Latest Hollywood Films Viewed...

Escape Plan.  If you could go back in time and tell my 90s self that one day there would be a Sly/Ahnult buddy-action movie teamup with a Sam Neill cameo and it would be dull enough to where I would spend most of it playing games on my cell phone, I don't think my my younger self would believe you.  But it's true.  This isn't terrible, and in fact the prison escape stuff is kind of clever, but it's undermined by the mediocre directing and terrible dialogue (apparently written in a West European language and translated, badly, into English), not to mention the disinterested supporting performances (the non-Bollyviewers and I spent most of the movie convinced that one of the head villains was played by a German lookalike for Jim Caveziel who was being dubbed into English by a particularly bored voice artist, only to discover that it was in fact Jim Caveziel.  Oops).  Sly gives a pretty good world-weary tough guy performance, although the idea of him as an attorney-turned-engineer-turned-escape artist is hard to buy into, and Arnie is rather better than that, since his character is somewhat enigmatic and tricksterish and gets (or invents) all the best lines.  If you like Pakistani-American character actor Faran Tahir, he's in this too, and gives a pretty good performance as a Muslim inmate whom Arnie feuds with and then talks into joining their escape plan.  Vincent D'Onofrio is pretty bad, and Sam Neill puts in just barely enough effort to sell the viewer on his character.

Went to the theater today for the first time in ages to see The Hundred-Foot Journey, simply because someone recommended it and I looked it up and hey, A.R. Rahman composed the music! It was a beautiful movie; very well done. Bollywood mainstay Om Puri was in it, as was Helen Mirren (who was awesome) and good-looking Manish Dayal. It was nice because I've been cramming down desi films like crazy lately, so this was a nice segway back into watching Hollywood movies (although I did watch Pulp Fiction the other night, haha). It was funny - I gasped because they had a song by Lata playing in the background, and the people around me stared at me like I was crazy.

Two thumbs up for The Hundred-Foot Journey! I recommend it to anyone.

The Last Unicorn.

It's probably been 20+ years since I last saw this. I remember finding it fascinating but bewildering (and occasionally traumatic) as a kid. On this version I mostly found it kind of odd and occasionally boring (and the anatomically correct harpy and treewoman are still major NOPE DO NOT WANT) but I felt like I understood what it was getting at for the most part. I liked the contrast between the handsomely detailed backgrounds (by some Japanese artists who went on to work at Studio Ghibli), the very stylized unicorn who looked like something Leiji Matsumoto would draw (not that the gentleman has ever had occasion to draw a unicorn that I know of), the coarsely caricatured humans done in a standard Rankin-Bass (western) artstyle, and the way the unicorn's human form was sort of a merger of the western and anime artstyles.

The songs mostly just take up space without adding anything to the story, and Mia Farrow, Tammy Grimes, Alan Arkin and Jeff Bridges give mediocre to bad voice-acting performances as the main good guys. Angela Lansbury is not much better. Paul Frees has great panache in his cameo, and Rene Auberjonois is amusing if hammy, but the jewel of the voice work is Christopher Lee (allegedly the only cast member who'd read the book, as usual). He never loses sight of the menace and insanity of his character, but he manages to give him a tragic and vulernable quality as well. He has perhaps twenty or thirty lines of dialogue and only turns up in the third act, but it is probably one of his best performances inspite of that.

Madhouse - A Vincent Price film from the later portion of his career, wherein his age was really showing. He played an actor who had a breakdown after the murder of his fiancee, and was brought back a little over a decade later to replay the character he was famous for. I can't fault Price's performance, for he was always a fantastic actor in everything he did. A lot of the characters just left me very angry. Peter Cushing did a good job, but again...I can never fault a Cushing performance. Mediocre movie at best, worth watching just to see Price in a lesser-known movie. The ending came out of nowhere, absolutely ridiculous, but it's a breath of fresh air in general for me after watching far too many poorly-done old grindhouse films. Those things will make anything look oscar-winning in comparison.

I Sell The Dead - Amusing little horror comedy in the style of a comic book. A few very good actors came together for a cute bit of kitsch. Better than Madhouse writing-wise, but the film style itself is a bit difficult for me. Still, I managed to get over it and enjoy this anyway. Ron Perlman is a gem. Plus, Larry Fessenden gets a pretty meaty role too...and I really like Larry Fessenden. Wish he could get more big roles...he's a good character actor. This movie is a great Halloween flick, I think.

