December 2005

A Disney movie about war without blood, death, or consequence?  Sound inane?  Well it is.  Narnia wants to be a combination of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter but the reality is more like Land of the Lost mixed with Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, except not quite that good.  How bad is this film?  H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E, and not in that funny Plan 9 from Outer Space or Showgirls kinda way.  We get emotionless children, insipid dialogue, inane plot, and some really inconsistent CGI which make this new take on C.S. Lewis’s story one fiasco of a film.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Negative Stars

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe based off of the book by C.S. Lewis is a stuptifyingly horrendously awful mess.  I HATED this film.  The film chronicles the four Pevensie children as they are given the job of leading an army and killing any non-believers to help out a lion who sounds quite a bit like Qui-Gon Jinn.  Poorly edited (140 minutes) with amateurish special effects and bad TV acting produce one of the worst films of the year and the most inept, violent, subversive, and intolerant children’s film ever made by Hollywood.  (Kudos guys!)

Lucky we had all these human clothes lying around

The story starts with Mrs. Pevensie (Judy McIntosh) sending her four children to stay with Professor Kirke (Jim Broadbent).  I assume the professor is a family friend or at least a nice stranger, but while the film explains why the mother would send her children away to protect them it never really clarifies why she would send them to Kirke.  Exploring the pristinely clean house during a game of hide and seek the youngest of the clan Lucy (Georgie Henley) discovers a wardrobe (large dresser) in one of the countless rooms in the professor’s well kept mansion.

Sorry, I have to stop for a moment.  The movie is spotless; there is no dust, no dirt, no hair out of place.  The Death Star wasn’t this clean!  It may be nitpicking, but especially in a movie where kids hide in dusty rooms, roll around in the wilderness and fight to the death you might expect them to get a little mussed.

 

Back to the story…  See these four “children of Adam” enter the world of Narnia through the wardrobe (don’t ask how or why, or how the professor came into possession of the magical wardrobe.  The film isn’t that well thought out.  For example where do all these perfectly tailored children’s clothes keep coming from in a world without humans?

Anyway, after 45 minutes of story they finally find themselves in a snowy forest and encounter all kinds of shocking sights.  Well, I would assume they would be shocking, but these kids take it in like it’s something that happens to them everyday.  True there is some shock when they meet Mr. Beaver (Ray Winstone), but the rest of the “wonders” of Narnia are taken completely in stride by the Pevensie crew.  I don’t know what would happen if I met a talking lion or an army of centaurs, but I’m guessing I would react more than if I had met three old ladies crossing the street.

Our visitors become instantly popular.  It seems Narnia has talking lions and beavers, evil witches, trolls, centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, but no humans.  Narnia has been plunged into eternal winter that only pre-told coming of for humans can reverse.  So these four untrained and somewhat unwilling children are given command of the armies of Narnia and Peter (William Mosley) is asked to lead them into battle.  Good plan; who put the lion in charge anyway?

Subplots include the seduction of Edmund (Skandar Keynes) by the White Witch, the fate of Lucy’s friend, a faun named Mr. Thomnus (James McAvoy), and the brutal and torturous death of the lion general Aslan (Liam Neeson), which good sister Susan (Anna Poppelwell) allows her 6 year-old sister to witness (as to what other use Susan has in the story, well….I’m still trying to figure that out).  Of course since no one dies in this movie I guess that makes the torture in front of children okay.  We are made to watch his eventual miraculous resurrection, and if you can’t figure out the clumsy symbolism of this you need to ride the special bus to school.  The scene is so heavy-handed and graceless all I could do was groan.

The cavalier way this film deals with death makes me incredibly angry.  The film puts children in control of an army allowing them to kill and yet never shows a moment of shame or contemplation for their actions.  Nor is any blood spilled during this great climatic war.  In fact the film’s main message seems to be war is good and there are never any consequences.  I bet George Bush will love it.

Can you hear me Kal-El?

