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Jan. 9th, 2012 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bobcatmoranHello! I am not dead! I had a lovely Christmas and New Year's in Minnesota. Awkward gatherings with my stepmom's side of the family were balanced out when me and my (Buddhist) sibs snuck out to visit some old family friends who were very close to our mom while everyone else went to church for Christmas service. The invitation had been carefully worded to exclude the parental units, since my dad has an unfortunate track record of making a horrible scene whenever we go out with him in public around our mom's friends and/or relatives. It's pretty embarrasing for all who are involved, and we had a perfectly wonderful evening without him there.
Then I got home and discovered that the home internets are still down, and are probably going to remain down for various reasons.
Meanwhile, I have been consuming all the media. Quick reviews follow. Cuts are for the cumulative length, not for spoilers beyond what's in trailers.
Hetalia: Paint it White
The good news about having the Funimation channel: I can watch the Hetalia movie. The bad news about having the Funimation channel: I can watch the Hetalia movie. Like pretty much all anime series-based movies, it's pretty much inaccessible if you're not already a fan. It was kind of funny for the continuity-related jokes, but based much more on Italy et al as characters than as personifications of countries, which means that the jokes are all stereotype-driven. Lots of England-France bickering, Italy waving white flags, America declaring loudly and repeatedly that he's the hero, etc.
The plot, such as it is, hangs around aliens who are on a mission to make Earth as bland and monotonous as their own planet. Italy, Germany, Japan, America, England, France, China, and Russia are the only ones left to save the planet from the alien menace. Well, okay, there's also Switzerland and his "little sister" Liechtenstein, protected by a "Barrier of Neutrality," but they're busy having a picnic while all this is going on. No, seriously.
I don't know if it was just something the Funimation channel was doing to pad out the running time, or the movie actually is this way, but there were a lot of shorter bits directly from the anime interspersed around the commercial breaks. Likewise, since the anime is a borderline gag dub, I have no idea how much what I saw resembles the movie as it was shown in Japan (I'm pretty sure Germany yelling, "There's no crying in alien invasions!" was not part of the original script). Anyway, long story short, a fairly good movie by the (very low) standards of movies whose only reason for existence is to eke more money from the pocketbooks of fans an anime and/or manga. Thoroughly mediocre by any other standards, although I give the end credits animation four stars for sheer adorkableness.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
If it weren't for Brad Bird directing this, I wouldn't have gone, having given up on the franchise after the second movie. But boy am I glad I did. It's an action movie with a great sense of fun about it. The plot only hangs together by the slimmest of margins — something about a madman getting his hands on a nuclear weapon? — but it's such a wild, enjoyable ride that I hardly noticed. There are a lot of great sendups of spy movie cliches, and the Tom-Cruise-climbs-the-Burj-Khalifa-skyscraper part that's featured in all the trailers is a real nail-biter even though I'd seen a good chunk of it already. If you're looking for a good way to get wasted, sneak a bottle of your alcoholic beverage of choice into the theater and take a drink every time you see an Apple product onscreen. Brad Bird is now 4-for-4 in my book. He also directed The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille.
The Muppets
Again, like the Hetalia movie, clearly made for fans and sort of locking out anyone new to the franchise. Just in case you didn't catch it from the title, this is a movie about The Muppets. The Muppets are in this movie, featuring The Muppets, and the movie makes sure that you know that this is a movie about The Muppets. Repeatedly.
It's a bit like reading a very good fanfic — the songs are all wonderful up to and including a barbershop quartet version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," there's a lot of great meta humor and lots and lots of in-jokes, and the creators obviously had a lot of respect and reverence for the original Muppet Show and movies. It was a great homage to the characters that Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and all the other original muppeteers created. But it never moves beyond being an homage, and although I'd still recommend it to Muppet fans everywhere, if Disney was looking to pull in a new generation of Muppet fans, I don't think this is a good way of doing it. All of the characters, aside from Gonzo, newcomers Walter and the '80s Robot, Rizzo the Rat, and Pepe the Shrimp (the latter two who only have cameos), have creators who have either passed away or retired from puppeteering. And in a sense, I think that's really frozen the characters and left them with a lose-lose situation where, on the one hand, if you change anything you risk messing with Jim Henson's legacy or Frank Oz wondering what the heck you did to Miss Piggy. On the other hand, if you don't change anything, there can't be any character development.
