HOW TO TRAIN YR MALEFICENT TRANSFORMER
It’s that time of year when only franchise summer blockbusters are playing. So …
How To Train Your Dragon 2
In which awkward teenage Hiccup is now awkward young man Hiccup trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. Meanwhile, the evil Drago Bludvist is amassing a dragon army, and is coming for Berk’s dragons. Hiccup is convinced he can stop the coming war. But events - to include some shocking revelations - complicate matters further.
Probably the most striking thing about HTTYD2, apart from the noticeably upgraded animation, is that it’s a great example of how to do a sequel right - telling a different kind of story, and letting the characters grow without simply rehashing jokes and catchphrases. It’s also got some surprisingly grim moments for a G-rated animated film.
The trade-off is that it’s not quite as fun as the first one, particularly when it comes to some of the family-drama angle, which occasionally feels a little too contrived and slows the film down. But overall, it’s a good film that sets the bar not only for sequels, but animated films in general.
Transformers: Age Of Extinction
It’s not really fair to review this one, since (1) Michael Bay’s target audience is teenage boys who go to movies to see explosions and babes in Daisy Dukes, and (2) the bride and I only saw it because we wanted to see Hong Kong get decimated by Dinobots.
And even there, it was a bit of a rip-off, since a lot of HK looked suspiciously like Lower Wacker Drive and a set made up to look more like the dilapidated town square of a mainland Chinese village than anything you might actually find in HK. Still, they did do some filming in Quarry Bay (where I used to work) and Victoria Harbour, and they did rip up some digitized downtown HK, which was fun.
The cameos by local HK actors and pop stars were also amusing - especially the part where Michael Wong says, “We need to call the Central Government!” You can almost see Xi Jinping slow-clapping off-camera.
Other than that … well, yes, it’s everything you expect from both a Transformers movie and a Michael Bay movie - annoying asshat characters (this time it’s Mark Wahlberg doing the overprotective dad routine), female eye candy and a stupid storyline with a complete disregard for logic (because it gets in the way of the explosions). I sometimes wonder if Bay isn’t somehow conducting some bizarre multi-million-dollar experiment to prove that you can dumb down summer blockbusters until they really are nothing more than three hours of explosions, destruction and ass shots and STILL get people to go watch them.
Anyway.
Maleficent
In which we get to hear the tale of Sleeping Beauty from the villain’s POV, for once. And as you’ve probably heard, Maleficent isn’t as evil as the 1959 Disney classic would have you believe - so much so that the blogscape is abuzz will all kinds of intellectual dissections about role reversals, female empowerment, queer politics and to what extent the movie succeeds as whatever sociopolitical screed a given blogger/critic thinks it was intended to be.
Which is probably giving Maleficent too much credit - at the end of the day, it's a fairly obvious attempt by Disney to repackage and recycle intellectual property. On the other hand, it does have some merit as a rewrite. The 1959 Maleficent was always pretty one-dimensional as villains go (even Disney fairy-tale villains, who are usually evil just because EVIL), so there’s a lot of room to play around with her character. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton does a pretty good job of recasting Maleficent as a powerful fairy wronged and betrayed by the human world. And Angelina Jolie really does bring that character to life.
But while Woolverton does manage to subvert a few fairy-tale conventions, almost everything that’s not about Maleficent herself directly falls back onto the usual genre clichés, and director Robert Stromberg gives some uneven direction that veers between stunningly picturesque imagery and the usual rollercoaster CGI action sequences. Also, the focus on Maleficent comes at the expense of almost every other character in the film, all of whom feel underwritten. All told, it’s not a bad film, but it’s not a great one either.
Wake me when it's over,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1478535.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
How To Train Your Dragon 2
In which awkward teenage Hiccup is now awkward young man Hiccup trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. Meanwhile, the evil Drago Bludvist is amassing a dragon army, and is coming for Berk’s dragons. Hiccup is convinced he can stop the coming war. But events - to include some shocking revelations - complicate matters further.
Probably the most striking thing about HTTYD2, apart from the noticeably upgraded animation, is that it’s a great example of how to do a sequel right - telling a different kind of story, and letting the characters grow without simply rehashing jokes and catchphrases. It’s also got some surprisingly grim moments for a G-rated animated film.
The trade-off is that it’s not quite as fun as the first one, particularly when it comes to some of the family-drama angle, which occasionally feels a little too contrived and slows the film down. But overall, it’s a good film that sets the bar not only for sequels, but animated films in general.
Transformers: Age Of Extinction
It’s not really fair to review this one, since (1) Michael Bay’s target audience is teenage boys who go to movies to see explosions and babes in Daisy Dukes, and (2) the bride and I only saw it because we wanted to see Hong Kong get decimated by Dinobots.
And even there, it was a bit of a rip-off, since a lot of HK looked suspiciously like Lower Wacker Drive and a set made up to look more like the dilapidated town square of a mainland Chinese village than anything you might actually find in HK. Still, they did do some filming in Quarry Bay (where I used to work) and Victoria Harbour, and they did rip up some digitized downtown HK, which was fun.
The cameos by local HK actors and pop stars were also amusing - especially the part where Michael Wong says, “We need to call the Central Government!” You can almost see Xi Jinping slow-clapping off-camera.
Other than that … well, yes, it’s everything you expect from both a Transformers movie and a Michael Bay movie - annoying asshat characters (this time it’s Mark Wahlberg doing the overprotective dad routine), female eye candy and a stupid storyline with a complete disregard for logic (because it gets in the way of the explosions). I sometimes wonder if Bay isn’t somehow conducting some bizarre multi-million-dollar experiment to prove that you can dumb down summer blockbusters until they really are nothing more than three hours of explosions, destruction and ass shots and STILL get people to go watch them.
Anyway.
Maleficent
In which we get to hear the tale of Sleeping Beauty from the villain’s POV, for once. And as you’ve probably heard, Maleficent isn’t as evil as the 1959 Disney classic would have you believe - so much so that the blogscape is abuzz will all kinds of intellectual dissections about role reversals, female empowerment, queer politics and to what extent the movie succeeds as whatever sociopolitical screed a given blogger/critic thinks it was intended to be.
Which is probably giving Maleficent too much credit - at the end of the day, it's a fairly obvious attempt by Disney to repackage and recycle intellectual property. On the other hand, it does have some merit as a rewrite. The 1959 Maleficent was always pretty one-dimensional as villains go (even Disney fairy-tale villains, who are usually evil just because EVIL), so there’s a lot of room to play around with her character. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton does a pretty good job of recasting Maleficent as a powerful fairy wronged and betrayed by the human world. And Angelina Jolie really does bring that character to life.
But while Woolverton does manage to subvert a few fairy-tale conventions, almost everything that’s not about Maleficent herself directly falls back onto the usual genre clichés, and director Robert Stromberg gives some uneven direction that veers between stunningly picturesque imagery and the usual rollercoaster CGI action sequences. Also, the focus on Maleficent comes at the expense of almost every other character in the film, all of whom feel underwritten. All told, it’s not a bad film, but it’s not a great one either.
Wake me when it's over,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1478535.html. Please comment there using OpenID.