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FMMP: Lovely Bones, Daybreakers, Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus
Nothing much has happened, unless you count Logan learning how to jump on top of the fridge and open the freezer to rifle through the food. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem if only he'd learn how to close it again when he's done. But I have been watching lots of movies. Spoilers for sure.
The Lovely Bones
I read the book, but don't remember it very well. I suppose from what I do remember the movie is fairly true to it.
Young Susie Salmon is at that age when she's first starting to notice boys, first starting to discover herself, first starting to chafe under the yolk of her parents' rules.
It is now, as she teeters on the cusp of womanhood, that she's abducted, raped and murdered by her neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). I echo the sentiments of almost every review I read when I say thank you, Peter Jackson, for sparing us having to actually see the gruesome details of the latter two -- even though without them the viewer is left momentarily confused as to whether she actually escapes or not (she spends the rest of the movie as a spirit watching her family).
She watches her parents wrestle with their grief, helpless to point them in the right direction towards capturing her murderer. When she isn't spying on them, she's tooling around in a limbo filled with breathtaking landscapes with another of George's victims, Holly Golightly (these sequences are the most tedious of the movie and go on entirely too long, and remind me uncomfortably of that really horrible Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come).
Her father (Mark Wahlberg) gives up far less easily than her mother. He's determined to track down her killer, except in the dark ages before the internet (the movie takes place in the 70's) this means trucking home boxes and boxes of public records on a handcart, which looked ridiculous and I found hard to believe was allowed. I mean, public records are available for open viewing, but not necessarily in one's own living room.
Then there's the grandmother, Susan Sarandon, who shows up halfway through for no other apparent reason than to show not all women of the time were domestic goddesses -- she sweeps the dirt under the rug, sets fire to breakfast, and fills the laundry room with soap suds, all while balancing her whiskey glass in her hand. It's sort of a comic interlude that really seemed kind of pointless.
Stanley Tucci rightly deserves the nomination for best supporting actor. I would go so far as to say his serial killer is creepier than Hannibal Lecter, because he walks the line of normal so well. He lives alone and builds dollhouses for a daughter he doesn't have. He's quiet and shy with a sweet smile. Except he's given cold blue contacts that make him look just a smidge strange and unsettling -- probably because his natural brown eyes look too warm and benevolent.
I especially love him because in an interview he talks about how while reading the murder scene in the book, he was holding the book at arm's length because it was so horrifying and difficult to get through. To turn around and play George anyway must take a lot for an actor.
My one complaint with the movie was a very unwieldy sequence at the end *HUGE SPOILER ALERT* Okay, George has Susie's body stuffed in one of those big old safes in his basement, which we don't really know until a very well-done scene at the end where Susie and Holly are visiting the sites of all George's previous victims' burial spots.
In a scene I remember very well from the book, Susie's sister breaks into George's house to look for evidence. She finds some, but not before he gets home and almost catches her. She escapes, but now the jig is up. The police are on their way. There's not much time.
Next thing we know, the safe is in the back of his pickup truck and he's bringing it to the town sinkhole, where everyone dumps everything imaginable they don't want any more. The owner of the sinkhole offers to help him with the safe, and I kid you not, it takes the two grown men like a half hour to get the safe into the hole just rolling it across flat ground (okay, not literally a half hour. It's filmed in slow motion to add to the drama. But it still takes them a really long time to move it). If it's this hard to move across a flat surface with two guys, HOW did George get it up out of his basement alone? Maybe the adrenaline from the fear of getting caught gave him super Hulk strength or something, I don't know.
*ANOTHER BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT* The movie ends the same way as the book, and I remember loving this ending. George gets away. Sometimes justice isn't served. Except while trying to pick up his next victim in a faraway town, he slips off an embankment and falls to his death, so in a way justice is served, just not the way we would like it.
