Sneaks In The Rain
Posted on | August 20, 2006 at 4:35 pm | Comments Off
Yes, we have been getting some rain around here lately. You folks who live in other, wetter climes don’t know how good it is to have the occasional rain shower to break up the hot, dry days. Heck, it was drizzling when I was jogging yesterday morning (sans iPod) at 8:30am, and that felt grand.
Anyway, Bryce and I saw an early showing (only $5!) of Snakes On A Plane this morning (Bryce had to rush to his son’s baseball game afterwards). Judging by the fact that this is first movie I’ve seen all summer where I didn’t start to nod off even once (increasingly hard in these days of medication), I have to say that I really enjoyed it. Maybe that makes it the best movie of the summer. The movie was exactly what it was advertised to be – a thrill ride. There’s not much in the way of plot, character development, or filmmaking innovation, but with a movie that’s so much fun, you just don’t care. I counted at least four times when Bryce snickered “That’s just wrong!” What a hoot. I’m glad they went the R-rated route so they could sneak in those extra scenes of wanton pandering.
I did find the movie somewhat campy, but at least it was a good kind of self-aware campiness instead of high camp for camp’s sake. If that makes any sense. It was more of a “winking” type of campiness. There are some very funny moments in the movie, but also some genuine chills. Snakes don’t bother me as much as spiders do, and after awhile you sort of get immune to their slithering grotesqueness, but there’s things to freak out even the most adamant of snake lovers out there. The movie just reminded me so much of those old time summer movies I used to see as a kid. Nothing too deep, no bigger points to make, just lots of fun.
I wish I could say the same about Azumi, another movie I saw this weekend. I went to see it because it was directed by the guy who directed Versus (which, as I’ve said before, I found tedious) and the fun Godzilla: Final Wars. It’s a Japanese import about a girl in a band of assassins out to rid the late feudal era lawless Japanese countryside of the warlords plaguing it. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity about whether or not the assassins are contributing to the problem rather than stopping it, though the movie doesn’t spend too much time weighing such matters. The “best” part of the movie actually occurs at the beginning, when our merry band of 10 young assassins, who have been training together since childhood, are forced to undergo their final test by pairing up with someone and killing their partner. Kind of reminded me of Battle Royale* a bit. The fight scenes, of which there are many, are well done and unbelievable. At one point, Azumi takes on hundreds of scoundrels all by her lonesome. There are some cute camera moves that draw way too much attention to themselves, like one scene where Azumi is fighting the bad guy on a plank, and the camera zooms around them in a full vertical 360 degree swath. Very disorienting. The actress who plays Azumi is a pop star in Japan, but not very good at the acting. She’s cute, but is pretty unbelievable as a warrior and doesn’t have very many expressions. Not an awful way to spend 2+ hours (the movie was too long), but it would be better as a rental. Plus, there was something wrong with the projector or something at my showing, because the brightness levels kept changing within scenes.
Latre.
* – I heard somewhere that they are going to attempt to make an American version of Battle Royale. That really surprises me in this post-Columbine era, especially seeing as how the original Japanese version has never even been released on Region 1 DVD, making it a bit hard to come by ’round these parts.
Late Additional Observation: Throughout the movie, I kept wondering where I had seen the actress who played the Paris Hilton-type socialite in the movie, Rachel Blanchard. She looked very familiar, like I had just seen her in something recently. Turns out that she played Nancy the American in the second series of the British TV show Peep Show, which I just recently watched and which I talked about here. Small world.