Life in Review
Last week was a busy week, as of about 2:30 on Tuesday I became a fully fledged Canadian Permanent Resident — took long enough. Friday marked the beginning of my twenty-second year on this fateful planet, which means I’m just that little bit older, wiser and have less of a justifiable reason to want to spend my free time watching movies and playing video games, but I doubt that’s going to change any.
A review of Repo Men is on its way, when I get enough free time.
So after many, many decades the US healthcare system may finally be joining the rest of the world with a form of nationalised healthcare. However, despite grasping the bull by the horns, they’ve still to wrestle it to the ground. Whether or not the US will actually get a form of universal healthcare that the world recognises will only be told with time.
It still won’t be until 2014 that the US system will even begin to resemble other countries access to care, but then the US is already well over a half-century behind the western world so there’s probably little sense in them rushing to join us all.
I don’t have many thoughts on this, beyond “about damn time” as this really doesn’t affect my life in any way. At least it’s another thing I can check of my mental list of American ass-backwardism thanks to the democrats, however I’m quite sure the Republicans will be fighting tooth and nail for the next decade to get themselves added back on to the moron list.
My greatest fear for this movie was the huge threat of no originality that frequently plagues remakes of classics. However for better, or some might argue worse, Burton didn’t stick to the books like they were a religious text.
What I liked:
The story was excellent, it was a merger between Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with new material. One of my biggest problems with the books, and thus the faithful recreations in movies, is that they were written to be easily red to children. The divisions in the story are so alarmingly strong that you could cut the spine of the book between certain chapters and never know the two belonged together, quite frankly it’s a book of short stories. However what Burton achieves is a contiguous and seamless work, there’s no concrete divisions. It’s fluid, and it’s elegant, which allows the story to be gripping.
Despite many complaints that the movie is lacking emotion (it’s based on a Victorian Era book, are you serious? Lack of emotion? Who’s a moron? Lots of incompetent reviewers working for prestigious newspapers that can’t be bothered to research a movies source material even though 99% of them will have read the book and likely noticed its lack of emotion) I found it to have ample amounts for its source material. Also, I believe some people really need to look up what really falls under the category of ‘emotion’. The movie had great optimism to it, while also providing the overwhelming feel of pessimism in the face of daunting odds. Burton’s Red Queen is the deepest I’ve seen of any Alice creation, she’s consumed by jealousy but reveals she’s actually got good in her but her life and upbringing have guided her away from being good.
Acting was top notch, but then every actor has a credit list the length of my arm so that’s expected. The art and direction were amazing, better even than Burton’s previous works, which is a commendation itself.
What I disliked:
There were a few lines that were hard to understand, this wasn’t a real problem for me (fast spoken lines in a Scottish accent don’t fool me easily, I had to deal with a Scottish substitute teacher in a French lesson in highschool, since then I’ve never had a problem understanding the Scots) as I’m English and have first hand experience with the accents. I know my wife had difficulty with many of the lines, as I was acting as translator. So I can only imagine the trouble some people had. However, as a Brit I’ve had to learn American accents, so I can hardly criticise a movie for making Americans learn accents from Briton. If you expect to sell your culture globally, you should damn well be open to getting some back.
Beyond a few lines people may find inaudible, I can’t criticise the movie on much. Anne Hathaway played the White Queen well, she just looked exceptionally gaunt beyond her usual… gauntness. Something about her bugged me, I’ve still not put my finger on it. It just feels like something’s not right about her as the White Queen. I believe a bit more attention to the make up could have likely resolved it to my satisfaction.
Overall: 9/10
This is the best Alice in Wonderland I’ve seen or read, basically because it feels like an adult story. Even when I originally read Alice in Wonderland, I believe I had surpassed the stories age target. I’ve got about a decade and a half on my original reading of the story, and I doubt a faithful reproduction would have held my attention beyond the first twenty minutes. This kept my attention locked until the finish.
