Recent Movie Review May 2014

Here’s some movie digest of relatively recent movies (American Hustle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Frozen, Europa Report, World War Z). Unfortunately, I am a bit short on time these days and must admit that I saw most of them on various tiny in-seat airplane screens instead of big cinemas but “shouganai ne” = it can’t be helped.

American Hustle:

Interesting. Nice twisted plot and nobody is what he/she seems and layers of lies like layers of onions, but somehow I did not find this movie overly original. There has been loads of stuff on con artists and onion layer plots. I cannot resist to compare it to Inception, which I liked much much better, since there was at least the unique and fresh aspect of reality bending to it with the streets of (was it Paris?) Paris folding towards you for example.

What irritated me about American Hustle was that I thought the whole time Amy Adams was Nicole Kidman… (now why did I think that, hu? Some resemblance perhaps?) and I also was sort of esthetically offended that Christian Bale looked so so so ugly in this movie! (laugh) He is not ugly and congrats for the ability to make himself ugly but it’s such a waste! There is so much ugliness around us, why add to that when it’s not necessary? Well, I am half joking of course, there was some nice acting there, but nevertheless how Bale looked like in that movie made me cringe the entire time.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I don’t know the first movie of this title that is apparently from 1947 (wow, who dug that one out of the ground again?) and cannot compare, but I found the new version to be almost entirely delightful. I am not a big fan of Ben Stiller, but in this movie he made me even like him It’s a nice story to see this guy doing things he’d usually never do because of a tiny mishap. I love this theme of tiny things causing big stuff and it’s just wonderful to have the negative inside the wallet and Mitty overlooks that and goes on this epic hunt. The shark in the icy waters of Greenland was over the top of course, but the exploding volcano in Iceland made up for that again and the Afghan warlords being softened up by cake as well. With plots like that you can easily disappoint the audience – we are waiting the entire movie for getting to know what was on that darn photo. That’s dangerous, the more you make the audience wait, the higher are the expectations and I feared the movie would crumble with the revelation of what’s on the photo, but, at least in my opinion, the outcome was adequate and fulfilling the promise and premise.

This movie was a great reminder of the “contract” you make as an author or director with the audience. You promise to deliver something (entertainment of whatever form) and the audience expects a fulfillment of such a promise. It would have been fatal for the movie not to show what’s on the picture for example or to have something disappointing on it, but the director = Stiller knows that lesson and delivers in the end. Well worth watching.

Europa Report

Never heard about this movie before and I am sure it has not seen any screenings in Japan. It’s a European SciFi movie it seems about a manned mission to the Jupiter moon Europa where mankind hopes to find the first extraterrestrial life in the presumed ocean under the icy surface.

The premise is a bit lame, countless missions on countless spaceships have gone out to find extraterrestrial life in the SciFi movie history and Jupiter and its moons are especially critical since there is something called 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I’d like to give the style of the movie a bit of credit. It’s all told backwards sort of. The mission fails and we know they won’t return more or less right from the beginning, but then it unfolds that they managed to repair their communication system (to simplify it a lot now) and we get to see the recordings the crew made during their journey = the movie has sort of mock-documentary style. Apart from 2001 elements, there are “Alien” elements too (on Europa itself), then a little bit of “The Abyss” and last but not least “Event Horizon”, sort of demonstrating how difficult it is to make an “original” SciFi movie these days. The documentary style also results in the actors being “kinda cold” and I found it difficult to identify with them and to feel anything for them.

Interesting experiment, but I guess this movie will soon be quite much forgotten especially with such a lame and “misleading” title…

World War Z

I know, I know, it’s been a while since that movie came out, but I had missed it and now finally saw it. I have nothing much to say about it except for impressive human/zombie ladders reaching over the barriers erected in Jerusalem and finally zombies who are quick instead of slow. If the fastness of the zombies and the consequences that their speed has is the only thing truly remarkable about that movie then… Anyway. Despite a bit of zombie tiredness due to too many zombie movies (and novels) I am still a fan of the Walking Dead and am looking forward to its next season World War Z I can do without…

Frozen

Now that main song (Let it go? Am not sure about its title) is quite an earworm as we say in German (a catchy tune) indeed. I am wondering why it appeals to people so much. I don’t know the original story by Hans Christian Andersen and how much it has been “disneyed” – I bet the snowman thing is a Disney addition for example.

The movie is only the fourth movie ever to have broken the 20 billion yen mark in Japan (the others are Titanic, Spirited Away and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and is insanely popular here (especially among women). The old advertisement slogan “women appeal to women and men appeal to men”, seems true for this movie. Twitter feed in the NHK news at 23:30 the other day spoke of “it’s appealing that there are two heroines and not only one”, for example.

I personally found the snowman a bit annoying and it reminded me somehow of Jar Jar Binks! Lol. Although of course he was not as bad… I think Jar Jar Binks enjoys the status of worst character ever in any movie

What’s a bit unusual is that the story is astonishingly populated, two heroines, two heroes of which one turns out to be a bad guy, plus the obvious bad guy, and not to forget the elk, the trolls (and the snowman). Even if it got watered down by being “disneyed”, there is some fine character crafting in the background done by Andersen, which surely contributes to the success of this story. But hey, in the end it’s 80% about that song after all, I guess