Gutbrain Records

Saturday, 2006 March 25

So far this year I've watched 32 movies and two of the best ones have been so-called family entertainment, National Velvet and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I watched Finding Nemo, too, and while I enjoyed it, I found myself wondering, what is it with Disney and killing the main character's mother? I'm not sure I'd want my child to watch Bambi. National Velvet and Wallace & Gromit are much better. That early Technicolor process creates a look that's like painting come to life. Lassie is another good one.

Today I watched Tetsujin 28-go, last year's live-action movie of a much loved Japanese comic book and cartoon known here as Gigantor. The special effects were very good but the movie was surprisingly subdued. The robots look great but they mostly stand in one place and take very slow punches at each other. Is this what the original was like? I haven't seen it, but I suspect it had more action.

I wish there had been more action in Tsui Hark's The Chinese Feast, which I watched a few days ago. I'd seen it when it came out, in 1995, no doubt at the Music Palace, but I didn't remember it. The cooking scenes are great but there are too few of them. Tsui Hark was apparently aiming at a mish-mash of Wong Kar Wai, Iron Chef and a typical Hong Kong New Year's comedy film. It made me sad to see Leslie Cheung, who has the lead role. I don't think I've seen one of his movies since he committed suicide a couple of years ago.

Red Peony Gambler 2: Gambler's Obligation is not as good as the first movie in the series. Director Norifumi Suzuki seems always to have trouble concentrating on plot and pacing and will go ambling after one exploitation element after another, as if they were wills-o'-the-wisp. Tai Kato, whose work I usually enjoy, made the third movie in the series, so I'm looking forward to that. What was the plot of this one? Oh, yeah, something about gangsters wanting to take over small businesses.

The well regarded 1952 film, directed by Anthony Asquith, of The Importance of Being Earnest was as good as I'd expected and contained a surprising bonus. While watching it I realized that Oscar Wilde's play must join the list of literary allusions in Alice Munro's short story "Wenlock Edge", published in The New Yorker a few months ago. I think this story is both very diffferent from most of her work and one of her best. You can read it here.

A quick word of advice to people making movies out of plays. Don't "open up" the play by contriving to photograph all sorts of exteriors and movements which we wouldn't have seen on stage. At the least, this usually throws the scale out of proportion. Asquith's film of Earnest only has two brief instances of this but one of them is quite detrimental, ruining a character's surprise entrance for the sake of some lame humor.