That said, '80s Robot? Hilarious, and used just the right amount to remain hilarious without becoming annoying. Overall, a great homage to the Muppets, well worth seeing if you're a fan, but skip it if you've never seen The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, or to a lesser degree The Great Muppet Caper or Muppets Take Manhattan.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Like most sequels, this doesn't quite live up to the first movie, but it's still enjoyable. Unfortunately, most of the best bits were in the trailers. This film is short on mystery, long on action — I honestly couldn't even tell you what Moriarty's big scheme was, aside from the bit where he was out to kill Watson in order to get at Holmes. I found that to be a bit of a shame, as one of the things I've always enjoyed about the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was that they were mysteries, and in this case there was barely enough given for me to even keep track of, although the fact that I saw this rather late at night might have something to do with it.
There's a lot of winking and nodding at the whole Watson/Holmes dynamic, and not just during the scene where Holmes disguises himself (terribly) as a woman.
The series' signature technique, where we see Holmes think out his meticulous butt-kicking in slow-motion and then watch him kick butt exactly how he had planned returns, although this time it's played with a little bit — I won't spoil it, but there's a spectacular payoff at the end.
Stephen Fry does a marvelous turn as Mycroft, Sherlock's older brother, and Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law continue to be awesome as Holmes and Watson, respectively. Unfortunately for any Adler fans in the audience, she makes only a very brief appearance — Mary, Watson's wife, gets more screentime, and the new female protagonist seems less of an intellectual match for Holmes. Fitting, I guess, for a less intellectual movie.
Quick sum-up: not as good as the first one, but still enjoyable.
The Adventures of Tintin
My dad had a sizeable portion of the Tintin comics, and I devoured them when I was in elementary school, soaking in the stories of the boy journalist who never seemed to actually file any stories but always had a lot of thrilling adventures. The Blue Lotus, Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Shooting Star, The Calculus Affair, and the book that this movie is partially based on, The Secret of the Unicorn. Now, granted, it's probably been about twenty years since I last read that book (oh, dang, that makes me sound old), but I still remembered bits — the pickpocket, the American in the blue suit, the secret behind the ship models — enough that there were very few surprises for me plot-wise.
That said, this delivered just about everything I could have wanted from a Tintin movie. The computer animation, which I was originally very skeptical about, largely manages to achieve a fine balance between realism and cartoonishness, without falling into the Uncanny Valley like so many other motion-capture films (e.g. Mars Needs Moms, The Polar Express, and anything else Robert Zemeckis has done lately). I suspect this is largely due to the extraordinary talents at Weta, the folks behind Gollum and Andy Serkis' other big motion-capture performance of the year as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Serkis plays Captain Haddock). It's all clearly taking place in a fantasy world — somewhere in Western Europe sometime in the interwar period — but the textures and the details of everything feel real to a degree that, dare I say it, even Pixar would be pressed to reach. Spielberg takes full advantage of the fact that this world is virtual to do some spectacular camerawork that would be impossible were this all taking place on a real, actual set.
As a side note, I saw this in 3-D, since that's the only way it was available at the local theater. I don't know if it was actually worth the extra $3, but I can say that the 3-D was well done, more on the level of Avatar than Clash of the Titans. Not gimmicky, just giving a greater depth of field, and thankfully not giving me a headache, unlike the preview for Beauty & The Beast in 3D (shame — that's my favorite Disney movie. I hope it'll be re-released in 2D as well).
The plot moves forward at a brisk pace, never feeling like it stalls out, and unlike Hetalia or The Muppets, this is a movie based on an existing franchise which I think would be totally accessible to newcomers. There are a lot of shout-outs for fans of the comic (that's Hergé himself doing the portraits at the beginning, all of them characters from other comics, for example), but you certainly don't need to be able to pick up on them in order to enjoy the movie. They're easter eggs, not plot points.
