Change Your Image
alinda-thelostgirl
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
Little Voice (2020)
Mellow and heartwarming
Over 20 years ago JJ Abrams co-created a show of a young woman trying to find her path in life in NYC. That show was called Felicity and it resonated with me a lot, this somewhat clueless and yet wise 18-year-old, navigating through life and and relating to others despite feeling awkward and intense.
Probably this show would have resonated with me even more back then. It has music, actual diversity rather than the token one that TV in the 90s allowed us, but the same sense of familiarity of being a young woman, trying to find your footing (and voice) and relating to others despite feeling awkward and intense.
I'm sorry I didn't get to watch this when I was a younger, however it pleases me to know that the awkwardly intense young people out there today get to enjoy it.
Glass (2019)
Never underestimate a mastermind
First of all, I am not a hardcore M.Night Shyamalan fan. Sure, I loved The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000), was baffled by later movies and bored to death by even later ones and honestly had started questioning his ability as a storyteller (cinematography and photography were always impeccable, but pleasing my eyes can distract my brain from being annoyed at the lack of content in a film only so many times).
It wasn't until The Visit (2015) that my interest was sparked once more. While still flawed, it delivered all the emotions a film like that should deliver, and I was genuinely thrilled by everything, including the inevitable Shyamalan twist.
So when I saw Split (2016), it was still with mixed anticipation and suspicion: either our boy has got his spark back or The Visit has been a fluke. But naturally, I was blown away, if not by a plot that, while enthralling, didn't really bring anything new to the genre, by McAvoy's brilliant performance and by that one last scene connecting the film to one of my all time favourites.
Now, some might not remember this, because Samuel L. Jackson has become a living legend and Unbreakable has become pretty iconic, but at the time of its release people's reaction to its ending were pretty mixed: either they loved it or they hated it, and while this can be said about many films, I rarely saw such a conscious divisiveness. More often than not people who love or hate a film have different reasons supporting their feelings, while in the case of Unbreakable, it was this one element that just split public opinion in two. Unbreakable was the Marmite of films.
For this reason, when I saw how the critics had panned Glass (2019) while some blogging movie goers were ecstatic, I knew I couldn't let either point of view affect me. Unfortunately, it did, as it warped my expectations in a different way. I expected the film to leave me either raving or raging, so perhaps my problem by the end of it was that I didn't feel either way.
The first act does a solid job of picking up where we left them. We see that the Horde is still up to its antics, kidnapping girls whose perfect, easy lives have made them impure and unworthy. We then find out that the past nineteen years David Dunn has been embracing the role he was given: a hero, helping those in need and intervening where the forces of order cannot seem to get anywhere.
If this part of the film has any flaws, it is in what I call "lack of trust" on the filmmakers part: they don't trust the moviegoers to be either smart enough or attentive enough to figure out or understand things on their own and therefore spell everything out for them, often by using the secondary characters like David's son, to exposition everything. A little more faith in the audience would have made certain awkward dialogues go a tad more smoothly.
The second act takes place in the mental institution we were shown repeatedly in the trailer. We knew the three protagonists would be assembled here, and were looking forward to it. This part is both brilliant and boring: the brilliance is in the way it questions all the beliefs built in the previous two films and in the first act of this very one, leading both the characters and us watching to wonder if we weren't just being delusional. Add to this some brilliant acting, especially from James McAvoy (how many personalities did he end up displaying here? I believe almost all of the famously advertised ones in the Split promotional campaign, and in sequence within the same take, too! Outstanding) and the whole thing could have been flawless. Except it wasn't. Once again we aren't trusted with being capable to understand things without someone reiterating them to us, burdening once more the dialogues with over-exposition and, well, boring us a little.
I honestly would've done with a bit less exposition and a bit more of David and Elijah, whose psychoanalysis deserved equal interest. But what appears to have been the choice here is that the audience already got to explore enough of their mindsets in Unbreakable and there wasn't much development to add to them here. Which is disappointing and hardly believable, and this is a major flaw in the script. The editing of Dr. Staple's analysis was beautifully realised in terms of camerawork and performance, but the lines were superficial and lacking, which was a real pity.
Then we get to the final act, and here is where my enthusiasm cools off. The showdown looks really good, even in terms of fight choreography, and the artistic choices behind some of the camera work remind us that this is an M.Night Shyamalan film without being overly pretentious.
However, rather than having a twist, it has a number of twists. And while I never look forward to a twist in a film, if there has to be one, it needs to have an impact on me. Unbreakable and Split had both delivered on that front, so it is somewhat disappointing that Glass with not one but what I think were three twists... does nothing.
