I AM going to get back to the old fantasy, but I feel the urge to post some quick movie reviews. I'll make them quick, because opinions about movies are about a dime a dozen and usually worth even less.
Prince Caspian: Well. It was fun, I have to give it that. I hadn't read the book in too long to do a detailed comparison, but anyone going into this movie not already knowing it was a Christian allegory would be unlikely to pick up on it, Aslan aside. As a CS Lewis fan, I was disappointed. On the up side, the battles are cool, and almost all the actors, especially the kids, are excellent.
Iron Man: Not a whole lot to say about this movie. Highly entertaining fluff. Somewhat of a let-down having theatre-hopped from Indiana Jones. Good if you want to while away two hours.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: This movie was to the Indiana Jones series everything The Phantom Menace should have been to Star Wars and wasn't. An enormously fun movie, with enormously fun action scenes and dialogue. Great acting, from Harrison Ford, Shia Labeouf, Cate Blanchett (you can feel the evil coming off the screen when she appears), and most of the others. Oh, and the janitor from Scrubs is in it, which I found awesome. The henchman still can't shoot, and Indy's hat (a fedora, of course) still stays on. There are a couple plot points that remain unexplained. But of course, that's all part of the fun. I haven't seen a movie this fun since... Well, probably the last Indiana Jones. A couple points of interest: this movie is set in 1957, the bad guys being Russian. So the original movies were Cold War era movies with Indy fighting Nazis; this latest is a 9/11 era movie with Indy fighting Soviets. Second, it's set at the height of the Red Scare, and some of the things certain characters say are reminiscent of things heard after 9/11. Not politically, really, at least in a partisan sense, but more along the lines of, "You can't trust anybody, these days." This lends the movie both a sense of timeliness and one of timelessness: timeliness, in that this story can be applied to our climate today; but timelessness, in that this very fact makes you realize that the last generation felt this way, and probably the one before them and the one before them.
Well, I'll quit here and pretend that still counts as "short."
5 comments:
Your last review was so informative that I could pretend to have seen the movie.
Hey. Excellent job reviewing Indiana Jones. After reading that, I can't not seeing it. ..not that I felt before that I could not see it, but you emphasised the point.
I'm afraid I am still going to have to see Prince Caspian just because, but I probably won't like it all that much either. Ah well. I always have the old BBC versions to fall back on.
Your apeness: Er... thanks? Always glad to help a, er, primate out.
Darth, yeah, you have to see Caspian if only to be able to be disappointed properly. And yeah, definitely see Indiana Jones. In fact, see it in the theatre, if possible--it's one of few movies where I'd recommend doing that.
For pure, subjective entertainment value, my vote stays with IRONMAN over Indy4. I was just a little bored by the movie. And Harrison has gotten old. All that falling down three stories after another must have hurt just a little, don't you think?
I don't know why, but I had trouble suspending my disbelief for this one.
Did you catch Ford "forgetting" which movie he was acting in (obviously a spoof put in by the writers)?:
"I got a bad feeling about this..."
IRONMAN was better written and better acted. By far.
As for CASPIAN...that sure was a good Vietnamese dinner afterward, wasn't it?
I actually found myself a lot more bored by Ironman than Indy; I didn't really like the climax of either, but at least Indy's had an interesting setting, where Ironman was just machines smashing each other on top of a skyscraper. Yet again.
Better acting, probably, except maybe for Cate Blanchett.
And yeah, the "Bad feeling" line was pretty awesome.
Furthermore, you are absolutely right about Caspian.
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