Also, if you have read the comics and have been bothered by the racism in some of them (they were written in the 1930s–70s and…um…let's just say they're a product of their age in some ways), that's avoided in the movie. True, they avoid it by not giving any non-European characters a speaking role, but at least there's no cringe-worthy moments so far as that's concerned.
Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It's got a real Indiana Jones sort of tone to it — the original trilogy, not the new one — and if you liked those movies, you'll probably like this one as well.
Sherlock 2x01: A Scandal in Belgravia
Ah, the other new Sherlock Holmes franchise that I totally fangirl — this would be the BBC series that stars Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, that is actually his name) and Martin Freeman, bringing the series into the modern era. This episode, the first of the second season, brings in Irene Adler, and unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of how her introduction turns a good portion of this episode into a big game of "Let's Explore Sherlock's Sexuality," and I'm definitely not a fan of the way that game was played. Much more than that would result in spoilers, but I will warn that Adler in this incarnation is a dominatrix.
Yeah.
Other than that, I did like the game of intellectual one-up-manship Sherlock and Irene played, the fact that all of John's blog posts have titles that are plays off of Doyle's story titles, and the big, juicy role that Mycroft had to play in all of it. I also took more delight than I probably should have at the terrible pun towards the end of the episode. There's also the fact that I actually said, out loud, twice, "Oh my god, John, what are you wearing?" Seriously, that Christmas sweater…wow.
Even with all the gender issues going on, I still found this more satisfying than the Sherlock Holmes movie, probably because it was much more tightly plotted despite being nearly as long.
Doctor Who Christmas Special ("The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe")
This was my first encounter with a Doctor Who Christmas special, and I have to say, I wasn't very impressed. I didn't really feel any sort of connection or sympathy for any of the characters — no, not even the newly widowed mother — and although I loved the idea of a planet full of living Christmas trees, I thought the whole plotline involving the forest was sort of painfully contrived. Like something out of a '90s environmental message, almost. Or maybe that's just my inner Ranger Rick reader keying onto the words "acid rain." There were a lot of great one-liners, some really neat moments, but overall, it was just sort of "meh." Not terrible, but not worth getting excited over, either.
Whew!
Then I got home and discovered that the home internets are still down, and are probably going to remain down for various reasons.
Meanwhile, I have been consuming all the media. Quick reviews follow. Cuts are for the cumulative length, not for spoilers beyond what's in trailers.
Hetalia: Paint it White
The good news about having the Funimation channel: I can watch the Hetalia movie. The bad news about having the Funimation channel: I can watch the Hetalia movie. Like pretty much all anime series-based movies, it's pretty much inaccessible if you're not already a fan. It was kind of funny for the continuity-related jokes, but based much more on Italy et al as characters than as personifications of countries, which means that the jokes are all stereotype-driven. Lots of England-France bickering, Italy waving white flags, America declaring loudly and repeatedly that he's the hero, etc.
The plot, such as it is, hangs around aliens who are on a mission to make Earth as bland and monotonous as their own planet. Italy, Germany, Japan, America, England, France, China, and Russia are the only ones left to save the planet from the alien menace. Well, okay, there's also Switzerland and his "little sister" Liechtenstein, protected by a "Barrier of Neutrality," but they're busy having a picnic while all this is going on. No, seriously.
