Movie: How to Train Your Dragon

It was awesome. This is an excellent kids movie. It teaches a lot of important lessons like using your head, and avoiding stereotypes without beating you over the head about it. It also has a fascinating mythology to the whole thing that is pervasive but comes nowhere near overwhelming anyone unfamiliar with the setting (and I certainly wasn't going into this.)

The summary of the story is that a child named Hiccup doesn't fit in with the rest of the village of Vikings that are routinely raided by Dragons. Obviously (since the title kind of gives it away) Hiccup ends up with a dragon that he has to deal with and bonds with it. The rest of the movie involves how Hiccup solves the challenges that brings him, including how to rectify being the friend of a dragon amongst a people that hate dragons and want to kill them on sight.

Movie: Inglorious Bastards

This movie is seven kinds of awesome. Basically it is a Quentin Tarantino movie about a group of US Jews who are sent behind Nazi lines to kill Nazis. That and the fact that it is basically a movie for those who felt the Nazis, especially the Nazi upper echelons that killed so many people and died before they could really be held accountable to the whole thing. I enjoyed it. There are a few elements of violence that are a little over the top, but since it largely involves blowing up nazis it is very hard to call it extreme. The ending is a classic that will be remembered for quite some time and the very very ending is even better.

In short, this is a movie worth watching.

Movie: Alice by Tim Burton

This was a good movie. It was my third favorite Tim Burton movie after Batman and Beetlejuice. First of all, it was visually stunning. It was pretty, haunting and unique, but not garish like some of Burton's works. His style seemed to work perfectly for wonderland. Second, I liked the plot. He managed to set it up in such a way that you have certain expectations about the world at Alice and the beginning which are pleasantly turned on their head in the middle of the story. Third, comparing it to the recent sci fi mini series of the same name, it also incorporates the original mythology but this time with the same character and the books. While it mixes and matches "Through the Looking Glass" and "Adventures in Wonderland" freely, it does so in a way that actually makes the story work well.

Fluffernutting is a nice easter egg. Depp's performance, some say, is upstaged by the Red Queen. This is true. By a long shot, but in this case that makes sense since the Red Queen is the primary villain of the story. Depp is not so insecure a performer that he'll overact just to be the main stay of the series and it reflects in this, despite the fact that it is marketed with Depp's hatter on the movie poster. The hatter isn't the main character, not even by a long shot, though he is among the most interesting.

I am entirely mixed about the statements it makes about how women are treated at the time. On the one hand, it does so in a personal and visible fashion. On the other hand...it has a ham fisted, almost forced feel to it, but to be fair; one cannot make a historically accurate piece without acknowledging it and Burton takes his worlds too seriously not to. I respect him as a film maker and simply hand waving it away was not warranted. Still, personally I'd have been a bit more subtle about it; not reducing the content in the story but minor changes to the dialog to bring the same point home.

Not that I'm Tim Burton mind you.

The film left the door wide open for a sequel so expect, "Through the Looking Glass" sometime in the next year or two.

Movie: Shutter Island

The last movie that Leonardo deCaprio did with Martin Scorsese directing it was 'the Aviator' which my Wife and I saw on our first date, so I'm not entirely unbiased about this, but nevertheless, I enjoyed it a great deal. The quality is good and it doesn't try too many gimicks, especially unfair gimicks to get its point across.

The basic premise of the movie is that two Federal marshals are called in to an asylum for the Criminally insane (note that it is not called Arkham) called Shutter Island 11 miles off the coast of California. The girl is gone when they get there, and the staff and patients are all behaving rather erratically, as if they are clearly hiding something. One doctor wants to use benevolent treatments while the other believes in old school treatments like Lobotomy, and there are hints early on of associations with the horrific German experiments at Auschwitz. The main character helped liberate the death camps in WWII and as such is highly suspicious of the older doctor.

In short, I liked it. The acting and the directing were perfect. The music score was occasionally a bit too overbearing and loud but I didn't notice it until after the fact when it was pointed out to me.

