Fuck you Brett Ratner for teasing me with a Sentinel head, fuck you right in the ear hole!
Twas busy this week, thus there’s only a pair of movies for me to babble on about this time.
Man On Wire (2008, James Marsh) **
Bland and boring, and it really shouldn’t be. What Philippe Petit accomplished is amazing, but James Marsh fails to ever create any tension or emotional resonance behind his act. Instead, Mr. Marsh seems more interested in throwing all the techniques he has learned as a filmmaker at the viewer. I thought what Mr. Marsh did amounted to trying to pull the wool over my eyes, but he didn’t succeed and I could see how vacuous the film he made actually was. I’m still amazed by what Petit did, but his feat deserved better than Man On Wire.
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, Brett Ratner) *
Loud explosions, characters not making sense, an inability to follow in-universe continuity, and blatant stupidity abound. I chuckled a few times at some funny lines, and I’m not one to care for how inconsistent the X-Men we get in this version of the film franchise are from the comic book versions. But, I am one to gripe about a shoddy film, and this was a shoddy film. My fiancee summed it up best during the scene where they save Mystique on the trailer, “Wait, if they had weapons with the cure the whole time then why didn’t they just use them in the first place?” Exactly.
Wrap-Up:
A double dose of terrible in this edition of This Week In Cinema. Sad thing is, both films had the potential to be so much better and they squandered it. Hopefully next week will be better, anything has to be better than this crop of disappointment.
Cheers,
Bill
You are nine kinds of wrong about ‘Man on Wire.’ In every interview you can tell the people are telling their story in the context of a post-9/11 world. They are trying to celebrate life and something wonderful about their memories despite something dark lurking around the edges of the same memories. There is a real internal tension throughout the telling story until the very end when they talk about the impact on fame on all of their relationships and friendship and how this moment of greatness changed their lives, and probably not for the better. At 1:26:30, that one guy says, “You cannot take away what happened,” and breaks down. There is so much in that one moment. It is an amazing, subtle movie that captures something great about art, memory, and loss.
Having said that, you are dead on about X-Men 3.
If I had bought into the relationships before that moment then I may have liked the movie, but I never did. I didn’t think Marsh did enough to develop or make me care about those characters so that when those moments came I would be impacted. I didn’t really get the 9/11 vibe either, but maybe that’s just me.