And Susie finally gets to enter heaven, though not before getting her first kiss with boy crush Ray. Awwwww.... Kind of. Because she's still a ghost but he's still alive. ?? Just let the Peter Jackson art flow. I can't wait for The Hobbit.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus:
I used to fancy myself quite the Terry Gilliam fan, but this makes two movies now I haven't really cared for (Please refer to how much I loathed Tideland. Though this one was miles better than that one).
This of course will go down in history as Heath Ledger's final film, which is unfortunate as it's kind of forgettable, especially when held up next to his legendary Joker role.
Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an old vaudevillian trying to keep his show alive in a modern London. He travels with his daughter, a boy and a dwarf (Verne Troyer) in a ramshackle old stagecoach. Part of the stage act is a mirror (actually two sheets of silver cellophane) which, if passed through, opens onto another plane of existence.
The troupe is followed by Tom Waits. More on him later.
They happen upon a young man hanged by the neck under a bridge (Ledger). They save him and he joins the show. He doesn't remember (or claims not to) who he is or why he was hanged.
Look, long story short, (*SPOILER SPOILER*) Parnassus has made a deal with the Devil (Waits) -- first one to capture a certain number of souls wins; Parnassus eternal life, the Devil the doctor's daughter. People who enter the mirror are shown the light and dark aspects of their heart's desire. Their choice determines if their soul goes to Parnassus or Hell.
This is the cleverness of the movie. Obviously Heath died before filming finished, and Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped up to replace him. Every time Tony (Ledger) enters the mirror, he becomes one of these other actors, and because it's a different plane of existence, it sort of makes freaky sense in the story. He escorts an older woman mourning the loss of her youth and he's Depp, seducing her with the promise of handsome male companionship. The thugs Tony stole money from meet him in the mirror as Law, and he escapes because they don't recognize him. Ultimately he faces up to his crimes as Farrell, the scalawag who sets up fake children's charities and makes off with the profits.
I don't know for a fact, but it's possible that it all worked out quite serendipitously if the mirror sequences (which are exclusively green screen and effects heavy) were saved for the end of the shooting schedule. In that case Heath's tragic death really didn't hurt the movie much at all.
Certainly not as much as the aforementioned green screen effects, which are cheaply done and painfully early 2000's quality. The same year Cameron elevated CGI technology to a bold new level, Gilliam seems to have only just discovered Movie Maker on his Windows XP Home Edition.
Also, I know Gilliam's trademark is chaos and insanity. I used to love it. Now I just find it annoying, like he only does it because he thinks he has to.
Daybreakers:
I enjoyed this far, far more than I expected to. Probably because it was short and concise with a tight story. If I have any complaint, it's that I would have liked it to have gone on a little longer. How often do you hear THAT about modern movies, with average running times of 2 hours?
Premise: The world has been overrun by vampires. Humans are an endangered species, and the ones that do exist are hunted by the vampire army so that they can be farmed for blood.
Edward (Ethan Hawke) is a hematologist (love it! A vampire blood specialist) searching for a blood substitute. His research is funded by an evil vampire conglomerate run by Sam Neill (more malevolent than I thought he could be).
There's some urgency to the search, because bloodsuckers who can't get enough blood are starting to turn into true nosferatu, vicious batlike creatures, no longer the civilized vamps who have gone on with their lives almost as before, except business hours are now between the hours of sunset to sunrise.
This is what I loved about the movie the most -- the attention to detail. The signs and billboards and new products that have been developed to allow the vampires to carry on business as usual. Like the "subwalk" -- a subterranean walkway for getting about during the day. Or specially modified cars with a "daylight mode" -- blacked out windows and a sophisticated camera system for steering (heavy Chrysler placement here). Even the mirrors are actually video images of the beholder, since they don't have a reflection otherwise. Coffee shops advertising the percentage of genuine blood content in their beverages. School zone signs warning traffic to slow between the hours of 2-3 a.m. It felt like no detail was missed in realizing this vampire-friendly world.
Sadly we aren't allowed to linger on all this wonderful detail, because there was a plot to get to and only 90 minutes to get through it. Edward is singled out by a rogue band of humans led by Willem Dafoe as being a human sympathizer because of his research (and he helped hide them when their car crashed and the vampire police showed up). They take him to their hideaway.
