FilmRoar

I was just listening to the Podcast of the Delta Park Project and was quite amused by the Star Wars Name Game. To play the game you figure out your Star Wars name like this:

1. Take the last 3 letters of your first name, and reverse them. This is your first name:
Leopoldo = Odl = Odel
2. Take the name of the first car you drove. This is your last name:
1972 Plymouth Volare = Volare
3. And add ‘From the Planet of’ and the name of the last prescription drug you took:
Sulfasalazine

So that would make me ‘Odel Volare from the planet Sulfasalazine’. What is your Star Wars name?

If you are like me you might have seen the trailer for La Niña Santa (2004) and thought it looked like an enchanting movie of seduction, relationship and intrigue. Like me you see it is playing at the local art film house and decide you should not miss it. Well if you are anything like me you will be badly disappointed. I blame the trailer.

The trailer for The Holy Girl quotes other reviewers saying the movie has ‘great subtlety and intensity’, is ‘wickedly sharp’ and that ‘you leave the theatre in a state of quiet awe’. Subtlety, I will grant but there is nothing wicked, the movie is terribly dull and both myself and my two companions left the theater with a state of ‘what the fuck’ mixed in with ‘god that was boring’ and ‘can we change the subject to something a bit more interesting’. Worse still the trailer makes it seem that the girl (Amalia played by newcomer María Alche with some grace and intensity) is the principal character in the story but she turns out to be the least developed. The only character to be properly developed is her mother (Helena played by Mercedes Morán). A major plot problem develops around the third principal, the doctor (played by Carlos Belloso), who seems to be irresistible to the women around him for no apparent reason.

The intensity and excitement in the trailer is nowhere to be seen in this oddly cut Argentinean feature. There is one beautiful moment in the trailer where Amalia clears the water from her eyes and looks at Dr Jano who notices her with a worried look that is followed by a somewhat mischievous grin from Amalia. This scene never occurs! It is constructed from shots taken from three distinct parts of the movie and builds a kind interaction that would have been interesting to see in The Holy Girl but is entirely absent. To be honest to their audience they really should change their tag line to “Sometimes the desire for a good movie leads to the temptation to see a mediocre one.”

A new trailer for MirrorMask has just been posted. I still fear this movie.

What could have been a very good movie, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) suffers from an insurmountable lack of appeal that makes it watch able but barely memorable. The recent remake of the Thornton Wilder novel which was made into a 1929 part talkie and a later 1944 adaptation tells a genuinely interesting story. Brother Juniper (played here by Gabriel Byrne) has documented the fatal collapse of a rope bridge that connects two Andean mountains in Peru. By interviewing people who knew the five victims of the accident the monk attempts to discern whether their deaths were a punishment delivered by god or were purely accidental. The mere audacity of asking the question brings the ire of the Archbishop of Lima (played by Robert De Niro) who accuses the priest of heresy and threatens to burn both book and monk. The rest of the movie is an account of the relationships between a singer who is central to all characters (Pilar López de Ayala), a theater owner (Harvey Keitel), a socially inept Marquesa (Kathy Bates), the viceroy (F. Murray Abraham), twin mute theater workers (Mark and Michael Polish) and an AbbessGeraldine Chaplin. The impressive cast had given me hope for the movie but with the exception of a stellar performance by Chaplin and a very decent delivery by Abraham (a favorite actor of mine) there was little energy or charisma to the performance in the movie. Worse still Spain stood in for what should have been beautiful Peruvian hills and streets. The scenery and props felt fabricated not natural as does a great deal of the dialogue making for a disappointing waste of story and talent. Knowing what great things these actors are capable of I was left to wonder if perhaps a different director (the movie was directed by relative newcomer Mary McGuckian) might not have breathed a little life into the dead flop.

Beautiful and violent Oldboy (2003) is the story of Dae-su Oh, a man kidnapped from a phone booth and imprisoned for fifteen years. Dae-su begs his captors for some clue of what he has done but with no answers and no knowledge of how long he will be kept he resorts to documenting this sins and practicing fight moves he watches in TV provided in his one room cell. After fifteen years of captivity he is released and given fifteen days to determine who imprisoned him and why.

The rest of the movie plays as an intricate suspense intertwined with deep emotion and brutal fights. The secret of what has been going has some clues in the opening scenes but is mostly left as a surprise to be revealed in the last few scenes. I do however suggest that anyone watching pay close attention to all the characters and to odd statements made by characters that give clues to their relationships. I had clued into an important detail then convinced myself I was wrong before realizing it was a key clue in the movie. I also had to avert my eyes a couple of times in the movie during some particularly violent scenes.

One of the most impressive moments in the movie is a fight in a corridor where our hero fends off attacks from dozens of bad-guy thugs. The scene is very much like any you might find in a kung-fu movie except that in this case it is utterly believable. That scene alone makes Oldboy worth watching.

If you have already seen Revenge of the Sith (2005) then go read Revenge of the Sith: The Abridged Script, it is worth it.
Warning: Contains spoilers… well the whole movie was kind of spoiled but you know.