Category Archives: Movies

How to Train Your Dragon 2 teaser trailer

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A teaser for the upcoming 2014 How to Train Your Dragon sequel has arrived, featuring epic dragon flying.  It will be interesting to see Dean DuBlois direct a feature on his own.  His usual co-director, Chris Sanders, went off to direct The Croods, proving that, um, he could not direct on his own.  (Well, I guess he still had a co-director on that film, didn’t he?  It just wasn’t DeBlois.)  Because The Croods was pretty bad.  Ahem.  That last shot in the teaser, I thought, what’s the point?  Oh.  He’s older.  Um.  Wow, that sure is amazing.  At least his hair looks a lot less dorky.  Shoulda been like that in the first film.

Seventh Son trailer

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The trailer for the Seventh Son recently came out.  The film, based on a book series, is set for release December 2013.  I love the look and feel of the film, though the dialog seems bland as usual for these sorts of fantasy adventures.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for it.  Still not sure whether or not I’ll see it in theaters.

Saving Mr. Banks trailer

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The trailer for the upcoming film Saving Mr. Banks (December 2013) recently came out.  The film chronicles the making of the classic film Mary Poppins, centering around the legendary clashing of personalities between the author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), and the media titan creative overlord Walt Disney (Tom Hanks).  It’s interesting to see a portrayal of Walt Disney as a character.  Given that he lent his name to his company that went on to become the world’s largest media conglomerate, his image is still tightly controlled by a business with deep pockets, so I’m interested to see what sort of character he’ll be.  Of course, in biopics, real personalities are always simplified and exaggerated; they’re turned into characters for the purposes of a story, after all.  It looks like they’ll of course be very gracious to the famous personalities involved.  Overall, it definitely looks like something I’ll be interested in seeing, even if what I’ve heard about the true stories weren’t quite so poetic.  Here it is:

Masquerade (2012)

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Link: Masquerade

Summary: After a king is poisoned, a double is secretly put in his place to keep chaos from erupting.  But the double has his own ideas about how to run the kingdom.

Thoughts: Because it’s a period drama, I at first thought the film might be similar to Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, but it was much more lighthearted and focused on the character’s noble intentions, making it more like the 1993 American film Dave, involving a double standing in for an American president.  A funny film, but the story’s villains were a little too obviously villainous for the main character’s noble words and decisions to really seem all that astounding; it’s not as if he were making some controversial political or religious statement or something, like Gandhi or Saint Thomas More.  Instead, he made very safe moral judgments that all modern audiences should agree with (unless something is being lost in translation).  So I wasn’t overly impressed with the main character’s moral decisions; they were just too easy.  While some of the potty humor (as in, humor literally involving a potty) was a bit much for me, some of the humor was quite good, and provided a good balance for the film’s more serious moments.  The film also featured a beautiful music score.

Side Effects (2013)

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Link: Side Effects

Summary: After taking new anti-depressants, a woman murders her husband, leaving her therapist to wonder if the murder was just a side effect of her new drugs as it seems to be, or if he’s missing something more sinister at play.

Thoughts: The story began a bit slowly, but got really interesting when therapist began unraveling clues that didn’t add up and seemed to imply that something more sinister was going on.  Unfortunately the solution to the mystery was rather simple and stupid, a bit of a let down after an interesting build up, leaving it a rather standard film.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

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Link: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Summary: Hansel and Gretel are grown and make a living hunting witches.  And their latest case is a big one, as the witches are capturing children to use them in a new formula that promises to make them immortal.

Thoughts: A fun popcorn movie.  The story was pretty weak and predictable, the humor was yawn-inducing, but this is a film that’s all about the action.  The violence was a bit over-the-top, with blood spurting and splashing and gushing all over, but it was all very cartoony, not horror-film-grisly.  I enjoyed the look and feel of the film, a sort of old German fairy tale look with a modern American attitude.

The Magic Flute (2006)

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Link: The Magic Flute

Summary: Mozart’s famous opera as a film.

Thoughts: This famous opera of Mozart features some of Mozart’s best music, melodic and fantastical, even though it accompanies Shikaneder’s lame boring story (if the guy was alive today, there’s no way he’d make it as a fantasy writer, and if it weren’t for Mozart’s music in this opera, he’d be mostly forgotten).  It was interesting to hear the lyrics in English, which made the story easier to follow.