Willem was a vampire, but through a freak accident became human again. They need Edward's help to replicate the conditions and create a cure that can be offered to everyone else. It isn't pleasant (it involves repeated exposure to sunlight until the agony of burning alive "jump starts" the heart), but they're successful and Edward is cured. When they try to return to "civilization" to turn the rest of the population back, they're discovered. *SPOILER SPOILER* Small glitch with their plan though: Edward's brother (who's a military man) catches them. They offer him the cure, but he's not interested, and I have to think there'd be a lot more where he came from.
But then they find out accidentally that a vampire is cured also by biting an ex-vampire (brother bites Willem). Brother gets cured against his will. He goes back to his army buddies as a human, and gets set upon and torn to shreds. Which turns those vampires human, so THEY get attacked by other army vamps, and so on. What ensues can only be described as a blood orgy, the likes of which will never be seen in any Twilight movie.
And, unfortunately, that's in essence the end of the movie. I sort of would have liked to see how it would play out, the existential crisis that people would suffer -- give up immortality or stay a vamp and risk starving to death? Would more undesirable classes of vamps (because there are still homeless, even in a vampire world) be forced to turn human and then farmed for blood? Could the nosferatu be trained as guard dogs? And how would all this affect Bella and Edward (sorry, different Edward)'s relationship?
I'm sure the idea of a sequel has been toyed with. Tery doesn't like Ethan Hawke because he smokes like a chimney and looks like he stinks to high heaven, but I still like watching him act. And I normally hate Willem Dafoe, but he was actually kind of good in this. I was just glad it wasn't a big explosion-filled shoot-em-up, which is frankly what the trailer made it look like.
The Lovely Bones
I read the book, but don't remember it very well. I suppose from what I do remember the movie is fairly true to it.
Young Susie Salmon is at that age when she's first starting to notice boys, first starting to discover herself, first starting to chafe under the yolk of her parents' rules.
It is now, as she teeters on the cusp of womanhood, that she's abducted, raped and murdered by her neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). I echo the sentiments of almost every review I read when I say thank you, Peter Jackson, for sparing us having to actually see the gruesome details of the latter two -- even though without them the viewer is left momentarily confused as to whether she actually escapes or not (she spends the rest of the movie as a spirit watching her family).
She watches her parents wrestle with their grief, helpless to point them in the right direction towards capturing her murderer. When she isn't spying on them, she's tooling around in a limbo filled with breathtaking landscapes with another of George's victims, Holly Golightly (these sequences are the most tedious of the movie and go on entirely too long, and remind me uncomfortably of that really horrible Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come).
Her father (Mark Wahlberg) gives up far less easily than her mother. He's determined to track down her killer, except in the dark ages before the internet (the movie takes place in the 70's) this means trucking home boxes and boxes of public records on a handcart, which looked ridiculous and I found hard to believe was allowed. I mean, public records are available for open viewing, but not necessarily in one's own living room.
Then there's the grandmother, Susan Sarandon, who shows up halfway through for no other apparent reason than to show not all women of the time were domestic goddesses -- she sweeps the dirt under the rug, sets fire to breakfast, and fills the laundry room with soap suds, all while balancing her whiskey glass in her hand. It's sort of a comic interlude that really seemed kind of pointless.
Stanley Tucci rightly deserves the nomination for best supporting actor. I would go so far as to say his serial killer is creepier than Hannibal Lecter, because he walks the line of normal so well. He lives alone and builds dollhouses for a daughter he doesn't have. He's quiet and shy with a sweet smile. Except he's given cold blue contacts that make him look just a smidge strange and unsettling -- probably because his natural brown eyes look too warm and benevolent.
I especially love him because in an interview he talks about how while reading the murder scene in the book, he was holding the book at arm's length because it was so horrifying and difficult to get through. To turn around and play George anyway must take a lot for an actor.
