Movie reviews
Jul. 15th, 2011 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaLikely to repost the first one to Tumblr, since I take my web journo responsibilities seriously when they actually outfit me with a media pass. XD;
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: the first Chinese film I’ve seen with a native steampunk sensibility, i.e. not just set design trappings. It starts with a Spanish-speaking ambassador in Roman(?! the year is 690AD) garb being given a guided tour of a 60-storey tall mechanical statue of Empress Wu in the guise of Guanyin, and goes on from there. Andy Lau corresponds to my mental image of Dee like RDJ to my mental image of Holmes, i.e. not at all, but I can live with the casting - which, by the way, Tsui Hark clearly watched the Guy Ritchie movie and found no reason why historical Luoyang couldn't be given the full London Below treatment. Indeed, if you were going to steampunk a Chinese dynasty, you may as well go with the cosmopolitan high-barbarian Tang, with its polo parties and drunken poets and ruthless, powerful noblewomen. It's probably the only period where you could portray a female official going around investigating a murder and not have anyone even take notice that she's wearing men's clothes. The mystery itself's not awful. Just remember the Chinese fair play rule variant: wuxia falls under improbable, not impossible. XD
Wanted: gods of small screens help me, I was only trying to see if James McAvoy had ever been in a non-classy movie. He's too good an actor for this one, although I suppose dude wasn't in the position to follow Morgan Freeman's lead and devote precisely as much effort to the script as it deserved. Everyone involved should get special Oscars for delivering those lines without actually falling to the floor and writhing in agony. I was not so lucky.
The problem - I mean, not the only problem, it's easier to trash a bad movie than praise a good one, but let's go with this - is that the whole thing is so blatantly a Walter Mitty fantasy of disturbingly total moral bankruptcy, I kept waiting for the more interesting film in which flashes of reality break through to let us know that James McAvoy's character has had a psychotic break due to a misfilled anxiety meds prescription, and is imagining everything while barricaded in the basement, obsessively rewatching Fight Club. The action sequences were genuinely stylish, though. 2 stars for car chases. Add another .5 if your sexual fantasies involve hardcore masochism at the hands of Angelina Jolie, She-Wolf of the Textile Workers' Union, and/or watching James McAvoy being tied up and lovingly beaten bloody by Slavic goons. It all passes a bit to the left of my moe mark, but the way it's set up and shot, it's definitely mashing somebody's buttons.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: the first Chinese film I’ve seen with a native steampunk sensibility, i.e. not just set design trappings. It starts with a Spanish-speaking ambassador in Roman(?! the year is 690AD) garb being given a guided tour of a 60-storey tall mechanical statue of Empress Wu in the guise of Guanyin, and goes on from there. Andy Lau corresponds to my mental image of Dee like RDJ to my mental image of Holmes, i.e. not at all, but I can live with the casting - which, by the way, Tsui Hark clearly watched the Guy Ritchie movie and found no reason why historical Luoyang couldn't be given the full London Below treatment. Indeed, if you were going to steampunk a Chinese dynasty, you may as well go with the cosmopolitan high-barbarian Tang, with its polo parties and drunken poets and ruthless, powerful noblewomen. It's probably the only period where you could portray a female official going around investigating a murder and not have anyone even take notice that she's wearing men's clothes. The mystery itself's not awful. Just remember the Chinese fair play rule variant: wuxia falls under improbable, not impossible. XD
Wanted: gods of small screens help me, I was only trying to see if James McAvoy had ever been in a non-classy movie. He's too good an actor for this one, although I suppose dude wasn't in the position to follow Morgan Freeman's lead and devote precisely as much effort to the script as it deserved. Everyone involved should get special Oscars for delivering those lines without actually falling to the floor and writhing in agony. I was not so lucky.
The problem - I mean, not the only problem, it's easier to trash a bad movie than praise a good one, but let's go with this - is that the whole thing is so blatantly a Walter Mitty fantasy of disturbingly total moral bankruptcy, I kept waiting for the more interesting film in which flashes of reality break through to let us know that James McAvoy's character has had a psychotic break due to a misfilled anxiety meds prescription, and is imagining everything while barricaded in the basement, obsessively rewatching Fight Club. The action sequences were genuinely stylish, though. 2 stars for car chases. Add another .5 if your sexual fantasies involve hardcore masochism at the hands of Angelina Jolie, She-Wolf of the Textile Workers' Union, and/or watching James McAvoy being tied up and lovingly beaten bloody by Slavic goons. It all passes a bit to the left of my moe mark, but the way it's set up and shot, it's definitely mashing somebody's buttons.
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Date: 2011-07-15 08:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-07-15 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 10:15 am (UTC)SING IT. (Though on re-watching, it really makes me appreciate how wonderful his British accent is; personally his American accent in Wanted is so natural as to totally fly under the radar until you're listening for it.)
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Date: 2011-07-15 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 02:51 pm (UTC)