He’s a funny guy, mainly. He’s actually much more charming and comical in person compared to most of his films.
He was excellent in Freaky, where he swapped bodies with a teenage girl and he had to portray a teen girl. That was a fun performance.
I haven’t seen him in anything for a while, but I remember him being a lot more expressive - and funny - in Dodgeball and Wedding Crashers.
Dune part 2
My reaction to this is bit like the first film; it was enjoyable enough and clearly a spectacle, but I was left underwhelmed because of the rave reviews. It is just a little…. dull. Maybe that’s on me and I just don’t ‘get’ it. Not a bad film but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I was hoping I would.
For some unknown reason, last night I watched Date Night on Max, a 2010 movie starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey. It was not very good.
You are correct. I told my wife yesterday, “I still think the Sci-Fi channel version of the first book is best.”
It really is. It tells the story very clearly and much closer to the book. The main thing I could not believe they changed in the movie was:
Wait, Alia isn’t even born yet at the end of the film? This has ramifications because:
-
Paul and Mom were only in desert less than 9 months? Oh…the book makes it clear he is out there years…Alia is 3 or 4 years old in the book. He was out there 3-5 years more or less. That makes a ton of sense.
-
She kills Harkonnen. It makes sense and is a pleasant surprise. She is 3-4 years old, but also contains all knowledge and personality of her entire previous ancestors. This also is important…because Harkonnen himself comes back to life in her mind.
There are many issues, but they really screwed up some ending stuff.
Just finished The Mouse That Roared and really enjoyed it. The last time I watched it was probably in the 70s when it was on TV. It still holds up well. I’m surprised they haven’t attempted to remake this one.
Your second spoilered point is one of the best turns of the book(s), but it might be weird to film/show.
Children of Dune on Sci-fi showed it, but mainly focused on adult Alia. Great adaptation as well.
It has actual ramifications for the films aside from being different from the book. Dune 3 is supposed to be a 12 year or so time jump from Dune 2. So is Anya Taylor-Joy playing a 12 year old? Is it really a late 20-something time jump?
I think they’ll just jump 25 years and she’ll be that age. Why hasn’t Paul and Chani aged that much?
Science Fiction!
Actually, spice would explain that perfectly in universe.
Probably explains why Pauls parents only like about 12 to 17 years older than him.
That, and a 5,000-year breeding program.
Watched the latest - and hopefully last - Mission Impossible movie. Or perhaps it should be called Mission Preposterous. A pretty muddled mess, IMO. Cruise is still fit in his 60s, but looking fairly jowly.
Into the Wild, 2007. The story of Christopher McCandless, based on the book by Jon Krakauer. Christopher renamed himself Alexander Supertramp and went into the Alaskan wilderness alone, where he died. Are we supposed to regard this as a tragedy? Early in the film, he sets fire to a handful of cash. After that, I was firmly on the side of “fuck this guy”, although there’s reason to think he had mental issues, and came from an abusive family. He’s also presented as inexperienced, although I was impressed by his competence. Og knows I’d have died a lot faster if I’d attempted the things he did. Anyway, a very privileged young man spent his life just as he wished to, and although it wasn’t a great movie, we watched the whole thing and had a lot to talk about afterward.
I went to see The Drama yesterday. I decided I didn’t care enough about any of the characters to want to know what happened to them.
oops wrong thread
Frost/Nixon - quite an excellent turn from Michael Sheen and Frank Langella as David Frost and Richard Nixon respectively in the run up to and through Frost’s interviews with a post-resignation Nixon. Would recommend.
Zootopia 2/Zootropolis 2 - not quite as complex or interesting as the first one, as here we know who the bad guys are and why they’re doing it fairly early on. Instead we get the “good guys trying to clear their names while on the run” story. Some quite funny moments, but some forced jokes too. A decent sequel (and set up for a third film) but would only recommend if you enjoyed the first film.
Fackham Hall. Le sigh. If you want to do a film based on an unending cascade of quickfire stupid jokes (like Airplane!), then you have to commit to the thing. You can’t do some and then pause the jokes for sentimental moments, you can’t drag the jokes out or repeat them (there’s a Beatles joke that they use three times), and you have to move swiftly on to the next one. Many of the jokes in this film are funny but not nearly enough to make it work, leaving the rest slowly dying before the audience’s eyes. Would not recommend unless you’re particularly bored.
