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On 26/07/2003 andrew said: "Big Dumb Movies"
are mostly what I watched in New York. Certainly no art-house stuff.
On the Saturday after I arrived, after I'd decided not to follow the opsophagoi over to Coney Island, I returned to were I was staying to find my hosts were out for a bit, I waited around, thought about going out to the cinema, then met them as they were considering going to see Finding Nemo. It's a fish-based comedy from Pixar. It's better than Monsters Inc, though not as good as Toy Story 2. The last isn't a serious problem: TS2 is one on the ten best films of the nineties. Like the Aardman animation films, the Pixar film seem like anachronisms: the technology is cutting edge, but the films themselves are made by people who share an aesthitic with film-makers of the pre-MTV age. The script's funny, the voice cast is excellent, and it contains a moment as strange and jarring and brilliant as Cowgirl Jessie refusing to go back into storage.
Then on Wednesday I made it my mission to go see Pirates Of The Caribbean, but I missed the early showing, and then I had to move back to Manhattan, so by the time I finally went to see it, in the enormo-theater in Times Square, I had to buy a ticket for the showing after next, and go see Terminator 3 in the mean time. T3 isn't a very bad movie, but it certainly isn't a good one. There's a chase scene at the start of Arnie vs a bunch of police/ambulance vehicles that would be pretty impressive it if didn't share a world with Grand Theft Auto III. And there's a lot of scenes where the cold robotlike face of the plot shows through (ha!), like when people who known each other all their life handily describe the key aspects of their relationship in a few snappy sentences. There's some cool stuff as well, but nothing you couldn't come up with if you sat down to write a third Terminator film yourself. But you'd probably rewrite the stupid bits.
Pirates of the Caribbean is actually a film that I have less to say about, as I don't want to spoil, and I don't want to overhype. It's a fantastically entertaining action-adventure film, in a Raiders of the Lost Ark sort of way. Which it's better than (so much for the hype).
Thursday I had an hour and a half to kill, so I saw Charlies Angels 2, which was playing every hour just across from the internet cafe. It has both Firestarter and Breathe on the soundtrack, and that actually says a lot. Many films would think twice before adding two songs from same band, let alone the same album, let alone an album that came out 6 years ago. But CA2 knows that both those songs are actually great, and it doesn't care what it has to do to entertain. Dirt Bikes, Surfing, Strippers, helicopters, it's all in there. The actual deductive elements that are meant to shuttle the plot from one cool scene to another are ridiculous, and sped through so fast that their wafer-thinness becomes a source of more entertainment.
And on Friday I got up extra early to see League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was, it's safe to say, a mistake. I you forget everything about the "team of Victorian-era literary heroes" comic that inspired it, and forget everything about the original adventures (Dracula, Allan Quatermain, Henry Jekyll, The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer), then you still have a deeply wretched film, full of sound and fury and lazy scriptwriting (see T3, but worse).
And I attempted to wash it from my head by going to see Sinbad later. It's certainly a pretty movie: the mix of handdrawn characters and CG backgrounds fits the subject well, and it's a pretty good Sinbad movie, in that it moves smartly from start-monster-monster-monster-oh look that girl that hated him loves him. It's even got a great line where after a particularly talky bit (about how the girl is actually engaged to his best friend) we zoom way out to where the Goddess of Chaos is watching that part of the globe: "Less talking. More screaming". But it's happy to be no more than an updating of an old movie. Like T3, you could do the same yourself.