I don't know if it was just something the Funimation channel was doing to pad out the running time, or the movie actually is this way, but there were a lot of shorter bits directly from the anime interspersed around the commercial breaks. Likewise, since the anime is a borderline gag dub, I have no idea how much what I saw resembles the movie as it was shown in Japan (I'm pretty sure Germany yelling, "There's no crying in alien invasions!" was not part of the original script). Anyway, long story short, a fairly good movie by the (very low) standards of movies whose only reason for existence is to eke more money from the pocketbooks of fans an anime and/or manga. Thoroughly mediocre by any other standards, although I give the end credits animation four stars for sheer adorkableness.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
If it weren't for Brad Bird directing this, I wouldn't have gone, having given up on the franchise after the second movie. But boy am I glad I did. It's an action movie with a great sense of fun about it. The plot only hangs together by the slimmest of margins — something about a madman getting his hands on a nuclear weapon? — but it's such a wild, enjoyable ride that I hardly noticed. There are a lot of great sendups of spy movie cliches, and the Tom-Cruise-climbs-the-Burj-Khalifa-skyscraper part that's featured in all the trailers is a real nail-biter even though I'd seen a good chunk of it already. If you're looking for a good way to get wasted, sneak a bottle of your alcoholic beverage of choice into the theater and take a drink every time you see an Apple product onscreen. Brad Bird is now 4-for-4 in my book. He also directed The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille.
The Muppets
Again, like the Hetalia movie, clearly made for fans and sort of locking out anyone new to the franchise. Just in case you didn't catch it from the title, this is a movie about The Muppets. The Muppets are in this movie, featuring The Muppets, and the movie makes sure that you know that this is a movie about The Muppets. Repeatedly.
It's a bit like reading a very good fanfic — the songs are all wonderful up to and including a barbershop quartet version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," there's a lot of great meta humor and lots and lots of in-jokes, and the creators obviously had a lot of respect and reverence for the original Muppet Show and movies. It was a great homage to the characters that Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and all the other original muppeteers created. But it never moves beyond being an homage, and although I'd still recommend it to Muppet fans everywhere, if Disney was looking to pull in a new generation of Muppet fans, I don't think this is a good way of doing it. All of the characters, aside from Gonzo, newcomers Walter and the '80s Robot, Rizzo the Rat, and Pepe the Shrimp (the latter two who only have cameos), have creators who have either passed away or retired from puppeteering. And in a sense, I think that's really frozen the characters and left them with a lose-lose situation where, on the one hand, if you change anything you risk messing with Jim Henson's legacy or Frank Oz wondering what the heck you did to Miss Piggy. On the other hand, if you don't change anything, there can't be any character development.
That said, '80s Robot? Hilarious, and used just the right amount to remain hilarious without becoming annoying. Overall, a great homage to the Muppets, well worth seeing if you're a fan, but skip it if you've never seen The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, or to a lesser degree The Great Muppet Caper or Muppets Take Manhattan.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Like most sequels, this doesn't quite live up to the first movie, but it's still enjoyable. Unfortunately, most of the best bits were in the trailers. This film is short on mystery, long on action — I honestly couldn't even tell you what Moriarty's big scheme was, aside from the bit where he was out to kill Watson in order to get at Holmes. I found that to be a bit of a shame, as one of the things I've always enjoyed about the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was that they were mysteries, and in this case there was barely enough given for me to even keep track of, although the fact that I saw this rather late at night might have something to do with it.
There's a lot of winking and nodding at the whole Watson/Holmes dynamic, and not just during the scene where Holmes disguises himself (terribly) as a woman.
The series' signature technique, where we see Holmes think out his meticulous butt-kicking in slow-motion and then watch him kick butt exactly how he had planned returns, although this time it's played with a little bit — I won't spoil it, but there's a spectacular payoff at the end.
Stephen Fry does a marvelous turn as Mycroft, Sherlock's older brother, and Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law continue to be awesome as Holmes and Watson, respectively. Unfortunately for any Adler fans in the audience, she makes only a very brief appearance — Mary, Watson's wife, gets more screentime, and the new female protagonist seems less of an intellectual match for Holmes. Fitting, I guess, for a less intellectual movie.
Quick sum-up: not as good as the first one, but still enjoyable.
The Adventures of Tintin
My dad had a sizeable portion of the Tintin comics, and I devoured them when I was in elementary school, soaking in the stories of the boy journalist who never seemed to actually file any stories but always had a lot of thrilling adventures. The Blue Lotus, Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Shooting Star, The Calculus Affair, and the book that this movie is partially based on, The Secret of the Unicorn. Now, granted, it's probably been about twenty years since I last read that book (oh, dang, that makes me sound old), but I still remembered bits — the pickpocket, the American in the blue suit, the secret behind the ship models — enough that there were very few surprises for me plot-wise.
