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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 03/09/2008 : 19:50:54
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The Other Boleyn Girl
What a pile of poo!
First there's the idiot-dialogue which wavers between banal and soap opera. Apart from two stand-out performances by Kristen Scott-Thomas and David Morrissey, it reeks of comic-book land. Some of the others can act - Cumberbatch, Portman, etc ... but Johanson keeps proving how comparitively bad she really is. Plus, her features really jarred in that family - coarse and bulbous next to mum and sis. It's what made her so right for Girl With A Pearl Earring, and so very wrong for this.
But the main problem is the treatment of the material. There's just no drama. Oh, there's incident. Plenty of incident. And then this happened. And then that happened. blah-blah-blah. But there's a strange wall between us and the characters. A wall almost of prurience - which might at least have been engaging, but not quite, so it just makes us always the outsider with no focus of identification. I'm sure Phillipa Gregory's book is spot-on with historical fact ... but the film leaves out all the more subtle political ramifications of Henry's alliances ... especially with King Phillip of Spain, which after all erupted during Elizabeth's reign with the defeat of the Armada.
So it's not beautifully illustrated documentary [though it does look sumptuous], it's not Mills & Boon [however hard it tries], and it's certainly not drama. We just don't care about anyone, and cannot find enough to relate to our own time.
It didn't surpise me at all to see David M Thompson's name attached. He has the imagination of a pebble, but enough sense to recognize a good subject. Documentary courses through his veins and the best he's managed in all his decades at the Beeb is a facility for controlling docu-drama, most successfully when he's hands off. His original BBC telly version of The Other Boleyn Girl - which he also executive produced - was much more successful and seemed to transcend its smaller screen concept.
This version tries to fold in on itself like a souffle mixture, but it splits, leaving us with a mouthful of well-decorated air.
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The Spiderwick Chronicles
This fantasy confection requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief, set as it is in a creaky old house in the middle of nowhere which just happens to be irrevocably linked to a bevy of not very nice forest creatures who want something within the old pile. They want it so badly they will use all their trolly might to get it, and present it to their right royal Trolliness, a superb monster perfectly voiced by Nick Nolte.
You may already be familiar with the plot if you've read the books. I haven't, so it kept me entranced with what was coming next. And with at least one version of the script with John Sayles name on it guarantees it's far from total dreck.
Nutshell - Mary Louise Parker [always believable] turfs up at this unlikely abode [inherited from Great-Uncle Spiderwick] on the road to forgetting her broken marriage. Teen daughter Mallory, a keen fencer, and twin sons Jared and Simon [another mini-triumph for Freddie Highmore] are less than thrilled with the move, especially when Dad's promised visit is delayed indefinitely.
Most pissed-off is Jared, who's got real anger issues and, in that self-fulfilling prophecy way, tends to get blamed for everything and not believed.
It's he who discovers the secret places of Spiderwick, an amateur naturalist who's had close encounters of the ultra-strange kind with all manner of woodland creatures more at home in ... well, in a fantasy story. So he writes it all down, including how to protect the place from the monsters and use the good-creatures for good stuff.
The pursuit of the book by the trolly things is what fuels the plot and, no surprise, re-unites the family. Well, mom and the kids anyway.
When acting is required, Parker steps up, as does David Strathairn as Spiderwick and Joan Plowright as his now elderly daughter.
Not great, but worth a ticket.
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Vantage Point
Small Advantage ... What's the Point!
Okay, it's a decent enough thriller. And the presence of Dennis Quaid is enough to raise expectations that this might be a story we can care about.
But everything works against that hope, and we're left with a twist on a tale which pays off for the action-junkies, laced together with the device of rolling back the clock to catch the action from the pov of various key-characters.
It's giving nothing away to say the scene we get to see over and over again is the public address of the US Pres [William Hurt] on the eve of an international summit on terrorism [what else] held in Spain. But everything's not so sunny when shots and bombs disrupt the proceedings.
Live news coverage is supplemented by American tourist Forest Whittaker's requisite vid-cam, which is confiscated by the CIA detail on POTUS duty.
There are enough characters to populate a Robert Altman ensemble piece, but neither writer Barry Levy nor director Peter Travis is expert enough to make this anything more than a formulaic device.
I kept wondering whether we'd have lost anything by telling the story in a more traditional way ... and no, we really wouldn't. Compare it with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which plays with time in order to make us more familiar with each character. There, in the hands of Lumet and some terrifyingly good acting, it works a treat.
Here, it promises more than it delivers. But still, Stuart Baird's diamond-sharp editing, and Quaid's enduring screen passion, make it worth sitting through.
Just a word to Bullitt and its famous car chase ... look what you started, just look! Go stand in the corner and don't come out till you're sorry.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 03/10/2008 00:15:53 |
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MisterBadIdea 
"PLZ GET MILK, KTHXBYE"
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Posted - 03/09/2008 : 23:27:57
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"Vantage Point" has become an injoke among me and my friends.
Our favorite part is where Dennis Quaid finally catches up with the bad guy after a billion-year-long car chase and screams "I TRUSTED YOU!" rather than something more germane to the situation, like "Where's the president?"
A close second is how the terrorists kidnap a special agent's brother to help the kidnapping. It's great that the terrorists couldn't just hire someone else to do it, or that the special agent didn't just try and free his brother on his own rather than aiding in the plot. |
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 03/10/2008 : 06:06:54
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
The Other Boleyn Girl
What a pile of poo!
{Giggle!}
Okay, as soon as I finish reading "How To Talk To A Widower" I'll get into reading this book, since I can see I won't be watching the movie!
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Several recent screen offerings
