I finally saw the live Lilo and Stitch. It was good but I think the original animated one (and its sequels, and the animated series) was better. There was one addition I did like—
—David’s grandmother who lives nearby and who becomes very important to the plot—
—but I still think most changes detracted rather than added to the live-action version. Zach Galifinaikas (sp?) in a regular US accent voice is no David Ogden Stiers in a booming semi-Russian accent, and Jumba is not the same character in the end, sadly to me. There is no Gantu, etc. And there is no scene in which
Stitch reads a picture book about a lost duckling and relates to it and it’s just heart-rending to see how alone he feels
And that sort of thing. Again, it’s still a good movie, and I do like the additional character.
Oh, and alas we don’t get to see
Pleakley’s penchant for drag, though the director said he wanted to include it, and kept asking, but was told no, which is a shame.
I just watched L'assassinat du Père Noël (1941)(English title: "Who Killed Santa Claus?").
The movie was produced by "Continental Films" which has something of a bad reputation. It was a French film studio sponsored by German money in Occupied France to make films that the Nazis would allow. Its job was to make entertaining films to delight the French while they were occupied by Nazi forces. Those involved often get tagged with the "collaborator" label--which is a bit rich considering that one of the lead actors in this move was tortured to death by the Gestapo a few months after the film was made. Must be some definition of "collaborating" that I was not previously aware of.
Having said all that, please forget it. Watching the movie on its own merits, ignorant of the background, it truly is a delightful feature. Set in a remote French village, we have a kindly mapmaker (well, globe-maker, really) who always play the part of Father Christmas for the village. There is a Crazy Cat Lady looking for her cat, Mistou. She is mocked by children, but treated gently by the adults. There are the children of the village and their schoolteacher, and one bedridden child. And then there is the surprise return of "the Baron" after ten years--with rumors that he has some dread disease. Plague? Leprosy? And early on in the film, the local priest is assaulted, presumably to try to steal the valuable "ring of St. Nicholas" from the church.
The movie is funny, charming, mysterious ("Father Christmas" is killed two-thirds of the way through), suspenseful and ultimately endearing. Ignore its murky history and watch it for its own sake. It is worth it.
Thursday, I saw the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Even though I know the story well through seeing the original, it was very enjoyable! In my opinion, it was done well, and made for a nice outing to escape the rain.
Well; not a movie, but as there isn't a thread for opera, I'll mention here that we've just been to see 'Jesus Christ Superstar' - a gorgeous production of an opera I had never seen before. Terrific music and great characters wonderfully acted, and not, as I was warned long ago, the least hint of blasphemy or heresy. Interesting that the soldiers taking Jesus away were dressed like ICE thugs - that was well done.
Thursday, I saw the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Even though I know the story well through seeing the original, it was very enjoyable! In my opinion, it was done well, and made for a nice outing to escape the rain.
BTW, I just love Toothless!
I need to see this. I’ve not seen any of them yet…
I saw Jurassic World Rebirth and… I found it the weakest of all of them thus far.
I was really disappointed by the first few minutes saying that most of the dinosaurs were dying off except for the ones in the equator. So much potential thrown away. Ugh. And for the roller-coaster aspect, fewer “oh my God” moments, and all of them were spoiled by the trailers.
That said, I liked the characters, though I predicted who would die and who would live with almost perfect accuracy (a couple of them actually lived I thought would die) the moment we saw them show up. It was an enjoyable thing to see, but I hope that things change in future movies.
I strongly recommend Camp Cretaceous on Netflix much more—it’s set in the same world with a lot more character development, world-building, etc.
Oh! Things that bugged me in the movie, just a couple more:
I thought the blood with the DNA for all of these came from mosquitoes and such. How did they get a dunkleosteus? It’s a fish! And from longer ago! (Technically, how did they realistically get a mosasaur?)
Dinosaurs didn’t just thrive in tropical conditions. We know more stuff more about that. In fact one cool thing about the original book/movie is that it was based more on contemporary science, and this should have been too. (Another error, though from the original book in a speech that was put in this movie—oxygen levels now are indeed comparable to the dinosaur era. (The speech claims otherwise.) It’s not the pre-Cambrian, etc. In some other eras, oxygen levels were much higher, which was why there were huge bugs and things that couldn’t survive now—but not the dinosaur era.)
