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| yambu |
 Posted: Fri May 30, 2014 1:26 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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| [moved to Couch] |
Last edited by yambu on Fri May 30, 2014 7:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri May 30, 2014 6:39 pm |
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(moved to couch)  |
Last edited by marantzo on Fri May 30, 2014 8:34 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Fri May 30, 2014 7:51 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat May 31, 2014 11:23 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Maleficent is a rather nice take on "Sleeping Beauty," partly because it focuses on a much more interesting character. Angelina Jolie is well-cast as the "bad fairy," who is really pretty complex and has good reason to want revenge on King Stefan although she discovers loading a curse on a new-born baby that doesn't fire until the kid is sixteen isn't the best way to do it. Among other things, it means you have to make sure the kid survives until she's sixteen, and what do you do when you realize you really like the kid. Elle Fanning has a much less complex character to deal with, so suffers in comparison, although her meeting with Prince Philip is nice.
They did alter the placement of the curse. In this version Maleficent is the one who has Aurora cursed with falling into a sleep like death, while in the original she simply cursed her with death and the third fairy modified the curse. I didn't see that the third fairy gave a gift at all. Maleficent also adds the proviso about 'true love's kiss," after the king pleads with her.
Special effects range from okay to spectacular. My favorite is Maleficent soaring through the forest when she still has wings and fighting battles with great effect. It's losing the wings through treachery that turns her to the dark side. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat May 31, 2014 11:39 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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On the other hand, A Million Ways to Die in the West is awful, despite the presence of Charlize Theron who gives a performance that belongs in a better movie, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried and Sarah Silverman. There's a running joke that Silverman's character is a prostitute who services a dozen men on a slow day but she and her boyfriend won't have sex because they're saving it for marriage. This gives Silverman a chance to talk about anal sex and other sexual activities, which really gets repetitive after a while. Theron does work well as an outlaw who is having second thoughts about the gang she's in--she got into it as a child and is smart enough to see that it's a doomed way of life. She does work pretty well with Seth MacFarlane. She's getting a bit old for the part, but I liked seeing her.
The pace tends toward the lethargic. MacFarlane has a lot of trouble finding a proper comic tone for his story. You're better off with Maleficent or watching Rango again. |
Last edited by Syd on Sun Jun 01, 2014 9:16 pm; edited 1 time in total
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 12:47 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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Syd wrote: On the other hand, A Million Ways to Die in the West is awful, despite the presence of...
As I feared. I sensed that MacFarlane had comedic ambitions, maybe he wanted to follow in the dusty tracks of Paleface or Blazing Saddles, but tends to let the grossness take over. If you're 15 and watching Family Guy (or watching it with someone who is 15), he might seem like the funniest guy you can imagine, but I don't think he's figured out how to do a grownup comedy, with real characters and some heart. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 1:54 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| Also annoyed with film because it pushed Railway Man out of local theaters, after only a week. Just learned this....we had planned to see RM today. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 4:43 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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Ida is the best film I've seen in years. It is 1960's Poland. Ida, a war orphan who had been raised in a convent, and who is now a Novice, seeks out her aunt, who is a part-time prostitute, and was a summary court judge in Stalin's day.
Ida learns that her parents, whom she doesn't remember, were Jewish, and that the man who had sheltered them eventually killed them.
Most of the controlling events are from long ago and are told matter-of-factly in the present. Yet you bleed for the victims even still. There is not a tear shed, nor a guilty moan heard. This was Poland twenty years after the Soviets had marched in. It would be crippled for yet another generation.
I've never seen camera work like this. It is mostly done in long, long takes, where this heartbreaking tale can be told at a pace close to real life.
The heroine is not a trained actor. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 6:50 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| yambu--Somehow Ida had gone right smack under my radar. So glad you mentioned it. Now I'm reading about it and practically frothing at the mouth to see it. Where did you? Because I don't think it's playing in NYC. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 7:25 pm |
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I remember seeing that Ida played at our Globe theatre but only lasted a week, so I never got to see it. (I might be mistaken and actually saw it on the posters on the front of the Globe, and it might come there.)
Many Poles told the Nazis where the Jews were, but a number of Poles hid them. |
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| mitty |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 8:23 pm |
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Joined: 02 Aug 2004
Posts: 1359
Location: Way Down Yonder.......
