White: The Melody of the Curse (2011): At first, I thought South Korean former experimental film director brothers' Kim Gok and Kim Sun's horror movie taking place in idol circles would be quite the thing. It is, after all, stylishly shot, solidly acted and interested in exploring the point where melodrama and horror movie - both emotional and visceral genres - meet while throwing mild barbs in the direction of showbiz, and therefore perfectly inside my areas of interest. Unfortunately, after fifty minutes or so, the film begins to drag quite horribly, its plot moving off into a direction that is slightly surprising but not all that interesting. Mainly, though, it moves slowly, until all the goodwill it has built evaporates or transforms into mild disinterest. If I were of a nasty disposition, I'd suggest that what we have here is a movie that only had enough material for seventy minutes of running time but had to be bloated up to a hundred minutes by any means necessary.
Terra Nova (2011): I don't usually talk about contemporary US TV here anymore, but I wanted to at least turn some of the time of my life the pilot to this show - which is as much as I'll ever want to see of it - stole from me into something worthwhile. If you think that the best way to set up a show about a US (the rest of the world doesn't exist, as we know) project to colonize an alternative timeline Jurassic age is to let us view this potentially exciting world through the eyes of that classical US family (though Mum has a British accent) I have come to hate with a passion through overexposure, then you're probably Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg. Also, creatively bankrupt. As if it weren't enough to make the central cast direly uninteresting, the show also shows them to be ridiculously egotistic, but obviously wants the audience to admire them for that, too. We can also look forward to old auto-plotting chestnuts like the whiny male teenager who will surely learn the meaning of "family" one of these episodes. And while I'm mentioning the word "family" - I think the script writers had a bet going how often they were able to shoehorn the word in; painfully often, it turns out.
Gorath (1962): To end this on a continuing down note, let me just state that this is the only Ishiro Honda movie I've seen I barely could stomach at all. Despite the appearance (or not, depending on the cut you see) of a decidedly silly walrus monster, this is a movie living in that area of the SF movie where only the insufferably po-faced dwell. Expect characters sacrificing themselves, young military officers singing rousingly and ideas about women coming from the least enlightened corners of the 50s.
I'm not usually one for calling movies out for taking themselves too seriously (rather for taking themselves not serious enough), but I have make an exception for Gorath.
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2 comments:
I don't think I can do Terra Nova. Haven't even tried, yet. Might give it a sampling later on when it is on DVD.
Especially since the plot, to me, seems to be: "Hey! We reallllly screwed up the Earth...oh look, another chance to screw up the earth! Except this time we can do it before humans are even born! SWEET!" I'm sure the extinction level event is supposed to fix everything (along with this alternative universe bit) but eh.
I can so many potentials for the set up...but the way they seem to be handling it just struck me as such a "SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER" that I didn't dig into it...
It's really not worth the time, I think. I doesn't look as if the producers even tried to think any of their ideas through, and didn't want to step even one millimeter out of their audience's supposed comfort zone.
I'd have expected to be at least somewhat entertained by the dinosaurs, but it's not as if they were used for anything but to threaten the holy family unit a bit so that everyone could learn a valuable lesson.
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