musings

I saw V for Vendetta tonight and, to be honest, it wasn’t as good a movie as it should have been. The movie is less subtle, and more melodramatic by far than Alan Moore’s work, and I can understand why he hated the script.

Performances in the movie were mostly good – Stephen Fry’s being the most remarkable, with his magnificently warm and human performance as Evey Hammond’s boss and friend, Dietrich. Stephen Rea, as Chief Inspector Finch, was steady and believable. Despite limited screen time, John Hurt was totally compelling. Hugo Weaving, as V, was perhaps the hardest to get a handle on – on the one hand, he conveyed all the emotion of V through body language, and did it amazingly well. On the other hand, I could still hear him slipping, occasionally, into Agent Smith mode when he spoke (though not nearly to the extent he did as Agent Elrond of the Matrix). (Never mind that I didn’t expect V to show any emotion at all.) Natalie Portman, as Evey Hammond, gave the weakest performance of all. She had these flashes of brilliance, but not enough to keep her from seeming dull and gray. And she needs to either give up on accents or get a better voice coach. Shades of Kevin Costner – at least half the time she sounded South African. And I have to appreciate the meta-irony in casting John Hurt in the fascist dictator role. I wonder if that choice was intentional – I’d like to think so, anyway.

Visually, the film didn’t disappoint. Great night time sequences, some decent effects, and the few action scenes were shot sans close-up-handicam – a rarity in action films ever since Gladiator.

Finally, though, the Wachowskis should be complimented for making such a subversive movie, and getting it out in such wide release in a post 9/11 world. I’d never have believed such a feat possible.

Syriana is an amazingly good movie. It’s received a fair amount of negative press, at least some of which is likely due to the stunningly misleading trailer – I knew what I was getting into coming in, but I watched the trailer again after seeing the movie, and was startled to see that the trailer was advertising an action thriller. Syriana is emphatically not an action thriller – it’s a very well plotted, very well acted political intrigue. A lot of the remaining negative press uses words like “boring” and “confusing” – the former of which is highly subjective, the latter partially true. There are four concurrent interwoven plots and they’re presented that way through a series of quick cuts, and I admit that early on I found the movie a bit hard to follow. As the movie progresses, though, the focus narrows and deepens (and the four plots converge), and it becomes much easier to follow. It’s such a complicated movie, though, that I don’t think I could begin to describe it and do it justice.

Clooney, as usual, is excellent, but more and more I’m liking Alexander Siddig. After slumming for years in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Siddig steals every scene he’s in in two consecutive films (Kingdom of Heaven and this one).

Finally, there’s a 43 minute mp3 of a round table discussion featuring George Clooney, Jeffery Wright, Alexander Siddig, Stephen Gaghan (the writer) and Bob Baer (on whose book the film is loosely based) at the official Syriana site that you really must listen to.

There’s a new trailer up for V for Vendetta, and it actually looks like it might not suck. I’m not holding my breath, because comic movies so rarely do anything but. Still, my interest is piqued.

Aeon Flux was much better than I’d expected it to be. While I wouldn’t call it a good movie, I was never bored. The movie starts off somewhat incoherent, but (unlike the Aeon Flux cartoon) eventually pulls together to form a coherent (if somewhat hole-ridden) narrative. I think I gained a bit of karma here, but maybe not too much. I was half-expecting a stinker on the scale of Elektra but was pleasantly surprised.

I loved Serenity. A lot of people seem to have done so. In fact, I haven’t seen a better movie this year. ‘Nuff said.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist the awful pun.)

I speak of the (usually) masterful Terry Gilliam’s latest movie, Brothers Grimm. I cast doubt on its outlook not because it’s a horrible movie (it’s not – it’s not a great movie either, but certainly not a disaster on the order of Van Helsing), No, I cast my doubt because it’s already been shredded by the critics and, if Toronto is any indication, because it’s suffering from a fairly limited release (and the theatres that are showing it are resigned to its failure – on opening weekend the movie was already relegated to the high-digit, small screen gulag in the local multiplex). There are certainly terrible aspects to the film – for instance, Jonathan Pryce and Peter Stormare’s performances were, well, inexplicable. They seemed more like an excuse to have a bad accent wander the scene than for any real purpose (even as comic relief they were stagnant). But buried amidst the rubble is a fun, silly movie. It’s not anywhere near the masterpiece that was Time Bandits, nor as brilliant as Brazil. It might even be the weakest of Gilliam’s movies, but I’ll take a bad Gilliam movie over any of Michael Bay’s abortions.