Unfortunately, the fantastical story seems to make even less sense in whatever strange World War I setting the director was going for, and the end result is just bizzarre.  The film is complete with wacky visuals, including a marching orchestra playing the overture on a battlefield, a closeup of a singer’s mouth to make it look as if the tanks in the background are being created by her voice, floating giant woman lips in green fields to which Papageno sings, and sandbags of the trench walls singing an English version of the second act’s “Der, Welcher Wandelt Diese Strasse”.  But, as strange as it all may sound, this is better than most visual stage interpretations of this wild opera, especially any version that features Papageno in a feather costume, because that’s just disturbing (for which I blame hack-librettist Emanuel Shikaneder, who obviously wrote Papageno’s role so that he had an excuse to dress up in feathers).

Overall, this was a very weird film.  But really Mozart’s genius score makes everything OK.

The BoxTrolls teaser trailer

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Huh, I didn’t even know Laika was making a film called The BoxTrolls set for release in 2014, but the teaser was recently released.  Aside from the rather blatant celebration of the modern non-procreative-sexual-indulgence-and-its-consequences-on-family-units-are-great mindset that Hollywood loves trying to get everyone to feel good about, the animation and character design look fantastic.  Still, after the films Coraline and ParaNorman, both of which also had great trailers and wonderful animation but not so impressive storylines, I’m not sure I’ll see this one in theaters.  Here’s the teaser trailer:

Wild Strawberries (1957)

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Link: Wild Strawberries

Summary: On his way to accepting an honorary degree at an award ceremony, an aging doctor is plagued with nightmares that remind him of his impending death and flashbacks of painful memories that change his opinion of himself.

Thoughts: The story reminded me a bit of Scrooge and A Christmas Carol in that flashbacks give an old man a different perspective on his life.  However, in Wild Strawberries, the main character is rarely present in his flashbacks.  Instead, he witnesses things that happened to other people that change his perspective of them, and in turn himself by their perspective of him.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, the story didn’t quite work for me because we never get to see the main character’s perspective in his own flashbacks.  We get other characters saying he’s cold and judgmental and selfish, but we never see how he actually acts that made them feel this way.  Perhaps these other people are simply interpreting his words wrongly.  For example, I sometimes raise my voice in passionate arguments, and people mistake it for anger.  It’s not; it’s just excitement.  I enjoy a good debate.  Or if you ever mention you’ll pray for someone, a person can take it as some horrible condescending judgmental proclamation.  But prayer is the opposite of condemnation.  So how can we judge whether or not the accusations these characters voice against the doctor are at all fair if we never get to see his actual behavior?

Anyway, that’s really the only thing that didn’t work for me, but it really annoyed me.  The nightmare sequences were great, very eerie, though certainly not horrific.  The film is full of director Ingmar Bergman’s typical fear-of-death theme.  Really, the characters in his film just need to go to confession and they’d be fine, but they’d rather linger on whether or not God and guilt are real, and then they quiver in fear in the terrible shadow of death and what awaits beyond, lest they can get their minds on something else, like issues of love.

Despite the elements that annoyed me, I still enjoyed the film.  I enjoy Bergman’s imagination, even if it blossoms best when his characters are fearing the darkness of death.  Of the small portion of Bergman films I’ve seen, I’d say The Magician is still my favorite, followed by Fanny and Alexander.

Mama (2013)

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Link: Mama

Summary: After their father dies, two young girls spend months living by themselves in an abandoned cabin in the woods.  When they are found, their uncle and his girl friend try to make a new life for them.  But it won’t be so easy, because a ghostly deranged dangerous dead woman wants to keep the children for herself.

Thoughts: Some of the horror elements comes across as silly and ridiculous, such as the girls crawling around on all fours like feral children.  The visuals of the ghostly Mama were certainly creepy, yet there was something Ghostbuster-ishly funny about them too, as if her character really wasn’t very sinister, just stupid and crazy.  I found myself laughing more than being scared.  The ending was a bit of a disappointment; it just didn’t seem to fit the rest of the story.  Overall, though, it was a fun movie; the story was engaging enough.  I’d be interested to see what the director does next.  Also, the film featured a fantastic music score.  I’d love to get my hands on the soundtrack at some point.  Soothing yet haunting melodies, a bit like the music of Pan’s Labyrinth.  Very beautiful.  Lastly, don’t go in the closet!  The closet!  The closet!  The closet!  CLOSET!!

The Monk (2011)

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Link: The Monk

Summary: A monk who grew up in a monastery has his faith put to the test as he is tempted by a devilish seductress.  Based on the famous Gothic novel from the late 1700’s.

