Shrek 2 (2004)
The original Shrek was a clever piece of satire on the nature of fairytales, with the occasional pop culture reference thrown in for the keen eyed. Shrek 2 is the exact opposite: a slew of pop culture references hacked together to form a plot that only occasionally satirises fairytales. It does have its moments, and the fun of trying to spot all the fairytale references is still there, but it's just not as charming as the original film.
Shrek The Third (2007)
At least Shrek 2 had pop culture references. This doesn't have anything except a pretty poor attempt to tug at the heartstrings. Yes, there are one or two genuine laughs, but when you've run out of fairytales to reference and have to resort to Athurian legend then I think you're in trouble.
High Society (1956)
A problem most musicals have is that they run for five minutes and then realise, "Oh crap. We haven't had a musical number in a while. We'd better stick one in here." The resulting musical numbers have little to do with the plot and just seem like an unnatural excuse for the characters to burst into song. High Society does not fall into that trap. Well, most of the time, anyway. If a character is singing, it (usually) seems like a natural thing for them to be doing, and they (usually) don't break into a huge unnatural dance number with thousands of cast members either. (Pointless pop quiz: One song eventually gave its name to a game show. Can you tell me which one without using Wikipedia?)
It's just a shame that the film still feels like it's being dragged out as far as it can. When you think it's going to surprise you with people hooking up with people you didn't expect them to, it reverts back to what you knew was going to happen 10 minutes from the beginning. After about an hour, I felt like screaming out "Get on with it!" more than a few times.
On a side note, Louis Armstrong turns up in a bus with a band and then they all disappear for most of the movie. They conveniently show up whenever a jazz number is needed and have no further use, except for a very lame gag at the end of the film.
I Know What I Saw (2009)
A good documentary presents the facts both for and against, and then either makes its argument or let's you decide for yourself. It raises and explores interesting questions to educate you on its chosen topic. I know what I saw when I watched this made for TV documentary about UFOs, and it wasn't what I just described. It just presents a few eyewitness accounts without explanations for any of them, which is just plain frustrating, and annoyingly avoids exploring any of the interesting ideas that it throws about. Why does the UFO mythos catch on and spread so quickly through the public whenever there is a sighting? If these are man made aircraft, why isn't the technology freely available? (Given the amount of radiation that always seems to end up at landing sights, probably because it's dangerous.)
Thank goodness it didn't go anywhere near Roswell. (If you don't already know, the craft at Roswell was a U.S. high-altitude spy balloon that burst.)
Michael Clayton (2007)
This was based on a novel, right? No? Then why does it feel like it was? Even the premise sounds like it was from a novel. George Clooney is a "fixer": a guy asked by company executives to solve problems before they become too damaging to the company. (e.g. "One of our clients thinks he hit someone with his car. Find out the details and make his case look good.") When he's asked to fix the problem caused by a senior lawyer forgetting to take his medication, he starts to uncover a whole legal conspiracy and thinks that perhaps there's more to this lawyer's behaviour than meets the eye.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that after watching the first half an hour of the film, that this would be 2 hours of George Clooney talking on a phone. The film takes a while to get rolling, but once we revisit the first ten minutes of the film in the final act you realise just how clever the script actually is. The question is whether the script is clever enough to get itself over the line as something that works, and that's something I still can't make up my mind about.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
"We rob banks." But you knew they robbed banks already, right? Prepare for disappointment as I reveal that you see them rob about, oh, two banks. Maybe three if you count that one at the beginning that had been shut down and so had no money. There are more shootouts in this film than actual bank robberies. Ahh, but at least the rest of the film is about Bonnie and Clyde as they go on the run, you may say. Wrong. Like Ned Kelly, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were part of a larger gang of bank robbers known as the Barrow Gang (because most of the members were part of Clyde's family in some way), and we've got to put up with all their annoying quirks throughout the film as well.
And what's with that awful hillbilly music that occasionally crops up? It may have been a cult hit and an instant classic when it was first released, but I don't think it's aged all that well.
It's also apparently hideously inaccurate, but what did you expect from a Hollywood interpretation of history?
La Vie en Rose (2007)
This isn't another Hollywood interpretation of history. It's the life story of French singer Edith Piaf. Never heard of her? Neither have I, but she was a huge star pretty much from the late 1930's through to the 1960's. Biographical films can suffer by not following a three act structure. I'd say this film suffers by not following a three act structure, but the gutsy decision of jumping back and forward in time to tell her story makes the film oddly compelling, if not a little hard to follow.
And even if you still think that the first two hours are a bit of a mess at times and that Edith Piaf is just a drunken idiot or a drug addicted monster throughout most of the picture, the last half hour is so moving that it makes up for it all. The last sequence is some of the best cinema I have ever seen for its sheer simplicity (good script writing, cinematography, and editing are sometimes all you need).
No comments:
Post a Comment