Recent Movies

[summercomfort]

Now that I have a TV set up at Jono's, I've been watching more of my movie backlog (accrued through buying of movies at blockbuster when they're on sale). There have also been some films I saw in the movie theaters. In order of awesomeness and thematic flow:

Coraline  A
Lots of fun. It stuck pretty well the the tone of the book, and I was vaguely okay with the different ending. Wybie--- well, I really liked Other Wybie, as someone for Coraline to talk to. Real World Wybie seemed a much more awkward addition, and I felt like his "weirdness" didn't mesh well with the weirdness of the other neighbors. I loved the visuals -- basically you get to visit each location 3 times: the normal world version, the Happy Other World version, and the Scary Other World version. Coraline behaved her age -- the pouts and the genuine spirit. Coraline is very hard to categorize -- it's not *just* a kids movie or *just* a fantasy movie or *just* a coming-of-age story. It is simply Coraline.

Pan's Labyrinth  A
Yeah, it took me forever to find someone to watch this with, but finally Jono and I did. It was much less angsty and far more grisly than I had anticipated. After the movie, I was very frustrated with the English name. I was totally expecting Pan to do weird stuff to the girl, but it turned out that he's just been a simple faun. The fantasy elements color the entire film, so even though much of it takes place in "Real Life" Spanish Civil War, the tone and the girl's POV make it very much a fantasy. I felt like I couldn't completely believe that any of the players were truly human and real -- the setting is isolated -- there's the mill and the woods. The characters were reified -- The lord of the mill and creatures and rebels in the woods. Everyone stood for something, represented something, and the emotions are so distilled and pure -- pure love, pure fear, pure determination. No wonder Guillermo's such good friends with Neil.  Anyone want to compare Pan's Labyrinth and Coraline?

Persepolis  A-
I really liked how human this story is. In a way, this helped me find the tone to my China comics -- she doesn't generalize one country or another, but instead base it on personal experiences. Plus the animation is beautifully yet functionally 2-D and b/w.  The downside, of course, is the loose narration.  Things happen, and they don't really tie together.  And the ending is disappointingly vague

Freedom Writers  A-
This movie frustrated me. Yes, it's great that the teacher could do all this, but can we have a more nuanced resistance in the character of the English department chair? And why is it one class? Does she not have 4 other classes and 120 other students to attend to? Did they just do boring worksheets all day while she planned fun lessons for that one class? Or how about the 30 students magically became good after she handed out the journals? Also, I was frustrated by the cavalier way that the English teacher was teaching History in her class. With no real discussion of cause and effect, with no real sense of history, but only an emotional appeal. I guess English just has a certain amount of freedom in the curriculum -- you don't have to cover specific historical or mathematical or scientific content.
Despite all my complaining, it *is* a rather good movie. At least the teacher wasn't on drugs, struggling with his own inner demons or ineptitude or whatever else. I'd like to know more about the real story.

Blood Diamond  A-
This one surprised me. I was expecting Africa action flick with tangential mentions of conflict diamonds, but that was actually the center of the story. I liked the matter-of-fact of the violence in this movie -- not glorified, not purposely ugly, just ... present. Leo was surprisingly decent as a complex diamond smuggler -- didn't turn into a big softie once he encountered the other main characters, but instead maintained his "just a guy trying to make do" attitude. And hey, talking about Africa as separate countries and governments and histories and peoples! Gasp!  The ending was a bit sappy, but it's Hollywood.

The Great Debaters  A-
This was Oscar-bait from a few years back. It's about a black college debate team in Texas, 1935. The film is more about race relations in Texas, 1935 than about debate. From a teacher's perspective, I wish they focused more on the mechanics of debate. The random side narratives were also a bit distracting until we got to the final debate. But history comes through -- the stories of real humans in history is always a sight to behold. Real lives and real stories always surprise me and move me. Which is one reason why I'm a history teacher.

Despereaux  B
Cute kids movie, with some frustrating lessons --- Rats are always bad and mindless and incapable of reform (and apparently Middle-eastern, given the background music). Mice are small-town conservatves but capable of being taught bravery. The narration was very transparent.
On the other hand, Roscuro the rat is pretty awesome, and so is Boldo the pot spirit:



Hamlet 2  C+
Pretty ridiculous. Way too many crotch shots and crude humor. This falls under the "it's funny because everyone is so pathetic" category. Except that it's not that funny. I must admit that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is pretty hilarious.

Tropic Thunder  C
Disappointingly bad. I heard that it was funny in a good way, but the progression of events is incoherent, I was pretty offended by the Cambodian drug farmers speaking perfect Chinese, and... yeah. Just ridiculous

Religulous  C-
I was disappointed -- didn't pay that much money to listen to smarmy Bill Maher indoctrinate me on his personal anti-Christianity agenda. Also, thanks for pretending that the Whole World is Islam/Judaism/Christianity. The interviews could have been so much more awesome if he weren't so busy trying to impose his own morality and ask leading questions. Jono writes about the experience here, which pretty much summarizes it. I really get turned off by self-righteous-ness.

