Archives for January 2007

I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Carribbean movie. Loved it in fact. I thought Johnnie Depp’s performance was hilarious and well worth all the attention it received. The action was intense and spiced with humor. A great flick.

Then I watched this movie, the sequel, and wondered where it all went wrong. Dead Man’s Chest broke box office records for having the largest opening weekend ever. Something like a bazillion dollars. People flooded to the multiplexes to see this movie. Were they as disappointed, I wonder, as I was?

Dead Man’s Chest felt more like a theme park ride than a movie, which is appropriate, I suppose, since the franchise is based on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyworld. The problem with this comparison, of course, is that theme park rides are fleeting bursts of suspense quickly forgotten once the ride stops. You can’t find meaning in a theme park ride, nor is there any rational order of events. It’s just random action: swoop this way, jolt that way, zip upside down, and as quickly as it’s started, it’s over. Please exit to your right.

That’s Dead Man’s Chest in a nutshell, a series of seemingly random events that don’t appear to coincide with anything that has happened previously. One minute the pirates on a ship sailing the seas, the next they’re on an island inhabited by cannibals with Captain Jack mistaken for a god. Imagine that, someone mistook for a god. How original. What a unique plot invention. I never would have thought of it (rolling of eyes).

Tsk tsk. The whole mistook god thing was an old joke back when the Ewoks did it in Return of the Jedi. Doing here feels stale.

But even more annoying was how characters from the first pirate film kept popping up randomly throughout the sequel completely untrue to themselves; as if the screenwriters were bored with their own creations and felt the need to reinvent everyone. The commodore, for instance, the picture of a perfect English gentleman is now a drunk, foul smelling blaggart with a self-serving violent streak. And the fair maiden (Keira Knightley), who was unquestionably valiant to her love in the first film, is now unjustifiably attracted to someone else. Ugh.

No, I was terribly disappointed with this film. Lauren and I even debated turning it off before it had finished, but I said no, let’s give it time. It’ll get better; I’m sure of it.

But it didn’t get better. And rather than leave me in anticipation for the third film, Dead Man’s Chest left me indifferent. Will Captain Jack be rescued from the sea monster? Will Keira Knightley redeem herself and run back to her faithful Will (Orlando Bloom)? Will Will’s father be rescued from eternal servitude to Davey Jones? Do I really care one way or another?

Sadly, no.

Lauren and I went to the movies over the holidays with her brothers, and since Lauren’s brothers love football, a movie about football seemed the logical choice. I’m not much of a football man myself. I like the sport; I just don’t like it enough to make time for it. At any rate, I was up for a football movie.

We Are Marshall is the true story of the death and rebirth of the Marshall University football team. In 1970, following a game with ECU, the Marshall team flew back to West Virginia in a chartered plane. Practically everyone was aboard: the coaching staff, the players themselves, other school personnel. Tragically, the plane went down just before landing, killing everyone aboard. The subsequent fire was so severe that six of the players were burned beyond recognition and now lie together in six unmarked graves by a monument honoring the dead.

For a small town, it was a terrible, crippling tragedy. Children lost their fathers. Wives lost their husbands. Young, starry eyed girls lost their fiancés. It was awful. So awful in fact, that the school decided to suspend the football program altogether. And there is where the real story begins.

Four team members survived the tragedy. They weren’t on the plane. They had missed the game and flight because of injury or oversleeping. And the only member of the coaching staff who survived, played wonderfully by LOST star Matthew Fox, was supposed to be on the plane but did another coach a favor by taking a car instead. His survival was an ironic twist of fate that left the man consumed with guilt and nearly broken.

When the school decides to suspend the football program, three of these four remaining players rally the other students and convince the administrative council to reconsider. Enter Matthew McConaughey. To resurrect the program, Marshall needs a new head coach, and McConaughey plays the coach of a rather obscure school in Ohio who volunteers for the job. As it turns out, he’s a delightfully down-to-earth, somewhat eccentric character, and McConaughey plays him proud and loud, talking out of the side of his mouth – as the real character must have done – walking in a slightly stooped fashion, and cracking odd jokes that make him adorably weird.

The rest of the cast was equally amazing. David Strathairn was great as the kindly university president clearly over his head after the tragedy. Ian McShane (Deadwood) was appropriately stiff and immovable as a father grieving the loss of his only son. But the actor who surprised me the most was Anthony Mackie, the team captain who survived the original crash because of a shoulder injury and who now feels the weight of the world upon him as he struggles single handedly to restore the team to its former glory. The locker-room scene in which McConaughey informs Mackie — despite Mackie’s objections to the contrary — that he’s too injured to play in the upcoming game is electric. Powerful stuff. Real, from-the-gut performance. I was floored and moved.

But what I loved most about the film was how incredibly honest it felt. It didn’t sugar coat the team’s awful record that followed the tragedy. It didn’t lead us to believe that all was right in the world at the film’s conclusion. The bereaved father was still bereaving in the end. The broken assistant coach was still, for the most part, broken. And the university president, who lost his job for his decisions, was NOT restored to his position and showered with apologies as Hollywood contrived stories would have done.