My one complaint with the movie was a very unwieldy sequence at the end *HUGE SPOILER ALERT* Okay, George has Susie's body stuffed in one of those big old safes in his basement, which we don't really know until a very well-done scene at the end where Susie and Holly are visiting the sites of all George's previous victims' burial spots.
In a scene I remember very well from the book, Susie's sister breaks into George's house to look for evidence. She finds some, but not before he gets home and almost catches her. She escapes, but now the jig is up. The police are on their way. There's not much time.
Next thing we know, the safe is in the back of his pickup truck and he's bringing it to the town sinkhole, where everyone dumps everything imaginable they don't want any more. The owner of the sinkhole offers to help him with the safe, and I kid you not, it takes the two grown men like a half hour to get the safe into the hole just rolling it across flat ground (okay, not literally a half hour. It's filmed in slow motion to add to the drama. But it still takes them a really long time to move it). If it's this hard to move across a flat surface with two guys, HOW did George get it up out of his basement alone? Maybe the adrenaline from the fear of getting caught gave him super Hulk strength or something, I don't know.
*ANOTHER BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT* The movie ends the same way as the book, and I remember loving this ending. George gets away. Sometimes justice isn't served. Except while trying to pick up his next victim in a faraway town, he slips off an embankment and falls to his death, so in a way justice is served, just not the way we would like it.
And Susie finally gets to enter heaven, though not before getting her first kiss with boy crush Ray. Awwwww.... Kind of. Because she's still a ghost but he's still alive. ?? Just let the Peter Jackson art flow. I can't wait for The Hobbit.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus:
I used to fancy myself quite the Terry Gilliam fan, but this makes two movies now I haven't really cared for (Please refer to how much I loathed Tideland. Though this one was miles better than that one).
This of course will go down in history as Heath Ledger's final film, which is unfortunate as it's kind of forgettable, especially when held up next to his legendary Joker role.
Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an old vaudevillian trying to keep his show alive in a modern London. He travels with his daughter, a boy and a dwarf (Verne Troyer) in a ramshackle old stagecoach. Part of the stage act is a mirror (actually two sheets of silver cellophane) which, if passed through, opens onto another plane of existence.
The troupe is followed by Tom Waits. More on him later.
They happen upon a young man hanged by the neck under a bridge (Ledger). They save him and he joins the show. He doesn't remember (or claims not to) who he is or why he was hanged.
Look, long story short, (*SPOILER SPOILER*) Parnassus has made a deal with the Devil (Waits) -- first one to capture a certain number of souls wins; Parnassus eternal life, the Devil the doctor's daughter. People who enter the mirror are shown the light and dark aspects of their heart's desire. Their choice determines if their soul goes to Parnassus or Hell.
This is the cleverness of the movie. Obviously Heath died before filming finished, and Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped up to replace him. Every time Tony (Ledger) enters the mirror, he becomes one of these other actors, and because it's a different plane of existence, it sort of makes freaky sense in the story. He escorts an older woman mourning the loss of her youth and he's Depp, seducing her with the promise of handsome male companionship. The thugs Tony stole money from meet him in the mirror as Law, and he escapes because they don't recognize him. Ultimately he faces up to his crimes as Farrell, the scalawag who sets up fake children's charities and makes off with the profits.
I don't know for a fact, but it's possible that it all worked out quite serendipitously if the mirror sequences (which are exclusively green screen and effects heavy) were saved for the end of the shooting schedule. In that case Heath's tragic death really didn't hurt the movie much at all.
Certainly not as much as the aforementioned green screen effects, which are cheaply done and painfully early 2000's quality. The same year Cameron elevated CGI technology to a bold new level, Gilliam seems to have only just discovered Movie Maker on his Windows XP Home Edition.
Also, I know Gilliam's trademark is chaos and insanity. I used to love it. Now I just find it annoying, like he only does it because he thinks he has to.
Daybreakers:
I enjoyed this far, far more than I expected to. Probably because it was short and concise with a tight story. If I have any complaint, it's that I would have liked it to have gone on a little longer. How often do you hear THAT about modern movies, with average running times of 2 hours?
