recent-ish-to-me movies
And by "recent-ish" I mean "I watched a couple of these back in May."
Beautiful Creatures: Somewhere in here is a pretty fun, cheesy tween movie about a teenaged witch (with an odd little witch family that's rather charming despite some rather violent dysfunction) who might destroy the world when she turns 16, and some interesting mother issues and her cousin who was her BFF until she became an evil witch. plus family curses and a house that appears to be its own rather fickle interior decorator. This is actually pretty much the second half of the movie. For some reason, though, it was decided that what the movie needed was to be from the POV of a bored small town boy who just wants to graduate and escape his boring hometown, and so I had to suffer through a lot of that to get to the good stuff. (Marketting apparently realized that the target audience was not going to care about that, and so did it's best to make it look like the movie was all about Lena and her family, and Ethan a relatively minor token love interest. Marketting was wiser than the actual writers in this case.) Also, LOTS of "good old pre-war South" and Civil War nostalgia, and southern cliches.
The Call: Suspense-thriller with a 911 operator (Halle Berry) trying to help a teenaged kidnap victim. Pretty good, and somewhat pleasantly couldn't care less about the serial killing kidnappers tragic past and complex motivations (just enough to give us an idea of what's in his head, but mostly "serial killer who abducts and murders teenaged girls, are you really that interested in his life story?") but definite warnings for violence against women (including 2 teenagers) but mostly off screen. I also give it credit for having damsels in distress behave intelligently and displaying self-preservation skills, even while understandably freaking out.
Epic: This gave me about as many Fern Gully flashbacks as I expected. (But Villain Dude, I'm sorry, you were fine and all, but you just aren't Tim Curry.) It should have been "Beyonce Knowles: Fairy Queen (Who Trolls Her Way Too Serious Boyfriend)" but that, sadly, was not to be. A bit heavyhanded with its themes, but very entertaining overall, and with some character dynamics I'm a sucker for even when done completely without any subtlety, and really really oretty animation.
Farewell My Queen: So, despite hearing good things about this movie for several months before watching it, I had some how managed to nothear about all thr blatant and deliberate lesbian subtext. I mean, given the context, I assumed there'd be some, but not as much as there was. (Not that I'm complaining, mind you.) The movie set set in the days immediately following the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and is set in the palace of Versailles, from the POV of Sidonie, a young woman who reads to Marie Antoinette, taking place over the space of only a few days. Sidonie has a schoolgirl crush on the queen, and spends a lot of time wondering about her relationship with the Duchesse de Polignac (the movie takes the stance that the rumors that she and Marie Antoinette were lovers were true) The world and characters exist almost solely within Sidonie's POV, and as such, the portrayal of the characters and events is filtered through how a teenaged girl isolated from most of the world would see them (and she doesn't always see them the same way from one event to another, depending on what's going on), and most of what's actually going on in France at the time is portrayed only in whispers that Sidonie overhears, and as we witness the court fleeing Versailles. This may bother some people, but it worked for me. Most advertising seems to center on a plotline that takes up perhaps 15 minutes of the movie, in which Sidonie is asked to serve as a decoy for the Duchesse, but the bulk of the movie is actually about sidonie navigating the court, even as it deteriorates around her, and her dealings with the other palace women. Definitely something to be watched if Marie Antoinette and/or little-explored POVs of major historical events interest you. Or if you like the idea of copious amounts of lesbian subtext accompanied by amaing 18th century costumes and settings.
Fire: A Bollywood movie about sisters-in-law (married to two brothers) who fall in love. My first (The only? Dor was secretly a lesbian love story, but it pretends it isn't. queer Bollywood movie. According to Wikipedia, this was a mainstream Bollywood movie, but it's in English and it very much felt like a Serious Business Hollywood movie, and not much like Bollywood. That said, it took a while to get going, but was pretty good once it did.