Again, another movie based on a book I haven’t read. Lauren, on the other hand, did read Memoirs of a Geisha (pronounced gay-shu, not ghee-shu or guy-shu as I have pronounced it before) and enjoyed it very much. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I don’t think I’d find the book as satisfying as she did.

To be blunt about it, Memoirs of a Geisha would have been much more enjoyable if it had been in Japanese with English subtitles. Instead, it’s a lot of non-Americans trying to speak English and only succeeding 80% of the time. Nothing is more frustrating when watching a movie than to have to stop the movie, rewind, and listen again to what’s being said in an attempt to decipher poorly spoken dialogue. This gets old very quickly. What were supposed to be touching moments became frustrating moments as Lauren and I tried to figure out what the heck the characters were saying. Clint Eastwood did it right; his film Letters from Iwo Jima, which hits theaters soon, is in Japanese, the language the characters portrayed in the film would speak. It feels more authentic this way. Memoirs should have done the same.

I suppose I could have turned on the subtitles for the film, but frankly I didn’t think of it at the time, and besides, I think I would have found it equally annoying; hearing and reading the same language would get confusing. My mind wouldn’t know what to pay attention to. Had the characters spoken in Japanese, my mind would note the inflection in the voice, the emotion behind the words, while ignoring the words themselves completely, allowing the rest of my mind to read the subtitles and understand everything I needed to about the character and scene. As it is, Memoirs was hard to follow.

Of course, what I propose would never have worked since the actors in the film are not Japanese, at least not all of them. They’re Chinese. They speak neither English nor Japanese. Ken Watanabe is Japanese, but his English wasn’t all that bad. It was the Chinese characters who were hard to follow. Were I a kinder person I’d be applauding the cast, since, if I’m not mistaken, some of them spoke no English at all prior to the film. They learned to speak it on the job, with the camera there rolling in their faces. But I’m not kinder than I am because I don’t think they should have been cast in the first place.

Visually, the film is stunning. The town in which it is set was spectacular. I’m sure it was all CGI and Hollywood set, but it appeared authentic, pre-war Japan in all its homes-clustered-together glory. In that sense, Memoirs was like watching a National Geographic documentary on urban life in Japan in the 40s. I enjoyed that aspect of the film very much. And credit is due to the other technical aspects as well: the costumes were beautiful; the cinematography, beautiful; the cast, beautiful. I just wish they spoke Japanese.

I haven’t read the novel by Lauren Weisberger upon which the film is based, but I think I’ll give it a go if ever I get my hands on it. It’s a fun story, and, if I’m not mistaken, is based loosely on Weisberger’s own experience as an assistant to the chief editor at Vogue magazine, who, like Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, was apparently a self-absorbed tyrant.

When I saw the trailer for the movie, I laughed myself silly. Rather then show us all the big plot points of the film – as so many trailers wrongfully do and thereby divulge the plot from beginning to end – we see a two minute clip from the beginning of the film when the young, naïve journalist-to-be, played by Anne Hathaway, meets the dragon lady that is Meryl Streep. It was hilarious. Stanley Tucci was spot on as Streep’s lieutenant, and Hatheway did her Princess Diaries thing, which is to stand there shoulder slumped with that sweet smile, looking as innocent as possible.

When Lauren and I rented the DVD, we watched the first half one night and the second half the next. Sadly, the second half didn’t measure up to the first. The reason the filmmakers made the trailer they did, I realized, was because the beginning of the film is so much more enjoyable than the rest of it.

Lauren and I quickly tired of Hatheway’s charcater. We stopped caring about whether she’d survive her year at Runway, the fictional magazine, or not. She became one of those characters that tinkers with the dark side before learning in the end that she was all right to begin with. She makes this realization, however, after making some rather stupid mistakes and silly wardrobe selections.

What annoyed me most about the film was the character played by Emily Blunt. She was Streep’s other assistant, one corporate ladder rung above Hatheway. It wasn’t Blunt’s performance that bothered me; she was fantastic. The writing that was to blame. Blunt’s character was simply too mean, too icy. And even more puzzling was how forgiving Hatheway seemed to be toward her. Hatheway continued to talk to her as if they were best buds, as if Blunt’s iciness were nothing at all, really. It didn’t work. If someone is that mean to you, you don’t talk to them; you avoid them. Why risk getting yelled at again, or chastised, or have eyes rolled at you? No, Hatheway’s treating Blunt as a friend was dumb, one of those unforgivable writing errors that you just can’t get over.

As for Meryl Streep, she was fabulous, even allowing herself to go on camera sans makeup for one pitiful little scene. I suppose that seems a trifle thing, to go on camera without makeup, but in the world of Hollywood where looks rule, it seemed a brave thing to me. Sure actresses become ugly occasionally, as Nicole Kidman did for The Hours. But in those instances we see a “made up” ugly; the ugly part is fake, fabricated. We never forget for an instant that beneath that false nose, Kidman is as gorgeous as ever. And so we see past it; we forgive. Not the case with Streep. Streep showed her own ugly, her true self not made up, and that’s different. That takes an extra measure of guts.

Overall, it was worth the rent but certainly not a movie we’ll be adding to our library.