Premise: The world has been overrun by vampires. Humans are an endangered species, and the ones that do exist are hunted by the vampire army so that they can be farmed for blood.
Edward (Ethan Hawke) is a hematologist (love it! A vampire blood specialist) searching for a blood substitute. His research is funded by an evil vampire conglomerate run by Sam Neill (more malevolent than I thought he could be).
There's some urgency to the search, because bloodsuckers who can't get enough blood are starting to turn into true nosferatu, vicious batlike creatures, no longer the civilized vamps who have gone on with their lives almost as before, except business hours are now between the hours of sunset to sunrise.
This is what I loved about the movie the most -- the attention to detail. The signs and billboards and new products that have been developed to allow the vampires to carry on business as usual. Like the "subwalk" -- a subterranean walkway for getting about during the day. Or specially modified cars with a "daylight mode" -- blacked out windows and a sophisticated camera system for steering (heavy Chrysler placement here). Even the mirrors are actually video images of the beholder, since they don't have a reflection otherwise. Coffee shops advertising the percentage of genuine blood content in their beverages. School zone signs warning traffic to slow between the hours of 2-3 a.m. It felt like no detail was missed in realizing this vampire-friendly world.
Sadly we aren't allowed to linger on all this wonderful detail, because there was a plot to get to and only 90 minutes to get through it. Edward is singled out by a rogue band of humans led by Willem Dafoe as being a human sympathizer because of his research (and he helped hide them when their car crashed and the vampire police showed up). They take him to their hideaway.
Willem was a vampire, but through a freak accident became human again. They need Edward's help to replicate the conditions and create a cure that can be offered to everyone else. It isn't pleasant (it involves repeated exposure to sunlight until the agony of burning alive "jump starts" the heart), but they're successful and Edward is cured. When they try to return to "civilization" to turn the rest of the population back, they're discovered. *SPOILER SPOILER* Small glitch with their plan though: Edward's brother (who's a military man) catches them. They offer him the cure, but he's not interested, and I have to think there'd be a lot more where he came from.
But then they find out accidentally that a vampire is cured also by biting an ex-vampire (brother bites Willem). Brother gets cured against his will. He goes back to his army buddies as a human, and gets set upon and torn to shreds. Which turns those vampires human, so THEY get attacked by other army vamps, and so on. What ensues can only be described as a blood orgy, the likes of which will never be seen in any Twilight movie.
And, unfortunately, that's in essence the end of the movie. I sort of would have liked to see how it would play out, the existential crisis that people would suffer -- give up immortality or stay a vamp and risk starving to death? Would more undesirable classes of vamps (because there are still homeless, even in a vampire world) be forced to turn human and then farmed for blood? Could the nosferatu be trained as guard dogs? And how would all this affect Bella and Edward (sorry, different Edward)'s relationship?
I'm sure the idea of a sequel has been toyed with. Tery doesn't like Ethan Hawke because he smokes like a chimney and looks like he stinks to high heaven, but I still like watching him act. And I normally hate Willem Dafoe, but he was actually kind of good in this. I was just glad it wasn't a big explosion-filled shoot-em-up, which is frankly what the trailer made it look like.
What, THIS?
II. I don't read the front-page obits. I heard about his death on the evening news as I just happened to be walking past someone else's tv, then I looked online to be sure that his death wouldn't effect the release of DK. I have no interest in the details of his death. I still don't even really know how Britney Murphy died. A heart thing, right?
III. I didn't spend money on either films. I DID watch The Crazies last night, and it was very decent. I just wish my movie-going experience hadn't been RUINED by the people behind me, who took along their couldn't-have-been-older-than-6-years-old daughter. Thankfully she didn't scream or cry or anything that would've made me want to report the parents to somebody, but she did talk the whole time and chewed her popcorn as loudly as only a 6 year old can. Ugh.
I've still yet to see the Last Temptation, so I can't comment on that. I can't imagine ANYONE having a crush on him, though.