In Flight Movie Reviews!
August 13th - about 61 hours after i left my hotel in Conakry i was finally on my couch back home in Australia. Granted about 19 of those hours were in relative comfort in Accra, but the last 36 I essentially didn't sleep. Came home and napped for two hours but been trying to stay up till bed time to get back on a normal schedule.
El bossman had picked me up from the shuttle bus stop, it was good to see him. Then i stopped by the Carls Junior that had opened around the corner from work _the day i left_ for a good ole taste of home (+ The shake shack in Dubai Airport that makes two American burger chains in about 16 hours!) and then drove home!
Anyway i watched a lot of movies during my flights so it's time for airplane movie reviews!
The Northman - the main reason i wanted to see this was because as soon as i heard in the trailer that the protagonist was named Amleth i suspected it might be a retelling of the Amloda Saga, on which Hamlet is based. And it essentially was I suppose, though it diverged from the original saga in some ways but what can one expect. Ultimately it's your classic revenge story but chalk full of viking symbology. What i really liked is the intimations that the protagonist might not the good guy at all -- spoiler here: but he's sworn to avenge his father who is murdered by his uncle and marries his mother -- but then towards the end when he reveals to his mother that he's come to rescue her she reveals she'd been taken by his father as an involuntary war bride and had wanted the uncle to usurp his position. So one can see if that had been one's perspective all along, the uncle would be the good guy and Amleth the unsympathetic vengeful antagonist, but i felt they didn't explore this nearly as much as they could of, going more down a "Welp i guess mom is evil too!" track. Ultimately i give it a B+ because while i love all the reference to Norse mythology and a movie based on a saga, it ultimately fails to be more deep than a revenge story.
The Green Knight - (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Knight_(film) ) is of course the classic tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. It was mostly true to the original plot and themes, with some divergences that are a spot baffling to me. The biggest thing to affect the story for me was the decision to go real heavy on the magical realism and is common with movies about Arthurian legends to set it in a place unrecognizable as historic England. Obviously the Arthurian legends always involve some magic that's incompatible with reality as we understand it and some fictional places, but i think it always hits better when set in the historical period it's supposed to be in. When it's set in a clearly dream like fantasy land its hard to get up any willing suspension of disbelief at all and it falls flat as a bunch of silly nonsense. Ultimately I give it a B-, high marks for good development of theme and the telling of a classic, counterbalanced with minus marks for choosing an absolute fantasy setting.
Voyagers (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyagers_(film)) - a group of 30 children + one adult are launched on an 86 year mission to another planet, where their grandchildren will arrive. Trouble begins when some of the children, teenagers by this point, realize they've been being dosed with a medication to dull their emotions and desires, and stop taking it. Then the adult supervisor is killed in mysterious circumstances, and things quickly devolve into a sort of Lord of the Flies in space. I think it was really well done, the themes are well developed, the behavior is plausibly portrayed. I give it an A
That was it for Accra to Dubai (i didn't even sleep), then Dubai to Melbourne i watched the following movies:
Mr Jones - i almost missed this one since the name wasn't very inspiring and the cover image wasn't particularly revealing either. But it had the backwards R of faux Cyrillics which inspired me to click on the description. It's the true story of a British journalist who traveled to Russia in the thirties and reported on the famine in Ukraine, which other at-the-time-acclaimed journalists were happily sweeping under the rug for Stalin. Of course i want to watch this movie! Well made and acted and a subject matter i am very interested in. Reminded me of "The Courier" which I'd watched on the inbound trip (https://emo-snal.livejournal.com/tag/movie%20reviews), if the name hadn't been so cryptic I'd have certainly have watched them back to back. I give it an A- just because I'm not sure someone who isn't into the subject matter as much of me would find it as gripping.
Okay enough with thinking movies, after 50 hours of travel it's time for some shoot em ups:
The Contractor - this follows the classic cliche plot line, good guy in tough situations reluctantly agrees to help with a caper, in this case in the flavor of at least thinking he's still fighting for good guys as a contractor. You guessed it, and this isn't even a spoiler because i think it's in the trailer -- turns out they're not good guys, it's just a heist. One thing that was very very unclear to me is i don't feel they developed at all why the protagonist suddenly realizes his boss is a bad guy. It's like one minute they are escaping from the semi botched heist and then for absolutely no reason as far as i can tell, the protagonist becomes convinced their boss is now trying to have them killed. Which he is but why? The rest of the movie seems to have been plausibly how things might play out for a down and out veteran but that the man that hired them is trying to kill them for literally no reason shit is just lame movie villain shit. And then he gets the evidence that the man they killed had developed a vaccine rather than the bio weapon he'd been told, and rather than make any effort whatsoever to get this vaccine now in his hands to people who could do something useful with it the movie plot utterly drops and forgets about this McGuffin vaccine and instead the protagonist just goes to shoot up his erstwhile boss, predictably successfully. I give it a C+ there were some good gunfight scenes and i think they did a good job with his moral turmoil over his life. There was a scene i liked where after he's mortally wounded one of his pursuers they sit and have a friendly chat, they're both veterans who didn't know what they were getting into.
