Cinderella (2015)

Friday, 27 February 2015 Starr5 Comments

My first early screening of the year was for Disney’s latest live-action adaptation, Cinderella.

I’ll be honest with you: I was not that excited for this movie. We’ve seen a few live-action Disney fairy tales and they haven’t done very well. And while Maleficent was a villain backstory, I couldn’t discern any actual new twists, and well, I own the original 1950 animated movie so I know the story? What is this new movie bringing to the table besides Cate Blanchett and a bunch of other actors that I don’t actually know very well.

ALSO, I’m not going to lie, I was a little salty about how bright blue the new dress is. Cindy’s dress was this silvery white that looked just barely blue in the light. It’s a beautiful dress, don’t get me wrong, but I just felt miffed by the color.

That is not a silvery blue. That’s an in your face, blue-as-blue-can-be kind of blue. Still pretty.

Also why does the shoe look so weird and polygonal? It just didn’t bode well for the movie, for me.

Sigh… Not sure what to expect from Disney live action adaptations anymore, but I tried to go into it with an open mind… and a themed DisneyBound of course!

Now, on to the actual review.

You know what’s kind of awkward… is when the movie ends and people want to know how it is. But they phrase it like this:

“Did you like the movie?”
“Well-”
“I loved it, it was amazing right??”

No. I did not think it was amazing, I’m sorry. I found it, basically, exactly as underwhelming as I thought it would be. That being said, I think I went into it with the expectations that this was a movie for adults. It’s not that it’s a movie for children, per se, but it’s also not quite a movie for adult Disney fans either…

Let me back it up and talk some of the things I liked about this new adaptation:

Costuming was exquisite. Seriously, it was pretty glorious. My cavorite costume of the film is Lady Tremaine’s first that we see in the film, with a spectacular black and gold color scheme. Most of her later costumes have green, and I don’t like green, especially wearing it, but I loved this first costume.
PLUS THAT HAT. Oh man, dream outfit. I would wear this. Complete with a grumpy cat.
Set design was beautiful. Oh man, it was really gorgeous. When Anastasia and Drizella are making fun of Cinderella’s house, it totally baffles me because uh, the house is beautiful. The Prince’s castle? Wow.
Action scenes are best in live-action. The scene where Cinderella is fleeing the castle as the clock strikes twelve is well-done in live-action. That kind of tension-building doesn’t come across as well in most animations, so this was done pretty well.
Scoring was also done really nicely. Although I will talk through some of my issues with it in a bit.

Essentially, my takeaway from this movie was that it took the fairy tale feeling that was conveyed by the animated 1950 films and translated that fairy tale magic through the aesthetics. Gilded everything, soft sunlit scenes. The movie was so nice to look at. But beyond that, I really found it lacking a lot.

Let me talk about the music really quickly. I was pretty dismayed that the songs from the 1950 movie weren’t used in this film, even in the scoring. The only song I recognized from the original soundtrack was when Lily James briefly sang “Sing Sweet Nightingale”. By briefly, I literally mean she sang the line “Sing sweet, nightingale” once while doing her chores. I didn’t hear the motif throughout the rest of that scene. I did not hear “So This is Love” as a motif in scenes with Richard Madden. I did not hear “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” at any point. And no “Bippidi Boppidi Boo” for our fairy godmother scene.

I didn’t love the casting of Helena Bonham Carter for the fairy godmother. It added to the confusion of what this movie was trying to be. After all, it wasn’t trying to be a super faithful live-action recreation because Helena’s fairy godmother is nothing like the matronly wise old woman archetype that we had in 1950. She is also not likely popular among children. So she’s cast in this film for adults and yet her role was so campy that I don’t understand what the larger goal was for this casting choice. And when you have so little screentime but are so heavily advertised (kind of like Johnny Depp in Into the Woods) you have to make THE MOST out of it and I just felt that her performance, much like many of the non-Blanchett performances, fell flat.

In fact, that was my major problem with the entire film. Overall, it seemed like it was aiming to just be a highly romanticized period film with some magic. But I felt so overwhelmingly uncharmed by it. What was it trying to be? It was not a faithful adaptation of the original animated movie, as it needed to do something original. (Didn’t love those twists, but I’ll talk about those in my spoilers.) It wasn’t innocent and light enough to be a children’s movie, but it was too campy to be an adult movie.

