Movies
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Picoreview: Loving Vincent
Picoreview: Loving Vincent: an amazing work of art that proves worth it in the end.
I’m not a particular Van Gogh fan, or at least I wasn’t before Vincent and the Doctor, which–I will fight you on this–is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever filmed. So I wasn’t going to Loving Vincent because I love Vincent, but rather because it’s been billed as an astonishing work of art.
And it is. They filmed it about five years ago and have spent the intervening time in post-production, hand painting every single frame with oils, in Van Gogh’s style. Over a hundred artists worked on it, and the resultant effort is…it’s an amazing work of art. It really is.
Part of the result, though, is also that it has an almost stop-motion feel to it at times, especially early on (when I was still getting used to it, maybe) and I really dislike stop-motion, so I personally probably could have done with a little less loving jolty detail and a bit more smoothness (I *loved* the black and white sequences, which were painted more smoothly), but I acknowledge that’s on me. What’s less on me is that there were times–again, especially in the beginning, where the dialogue (much of it presented by Chris O’Dowd (the film is chock bloody full of Irish actors and I have no idea why, but it is. :))) takes on a narrative tone that’s Very Stilted. It sounds like a not especially accomplished stage performance, and it doesn’t mesh well with the visuals. It sounds very much as though it was done separately and dubbed in, which may be exactly what happened, but it really doesn’t flow aurally with the imagery. It evens out later (once O’Dowd is off screen, honestly), but I think it takes longer for the audio to settle than the visuals, which…the visuals in this movie should be harder, I think.
The story itself is presented as a mystery: Van Gogh has died, but he left a letter to deliver to his brother. O’Dowd’s character was the postman who delivered their letters, and sets his son to deliver it; the son, resentful at first, gradually gets caught up in the story of the last days of Van Gogh’s life, and begins to struggle with the question of whether Van Gogh committed suicide or was murdered. It’s only a 96 minute movie, but I found myself thinking it was pretty slow and somewhat tedious…but by the end, thanks in large part to a genuinely powerful and moving monologue performance by Jerome Flynn as Van Gogh’s doctor Gachet, I was completely invested and a little teary-eyed. Many of the audience around me were sniffling and wiping their eyes, more affected than I was.
Every character (and setting) in the film is inspired by a Van Gogh painting. Some are the people he actually painted, playing ‘themselves’; some are cast from paintings around whom a character was built. One of the splendid bits is that at the end, the original inspirational painting is presented beside a photograph of the actor, and then, where available, other paintings and photographs of the actual person are used so we can see the journey from person to painting to actor to character, which I thought was really splendid.
In the end, I think it’s well worth seeing, especially on a big screen, where the effort and artistry that’s been put into it is clearly visible. But then you should watch Vincent and the Doctor, because it’ll rip your heart out where Loving Vincent only tugs at the heartstrings.
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Picoreview: Inhumans
Picoreview: Inhumans: not *as* bad as the reviews said. To further illuminate that comment, I also went to see Rough Night this week, and of the two, Inhumans is not the one I wanted to walk out of.
That said, you should not in any way mistake it for *good*.
I went because I was sort of horrifiedly fascinated to see just how bad it was, after all the scathing reviews. The result may be that my expectations were SO LOW that I could not actually be disappointed. Also, there were only four people in the entire Imax theatre (I was the only woman), so I sat in the back row and livetweeted the whole thing, which may have added considerably to my enjoyment of the whole thing, because, I mean, it was awful, but I genuinely had a good time.
The inhuman special effects are unforgiveably bad. Medusa’s hair is embarrassing and her costume is dreadful. Gorgon is wearing plush boots with hooves glued to the bottoms and they must have told him “just walk on your toes, it’ll be fine.” Lockjaw–okay, actually, Lockjaw’s teleportation looks pretty cool, so presumably that’s where they spent all the budget. Although it doesn’t look like an expensive effect.
The writing is *appalling*, especially in the first twenty minutes. I mean, my *God*, it’s bad. Iwan Rheon is not only saddled with truly awful lines throughout, but is also, I think, badly miscast as Maximus, which is saying something, because the writing is so terrible for everyone that it’d be pretty easy to feel that the entire show was badly miscast. But he really stood out. *None* of it is well-written, though. Somebody somewhere said “Inhumans should have been treated as a family drama like The Tudors, only with superpowers,” and that really is what they should have done and instead they…have done this awful stilted thing with a painfully tropey creepy charmless bad guy and…I mean, honestly, I don’t even know how they made it this bad.