All but two of the characters the family meet in Narnia are CGI.  Mr. Thomnus is the first character we meet through Lucy’s eyes.  McAvoy is fine in the part though the look of the character, a faun, is never quite right.  The other, the White Witch (Tilda Swinton in a waaaay over the top performance), is evil and devious, but only in a 3rd grade kinda way.  You expect her at anytime to sneer and cry for her mommy.  Truthfully it was hard to take her character seriously when she’s walking around for most of the movie with the Fortress of Solitude on her head.  Creepy?  Maybe, but not too scary.

As for the human characters, the acting is what you would expect in a film that contains only child actors talking at bluescreens.  The awkwardness of it made me nostalgic for Jar Jar Binks.  It’s not that the performances of the actors are bad, though they are pretty bad.  And it’s not that the characters are thinly written, though they are.  It’s the way the story makes these four children carry the entire movie, an overweight and gargantuan charge, that sets them up to fail.  It feels way too much like a rushed “TV event” rather than a large big budget theatrical production.

The special effects are an odd bag as so many shots were needed (about 75% of this film is CGI) that multiple companies were hired.  Some of the effects work well.  Most do not.  The blue screen scenes look amatuerish and you can often easily tell when the actors are in the studio versus at a location.  This might make a fun drinking game but doesn’t really help the movie.  It almost seems that the film was rushed into production as many of the larger or more complex shots seem unfinished and blurry as if only partially finished.  Geroge Lucas should get ILM’s name of this film before it does his company irrevocable damage.

The story might work well in a book but the movie takes any subtlety of the Christian allegory and rather crudely screams it at the top of its lungs.  You might have well just named the lion Jesus for Christ’s sake!  I also have some problem with the Christian theme being so heavy in the movie and casting every character who believes something different as a sub-human monster.  Nice lesson or religious intolerance for kids there guys.  The film also states the mind-blowing assertion that no matter how ill-equipped or badly led your army is as long as you have God on your side you will be victorious over infidels.  Wow, a movie that pushes the ideals of Christianity and Al Qaeda!  I wish somebody would have shot me halfway through this mess, but of course I wouldn’t have really died because I would be resurrected and forced to watch more.  Sadly I had to settle for dying a little inside.

It’s quite a shame that a film with this much money and press behind it seems so cheaply and so poorly made.  Other than making Willow look awesome by comparison the film achieves little in its 140 minute running time.

One of the more interesting movies I was looking forward to this fall was MirrorMask.  Written by Neil Gaiman (yeah, that Neil Gaiman!!) and Dave McKean (who also directs) the film tells the story of Helena a fifteen year-old girl who is raised in the circus and desperately wants to escape to the real world.  Helena becomes trapped in a strange dream world and she must find the MirrorMask to help the White Witch and find her way home.  The movie was released in New York on September 30, and in the strictest sense of “limited release” it seems it will not be shown elsewhere.  Sony announced plans to release the DVD on February 7, 2006 instead.  Great, after subjecting myself to the horror that is The Chronicles of Narnia (check back tomorrow for my scathing review) now I don’t get to see what talented people can do with similar subject matter!  I can only assume that Sony was scared off the the pre-hype that Narnia has been getting and didn’t want to go head-to-head for the same audience.  *Sigh* 

For those of you interested check out the movie’s trailer here and let us know what you think.  And if by chance anyone out there has seen this and would care send us a review we’d be eternally grateful (for at least 15 seconds).

MirrorMask
N/A

The idea behind Melinda and Melinda is really good.  The execution however never achieves its lofty aspirations.  Two different versions of a story are shown; one is tragic one is comedic.  We’ve seen this before were different views of are presented in the same film and in almost every case one part of the film is better than the other.  The comedy turns out pretty good but the tragedy is only so-so and Allen never finds a way to merge the two stories into one film.

Melinda and Melinda
3 & 1/2 Stars

Two different takes on life has been done before on film and the romantic theme has been done recently (1998’s Sliding Doors); so this film is coming to the party a little late.  But we do have Woody Allen who makes a very interesting party guest throwing this bash; so, of course,  there is much to discuss.  Is this one of Allen’s best films?  No, but it does have its moments and very good performances that are definitely worth checking out.