I definitely had an issue with the dialogue. Most of it was cringe-worthy. It was not natural, maybe because of this lofty romantic fuzzy daydream vision they were going for? BUT THEN explain Helena Bonham Carter’s character? The goofy fairy godmother? Goofier than Whitney Houston’s. I mean, she’s HBC. We know what to expect from her, and she deliver that, but it seemed so out of place in this film.

You know, let’s go back to talking about the actors for a minute. Cate Blanchett can do no wrong, but they gave her such odd lines to work with. Lady Tremaine as a character is just kind of cruel because she can be. They weakened that in this film, and I don’t understand why they did this. She did what she could, but even she couldn’t salvage the awkward dialogue. There’s nothing WRONG with the actors in this film, but the performances were just all so flat and lacked depth. Richard Madden? Lily James? YAWN. I do find casting Richard Madden as Prince Charming odd. He’s not handsome in the conventional Disney way of casting men who look young and dashing and charming? He’s more handsome in that John Stamos way, if that makes sense? It seemed odd. He was also one of the more expressive actors in the movie, and that’s saying something. The stepsisters were comical, as they’re supposed to be, but were they actually much more animated than everyone else or did they just seem so much more lively relative to their costars? True, their funny moments were pretty funny. The comic nature of how ridiculous the sisters are was maintained in this movie, thank goodness. Those two made the most of their time on screen.

Oh, but Cate Blanchett really was brilliant. Truly an amazing actress, and the little things sh did really reminded me of some of the great actresses that have graced the silver screen. She already is in their company. Amazing.

I’m going to cut to a trailer before I rip into this some more, but I’m going to rip into this some more after the trailer:

Cinderella is out in theaters March 13. Spoilers to follow:Read More »

Frozen Fever (2015)

Thursday, 26 February 2015Thursday, 26 February 2015 StarrLeave a comment

I was able to see an early screening of Disney’s newest live-action adaption, Cinderella, last night, my first screening of 2015!

But I’ll level with you: I think a lot of Disney fans were more excited for Disney’s newest animated short than for their newest live-action adaptation. From what I’d seen in my travels through the Disney fandom, Frozen fans were barely hibernating when they were able to spring back up in excitement!

Can I be a bit more honest with you? I was not excited. I was WAY over the hype for Frozen before the movie was even released. The soundtrack was fantastic, yes. Was it a good movie? Sure. But was it hyped beyond belief to the point where most Disnerds are a bit sick of it? YUP.

That being said, “Frozen Fever” was really cute!

Yes, there were some echoes of the original movie that were eye-roll-worthy. (“After all, a cold never bothered me anyway.” UGH, Elsa, no.) And some of the animation seemed recycled:

Pretty sure they just inserted Elsa into the scene of Anna waking up on coronation day? The lighting on Elsa seemed a bit off.

But it all worked to remind you that FROZEN HAPPENED, in case you forgot. They rode bicycles in the hall…

Notice that Anna is holding her favorite food: a SANDWICH!

and even Oaken and a portable sauna make an appearance, among other nods to the movie:

The premise is that it’s Anna’s first birthday post-events of Frozen and Elsa wants to make everything PERFECT to make up for being a cold ice queen for all of Anna’s life.

Of course, hijnks ensue because, well… think about the title. Also, it’s a Disney short; when AREN’T there hijinks?

It was definitely cute and fun and REALLY, I mean really, reinforced the idea of sisterly love. Elsa makes a lot of very grand gestures for her sister in this movie for Anna’s birthday, so if you’re not used to seeing grand gestures of platonic love, you’re going to be a bit confused. It’s okay, it’s super sweet and thoughtful. I mean, it includes this adorable/awkward family portrait:

I’m going to cut to the trailer now before I spoil too much. Even though I’m really sick of Frozen (and the folks in the theater were REAL sick of it), this was still a fun short to watch. Short and sweet. Definitely good for fans of Frozen and still a treat for Disney fans otherwise.

“Frozen Fever” and Cinderella will be out in theaters March 13th.

Seventh Son (2015)

Friday, 6 February 2015 Starr2 Comments

This was not a good movie. It pains me to say this because I have a friend who worked on it (the visual effects were great, B!) but oh boy.

Okay, now that I’ve blurted out my thesis, it’s time to back it up.