Movie: Batman - Gotham Knight

So the idea that a bunch of DC comics writers and Japanese anime artists collaborating to make Batman sounds neat...on paper. In practice what it means is that you end up with something similar to 2 out of 6 segments having awesome animation; 3 out of 6 segments having awesome writing and only 1 out of 6 segments having both. I think one of the things that hampered this was the idea that they were tying it in to the Dark Knight universe from Batman Begins (ie the highly popular movies) setting the story between them. They were obviously trying to go for something similar in scope to the Animatrix, but the thing is with the animatrix, the artists (I think) wrote their own scripts as well. I mean, had the anime people been able to take their own twist on Batman (as the whole video was originally marketed) I imagine that they would have been able to tell stories much more suited towards their animation style. I mean you could have had an homage to the 60's era Batman or the 90's cartoon or the Graphic Novel Dark Knight or even something wholly original. Instead they told a series of interlocking stories that could have been interesting but for the most part weren't.

The lesson from this is that one or two neat ideas might work in synergy...but three or four and you'd better wait to try it first with something simple before you take a huge leap into the abyss.

Play: Mama Mia!

Mamma Mia is an excellent play. It is essentially a story written around a stuttered medley of Abba disco songs. You can tell they created the plot primarily based on the lyrics of the songs but they mesh together in an almost seamless format. There was one minorly uncomfortable moment where the main female young lead sings what was clearly written as a love song but with ambiguous lyrics to her father “What’s the name of the game” in a much more different context, but in the end it managed to work well. The play itself is just plain fun and contains a high amount of energy. The costumes are well done. The set is fairly minimalist but since this is a quasi surrealistic musical it doesn’t really need stunning vistas. More over, they are able to cram an extremely large number of characters into only almost two hours and still make them dynamic, believable and quasi realistic. I highly recommend seeing it if you get a chance.

Movie Review - Terribly Happy

Terribly Happy is an interesting move entirely in Danish. The showing that we saw had a bizarre bit of Danish Film Festival propaganda about how cool Denmark was and how they were essentially the center of all things cultural, without actually seeming arrogant about it. It wasn’t really that bad but it was an interesting chaser right before the movie.

The basic premise of the film is that an out of favor cop from Copenhagen is sent to the middle of nowhere (and they spend like, the first three minutes of the film showing just how in the middle of nowhere it is) to be given a second chance and ‘do his time.’ The film states that it is based on ‘actual events’ however a careful search on my part could find absolutely no indication anywhere what those events were. I’ll explain below.

On the whole I enjoyed the movie. I found the actors and the plot moved at a reasonable clip and it had enough twists and turns that it easily drew you into it. The self described genre of the film is ‘Thriller’ and I found that appropriate. It has also been compared to Twin Peaks meets Northern Exposure. I think it has a little bit more Northern Exposure than Twin Peaks, because while there are no supernatural elements they do do a very good job of portraying just what life would be like in a very small Danish town in the middle of Southern Jutland (which is apparently the middle of nowhere.)

(Spoilers follow)

So, I spent like 30 minutes looking everywhere I could find on what the hell these ‘actual events’ were. The movie was based on a Danish novel called Frygtelig lykkelig by Erling Jepsen. After googling all of these people there was nothing mentioned about the actual events. Was it just a few events, like the fact that people died and they made wild speculation about it, or was it pretty damn close to the bizarre plot of the movie? The reason I wanted to look this is up is because, quite frankly, there is absolutely no explanation about how anything is discovered.

I know I said spoilers, but I don’t want to give too much away. But people DIE in this thing and the bodies are discovered, and the killer and many people involved end up going on their merry way (and yes, that’s not by itself the biggest spoiler of the damn movie….). So how did anyone see anything? As near as we can tell, the little girl who witnessed everything might have put the pieces together when she grew up and written a tell all or gone to court?

Who knows.