Edge of Tomorrow
I have a complicated relationship with the films of Tom Cruise; on the one hand, he's a perfectly serviceable, photogenic leading man who seems (based on his choice of projects) to be interested in  a lot of the same things my friends and I are into, and on the other hand I find him kind of annoying as a screen personality and even more so as a RL personality.  This well-made but financially unsuccessful science fiction movie, which was directed by Doug Liman (Bourne Identity, Mr and Mrs Smith) and based on a manga called All You Need Is Kill, is probably the best film Cruise has made in a while, and I'm not just saying that because the premise (Groundhog Day Meets Starship Troopers) requires Cruise to die in a darkly humorous fashion every ten minutes or so.  It's well-paced and not draggy (unlike both Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers), action-packed, humorous, somewhat thought-provoking in its handling of the time loop angle and its very alien antagonists, well-acted by Cruise, Emily Blunt, and the handful of supporting actors who matter.  The references to WWI and WWII battles fought in France, Belgium, and modern Germany helped keep the story grounded, IMO, and the combat exosuits were thought-out well.  If it had a problem, it was that the dialogue for the American and British characters felt slightly "off" (the film was coproduced by an Australian company and the Japanese manga publisher, among others) and the ending was a slight copout. 


The Black Hole

This is one of those movies that the More Casual Fan and I watch from time to time.  It's not a good movie by anyone's reckoning, but it's one of those interesting film failures that we like to sit and probe at like a sore tooth or something, because most of the things that are blatantly idiotic about it could be fixed or explained away without a great deal of trouble, and the things that are ambiguous or surreal about it are fun to debate.  I don't know whether it was the tv we watched it on or Disney's dvd release, but the visuals felt overly bright and sharp for some reason; this is ultimately a haunted house movie in outer space with some elements borrowed from 2001, Star Wars, Star Trek, and 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, and I remember it seeming appropriately dark and murky in earlier video releases.


Interstellar

The non-Bollyviewers and I watched the Imax version of this, and the outer space scenes made that worth the price of admission all by themselves.  They are stunning, with the wormhole passage and the final docking sequence, where the main character and one of the robots attempt an almost impossible maneuver, being my personal favorites.  I've seen very negative comments about the pacing, plotting and physics.  I can't speak to the physics-I thought the film gave a decent cliff notes version which could be followed by people like me, who know a little about space travel and astronomy but not a great deal, and the actual physicists and astronomers who've commented on the film seemed forgiving of its shortcomings.  Pacing was okay by me: there are two sequences, one near the end and one near the beginning where Matthew McConnaughey's character dithers too much before realizing what he needs to do, but otherwise I was fine.  There's a lot of semi-philosophical conversations that are going to come off as either pretentious twaddle or preaching to the choir depending on your personal beliefs, for me it was mostly the latter, but the actors are compelling enough in those scenes to make up for it.  Plotting-well, I'll give you that.  One of the misadventures the characters get into in the second half could probably have been avoided if the characters just stopped and thought through the implications of time dilation more carefully, and since they get into the *other* misadventure partially because the main guy is being immature and trying to punish one of the people responsible for getting them into misadventure number one, alot of the second half depends on the main party of space explorers being kind of dumb, although I was sufficiently sucked in by the plot to not notice until after the fact.  

Also, like Edge of Tomorrow, it pushes its premise just a little too far in the service of trying to resolve the main character's situation in a way that mainstream audiences will accept, but I actually liked the long epilogue that resulted from that-after having the terrible situation of the human race rubbed in our face so much, we deserved to find out what happened to it.

I liked the acting in general-Matthew McConnaughey's and Anne Hathaway's characters were not always sympathetic but they were believable as the types of people they were meant to be, and the other actors did well with what they were given.  I did not care for McConnaughey's handling of the scenes with his character's daughter: we're meant to understand that this is a dysfunctional relationship where he sees her too much as an extension of himself, as parents sometimes do, but even allowing for that their scenes together just felt off.  The cast in general tended to mumble a lot-there was at least one place with Michael Caine's character where obscuring what he said seemed to be intentional, but there were tons more places where it didn't seem to be.  I liked the robots (supposed to be repurposed military support devices), with their gruff voices, sarcastic humor and weird, utilitarian designs.