Ken Leung, playing Karnak (whose name I never caught in the show, and whom I referred to as Tattooed Attitude), was trying really hard with really bad material. (So was Crystal’s hair. Crystal, played by Isabelle Cornish herself seemed…pretty Crystal-like, really. Not good, but I thought she had potential.) Serinda Swan’s Medusa was…*sigh* Yeah. Anson Mount managed to be utterly awful without having to say a word as Black Bolt, and then he got a little better and I thought perhaps he could pull it off with time and practice, and by the end he’d won me over and I was really enjoying him.
(As an aside, though, these people have *moronic* communications systems for a people with a silent king. I mean, Black Bolt ACTUALLY USES SIGN LANGUAGE in this film. Which is AWESOME, because silent king! Except…Medusa…is the only person…in the entire Inhumans family…who has bothered to learn it, and thus is the only person who actually knows for sure what Bolt is saying. WHAT KIND OF DUMBASSERY IS THAT?! And also they have a, you know, like, Star Trek communicators system, WHICH THE KING CAN’T USE. BECAUSE THEY’RE MORONS. I mean, for God’s sake, if nothing else they’ve been watching Earth for ages, HASN’T SOMEBODY NOTICED HUMANS USE PHONES TO TEXT NOW? Do the Inhumans not have a writing system which THEIR KING could communicate with? OMFG!!!!)
Ahem. Back to the main post:
Gorgon is WONDERFUL. Despite the plush boots and bad writing, Eme Ikwuakor *radiates* charm and presence, and dominated the screen whenever he was on it. I loved him and I want him to have awesome SFX instead of humiliating ones.
There were three twists I didn’t expect in the show, two of which improved their characters (one improved the affected character so dramatically that I completely reassessed the performer’s ability) and one of which made me go OH YAY. And my final verdict?
I’ll watch more. It’s not good, but it’s not as bad as I expected from the reviews. I think its most unforgiveable flaw is that it’s not much *fun*, but honestly I do not think it’s noticeably worse than the first 2/3rds of season one Agents of Shield, which I thought was really grimly bad but watched all of. It’s not worse than Legends of Tomorrow, except Legends knew it was bonkers from the outset and just ran with it, which gave it a higher feet-kicking outrageous entertainment value. But ultimately, yeah, I’ll give Inhumans a chance.
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Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets
Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets: much worse than it had to be.
I went to see this with a friend who’s visiting, and we agreed that it really was much worse than it had to be, which is different, perhaps a step up from, “not as good as it could have been.”
The dialogue, specifically the dialogue between leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, was excrutiating. They had roughly the chemistry of two wet paper towels (although that may be doing wet paper towels a disservice), and the attempt at a romantic storyline between them was very possibly the worst I’ve ever seen on film.
The stupid thing is that it was totally unnecessary. They could have eliminated all attempt at a romance and made them just partners and it would have improved the film 100% and cut it by at least 20 minutes, which would have improved it another 80%. (It would require at least another 10 minutes of cuts for cuts to improve it by a full 100%.)
Aside from the total lack of chemistry, DeHaan and Delevingne were desperately mis-cast in terms of size and physical attributes: they literally looked like children with their waifish forms, big eyes, delicate bone structures, and teensy tinsy heights. Everybody else (including the obviously very young and very, very pretty Kris Wu as a young sergeant that my companion and I said sadly to each other, “He’s obviously going to die,” as soon as he came on screen) looked like adults and towered over them. It was genuinely bizarre.
On the other hand, it turned out Delevingne, whom I’d only half-seen in the half-watched Suicide Squad, was really pretty good when not on screen with DeHaan, which made her character being sidelined a lot annoying even though I’m not a reader of the original comics, which are titled Valerian and Laureline and the characters evidently carry equal story weight. (My companion didn’t think she was as badly used as I did, so YMMV.) I want to see her in a well-written part, now, but I wish they’d cast somebody else in this role. Someone who didn’t look like a Wolfrider thrust amongst humans.
All that (and more) bitching aside, I’m not sorry I saw it. The effects were glorious, the maps from Valerian & Laureline to every piece of space opera from Star Wars onward were clearly and brilliantly overlaid, starting with a
Jabba the Hudefinitely not Jabba character and rolling right up through Avatar (we, in fact, kept referring to the main alien species as “the pale Avatar people”), the underlying story was decent, and the first five minutes were among the best I’ve ever seen in science fiction film making.Seriously: the first five minutes were worth the price of admission. Even if the rest of it had been irredeemably horrible (instead of just a lot worse than it needed to be) I would not have been sad to have seen it on the big screen just for the first five minutes. They were uplifting and hopeful and funny and poignant and *beautiful*.
