more film reviews from my unlimited pass
Dec. 28th, 2022 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretCirkus
The local theater that I'm still on an unlimited movie plan at has a lot of Indian film because there's a big Indian community in the Edison area. This movie, says Wikipedia, has gotten terrible reviews, but I liked it! It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, with two sets of twins separated at birth only to encounter each other as adults, with chaos and mix-ups ensuing. The core premise is that the idea of separated twins can challenge Indian ideas about caste and the importance of genetic destiny. Yet the film also recognizes a contribution of genetics, as one of the sets of twins turns out to be linked supernaturally by a strange ability to manipulate electricity.
Hijinks and mistaken identities undertaken in a farce of sufficient precision is a pretty guaranteed win for me, so I liked this even though I agree with some of the reviewers that a few of the comic performances were overly broad and annoying, and the special effects were sometimes kind of cheap looking.
Babylon
Some really great performances from Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie as silent film stars who struggle to cope with losing fame after the rise of talkies, but ultimately I was a little meh on this. There was just SO MUCH happening visually and it wasn't wholly satisfying how it all fit together. into a narrative Honestly it had me thinking of the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar, probably my least favorite Coen Brothers film. If there was a movie that had Babylon's actors and visuals, and Hail Caesar's plot, that together would be a great movie.
The final scene of the film is a fanvid, a tribute to the history of film recognizably in the form of a fanvid. Probably the most expensive fanvid in history, I was saying, since one presumes they actually cleared the rights for all the source they used. I was utterly fascinated by that choice and what they were trying to achieve with it. Talk about vid as essay vs vid as affective narrative, I mean...
The local theater that I'm still on an unlimited movie plan at has a lot of Indian film because there's a big Indian community in the Edison area. This movie, says Wikipedia, has gotten terrible reviews, but I liked it! It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, with two sets of twins separated at birth only to encounter each other as adults, with chaos and mix-ups ensuing. The core premise is that the idea of separated twins can challenge Indian ideas about caste and the importance of genetic destiny. Yet the film also recognizes a contribution of genetics, as one of the sets of twins turns out to be linked supernaturally by a strange ability to manipulate electricity.
Hijinks and mistaken identities undertaken in a farce of sufficient precision is a pretty guaranteed win for me, so I liked this even though I agree with some of the reviewers that a few of the comic performances were overly broad and annoying, and the special effects were sometimes kind of cheap looking.
Babylon
Some really great performances from Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie as silent film stars who struggle to cope with losing fame after the rise of talkies, but ultimately I was a little meh on this. There was just SO MUCH happening visually and it wasn't wholly satisfying how it all fit together. into a narrative Honestly it had me thinking of the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar, probably my least favorite Coen Brothers film. If there was a movie that had Babylon's actors and visuals, and Hail Caesar's plot, that together would be a great movie.
The final scene of the film is a fanvid, a tribute to the history of film recognizably in the form of a fanvid. Probably the most expensive fanvid in history, I was saying, since one presumes they actually cleared the rights for all the source they used. I was utterly fascinated by that choice and what they were trying to achieve with it. Talk about vid as essay vs vid as affective narrative, I mean...
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Date: 2022-12-29 02:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
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