Hysteria: A romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator starring Hugh Dancy, Maggie Gyllenhall, Felicity Jone, Jonathan Pryce and Rupert Everett, the title referring to the historical diagnosis of "female hysteria," for a variety of women's complaints and "abnormal" behavior. I"m not sure what plot details could actually add to the appeal of the premise, so I'll skip those, though I do give it a lot of credit for having a romantic triangle involving sisters and not even thinking about actually making them rivals or jealous of each other. A few fan reviews I read made me worry that this would be a case of "educated middle class white dude discovers feminism and tells us all about it," but that isn't the case at all (thankfully). A bit heavy-handed at times and a bit too sure of it's cleverness at others, but overall quite fun.
Jack the Giant Slayer: An entertaining movie that completely fails to live up to it's potential in various areas (including, sadly, it's sole female character) save for camp. The trailers promised a movie along the lines of the Hallmark fairy tale and fantasy miniseries from the 90s/early-2000s, and it pretty much was, though with a bigger budget. There are the beginnings of interesting ideas dealing with parallelism and oral traditions and how stories change over time, and some parts make me think it originally started out as a much darker and more serious reimagining, but it mostly settles for camp and cheese. A Couple of sidenotes: (A) Ewan McGregor spends a lot of the movie looking like he isn't entirely certain how he ended up in this movie without even getting to be the hero, but is having the time of his life anyway, (B) Jack is played by Zombie!Romeo in Warm Bodies *points way down to the bottom of the post* which I watched about a week and a half before this, and so found a bit disconcerting, (C) someone in this movie appears to have watched SWATH and taken the "you look fetching in armor" line very seriously (though I think it was also the only direct reference to Isabel's looks here.)
Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak: An exceptionally dramatic 80s Bollywood romantic drama about young lovers who discover that their families have major grudges against each other and their fathers are mortal enemies. It's as straightforward "Romeo and Juliet" as it sounds, yet I loved it anyway. Mostly because Raj and Rashmi generally behaved in intelligent and sensible ways, and they don't conform to and lot of the normal tropes for that kind of plot, and Rashmi was terribly determined to get her way, which is always good. downside: The US release is by Eros, which means THERE ARE NO SUBTITLES FOR THE SONGS. I hate that about Eros DVDs, but somehow hate it even more for this one.
A Royal Affair: Danish movie about Caroline Matilda, the wife of Denmark's Christian VII, and her affair with Struensee, the royal physicain and a reformer, as they both attempt to navigate the royal court. I know very little about the history involved, so can't speak for it's accuracy, but it was beautifully made and perfectly acted, and the soundtrack was amazing, and some of the musical cues were unbelievable. Visually, the only movie I can compare it to off the top of my head is Bright Star, though I don't think it's a completely accurate comparison.
The Sapphires: I first heard about this Australian movie via the outrage over the US DVD cover, in which the 4 Aborginal women who play the main characters in the film are superairbrushed (two of them to the point where I actually find them unrecognizable) and tinted blue in the background, and the focal point of the image is the only white character of any importance in the film, a secondary character who plays the girls' manager. (Chris O'Dowd, the actor in question, has pretty much said that the cover is everything wrong in the world, or at least Hollywood.) A fitting enough introduction, I suppose, as the movie itself deals pretty heavily with racism and racial identity. Based on a 2004 play written by Tony Briggs (who also cowrote the movie, and loosely based the play on the experiences of his mother and aunt, and their two cousins) it features an quartet of Aboriginal women who sing soul music in tour in Vietnam in 1968. The movie is excellent and well acted, and while the music may not have been on par with, say Dreamgirls, it more than makes up for it in other ways.
Warm Bodies: A zombie apocalypse parody based on Romeo and Juliet in which a somewhat self-hating zombie named R falls for a human girl named Julie (whose father runs the only settlement of human survivors that they know of). After he eats her boyfriend's brain. I spent a fair bit of it saucer-eyed and going "WHAT AM I WATCHING?" and occasionally concerned that the writers may have accidentally started taking it seriously a few times, but it was very entertaining, if in a rather odd way at times.