Honestly, the easiest fix for this “all dying off” nonsense would be that how to make dinosaurs is much more known, and all kinds of people (and governments with whatever agendas) could make them more robust.
Also this business about getting blood samples from the biggest dinos—er, except the pterosaur isn’t a dino, it’s a flying reptile, and why the pterosaur? It’s not the largest creature compared with lots of them. I get the nice “land, sea, and air” thing, but it doesn’t make sense with the “biggest because they have the biggest hearts” mandate. But then we see them getting stuff from… an egg. In a world where they can breed these things. Maybe the giant pharmaceutical company somehow couldn’t get their hands on the needed stuff, but… if eggs will do, then just use that dna tech and make some, no being eaten.
Also it’s the island of misfit toys, er, mutant dinos, but only two of them (discounting dead ones in the tubes in the lab) actually seem mutated. They could have gone wild with this. Why weren’t the other dinos visibly mutated in some way?
I think the “made a weird mutant dino because the public was bored with regular dinos” was done better before with the Indominus Rex.
(Not to mention that we’ve had zoos forever, and now animal parks, and people aren’t bored with those. I don’t think 30 years or less of dinosaurs would make people bored at all. Metaphor for the JP franchise or not…)
Just saw Superman and had the words of the Superman Grace stuck in my head everytime the Superman theme played....admittedly this is the fault of holiday club and not James Gunn.
Did you like it? I’m sure I’ll go see it before too long, but I can’t say the trailers and other promo things I’ve seen have gotten me particularly excited about it.
Did you like it? I’m sure I’ll go see it before too long, but I can’t say the trailers and other promo things I’ve seen have gotten me particularly excited about it.
I really enjoyed it! Definitely not perfect but (personally as a comics Superman fan and Snyderverse Hater) it was a real breath of fresh air in terms of the DCU at least. It was a lot of fun and the SFX for Krypto is particularly impressive - they used motion capture on a *human* and somehow mixed it with the real actor dog? It's really well done and you would never guess that it is mostly motion capture, much less a motion captured human.
The trailer shown beforehand for Nolan's The Odyssey has me intrigued - I'm not much of a Christopher Nolan fan because he sucks at writing women, but Lupita Nyong'o is playing Clytemnestra which I am very intrigued by. Lupita has a very delicate, almost ethereal kind of beauty which is not how I imagine Clytemnestra at all.
I just finished watching Old Guard 2 on Netflix. It's not, IMHO, as good as the first one, but good enough to keep my interest. It ends on a massive cliff hanger, so it's obvious there are plans for a third one.
I have mixed feelings about the Snyderverse. I liked some of his take on Superman, but just couldn’t deal with Ben Affleck as Batman, and I hated “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
Well; not a movie, but as there isn't a thread for opera, I'll mention here that we've just been to see 'Jesus Christ Superstar' - a gorgeous production of an opera I had never seen before. Terrific music and great characters wonderfully acted, and not, as I was warned long ago, the least hint of blasphemy or heresy. Interesting that the soldiers taking Jesus away were dressed like ICE thugs - that was well done.
I love JCS but it js definitely written from the POV of Judas and is not exactly a model of orthodoxy! I don’t have a problem with that though.
Strangely the people getting their knickers in a twist over Cynthia Erivo being cast as Jesus in a forthcoming production don’t seem to be aware their parents would have been protesting outside the theatres decades before.
(I think she will be great, as will Adam Lambert, Philippa Soo and Josh Gad. I just hope it gets filmed.)
Comments
—but I still think most changes detracted rather than added to the live-action version. Zach Galifinaikas (sp?) in a regular US accent voice is no David Ogden Stiers in a booming semi-Russian accent, and Jumba is not the same character in the end, sadly to me. There is no Gantu, etc.
And that sort of thing. Again, it’s still a good movie, and I do like the additional character.
Oh, and alas we don’t get to see
The movie was produced by "Continental Films" which has something of a bad reputation. It was a French film studio sponsored by German money in Occupied France to make films that the Nazis would allow. Its job was to make entertaining films to delight the French while they were occupied by Nazi forces. Those involved often get tagged with the "collaborator" label--which is a bit rich considering that one of the lead actors in this move was tortured to death by the Gestapo a few months after the film was made. Must be some definition of "collaborating" that I was not previously aware of.
