Culture from the darker side

I admit it, I love movies I can dream in… Pan’s Labyrinth comes close….

In post-Civil War northern Spain in 1944, a 12-year-old girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), moves with her heavily-pregnant mother and stepfather into a new home in the countryside. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) has been sent to this remote area to rid it of a small Republican militia. Largely ignored by the sadistic Vidal, Ofelia, who revels in ancient stories and fairy tales, discovers an immense and ancient labyrinth guarded by a faun (Doug Jones). He tells her she is the long-lost daughter of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, and to regain entry to her kingdom she must carry out three tasks. So Ofelia enters a strange and no less dangerous world of fairies and extraordinary creatures such as the terrifying Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones).

The Visual Effects on the movie are what mesmerized me the most. Del Toro has shown several times that he knows well how to use special effects, and it did not overwhelm the experience. The Faun alone was gorgeous, the sequence in a different “dimension” was simple but effective.

If anything I was a bit disappointed how much of the movie was set in our world instead of the world of the faeries. But at the end of the day the story still makes me want to dream, and I am thankful for movies like these….

4/5

Perfume is based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.

The story revolves around a strange young man born in 18th Century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, whose prodigious gift of an incomparable sense of smell and inexplicable lack of a personal scent isolates him from society. Obsessed with the rich sensory world he alone inhabits, his single objective in life becomes the preservation of the perfect scent: the skin of young, beautiful virgins.

The challenge for the movie clearly was how to show scent in a visual medium, which by itself does not possess any scent. According to several sources it seems many directors didn’t believe it could be done, but Tom Tykwker (of Run Lola Run fame) took on the task and….. succeeded.

The movie is long, almost 2 1/2 hours, but one can sympathize, both with the victims and the murderer, with the victims because they do not deserve to die, and with Grenouille, because he is driven by something that he perceives as larger than him. He initially doesn’t try to kill them, but his attempts to save the essence off of a living woman (a prostitute) fails as she considers him weird, so he kills her, and then choses it as the easier / only way to accomplish his goal.

The movie has no winners, everybody loses, even side characters die once they have met him…..

The movie is cruel, but not obviously so, it isn’t crude.

The women are beautiful, though more in a 21st century kind of way, not in a 18th century France kind of way.

I now want to read the book:

5/5

Technorati Tags: books, Movies, Reviews

It is hard to look at this movie from a “culture” standpoint, it is after all a documentary about the ill fated EV1 from General Motors.

“Who killed the Electric Car” is half the story of a conspiracy by car companies to not “get us further” while at the same time playing a “whodunnit?” about what truly lead to the demise to the Electric Car in California, it then also goes on to look at the Hydrogene powered car, the one “solution” that the current US Administration is favoring and which is sold as the “next best thing”.

The movie is set up like an investigation. It first spends roughly a third of it’s time to show us how great the EV1 was, then it goes on to show us what happened that lead to it’s end and finally it wraps up by recounting the “real” reasons.

I put real in quotes here because I am sure there are people out there who are starting to call for tinfoil hats once the movie is over and I am not trying to tell my conclusions on this one.

The Audience Reactions where mixed, at times laughing loud at some obvious “American fallacies”, my most favourite one must have been towards the end when one of the interviewed people was basically saying:

When you tell the American consumer to be environment sensitive they think you are telling them to turn down the heat or cooling and drive a small car, you know, live like Europeans.

The movie itself is entertaining though, and it is definitely worth looking at this and maybe starting to wonder why in a hundred years we have not managed to come up with a better way to move ourselves around.

Rating: 4/5

Phillip K. Dick hasn’t really been lucky with movie adaption of his stories. The best so far must have ben Blade Runner, though it merely borrowed the general idea of the story, hence the change of the name to Blade Runner instead of “Do Androids dream of electric sheep?”.

The last adaptation “Paycheck” was just horrible to watch. Now with “A Scanner Darkly” Richard Linklater (of “Waking Life” fame) is giving it a shot and (mostly) succeeds.

The book and the movie are bizzare, what is reality? What is drug induced? In a way it is in the good old vain of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” just less funny and more “hardcore”. And of course there is a morality tale: How far can one go to take down the bad guy/

Rating: 4.5/5*

*Need to see it again, it has cult potential, much like “Waking Life”

Being on a “trip down the road” I re-read and re-watched the movie:

Movie:

Funny, Johnny Depp, clearly is an amazing actor and he nails the character well… It’s cult for a reason.

Book:

Of course it came first, and yes, it is a weird book but also hilariously funny. It makes one wonder how much of this has really happened and how much was drug induced. He drank, did drugs and wrote…. Maybe this goes in line, looking at some other funny and hilarious authors. i guess one has to go to the edge to have an appreciation for the absurdity of life and the comedy it is.

Rating (for both): 5/5

Ah, summer 2003, the first pirates movie hits the screen and it was fun.

Three years later, Jack’s back and….. He’s still funny.

