War of the Worlds

I was reserving my opinion on this one till I saw it again. Was so sensorily overwhelmed by the first viewing at the cinema, that all I had remembered was the experience of the joyride, not the actual joyride.

So the second viewing on DVD is a massive disappointment. Unlike in cinema, my experience of watching War of the Worlds sans the sensory overload was bad. Out of nowhere, the discrepancies propped up and ruined it all for me.

Firstly, the film looks bad. Either the camera used throughout is the jaded one from the 80s or there is some deliberate manipulation by filters etc. Whatever the reason, the film looks woefully jaded. None of the slickness and sharpness in the picture that one would expect from a present day sci-fi fest. I’d barely noticed it in cinema but on DVD it was so obvious, it made my mom quip “Is this the new War of the Worlds?” The effect, to put it more colloquially, reminds one of playing a long-forgotten video of Star Trek on VCR.

This poor camerawork/deliberate manipulation dampen the special effects to near-nil. The tripods, aliens and the works simply don’t look as sinister as say in Independence Day.

The background score is a joke. Its so over the top and so cliched (the usual loud bangs and crescendos), makes one laugh. Another factor which inhibits any chilling effect of tripod/invasion. Works bigtime in cinema when you lounge away with popcorn for cheap thrills like these, but on DVD it gives one splitting headache.

The dialogues are pathetic. Its like there’s a huge attempt at being un-cheesy, but the resulting blandness simply doesn’t involve the viewer in this short movie.

Oh yea, the movie is way too short to leave any impact whatsoever. At 112 minutes, its way too quick, the buildup way too haphazard and ineffective, the characters all bland, sketchy and uninvolving and to top it all–the climax, which except for die-hard purists, comes across as stupid and hare-brained to almost everyone else (including yours truly). The abruptness kills whatever impact the film had.

And then there are the gaping holes in screenplay–How come an airplane crash that left the whole house and half the neighbourhood smashed manages to miss out the hero’s van in the open driveway? And amidst the huge blast in the valley which sends every army truck and soldier ablaze, how is it that the hero’s son emerges scratch-less in the climax from, hold your breath, his city home?

Acting’s pretty functional. Cruise is one of my favourites and he gives it all to the un-sentimental protagonist. Dakota Fanning’s awesome and so is the guy who plays Robbie. There’s little anyone else has to do and one hates Tim Robbins’ nerve-grating character for taking so much of this already snappy-short film.

Anything that saves the day?

Well, you have to give it to Spielberg for not showing American landmarks being smashed, Manhattan getting grounded, the usual politico balderdash with the American president coming in the climax to congratulate, the fight with the aliens, presence of aliens throughout etc. (The latter two, it must be said, work bigtime against the movie for an average viewer) Problem is there’s little creativity to compliment his bravery. Some dad-daughter personal sequences jacked off from the masterful Signs don’t a different film make.

Still, a few sequences stand out–like when the daughter’s blindfolded and sings a lullaby to herself as her dad hacks away the irritating survivalist (brings back the memory of LOTR-ROTK when that Hobbit whatsitsname is singing and the beautiful song forms a background to the painful demise of Faramir in Minas Tirith). Coupling this innocence with something as disturbing as murder accentuates the latter’s effect by a ten fold. The tripods’ are admittedly well put together too and the handful of scenes where you see them in the full abandon are the sole high points of the movie.

Its also somewhat difficult to erase the memory of the wonderful experience of the cinema but surely if the film was solid in content and technique… some of that would have been evident on 2nd time viewing. Sadly, there’s too little of that. Repeat value for a blockbuster film like this, is surprisingly, near zero.

My rating after first viewing: ****
My rating after second (and final) viewing: ** & 1/2 (Overall, a quirky, bizzarre film that attempts to be “different” but in the end becomes little else than “a one-time watch and forget affair”)

PS: The DVD extras are alright. There’s no extra footage being shot but dutiful homage is given to the 1950s cinematic adaptation (so tacky, you’ll faint laughing) and H.G. Wells. Usual interviews and computer wizardry chronicled in detail, but everything seems a useless exercise when the actual movie loses its sheen in one viewing.

Sin City!

Sin City: Load of bull!

The analogy is simple-the fact that European languages can be written using English alphabets still doesn’t make them any more accessible to an English speaking person as languages written in other scripts, like Arabic etc.–one still needs to know the grammar, the rules, the subtlities and so on. In the same way, books/comics/comic strips–when adapted to the big screen have a great responsibility at hand–making the uninitiated familiar with the grammar, the innards of the story. Something which the makers of LOTR and HP might have managed, but the makers of Sin City are way off the mark.

