movie duality
Nov. 24th, 2007 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llcoolvadA weekend of movie opposites!
First up was "No Country for Old Men" with Patrick last night; I'd been dying to see it, and I really liked it (right up until the ending). It was suspenseful, interesting, paced well, the actors were excellent, and I was able to ignore Javier Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut for most of the movie. It's a noir gory western, what's not to like? Hugely violent, lots of dead bodies, buckets of blood, chair-gripping tension, a few moments of black humor, unrelenting evil villains, morally-ambiguous heroes, a laconic good guy — all good.
My main complaints were that a key event happens completely off-screen, so you don't actually know what happened (it could have gone two different ways), and then there were at least three extra scenes at the end that I thought were completely superfluous. We learned nothing new, there weren't any surprises, and the tension continued with absolutely no payoff. Seemed like a cheat, really. I haven't read the book it's adapted from, so I don't know if my complaints are largely the fault of the book or the Coens. Or my own tortured brain.
Then this evening I was coerced into seeing "Enchanted" with my chick-flick friends; not a movie I had any intention of seeing, and holy cow, the entire movie should be glazed in pink frosting! The audience was packed with tween girls and their parents, and there was much chortling with joy and squealing with glee. I haven't been to such a girly movie in ... hmm ... maybe ever before! When a movie can make rats, pigeons, and cockroaches cute and cuddly, you know you're in girl-ville.
For all of that, it was still pretty enjoyable. It poked a lot of fun at itself, and there were wisps of girl-power and 'reality is good' messages. The song and dance numbers were silly romps, and again were sweetly self-mocking, and Amy Adams, the fish out of water lead, was so naive and sweet and innocent you just had to like her. (You might hit her, but it would be with something soft.)
My only real beef was that the New Yorkers in the film spent a lot of time goggling in amazement at the crazy people wandering around singing in costumes, and seriously? It's New York! People are always wandering around doing some damned thing. A beautiful woman climbing out of a manhole in full ballgown is not worthy of gawping in astonishment.
Anyway, oddly, I guess I give a qualified thumbs-up to both films — but perhaps not to seeing them on consecutive evenings!
First up was "No Country for Old Men" with Patrick last night; I'd been dying to see it, and I really liked it (right up until the ending). It was suspenseful, interesting, paced well, the actors were excellent, and I was able to ignore Javier Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut for most of the movie. It's a noir gory western, what's not to like? Hugely violent, lots of dead bodies, buckets of blood, chair-gripping tension, a few moments of black humor, unrelenting evil villains, morally-ambiguous heroes, a laconic good guy — all good.
My main complaints were that a key event happens completely off-screen, so you don't actually know what happened (it could have gone two different ways), and then there were at least three extra scenes at the end that I thought were completely superfluous. We learned nothing new, there weren't any surprises, and the tension continued with absolutely no payoff. Seemed like a cheat, really. I haven't read the book it's adapted from, so I don't know if my complaints are largely the fault of the book or the Coens. Or my own tortured brain.
Then this evening I was coerced into seeing "Enchanted" with my chick-flick friends; not a movie I had any intention of seeing, and holy cow, the entire movie should be glazed in pink frosting! The audience was packed with tween girls and their parents, and there was much chortling with joy and squealing with glee. I haven't been to such a girly movie in ... hmm ... maybe ever before! When a movie can make rats, pigeons, and cockroaches cute and cuddly, you know you're in girl-ville.
For all of that, it was still pretty enjoyable. It poked a lot of fun at itself, and there were wisps of girl-power and 'reality is good' messages. The song and dance numbers were silly romps, and again were sweetly self-mocking, and Amy Adams, the fish out of water lead, was so naive and sweet and innocent you just had to like her. (You might hit her, but it would be with something soft.)
My only real beef was that the New Yorkers in the film spent a lot of time goggling in amazement at the crazy people wandering around singing in costumes, and seriously? It's New York! People are always wandering around doing some damned thing. A beautiful woman climbing out of a manhole in full ballgown is not worthy of gawping in astonishment.
Anyway, oddly, I guess I give a qualified thumbs-up to both films — but perhaps not to seeing them on consecutive evenings!
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Date: 2007-11-25 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-25 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-25 09:34 pm (UTC)