WoS Reviews: More Movies So Far
It would seem that I am on a lucky streak of really good movies of late. Not too shabby for starting into the 2011 Movie game a bit late. Here are more quick reviews of the last three I’ve seen. I have to admit, that they were all pretty damned good. Take a look:
13 Assassins: Takeshi Miike’s take on “Seven Samurai”, a bloody, action-filled romp through 18th Century Japan, never made my 2011 Want to See list, but through strong word of mouth, here we are. It is a basic plot; samurai of a certain shogun must assassinate the shogun’s psychotic brother lest he assume a seat of power and turn the hard-earned peace back into warring chaos.
It presents many complex themes within this simple plot, such as a samurai’s duty to the master against the duty towards the people and the act of brutal war to maintain a time of peace, mix that with a samurai’s feeling of obsolescence in this new era and the stage is set for one of the strongest samurai flicks to come around since that golden era of the chambera.
I read that all of the actors, including the older ones, had to be taught bushido, the art of samurai swordsmanship, when back in the days of Mifune, every studio put their contracted actors through this training as a given that they would have to perform in samurai films. Ah, the bygone era.
This movie is filled with manly men saying manly things, followed by brutal actions, but never shied away from the questions of violence. Still, the last 45 minutes was one of the best action sequences I have seen this year.
High recommendation.
X-Men First Class: I have heard nothing but doom for this pre-boot to the X-Men series ever since it was announced. It didn’t even make the annual Want To See list on my Year End WoS Reviews. But Producer Bryan Singer and Director Matthew Vaungh put together a well-crafted piece of genre. Steeped in both the 60’s atmosphere and politics of the times, this film followed the Sophoclean friendship of Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr, whom become the godly Professor X and the evil Magneto, respectively. It balances their relationship and conflicting points of view with an assembly of young mutants to battle Sebastian Shaw, NOT overplayed by Kevin Bacon as he seeks to widen conflict between the US and USSR by diverting nuclear missiles to Cuba. Yep, you read that right.
To see the emotional pay off of this story, as it both pays homage to the earlier films and sort of reboots them was what made it enjoyable for me. People will complain that the original “first class” of the comics was not featured will see (SPOILER) that the Xavier School for the Gifted was established at the end of the film, so that first class can still happen. I just may see this one again.
High recommendation.
The Tree of Life:
This was the very first Terrence Malick movie I ever saw. And it was pretty damned good. Now, it will not register with the “I hate to stop and think about it” crowd, but I found the imagery mesmerizing and the central story, that of a man remembering his youth and the parental forces that shaped him, compelling and well-acted.
It is awash in self-reflective sequences that depict the origins of the Universe and follows that through to the time of the rise of man, which becomes philosophical once the story of the man and his remembered father enter the film.
It is unique and beautiful. To be honest it could have gone either way for me as sometimes there seemed to be random shots of “things” in the film just to have random shots of “things” in the film. But, what finally clenched the film for me as something I liked are twofold, first, there needs to be a Native American version of this made, and two, the shot of the bridge near the end. After all that nature created, here was this glorious shot of this huge, beautiful bridge, something manmade. I looked at that accomplishment and many thoughts raced through my head; I was taken back to Orson Welles meditation on Chartres and how man will leave these unsigned works of art to show we were hear past our time on earth and also how these works are a sign of our own mortality.
Looking at the shot of the bridge, I thought, “Yeah, we made that. As a human species, we made that.”
And it was good.
High recommendation.
© 2011 Ernest M. Whiteman III
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