This week at the movies.
We went to the cinema to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I always feel a little embarrassed when I come out of the showing and everyone is playing the “so what did you think?” game*and I know that some of my friends loved the movie whereas I couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. That said, I had already sat through a meal where two of the people at the table discussed how much they loved Twilight (as a book, not the film) and I buried myself in my food to avoid having to comment, so I really should have been expecting the question.
As movies go, it felt emotionally dead. It’s great looking, certainly, and the screenwriters have done a decent job of extracting the majority of the salient plot points from a pretty long book and packed them into a reasonable amount of screen time, but I just wasn’t caught up in the story. The story can no longer really be carried by the efforts of the adults (although I still enjoy seeing Alan Rickman streeeeetching out his lines to breaking point) and it’s almost too much to expect from the still-growing talents of the younger cast (mind you, they’re all about twenty now, so maybe I should revise the description). Daniel Radcliffe has some great moments, and seems to cope a lot better when he’s given something lighter to handle, but in the end it’s not enough to sweep us along. I got the feeling that the movie was depending on prior emotional investment primarily through the novels, and possibly through the earlier movies – although if the latter was their intention then the release delay pretty much killed that stone dead for me.
At home, we watched the Bollywood hero movie, Krrish. That was quite fun, although I’m still unable to cope with the devastating length of Bollywood movies. It’s amazing that Hollywood churns out crap like Elektra (I’m not even providing a link for that guff) and meanwhile there are movies like this that are full of humour, charm and romance.
At the opposite end of the scale, we watched Monster. Not an easy watch, and super-grim. By the end of it, I was starting to wonder what I was meant to take away from the experience, aside from the advice that if Bruce Dern tells you to do something, you’d better bloody listen. Silent Running 4 lyfe, yo.
*where you try and see what everyone else thought before you accidentally look like an idiot who didn’t “get” the film.