Here, there’s just so much compulsive obsession about getting every single frame look exactly like in the comic strip, that the end result ends up being just that–a collage of frames sans emotion, sans depth, sans substance. There isn’t much to write home about the style too. Resembling something of a hybrid between Kill Bill and second grade animation, the sole point of the movie–violence–comes across as so alarmingly disappointing, its pitiably funny. Everything in the canvas looks constructed (which it is)—right from the buildings to the cars to the whole environment—there isn’t a single pixel that evokes a sense of grittiness. Everything’s calculatedly ghetto-cized by some imaginative designer but the “plastic” feel is so imminent, its frustrating to watch (this, when the film was supposed to be a peek at a dark fictitious city with rough-and-grimy streets and dangerous people).

And then there’s this thing called “action”. Yup, Sin City packs in about a millionth of adrenaline rush in the action sequences as fighting with your Gijoes at home might give. In true Kill Bill style, there’s the usual slashing, hacking, body parts flying, weapons aimed from sky, pistols backfiring, fistfighting, speed chasing– all looking like some cheap third person shooting video game in auto mode.

There are no characters to speak of. Some loser from nowhere who gets a hit everytime he slashes gets all senti when a hooker he sleeps with is mysteriously found dead in bed. Turns out its some twisted tale of some godforsaken Senator buying a cannibalistic psycho to do the job (Yawn). Then there’s another cliched storyline of some random ex-photographer accidently killing off a cop (since the cop’s taken his disguise a wee bit too seriously) and alongwith some hooker-female fighter army (who together run a part of city called “Old Town” or something…LOL) tries to cover his tracks by doing some more slashing and hacking. And finally, there’s this almost-retired cop who is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit (the same old yarn of a wronged honest cop taken for a ride by politicians etc).

The females particularly have 2 jobs– to flaunt their anatomy and to launch into Uma Thurman style hacking. In typical noir fashion, the males do little else than frown, punch, sh*g, frown some more and punch even more. Surprisingly, the film’s choc-a-bloc full of truly able performers, who unknowingly and valiantly try to give some meaning to the going ons. But the screenplay and direction being so stilted the way it is–only a handful of their attempts yield anything watchable. Of the ensemble, the three leading men–Bruce Willis as the wronged cop Hartigan, Clive Owen as the ex-photographer and Mickey Rourke as the Hellboy-ish Marv manage to be effective. It goes without saying, that the kind of potential the script and the actors had, all that was needed was to turn the comic strip into an entertaining screenplay. Which is what the makers muck up, bigtime.

The dialogue writer takes his job a tad bit too seriously in this make-believe plastic fest, and tries being all ironic and philosophical and rough in every line. Not surprising then that every one of these lines falls flat. It doesn’t help much at all when there’s an irritating voiceover which reads like one long dry monologue throughout the 2 hours (after about 15 minutes, everything being said on this commentary registered as blah blah blah by my brain–that’s how uninvolving is the film). Read the following line from the movie:

Marv (loser-hitman of 1st story): The night’s as hot as hell. It’s a lousy room in a lousy part of a lousy town - I’m staring at a goddess. She’s telling me she wants me. I’m not going to waste one more minute wondering how I’ve gotten this lucky. She smells like angels ought to smell, the perfect woman… the Goddess. Goldie. She says her name is Goldie.

The whole movie is flush with such boring, inane lines being blurted in the background as if the viewers are some kindergarten kids. No scene is allowed to speak for itself–you always have someone blah-blahing all the way through it.

One couldn’t care less for the three stories and their respective characters—the film’s pure sh*t on toast somehow being revered thanks to Tarantino’s name tag attached to it (who IMHO gets way more hype than he’s worth).

Very pseudo both in style and content, totally dry, repulsively sexist and shallower than any of the umpteen horror movies put together, in one word Sin City is just that–BRAINDEAD.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

My rating: *** and 1/2

The aficionado that I am for this scarhead character, the least I could do to remind myself of my fanship is to catch the latest screen adaptation on the first day of its release. And after a very long time indeed, I felt sorry. No need to get impatient yet. If you think I am going to spend the rest of my review slashing the movie to pieces, you couldn’t be more…. oh well read on.