That said, this delivered just about everything I could have wanted from a Tintin movie. The computer animation, which I was originally very skeptical about, largely manages to achieve a fine balance between realism and cartoonishness, without falling into the Uncanny Valley like so many other motion-capture films (e.g. Mars Needs Moms, The Polar Express, and anything else Robert Zemeckis has done lately). I suspect this is largely due to the extraordinary talents at Weta, the folks behind Gollum and Andy Serkis' other big motion-capture performance of the year as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Serkis plays Captain Haddock). It's all clearly taking place in a fantasy world — somewhere in Western Europe sometime in the interwar period — but the textures and the details of everything feel real to a degree that, dare I say it, even Pixar would be pressed to reach. Spielberg takes full advantage of the fact that this world is virtual to do some spectacular camerawork that would be impossible were this all taking place on a real, actual set.
As a side note, I saw this in 3-D, since that's the only way it was available at the local theater. I don't know if it was actually worth the extra $3, but I can say that the 3-D was well done, more on the level of Avatar than Clash of the Titans. Not gimmicky, just giving a greater depth of field, and thankfully not giving me a headache, unlike the preview for Beauty & The Beast in 3D (shame — that's my favorite Disney movie. I hope it'll be re-released in 2D as well).
The plot moves forward at a brisk pace, never feeling like it stalls out, and unlike Hetalia or The Muppets, this is a movie based on an existing franchise which I think would be totally accessible to newcomers. There are a lot of shout-outs for fans of the comic (that's Hergé himself doing the portraits at the beginning, all of them characters from other comics, for example), but you certainly don't need to be able to pick up on them in order to enjoy the movie. They're easter eggs, not plot points.
Also, if you have read the comics and have been bothered by the racism in some of them (they were written in the 1930s–70s and…um…let's just say they're a product of their age in some ways), that's avoided in the movie. True, they avoid it by not giving any non-European characters a speaking role, but at least there's no cringe-worthy moments so far as that's concerned.
Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It's got a real Indiana Jones sort of tone to it — the original trilogy, not the new one — and if you liked those movies, you'll probably like this one as well.
Sherlock 2x01: A Scandal in Belgravia
Ah, the other new Sherlock Holmes franchise that I totally fangirl — this would be the BBC series that stars Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, that is actually his name) and Martin Freeman, bringing the series into the modern era. This episode, the first of the second season, brings in Irene Adler, and unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of how her introduction turns a good portion of this episode into a big game of "Let's Explore Sherlock's Sexuality," and I'm definitely not a fan of the way that game was played. Much more than that would result in spoilers, but I will warn that Adler in this incarnation is a dominatrix.
Yeah.
Other than that, I did like the game of intellectual one-up-manship Sherlock and Irene played, the fact that all of John's blog posts have titles that are plays off of Doyle's story titles, and the big, juicy role that Mycroft had to play in all of it. I also took more delight than I probably should have at the terrible pun towards the end of the episode. There's also the fact that I actually said, out loud, twice, "Oh my god, John, what are you wearing?" Seriously, that Christmas sweater…wow.
Even with all the gender issues going on, I still found this more satisfying than the Sherlock Holmes movie, probably because it was much more tightly plotted despite being nearly as long.
Doctor Who Christmas Special ("The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe")
This was my first encounter with a Doctor Who Christmas special, and I have to say, I wasn't very impressed. I didn't really feel any sort of connection or sympathy for any of the characters — no, not even the newly widowed mother — and although I loved the idea of a planet full of living Christmas trees, I thought the whole plotline involving the forest was sort of painfully contrived. Like something out of a '90s environmental message, almost. Or maybe that's just my inner Ranger Rick reader keying onto the words "acid rain." There were a lot of great one-liners, some really neat moments, but overall, it was just sort of "meh." Not terrible, but not worth getting excited over, either.
Whew!
