Savage Prince Hancock: Chronicles of the Crystal Skull
Been seeing movies in the theater lately: hooray!
I'll stay mum about a few of them, because they're gone now and not on DVD yet, but...
Hancock would have been the pleasant surprise of the year if it wasn't for Kung Fu Panda. As it is it's the second. So much more like a small-run comic book than I expected, and I didn't even see the reputedly awful trailers. It's got a lot of ambition, more than it can handle really, but I give films a lot more points for what they succeed in doing than I deduct for what they try to do and fail.
I have no hesitation in calling it the best film ever on the subject of the bigamous wife of an unsuccessful PR guy.
Prince Caspian was badly paced and sometimes repetitive (does it take an ironic hipster to find it laughable that Aslan tells Lucy, on two separate occasions, that "things never happen the same way twice"?) But I thought it managed the "darker" thing pretty well, after it gets past doing a little tell-don't-show about it early on. It's eventually achieves a mixture of:
- Gotterdammerung tone wherein the legends are over and the extraordinary seems out of place; and an
-It-style recurring nightmare tone wherein you have to re-fight a battle but without all the resources you had last time.
All-in-all, it had a sense of epicness, and the characters (esp. Edmund) were reasonably aware of their own pasts, two things often missing from adaptations and sequels. And the alterations (a fairly tragic extra battle scene, more behind-the-scenes-with-the-bad-guys, and a reappearance by the first film's best character), all worked well, says the guy who read the book once decades ago. I mean, how could anyone resist the temptation to bring her back?
Savage Grace: Very deftly done portraits of unpleasant, decadent rich people you will never meet and who never seemed to have any impact on any lives but their own. A beautifully horrible irrelevancy.
Indiana Jones Looks For Stuff Which Is Kind Of Magnetic: My review is in the from of a play:
(Lights come up. An unmarried couple blink their eyes as if they had just been watching a movie.)
Cass: Well, that could have been worse.
rollick: Yeah, but there's something else it also could have been.
(Cass thinks about this for a moment.)
Cass: Better?
Rol: That's it.
(Lights go down.)
I'll stay mum about a few of them, because they're gone now and not on DVD yet, but...
Hancock would have been the pleasant surprise of the year if it wasn't for Kung Fu Panda. As it is it's the second. So much more like a small-run comic book than I expected, and I didn't even see the reputedly awful trailers. It's got a lot of ambition, more than it can handle really, but I give films a lot more points for what they succeed in doing than I deduct for what they try to do and fail.
I have no hesitation in calling it the best film ever on the subject of the bigamous wife of an unsuccessful PR guy.
Prince Caspian was badly paced and sometimes repetitive (does it take an ironic hipster to find it laughable that Aslan tells Lucy, on two separate occasions, that "things never happen the same way twice"?) But I thought it managed the "darker" thing pretty well, after it gets past doing a little tell-don't-show about it early on. It's eventually achieves a mixture of:
- Gotterdammerung tone wherein the legends are over and the extraordinary seems out of place; and an
-It-style recurring nightmare tone wherein you have to re-fight a battle but without all the resources you had last time.
All-in-all, it had a sense of epicness, and the characters (esp. Edmund) were reasonably aware of their own pasts, two things often missing from adaptations and sequels. And the alterations (a fairly tragic extra battle scene, more behind-the-scenes-with-the-bad-guys, and a reappearance by the first film's best character), all worked well, says the guy who read the book once decades ago. I mean, how could anyone resist the temptation to bring her back?
Savage Grace: Very deftly done portraits of unpleasant, decadent rich people you will never meet and who never seemed to have any impact on any lives but their own. A beautifully horrible irrelevancy.
Indiana Jones Looks For Stuff Which Is Kind Of Magnetic: My review is in the from of a play:
(Lights come up. An unmarried couple blink their eyes as if they had just been watching a movie.)
Cass: Well, that could have been worse.
rollick: Yeah, but there's something else it also could have been.
(Cass thinks about this for a moment.)
Cass: Better?
Rol: That's it.
(Lights go down.)