I haven't had much to say about movies lately, largely due to sloth. We never saw Superman, but we did get to Pirates 2, and enjoyed it. I thought it felt sort of scattered, with too many plots and subplots going in every direction, but when you consider that most summer movies don't have any plot at all, that's an odd criticism. And I remember thinking much the same about Pirates 1 when I saw it in theaters, before coming to enjoy it much more after a couple of DVD/cable viewings. I'll write a full review at some point; it's half-done and sitting on my notes page with literally 25 other partial reviews of books and films. Some day I'll be in the mood and finish up a bunch of those at once.
Since Pirates though, we havne't seen anything. Malaya's been wanting to go, but Miami Vice looked too drab and boring (Cleveland Vice?), and when it got bad reviews and only made $25m (a disaster considering the $130m budget) we had no cause to regret our decision. We were looking forward to Jet Li's Fearless, but true to form with an import martial arts film, the studio delayed it another two months, pushing it back to September.
We did see an import martial arts film on DVD, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Chan Woo Park's
Oldboy, which is from Korea, but is not a martial arts film. It's got a few fight scenes, but no more than any other gritty, heavily-violent action film. It's just that the characters are Korean, hence their fighting is termed "martial arts" even though they're no doing anything special or stylized or involving nunchucks. I'd heard a little about Oldboy, that it's about a guy who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years, before suddenly being set free, without ever knowing who held him or why. He then sets out to find his kidnappers and figure out why he was held.
Lest you think that's spoilery, you learn that in about the first 20 minutes of the 2-hour film. It's the set up, and where the movie goes from there is never less than edge-of-your-seat shocking. It wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen, but it was certainly in the top 10, and if you can take moments of intense violence and searing emotion, you should watch it as soon as you can. I'll put up a real review of it at some point, but I'll have to give this one at least a 9 or a 9.5/10 overall. It's an amazing cinematic experience.
Back in theaters, there is finally a movie coming that Malaya and me are interested in. The Descent. Malaya's really the one pushing for it, and I wasn't interested in another cheesy horror movie, until the reviews started coming in. Right now The Descent's at
83% out of 77 reviews on RT, and that score is being dragged down by uptight "major" critics. A couple of days ago the film had 38/40 positive reviews, and it's getting raves; four-star reviews from lots of people,
including Jim Emerson, the guy holding down Ebert's fort until he snaps back from his latest life-threatening cancer operation. It's got a
71% right now on Metacritic, with multiple 90+ scores from the sort of major critics who seldom give a bloody, gruesome horror movie anything better than 1-star. So that'll probably be us some time this weekend.
I've got to also mention the trailer for Borat, which I wouldn't have imagined touching with an eleven-foot pole, except that I heard good things about
the trailer, watched it, and found myself laughing out loud several times. I hate that guy's Ali G character, and knew nothing about Borat other than that the actual Khazakistani government is pissed about his parody, but it is a funny trailer. I can't imagine the whole movie is, since the trailer shows his life in his amusing 3rd world Eastern European nation, and ends with him going to America. Which makes me assume that the rest of the film is set in the US and filled with with typical madcap-yet-heartwarming antics featuring the wacky foreigner confused by our culture, and who, through his confusion, enables us to see our own absurdities in a fresh light. And those fish out of water sketches always bore and annoy me.
It's a funny trailer, though.
In other movie news, it looks like I was right about a prediction, for once. Back in January I was musing on the overcrowded slate of upcoming CGI kid's movies,
and I said:
I've been wondering when the CGI family animation crash was going to come, and honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't arrived already. The public just can't keep supporting every crappy CGI movie with bright colors and a band of anthropomorphized, mismatched animals thrown together on a wacky adventure. Can they? When do diminishing returns set in, especially given how lame most of these films are? Shark Tale and Madagascar were profitable, but can The Wild, Over the Hedge, Open Season, The Ant Bully, Ice Age 2, Barnyard, and Happy Feet, and even postmodern Hoodwinked, all possibly make money off of the exact same demographic? True, 5 year olds are very easily entertained by bright colors and textured objects moving around on a screen while making silly noises, but at some point these crappy and redundant films have got to stop making money. Right?
I didn't actually predict anything there, but my doubts have been proven out. Over the Hedge did okay, as did Monster House, and Open Season and Happy Feet (
worst trailer ever) are still in our dreadful future, but Madagasgar-rip off The Wild flopped its way to just
a 9.6m opening, Ant Bully crashed in at
$8m last weekend, and gender-confused (hornless male cows with udders?)
The Barnyard was gifted with a
$7m estimate by the usually-accurate Box Office Mojo.
No one's predicting the end of CGI hits; Cars made a fortune and Shrek 3 will surely back up the Brinks truck, and good films will always make money (I hope) but the days when you could throw any mismatched bunch of animals together, get celebs who wanted to impress their kids to do silly voices, and put 90 minutes of their fart jokes and physical comedy on screen to a guaranteed $30m opening weekend
seem to have past. Thank you market saturation (inevitable in America) for doing what good taste (rare in America) and poor reviews (trendy in America) could never have managed on their own.
Labels: movies