Also Rihanna was wonderful. I love Rihanna anyway and although her introduction in the film was, um. Yes. It sure was um. Anyway. She was amazing in her small part and the movie would have been vastly improved if she’d been cast as Valerian. Unfortunately, what casting her *did* do was play up how poorly cast the leads were, because she was all emotion and riveting screen presence and completely overwhelmed DeHaan (Delevingne was only on screen with her for a few seconds), but dang, I loved her.
So I thought the bones of a good–even great–movie were in there, but they were tragically given body by two badly miscast leads and a script that needed to stop forcing romance onto a working relationship, and that’s genuinely too bad.
But really, man, the first five minutes. Wow.
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Birthday & Wonder Woman
So yesterday was my birthday and it is also the birthday of my many many birthday twins, but I wasn’t online much and so I failed to say happy birthday to Esmerel and Silkblade and Chaz’s niece and also Morgan Freeman and Marilyn Monroe and Superman (the first Superman comic was published June 1 1938 :)).
Happy birthday, twins, and thank you to everybody who wished me a happy day!
Ted and Indy snuck off and got a couple pieces of art that have been sitting around for a long time framed, for my birthday. I had no idea what they were plotting, even with Indy saying, “Daddy and I went to see a man to do a thing for you and the man said it should be ready by your birthday!”, which kind of vague meaningless information is often sufficient for me to figure out what’s going on. This time I didn’t, though, and I was absolutely *floored* to receive these:
I love both of these dearly, and was so surprised and happy! The raven is an artist’s copy of a painting done by an Alaskan artist who lives in Belfast (!!!). She had her copy at a convention to show the prints she was going to have done, but she offered to do an artist’s copy for me because we bonded so strongly over understanding Raven from an Alaskan’s point of view, and, being no fool, of course I said yes.
The other is by an artist whose name I can’t remember right now, but I bought it at…Eastercon a few years ago, and I just…love it. So much. I can look at that painting for *hours*. And while the photo does reasonable justice to the silver frame of the raven painting, it really does no justice at all to the greens and blues and silver-gold shimmers of the other frame. I may have to take a better picture at some point, because it really is gorgeous.
And then also for my birthday I got to go see Wonder Woman with a bunch of girlfriends, which was honestly a terrific way to see the movie. (The women going to the all-women showings at the Alamo Drafthouses in the states are going to have an AMAZING experience.) I looked down the row a few times, to see us all smiling like fools.
There were scenes…I know I’ve seen scenes like then before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever beamed through them before. Watching a woman, watching _Wonder Woman_, doing those things…it meant more to me than I ever imagined it would. I mean, I was looking forward to it, obviously, but…it still affected me more than I expected.
Gal Gadot is terrific as Diana. I mean, honestly, utterly terrific. I think she deserves an Oscar nomination. She was *amazing* in the role. Chris Pine is very funny and charming and this is probably the best-written part I’ve ever seen him in. And Robin Wright is just OH MY GOD. OH. MY. GOD.
There are a WHOLE BUNCH of things I’d have done differently. I would have liked to have seen what a female scriptwriter would have done with the story, for example. But it was funny and it was powerful and it had heart and it made me happy. I hope it makes ALL THE MONEY and I intend to do my part in seeing it more than once to help that goal. ♥
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Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast
Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast: exceeded my expectations by a considerable margin.
(Also, irrelevantly, I was sitting between two little girls who sang all the songs they knew, and an older woman who kept wiping her eyes, both of which I found pretty charming. :))
The showing I went to go see originally was sold out, which meant I basically spent four hours wandering vaguely around downtown Drogheda (spoiler: it hasn’t got 4 hours worth of entertainment in it) so I could go to the next one. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be worth four hours of puttering around.
I was, in fact, feeling pretty…cautious about it, overall. I hoped I’d like it. I wasn’t sure. The animated film has problems, especially with the timeline, that I figured would be extant in the live action version as well. I mean, obviously it was a *chance* to fix those problems, but every time I think an adaptation is going to take advantage of BEING AN ADAPTATION and FIX PROBLEMS WITH THE ORIGINAL, it doesn’t. So I didn’t have much faith.
But the screenplay was actually much stronger and dealt with…basically every issue I had with the animated movie. I was astonished. It had *other* problems, new ones of its own, but that’s what I want out of an adaptation, as expecting perfection is unreasonable. :)
Having JUST written my own version of BatB ([begin shameless self-promotion] ROSES IN AMBER [end shameless self-promotion]) there were moments early on where I went “oh but that’s not the way the story went,” but I got over those swiftly and settled back in to this being a new, improved version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And I really do think it was improved.
I shall have many thoughts, but not many spoilers, behind the cut.
