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May movies
Jun. 1st, 2017 08:46 amI need to start my May movies post with a movie I watched in April and then forgot to write about, even though it was one of my favorites: The Painting, a French animated film about the figures in a half-finished painting, who decide they must set out on a journey to find the painter and convince him to finish it, because the fully-finished figures are (what else?) oppressing the partly-finished ones and the “sketchies,” who exist as little more than rough stick figures.
This makes the story sound heavy-handed, which it isn’t really; the characters slip out of their painting and explore the painter’s studio, traveling from painting to painting, and it’s all totally charming. And the animation is simply gorgeous.
Onward to the movies actually watched in May!
The Fox and the Child, also a French movie, strange and slow-paced and not quite like anything else I’ve ever seen, and enchanting, once you get over expecting it to have a plot like a normal movie.
A ten-year-old girl lives with her parents (whom we never meet; in fact the girl is the only human we ever see) in a mountain wilderness, where she ever so slowly befriends a wild fox. The fox and the girl are both fun, but the mountains are the real star of the show: the leaves turning, the snow falling, the flowers blooming again in the spring, the clear blue sky and the dramatic mountainsides. Wikipedia tells me these are the Jura Mountains in France, and they are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (the 1982 version with Anthony Andrews, who also played Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) is a swashbuckling hoot and I highly recommend it if you need a fun adventure movie with enormous capes and even larger hair.
Dinotopia, which I think is actually a miniseries? Except they put it on the DVD without any episode breaks even though it’s like four hours long, WHO DOES THAT. In any case, it’s aggressively mediocre. I supposed Dinotopia would be a difficult book to adapt in any case - it’s short on plot and long on gorgeous drawings of the world - in fact it aggravates me that the miniseries makers, who had essentially a book of the most gorgeous possible concept art for their show, ended up with something so visually incoherent. It’s like they raided the costume department for everything faintly weird looking without ever realizing that they would have to harmonize this to some overall aesthetic.
Jackie, which is a total bummer, although honestly I should have expected that from a movie that is a biopic of Jackie Kennedy focusing mostly on the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Unfortunately, on top of being a bummer, I just didn’t find it that compelling. The movie hops around in time a lot, to the extent that it obscures the emotional arc, which is especially frustrating because I see little reason why they couldn’t have just told the darn story in chronological order and done away with the talking-to-a-newspaper-reporter frame story entirely, because it seems to exist mostly so the filmmakers can spell out their point just in case any of us are being a bit slow about it.
This makes the story sound heavy-handed, which it isn’t really; the characters slip out of their painting and explore the painter’s studio, traveling from painting to painting, and it’s all totally charming. And the animation is simply gorgeous.
Onward to the movies actually watched in May!
The Fox and the Child, also a French movie, strange and slow-paced and not quite like anything else I’ve ever seen, and enchanting, once you get over expecting it to have a plot like a normal movie.
A ten-year-old girl lives with her parents (whom we never meet; in fact the girl is the only human we ever see) in a mountain wilderness, where she ever so slowly befriends a wild fox. The fox and the girl are both fun, but the mountains are the real star of the show: the leaves turning, the snow falling, the flowers blooming again in the spring, the clear blue sky and the dramatic mountainsides. Wikipedia tells me these are the Jura Mountains in France, and they are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (the 1982 version with Anthony Andrews, who also played Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) is a swashbuckling hoot and I highly recommend it if you need a fun adventure movie with enormous capes and even larger hair.
Dinotopia, which I think is actually a miniseries? Except they put it on the DVD without any episode breaks even though it’s like four hours long, WHO DOES THAT. In any case, it’s aggressively mediocre. I supposed Dinotopia would be a difficult book to adapt in any case - it’s short on plot and long on gorgeous drawings of the world - in fact it aggravates me that the miniseries makers, who had essentially a book of the most gorgeous possible concept art for their show, ended up with something so visually incoherent. It’s like they raided the costume department for everything faintly weird looking without ever realizing that they would have to harmonize this to some overall aesthetic.
Jackie, which is a total bummer, although honestly I should have expected that from a movie that is a biopic of Jackie Kennedy focusing mostly on the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Unfortunately, on top of being a bummer, I just didn’t find it that compelling. The movie hops around in time a lot, to the extent that it obscures the emotional arc, which is especially frustrating because I see little reason why they couldn’t have just told the darn story in chronological order and done away with the talking-to-a-newspaper-reporter frame story entirely, because it seems to exist mostly so the filmmakers can spell out their point just in case any of us are being a bit slow about it.