A group of friends talk about life during a relaxed dinner at their favorite restaurant.  One introduces a vague story he has overheard about a woman crashing a dinner party of friends and then two of them take turns telling the story in how they see the world.  Each story is then shown to us as it evolves from their initial narration into a two separate stories inter-cut between each other and scenes from the restaurant discussion.  Wallace Shawn provides a fine performance here as the man who argues that life is tragic yet gives us the comedic telling of Melinda.

The two stories contain different characters and the film is cut together so you see a little of one and then a little of the other back and forth.  Part of the problem is the only thing holding the stories together is the loose dinner party that really isn’t a part of either story, and might be the most interesting part of the film that sadly only gets brief moments in-between the two stories.

The film provides a showcase for some great performances.  Radha Mitchell is Melinda the main character in both stories although different in each.  She provides the range of emotion and is good even as the tragic story gets too maudlin and sloppy.  Also well used here is the beautiful Chloë Sevigny dressed down as the good normal gal of the group.  The other member of the tragedy worth mentioning is Chiwetel Ejiofor who instantly infuses the film with class.  Another great performance by Ejiofor; I’ll go see this guy in anything.

From the comic tale Will Farrell does a good job with the neurotic Woody Allen role and only gets annoying late in the film.  Allen did a good job in this casting (much better than Biggs or Branaugh) Farrell is able to do the role naturally without falling back into imitation.  Amanda Peet and Steve Carell also add some nice comedic touches.

Although the film has interesting ideas and good performances they never quite come together to make a cohesive film.  Part of the problem lies in the final act of the tragedy as it becomes depressing at the same time the comedy is getting into full gear.  The dichotomy never quite fits.  Still there are plenty of reasons to look at this film not the least are a series of very good performances by Mitchell, Ejiofor, Farrell, and Peet.

In Living Color, AKA Fox’s first attempt at an SNL type show was is an interesting little slice of early 90’s history.  From the mind of Keenan Ivory Williams the show was set up to put his family to work and provide some inconsistantly funny sketches.

In Living Color – Season Four
2 Stars

What’s the legacy of In Living Color?  Even though most of the recurring sketches and characters have been long forgotten the show did have a strong following during it’s run and jump started the careers of Damon Wayans, Jim Carey, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez.

The fourth season of In Living Color introduces “Fly Girl” Jennifer Lopez and adds another Wayan, Marlon Wayans, to the company payroll.  The sketches from the season include returning original characters like Fire Marshall Bill, the Head Detective, and Men on Film.  Also included are some pretty good parodies such as the “Def Comedy Jam” parody which is a wicked take on live audiences that laugh at mediocre material.  There’s also a best of parodies episode include spoofs on Superfly, Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs.

Jim Carrey is the gem of the bunch and besides his role of of Fire Marshall Bill he does a Ross Perot impersonation, the father of the Dystfunctional Home Show, and his William Shatner impersonation in a Rescue 911 spoof and a Star Trek spoof.

Damon Wayans provides many of the laughs with his roles as the Head Detective, one half of the Men on Film, Handiman, and Homey D. Clown.  One of the episodes is a best of Men of Film which includes clips from this season and other season including Blayne’s short live heterosexuality.

Not all the comedy comes off and much of it misses the mark.  For every one that works there are two or three that don’t.  For example the recurring character of Wanda (Jamie Foxx) who’s whole character is she’s an ugly and not very smart woman.  Though one of the sketches does lead to an appearance by En Vogue.  The show was very popular with urban music and hip hop and you get performances by the likes of Naughty by Nature and Mary J. Blige.  You also get group after group of very forgettable bands such as Digital Planets, but hey at least JLo and the Fly Girls can dance to anything.

The comedy is real hit-and-miss especially for a fourth season show.  Longtime fans of the show will really enjoy it but I think for the casual viewer the $40 price tag is much too high for what you actually get.