In this entry I will do a short review of the movies I have
watched during 2012. I will start from the movies I liked most and will continue in
descending order finishing with the movies I liked least.
1. The Dark Knight
Rises (USA, Christopher Nolan).
The nice thing about of this movie is that I loved it despite
the very high expectations I had. Christopher Nolan makes a more than decent
ending to his superb trilogy, satisfying both mainstream society and comic
readers like myself.
What I liked most.
How long was this movie, 165 minutes? Really?! Didn't actually notice.
Excellent rhythm and music (breathtaking!) and cool fights. But perhaps the
most outstanding (and controversial) aspect of this superheroes movie made
mainstream is that it actually contains a message: beware rich and powerful
men, some people are getting angry, and if the bridge between wealth and poor keeps on growing something big may happen. The scary thing about it is that
many people find themselves more identified with the bad guys (Bane) than with
the good ones (Batman or the policemen).
What I didn't like. The ending. Few people understand why Bane turns out to be a mere lackey
of Talia al Ghul. No biggie for me, still loved the movie so much.
2. Wreck-It Ralph (Walt Disney Animation
Studios)
Nice surprise by
Walt Disney Animation Studios. Went to watch the movie without knowing what to
expect, having heard it was sort a homage to arcade videogames players. Not the
best movie I’ve ever seen, but still an entertaining one with some winks to the videogames playing community.
What I liked most: the original screenplay and, especially at the beginning, how the
movement of the protagonists actually look like videogame characters.
What I didn't like: After a very powerful opening part of the momentum is lost in the
middle of the movie, when the references to videogames characters suddenly come
to an end, and the movie just looks like yet another animation film.
3. Brave (Pixar)
Yet another good
movie from Pixar. As it happened in Wreck-It Ralph, I didn’t know anything
about the movie before watching it. With a rather simple plot, Brave is a tender movie with beautiful images
and a message for women to raise their voice and be the true masters of their
destinies.
What I liked most: beautiful landscape with a message especially relevant in the country I
live, China, where women (and people in general!) are still afraid of voicing
out their opinions.
What I didn't like: simple plot with an easy to figure ending.
4. Life of Pi (Ang Lee/Li An)
This movie looked
dumb to me in the trailers, but I kept on hearing good reviews from my friends,
who encouraged me to watch it, which I reluctantly ended up doing. I have mixed
feelings about Taiwanese polyvalent director Ang Lee, having loved his Brokeback Mountain (USA, 2005), sort of liked
Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan, 1994)
and Hulk (USA, 2003) and not so much
liked Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (although I don't like too much martial arts movies anyway).
While not being an awful movie (wait and see for the next movies I will
review), Life of Pi is as dumb as it looked in the trailers. The plot
can be summarized in “no matter how much God fucks you up you should still be
grateful to him”. But its main problem is the structure: while for the first
half hour the movie is mainly a nice combination of present (story told by the
protagonist) and past, after that the movie forgets about the narrator to be
focused exclusively in the story in the past, all portrayed with an overuse of 3D effects
that seems more a marketing campaign of 3D special effects companies than an
actual movie. And to top it up, after you have been mesmerized by lots of
bright sea creatures and sparkling (always bright and sparkling) magical
forests the end is a 10 minute monologue by the protagonist where you just want
to hit him to make him shut up.
What I liked
most. Getting to know a bit about India.
What I didn't
like. Senseless plot and overuse of special effects. Bad, irritating ending
scene.
5. Les Misérables (Tom Hooper)
While Life of Pi was moderately boring and I could make it to the end, I
just had to leave the cinema before the end of Les Misérables. I must say I am not a big fan of musicals, and I
would have actually liked this movie if characters had talked like
people do in real life. Still, I liked three of four scenes (music in the
opening in one is pretty catchy), but I could not keep awake when characters
were singing for five minutes just to say “thank you” or “good bye”, while
another five were used to say “your welcome”, “talk to you later”. Don’t see the fun of it. And the thing is
that dialogues are sung 98% of the time. Maybe a combination between sung and spoken
dialogues would have made me enjoy the movie, like it is done in some animation
movies such as Lion King (Walt
Disney, 1994).
Finally, I read the book not too long
ago, so knowing exactly what was going to happen didn’t add any tension to the
movie.
What
I liked most. Depiction of post revolutionary
France and some catchy songs.
What I didn't like. Characters having to sing for ten minutes in order convey the simplest things.
What I didn't like. Characters having to sing for ten minutes in order convey the simplest things.
6. War
Horse (Steven Spielberg)
The introduction for this one is easy:
absolute crap. If you are interested in listening to French people speaking
with a super strong English accent with each other (as far as I know French
people use FRENCH to communicate with each other) or you like watching lengthy
corny scenes about super natural horses run through trenched territory then THIS
is your movie. Personally I would rather be punched in the face for two hours
than having to watch this movie again.
What
I liked most. That it came to an end.
What
I didn’t like. Pretty much everything.
7. The
Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)
As I said during my review of Love
(2012, Doze Niu), watching a Chinese movie can be a painful experience, and The Flowers of War took me one step
further into the realm of pain. What can we say about this movie directed by
Zhang Yimou, capable of epic dramas such as Live
(1994) but now on the road of commercial, shallow movies in the line of Feng
Xiaogang? The Flowers of War is a mix between easy, nationalist-anti-Japan
demagogy (I’m not defending what Japanese army did in Nanjing, but it has been
told around one million times already) and stereotypical love relationship
between foreign male (Christian Bale) and Chinese girl, who although being a
prostitute happens to be also an intelligent, sensitive and caring girl
who…enough of this, The Flowers of War
is so bad it just doesn’t deserve anymore of my time. To wrap things up a
friendly warning: think twice about it before watching a current Chinese movie
in the future. Or better: just don’t watch any Chinese movie. Anything
relatively interesting will be banned by the government, and even if it makes
it through the censorship it won’t be successful among the majority of
brainwashed Chinese viewers.