Beautiful Creatures: Somewhere in here is a pretty fun, cheesy tween movie about a teenaged witch (with an odd little witch family that's rather charming despite some rather violent dysfunction) who might destroy the world when she turns 16, and some interesting mother issues and her cousin who was her BFF until she became an evil witch. plus family curses and a house that appears to be its own rather fickle interior decorator. This is actually pretty much the second half of the movie. For some reason, though, it was decided that what the movie needed was to be from the POV of a bored small town boy who just wants to graduate and escape his boring hometown, and so I had to suffer through a lot of that to get to the good stuff. (Marketting apparently realized that the target audience was not going to care about that, and so did it's best to make it look like the movie was all about Lena and her family, and Ethan a relatively minor token love interest. Marketting was wiser than the actual writers in this case.) Also, LOTS of "good old pre-war South" and Civil War nostalgia, and southern cliches.
The Call: Suspense-thriller with a 911 operator (Halle Berry) trying to help a teenaged kidnap victim. Pretty good, and somewhat pleasantly couldn't care less about the serial killing kidnappers tragic past and complex motivations (just enough to give us an idea of what's in his head, but mostly "serial killer who abducts and murders teenaged girls, are you really that interested in his life story?") but definite warnings for violence against women (including 2 teenagers) but mostly off screen. I also give it credit for having damsels in distress behave intelligently and displaying self-preservation skills, even while understandably freaking out.
Epic: This gave me about as many Fern Gully flashbacks as I expected. (But Villain Dude, I'm sorry, you were fine and all, but you just aren't Tim Curry.) It should have been "Beyonce Knowles: Fairy Queen (Who Trolls Her Way Too Serious Boyfriend)" but that, sadly, was not to be. A bit heavyhanded with its themes, but very entertaining overall, and with some character dynamics I'm a sucker for even when done completely without any subtlety, and really really oretty animation.
Farewell My Queen: So, despite hearing good things about this movie for several months before watching it, I had some how managed to nothear about all thr blatant and deliberate lesbian subtext. I mean, given the context, I assumed there'd be some, but not as much as there was. (Not that I'm complaining, mind you.) The movie set set in the days immediately following the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and is set in the palace of Versailles, from the POV of Sidonie, a young woman who reads to Marie Antoinette, taking place over the space of only a few days. Sidonie has a schoolgirl crush on the queen, and spends a lot of time wondering about her relationship with the Duchesse de Polignac (the movie takes the stance that the rumors that she and Marie Antoinette were lovers were true) The world and characters exist almost solely within Sidonie's POV, and as such, the portrayal of the characters and events is filtered through how a teenaged girl isolated from most of the world would see them (and she doesn't always see them the same way from one event to another, depending on what's going on), and most of what's actually going on in France at the time is portrayed only in whispers that Sidonie overhears, and as we witness the court fleeing Versailles. This may bother some people, but it worked for me. Most advertising seems to center on a plotline that takes up perhaps 15 minutes of the movie, in which Sidonie is asked to serve as a decoy for the Duchesse, but the bulk of the movie is actually about sidonie navigating the court, even as it deteriorates around her, and her dealings with the other palace women. Definitely something to be watched if Marie Antoinette and/or little-explored POVs of major historical events interest you. Or if you like the idea of copious amounts of lesbian subtext accompanied by amaing 18th century costumes and settings.
Fire: A Bollywood movie about sisters-in-law (married to two brothers) who fall in love. My first (The only? Dor was secretly a lesbian love story, but it pretends it isn't. queer Bollywood movie. According to Wikipedia, this was a mainstream Bollywood movie, but it's in English and it very much felt like a Serious Business Hollywood movie, and not much like Bollywood. That said, it took a while to get going, but was pretty good once it did.
