Clash of the Titans

It's been a while since I reviewed a movie here. So, here goes:

Last week... I don't remember what day... Derek and I watched the new "Clash of the Titans." Now, I went into this movie expecting it to be singularly ridiculous, somewhat amusing, fairly lacking in content, and pretty much laughable. I believed it would be entertaining, but what I did not expect, was that I was going to love it.

Very rarely do I watch a movie (especially a movie that I didn't expect anything from) and wish that I had seen it in the theater. Possibly this is because I am pretty picky about the movies I go see (and am getting pickier as theater prices sky-rocket to ludicrous heights), or possibly it is because we watched the movie on my laptop, but either way, as we watched "Clash of the Titans" I found myself wishing that I had gone to see this movie when it was in theaters.

The visuals and special effects are fantastic. The monsters are realistic and frightening (but not horrifying to look at). The action is well-choreographed and intense, but not gory. The characters are likeable and heroic (as it should be in the retelling of a Greek myth), and they are none of them cowards.

The plot is pretty simplistic, which Derek listed as a con, but I list as a pro. You see, I am a student of mythology... being an English major and all... and the movie is pretty true to the story of Perseus. If you read Bullfinch's Mythology, which is one of the best compilations of Greek and Roman myths that is out there, you will see the problem with turning any of them into a full-length movie: the longest story in the book is probably about 6 pages long and some of them are as short as a paragraph or two. Also, most of the stories are interconnected, so as to make it difficult to pick one out to tell without leaving your modern audience completely confused. Thus, the fact that the movie stuck closely to the storyline of the myth without becoming too tangled and confusing was, to me, a major bonus. The story was told with artful simplicity and although it strayed in a few places from the original myth which you can read if you click on that link... it did not do so by too many extraordinary leaps, and the leaps it did make gave the movie a focus and direction that is lacking in many of the myths and would make them hard to turn into movies (they tend to meander around a bit).

A few things I noticed while watching that did sort of bother me. In the movie, Queen Cassiopeia says that her daughter, Andromeda, is more beautiful than the gods. However, in the myth, Cassiopeia compares her own beauty to that of the gods, which is the vanity she is punished for and the reason that the gods demand her daughter as a sacrifice to the sea monster. Also, the movie has a Kraken threaten the city of Argos, instead of the sea monster Cetus. Now, I understand that, "Release the Kraken." is much cooler to say than, "Release Cetus," and it was probably one of those points that Liam Neeson's agent negotiated for... however... the Kraken is from Norse mythology, while Cetus was from Greek mythology and is the creature that actually attacks Argos in the Perseus myth... so that kind of annoyed me. The other points where the plot strayed from the original myth were fairly minor and didn't impact the overall story too much.

However, those two points were pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. There were no scantily clad people running around, I noticed one swear... mostly because it was so obviously out of place in the language of the time/place... and no sex scenes, for which I was thankful and quite impressed.

Overall, if you're looking for something fun to watch on a Friday night, go ahead and rent this one. There's action, adventure, great special effects, a rather fantastic soundtrack, good characters, and even a little bit of a plot, and nothing offensive to jar your senses as you watch the movie. It's not a "thinking" movie, it's not one that I'll probably own. But it is one I'd be willing to watch again, because it was fun.

The Last Airbender - Movie Review

While on vacation in the Smoky Mountains, Derek and I decided to go see "The Last Airbender." Now, when I first began seeing trailers for this movie I was uninterested for 2 reasons.

First, the title just made me giggle. Think about it for a minute... if you can't figure it out, well, then, you just weren't blessed with the Walker sense of humor.

Second, it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie. After sitting through the debacle that was "The Happening" - a movie not worth the film it was shot on - I had pretty much made up my mind that I was never going to watch another Shy-o-melly-o-man (as Evan pronounces it) movie again.

However... Derek was curious, and so he started doing some research on this movie. As it turns out, the movie is based on a 3 season children's cartoon that aired from 2005-2008. I still wasn't sold, seeing as how I haven't been a fan of any cartoon that aired after the 90s, but Derek discovered that the cartoon was available on Netflix's "watch it now" feature (if you are unfamiliar with netflix, "watch it now" means that you can stream some of their selection straight to your computer without waiting for a DVD (or to your television, if you're like us and have a Wii)).

