Movies I finally saw.

[rivka]

A multitude of spoilers below. If you reviewed any of these movies and happen to know where your reviews are, I'd be awfully grateful for links. I had to skip all the commentary at the time.

Goblet of Fire: I rewatched Sorcerer's Stone just before going to see Goblet of Fire. I loved the first two movies when they came out, and didn't understand at the time why some people were complaining that they were "too faithful to the books." Comparing Stone and Goblet, though, I get it. Stone is a great film re-creation of a book, and the experience of watching the film is a lot like the experience of reading the book. But Goblet is great as a movie. It very much feels like something that was created to be watched, rather than something that was created to be read and then transferred to a visual medium. I loved it. The underwater scenes were unbelievably creepy and tense - I really felt how awful that task was, in a way that I didn't when I read the book. I felt that they mostly cut the right things, although I would've liked to see more hazards in the maze than just moving hedges. In all, it was a gorgeous, great movie.

But I did have one significant problem: the way that the Deatheater trials, and Barty Crouch Junior, were portrayed in the Pensieve. I think it's important to the overall themes and plotlines of the series - and especially important to setting up the events of Order of the Phoenix - to make it clear that some nasty, oppressive, and unfair things were done in the name of hunting down Deatheaters. And the pathetic, Azkaban-ridden figure of Barty Crouch Junior crying out desperately, "I'm your son! I'm your son!" is an important invocation of that. Making him just an evil sociopathic monster is cheating.

Minor quibbles: it would've been nice to see the Beauxbatons champion - the only female one - do one single piece of competent magic, instead of always failing or needing to be rescued. And I wish Voldemort hadn't had that "power of love" soliloquy at the gravesite. (Surely there was another way to infodump.)

Serenity: I had very, very high expectations for this movie. I watched it just after Michael and I had gulped down all of Firefly on DVD in a couple of weeks. I was completely immersed in the characters and the world. Perhaps as a result, I was let down by the movie. My gripes:

(1) I dislike the character of River Tam. The government-experimentation plotline is not a bad one, I'm just bored to tears with media "insanity" - cryptic incoherencies, rich with symbolism, with bursts of bizarre behavior that somehow reinforce the plot or theme. I'd have a lot more respect for Joss if he'd made River so overwhelmed by PTSD that she was barely functional; if she had to be psychotic, I'd have a lot more respect if she were, say, responding to hallucinations and not keeping up with her personal hygiene. As it is, she's pretty-symbolic-crazy, and she drives me nuts. So I was not enthusiastic about the fact that the movie centered on her.

(2) Isn't it enough that she's psychic? Does she have to fight like Buffy? The scene in Firefly where she's able to shoot those guys without seeing them - that makes plausible sense given what we've gathered was done to her. But there's no scientific plausibility to a 90-pound girl being able to take on dozens of armed fighters simultaneously. Buffy has some sort of weird juju/magic to explain her fighting skills. There's not supposed to be magic in the Firefly 'verse.

(3) The whole thing with "our benificent attempts to perfect humanity by controlling people ended ironically and horribly!" felt like the plot of a Star Trek episode. Especially the part about people being so peaceful that they lost all impulse to care for themselves.

(4) Because the movie wasn't necessarily written for people who had seen Firefly, and couldn't be, it felt... less intimate. We pulled back from the characters and were re-introduced to them, and that meant that I didn't get as much of the characterization I craved.

Chronicles of Narnia: I don't have as much to say about this one, but I did like it very much. I thought the child actors were very good. I loved the design sensibility. I was shocked, and then had to agree with, how young Lucy was. The talking animals were mostly very well done. My only quibbles were minor: I wanted Aslan's voice to sound rougher and less like a Sunday School teacher's, and I think it's awfully hard to show anything like a reasonable battle scene if you're trying to preserve your G rating. I wish they'd either just implied the battle, or gone for a PG.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Your Firefly quibbles are pretty much identical to mine.

Also, a propos of nothing, I've seen photos of the southern California high school that was the set for the planet of the dead peaceful people, and it didn't look much different. I felt I'd die of boredom, bright light, and sharp angles if I had to go there.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Over in my LJ, I posited that River Tam was a Slayer (http://filkerdave.livejournal.com/412102.html). batyatoon said her theory was that the government, having created demons (Reavers) was trying to create Slayers to fight them.

Which makes a certain amount of sense.

Buffy, River and Juju

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

Buffy's juju is mostly that she has the speed, reflexes and indestructiblity of most demons (she can take a kick to the head that would crush my melon and is just knocked out from it). and she can heal *really* fast. a lot of the rest comes from her practicing really hard at her craft. it's one of the things i love about the series. if you go back and watch the first fights each season, you see how much she has improved over the years.

