Media Bits

Aug 15, 2009 12:26

It has been a long and busy week, so when I get home from the real world, I tend to not want to do much but lie on the couch.  Hence, I've watched a lot of movies and TV lately...(all musings are basically spoiler-free)

I watched Oldboy last night.  I'd seen most of it before, but not all in one sitting.  It's a hard movie to explain, and even harder to know how I feel about it.  It's a Korean revenge flick, and the premise is that a man who's admittedly been kind of a jerk most of his life, Oh Dae-su, is abducted off the street and imprisoned in what's essentially a high-security, gaudy hotel room for fifteen years, and no one tells him why.  Then one day, he's released without explanation and told merely that he has until July 5th to figure out why he was imprisoned, why he was let out, and who is behind it all.  It's an incredibly gory film, but the crazy thing is that it's really, really funny, especially the first two-thirds.  The actor who plays Oh Dae-su has a great deadpan delivery, and the narration is the humorous icing on the cake.  Who knew dental torture was good for laughs?  And the fight scenes are realistically funny.  There's one in particular where Oh Dae-Su takes on about twenty thugs, armed only with a claw hammer, all the way down a long hallway.  Instead of gracefully wire-fu-ing his way through, Oh Dae-Su hits people with the hammer, picks up one of the baddies and uses him as a human shield to push the rest of them back, and falls down a lot, in which case he starts hitting people in the shins with the hammer until he can get up, like a normal person would do.  Or a sort of normal person, I guess.

The reason I don't know if I actually liked the movie, though, is the twist at the end.  It's an excellent twist, don't get me wrong, but the level of squick involved is just so intense and wrong and--ugh.  Like I said, narratively, it's the right twist; emotionally, it's very uncomfortable, which it's supposed to be, but it makes it so I'd probably never want to watch the film in one sitting again.

I read that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are going to do an American re-make of Oldboy.  All I can say is 1) I'm very skeptical they can pull off the same odd humor that the original did, and 2) there is no way a Hollywood movie could have the same ending that the original did.  Mark my words, it will not happen.  Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends very much on what the new ending is, I think.  They'll be hard pressed to find anything more gut-wrenching, but because of my ambivalence with the way the original ended, this is definitely not a case where I'll be disappointed if they change it to something else so long as it works in its own right.

On a completely different note, I also watched the pilot of Glee, a dark comedy about a high school glee club made up of misfits and their eager, idealistic director.  I've never seen High School Musical, but I imagine this is sort of High School Musical For Cynics.  I think it has potential.  The kids are all really talented, and the musical numbers were a lot of fun.  (I'm wondering if the adult characters will get in the act at some point; I noticed a few of the adult actors have Broadway experience...).  As characters, the only kids who were really well fleshed-out in the pilot were the two lead singers, Rachel and Finn.  I love Rachel already.  She's both a diva and a dork, which is a very unique and entertaining combination.  Finn isn't quite as unique; he's the jock who really wants to sing, yada yada yada, but he does have a much more interesting back story than you'd expect.  Also, I think Kurt, the (thus far fairly stereotypical) funny gay kid, may have a bit of a crush on Finn--maybe it's just me with slash goggles on, I don't know--so that might get interesting.

Their teacher, Will, is appropriately idealistic and winsome, the cheerleading coach appropriately scary, and Will's fellow teacher and supporter, Emma, appropriately quirky and quite obviously crushing on Will.  The only character I don't like at  all is Will's wife, Terri.  I think she's supposed to be funny, but she's just shrill, stupid, and mean.  I sort of wish they would find some reason for her to go away soon.

And on yet another note, I re-watched Patricia Roszema's Mansfield Park.  It's an adaptation of the one Jane Austen novel that, try as I might, I cannot like, even though I can admit that it's well-written (mostly because I wish the "villainess" of sorts, Mary Crawford, was the main character rather than Fanny Price.  Mary has the audacity to make a sodomy joke!  In a Jane Austen novel!  For those unfamiliar with Austen...that sort of thing doesn't happen very much.  Like, ever.).  The heroine, Fanny Price, is just such a doormat in the book that it's hard to sympathize with her.

However, I love this movie.  It's essentially a "re-imagined" Mansfield Park, using the same plot but radically changing some of the characters in ways that make them far more relatable (Fanny is not a doormat; Edmund, the man she's in love with, is not quite such an oblvious and stodgy twit; his sister Maria is still not nice, but she has actual reasons for what she does, etc.) and playing up certain themes that simmer beneath the surface of the book but never come to the fore, particularly slavery in British territories in the West Indies.

The key change, though, is that Roszema makes Fanny into a writer.  This doesn't seem like much of a big deal, but what it does is turns Fanny from someone who is timid and quiet because she doesn't have anything to say into someone who is timid and quiet in social situations because she's essentially had all her spirit and chutzpah browbeaten out of her by the family she lives with.  We see in her writings what a vibrant, thoughtful person she really is when society isn't telling her that it's better to be seen and not heard.  I'd like to see if someone could make a good movie out of the book without changing the main character so much, but honestly, from the more faithful to the text adaptations I've seen, somehow I doubt it's possible.  How do you center a movie around someone who never says or does anything, just has things said and done to her?  So far as I've seen, no one has come up with a good answer for that.

I still haven't seen all the episodes of Dollhouse, and I'll probably have to go through it once more and watch the episodes in order, but so far it's good enough that I'll give the show a chance come fall.  The episode where Echo is a back-up singer was just outright bad, but I haven't run into any other completely horrible ones.  "The Gray Hour" was all right, the one where Echo was blind wasn't good, but it wasn't horrible, and I really liked "Man on the Street."  I saw the last four episodes in the original run and really enjoyed those, and "Epitaph One" was an incredibly cool idea for a series finale, so I'll be curious to see how they work with that now that the show got a surprise second season.

Is it just me, or is Echo regrettably the most boring character on the show?  I tend to have ancillary-character-love anyway, so I might be skewed, but...I think she's objectively the most boring character on the show, too.  I love Victor, I love Mellie, I love Boyd, I love Dr. Saunders; I'm fascinated by Adelle; I love to despise Topher; I'm actually generally creeped out by Paul, which I don't think I'm supposed to be, but it's an interesting sort of creeped out; and I'm even coming around to liking Sierra.  (And I want much, much more of that character at the end of the regular part of the series--you know exactly who I mean if you've seen it.)  But Echo...Echo is just sort of empty for me.  Is it just me, or does anyone else get that feeling, too?

Well, I'm off to the gym, and then I'm going to find a nice, shady tree to sit under with The Thin Man and spend my afternoon with Nick and Nora Charles.  Happy weekend, all!

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