Rather than surprised, I was bemused that none of them had any real effect on how I would perceive the events happened until them. If anything, they reminded me of those parodies of soap operas where every line was the reveal of a twist, or even of the waterfall scene in Sherlock Holmes: A game of Shadows (2011) in the parody video of How It Should Have Ended.
That said, the ending was weak, not bad. It didn't so much bore or upset me but rather disappoint me, like a Doctor Who finale while Stephen Moffat was the show runner: had the set up and buildup not been so good, with such excellent performances that could excite and thrill so much, hooking me to the story, I probably wouldn't have found the epilogue so underwhelming.
All in all, this is a very good film, it's just a pity that it's the last chapter to two far superior films. I will probably watch it again, and perhaps have a marathon watching all three films back to back, and give Glass another few shots at winning me over. It's definitely the best sequel to one of his iconic franchises Bruce Willis has been in for quite some time, and it's also one of his best performances in the last years, and just for that, M.Night Shyamalan deserves some mad props. It has solid performances from all of its cast really, except James McAvoy's which would be better described as "mind blowing". And it recaptures the atmosphere and feel of the previous instalments quite well, preserving the superhero meets reality quality Unbreakable had established.
Overlord (2018)
Thoroughly enjoyable zombie-war film mashup
Despite not containing real spoilers, I'm filtering this review because I make a commentary of all three acts and I feel that even knowing how I felt during the development of the third act might spoil the fun for someone else.
First off, I went to the cinema expecting to enjoy this film. Nazi experiments and monster movies are a combo that promise to be entertaining, though not all films then deliver such promises.
Now, the film mashes up the war film genre with the action-horror one, so if you're expecting historical accuracy, don't even bother. Bear in mind that the real historical events are here being used as plot devices, and that this is clearly meant to be low brow entertainment, and not a depiction or criticism of the horrors of war.
The cast is brilliant, managing to pull off any bits of inevitably cliched script-writing this sort of project is bound to have. What particularly impressed me though, were the action scenes, from the fast-paced, savage beginning when the soldiers are reading to jump into Nazi-occupied French territory, to the fights between the heroes and the villains in the film's third act.
The plot is never stale, though not original either. Most of the story's development can be easily predicted, but it's well shot and well acted so it still manages to keep the viewer engaged. By setting this horror flick in the midst of the war, the film doesn't suffer from excessively slow build up syndrome, by which I mean when monster films don't want to reveal their monster immediately and so tend to pace the build up too slowly. There are so many other things happening that while you are aware you are being kept from the promised monsters in order to build anticipation, you don't have the time to resent the film for it or be bored.
My only criticism is with the third act. Once we get to the actual showdown, the film becomes a little bit weak, or perhaps the correct word would be "abrupt": after all that build up, it all gets done and over so quickly that you feel a little bit robbed of the satisfaction that you know should accompany the closing of the action. It made me wonder if perhaps there was more of it, but perhaps had ended up on the cutting floor of the editing room.
All in all, a violent, gruesome and action-packed film that will keep you entertained from the beginning to the end. What more would you even expect from it?
The Changeover (2017)
I wish they hadn't "twilighted" this beautiful story.
As someone who read the book over 20 years ago, I knew coming in I wasn't the target audience for this film. But I re-read the book recently, and despite it being a YA novel, I found it just as compelling now as it was when I was 13.
Casting-wise, I found some of the choices quite brilliant. Timothy Spall as Carmody (does he even have a name in the film?) was everything I pictured when reading the book and more, down to the smile that felt like the face shrunk around it. Brilliantly terrifying. I would comment on the other characters too, such as Myriam and Winter Carlisle, but truth is, their presence in this film is so minor and marginal, I can barely remember if they were there at all. The little boy playing Jacko was an adorable little boy, just like the character he was playing, so no issues there.
This leaves the main character, her love interest and her mother. In the book, Laura is a compelling character you immediately sympathize and root for. She feels things, even more strongly than others, and reacts to things. She speaks her mind, sometimes faster than it is wise. She is feisty and brave. Why the writers in the film decided to write her as the exact opposite in this adaptation, I will never know. Perhaps they saw the success of the Twilight franchise and decided to try and make their protagonist remind people more of the heroine of those books/films. What a shame, trading in all the liveliest qualities of Laura for this lifeless adaptation. The actress they cast did match with the physical description, but what came out of her mouth were dull, cliched lines that didn't even seem like they were meant to be part of a dialogue, just written for some dramatic effect. And not satisfied, the writers decided to turn Sorry into some sort of Edward-like character, broodingly stalking our protagonist and too busy pouting to bother having a personality. In the book, Sorry has so many layers, you cannot wait to see more of him. Here, the character was stripped off of any quality but his physical appearance, making all of his screen-time feel longer and more boring than it probably was. But the one who got the worse treatment was Kate, Laura's mother. I guess the production decided that the viewers had no interest in the struggles of a single mother of two, so they stripped her role to the bare minimum, removed any of her motivations and only left what comes across as an incompetent mother who is completely oblivious at first and aggressively unfair later on. Apparently all we need to know about the protagonist's mother is that she doesn't understand her daughter and she nags, because isn't that what mothers do?