Nobody - this one i wanted to see because from the trailers it looked kind of funny in a very intentionally unassuming kind of way, and it delivered on that. I think they did a good job of developing how boring and unsatisfying the protagonist's life is and then slowly working up to the reveal that his background isn't what it at first seemed. Beyond that it's not a terribly deep movie, it's the classic "guess i gotta kill these people so they'll leave me alone" type action movie but it had some real good fight scenes and i liked his restrained manner. The one thing that wasn't working for me is they had the guy who stayed Doc Brown in Back to the Future playing his father and spoiler alert he comes out the nursing home suddenly all alert and capable to participate in the final gun battle and i think all his scenes came off super cheasy and really cheapened things. I give it maybe a B- or C+, it's just a good shoot em ups movie nothing deeper than that.
Clean - a garbage man is trying to go through life and stay clean, from drugs and his own violent past. Trying to do good to those around him. Fairly typical stuff but where usually a movie like this would give maybe fifteen minutes to developing that in the beginning and then get on with shooting, I feel like 50-60% of the movie was that, and they did it well enough that it wasn't boring. And then surprise surprise he gets entangled with something and the "i have to kill these people so they'll leave me alone" plot is activated. Plus just like Nobody the bad guys initially think he's, well, nobody, and then quickly find out "he's basically the grim reaper." The one thing i particularly liked about it was i felt they did an unusually good job of humanizing the antagonist. He's definitely evil but you can understand his motivations and concerns. C+ because it's ultimately just another shoot em up.
And then even though i still had time to watch another movie, about four hours left of the flight, i thought i ought to try to get some kind of sleep. Though i was feeling very uncomfortable. I think i can only actually sleep on a flight if i have the bulkhead seat to lean against the bulkhead.
El bossman had picked me up from the shuttle bus stop, it was good to see him. Then i stopped by the Carls Junior that had opened around the corner from work _the day i left_ for a good ole taste of home (+ The shake shack in Dubai Airport that makes two American burger chains in about 16 hours!) and then drove home!
Anyway i watched a lot of movies during my flights so it's time for airplane movie reviews!
The Northman - the main reason i wanted to see this was because as soon as i heard in the trailer that the protagonist was named Amleth i suspected it might be a retelling of the Amloda Saga, on which Hamlet is based. And it essentially was I suppose, though it diverged from the original saga in some ways but what can one expect. Ultimately it's your classic revenge story but chalk full of viking symbology. What i really liked is the intimations that the protagonist might not the good guy at all -- spoiler here: but he's sworn to avenge his father who is murdered by his uncle and marries his mother -- but then towards the end when he reveals to his mother that he's come to rescue her she reveals she'd been taken by his father as an involuntary war bride and had wanted the uncle to usurp his position. So one can see if that had been one's perspective all along, the uncle would be the good guy and Amleth the unsympathetic vengeful antagonist, but i felt they didn't explore this nearly as much as they could of, going more down a "Welp i guess mom is evil too!" track. Ultimately i give it a B+ because while i love all the reference to Norse mythology and a movie based on a saga, it ultimately fails to be more deep than a revenge story.
The Green Knight - (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Knight_(film) ) is of course the classic tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. It was mostly true to the original plot and themes, with some divergences that are a spot baffling to me. The biggest thing to affect the story for me was the decision to go real heavy on the magical realism and is common with movies about Arthurian legends to set it in a place unrecognizable as historic England. Obviously the Arthurian legends always involve some magic that's incompatible with reality as we understand it and some fictional places, but i think it always hits better when set in the historical period it's supposed to be in. When it's set in a clearly dream like fantasy land its hard to get up any willing suspension of disbelief at all and it falls flat as a bunch of silly nonsense. Ultimately I give it a B-, high marks for good development of theme and the telling of a classic, counterbalanced with minus marks for choosing an absolute fantasy setting.
