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I admit I have not seen Avatar yet. This Christmas it was a challenge just getting my super son to the movies but we did see Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which I now want on DVD.
Recently on Facebook there has been the wonderful group IF MR. BEAN WAS IN AVATAR HE WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS!!
Now another amazing insight into the mind of James Cameron can be found on Indexed
Enjoy.
This week with one thing and another I happened to see not one but two films. While neither Enchanted or Bride and Prejudice are new movies what surprised me was the similarity between them. And just in case you are thinking it really is Bride and Prejudice not Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Both movies derive from other material. Enchanted has echoes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid and Bambi as well as Moonstruck and other New York based movies. Bride and Prejudice echoes both Pride and Prejudice in its novel form and Bollywood musicals. Both seem to do a great job in meshing these disparate forms into a story. I have to say “seem to do a great job” as I have not seen enough Bollywood to know of the rules of the genre.
Both movies are relatively chaste. In Enchanted Giselle longs for true love’s kiss. In Bride and Prejudice the sign of true affection is a kiss on the forehead or holding each other close. There is romance without explicit sexuality, though in Bride and Prejudice there are issues of the problems of younger people being more revealing in their clothes and the potential problems this will cause.
I had seen parts of Bride and Prejudice before and wanted to see the whole move to understand it all. It has great ideas and some gtreat scenery. Enchanted is a delightful postmodern take on the Disney fairytales of days gone by. Both suceed somehow in the clash of cultures ideas. While Bride and Prejudice had the more intellectual and thought out approach, Enchanted‘s approach was more fun and likeable.
I am happy to recommend both films. Which you like more is a different issue.
Ok this is not a consideration of a fiction novel, I have a few of those to give, but instead some comments on Prince Caspian.
I enjoyed the movie, the effects and the overall message. It does intrigue me if The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is analogous to the ministry of Christ and the voyage of the Dawn Treader is analogus to the book of Revelation as the seven kings represent the seven churches is Prince Caspian analogous to the Reformation? Just a thought.
There was lots of discussion in the family for this movie about the portrayal of the Telmarines. I had imagined them much like they were portrayed – my wonderful wife and others more like Arabs. I suppose we now have a model which will be seen and memorised from now on for kids. I am happy the producers etc. thought closer to what I did than others – of course my imagination was more correct wasn’t it. 🙂
Now this is the second movie my son has seen at a drive-in the first was Cars. He asked some fun questions like “Where has the train gone” and “Are they cutting up boys” but seemed to enjoy it sort of. Which raises the other issue that some of my students have expressed concern about, why does this have a M rating? That I can not answer other than my old addage, “In their movies, Americans hate sex and Australians hate violence”.
So overall I recommend the film and hope you enjoy it too.
We all have a past. For better or worse. There are things we readily admit to and things we don’t tell anybody.
One bit of the past I saw on a T-Shirt recently said “Kitt is a Cylon”. This took me ages to figure out. If you need help see Kitt & Cylon for it all to make sense and remember the defining thing of a Cylon is the red light that flashes back and forth.
Another thing from my past is comic books. Now I may be stating I am more of a geek than I like to admit to but I still sometimes read them. For Christmas I received 52 Volume 1 and have read from the library Showcase Presents JLA, Vol 1 and The Tornado’s Path.
I have to admit I enjoyed all of them and now want to read all of 52. Even if its last volume is not quite out in this country yet.
The reason I realise I enjoy reading these, and these particularly is that they take me back to my first reading of comics. I can remember one year on the way home from or on the way to the Easter show, I think, my Mum, Dad and I stopped at St Leonard’s railway station and bought me my first comic. One story in the book was a Justice League of America book and it started me reading comics for many years. My preference has remained to this day to be DC. This does not mean that I am not looking forward to Iron Man at the movies, though I must admit some of the Fantastic Four movies seem more farce than serious takes but I still have a preference for the Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Supes and the gang. I am really looking forward to the Justice League movie even if I have troubles thinking that Adam Brody will be the Flash. When was Barry Allen or Wally West that dark? Geeky no problem, dark no.
So is this a hankering for a simpler time? I actually don’t think so. The things that appealed to me when I was a child are still the things that appeal to me today. I don’t think we move as far from out childhood as we would like to think.
So I have confessed to my comic loves, what are your unwritable confessions?
Bruce Beresford’s Josh Hartnett Definitely Want To do this … True Stories from a Life in the Screen Trade was not quite what I was expecting.
I thought it would be a memoir of some sort with a prose type structure. Instead it was a memoir in a diary, with footnotes, insights and name dropping galore. The name dropping is not for the sake of it but because these really are the people Bruce mixes with. He has good days and bad days and knows more correctly than not that certain producers really do not have the money.
I think what I most enjoyed about this book was the fact that it was about the reality of a persons life that many of us would think is glamourous. Bruce shows he lives a lot on airplanes, visits strange places for work, some of which are nice, refuses the services of well dressed men who can provide “comfort” in the form of young women and overall is a “normal” Australian guy.
Of course most normal Australian’s do not go to the opera, theatre or watch movies as much as Bruce does but his one paragraph reviews of these items makes them interesting. He is basically stuck doing not much in the time he writes the book. He rewrites scripts, tries to find money and dreams about making interesting movies. He was the first choice as director for a movie about William Wilberforce which became Amazing Grace directed by Michael Apsted.
If you like Australian directed movies or want insight into what movie making is like I recommend this book.
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