MovieComment

Lagaan

Posted by Player under Foreign

Lagaan: The Musical Cricket Saga

Lagaan is the word given for the tax which villages in India had to pay the British colonial army, during its occupation. It is also the title of this foreign film. Let me just say, that if you have never seen or heard of India’s long standing tradition of film, you might want to make this movie your first introduction to the musical and colorful world of Indian films. Most younger Americans think of Disney when hearing the word Musical, but in fact America has a long tradition of musicals, and so if you don’t like musicals don’t watch Indian films, cause Lagaan and other Indian films are about music and dance, singing and celebrating.

The plot is pretty simple, the evil British captain dares a daring villager to play him in a game of cricket (the most boring sport of all time). If the “darkies” beat his British team, he will forgive them their lagaan for a full 3 years. Since it has not rained at all, the village is starving and cannot afford to pay the tax, so Buvan, the lead Indian villager accepts the challenge and then has to convince his village that they can win, then train them, then play the game. In between there is a love triangle between Buvan and Ghauri (the Indian hottie), and Elizabeth (the uptight but caring British hottie). They both want Buvan, but they will have to wait for the game of Cricket is all that matters now to Buvan.

The film has excellent color and very little noise in the video can be seen. The audio side is in digital surround, but this movie takes very little advantage of. The only audio track is in the native language with English or French subtitles. There is some English spoken in the movie by the British actors, so you can follow along sometimes without subtitles.

This is probably the longest movie I’ve ever watched recently. It seemed like it took 4 hours. Every time I thought it was done, they started to sing again and dance. The women have very high pitched voices, so definitely you have to get into the songs. The cricket game takes place in the second part of the movie and it is longer than most baseball games I’ve seen!

In the end I learned a lot about Indian film, native story telling, and of course why I hate cricket and most British people who play it. It is rather surprising that Ted Koppel, a native Englishman, hates baseball, but comes from a country that can play such a long and boring game as cricket.

Prey For Rock’n'Roll

Posted by Player under Drama

Ever since I watched the movie Face/Off, I’ve been strangely fascinated with Gina Gershon. She is not your typical brunet actress. Gershon just looks and talks differently from other women, and it is this that makes her appealing, and when you add movies like Show Girls and Bound, the appeal easily crosses gender lines, to the point, that now Gershon is not only popular with men, she’s absolutely famous in the gay community with both men and women.

In Prey for Rock & Roll, Gershon is stunning as Jacki, an aging guitarist and lead singer of her own struggling all girl rock band. Once again Gershon’s character is the strong female who may have her doubts at times, but who is as tough as any man. The most striking comeback in the film is when her drummer’s brother asks her how old she is, her response is a quick, “How big is your dick?”, meaning you don’t ask a woman her age in this society, just as you don’t ask a man to tell you how long his sex organ is.

The storyline sees Jacki keeping her band together in spite of her drug addicted bass player and her tragedy stricken drummer. Her only solace is Lori Petty’s character, who is the ever positive lead guitarist. Oh and of course her drummer’s brother who just showed up out of prison and who is attracted to the older Jacki.

Overall the acting could have been better by the supporting cast in some scenes, and the music, well that is usually personal preference, but on average it could have been better as well. Gershon does all her own singing, which is pretty unusual in rock movies nowadays, which comes off as being more believable, but again, the music just did not work most of the time, except for the “Every Six Minutes” song that becomes a major statement about women’s vulnerability and their will to not be victims.

In the end, though Prey For Rock’n'Roll is worth watching not because of Gershon, but because major Hollywood films today lack not only believability, but legitimacy. A lower budget film like Prey For Rock’n'Roll, is not suppose to make you feel better about the world, it is suppose to show you how some women still manage to survive in this world. And for that it makes no apologies, and it asks nothing of you. As Jacki saids, “I use to watch all these movies, to pretend I was somewhere else than where I was at; But now I don’t watch movies anymore.”

I, Robot

Posted by Player under Action

I, Robot is perhaps the first film I’ve ever seen, where it was made fun of even before it debuted in another film. In the movie Jersey Girl, Will Smith stars as himself and jokingly he refers to his latest movie. But ironically, Will Smith’s film really ends up being just that, a film that could have been about the big questions of life, like what is life? or why are we here?, but which ends up being just another action film.

I’m sure some fans of the author of I, Robot will not see this film based on principle alone, but since I have never read the original book, (although I have read some of the short stories,) I took a chance and sat through the film.

The story begins with Will Smith’s character. A homicide cop who is divorced and who has a prejudice against robots in general. It is he who is called to an apparant suicide at US Robotics, who is the world’s most powerful company. The company’s co-founder and chief scientist has just killed himself. USR is about to unleash it’s biggest rollout of their new NS-5 robots, but Smith thinks the suicide was really a homicide and all clues point to one NS-5 unit who just happens to be very unique for a robot. Eventually all events lead back to USR headquarters where the real enemy is revealed, and when of course all NS-5 units go crazy.

Will Smith proves that even if the script sucks, that he can still act and that he is still one of the most charming actors in Hollywood. It is his charm that makes I, Robot watchable. His supporting cast is mostly terrible or one dimensional characters without depth. The robots have more depth in this movie!

The special effects are actually not very believable. The Robots are all CGI animations, and although they are very cool looking, their physics sometimes boggles the mind, more than it amazes it.

In some moments, the film stops and asks some deep questions, but the answer never comes, and instead some more action takes place, which makes me think, the action movie was more important than understanding the human dilemma.

I, Robot is not the drama that A.I. was, and does not exceed The Chronicles of Riddick on the action movie scale, about the only thing it has is Will Smith.

The Hulk (Ang Lee)

Posted by Player under Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Like most fans of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I think I expected too much from Ang Lee, this time around. The Hulk, this time around is a drama with some action, but for the most part the film is a lot slower than most fans of say X-Men2 would expect. This is not to say that Lee did not do some really inventive and cool things in this film, it is just that overall the film never quite makes the same category of films that it could be associated with.

The storyline is pretty basic, but also very Greek Tragedy. Father wants to remake the world, has son, loses everything in the process. Son grows up, comes full circle with father, must over come father’s weaknesses. There’s a love story there too, but it is not as developed as one would have thought.

The look of The Hulk is interesting, Lee portrays a natural world and a human world. The natural world is colorful and absorbing, the human world is divided, less colorful and did I say dimly litted. The action scene with the hybrid dogs is just one dark fight scene. By far the best action sequences that Lee shows the audience, are when The Hulk is jumping and running by himself. Probably the best thing the Lee does overall is his capturing of how The Hulk jumps to travel large distances. This is done even better than in the many cartoons that The Hulk has had over the years. As for CGI Hulk, it just is not that realistic, this Hulk looks more like shiny green clay than a real creature. The tank scene is pretty much the best action scene in which a CGI Hulk battles human looking objects.

What I really did not like about the film was the Sam Elliot character of General Ross. It was too over the top and I really did not think the acting was that good overall in the picture. Average drama like in the film Space Cowboys, is really hard to come by, and The Hulk lacks it in a few places.

In conclusion, if you are absolute Hulk fan, see this film. If you have seen A Beautiful Mind, well then you have seen a better Jennifer Connelly film than this.