by ·Comments Off on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994, Kenneth Branagh)

Unexpectedly this starts the same way as The Terror, with a ship becoming icebound and seeing mysterious things on the ice, but this takes five minutes to get where Terror got in a couple hours. Dr. Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein is traveling to the ends of the earth to escape his creation, or something. Clearly this movie was an answer to Coppola’s Dracula, but Branagh turns in a faithful literary adaptation, one of those prestige pics where none of the actors are strictly bad in it, but the overall effect is weak. It’s nice when the camera whirls slowly through the middle of rooms during long conversations, anyway.

Also the monster can fly in this version

More than anything else, I liked this staircase:

After the framing story with Captain Aidan Quinn (In Dreams, the bad Handmaid’s Tale), Young Dr. Frank meets Helena Bonham Carter via family friend Ian Holm, then Frank’s mom passes away. “No one need ever die. I will stop this.” At school, Frank pals around with foolish Tom Hulce (Amadeus himself), challenges intolerant professor Robert Hardy (he starred in Demons of the Mind), and learns creepy secrets from John Cleese as Professor Snape, before the professor is murdered by anti-vaxxer Robert De Niro (no shit).

The classroom pet: a cursed monkey’s paw

The part where Frank floods the creature with amniotic fluid then releases electric eels into the chamber is the first thing worthy of Unbound, but Ken quickly goes too far into kookiness when the floor becomes slippy with fluid and nobody can stand up for a long minute, then Frank accidentally kills the monster through clumsiness and bad placement of ropes. But of course the monster survives, wanders off and bonds with a blind grandpa (Shakespeare specialist Richard Briers, also in Spice World). No orderly trial for Justine like in the previous movie, just mob violence. Helena B.C. is angry when Frank gets to work making a lady monster instead of planning their wedding, and even angrier when she’s murdered then wakes up as the lady monster.

by ·Comments Off on Cinderella (2015, Kenneth Branagh)

Part of Disney’s ongoing live-action-remake series. This one adds nothing to the Cinderella story, fails to update or improve it in any way, has no seeming artistic reason to exist. But gee, it’s pretty.

From the director of Thor and writer of Antz, starring cousin Rose from Downton, with Daisy as one wicked stepsister, Cate Blanchett the wicked stepmother, Derek Jacobi (The King’s Speech) the king, Helena Bonham Carter the fairy godmother, Rob Brydon as a painter and a voice actor from the Castlevania games as the prince.

Ouch from Dissolve:

The film just touts, with sparkly but plodding repetition, the outsized, eventual rewards for being a sweet, brave dishrag that causes no trouble and makes no waves. … Asked why she stays on in such a horrible household, she explains that she’s doing it to respect her parents’ memory. By intepreting “be kind” as “be passive,” she teaches herself to be happy with physical and emotional abuse, to accept it as the norm, as the price of respecting her dead family. It’s a grotesque message, presented with perverse cheer, through a character who’s more idealized martyr than relatable hero.

Opened with a short called Frozen Fever, in which all your favorite Frozen characters smile almost nonstop, sing a song, catch a cold and celebrate a birthday. Didn’t hold a candle to Partysaurus Rex.

by ·Comments Off on Les Misérables (2012, Tom Hooper)

Oh yes it made me cry at least once. Yes I was impressed with the music. Yes some of the acting was really nice, and yes Russell Crowe seemed not to fit in. Same stuff everyone else has said, I’m sure, but two months late.

Hooper is the guy who made The King’s Speech, and has apparently let the big budget and musical numbers fog his memory of how to effectively edit a film. Huge Ackman is the former criminal, pursued unto death by supercop Crowe. Huge’s ex-employee and future oscar-winner Anna Hathaway dies a miserable prostitute, so Huge rescues her little girl Amanda Seyfried from her horrid keepers, welcome comic-relievers Helena Baron Carter and Sacha Bonham Cohen. Seyfried falls in love with Eddie Redmayne, whose doomed compatriots (including some very good young non-movie-stars who make us forget all about Seyfried for a spell) attempt another French Revolution. Huge saves his adopted daughter’s boyfriend, then suddenly dies of old age so they can carry on.

Film Comment:

This movie is by definition hobbled, with no chance of equaling Raymond Bernard’s exquisite and resonant 1934 version of the novel, which unfolded over five luxurious hours. The stylistic elegance and visual coherence of that early French cinema adaptation have been traded in for an all-out sensory assault.

Jim Emerson’s hateful review round-up was pretty hilarious. “The actors are playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their faces into ours. It’s like Full Metal Jacket: The Musical! with all the parts played by R. Lee Ermey.”

by ·Comments Off on The King’s Speech (2010, Tom Hooper)

Nominated for an ungodly number of oscars, winning picture, actor and director (over four of my longtime favorites: Fincher, Russell, Aronofsky and Coen). I smelled another inconsequential Shakespeare In Love and was prepared to be offended, but was crestfallen to discover that I really like the movie. It’s superbly acted, as we’ve heard over and over, but also very well written and even interestingly shot. Damn. At least Social Network got (adapted) writing and editing, both of which it richly deserved (sorry, Inception).

Simple story, really, with a built-in, historically accurate underdog triumph ending. The duke (who becomes king a couple years later) stutters horribly during any attempt at public speaking, so his wife turns to an uncredited speech therapist with unusual methods in a last-ditch attempt to help her husband, culminating in the new king’s first major radio address, declaring war on Germany in 1939. My favorite scene is when Geoffrey Rush’s wife discovers the king and queen in her husband’s grimy study, revealing to the king (and the audience) that Rush’s speech therapist has faithfully kept his famous student’s secret even from his own family for years.

Colin Firth, a longtime Katy favorite, did not disappoint (I thought he was better in A Single Man). Guy Pearce played a very convincing Brit. Good to see Helena B. Carter and Michael Gambon, too. I don’t know what the movie had against Winston Churchill, casting him as a toady Timothy Spall. Hooper previously made soccer movie The Damned United and the John Adams miniseries. Writer David Seidler worked on a couple of not-well-liked 90’s cartoon films and something called Kung Fu Killer. Shot by Danny Cohen (This Is England, Dead Man’s Shoes) with production design by Eve Stewart (Topsy Turvy).