First of all, is anyone surprised? When my friend Annie told me she had early screening tickets on Wednesday, I had no clue what she was going on about and very vaguely knew that it was a movie at all. Something something… fantasy or sci-fi genre? Am I out of the loop or did it seem like there was very minimal promotion going on for this? (Not a rhetorical question, it is entirely likely that I just was never targeted for advertising for this movie.)

I am assuming that all the actors in this film were really well-paid because ugh, it was just awful. I really take issue with the writing. The dialogue made me roll my eyes into the back of my head and the plot points were so loosely tied together. The movie itself was pretty short, which was great for me because that meant I didn’t have to endure it for more than 2 hours. But maybe they could have used some extra time to build the world here? World building is crucial and I will never excuse any book, movie, TV show, etc. that doesn’t take care to do it. I mean, there’s a scene where we are looking at a tombstone. It says “REBEKKA” backwards. Is this the script of this grand world? Mirrored English? That was one of the worst offenses, that they made such a laughably barely-half-arsed attempt at the world-building. This is a movie based on a book series, the world-building is done! You just have to put it in the movie!

You know what’s worse than a movie with an all-white cast?
A movie where the only people of color are the secondary villains who have zero character development and are killed off.
Djimon Honsou is in this and it’s such a shame that his talent is wasted here. There was an Asian secondary villain who doesn’t have any freaking lines before he is killed. Do not even get me started on the black female secondary villain who takes the form of a leopard. She is reduced to an animal much more than the other villains, and the Asian one was a bear chained in a cage for most of his scene, so that’s telling. And of course, she has no lines. At least Djimon Honsou had lines.

I cringed during most of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s scenes. I think I cringed most watching Julianne Moore play this poorly developed villain. I couldn’t help think of her standing in front of a green screen pretending to wield magic while she has been nominated for an Oscar for the fifth time. I’ll go more into how I think her character fell completely flat later, but just… know there was a lot of putting my head in my hands in the middle of the theater. I don’t blame her at all. She did the best she could with what she was given… but she was given baloney.

Jeff Bridges, the Oscar-winning actor, may have known this was all ridiculous. He uses this strange affect when he speaks in this movie, like if Sean Connery was trying to play Gandalf. Maybe his character is supposed to be a kind of washed up old fool, but it was still very sad to see him like this. I’d like to think that he knew this whole movie was ludicrous and was just having fun while getting paid.

Ben Barnes actually did a pretty good job. I’m not familiar with his work (sorry Prince Caspian fans) but you know what, he looked good in this role and I think he delivered. Not sure why his character was the only one with any real depth but okay then. I’d watch more movies with him after seeing Seventh Son.

If you’re familiar with my reviews, you might know that I care deeply about world-building and relationship-building. The relationships between characters bond us to them more than their actions independent of other people. The relationships in this movie were almost all BS. There’s, obviously, a love story and it’s completely limp. It drives much of the plot ending forward and I was so detached from it that I was really disgusted. Two attractive actors with some on-screen chemistry does not a love story make! The only maybe compelling relationship, to me, was of Tom Ward (our protagonist) and his mother. His mother was a pretty cool character, played by Olivia Williams, and I maybe felt most attached to her. But maybe that’s just because it’s easy to write maternal traits without having to do much else.

I mean… I have so many negative things to say here. A waste of Kit Harington, who is only in the movie for the first 10 minutes, sorry to all his fans. A waste of admittedly, as I said early, really nice visual effects to create magic and mythical beasts. A waste of what seems like it was a really cool world. This story is just empty and flat and I had no reason to care about it. I was so uninvested in the characters, in the story, about 5 minutes into the movie. Spoiler alert: Gregory locks away Mother Malkin and she escapes because “time made her stronger” and that is the impetus for our conflict? That after enough time passed, she could just leave her prison? As soon as this happened, and Julianne Moore was introduced in just an utterly tragic costume, I knew this movie was worse than I thought it would be going into this screening.

I’m just going to show you the trailer now, I guess. More ranting afterwards.

Inherent Vice (2014)

Friday, 9 January 2015Thursday, 8 January 2015 Starr1 Comment

I got to attend a screening of Inherent Vice thanks to Cloture Club this past Wednesday. (It had a limited release late last year and will have a wider release today.)

I didn’t know too much about the movie going into it. I’d only just started seeing some trailers and commercials, and they didn’t tell me much about the actual story. (Much like how I felt about the Interstellar promotions.) (ALSO I’m going to talk about Interstellar soon. If I don’t, bug me about it.) The initial impression I got from this was a very American Hustle-esque vibe of nostalgia for an older time with some investigative hijinks? Also, check out that cast list, it is not to be trifled with. We have an awards-season gunner here.

