Movies I finally saw.
Feb. 19th, 2006 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaA 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.
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.
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Re: Buffy, River and Juju
Date: 2006-02-20 04:28 pm (UTC)but where's the story?
n.
Re: Buffy, River and Juju
Date: 2006-02-20 09:31 pm (UTC)Re: Buffy, River and Juju
Date: 2006-02-21 04:08 am (UTC)As a social control tool, Uncontrollable Unkillable Insane Violent Barbarians work pretty well.