Adapted from what I consider to be the real series defining book (even more definitive reading than the 1st 3 instalments put together)–the action was so fast I was sweating, the pace so frenetic it got me dizzy, and the sequences, scares, surprises, revelations, creatures, magic so crazily yet so intelligently built up for the absolute grand finale that 2 years on and the experience of reading was still fresh by July this year. And then the Half Blood Prince came out. And I re-read parts of Goblet of Fire again to get my facts right

Which meant that I went to the movie with a lot of baggage indeed and this is why I felt sorry for myself as I sat there for 3 hours munching my popcorn away. It was like seeing a thriller when you know the twists, when you know who kills who and who dies in the end. And to make it even worse was the film, yes Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, itself— a film so amazingly yet so obediently adapted that everytime a well-shot scary sequence came with a “bang” and someone screamed in the theatre, I just sat there like “Oh well, I saw that coming for over 5 minutes now”. And throughout the whole movie, it was all about “Tom Riddle’s house is just as I had imagined”, “Oh no, Cho is nowhere as cute as I’d thought she’d be”, “Dammit, they don’t have house-elves or what”, “Ah, the Dark Mark is scarier than I had thought” “But wasn’t the maze sequence longer?”.

As hard as I would have liked to try, except for the intense climax (an integral twist of which I had conveniently forgotten… to my respite let me add), I couldn’t view it as a first timer. The fact that Goblet of Fire is such a pure action-and-plot oriented enterprise (probably the most in the series) with little attention to characters which had been fleshed out to their max by and till Prisoner of Azkaban, and as I said earlier, the film being such a wonderful adaptation (read translation), didn’t help the cause at all.

So in a way I was envious of all those who had discovered Potter just through the big screen and just sat there going through, I bet, one hell of a joyride. Of course, I have been consoling myself since I came out of the cinema, by remembering those nail-biting 6 or so hours in which I had raced through the book and been through all those motions in the silence of the room. In a way, that kind of un-manipulated thrill can never be competed by the audio-visual manipulation of a movie and also the fact that one is at the mercy of someone else’s vision throughout cannot just be shrugged off.

And thus, with all my justifications which have consoled me to the point where I can stop wincing, stop moaning and start concentrating on what I had come here to write about, let me review the film.

First, the performances. As the exceedingly photogenic and undoubtedly talented trio, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson turn in sparkling performances with not a twitch of confused acting. Thoroughbreds now that they are, this being their fifth year acting in this enterprise, they’ve evidently given every shot of theirs, the very best and have made Harry, Ron and Hermoine as adorable and lively as Rowling’s characters could be. Being not a character oriented film at all, evil regulars like Alan Rickman (Snape) and Tom Felton (Draco) have next to no role here but with the Great Lord Voldemort himself (Ralph Fiennes fiendishly and deliciously playing to the gallery) making his presence, I doubt if you’d care. James and Oliver Phelps are awesome as the ruffly cocky Weasley brothers; then there’s Miranda Richardson who makes the character of Rita Skeeter even bitchier, there’s Jeff Rawle whose cries for his dead son towards the finale stay with you long after the scene’s gone, there’s Brendan Gleeson whose Mad Eye Moody is fabulously over-the-top and finally there’s Stainslav M as the enigmatic Victor Krum who couldn’t be more suitably cast. Michael Gambon, though, as Dumbledore is perhaps a bit too animated sometimes.

The screenplay is a terrific image of the book, and for maximum effect, the flab (ie. Hermoine, her concern for house-elves and her SPEW plus the actual match of the Quidditch World Cup) is completely gotten rid of– to focus solely on the daddy of all the events in the series–the Triwizard Tournament. And though the tasks are shorter and snappier than a purist like me would have liked, the thrill factor is kept high. One thing for which this film would always remain ingrained is the finale—the thrill and the shock value isn’t dampened by any unnecessary editing. The length, the twists and the actual sequence is just right.

The canvas is huuuuuge. CGi splendid. Camerawork exquisite. Which means that sequences like the Dark Mark being conjured, the fire-breathing dragon chasing Harry on the broom, the Merpeople dragging him down with their tentacles and Voldemort emerging from a boiling cauldron are a treat for the senses. The sound design, though functional, could definitely have done with more background score in both action and dialogue sequences. Maybe this was deliberate, but in more than one sequence I felt my eyes were having more fun than my ears. Also, one tends to miss the moving staircases, the talking portraits and strangely enough The Great Hall is deceptively small. There are no special filters used by the look of it, and the film’s canvas carries on the unforgivingly gritty and rough look from Prisoner of Azkaban. Dialogues are fantastic and the humour, tastefully nuanced.

All in all, a remarkable film where my own movie-watching experience was spoiled by being a compulsive reader. But I am sure I am not the only one.

PS: Big thumbs up to Mike Newell. I so badly wish he was directing the sinister and cerebral next one too.