Going into the movie, I suspected it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I mean, here’s the description I was given before the screening:

“Inherent Vice” is the seventh feature from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first ever film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel. When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin…well, easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused – except this one usually leads to trouble. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists… Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp – all Thomas Pynchon.

Are you confused? I sure was.

And to be honest, I was still confused coming out of the movie. One thing I will say off the bat is that Paul Thomas Anderson did a really wonderful job of transporting us back to that late 60s/early 70s time in American life. It’s not only the obvious costuming and set design, but the camera work and the editing. Lots of tight angles, a nostalgic grainyness… if you had not seen a movie in the last 40 years, this movie would seem very familiar stylistically to you. In one of the opening shots, we see Katherine Waterson, who plays Shasta Fey, looking so incredibly mod and the stylizing of the shot makes her look even more authentically mod.

This still is brighter and clearer than this scene was in the film.

Joaquin Phoenix delivers a great performance, as usual. He is also rocking some really incredible sideburns.

Them muttonchops put Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine to shame.

Also, for fans of Walk the Line, we see Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon reunited.

Before I attempt to talk about the plot (which I really barely understood…), I’ll just go over some thoughts:

Do not see this movie with your family unless your family has a special bond that allows you to see a movie with a lot of nudity, sex, and excessive use of the phrase “pu**y eater”. (I mean it.)
There is also a lot of drug use in this movie. It’s important to the plot and the themes of the film, but not important enough to warrant how much it’s mentioned or shown in the film.
The movie is narrated by Sortilège, a chracter who is in the film as one of Doc’s friends but otherwise… serves no real on-screen purpose? Unless I’m missing something? I don’t know why there was a need for her to be this on-screen character who is a friend to Doc for about 5 minutes total of the film. She was a good narrator, don’t get me wrong, but having her be an on-screen character confused me a bit. I think it was meant to make her seem like part of the story, but she was maybe the only character who had just nothing to do with any of the interwoven storylines.
Owen Wilson always plays Owen Wilson. I would like to see him challenge himself as an actor to not play Owen Wilson.

Also, you will get certain cravings in this movie:

Pizza
Fudgesicle (which actually turns out to be a frozen chocolate-covered banana)
Frozen chocolate-covered banana
Pancakes

All in all, this movie wasn’t really for me. At all. I would compare it to Burn After Reading. If you liked that, you’ll likely enjoy this. It has a similarly nonsensical, all-over-the-place plot, and even a similar theme of paranoia. Not my cup of tea, as I said before.

gif animated GIF

That being said, there were a few shining moments for me. Some very random moments that were just really funny, very randomly emotional moments. It wasn’t a complete waste on me, but I just walked out of the theater not sure how everything started, ended, or what was really going on in between. It felt like just as the weirdness had plateaued, something else crazy would happen. Again, I am sure this was intentional but it’s not something I personally enjoy in movies.

This trailer actually includes most of my favorite moments from the movie:

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Friday, 12 December 2014 StarrLeave a comment

Thanks to a last-minute save by my good friend Annie, I was able to attend an early screening of the final film in The Hobbit trilogy!

Oh man, what a ride this has been. The Tolkien fandom awoke after the end of the LotR trilogy ended. We get some more New Zealand tourism goodness. We got to see Orlando Bloom is his utterly glorious Legolas wig, even though Legolas isn’t in the novel. We get a beautiful Evangeline Lilly in her gorgeous wig, even though Tauriel isn’t a character in the book either.

Let me talk about the Tolkien fandom hype for this, eh? The hashtag for this film is #OneLastTime, as in what Thorin asks of his fellow dwarves: “Will you follow me, one last time?” But of course, for the fandom, it is One Last Time to see a fresh view of Middle Earth, One Last Time to have adventures with hobbits and wizards and elves and dwarves and orcs. The feels are powerful and iminent. This is our last time, folks. Let’s take some time to appreciate that all good things come to an end. (Unless/until they make The Silmarillion.)

If you didn’t feel the feels watching Billy Boyd sing “The Last Goodbye”, you’re probably not the target audience for these films 😛

Oh, hasn’t it been a great ride, friends? No matter your criticisms for these films, it’s been so much fun experiencing the epic proportion of Middle Earth and its inhabitants.

