Category: Film & TV (Page 3 of 4)

I’ve been too busy to watch much in the way of movies lately, and most importantly, to finish bad ones, but still it’s one thing I’ve done beyond working on Mike’s campaign. So here is a quick recap of what I’ve watched lately.
Vidas Privadas. This movie about a woman who returns to Argentina after 20 years on exile in Spain is just too unbelievable to make it worth your while. There are coincidences after coincidences, the whole tragedy of a nation is simplified and spoon fed and I’d even say the movie is an insult to those who survived the military dictatorship. In all, it mostly seemed exploitative and my whole reaction was “come on!”
National Treasure. This movie was so silly, so uninteresting, with such lack of character development as well as so improbable that I didn’t finish watching it.
Harem. This was a movie about an Italian girl (I think) who was brought into the harem of the Ottoman ruler in the last days of the caliphate. Mostly it involved harem politics, though there was some boring sex as well. Whatever major point it was supposed to have I didn’t get, and I didn’t finish it either.
Hellraiser V. I’d actually seen it so I didn’t bother with it. Hellraiser I was great, all the other ones sucked and I don’t know why I bother with them.
Tristan and Isolde. I’ve never seen the opera but I figured I should familiarize myself with the story. The story itself is quite simple and predictive – but being so old, what can you expect?. But the production values were great, and the story kept me interested the whole way (no small feat lately). Plus I love Rufus Sewell.
El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba. This was another of those Salma Hayek Mexican movies based on an important work of literature, this time a great novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Unfortunately the story did not have enough material to extend it to a full length movie (that’s why it’s a novella, not a novel) which meant the movie itself drag throughout it. I didn’t like the Mexico setting – why not keep it in Colombia – and mostly, I didn’t like how the last line was delibered. The last line carries the whole of the movie – as is often the case on Garcia Marquez books – so getting this right (aka how I read it myself) is what makes or breaks the story. In this case, it broke it.
The Tooth Fairy. Another lame, lame, lame horror movie. Not scary and very boring. Keep away.
Ocean’s Twelve. Why pull out a heist if you are not prepared to deal with the consequences and you fold as soon as you get threatened? Whatever. The second heist was lame and did not have the power and interest of the one from the first movie. Again, not worth your time.
so yes, I have had horrible lack in movies lately. I hope it changes.

Note: This note contains spoilers
I don’t know what to make of The Descent, the new horror movie that’s getting greating reviews online. As a horror movie I didn’t think it was that great. It relied on jolts and thrills – a monster appearing out of nowhere – which got boring after a while (though I still screamed when I saw them).
I was also disturbed by the movies allegorical meaning – but this was ’cause I couldn’t find a concrete story behind the story. At its most evident, this was a story about a woman who is fighting her demons from the accident that took her husband’s and daughter’s life. But there are many other symbols in the movie that are not as easy to explain. For one, there are lots of phallic symbols: the sticks that killed her family, the logs on the truck at the end of the movie, the weapons they manufacture and use to kill the monsters and those cone-shaped mineral deposits so common in caves whose name for the life of me I can’t remember. There are also several female symbols, of which the hole they climb down to the cave is only the first and most evident one.
Then there is birth. At one point all the women pass through the birth canal, or rather a small opening in the rocks filled with water. They do this head first, struggling to pass until Sara, the protagonist, gets stuck. “Breathe, breathe” says her friend, as she squirms and panics and can’t get out. Once out the rocks fall down and they can’t get back in. Imagine that.
Then there is the struggle to find their way, lost as they are in the big cave. Then one of them falls and injures herself, and then the monsters appear. The monsters are very similar to gollem from Lord of the Rings, but also to fetuses. The monsters eat the women until they kill them, though the women fight them.
But what does it mean? Are the monsters the women’s demons? The women’s subconcious? In the struggle for life, are we all willing to eat one another? Or is it our children who are eating us alive?
Can’t really tell. Finally all the women die save for two, the protagonist and the Tombraider type who had been having an affair with the protagonist (Sarah)’s husband. Sara kills her – kills her hold over her? just expresses her anger? And later on, after she’s reborn again (coming out of the cave, breathing, breathing) and escapes, she finds her seating besides her car. A new demon to fight, this one is not well dead.
So no, I’m not sure that it actually means something beyond some cool symbols the director thought to put together but especulating about it is more fun than waiting for each golem to jump up at you.
Well, I’m really tired, so much so taht I’m typing with my eyes closed (let’s hope I have my fingers on the right keys). Time to go to sleep.

Mika has been saying that she wants to see the new Superman movie – it’s been impossible to escape its publicity when you even have to walk under a Superman gate at Safeway to enter the store. She’s not a big Superman fan per se, but her friend Emmanuel is devoted to him, when he is not Superman himself. So every time we see something supermanish (all the time), she thinks of Emmanuel and wants to buy it for him.
I was not at all sure that Mika could sit down through a whole “adult” movie at the theater. She’s gone to see some animated movies, but her record hasn’t been great. She walked out during one (too loud) and fell asleep at another. So I decided to get the old Superman and see if she could sit still for that movie at all. Just like I predicted, she couldn’t. Not even for ONE minute. In a way it’s good, I don’t really want her to be staring at the TV for so long, but it definitely means we are not taking her to the theater.
I, on the other hand, watched it. I hadn’t seen it for years, but I soon fell into its magic. OK, forget about the magic, the romance. The scene in which Superman takes Lois Lane flying has to be the most romantic scene in all of movie history. It still tingles all the right parts of me and brings me right back to the time when I was a young teen (or was I a preteen?) watching it.
I have no interest in watching the new Superman. I don’t think anyone but Christopher Reeve could be Superman, and the actress they have playing Lois Lane looks like a child, not a woman. But I think I will rent Superman II, and watch those scenes in Niagara falls again (can’t tell you what the rest of the plot was).

Apparently The O