Having said that though, I would like to point out that it has some serious timing issues. The story is simple: Jack has a compass, someone else wants it and won’t stop anywhere to get it. Or so it seems.

The full cast of the first movie is back and at almost two hours it is an epic. It is a funny movie, it is just too bad that most of the funny moments are being carried by Johnny Depp with the other actors just “standing around” for the most part either being the part of the joke or being the observers.

The fact that the movie ends in a cliffhanger does not really help either. Comedy lives off timing and as amazing the movie’s special effects are, the timing is off on occasion.

It’s fun, it’s for popcorn and summer, just not quite as great as the first one, despite all the amazing SFX.

Rating: 3/5

Climate Change, Global Warming. i don’t think there are many people out there who haven’t heard these words yet. But what does it mean?

“An Inconvenient Truth” shows Al Gore, the almost president of the United States” in a quest to get people to understand what the climate change means. He is eloquent, he speaks with conviction and he wants us to be convinced too.

That is the good news in the movie, the bad news is that we’re pretty much fucked. Scientist in general seem to like the movie though they point out that he seems to be a bit more optimistic that we can still prevent what will happen than is likely.

And I agree with it. I know many people who point at what has happened and claim that we can still stop it. But the way this works is like a runaway train. You don’t realize that you’re out of control until it is too late. There is a lot of redundancy in the system, but I think we are reaching the point where there is no turning back…

The movie should make one think, and my hope is that more people are going to watch it. It is well done in the way he presents the matter, but chances are he is going to preach to the choir.

After all: Carbon is life.

Rating: 4.5/5

There are very few studios these days in Hollywood that people trust blindly. Pixar so far has been the one that had delivered quite well over the years. Pixar’s latest “Cars” isn’t an exception.

As common for most Disney movies the story itself is rather simple. It’s a morality tale and a love story. I can imagine how the pitch session must have gone at Disney:

Writer: “Well, it’s a love story and we have a morality tale in it as well.”
Suit: “Again? What’s the hookup?”
Writer: “Well, it’s cars who do the story.”
Suit: “Cars? You mean people in cars?”
Writer: “No, cars.”
Suit: “I don’t get it….”
Writer: “CARS!”
Suit: “…. but you are Pixar, so I am sure you make it work.”

I am not quite sure what to make of it. Gasoline is not running in my vains, and NASCAR is not something I am following, so a lot of the inside jokes are probably going past by me. The story itself is straight forward, so what is left is the dialogue and the amazing graphics. A scene in which the cars “chase” each other through a wooden stretch and drive through water looks utterly amazing.

Car is an entertaining movie, no question about it and for car aficionados it clearly is something to enjoy. For everybody else there is the goodness of a Pixar Story and beautiful pictures and some more general inside jokes.

Rating: 3.5/5

What went wrong? Was my first thought after I left the theater. Mission Impossible III failed the mission.

And I am still pondering my head over how this actually came to pass. The ingredients were all there, a really really bad bad guy and decent to good actors (Cruise can act in specific roles and it clearly applied for his role as Ethan Hunt in the other two MI movies).

But yet, it didn’t quite excite me as much. The plot was pretty straight forward, the twist was pretty much clear from the get go and in the end I just didn’t care. The explosions weren’t that big, the sceneries (although nice) not as spectacular as one may have hoped. Not even Phillip Seymour Hoffman could save it (and that he can act he proofed in Capote).

So I don’t know what went wrong. Things went boom, it was “fun” for a minute, but it just didn’t carry through the entire length of the movie.

Bummer, really.

Rating 2/5

Movie adaptations of comic books and computer games have the tendency to … well let’s just say “not live up to the expectations”, Silent Hill (written and directed by Christophe Gans of “Crying Freeman” fame) manages to side step most of the problems and produces something that is as close as a movie seems to be able to get to a computer game.

The Story:

In the games it is never quite clear what Silent Hill really is, there is a lot of speculation going on but beyond that it ranges from “nightmare” to “soul finding mission”. The movie does not really bring us any closer to it. In this installment of Silent Hill a mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) and her young daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) set out to find Silent Hill, a name that the daughter is mumbling while sleep walking. The entrance into silent is is marked by a police chase and a crash and then nothing is as it was before. Rose is gone and the town is covered in thick fog.

Things in Silent Hill aren’t what they appear to be though, the fog in reality are the ashes from the coal fire that closed down the town decades ago. But this is not the only “odd” thing about Silent Hill, it’s inhabitants have left, and what was left behind is not from this world. Rose is soon joined by Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden) the cop that chased her into Silent Hill and both women try to find Rose and uncover the dark secret that lies behind Silent Hill.

Silent Hill clearly is a Horror movie, but it goes beyond this, the images at times seem to be ripped straight from the games and the sound design does it’s best to draw you in. The movie overall is a visual piece of art without sacrificing the story in and on itself (which is a rather simple one, but the visuals and the way it is told make more than up for it).

If you liked the games you should really go and see it, if you want to see some impressive visuals go for it as well. If you like Horror you may enjoy this as well.

Rating: 4/5