Saw Resident Evil last night on HBO... it ends exactly the same way 28 days later begins :-)
Not to mention that both are cannibal zombie movies. Amazing coincidence.
Of course Milla Jovovich <> that english bloke.
To escape the heat of the afternoon, I dived into a movie theater downtown, and the movie I hadn't seen was this.
I am a fan of Samuel L. Jackson. I think his role in Pulp Fiction is incredible. I think his screen presence (and a little acting) makes his characters interesting and intense, and larger than life, which is a good thing in many movies.
But why, please, is he trapped inside of a fascist fantasy movie?
In this movie, 4 policemen and a prisoner (who is described as evil, sure) are in a car, and because of something he says, just a nod from one of the policemen prompts the other to hit the prisoner. Who is cuffed, BTW.
Ok, so that is a felony comitted by one of the "good guys", with acquiescense from another. It is also, of course, a cowardly action, and think about it: just a nod, and whack. That shows habit, so the subtext is apparently that these nice guys, members of "the most respected police force in the world", routinely hit defenseless prisoners.
Yup, those are the heros in this movie.
But let's put aside the obviously rotten ideology this movie represents, where it's ok for a character, just because he is labeled as "good", to break the law without consequences, and without even suggesting that such a thing may be, you know, not the best thing to do.
Let's talk about cinema. This is the kind of movie where two characters of similar height and build fight, in a dark railroad set, backlit.
For minutes, they punch, and kick, and throw themselves at each other.
And it's phisically impossible to see who the hell is beating the other, because you can't tell them apart.
That's lazy filmmaking, and it shows this morally bankrupt movie is not even well done garbage.
At least Leni Riefenstahl's movies are allegedly beautiful to look at. What's the excuse for this one?
I have been thinking a little about being relatively old in IT/Internet/dog-year terms, and some things have changed. A lot.
When I was a kid (say, 8 years old?) there were only two TV channels where I lived. And I lived in a rather largish city (350K people). In fact, it was more like 1.5 channels, since one only worked from 6PM to midnight.
Now, I could have 300 channels, if I had any time free to watch TV.
Of course, it was black and white TV, color TV was still 2 years in the future. Hell, our TV still had vacuum tubes. Now I can watch DVDs with Dolby 5.1 sound. I only saw my first _movie_ with Dolby sound when I was 14.
At that time (although I had not heard of those things yet), the university where I would later study and work was buying a computer. That modern marvel had 64KB of main memory, and supported up to three simultaneous users on teletypes (yes, teletypes), but at the time they only had punchcards. My phone has more computing power than that.
Eventually, I used that very same computer to learn Fortran III+ using a line editor and a line printer, although it only had one teletype, since it had been upgraded to glass ttys (wyse60s, IIRC). I still have some glass ttys at home (real wyse60s, nice toys).
Phone lines were so hard to get that a house with phone costed roughly 50% extra. To make a phone call to a town 60KM away, the procedure included calling an operator, and waiting two or three hours for the operator to call back.
Now, people get mad at me because I am not in MSN messenger all the time, and I have lost 5 phones in two years, but it's only a minor annoyance. In those days, the idea of losing a phone was about as bizarre as losing a doorstep.
Bills (power, phone, water, etc.) had to be paid on specific banks, on specific dates, and usually there were lines of a block or two on the last available date. Now I have them automatically paid from my bank account, and I get informed via email to authorize it.
Since I was 5 years old, I took a bus (not a school bus, a plain city bus) to school every morning and noone found that too weird. Now I am the only person I know who takes random cabs, because it's safer to call one by phone.
Every country in every direction, including my own, was under a repressive and criminal military dictatorship, and half the world was communist.
But... the last time a man had gone to the moon was with Apollo, the coolest-looking and fastest plane in the world was the SR-71, Ema Peel looked great in The Avengers, summer was hot, girls on bathing suits made the heat bearable, girls make anything bearable, anyway, so _some_ things never change.
I had just finished reading The Count of Montecristo, and I thought it was a great book, and it still is, although I appreciate all the sex and drug abuse of the book more now!
I was a chubby kid, I am a chubby adult. I was a skinny teenager, though, but that didn't last ;-)
So, just because I can now buy a real laser beam for the cost of a hamburger (which was a novelty food when I was a kid), while it was before the stuff Bond villians with lots of money played with, are things really different... well, yeah! ;-)
Although it opened here (Buenos Aires, Argentina) at the exact same time as almost everywhere else, here's a late review of the movie.
I liked it. I have read the critic slam it, and you know what? I understand them. But I liked it anyway.
Now, why is that, and why don't I slam it as well? The problem critics had with Matrix: Revolutions is one of expectations.
They expected it to be a movie that lifted Matrix: Reloaded into a meaningful and worthy sequel of the original film. That is of course impossible for many reasons.
The main one is that it's 2003, not 1998. In 2003 lame movies like Bad Boys II have special effects that are about as good as The Matrix's were. We are jaded to them.
In fact, we are not only jaded to special effects that were special five years ago, we are jaded to surprise itself, like if showing us something new was an old thing itself.
So, even when there is a sequence that should awe us (like, say, the slow motion punch into Smith's face, look how you can see the fist pushing individual raindrops, the face deforming under the pressure, the detail of the impression of the knuckles... do you know how that was done? I don't!)... well, awe is old news.
So, I went to the theather expecting a movie that would be a fine action movie, with impressive sights, lame acting (not a decent actor in the bunch, except Lawrence Fishburne, and he was apparently directed not to act, but to look serious and important), some sophomoric babble, and some kung fu (I wanted more seraph, though).
In that level, it works. In making us all be five years younger, it didn't.
And to those who said the ending just drops the ball of the story threads, well, guys, this was a christian parable, Neo died for the sins of the programs, he was not the christ figure of the humans, but of the machines.