Apparently director John Singleton wanted Four Brothers to have the feel of an old Western, and he largely succeeds. Four Brothers is an extremely violent revenge tale – that of four adoptive brothers avenging the assassination of their mother. Strong performances from the four leads (Mark Wahlberg (okay, he’s kind of a hot-headed machine, but that’s more depth than he showed in The Italian Job), Tyrese Gibson, Andre Benjamin and Garret Hedlund), along with a reasonable plot (for an action movie) are undermined, however, by the final act, which feels like it borrows from every other revenge picture ever made. While I’m sure that Four Brothers is better than Singleton’s last effort (2 Fast 2 Furious), for a career that started with Boyz n the Hood and had a highlight as bright as Rosewood, I can’t help but think that Singleton’s just going through the motions. In the end, though, Four Brothers is a largely straightforward revenge movie, with the requisite plot twists and swerves, and enough bullets, blood and broken bones to satisfy the summer movie junk-food cravings.

I saw a couple of movies on Friday night – Million Dollar Baby and Constantine.

Million Dollar Baby, despite all appearances, is not a boxing movie. It’s dressed up like a boxing movie, it walks like a boxing movie, and it talks like a boxing movie. It’s not a boxing movie but rather a movie about a boxer. Like Mystic River before it, there are no special effects, no fancy camera work, no flash. Just a simple story, told in a straight-forward fashion. Long lingering conversations allow the characters’ personalities shine through, and sometimes there are just silent scenes that are more revealing than any dialogue could allow. Million Dollar Baby is mostly a quiet, contemplative movie, that plucks at heartstrings but still can make you laugh. It’s not a flashy movie, but like Hillary Swank’s character, Maggie, it’s got a lot of heart.

Constantine, on the other hand, is all flash. A lot of my friends told me that if I could get past the fact that it was based on Hellblazer it was a pretty decent movie. I wouldn’t go that far, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ll skip all the bits that have been changed from the comic and treat the movie as standalone. The high points: Tilda Swinton was marvellous as the archangel Gabriel, Rachel Weisz looked like she actually believed her role, and Djimon Hounsou, as Papa Midnite, was the king of cool. The low: Hell is Los Angeles, only on fire. Really. I suppose that’s better than the cheap Nine Inch Nails video vision of Hell that was Event Horizon, but really, it was pretty lame. The half-skull demons were also rather less than intimidating. Aside from those two, the special effects ranged from pretty okay to really impressive. Of course, the impressive effects were all hiding in the background, so you had to be paying attention to see them. Reeves was, unsurprisingly, pretty wooden. The story was convoluted, and the dialogue often utterly vapid. Despite that, however, I kinda liked the movie. How often do you see a Hollywood action movie where the hero doesn’t walk off into the sunset with the girl?

I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this afternoon, and it was a delight. I was really expecting a much darker movie that the one I got, but looking back at what a warm and fuzzy movie Big Fish was, in retrospect, I’m not really surprised. The movie is a very faithful adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s classic – even the musical numbers have their lyrics taken straight out of the books. There’s a fairly minor addition to the story, but nothing that detracts from the feeling of the book. Johnny Depp plays Wonka as a glam-era-rockstar inspired (right down to the requisite androgyny) reclusive genius, and it really works. (Depp’s Finding Neverland co-star Freddie Highmore plays a quietly charming, unassuming Charlie Bucket.) There is one subtext that I don’t recall from the book, though – that Wonka had actually set up the “rotten” children to fail. Maybe it was less jaded eyes that read the book so many years ago, but the movie definitely gave the impression that Wonka knew full well who was going to win his special prize the moment the fifth Golden Ticket was found, something I don’t recall from the book. Still, anyone who enjoyed the book will certainly enjoy this movie. The Tim Burton-Johnny Depp combination strikes gold again.

Paula and I went to see George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead last night. Like all of George Romero’s zombie movies, this one is a bit (and I emphasize bit) of social commentary wrapped in a zombie thriller. Where Dawn of the Dead was an allegory for mass consumerism, Land of the Dead embodies the Marxist class struggle. Like the other Dead movies, however, the social commentary really amounts to “Hey, look!”. It’s not deep by any means. Land of the Dead is nothing at all like scary. There are a whole lot of cheap startles, but there’s no real tension. There is, however, an unholy amount of gore. And now that Romero has a real budget, the gore is incredibly visceral. Zombie fans, rejoice, this is the first good zombie movie since the not-zombies-at-all 28 Days Later….