So, we started watching the cartoon. It didn't take long to get us all hooked. The cartoon is called: "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and Leiana refers to it as "Alatar!" :) The cartoon is very well done. The script is fun, the characters are lovable and compelling, and the story is a well-written arc that moves the plot along from start to finish without many "throw away" episodes in between, which is pretty different for a kid's show. After watching the last episode, I was ready to see the movie, although I did tell Derek that I was pretty sure it would be hard for the actors to live up to the characters I had fallen in love with during the cartoon.

The basic story goes like this: there are 4 nations - The Fire Nation, The Water Tribes, the Air Nomads, and the Earth Kingdoms. In each of the nations there are people who are able to "bend" or manipulate their people's basic element. There is one soul in the world who is capable of bending all four elements. This soul (the Avatar) is reincarnated throughout the ages. However, 100 years ago, he went missing and the Fire Nation took the opportunity to attack the rest of the world in an attempt to conquer the rest of the nations and become all-powerful. Two water tribe teen-agers: Kitara and her older brother Sokka discover the new Avatar at the South Pole frozen in a block of ice. They release him and discover that he is the Avatar and that he ran away from the air temple before he could learn the other three elements. He is shocked to discover he's been in the ice for 100 years, to him it has seemed only like a few days. The world has changed and they must get Aang (rhymes with "rang") teachers in the other three elements (water, earth, and fire) so that he can stand up to Fire Lord Ozai and free the world from the oppression of the Fire Nation.

Enter the movie. The first installment in a planned trilogy (to mirror the 3 seasons of the show).

I'll start with the things I liked about the movie. The visuals were absolutely stellar. The sets (most likely a lot of CGI) were perfect real-life replicas of the scenery from the cartoon. The CGI was almost impossible to spot. Most of the story-line followed the story of the cartoon, often making it feel as if the cartoon had simply been transferred over to real-life acting. I really can't say enough about the visuals. The actors they picked looked the part and most of the non-verbal acting was quite excellent.

Moving on...

The things I didn't like... I think most of what I didn't like can be summed up by saying that "The Last Airbender" simply suffered from bad directing... but I'll go into specifics for you:
1. This is a tiny little thing, but it really annoys me when they can't get pronunciation of names right in movies. ESPECIALLY when said movie is based off of a cartoon or another movie... it's not like in a book where there might be some leeway for how a name was supposed to be pronounced. They mispronounced "Aang," "Hiro," and "Sokka" three of the MAIN characters' names, they mispronounced "Avatar" at least half the time. (It's kind of like whenever anyone in a movie or a TV show mispronounces the word "nuclear" - it just grates on my nerves).

2. The delivery of lines was very wooden. There wasn't much in the way of well-delivered lines, except perhaps during one of the final scenes in the movie between Ue and Sokka (I don't want to give away a major point for anyone who isn't familiar with the story), but I felt that in that scene, Sokka really delivered his lines well. I chalk this up to a bad director. (sorry, M. Night) Because except for line delivery, I thought that the actual acting was pretty good... at least until anyone opened his or her mouth.

3. The bending. In the cartoon, the bending of any element is like someone holding a weapon. The martial art-esque movements manipulate each element as though it is an extension of the bender. In the movie, however, the bending requires an interpretive dance that is at least 5-10 moves long before they can get their elements to do ANYTHING. This was frustrating, and again, I chalk it up to a director's choice (correct me if I'm wrong about that, John). It felt as though they knew they had 2 more movies to make, and they didn't want to pull out all the stops in the first movie, and so they held back. I felt that this holding back hurt the movie more than anything else.

4. Kitara's narration. While she does narrate the opening sequence to every episode in the show, every time she interrupted the story to narrate what was going on or to show that time had passed during the movie, it jarred me out of the moment. It was like M. Night kept slapping me across the face and yelling, "HEY! You're watching a movie!!!!" It really broke up the flow of the story for me and made it hard to just watch.

5. The final part of the battle between Aang and the Fire Nation when they are attacking the Northern Water Kingdom. So that I don't spoil it for you, what he does in the movie is NOT what he does in the cartoon, and the pacifistic agenda annoyed me.