Hysteria: A romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator starring Hugh Dancy, Maggie Gyllenhall, Felicity Jone, Jonathan Pryce and Rupert Everett, the title referring to the historical diagnosis of "female hysteria," for a variety of women's complaints and "abnormal" behavior. I"m not sure what plot details could actually add to the appeal of the premise, so I'll skip those, though I do give it a lot of credit for having a romantic triangle involving sisters and not even thinking about actually making them rivals or jealous of each other. A few fan reviews I read made me worry that this would be a case of "educated middle class white dude discovers feminism and tells us all about it," but that isn't the case at all (thankfully). A bit heavy-handed at times and a bit too sure of it's cleverness at others, but overall quite fun.
Jack the Giant Slayer: An entertaining movie that completely fails to live up to it's potential in various areas (including, sadly, it's sole female character) save for camp. The trailers promised a movie along the lines of the Hallmark fairy tale and fantasy miniseries from the 90s/early-2000s, and it pretty much was, though with a bigger budget. There are the beginnings of interesting ideas dealing with parallelism and oral traditions and how stories change over time, and some parts make me think it originally started out as a much darker and more serious reimagining, but it mostly settles for camp and cheese. A Couple of sidenotes: (A) Ewan McGregor spends a lot of the movie looking like he isn't entirely certain how he ended up in this movie without even getting to be the hero, but is having the time of his life anyway, (B) Jack is played by Zombie!Romeo in Warm Bodies *points way down to the bottom of the post* which I watched about a week and a half before this, and so found a bit disconcerting, (C) someone in this movie appears to have watched SWATH and taken the "you look fetching in armor" line very seriously (though I think it was also the only direct reference to Isabel's looks here.)
Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak: An exceptionally dramatic 80s Bollywood romantic drama about young lovers who discover that their families have major grudges against each other and their fathers are mortal enemies. It's as straightforward "Romeo and Juliet" as it sounds, yet I loved it anyway. Mostly because Raj and Rashmi generally behaved in intelligent and sensible ways, and they don't conform to and lot of the normal tropes for that kind of plot, and Rashmi was terribly determined to get her way, which is always good. downside: The US release is by Eros, which means THERE ARE NO SUBTITLES FOR THE SONGS. I hate that about Eros DVDs, but somehow hate it even more for this one.
A Royal Affair: Danish movie about Caroline Matilda, the wife of Denmark's Christian VII, and her affair with Struensee, the royal physicain and a reformer, as they both attempt to navigate the royal court. I know very little about the history involved, so can't speak for it's accuracy, but it was beautifully made and perfectly acted, and the soundtrack was amazing, and some of the musical cues were unbelievable. Visually, the only movie I can compare it to off the top of my head is Bright Star, though I don't think it's a completely accurate comparison.
The Sapphires: I first heard about this Australian movie via the outrage over the US DVD cover, in which the 4 Aborginal women who play the main characters in the film are superairbrushed (two of them to the point where I actually find them unrecognizable) and tinted blue in the background, and the focal point of the image is the only white character of any importance in the film, a secondary character who plays the girls' manager. (Chris O'Dowd, the actor in question, has pretty much said that the cover is everything wrong in the world, or at least Hollywood.) A fitting enough introduction, I suppose, as the movie itself deals pretty heavily with racism and racial identity. Based on a 2004 play written by Tony Briggs (who also cowrote the movie, and loosely based the play on the experiences of his mother and aunt, and their two cousins) it features an quartet of Aboriginal women who sing soul music in tour in Vietnam in 1968. The movie is excellent and well acted, and while the music may not have been on par with, say Dreamgirls, it more than makes up for it in other ways.
Warm Bodies: A zombie apocalypse parody based on Romeo and Juliet in which a somewhat self-hating zombie named R falls for a human girl named Julie (whose father runs the only settlement of human survivors that they know of). After he eats her boyfriend's brain. I spent a fair bit of it saucer-eyed and going "WHAT AM I WATCHING?" and occasionally concerned that the writers may have accidentally started taking it seriously a few times, but it was very entertaining, if in a rather odd way at times.