Conceptually, the film's not that unique: a lot of the first act has similarities to Signs and X-Files, a lot of the second and third act build on storytelling tropes originated by 2001, or are in dialogue with the less silly aspects of Disney's Black Hole (Interstellar technically has *two* hell-themed sequences to Black Hole's one, although you need to be pretty familiar with Dante's Inferno to recognize the first one, and even more familiar with Christian theology to recognize the other).  There are also vague similarities to the original Star Trek (mostly just the space exploration premise) and to Star Trek Deep Space Nine (specifically the pilot and a late-series episode called Sound of Her Voice, and a popular fan theory about the nature of the "wormhole aliens".)  But as with his Batman movies, Nolan does an impressive job of repurposing material that was flawed, silly or outdated into something interesting, dignified and relevant.

Holiday Inn. This is a very self-aware musical film about show business, and pretty unapologetic about what show business people are like: the two main female characters are bratty, fickle, ambitious and manipulative, while the men although slightly more nuanced are no better as human beings: Bing Crosby's character is fickle, manipulative, lazy and passive-aggressive; Fred Astaire's is fickle, ambitious and manipulative but comparatively honest about it.  We're supposed to be amused by and tolerant of their antics, both because they aren't really capable of sustained malice and because they don't hurt anyone but themselves and other people like them.  And because they are enormously, insanely talented-I didn't actually watch very much of the speaking scenes this time, just cruised through the musical numbers: listening to Irving Berlin's songs and Bing's glorious voice at its prime, watching the lightning precision of Fred Astaire's feet in the dance numbers (I am particularly partial to "You're Easy to Dance With", "Washington's Birthday" and the firecracker dance).

Malificent.  This is a sort of perspective flip/revisionist retelling of Disney's animated Sleeping Beauty, which was and is one of the most visually striking things ever committed to celluloid.  Malificent is a very handsome film in its own right that preserves the medieval/renaissance feel of the original and then adds a fairyland that looks like a cross between Avatar and the Dark Crystal.  While Sleeping Beauty used a certain amount of Christian imagery without actually doing anything particularly intelligent with the ideas underlying the images, Malificent largely discards the imagery while crafting a story of sin, redemption and reconciliation that is arguably closer to Christian ideals.  There's a lot of these revisionist hero-as-villain/villain-as-hero retellings where the villain as hero is a totally okay person who never does anything really bad but is misunderstood or scapegoated every step of the way, but this one isn't like that.  It is smart enough to acknowledge that although the main character had suffered greatly and been terribly wronged, none of that makes it okay for her to punish an innocent child for her ex-lover's sins, and the character herself comes to understand that.  One of the most ancient and terrifying myths the western world knows is the story of a woman who, in seeking vengeance on a man, targets children and adolescents, and there's something weirdly brilliant, and appropriate, about the idea of someone under the Disney banner managing to come up with a riff on the Medea story that ends happily for both the Medea analogue and the analogue to her victims.

It's not flawless; the prosthetic cheekbones used to make Jolie look more like the animated Malificent are distracting and unnecessary.  I find it weirdly infuriating that these talented, ignorant sods really expect us to believe that Malificent's and Diaval's (presumably benign) respective sets of fairy parents gave their children names that meant "evildoer" and "devil" in various Romance languages (especially since the filmmakers could not be bothered to retain Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather's names).  The film's a little hazy on the politics of fairyland: although you can argue that the shift from the egalitiarian world of the opening, to Malificent as Lady-Protector and then later to Evil(....ish) Queen as being down to Malificent becoming infected with Stefan's pride and ambition over time, it's just not spelled out very well.   Moody, melody-impaired composer James Newton Howard is totally inadequate, especially compared to Sleeping Beauty's use of middlebrow, easily accessible arrangements of pieces from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet.  Also, since I've never seen Sharlto Copley in anything but this and A-Team, I had trouble taking him seriously as the villain of the piece, King Stefan.  The three pixies were well acted but (even allowing for the premise that they were well-meaning idiots) poorly written.  

In general I thought the cast did really well though: Elle Fanning is so charming as Princess Aurora that you have no trouble believing that Malificent would grow attached to the target of her vengeful curse; Sam Riley was amusing as Malificent's (unwillingly shapeshifted) henchraven Diaval; the guy playing Prince Philip was very likable in his brief scenes; and Angelina Jolie was magnificent.  It's been rumored that she's thinking about retiring from acting, but if so, at least she's going out on a high note.  (Says the lady who's still bitter about Sean Connery choosing to retire immediately after League of Extraordinary Gentlemen instead of trying for a more worthy finale...)