first experience and took me a long time to get over.

^… shall make you fret.

^^William: “Hold on, hold on, there must be a law against killing lawyers.”
Goodmountain: “Are you sure?”
William: “There’re still some around, aren’t there?”

^^^There was a BBC documentary on this with Stephen Fry, one hour, all on You-tube, but it’s gone now. If you get the chance, watch it, if only for seeing how a wooden counterthread for a screw is carved by hand and Stephen Fry behaving like a complete fanboy over the reconstructed press (”a most satisfactory object”).

^^^^Han shot first.

 

March Short Movie Reviews

I should probably retitle these “Short Non-Printed Material Reviews”.

Phantom of the Opera - Live at the Lyric Theatre. C’mon, it’s Phantom - what can I say? I hadn’t seen it live before, and what struck me was the unashamed Gothic (as in, Northanger Abbey gothic) fun of the musical version (underwire nightdresses, the works) and how much I need to reread the book because I can’t remember now if there was an eight-sided mirrored room with an iron gallows (not in the musical). I went with (but did not sit with for a variety of reasons including the Dreadful Situation of wheelchair seating at the Lyric) my family, and we enjoyed it. It was well done but, ultimately, isn’t the only reason you are there the organ music in the first scene, the way The Poseidon Adventure can be as dreadful as it likes as long as they turn a ship upside down? Also, I worked out why you’re meant to “keep your hand at the level of your eyes”. That had been bugging me for years.

The Bucket List - I would have liked it as an amateur theatre production. Mawkishly sentimental, silly, obvious, degrading and with backdrops that look like they were painted for a film in 1950.

Run, Fatboy, Run - Better than The Bucket List. And, indeed, not awful. Ordinary, tainted and not the best work of any of the actors, and would have been better without the American influence (actually, I like the idea of an American trying to live in London and the cultural difference getting to the point that he just breaks and can’t take it anymore, but they didn’t do it well and this wasn’t the movie for it in any event). Dylan Moran played a dreadful human being, as he should.

Jumper - Better than The Bucket List. It was all about the special effects, because the story felt… ellided. It made me want to read the book but I don’t think there is one. Still, though I didn’t walk out feeling ten foot tall, I had fun.

CMC Rocks the Snowies - Better than The Bucket List, even if the mountains were shorter. It would be hard to give this a negative review. The taxi to the airport, the flight to Canberra, the bus to Thredbo, our lunch on the way, the lodges, the tickets to the festival, the gift bags with hats and peach schnapps and the side-venue with drinks and food on the Saturday were all paid for. The air was clear as crystal and the white stars did fairly blaze at midnight in the cold and frosty sky, etc., although there was a heatwave on Friday and we’d only packed jeans and boots. We took a skilift up the mountain and drank beer on a balcony and were very cozy in our cabins at night. There was a kiosk at the gate to the concert area which made fresh hot cinnamon doughnuts. I got to see The John Butler Trio live (and dreadlockless) and several country bands covered The Travelling Wilberries, which always makes me happy. A man took an odd fancy to my scarf, but the skiruns were scented of hay and even if you don’t know country music it is very easy to pick up the words and sing along to. People wore fancy boots and akubras and cowboy hats and generally it was just a fun weekend. The only dull spot was my inability to catch the colour of the mountain in coloured pencil.

Vantage Point - Better than The Bucket List. I think. Who puts Sigourney Weaver in a movie and then doesn’t use her? Hello? People? I enjoyed the structure of the story: eight (?) overlapping viewpoints putting it altogether, but oh! the corniness! the Americanness! the Quaid! “Don’t worry Mr President! I’ve got you!”.

Hey Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger - Better than The Bucket List. An Australian Judy Blume novel, really, in which a young, awkward girl grows up, gains confidence, explores sexuality, accepts her & her families admitted oddities. Not a kid’s movie, unless you have prepared the kids, and it will probably be studied in school. I cried three times, twice over the duck (actually, I cried once over the duck and bawled the second time) and think the beanbag scene in the family psychologists office was one of the funniest things I’ve seen for a while. Also, I want a toy xylophone as a doorbell.

