Sun, 16 Nov 2008

Madagascar : Escape 2 Africa

I watched this with my wife and our 5-year old daughter. It was enjoyable, but we all found it not as good as the first movie. The story was not very interesting. Strip out jokes, running gags, funny cultural references and this is a fairly thin bit of story telling.

My daughter even said the first one was much better immediately after watching. I feel that perhaps it was overloaded with characters. You have the four main characters, the crazy grandma, the penguins, the safari tourists, the zebras, the lions, the hippos, King Julian and his sidekick, Mort+ shark, the Monkey brothers etc etc. The plot felt like a watered-down Lion King.

Also somewhat spoiling our enjoyment, the print was extremely worn. This movie has only been out a week. We will probably give this another go on DVD when that comes out, but NOT recommended for a family movie theater outing given the total expense these days.

posted at: 12:08 | path: /films | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 18 May 2005

Revenge of the Sith

I was thrilled to see a preview screening of Star Wars Episode III this afternoon. I had to take a 1/2 day off work but it was worth it.

I'd go along with a lot of what has been written in the favorable reviews, and also some of the negative ones.

The only thing left to say is the bits that I noticed that I hadn't read about already. Don't read any further if you are avoiding spoilers!

• Padme with "Princess Leia" hair.
• Senator Bail Organa's ship is similar to the fleeing "diplomatic" ship which Princess Leia is caught in in episode IV.
• The burning Jedi Council building was disturbing. It brought back memories of 9/11 for me. There is a real whiff of atrocity in the air during these scenes - something bad happening downtown.
• Senator Palpatine starts to use his "Emperor Voice" at a distinct moment in the film.

My feeling is George Lucas did not wimp out as much as I expected him to. He's bridged the two trilogies amazingly well, and ultimately it was about as good as it possibly could have been.

He also seemed to expand his own range, managing to intermix truly political observations with farce and physical humor.

I heard that Steven Spielberg cried at the end, and in a different setting i might have come close myself. Certainly the film made me sad. I knew a lot of Jedi weren't going to make it, but I wasn't ready for most of them to be summarily shot in the back. I also hadn't considered that there are Jedi kids at the academy.

Lucas' dialog is as bad as ever, I now like to think that in fact they didn't speak English a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, so in fact everything spoken in the film has been translated at least once, possibly many times. In fact, once you accept that, the dialog makes absolutely perfect sense. One day maybe someone will fix it, with an idiomatic overdubbing, but until then we must make do with flat computer generated dictionary speak dialog. It's a small price to pay.

posted at: 22:22 | path: /films | permanent link to this entry