Flying from SFO to LHR again.
Monsters vs. Aliens (Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman, 2009)
[wikipedia]
Powerfully dumb.
Kinky Boots (Julian Jarrold, 2005)
[wikipedia]
(Lucía was asleep)
Heartwarming, fairly predictable, occasionally funny. Lots of nice shots of shoe-making. A nice performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, though I was less sold on Joel Edgerton or Sarah-Jane Potts. The supporting cast of factory workers was very nice.
Three Outlaw Samurai (Hideo Gosha, 1964)
Lucía, Jun-Dai, Barb, Ben, and Dick on 24 April 2012.
Jun-Dai
Only now, looking up the wikipedia article, do I see that this film was tied into a long-running TV series.
When watching the film, I couldn’t help but feel that by 1964 the samurai chanbara genre had already become a bit self-conscious. Three Outlaw Samurai feels very much like a post-Sanjuro film, where the kind of wry wit and sarcasm that flow throughout Sanjuro are used in a sort of shorthand form in Three Outlaw Samurai. Long gone are the sort of naïveté and earnestness of 50s samurai films.
(1 star)
Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
Jun-Dai and Lucía at home on 15 April 2012.
Jun-Dai
Ashes and Diamonds is a film largely built around a single performance: Zbigniew Cybulski as Maciek, the disaffected rebel youth whose sense nihilism and alienation are overcome by a newfound attraction to a barmaid, revealing in a way that his loyalty to the Home Army resistance group is based not on principles so much as on not having anything better to do.
Behind this there are a series of interconnected subplots that mostly take place at the same inn, and they are all very interesting in their own way revealing a network of relationships crossing the left and right ends of the Polish political spectrum of the immediate postwar period.
The film is beautifully photographed in black and white.
(2 stars)
Lucía and Jun-Dai at the BFI Southbank on 14 April 2012 at 18:50.
Jun-Dai:
Quite a spectacle. I wonder how well it captures the spirit of the original follies.
Lucía and Jun-Dai at the BFI Southbank on 14 April 2012 at 16:00.
Lucía:
A film featuring dragons but no vikings. The dragon scenes were the highlights of the film. The scene that introduces the dragons through shadow play on the castle walls was quite well done. The dragon-slaying was well-paced and gory.
The overall pace of the film, however, just dragged. Even viewers that might normally be charmed by high-pitched children’s voices singing simple melodies would have to admit that the poor sound quality made certain notes grate on the ears. The princesses lacked even the slightest hint of personalities, and all the wooing sequences were boring rehashes of stupid stereotypes. (This wealthy prince is ugly and only the second-best knight from all the surrounding kingdoms; clearly he deserves to be ridiculed and humiliated for thinking that a pretty princess would even consider marrying him, though her talents only range from sighing discontentedly at the landscape to flouncing out of her sisters’ double-wedding banquet.)
(stars?)
Lucía and Jun-Dai at the Sofitel Brussels Le Louise on 08 April 2012 around 23:30.
Lucía:
All films about vikings should feature dragons, and vice versa.
(stars!)
Lucía and Jun-Dai at the Odeon Leicester Square on 24 March 2012 at 20:00.
Crotchety, old me:
Wow. Apparently, 3D is a very immersive experience for young children. Unfortunately, under the assigned-seating scheme, one is not able to choose seats based on their proximity to the aforementioned little nippers. This oversight on the part of the ticketing agent may result in a perhaps overly-immersive viewing experience, involving two solid hours of kicks to the back punctuated by the occasional glancing blow to the head. If you’re going to see this at the cinema, consider bringing a helmet.
As for the merits of the work on screen: I found it uneven. There were some magical touches in the production design (The scenes of Georges Méliès’ filmmaking process are really fun). Some bad acting. Some wooden characterisations, a sometimes plodding pace, and lacunae in the storytelling that seem to be artefacts of trying to squeeze too much story into too little film. Still, there is enough there that most would likely enjoy it.