The robots in the city are the romans, the oracle and other "good bots" are israelites, the architect is Herod, Smith is the roman legions oppressing the israelites, and Neo's messianic "death" (he didn't die, but he is shown in a crucifiction-like pose, and doesn't move) is the second coming announcing the raising of the new temple, by turning the romans against their own legions and ushering peace on earth.
And the humans in Zion are vermin in Jerusalem's sewer system. Just ask the Merovingian (He, I have no idea who he is in the analogy, I just thought this as I was writing, be happy if it holds for another 30 seconds ;-) Ok, he is Mary Magdalene's pimp.
See, that's the kind of thing the Matrix trilogy does, it induces otherwise reasonable people into trying to shoehorn random data into patterns it doesn't fit (at least I tried to make a slightly original one).
That not specially cool quality is shared with other upper-mediocre-crust entertainment, such as "Catcher in the rye". While amusing, its produce is, of course mostly pedestrian.
The trick here, I think, is one used by people like Berlitz, writing about the magic proportions of the pyramids. If you have a large set of numbers, and allow yourself some freedom to tweak, they will match some of the hundred of "important" numbers in nature.
My height * 1000000 ~ the distance to the moon. I must be really important!
The Matrix movies have dozens or hundreds of nuggets of things we recognize from somewhere else, usually only slightly veiled, so we can feel smart about unveiling them, and smarter still about connecting them.
Well, like the size of the stones in the pyramids, you can plug those nuggets into almost any structure you want, as long as you are willing to stand a few holes and forced fitting... and man, did that get old quick after the first movie or not?
So, that's why it didn't work on the philosophical level: we are tired of it, we only had gas for one of those movies.
Add that to the special-effects-are-not-special-anymore syndrome, and you have a recipe for a movie that, while ok, can't work.
And that, friends, is why it didn't.
Today's topic is one that probably has never been covered in advogato (and there are more of those ;-): Alexandre Dumas (père).
Why? Because I lately see him everywhere. For one thing, a few weeks ago, I watched a movie. I think the english title is "the ninth gate". That movie, while apparently a books and demons sort of thriller with Mr. Depp, is based in a book by a guy called Pérez-Reverte.
Now, that book is way better than the movie. In fact, it's one of the better books I've read in the last year or so, and I read a lot.
The book is called... El Club Dumas. Which in english means roughly the same thing as in spanish.
Now, I can understand why Roman Polansky would throw away half of the book (The Dumas half) and keep the other half (the devil's half), and making a movie based on the book would probably be impossible otherwise, but hey, it still sucks.
Why does it suck? Because the Dumas side of the book is way better. It's fun. It has a plot. Or two plots. It has characters. It has great dialog. The devil's half is, well, about the devil, and about books. Old books.
And I prefer the Dumas half, because it has a ghost of the real thing. That real thing being, of course, Dumas' work.
I had read Dumas when I was a kid, and I thought it was funny, and that I had outgrown it, until one day, two years ago, I felt a irresistible urge to buy a 1300 page mammoth called "The Count of Montecristo".
In the first 120 pages or so, it has, love, politics (with Napoleon!), evil scheming, prison, drugs, escapes from prison, sex, religion, loyalty, betrayal, and, the most important thing, it's so much fun you don't even care about the stranger parts.
I remember a article in Salon a while ago, like a defense of the plot in literature, against style. And Dumas is the greatest example of why that makes sense. The style is not bad, mind you, but it's functional to the plot. Characters in a Dumas book exist to do things. They make decisions, they try to advance to their goals, they push and kill and fuck each other as if their lifes depended on it, and well, as far as a character has a life, doesn't it depend on it?
And then I realized the bad luck Dumas' books have had when turned into movies. And I can't understand why. After all, they have everything to make good, or at least fun, movies. They have guns, explosions, scenarios, action, and sex! Ask Peter Dragon to make one!
But last night I saw The Man in the Iron Mask on TV. Oh, man.
Ok, I understand that noone could make a movie about the man in the iron mask with the original title (The Vizcount(sp?) of Bragelonne), because people would mistake it for a Merchant-Ivory movie.
I understand that they had to make Leonardo diCaprio into Louis XIV. Hey, he's not so bad at it, even. He does look like a bland inbreed with an attitude problem.
I accept that they had to cast 3 actors from UK and the US as mousketeers, and that they had to fake french accents (why? the audience wouldn't notice it is set is France if they didn't?)
I can accept the way they totally screwed the character of Athos' son, turning him into a moron.
What I can't accept is the ending.
In the book, Athos dies of grief. Porthos dies saving his friends. Aramis (who is NOT, for christ's sake, the secret general of the jesuits) retires to a monastery, D'Artagnan dies many years later in the siege of Maastricht (to match the death of the real D'Artagnan), and Louis XiV wins.
It's a very sad ending. But it actually makes sense. You don't go and replace the king of a country, get caught and then get away with it, sad as it may be.
The movie? Oh, well, let's see, the man in the iron mask becomes king, Athos, Porthos and Aramis become his counselors, Athos gets the (new) king as a (new) son, as if it was a new goldfish to replace the flushed one, and the only one that dies is D'Artagnan, but he dies saving everyone else, so it doesn't matter.
Oh, and D'Artagnan is revealed to be the father (with Anna of Austria) of Louis XIV (and the man in the iron mask). Why was that? Someone saw "The empire strikes back" while drafting the script?
And it's not the first time. Monsieur Dumas has (ok, no, he's dead) seen many movie versions, and each one massacred the books in similar ways.
And here I am, hoping one day someone will burn 120 million bucks in a 5 hour epic called "The vizcount of Bragelonne".
With people speaking without accents. Or in french, or with a real french accent. And where everyone dies in the end.