River has been altered by the Sekrit Govmnt Kabal. we don't know what has been done to her metablolism, or even to her cellular structure. it's entirely possible that she has been made similar to what we know as a Slayer. also, it was made clear (certainly in the series) that she was trained as a weapon. a psychic killing machine would be pretty much the only thing you could use against a Reaver. i like what filkerdave says in his comments to you here. i haven't read his whole thing (yet) but it sounds pretty plausible.

as for me, in the series you never saw Reavers except in that one episode. in the film they terrified me. flat out. my worst nightmare, basically. *shiver*

obviously Joss has a thing for Slayers, and thus made River more or less into one.

i don't know enough about mental illness to talk about the rest. i happened to really love it, but i can see and understand your frustrations with it.

there's an interesting episode in the final season of Angel with a psychotic Slayer. i'd be interested in hearing your take on it if you ever see it (or if you have seen it).

i loved both Goblet and Narnia too :) i'm a total pushover for my faves :)

n.

Re: Buffy, River and Juju

[rivka.livejournal.com]

a psychic killing machine would be pretty much the only thing you could use against a Reaver. i like what filkerdave says in his comments to you here. i haven't read his whole thing (yet) but it sounds pretty plausible.

Not to me, actually. The reasonable thing to use against ships full of crazy-homicidal cannibal guys, if you are a massive government with what appears to be unlimited financial and technological resources, is some kind of distance weapon. You have to do a lot of fast talking and hand waving (which, of course, Joss is totally capable of) to make an argument that hand-to-hand combat is the best way to take them down.

The Reavers, as presented to us in the canon, are an unsolvable problem because the people they're attacking are resource-poor settlers on the perimeter of known space, who have no support from the military forces of the Alliance. What would make them an unsolvable problem for the Alliance itself, with its city-sized spaceships?

Re: Buffy, River and Juju

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

no problem at all.

but where's the story?

n.

Re: Buffy, River and Juju

[rivka.livejournal.com]

True, it wouldn't make much of a story. It's a much better story to show outclassed low-resource people trying to fight the Reavers, which is pretty much what they did.

Re: Buffy, River and Juju

[almeda.livejournal.com]

It was postulated in a critical-essays-about-the-fireflyverse book (before the movie came out, contradicting some of the speculations) that the Alliance allows the Reavers to predate the edges to keep the edges *dangerous*, so that the Alliance looks like the better alternative.

As a social control tool, Uncontrollable Unkillable Insane Violent Barbarians work pretty well.

[platypus]

That lack of intimacy with the Serenity characters really disappointed me, and I resented every excess moment devoted to punchin' and shootin' that could have gone toward letting us get to know these people better. (The scene where Inara called and everyone listened in was cute, but there was so little of that in the movie.) There were some compromises made in order to make the movie more accessible to newcomers; I understand that. But it felt like they sacrificed too much of Firefly's charm in favor of generic action sequences that failed to endear the movie to anybody (including newcomers). If you're gonna go out, go out being yourself. Serenity was so damned depressing I could barely watch it a second time. (This was probably compounded by the fact that I hadn't completely finished the series by October, and so I watched War Stories for the first time immediately before going to the movie. And War stories kicked that movie around the block, in terms of character development and non-cheapass emotional impact, for me.)

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

since Narnia made the choice not to be completely faithful (waterfall scene? please), I was happy that they gave Edmund a better motivation than pure greed but I wish they'd made a bit more of a point of Peter's culpability in what happened - if he'd been a better leader for his family, and that's clearly how Lewis wants us to see him, a lot of what eventually happened wouldn't have - and the role that Susan's unwillingness to deal with anything that made her uncomfortable played. One of the things I liked about the books was that there were consequences not just for eeeeeeeevul but for just plain being a shit, and it wasn't OK to be a shit as long as you won.

[llnaughty.livejournal.com]

i read somewhere that how river is in the movie is how joss wanted her to be at the end of the firefly series, if it had five or six seasons long, and _then_ he was making a movie.

since it had less than one season's worth of character development, and since he didn't know whether he'd be able to get another movie made, i think he just decided to make the movie as if he had a full series behind it.

yes, the timeline gets a little compressed, but i can understand that. and the rumoured restarting of the firefly series i guess would continue not from the movie, but from the end of the tv episodes we've seen, so in between firefly and serenity, and that way he can still have wash and book and everyone else...

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

"I agree with Rivka!" ;-)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Whoa. On all of it? That's got to be a record, even for us.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Maybe you can solve a controversy that arose here. In the Narnia movie, did they or did they not leave out the stone lion?

zorinth says they did, rysmiel says someone on LJ says they didn't. I haven't seen, won't see, and am very very calm about this movie, but it would be really nice to know.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I think the stone lion was there, but not the whole "not only was it not a live lion that I should have been scared of but only a stone one, it's probably the Aslan everyone was going on about, and the Witch has already won, and aren't I clever to be on the winning side, that'll show them" reaction. But I could easily be misremembering.
I expect my children will want it when it comes out on DVD, I could check then.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

As the previous commenter said, they left out Edmund's thoughts about the stone lion. He does draw on a mustache and a ring around one eye, but without showing his thinking process - or even showing him being scared of the stone lion at first - it was pretty much meaningless.

Also, we saw the stone lion back to life at the end of the movie, with a mustache still. There wasn't anything about "us lions" leading the charge, though.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

This just reminded me of something I had to say about Narnia (mostly the movie) so I posted it in my own journal today.