Be Kind, Rewind - Better than The Bucket List, by a very long way. I’ve seen bad reviews of Be Kind, Rewind, and they seem to fall into either “It’s a bad Michel Gondry Film” or “It’s a bad Comedy”. No, it doesn’t mess with reality like Eternal Sunshine. But I wouldn’t classify it as a Comedy - not because it isn’t funny (it is, and I would probably even watch a regular comedy that used this premise) but because it’s an American movie and it isn’t an American Comedy. Like Hidalgo, it suffers from preconceived expectations and reviewers’ inability to classify it. I loved it. It was, like Hidalgo, expansive, but the movie it reminded me most of (and which is referenced/refilmed twice in Be Kind) was Driving Miss Daisy. Not for any obvious reasons, but because it had a gentle, funny seriousness underlying it, and because halfway through the movie I consciously thought “please, please don’t finish yet” and by the time it did finish I thought, “That was an elegant sufficiency”.

 

February short movie reviews

The Jane Austen Book Club (twice - double booked, not enthusiasm) - I am operating on the assumption that the book was better, because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have made a movie. Some good moments shoehorned into a woodenly-scripted frankenstein’s monster of preachy literary allusion which devalued Austen, failed to succeed in pointing out that some men like Austen, made cringe worthy attempts to do so and ended with cheese. However Hugh Dancy’s programmer, SF-geek, over-caffeinated, alternative-energy character was really great, and I could almost sit through the movie a third time for him alone. Among many things, it was great to see an avid SFF reader (first met at an SF convention) with a slightly bizarre and intense outlook on life who was funny (and true!) but not made fun of and who succeeds in promoting science fiction, female authors of science fiction, science-fiction-as-real-books and persuading another character to stay up all night reading Ursula Le Guin and prompt my sister to ask if I had any of her books. That blew me away.

Juno (again) - Still like it. It falls somewhere between Thankyou For Smoking and My Girl.

St Peter’s Chorale - Some beautiful pieces, including a haunting Australian composition by Sarah-I-did-not-write-her-name-down in which the voices at times sound like didgeridoos.

The King of Kong - I won tickets to a preview screening, but it is worth paying to see even, and perhaps especially, if you don’t know much about video gaming. Well told, with marvellous characters who at times are so appalling that it is a shock to remember they are not fictional characters at all, but real people (allowing for a documentary director’s viewpoint), and often very funny. The story continues after the credits.

Moulin Beige - I’m not sure cabaret is my thing, but there were some inspired moments (the Two Men in a Box skit which felt like something out of Cirque du Soleil, but without acrobatics or a budget) and The Joynt has excellent chips.

There Will Be Blood - This would have been a better movie if they kept the original title. It would have drawn it together thematically and given it relevance instead of just being a bald statement of the plot. It’s like calling Die Hard “There Will Be Sardonic One-Liners” or Juno “There Will Be A Baby” or Snakes on a Plane… oh wait. Only There Will Be Blood sounds like a pirate movie, so more like, “Avast! A Swaddled Infant” or “Arrr There Will Be Defeated Terrorists”. Deb disagrees with me on this. I am not ruling out my opinion may be influenced by the lingering disappointment of discovering (before I saw the movie) that the title was not a subtle allustion to The Princess Bride. There was some vivid acting, but though never boring the movie was not fulfilling. It reminded me of The Aviator, in which acting calibre could not redeem a movie that otherwise only had its historical overview of a phenomenon to recommend it. But Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) was awesome! That boy can act!

 

January short movie reviews

Below are last month’s reviews. The book reviews are here.

 

All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane

Jess and I saw this tonight, everyone else having fallen by the wayside. At the end of the movie, I fell down the stairs while walking and reading the credits, wrenching my shoulder, banging my knee and jarring my foot (this in addition to the pinched nerve in my other leg). Jess survived unscathed. We collected the third member of our household and came home to find the fourth unpacking, listening to depressing music at high volume and just finished drying the dog with a hair-dryer.

