Muppets, Artists and Other Creatures
One of the advantages of long flights is time to watch some movies 
On the way to and back from Thailand I watched five:
The Artist
Three Musketeers
The Adventures of Tintin
Ratatouille
The Muppets
The Artist
The movie received quite some attention and academy awards but nevertheless it left me untouched. I have nothing against silent movies, in fact I love Chaplin and am a big fan of his Modern Times, or The Gold Rush. So it's not the silent movie issue that disturbed me about this production, it's rather that I found it to be simply boring. There were many redundant scenes. For example the protagonist walking towards the door. They tell you on the first day in any film school that a good director wastes no film time on things that the audience does not need to know.
I supposed the director used those scenes to calm the film down, to make it slow, but if that is the only purpose of the scene than this is waste. Chaplin did not waste scenes, silent movie or not. All his scenes had something to say in contrast to The Artist. In my opinion the hype about the movie is based on nostalgia. The movie is woefully looking back to glorious days, forgetting the biggest rule of film making – don't bore the audience.
There was fine acting involved but what stirred me more than the people was the abilities of the dog…….. The movie left me yawning and I found its artsy escapades into doing some sound effects after all annoying rather than clever. If you make a silent movie make it right and don't cheat with sound. Chaplin needed no sound to convey his message (only music). Somehow the movie left me with the feeling that the director and screenwriter have not really learned from the masters.
The Three Musketeers
So, this is about the 500th version of Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers and it is surely the flashiest and most ludicrous one, but it had some stuff going for it and those were the king and queen of France whom I found delightful, Christoph Waltz as Richelieu and most of all Milla Yovovich and Orlando Bloom as the remaining bad guys. It was just pure fun to watch how the latter two enjoyed playing evil dudes, especially Orlando. You could, at least in my opinion, really see that he had fun with the part and who would have thought that the slimy bad guy was fitting so well to the sonny-boy whelp Orlando.
Interestingly neither D'Artagan nor the three musketeers left any sort of impression on me. They were kind of necessary to make the bad guys shine but that was about it.
Story wise… What is there to say that hasn't been said yet about the Three Musketeers? Nothing, so I won't bother. It's a fine story (also without airships) that contains all the "necessary" elements for drama rooted in betrayal and intrigues.
A fun piece to watch but also a movie to be rather easily and quickly forgotten.
The Adventures of Tintin
Wow, what a fine piece of animation. We've come a long way from Mickey Mouse or even Toy Story. What I was wondering the entire time though was, why did they not shoot that in live action? There is nothing in the movie that could not be done by special effects and stunts. Too expensive maybe? (Especially the scene in the Arabian town with the falcon chase) . I read some though not all of the Tintin comics when I was a kid, and it was nice to revisit the stories and the characters. I was never a real big fan of Tintin though, since I always found him to be "too clever". He outsmarts everyone all the time and is just too brave and has no big flaw whatsoever and I always, already as a kid, found that kind of lame. It was fun to follow his reasoning and to revisit childhood reading but I prefer more quirky characters like my all time childhood favorite Scrooge MacDuck, who has many flaws but is still lovable and so much more interesting than a super-smart Tintin. He reminds me of Mickey Mouse also in his "he is always right and never loses" way and I never liked Mickey either. Guess I always had a weakness for the dark side of the force Nevertheless, a fun movie to watch and what a nice tweak that the bad guy looked very much like Mr. Spielberg himself
Ratatouille
A nice premise: A rat who wants to be a chef in a Parisian restaurant. That is what Hollywood calls high concept. It's a nice idea. but it also bears plenty of pitfalls. For that "rat as a cook" premise the viewer has to completely suspend disbelief and accept that the rats have been entirely anthropomorphized. That's fine and it happened in many movies with great success. E.g. nobody has a problem with accepting that all the toys in Toy Story come to life. The trouble with Ratatouille is that there is interaction between the humans and the rats and the way the rat communicates with the human hero (by pulling his hair) is funny but it also shows the limits of humanization of the rat. It would have been less awkward I guess if the rat would simply have been able to talk to the humans. Anyway, the story is a simple one, outsider receives recognition because he remains true to himself. The characters were only a little but not too much cliche and the food critique who loved his ratatouille was a nice opponent. A fun story, but I don't think I will remember it for a long time.
The Muppets
Another childhood revisited movie but that one managed to engage me much less than Tintin. I loved the muppets when I was a kid (who didn't at that time), especially the two grumpy old guys. If I ever had a favorite muppet it was the animal and his drumming But alas, I guess the movie was too much geared towards a young audience to engage me. Somehow there was no edge, no bite. I think it was the wrong move to make the movie about the revival of the muppets. If you need to revive something it means it is dead. Had there been another story line, simply some adventures of the muppets for example, I suppose I could have enjoyed it. To make their revival the topic of the movie felt as if they had no other story left to tell… In a way, alas, the muppets are history indeed…