6. How long it took for them to decide what they were doing. In the first half of the movie, the three main characters seem to be wandering around aimlessly. This, again, I believe we can chalk up to the writer/director, good ol' M. Night again. Unfortunately, this one may not be his fault. See, if you think about the movies that M has directed, they almost all have an "aha!" moment at the end of them. They're psychological thrillers and deep, poignant, mysteries (with the exception of "The Happening"... what was he thinking?), but they are definitely not fantasy adventure quests. The story of "Avatar: the Last Airbender" is a classic quest/adventure story. Now remember, the cartoon did fairly well, and it's fairly new. A large percentage of the audience in the movie theaters, I have got to believe have either seen the cartoon or are familiar with the story (at least, that was the case for our theater, I could tell by the conversations I overheard afterwards). Throughout the movie, it felt like the story was trying to "surprise" me. There was the big moment when Aang reveals he is the Avatar! (Oh wait... even if you didn't see the movie, that much, at least, you could infer from the trailers). There is the moment when they decide they have to find Aang a water bending teacher! (Oh wait... duh!) Then there is the moment when Zhuko reveals why he cannot go home and why he has to capture the Avatar! (Oh wait... this moment occurs three quarters of the way through the movie, and if you hadn't figured out most of his story by then, you really weren't paying attention... even if you hadn't seen the cartoon and already knew his story). There was the big moment when Aang goes into the spirit world (Oh wait... he does that several times throughout the movie and really doesn't accomplish much by doing so).

All in all, I actually did enjoy the movie... but I walked away from it equating it with movies like: "The Seeker," "The Spiderwick Chronicles," the new "Prince Caspian," and "Percy Jackson" - it was good, I enjoyed it, I might even be willing to watch it again, but it simply did not live up to my highest expectations. Here's hoping they get a different director... or M. Night learns his lesson and does a better job on the sequel.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Having read reviews from places like pluggedinonline and screenit (two very valuable resources if you have no interest in being surprised by anything offensive in your movies) I knew that there would be zero foul language and no offensive scenes. They told me that the movie was based off of a video game (which never bodes well), and they told me that there would be a lot of violence. What both sites failed to tell me, however, was that this was going to be a movie that I would absolutely love.

The movie opens with an Aladdin-esque chase through the streets of Persia (they may have given a town name, but I don’t remember it). As the child who becomes the hero of the movie races through the streets eluding the king’s guards, you may feel a strange compulsion to press ‘A’ ‘circle’ ‘square’ ‘square’ ‘X’ on your game controller... only to realize that you don’t have one. However, this does not mean that the movie is not well done, it simply means that some of the action and stunts are the sort of things you would see in a video game. The further into the movie you get, the more you begin to forget that this was based on a video game, because the story draws you in and sets you on the edge of your seat hoping that everything will work out in the end.

As the story unfolds, you grow to love the main characters. Dastan: an orphan who was adopted by a king, is utterly heroic and full of life, humor, and nobility. Tamina: a princess with a sacred duty, is completely dedicated to her responsibility, capable, and still perfectly feminine without having any need to prove herself (as so many modern female characters are unfortunately written). In a fight, she’s not really much help, which makes her believable, but neither is she brainless, helpless, hopeless, or unemployed in Greenland... (to paraphrase slightly and take a bit of a tangent).

The movie is obviously the work of the same people who created Pirates of the Caribbean, and there were several places where I felt that one of the lines said about Jack Sparrow would have been appropriate for Dastan as well, “Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?” Although there is no rigging to swing from nor masts to run across while being sucked into a whirlpool - the streets and walls of  Persia are every bit as precarious and the main characters traverse them with thrillingly light-footed ease. And while Dastan is not as charismatic as Capt. Sparrow, he is every bit as likeable, every bit as compelling, and every bit as fun.

What I'm trying to say, is that if you want to see a movie that contains characters who are compelling and heroic, is good swashbuckling fun that hearkens back to past movies like Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean, and contains a well-written, fun, witty script - then I would highly recommend you go see Prince of Persia. You will not be disappointed. Also, although I believed that Jake Gyllenhall (no idea how to spell his last name) had played his "perfect" role already (October Sky), I realized watching this movie that he has been missing his calling these past 10-15 years. He was born to play this part :)

However... if you're deathly afraid of snakes... well, there are some parts that you might want to close your eyes for. ;)