June Film Fest!

So I've actually been going to the movies again. I think the grand total is something like four films in the past month, at various prices and with various people. Here's a brief run-down and reviews:

-Madagascar-- saw this with Ed, Erin and assorted "crew" after Brett and Autumn's wedding. The idea was to go see War of the Worlds, which Ed swore opened a week earlier or something. It didn't. It STILL isn't in theatres. Anyway, in its absence we opted for this, a zany computer animated movie about zoo animals who return to the jungle. The penguins were funny, but the lemers were really creepy to me -- the way they were animated made them look like they were people wearing animal masks with big googly eyes, like something from a nightmare. No one else I went with seemed bothered by it, though. Maybe I'm the only one who has those nightmares. It was funny enough, but not exactly compeling. By the time the movie actually started adressing questions about natural instincts (lions eat zebras!) versus learned, domesticated behaviors (lions and zebras are best friends!) it was too late to really explore them with any depth, and anyway 'the brutality of nature' makes an odd theme for a children's movie. They had a musical montage where cuddly animals were snatched into the jaws of ferocious predators. I laughed and was entertained by the whole thing, but I don't know if I would have sat through it on video, in the comfort of my home, with better things to do.

-The Sisterhood of the Traveling Magical Pants-- or something like that. Saw this one under similar circumstances with Erin while we were in Wisconsin. We found some free movie passes in a drawer while organizing her room (or I may have just been snooping through her stuff), and decided to go see Batman Begins since it was listed on the Internet as playing at 12:05 PM on Tuesday. I figured maybe it was a special noon-time sneak-preview, but no, when we got to the theatre, we found out that the listing should have been for midnight on Wednesday. I'm still not sure who got their AMs and PMs mixed up. So we went to go see this story about four teenage girls coming of age instead, as 1). Erin is a girl, and 2). it had gotten good reviews. The movie starts out with the girls doing female bonding stuff as they grow up and prepare to spend their first summer apart, and I had the keen sense that I was somewhere I very much did not belong. I felt as if I had crossed some unnatural boundary into a land where hearts and crushnames are scribbled on binders, and menstration is discussed in vauge, yet shockingly frank terms, and I wanted very much to find another theatre where things were just simply racing around and exploding. However, once the movie kicked into gear and the girls embarked on their various adventures, both specacular and mundane, I really started to appreciate it. There was a remarkable ansence of cliches and a surprising depth of emotion. I may have cried, but I'm not telling. Even the least engaging plot took place in an Italian fishing villiage, so it was beautifully shot, and a film as dramatically packed as this one was probably needed the room to breath anyway. As a writer I was also impressed with the way they kept the various plots from seeming like more than just a series of vingettes and kept the plot constantly moving. I recommend it, even if you are a boy.

-Batman Begins-- Once back in California, I did go see this, with Ed, Nicole and "crew," and was thoughrougly entertained. The plot had a cool way of just growing into something bigger, so that Batman always had another challange around the corner. Very cool, scriptwise, and I was impressed by how many characters and how much plot they were able to pack in effectively without really any dragging spots. It was much, much tighter than Spider-Man 2 (which I loved) in this regard. The acting was solid all around, and I thought Tom Wilkinson was especially brilliant in a few spots as a mob boss, but really, take your pick -- great, comic book performances throughout the whole movie. I do take issue with the film's ethics, though, as Batman esentially kills twenty evil men because he refuses to kill one evil man (even though he probably does in the process), and at one point sends a character to his death saying "I'm not going to kill you, but I don't have to save you." It's like he's tricking himself into thinking that he has a code of morality about killing people, but really all he's trying to escape is guilt. The filmmakers don't seem totally oblivious to these issues, which means the moral slips might be part of Batman's character, but it's never made very clear. This didn't stop me from enjoing the movie, but does preventing me from being able to wholeheartedly endorse it.

-Star Wars III-- I was afraid that I might never see this because the second one was so bad (I still haven't seen the third Matrix movie), but finally went to see it on Thursday with Ed and Kyle, who I hadn't actually seen in over a year since we were both studying in Granada at opposite times. I did not enjoy the movie as a film student, or really as a Star Wars fan, but other than that, it might be OK. As a film student I object to the bizarre, half-hearted plot and completely obvious and unimaginative dialouge. No one says anything that stands out as funny, clever, or really even notable. It's as if the idea of subtext never entered the writers' minds. As a Star Wars fan I object to a lot of little details I won't bore you non-Star Wars fans with. I think I've vocalized all of them at one point, and I'm happy to let it rest now. There were at least two action sequences that were quite good, although inconsequential, and I did like the melodramatic new bad guy they introduced for no reason. The moments of goodness, however, don't make up for the fact that every single Star Wars movie has had less CHARM than the previous one, and as the last film made, this one is nearly suffocating for moments that don't feel like part of a very calculated (yet deficinet) outline.

-Land of the Dead-- wow, I guess I've been to the theatre five times in the last month! Saw this one rather spur of the moment while visiting Peter up in L.A. when his friend invited us to go see it with a bunch of other people (animation students, I'm assuming). It was SO spur of the moment that we were running from the minute we got out of the car, but made it in time for a few previews. I made a zombie movie before it was cool to make zombie movies, and am a fan of the genre, but tend to be depressed when I almost inevitably find that they are gorier and more depressing that I could have imagined. The new Dawn of the Dead was a slick, bloody bit of nihilism which I abhorred, and even Shawn of the Dead, which I liked very much, suffered in my eyes because of an unrepentingly violent scene where a character had his guts ripped out and devoured as he screamed and watched. Not very fun.
Land of the Dead is just as bloody and gross as any zombie movie, but for some reason didn't leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. The gore seemed to have more of a purpose (if that's possible) and was easier to dismiss as good special effects work for some reason. Zombie films, as with all movies dealing with the fantastic, only really work when there's some sort of symbolism going on, parts of the real world we can see personified in monsters and the way that people react to them. In this movie, the zombies seem to represent the underclass, trampled masses that society uses and tosses away. If nothing else, it's about people realizing the extent of their oppression and rising up to face the inveitable horror of it. And unlike director Romero's first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (which was more about Cold War paranoia), this one has an element of hope to it. Stumbling, deformed hope that goes "RAAARRR!!" but hope none the less.

So that didn't end up being all that brief. Oh well. I also wanted to add that while it costs nearly ten dollars to see a movie in Los Angeles (and that's WITH a student discount!), you can easily find first run movies in Wisconsin that cost only FOUR dollars. Where is the justice??