Francois Truffaut once claimed that there could be no such thing as an antiwar-movie since even a gruesome war movie makes war look energetic and exciting. If the French director had lived long enough to see Sam Mendes’ latest film he might have changed his opinion. Jarhead is so lifeless and dull that it could qualify to be the first true antiwar movie.Now I really don't want to see the movie.
I rented Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Kingdom of Heaven this weekend. Long story short, they were both ok. Not spectacular but ok.
HHGttG surprised me. Originally, it was a Radio series on the BBC, which I have copies of on MP3. Then it went through incarnations as a TV series and several books, although possibly not in that order. What surprised me was that they changed a good bit of it for the movie. I understand much of this was Douglas Adams's idea, but that isn't a good excuse because many of the changes don't work.
The comedic timing of the film is just off until you get Ford and Arthur onto the Heart of Gold. You rush through the destruction of Earth so quickly you can't really take it in. This pacing means you also don't have any time to laugh at the early jokes.
Some of the changes do work for me. In the books and radio series, Arthur Dent is a pitiful earth monkey who has a profound effect on the universe because he's the only survivor of Earth's destruction. In the movie he's far less pitiful and loserly. They accomplish this transformation mostly by making Trillian his love interest. To make up for turning Arthur interesting, they turn Zaphod into a worthless twit and add a whole bunch of stuff to the middle of the movie that doesn't belong there. Ah well, at least it was just a rental.
Kingdom of Heaven is to medieval history what Gladiator is to Roman history. Both are Ridley Scott films. Both tell the story he wants to tell with little regard for actual history. There are good fight and battle scenes, none of which have any particular historical accuracy at all. The swordplay is wrong. The battle tactics are wrong. There is a lot that is wrong. But it looks good. So if you want a movie that has a lot wrong with it, but looks good, then this is a good choice. It made me want to take my sword off the wall and give some milk jugs what for.
Kingdom of Heaven got a lot of bad press when it initially came out. Some reviewers thought the movie showed a very one sided portrayal of Christians and Muslims. This is mostly true. There are token Christians who are "enlightened" and tolerant and token Muslims who aren't. Generally devout Christians are portrayed badly while devout Muslims aren't generally portrayed at all. The overall theme of the movie is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews really aren't any different and we should just live in peace and toleration. The problem is that the movie comes to no conclusions about how to accomplish this when individuals on all sides want the conflict to occur and will actively engineer it.
No comments:
Post a Comment