Voyagers (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyagers_(film)) - a group of 30 children + one adult are launched on an 86 year mission to another planet, where their grandchildren will arrive. Trouble begins when some of the children, teenagers by this point, realize they've been being dosed with a medication to dull their emotions and desires, and stop taking it. Then the adult supervisor is killed in mysterious circumstances, and things quickly devolve into a sort of Lord of the Flies in space. I think it was really well done, the themes are well developed, the behavior is plausibly portrayed. I give it an A
That was it for Accra to Dubai (i didn't even sleep), then Dubai to Melbourne i watched the following movies:
Mr Jones - i almost missed this one since the name wasn't very inspiring and the cover image wasn't particularly revealing either. But it had the backwards R of faux Cyrillics which inspired me to click on the description. It's the true story of a British journalist who traveled to Russia in the thirties and reported on the famine in Ukraine, which other at-the-time-acclaimed journalists were happily sweeping under the rug for Stalin. Of course i want to watch this movie! Well made and acted and a subject matter i am very interested in. Reminded me of "The Courier" which I'd watched on the inbound trip (https://emo-snal.livejournal.com/tag/movie%20reviews), if the name hadn't been so cryptic I'd have certainly have watched them back to back. I give it an A- just because I'm not sure someone who isn't into the subject matter as much of me would find it as gripping.
Okay enough with thinking movies, after 50 hours of travel it's time for some shoot em ups:
The Contractor - this follows the classic cliche plot line, good guy in tough situations reluctantly agrees to help with a caper, in this case in the flavor of at least thinking he's still fighting for good guys as a contractor. You guessed it, and this isn't even a spoiler because i think it's in the trailer -- turns out they're not good guys, it's just a heist. One thing that was very very unclear to me is i don't feel they developed at all why the protagonist suddenly realizes his boss is a bad guy. It's like one minute they are escaping from the semi botched heist and then for absolutely no reason as far as i can tell, the protagonist becomes convinced their boss is now trying to have them killed. Which he is but why? The rest of the movie seems to have been plausibly how things might play out for a down and out veteran but that the man that hired them is trying to kill them for literally no reason shit is just lame movie villain shit. And then he gets the evidence that the man they killed had developed a vaccine rather than the bio weapon he'd been told, and rather than make any effort whatsoever to get this vaccine now in his hands to people who could do something useful with it the movie plot utterly drops and forgets about this McGuffin vaccine and instead the protagonist just goes to shoot up his erstwhile boss, predictably successfully. I give it a C+ there were some good gunfight scenes and i think they did a good job with his moral turmoil over his life. There was a scene i liked where after he's mortally wounded one of his pursuers they sit and have a friendly chat, they're both veterans who didn't know what they were getting into.
Nobody - this one i wanted to see because from the trailers it looked kind of funny in a very intentionally unassuming kind of way, and it delivered on that. I think they did a good job of developing how boring and unsatisfying the protagonist's life is and then slowly working up to the reveal that his background isn't what it at first seemed. Beyond that it's not a terribly deep movie, it's the classic "guess i gotta kill these people so they'll leave me alone" type action movie but it had some real good fight scenes and i liked his restrained manner. The one thing that wasn't working for me is they had the guy who stayed Doc Brown in Back to the Future playing his father and spoiler alert he comes out the nursing home suddenly all alert and capable to participate in the final gun battle and i think all his scenes came off super cheasy and really cheapened things. I give it maybe a B- or C+, it's just a good shoot em ups movie nothing deeper than that.
Clean - a garbage man is trying to go through life and stay clean, from drugs and his own violent past. Trying to do good to those around him. Fairly typical stuff but where usually a movie like this would give maybe fifteen minutes to developing that in the beginning and then get on with shooting, I feel like 50-60% of the movie was that, and they did it well enough that it wasn't boring. And then surprise surprise he gets entangled with something and the "i have to kill these people so they'll leave me alone" plot is activated. Plus just like Nobody the bad guys initially think he's, well, nobody, and then quickly find out "he's basically the grim reaper." The one thing i particularly liked about it was i felt they did an unusually good job of humanizing the antagonist. He's definitely evil but you can understand his motivations and concerns. C+ because it's ultimately just another shoot em up.
And then even though i still had time to watch another movie, about four hours left of the flight, i thought i ought to try to get some kind of sleep. Though i was feeling very uncomfortable. I think i can only actually sleep on a flight if i have the bulkhead seat to lean against the bulkhead.