Judgement: Buy it! (see it in theatres if you can)
I went into this movie with zero preconceptions, all I knew about this movie was that it was a remake of a George A. Romero ‘not quite a zombie’ movie.
What I liked:
There was lots of great things about this movie. The cast was great, I recognized all of the main trio and most importantly they were all decent actors. The lead male Timothy Olyphant I recognized instantly from Deadwood and Hitman, and any remote horror movie fan should recognize Radha Mitchell from Silent Hill and Pitch Black.
The premise was different for a zombie movie, however while it was likely very original on the initial release it is now occasionally used. An unmarked plane crashed far upstream of the towns water supply and it was carrying a toxin (technically a toxicant as it was man made and introduced) designed to destabilise the population. What’s not explained is that the condition the toxin creates is allegedly itself infections, however this seems to get contradicted in the movie itself.
What I disliked:
The pacing in the beginning was excellent, however it began to degenerate towards the end, with the movie itself ending about 30 minutes beyond the optimal ending, for those who don’t want to know why, skip the next paragraph!
Spoilers Follow (I’ll try to keep it light): The town breaks out in full on Crazy fever and the military intervenes, sorting the healthies from the crazies and ships the healthies away, however anyone running a fever is locked up in a crazy camp. David (Timothy) the town sheriff is shipped of as healthy while his pregnant wife is locked up to be tested and his deputy is put in a holding cell. A rescue attempt saves David’s wife and they make it out of town, running into a few problems along the way, however this is where the pacing slows down. The perfect ending for this movie would have been their escape past the military lines, however it took about 30 minutes longer than this of very slow semi-action. Spoilers End.
Beyond the pacing, nothing was really bad, which is surprising. However, I must stress it, the pacing was really bad. The plot was believable, however this believability likely contributed a lot to the dead pace. They could easily have cut out a secondary character and skipped about 15 minutes, which would have helped greatly. For those who see this movie, you’ll instantly know who I mean and how easily she could have been removed (for a great increase in shock-factor).
Overall: 7/10
If a few pacing issues had been resolved, it could have been excellent, definitely a 9/10. However this would have made it a 60 minute movie, and no one would pay the exorbitant theatre price for a little over an hour of film. In the film it appears like a section is stripped from the original script, right where David turns the towns water supply off, which could have provided a good extra 20 minutes (that a certain secondary character hogged) of conflict between the Sheriff and the towns mayor and populace. In fact, it would likely have been an ideal way to display how widespread the infection has gotten in the populace, however this chance wasn’t taken.
The 60 minutes of this movie that had perfect pace, great cast and original story were gold. However, the extra 40 minutes were slow and relatively useless, especially in the present day where the ending likely didn’t have the same dramatic effect the original likely had on its release in ‘73. For horror fans, it’s certainly worth a watch, and I’ll have no hesitation to rewatch it, however for the majority of people it’s likely a watch once film, so definitely not a buy.
Judgement: Rent it.
Sometimes in life, it sucks to be an American hockey fan . . . I’m glad I’m not. The US did an admiral job tying up the game in the final 30 seconds, however their luck didn’t last during the sudden death overtime. Too bad boys, better luck in Russia 2014.
I’ve not liked the medal ranking being used by the NA media, I much prefer the IOC ranking of the most gold medals (the system used by the BBC). Although out of fairness, I believe a weighted system should be used (gold = 3, silver = 2, bronze = 1), which would still have the top teams in the same positions, but gives a lot more credit to the teams in the lower ranks. It also places Korea in its rightful place, many of them did simply amazing and shouldn’t be placed behind Austria and Russia who weren’t fielding nearly as many of the worlds’ best athletes.
However, no matter how you rank it, the UK flat out sucked like an old prostitute. When you never see snow it’s hard to learn how to play in it. I’m hoping for better in the London summer games, but even being a non-religious man I know it’ll take more than every Brit praying for a miracle to get us anywhere near winning the most golds. Maybe Briton will win by the 2186 games . . . just being realistic.
© 2010 Nik Gregory All Rights Reserved