This final installment for the trilogy jumps RIGHT into things. If you had forgotten (as I had), The Desolation of Smaug ended with Smaug leaving the Lonely Mountain and making his way to Laketown to wreak havoc. So BotFA starts right there, with a deadly dragon ready to rain hellfire upon innocent people and the action gets going from the get-go.

(If you haven’t seen the previous 2 films, or even if you just don’t remember where the last film left off, you will definitely be a bit confused at the beginning of the movie. Why is this guy locked up again? Why is Kili dying on a table? Which dwarves went up the mountain and which ones stayed in Laketown? Who are any of these people? Where did Legolas and his golden locks go?)

LET’S JUST BE REAL: If you liked The Lord of the Rings, you liked the last 2 films in The Hobbit series, you’re going to like this final film. You’ve got everything you could ask for:

Beautiful, breath-taking New Zealand scenery
Martin Freeman as the endearing titular character
- He’s also so great with physical comedy and his facial expressions. We get great little doses of comic relief from him
Great comic relief moments overall
Interesting romance arc with Tauriel (who, again, is not a character from the canon, so all her storylines are made up)
Benedict Cumberbatch’s great voicework for Smaug and the Necromancer
Plenty of battle scenes (and I mean PLENTY, I mean it’s in the name of this film so)
Amazing cast members all around, truly
Terrific scoring by Howard Shore
Awesome effects

Can we also have Richard Armitage do a lot more voice work?

Non-spoiler-y comments:

There are POCs in this movie! Not very many, I think I saw maybe 2, but Laketown is a diverse enough town that there was at least one black person and one Asian person. Erm, okay, you can do better but you know, better than zero, I guess.
Even though many people didn’t like that there wound up being a bit of a love triangle in The Hobbit with the introduction of Tauriel (again, a non-canon character) and having Legolas in there (again, not in The Hobbit novel), I thought they handled it pretty well. I was satisfied with how they ended things. I’ll have some more comments on this below the trailer, but they could’ve done a lot worse. That being said, it did feel pretty unnecessary, but I guess they wanted us to feel more attached to these 3 characters? I certainly did.
There are really excellent moments of dramatic irony that point to events that will take place in The Lord of the Rings.
OKAY I did have an issue with a scene here and maybe some of the world building lemme break it down for you:
- First of all, not sure how orcs are so easily beaten by men who seem to have zero battle experience?
- At one point towards the end of the movie, Bilbo literally takes out orcs by throwing large rocks at them. Am I supposed to believe that he is killing them with these large rocks?
- If Bilbo throwing large rocks kills orcs, how is it that he survives being thunked on the head with the hilt of an orc’s sword? (This is not a spoiler, obviously our titular character doesn’t die, we know he survives to the events of The Lord of the Rings.)
- Basically, these orc extras seem way too easy to kill, even when compared to elf, men, and dwarf extras.
I do feel like, by this last film, I could start to differentiate the 12 dwarves that aren’t Thorin. That being said, I still can’t name half of them or tell them apart, really.
INTENSELY cool scene involving Galadriel (not in the book), Elrond, and Saurumon. We don’t see this much action from them in The Lord of the Rings so this scene was really fun to watch.
It’s also cool to see Lee Pace as Thranduil go to battle because, again, we don’t see much action from him in the earlier films, where he looks fabulous as always but in a very stationary way: standing fabulously, sitting fabulously, occasionally walking or pacing (!!) fabulously.
Would have liked to see a bit more fleshing out of Thorin’s dragon sickness. I feel like the trailer really set us up to watch this key character’s obsession and the corruption of his goals, but that was done a bit too weakly in the movie. It seems way more unreasonable than I thin it needed to seem, and then there’s just a very strange kind of hallucinatory sequence that just doesn’t carry much weight because the whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
It’s nice that we end at the scene from the first LotR film where Gandalf shows up at Bilbo’s door after his 111th birthday. It really helps to bring us full circle.

I would highly recommend refreshing your memory on the last 2 films before you watch this one, and it does help to have seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy because they make so many little nods to it in this film. But even if you do neither, you can still really enjoy this last Tolkien dream-come-true. One last time.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will be in theaters in the US on Wednesday, December 17. (Check your individual country’s release date.) (Very sorry Argentina, as I believe you will not be getting this movie until January 1.)

Spoilers below the trailer: