Margie was out of town this week on business, so Katherine and I set up a nightly film schedule. Well, in actuality, she pulled out six movies, I putted out eight, and then another five or six shorter features, and she looked around in the cabinet and … we ended up figuring out each night what it would be.
I don’t know what the selection says about us, but …
DAY 1
Sherlock Holmes (2009): We actually watched this earlier in the day. It remains a strangely fun, dysfunctional flick, where you don’t know if you want to admire Holmes, slap him, or feel sorry for him. Which, in most modern renditions of the character, means it was a succcess.
The idea of Holmes thinking so far ahead in a a physical battle that he charts out each move — and then showing them — is very nicely done. (Katherine liked that bit.)
And Robert Downey, Jr., is always fun. Good music from Hans Zimmer, too.
Katherine liked how Holmes confronted the villain at the end. She thought it was a lot like the ultimate scene between Westley and Humperdink in The Princess Bride.
Fellowship of the Ring (2001): This remains terribly impressive and, aside from the excision of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs, is the most “faithful” of the Jackson adaptation of Tolkien.
All the characters are good, and Gimli is at his least buffoonish. After some initial smiles, I found myself wearying faster than usual at Elijah Woods’ pained/tragic expression. McKellan and Lee make such fabulous Gandalf and Saruman renditions, it’s hard to say who could ever supplant them.
The real gem in the rough here is Sean Bean as Boromir, who takes a rather stiff foil to Aragorn and invests him with a passion not only for his city, but for his comrades. Notably, he shows more compassion and attachment to the Hobbits than Aragorn does. The preying of the One Ring upon his heart and doubts, thus, becomes all the more tragic. His final speech to Aragorn is a bit over the top, but Bean still manages to pull it off.
Katherine enjoyed how the Hobbits snuck into the Council of Elrond. She also liked how Legolas stood up for Aragorn at the Council, and how the Fellowship comes together.
DAY 2
Young Sherlock Holmes (1985): This has long been on my list for K to see, and afer getting over some of the dissimilarities of the characters, she did fine. The movie’s FX really holds up quite well after a quarter century (!), stop motion and (ground-breaking) CGI both. The movie’s triffic fun, and I’m glad we watched it.
Katherine thought it was fun, since we know about what the characters become later. She thought the difference between Watson here and Watson in the movie above was so different. She also liked the color-of-the-bear riddle.
Batman/Superman: Public Enemies (2009): Faithful adaptation (for good and for ill) of the comic series. GGood use of “traditional” Animated DCU voices, even if the animation style is (faithfully) a bit odd. Not a huge rewatch factor, but it’s always good to see Supes and Bats working together, esp. against waves of bad guys (and good guys). (Katherine liked that factor, too.)
DAY 3
The Mummy (1999): This just one of those massively fun adventure movies, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously but with enough occasional bits where seriousness is the order of the day to keep it from being a slapstick romp. The (also somewhat groundbreaking for the time) FX remain strong, and the movie has a high percentage of lines that are repeated around our household.
This film gets regular replay in this household, and I have no problem with that. I’ll even go so far as to say (gasp) I enjoy it more than its spiritual forebearer, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Kay still thinks it’s creepy, but fun at the same time. Especially Benny.
DAY 4
Charlie’s Angels (2000): Okay, so the “fun action flicks” played a large percentage of the screens during this film series, and this one falls into that category. Katherine hadn’t seen it before, but I thought the Girl Power aspect would entertain her, and I was right. She liked bits and bobs of all the characters, and, without taking it too seriously, I’d agree that there would be far worse role models out there, at least in a cartoonish sense.
The movie not only does well on its own, but it plays on the TV show nicely, with the opening montage, the whole girls / Bosley / Charlie relationship, etc. In fact, unlike most remakes from TV shows (a genre it, itself, lampoons early on), this one refreshingly doesn’t run away from its roots, but considers itself near-continuity. That’s nice.
Katherine liked all the backstories. And The Chad.
Hulk Vs. (2009): This consists of two half-hour unrelated (save by production house, and some voice artist) slug-fests between Hulk & Thor, and Hulk & Wolverine. Both are not-too-bad intros to the continuity of both guest stars (the Hulk’s continuity is mostly assumed — Banner-anger-Hulk-rest-Banner-wandering). Which means that not only do we get Thor, but also the Warriors Three, Balder, Sif, Hela, Loki (who is appropriately hoist on his own petard twice), the Enchantress, the Executioner, Odin, the Odinsleep … Really, not at all badly done.
The Wolverine segments gets into the whole Weapon X program, Wolvie’s origins, and various erstwhile allies involved — Deadpool, Sabretooth, Deathshrike, Omega Red. I’ve never been as fond of all that continuity folderol, but we enjoyed Deadpool at least.
Interestingly enough, the Thor tale paints Banner in a much more human, sympathetic light. In the Wolvie tale, Banner plays little time on-screen, and is mostly a sniveling whiner.
Katherine thought it was a different Wolverine than she was used to, and liked the in media res at the beginning of the Wolverine segment. She likes Hulk’s nicknames for people. She had fun in the Thor segment trying to map the Norse gods to the Greco-Roman ones she’s more familiar with.
DAY 5
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002): We were pretty disengaged on this one. Kay wanted to continue her documentation of spells cast in the HP films (yes, I know there are online lists of them … ssshhh, it’s geeky research!), and I’m burned out on HP given the number of times the films have been watched here in the last six months.
Not much more to say about it, except that it’s neither the best nor the worst HP film, I like Moaning Myrtle, and I’m glad we haven’t seen much more of Dobby since then.
Katherine maintains she doesn’t watch it much because, despite how hilarious Lockhart is and how much she likes Dobby, she just dislikes the basilisk.
DAY 6
The Ten Commandments (1956)
I grew up with this movie playing every Easter on network TV. For whatever reason, I’d forgotten over the years how over-the-top patriotic it’s all about. Cecil B. DeMille very explicitly (he says so himself in the introductory passage) frames the story of Moses as one not just of freedom by faith from slavery in a foreign land, but as the foundation for freedom in the modern age. Given that the Israelites effectively (in the story) abandon one yoke (that of physical slavery to the Egyptians) for another (that of cultural slavery to “I AM”), it’s an odd concept; put another way, one would not consider the land of Israel to be an exemplar of American-style democracy and freedom.
That said, the movie does, in addition to some still-spectacular SFX (“cheesy, but awesome,” quoth Kay) and faboo music from Elmer Bernstein, raise some interesting questions of cultural and personal identity, doing what is right vs. what is convenient, and working within vs. outside of an illegitimate system to change it. For all that Heston’s Moses eventually becomes a cliche as the movie progresses, the earlier, relatively more human story allows for some of these questions to arise. His decision to take on his Hebrew identity and fight against his adopted culture (and father figure) is perhaps divinely ordained, but you can almost see the argument that Moses could have done better by becoming Pharaoh and striving to better all the people’s lives through his wise rule. Would have been a lot less bloody than killing all the Firstborn of Egypt (a very creepy scene, and one that makes Passover a lot more like Halloween than one would think).
I’d forgotten how compacted and simplified the action becomes after we leave the Egyptian soap opera. Bang! Mt Sinai! Bang! Golden Calf! Bang! Moses dies before entering the Promised Land! The closer we get to Scripture, the more reverence the movie has for the orthodox line, which makes it more a series of Biblical vignettes than a story.
The movie has a cast of zillions. The other ones most worth mentioning are Cedric Hardwick as the beneficent autocrat, Seti; Yul Brynner as the prideful Rameses; and Edward G. Robinsn as the vile straw boss, Dathan.
Katherine liked it, especially that it had an Intermission / Entr’acte, with special orchestral segments at the beginning, middle, and end of the film. She also thought Moses’ hair changes were interesting.
WRAP-UP
“I want to watch them all again,” Katherine says. “It was all-around good.” And something she didn’t mind doing with her dear, old Dad. Huzzah.