I finally watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. I’ve wanted to see this for a while, because it’s highly praised as the most faithful adaptation of the 1001 Nights (including by the recent Annotated Arabian Nights), and I’ve remarked before on this Board about most of the things in “Arabian Nights” movies being not merely inaccurate, but not actually in the original Arabian Nights. Besides, I’ve seen Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew and Decameron, and know that he tries to be very faithful. (How faithful? Pasolini was an atheist, but he filmed Saint Matthew absolutely straight, miracles and all, without tryin to explain them away or hedge them.)
Jusy a quick aside – most of the things we associate with the Arabian Nights aren’t there, and some of the stories we associate with it aren’t actually in there. Chief among these are the story of Aladdin and of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. There are jinni, but (aside from one obscure example) no jinni living in magic lamps – an certainly ot in the form we always associate with the story. There are no magic crystal balls (as in three movies I can name). Sinbad isn’t a captain. He isn’t even a sailor in our sense of the word – he’s called a “sailor” because he’s a [passenger on a ship. There’s no cyclops in the story of Sinbad (just a “normal” two-eyed giant). Flying carpets don’t work the way we portray them. And so on, and so on.
Very very few adaptations provide the “framing story” of Sharzad (usually spelled Scheherazade, which is the German form) and Sharyar, which I would have thought was integral to the story – it explains why there are 1001 Nights. The story is pretty clearly misogynistic and, as told in the Nights, downright racist, but I think you could get away with it as a case of “The Man Who Learned Better”. Nonetheless, Pasolini doesn’t include it in his film. It’s too much at odds with his efforts to tell a story with sex-positive episodes. So he uses, instead, the story of Zumurrud.
I was unfamiliar with this story, because it shows up much later in the Nights than I have read. I’ve read several translations of parts of the 1001 Nights, and have started, but not completed, the entire translation by Richard Burton, but Zumurrud is in the 4thn volume, and I haven’t gotten that far. As far as I can tell from a quick reading, it’s faithful to that story.
My biggest complaint is that Pasolini retains the story-within-story-within-story format of the original Arabian Nights (although no one else really does. If you want a taste of this, read Cloud Atlas or Godel, Escher, Bach. )But he doiesn’t make it at all clear when you’ve changed from one story to a story within. Sometimes it’s clear, but other times you find yourself hopelessly lost And it’s not as if the style itself ought to confuse you – it’s clear enough in the film version of Cloud Atlas which story you’re following.
I’d hoped that the fact that I’ve read the Nights so many times would have helped me, but it was only at certain times that my knowledge rescued me from complete confusion. I recognized the Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad, but that story contains numerous stories within, and the film offers only two of these, but somewhat changed. It doesn’t help that, besides the story of Zumurrud I hadn’t read the Tale of Aziz and Azizah, either. I will say that, even when I was unfamiliar with the stories, they had the air of authenticity about them that most Arabian Nights films lack.
The locations are frequently impressive – Pasolini filmed in various places and uses real examples of monumental architecture as backdrops for the stories. It’s a far cry from the matte painted backgrounds you usually see. There are a couple of special effects – mainly of flying characters, and they’re pretty awful. As convincing as the flying scenes in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. Fortunately, these are few of these.
There’s a lot of sex (the film is rated NC-17) and some gore and implied gore. The actors look about as far as you can get from Hollywod casting. They look like authentic inhabitants of the Middle East, which thet mostly are. But sometimes the juxtaposition of a clearly Italian actor with a crowed of people who appear to be Arabs, or another crowd that that appears African is a little jarring. Supposedly Pasolini had to make some such changes because of who would or could perform sex scenes restricted him.
It probably is the most authentic interpretation of the original books, but it’s also pretty confusing, even if you are somewhat familiar with the source material. It probably needs more than one viewing. But after watching so many versions that were filmed thousands of miles away, on stage sets that are based on a Westerner’s ideas of what things ought to look like, and with Western-composed “Oriental” music that, however god it might be, is still an imposition, it was interesting to see something shot on the spot, with believable actors, and minimal music (Ennio Morricone contributed the score, but it’s not at all intrusive. )
Just watched an entertaining little film called Wicked Little Letters starring Olivian Colman and Jessie Buckley both excellent. Based on a true story with a nice twist. The twist was not that difficult to figure out but knowing it made it fun watching the characters interact. Quite funny, too.