Having said all that, please forget it. Watching the movie on its own merits, ignorant of the background, it truly is a delightful feature. Set in a remote French village, we have a kindly mapmaker (well, globe-maker, really) who always play the part of Father Christmas for the village. There is a Crazy Cat Lady looking for her cat, Mistou. She is mocked by children, but treated gently by the adults. There are the children of the village and their schoolteacher, and one bedridden child. And then there is the surprise return of "the Baron" after ten years--with rumors that he has some dread disease. Plague? Leprosy? And early on in the film, the local priest is assaulted, presumably to try to steal the valuable "ring of St. Nicholas" from the church.
The movie is funny, charming, mysterious ("Father Christmas" is killed two-thirds of the way through), suspenseful and ultimately endearing. Ignore its murky history and watch it for its own sake. It is worth it.
BTW, I just love Toothless!
I need to see this. I’ve not seen any of them yet…
That said, I liked the characters, though I predicted who would die and who would live with almost perfect accuracy (a couple of them actually lived I thought would die) the moment we saw them show up. It was an enjoyable thing to see, but I hope that things change in future movies.
I strongly recommend Camp Cretaceous on Netflix much more—it’s set in the same world with a lot more character development, world-building, etc.
Oh! Things that bugged me in the movie, just a couple more:
Dinosaurs didn’t just thrive in tropical conditions. We know more stuff more about that. In fact one cool thing about the original book/movie is that it was based more on contemporary science, and this should have been too. (Another error, though from the original book in a speech that was put in this movie—oxygen levels now are indeed comparable to the dinosaur era. (The speech claims otherwise.) It’s not the pre-Cambrian, etc. In some other eras, oxygen levels were much higher, which was why there were huge bugs and things that couldn’t survive now—but not the dinosaur era.)
Honestly, the easiest fix for this “all dying off” nonsense would be that how to make dinosaurs is much more known, and all kinds of people (and governments with whatever agendas) could make them more robust.
Also this business about getting blood samples from the biggest dinos—er, except the pterosaur isn’t a dino, it’s a flying reptile, and why the pterosaur? It’s not the largest creature compared with lots of them. I get the nice “land, sea, and air” thing, but it doesn’t make sense with the “biggest because they have the biggest hearts” mandate. But then we see them getting stuff from… an egg. In a world where they can breed these things. Maybe the giant pharmaceutical company somehow couldn’t get their hands on the needed stuff, but… if eggs will do, then just use that dna tech and make some, no being eaten.
Also it’s the island of misfit toys, er, mutant dinos, but only two of them (discounting dead ones in the tubes in the lab) actually seem mutated. They could have gone wild with this. Why weren’t the other dinos visibly mutated in some way?
I think the “made a weird mutant dino because the public was bored with regular dinos” was done better before with the Indominus Rex.
(Not to mention that we’ve had zoos forever, and now animal parks, and people aren’t bored with those. I don’t think 30 years or less of dinosaurs would make people bored at all. Metaphor for the JP franchise or not…)
I’m still glad I saw it, don’t get me wrong…
I really enjoyed it! Definitely not perfect but (personally as a comics Superman fan and Snyderverse Hater) it was a real breath of fresh air in terms of the DCU at least. It was a lot of fun and the SFX for Krypto is particularly impressive - they used motion capture on a *human* and somehow mixed it with the real actor dog? It's really well done and you would never guess that it is mostly motion capture, much less a motion captured human.
The trailer shown beforehand for Nolan's The Odyssey has me intrigued - I'm not much of a Christopher Nolan fan because he sucks at writing women, but Lupita Nyong'o is playing Clytemnestra which I am very intrigued by. Lupita has a very delicate, almost ethereal kind of beauty which is not how I imagine Clytemnestra at all.
I have mixed feelings about the Snyderverse. I liked some of his take on Superman, but just couldn’t deal with Ben Affleck as Batman, and I hated “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
I love JCS but it js definitely written from the POV of Judas and is not exactly a model of orthodoxy! I don’t have a problem with that though.
Strangely the people getting their knickers in a twist over Cynthia Erivo being cast as Jesus in a forthcoming production don’t seem to be aware their parents would have been protesting outside the theatres decades before.
(I think she will be great, as will Adam Lambert, Philippa Soo and Josh Gad. I just hope it gets filmed.)