So real life in Brisbane is somewhat quirkier than the movie, which was patchy but (not unlike the vicar’s egg) very good in those patches. The soundtrack was brilliant, and there were the laughs of recognition (the RE - still corpse-purple - and the Botanic Gardens) and of genuine amusement (the Sesame Street theory of urban development). As is so often the case in romantic comedy-dramas the secondary characters (Tyson and Katherine) were more unique and appealing than the more neurotic, tortured main characters (Anthea and Michael), but it is a good sign that I remembered the names of most characters, and there were scenes where I thought - hey, I was really getting pulled in there. And although at the start I thought, “not gritty - it’s so overdone”, that grittiness was pretty low-key, and there were moments of colour and beauty that were a relief for a small film. The film also caught, subtly, the fact (especially at the wedding) that in Brisbane everyone knows or is connected to everyone else.*

However, if your friends ever ask you to be extras in their friend’s cousin’s movie, do. The most striking feature of the film’s Brisbane was the emptiness of it - as if all the friends and half the city had gone to London.

Off to have chai now.

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*E.g. my housemates are each others’ sisters’ friends and boyfriend’s sisters, and I am not as was thought the random person who answered an internet add, rather I am the family friend of the sisters’ father’s business partner, and one of my coworkers who was to have joined us at the movie has a boyfriend who shops at the same store we do and is my godfather’s son, and one of my client’s cousins, to whom my boss tried to marry me off, is already married to my third cousin, whose parents live in Taringa.

 

Five things that were wrong with Elizabeth: The Golden Age

1. It was the second movie in a trilogy. I wonder how many of the negative reviews were by people unfamiliar with trilogies. Frankly, it was better than The Two Towers.
2. The first movie in the trilogy was Elizabeth. I think this is why the Red Curtain Trilogy was only called a trilogy later: Strictly Ballroom blew the other two out of the water. Some things shouldn’t be compared. Of course, in this case I think The Golden Age was easily better than Elizabeth.
3. Clive Owen. He really did seem (and I quote) out of “another place, another time”. The wrong one. Clive Owen and period drama just don’t click for me. He’s too… forward from the scene. I wonder how Viggo Mortensen would have been? Or any Raleigh less wracked by emotion.
4. Random Horses. This seems to be a failing of second installments. See the mention of Two Towers above.
5. The End. See point 1. Will the Infanta come back to haunt us?

Summation: I liked it. It was vivid. I liked the pageantry and the feeling of falling through paintings. I liked the dignity, in spite of the emotional torment. I liked the themes (especially the rule of law), though I hope they are followed through in the next movie. I liked the pirates and the intrigues and the warrior queens and the silent, threatening children. I liked that it wasn’t caricatured evil versus idealised good, but caricatured and well-governed nebulousness on one side and many-shaded, hypocritical, conscience-ridden, cruel, superstitious, near-sighted main characters on the other. I liked the hair and the hallways and Mary Queen of Scots, and the talent for drama which Elizabeth and Mary both displayed. It was a flawed, fabulous, fantastic pageant,a dark tale of the Faery Queen, relentlessly human, almost a pantomime,  beginning to rot a little with decadence, still fresh with innocence and promise, always with something of the stage about it.

And although it didn’t make me walk out feeling ten foot tall,  I did come out of the theatre with excellent posture.

 

Meep: Good Things

Some exciting events: 

Wacom Cintiq 12WX (I can’t buy this until my Graphire pays for itself)

Previews on youtube for the movie of one of the best books I’ve read this year, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic autobiography Persepolis (they’re in French, but you’ll get the idea):

Finally! The 18th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy is up (in three parts) at http://troubleinchina.livejournal.com/. I look forward to this carnival - lots of thought provoking discussions. This month is heavier on the gaming side of things, which I am not at all involved in, but I also enjoyed this post on 7 more things heroines can do, because it covers some ground I was exploring in last month’s NaNoWriMo project.

Also, the 5th People of Colour in Science Fiction and Fantasy blog carnival is up at Of Shoes - And Ships - And Sealing Wax, but I only just found out and haven’t read it yet.