When I started watching, I really wanted to like the film. I loved that it was an actual NZ production, that the cast pretty much looked their part (well, not Kate, to be fair) and I was willing to accept the differences: Laura's dad dying instead of the divorce, the more modern approach on how kids her age spend their time together and such, but the more the film went on, the more it felt that too much time (and money) had been spent on making these minor, in both importance and effect, than in creating a solid story that could keep the viewer interested throughout the film's run-time. And the final showdown happened so quickly and when I had already lost any interest in the plot development that it took me a while to notice "Ah, this is it, she won."
Finally, either someone in the editing room messed up, or the script writers didn't feel the necessity to maintain any coherence in their dialogues. Sorry telling Laura that he knew she could make it, apart from being what any viewer would expect him to say, has absolutely no foundation as nowhere in the film did he ever express such certainty and the only time in which the changeover is verbally addressed, we only see him object to it. Now, in the book he does the same, but then again, Margaret Mahy doesn't forget that, and how he acts before and after the changeover is in perfect accordance to his personality.
To anyone who has watched this or would like to see it, I recommend you read the book it's based upon and hope someone else, some day, will have another crack at it. Perhaps Timothy Spall can be persuaded to reprise the role, because he's just perfect for it.
Stranger Things (2016)
Brilliant show full of 80s nostalgia
I started watching this show expecting not to like it, simply because everyone around me had been hyping it so much, I felt I could only be disappointed. It didn't only NOT disappoint, but I got exactly why all those people, 80s kids like me, loved this show so much.
We grew up watching E.T., Firestarter, Stand by me and Poltergeist, the last one, hiding behind the sofa for most of the film because our parents had realised it was too scary for elementary children and sent us to bed an hour ago.
We all had walkie talkies that never quite worked as we expected them to, we all jumped at noises in the dark wondering what kind of monster (or benevolent alien) was lurking there and we all associated those heavy synthesizers with the "something big's about to happen" moment.
And we are all very, very nostalgic geeks. The Duffer brothers didn't have a hard time making us happy, because they knew exactly what we wanted, and they delivered.
Wuthering Heights (2011)
Good-looking actors, beautiful photography, worst adaptation ever.
Like most classic novels, Wuthering Heights has seen several incarnations on both the big and small screen. Each would focus on one or more of the several themes Ms.Bronte dealt with: physical, verbal and psychological abuse, betrayal, cruelty, child neglect, discrimination, harsh weather and so on.
Fans of the novel have grown accustomed to slight disappointments when watching an adaptation, for none has ever been perfect. Let's just look at some of the various Heathcliffs: Lawrence Olivier's was too polished, Timothy Dalton's was quite believable until it was mutilated by poor script writing and a ridiculous change of ending, Ralph Fiennes' was too unlikely despite being so well acted, Tom Hardy's was too clean - literally, how did Heathcliff keep his face so grime-free with all the grunt work he was supposed to be doing?
But the acting was satisfactory when not superb, the story almost always faithful and you could tell these Heathcliffs tried hard.
Now, I don't want to be harsh on James Howson, this was his first film and the worst thing I can say is that it shows. You cannot blame a first-timer for his shortcomings: you must blame the director.
Andrea Arnold should have given her actors more direction and honed their abilities. Instead they appear to be mannequins placed in the middle of the moors - they hardly speak, they hardly move and nothing seems to happen for most of the time while we are shown cloudy footage of the Yorkshire moors. Which one can suppose are being used to emphasize the harshness of the environment surrounding the protagonists and therefore the harshness of the events playing out, as in the book. And for perhaps the first time in history they fail, for just five minutes into the film I felt them to be pointless and entirely void of atmosphere.
But here's Andrea Arnold's worst sin: Emily Bronte's characters have always been excessively flawed, the protagonists in particular don't have a redeeming quality to share between them apart from their obsession for each other, but one thing they had never been guilty of was being boring. Until this film came out.