Comments

[eptified.livejournal.com]

What did you think the point of Pan's Labyrinth was?

[summercomfort]

That, exactly. Hey, look, I didn't take any points off for it being all fantasy-like. I didn't even say it was bad.

[eptified.livejournal.com]

I personally thought it was bad - really well-constructed bad, but bad. (Like the Incredibles.) The point of being a fantasy is that you get to tell a story with big, mythic constructs, and it didn't seem to know what story it was trying to tell, and then the ending invalidated a bunch of the points it had been trying to make, so it ended up being anti-oppression and puritanical and anti-fascist and millennial. Whereas Coraline was pretty straightforward about the point it was trying to make. (I guess I don't like ambiguity up in my fairy tales.)

[summercomfort]

I felt like it was a very effective movie in constructing this world and conveying this fantasy-ness. But I don't really dig it. Like, I came out of Coraline and Dark Knight all excited, and I came out of this going, ::shrug::. Like, nothing really hit me. I guess I wasn't suspending my disbelief at the right times. So I guess I think about it the same way as Grave of the Fireflies -- it is so efficient at what it's doing that I put up my defenses.

That said, I don't think it has all those messages and points that you mention. I feel like it just took a fairytale and put it in a Very Specific setting. But in the end, that doesn't matter. It could have taken place during Hulagu's seige of Baghdad for all it matters. Girl has goal, girl completes tasks and comes into her own. Real World is simplified to a bunch of tropes and allegiances and cares too much about what someone *represents* rather that what that someone *is*. (Spy chick: "I am brave and hardened" "I am the caretaker of this girl" "We will raise this child without your memory because you represent all evil." She is so *convicted* about everything.)

Warmth and human-ness and second chances come with the fantasy world. (Messing up, death of the fairies, learning to be brave.) I feel like I can almost tell the story the other way around -- with Spanish Civil War being the fairytale and with the Labyrinth being the Reality.

*SPOILERS*

[eptified.livejournal.com]

Nah, see, they got the story wrong - in the movie, girl has goal, girl completes tasks (except not - she fails at the last one for arbitrary reasons, with dire consequences) - and girl then dies and goes to Hans Christian Anderson Heaven, rather than going on to live her adult life. No second chances. And the point of the dude with the broken watch is that fascism is obsessed with stopping time and living in imagined utopias which transcend the need for change, so... it's a little confusing. You could say that the point of the movie is that the horrible thing about fascism is that it takes away the significance of people's stories, but I think that might be giving it too much credit. I think Del Toro wanted to make a movie about fairytales and also wanted to make a movie about fascism, and then didn't quite succeed at making either one

Re: *SPOILERS*

[summercomfort]

Funny, I felt like the one task that she kinda didn't too well at was the second one where she was stupid and ate the grapes, whereas she succeeded in her final task. I mean, at the very beginning when the narrator said that she's the daughter of the lord of the underworld or death or whatever, I was like, "oh okay, she's gonna die at the end in order to return to her father's kingdom. That means that the dead girl we saw in the first scene is probably her, and it probably means that she succeeded." I thought of the second chance as the faun coming back after the semi-failure of the second task to give her the third task.

Yeah, my "meh"-ness about the whole movie is all the fairytale-like symbolism in the Real World. I mean, that's what he wanted to do, so I didn't knock any points off. Didn't mean that I liked it. All these elixirs and demons and the lonely seamstress and the brave scullery maid.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

How did you find the violence in Pan's Labyrinth? I thought it was pretty terrifying, and a pretty good polemic against fascism.

yrs--
--Ben

[summercomfort]

eh. The rebels did the same "shoot twice to make sure they're dead" thing that the fascists did. A lot of the other violence, I felt, was too grotesque. It was like holding up stinking worms and shoving it in your face. Like -- bash head in with bottle -- wouldn't it have been more efficient with a gun? Maybe I have in mind the Nazi efficiency, but really, did we *have* to see every puncture of the needle in the dude's face? I feel like the violence actually obscured the characters at times. I was more focused on the horror of the death than contemplating the loss of life in such a death.

[rumblerush.livejournal.com]

The looseness of Persepolis' narrative in the movie version is an unfortunate consequence of how much she was trying to pack in from the graphic novels. The Vienna sequence, for example, is haphazard and confusing in the movie. I remember thinking, "wait, I thought she was happy to have made friends, now she has no contact with them?" "Wait, where did this embarrassment about being Iranian come from?" "Wait, she's homeless now? What? How'd that happen?"

In the graphic novels, you get a lot more ligament to bind those joints together and the story is more cohesive. I can understand the trade-offs she was making though, because it just wouldn't have been possible to cover all the distinct phases of her life and their corresponding reflections on Iran if she had dwelled on the same level of detail.

[summercomfort]

Yeah, I figured. I was frustrated because I was hoping to show clips in school (that's my underlying motive for most movies I watch), but it's too loose that each vignette loses its punch.