i saw three movies this weekend. and the weekend is still, well, middle aged. i guess it's possible i might cram another one in. but here's the report so far:
friday night we saw both the corpse bride and serenity.
i'm a big fan of the nightmare before christmas, tim burton's 1993 animated musical. i own the soundtrack and still listen to it year-round (usually skipping the weird patrick stewart voiceover track, which doesn't appear at all in the movie). so i was very excited when i first heard about "the corpse bride," and slightly worried that i would miss my chance to see it on the big screen because of my trip to syria. but it's still here and, i must admit, a little disappointing. the animation, of course, is first class. i loved the way the characters looked--the stylized edward gorey-type caricatures. but the writing just wasn't as clever as it is in "nightmare." the characters never got beyond their caricatures and none of the songs got stuck in my head. in fact, i can't remember a single song anymore. don't get me wrong, if you're a fan of animation "the corpse bride" is worth seeing on the big screen. but when you get home, watch "the nightmare before christmas" to see how it's really done.
but i didn't watch "nightmare" again after the "corpse." instead, two hours later, we returned to the same theater to see "serenity." it was okay. i've never seen a single episode of firefly, a show that i've only heard good things about but never got around to renting the DVDs. and, at least at the beginning of the film, i felt a little bit like i was coming in at the middle. but it didn't take long to figure out the various characters. the film really does stand on its own.
i think my problem is not that there was anything wrong with the film, but that i've simply lost my appetite for science fiction movies, at least the ones that are action films (which is almost all of them). fight sequences bore me--i've seen to many for me to be excited to watch. when characters start to fight on screen, i'm just wait for it to be over so the plot can continue. the things that make me like science fiction in novels and on tv, the careful exploration of a complicated alternate reality. i don't think that's possible in a two hour movie. (i think atrios is right--only an ongoing series can really do this stuff justice) it's really too bad. i used to get a lot of enjoyment out of sci fi films. and i still go to them pretty religiously out of a lingering sense of loyalty to the genre, but the magic isn't there anymore.
and then, for something completely different, mrs. noz and i saw downfall, the story of last few days in hitler's bunker. it was a truly unusual film--one of the very few taken from the point of view of the nazis, or at least a young women living among the nazi elite. the film is a german production, so i believe the making of the film broke a post-war taboo. you almost feel sorry for the group of true believers trapped under berlin. their grandiose dreams are over as the red army closes is. hitler coming up with plan after plan to reverse the situation that are increasingly detatched from reality. his generals see the writing on the wall, and yet they do their best to follow him to the bitter suicidal end.
anyway, of the three, i liked "downfall" the best. am i a sick italian-american or what?
