Jun 28
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third entry in the film series, takes a new direction with the series and is darker and funnier than the first two pictures. Chris Columbus serves as producer this time around and Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón directs. The action comes fast and furious and there’s a distinct style to the flick, something almost quirky.
Apr 3
As well-crafted and well-acted as Million Dollar Baby is, it can’t quite shake the trappings of similar “issue” movies and drags as it works toward the inevitable conclusion. The Clint Eastwood picture won the Best Picture Oscar, with the filmmaker also picking up Best Director, Hilary Swank winning Best Actress and Morgan Freeman winning Best Supporting Actor.
The screenplay comes from Paul Haggis, whose work has sometimes been very good at handling issues (In the Valley of Elah) and sometimes very manipulative (Crash). Million Dollar Baby falls in the latter camp. While it begins well, the road it takes as it nears the famed and much-ballyhooed conclusion is surprisingly bland. The attempts to sensitively handle a serious issue become games of one-upmanship, with increasingly more problems paving the way to soften the inevitable blow.
The Notebook is one of those ooey-gooey Nicholas Sparks things that has the kids all crazy, apparently. The 2004 flick was and is immensely popular, somewhat like Titanic in the late 90s and the Twilight series now. It’s a movie about getting the equations down, about setting the scenes properly and about ticking all the focus group boxes. As such, it’s an entirely bland exercise in filmmaking and an insult to real romance.
The Sparks equation is something we’ve seen before. This time, Nick Cassavetes has the divine honour of bringing the mush to the big screen. He’s the director behind John Q and My Sister’s Keeper. In the case of The Notebook, the job is to bring an epic romance to life using all the cheap cornball tricks in the book.
The reason the American remake of Shall We Dance? fails to engage is because it lacks the cultural impact of the original Masayuki Suo film. The American version gets to use a host of stars like Jennifer Lopez, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci. It uses the Pussycat Dolls on the soundtrack and feels somewhat “hipper.” In terms of any emotional connection, however, the 2004 version pales in comparison to the 1996 Japanese film.
I almost consider Suo’s picture to be a masterpiece for its genre. It is a light but important motion picture about what it means to be a stoic man in Japan. It is about freedom, too. But when Gere’s John Clark takes dance lessons, it’s hard to buy that the same cultural pressures are impeding his ability to tell his wife or talk about dance out in the open. The stigma just doesn’t convince.
Meh.
Picking up where 2001′s The Princess Diaries left off, this Disney picture attempts to encapsulate the notion of royalty and female empowerment with the typical gloss expected from the company. It’s directed by Garry Marshall and features a pretty good cast in theory, all things, but it never quite gets off the ground and does little to entertain beyond the girl demographic.
Truth be told, Disney’s “princess” films are certainly targeted at young girls and they doubtlessly press all the right buttons. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement features everything a young female is supposed to enjoy: fashion, princesses, princes, dukes, lords, parades, tiaras, and so forth.