Thoughts: I’ve never read the Gothic novel on which this film is based, and certainly have no plans to any time soon.  (I find it hard to read a lot of old fiction; the style is just too impersonal for me.)  Still, I somehow expected this film to be darker, both in tone and in plot.  The spiritual torment of the main character doesn’t come across for me very well, such as his anguish in choosing what he knows to be wrong, and his guilt after choosing it.  He seems to face his sins rather stoically.  Then again, when a main character is choosing what he knows to be wrong, it’s rather hard to have much empathy for him.  But it might’ve been a bit easier if he had made some noticeable sign of regretting it.  Anyway, interesting film.

Man of Steel (2013)

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Link: Man of Steel

Summary: When the evil villain wants to turn Earth into a new Krypton, killing the planet’s population in the process, Superman must save the day.

Thoughts: This is the first Superman film I’ve ever seen.  I am completely unfamiliar with the lore.  Superman has never seemed like that intriguing of a super hero to me.  And this film doesn’t help with that.  The backstory was interesting and worked well, I thought.  I enjoyed seeing Russell Crowe as Superman’s real father, and I enjoyed the flashbacks of Clark Kent growing up, learning to use his powers and arguing with his father about their appropriate use and his relationship with the rest of the world.  The dialog writing was atrocious, but I can appreciate what they were going for.

Unfortunately, the adult Superman is a super-bland character.  He wants nothing concrete, and hardly seems to care that much about other people, saving a few of them here and there only because it’s the superhero thing to do.  There’s hardly any humor, and what little there is comes off as awkward and not very funny; overall, this film took itself way too seriously.  I also completely don’t understand the Christ connection.  The film rather blatantly portrays Superman as a Christ figure, as they are both, in a sense, persecuted saviors.  (Granted, so are countless story heroes.  And maybe the Christ connection is part of Superman lore, so maybe it works for other viewers better than it did for me.)  But the reasons they are persecuted and the ways in which they save people are far too different for the comparison to be at all valid, as far as I can tell.  Christ is about saving us from our own sins, saving us spiritually by teaching us about love and forgiveness, inspiring us to love as he loves.  Superman is only a physical savior, and there’s no chance you’re ever going to get his strength, because he’s not even human.  We persecuted Christ our of fear of our own condemnation, persuaded by the lure of our selfish desires.  We persecute Superman because . . . what, he’s too strong?  “Ah!  A strong man!  That’s just not fair!  Kill him!  Also, he can see under my clothes!”  Am I missing something?  Finally, what’s with all the destruction?  Yay, the world is saved!  And we have $5 billion plus in damages!  It’s as if the director said, “Look, I don’t really know how to do a good fight scene, but I reckon if things are exploding and crumbling and crashing and smashing all the time, that’s basically the same thing.”

Overall, very bland story, very bland characters.

The LEGO Movie teaser trailer

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The trailer for the upcoming animated LEGO movie has arrived.  It’s just a teaser and story-wise, there’s nothing much of interest here.  But the animation looks fantastic, and I love how they make CGI look like it’s stop-motion.  It’s also interesting to see how the toy company behind LEGO uses other franchises to advertise their own; it reminds of how Disney did so with Toy Story and Wreck-It Ralph.  Anyway, I’ll definitely be interested to see this movie.  As of now, it’s set to be released February 2014.  Here’s the trailer:

Annie Hall (1977)

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Link: Annie Hall

Summary: A man spends time with a woman.

Thoughts: I enjoyed the non-linear storytelling and some of the filmmaking gags (subtitles to show what characters are really thinking, stepping aside to talk directly to the audience, going into flashbacks and trying to interact with flashback characters).  It made an otherwise bland and empty story rather engaging.  That said, I don’t find Woody Allen’s character to be all that very clever or witty.  I’m surprised that Annie Hall enjoyed his company; he does nothing but make wisecracks all the time.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

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Link: Silver Linings Playbook

Summary: After being released from a mental health facility, a man tries to get his life back in order.  And what better way to do it than to promise to join a dance competition with a woman who has a lot of her own issues?

Thoughts: I didn’t think this film made any sense.  The characters are supposed to have mental health issues, but they’re all really fine, they just get way too angry over little things and then fight about it.  As if that’s all that mental health comes down to, control of temper.  Very poorly written film.  The “let’s join a dance competition!” plot made no sense, as it has nothing to do with anything; it doesn’t challenge the characters in any dramatically interesting way.  Also, it bugged me that the main character is married, yet basically spends the entire film falling in love with another woman.  This would be dramatically fine if a love triangle was one of the film conflicts.  Instead, this film seems to support the idea that marriage is overall meaningless, just an occasional promise to only sleep with one person at a time for monetary benefits, not a lifelong commitment to someone else no matter what.  Did not much care for this film.