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billyweeds wrote: yambu--Somehow Ida had gone right smack under my radar. So glad you mentioned it. Now I'm reading about it and practically frothing at the mouth to see it. Where did you? Because I don't think it's playing in NYC.
I saw the article about it, but it didn't come down here at all.  Naturally. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 8:27 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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billyweeds wrote: yambu--Somehow Ida had gone right smack under my radar. So glad you mentioned it. Now I'm reading about it and practically frothing at the mouth to see it. Where did you? Because I don't think it's playing in NYC.
Read David Denby's laudatory review. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 9:12 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| yam--Right you are. Found it. Now to find the time to see it. |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 10:27 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan were first teamed together on Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Tristam Shandy’s “unfilmable” novel “Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.” Winterbottom brought them back together for cinéma vérité style, TV mockumentary series “The Trip”. The series is built around the conceit that Coogan was commissioned to write an article for The Observer newspaper on the delights of various Lake District hotels and restaurants. Stood-up by his girlfriend, he invited his male friend and fellow comic actor, Rob Brydon, to join him on the expenses-paid ‘trip’ in her stead. The barely fictionalised travelogues proved an enjoyable watch mainly due to the constant riffing and joking of two knowing comic actors. They were great company, but the programmes were given more heft and frisson by how the pairs sparring and probing exposed their tics, vanities and middle-aged angst. They got on each other’s nerves and under the skin of celebrity. The quality of the food and lodgings were incidental. The deconstruction of celebrity is something of a stock-in-trade of Steve Coogan. The characters he creates, pompous and pathetic in equal measure, are designed to be ridiculous, but with “The Trip”, the audience were never sure where the real Coogan stopped and the character he played - a version of himself - began. There was also some nice diversions threaded through the film, where Rob Brydon, showing his romantic side and a touch of Welsh lyricism, retraced the steps of the Lakeland poets and read short excerpts of their works.
Such was the success of the TV series, it was edited down and made into a film for general release. The sequel, The Trip - Italy has gone straight to cinema. Like most sequels, the new film boasts a bigger budget, but not much else that is new or better. As the title suggests, this time, our joshing duo are in Italy visiting some of the more select restuarants and boutique hotels in Tuscany, The Amalfi Coast, Rome, Naples and other locations that I might struggle to pinpoint on a map, but whose names are richly redolent of history, art and film. And, with all due respect to the so-called city love, surely it is Italy that is the land of amore. The itinerary could have been designed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, and probably was. Much to Rob Brydon’s chagrin, Sicily was dropped from the schedule, not this this stopped the pair indulging in their “Godfather” impressions and routines. Brydon and Coogan’s remained great fun in this outing, though to my mind the film lacked some of the spontaneity and freshness of the original, it even felt slightly desperate. Further, the food and travel porn lifestyle we were watching the protagonists enjoy – essentially a free, dream holiday to Italy – seemed distant and unobtainable and may have served to bolster their celebrity rather than undermine it. It left me a little envious and craving pasta…And the company of a cute deckhand.
Again, the audience was left a little uncertain as to where division were between the script, the improvisations and reality. As such, I was slightly taken aback by how casually the film treated the episodes of adultery indulged in by both actors – one shown, the other implied. Fuelled by red wine, Rob Brydon seemed to be intent on proving that the most effective way to coax a woman into your bed is to make her laugh.
“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”
- Marilyn Monroe
Bloody comedians. It certainly worked for the comely, blonde woman who’d been crewing on the luxury yacht the boys had used to travel down the coast. Given that Coogan and Brydon are playing themselves and shown talking to and about their actual families, I wondered how their real-life partners felt discomfited by their fictional infidelity. Perhaps in the sleb world, opportunity, availability and an artistic temperament mean that such things are, in fact, unremarkable. It also crossed my mind that women in the audience might get the totally scurrilous impression that all men might behave this way given half a chance. I suspect this is just the type doubt the filmmakers were looking to create. In a nice parallel to the first film, this time the sullied-romantic Brydon, was eager to trace the steps of Byron and Shelley and their grand tour. Perhaps the poetry was his back-up in case the jokes didn’t work.
Finally, horror of horrors, I found myself identifying a little too much with the pompous Coogan, his greying temples and midlife dis-ease. He’s actually five years younger than me…sigh.
***½ (out of five) |
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I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2014 7:12 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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billyweeds wrote: yam--Right you are. Found it. Now to find the time to see it.
Yay! Gonna get to see it this week in Woodstock. |
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