Tag Archives: movies

The Shining

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Watched The Shining today.

Reaffirmed my general dislike of the directoral efforts of Stanley Kubrick. His cinematography is excellent. But I find his direction and his movies to be cold and lacking from an emotional standpoint. I love the staging of his shots, but there’s rarely a time where I like any of his characters or where the action on screen inspires me to care and feel. His movies just feel cold and distant.

The one real exception is Spartacus. Spartacus is unique in the Kubrick oeuvre in not really being typical of his style. The charisma and the emotion of his stars is visible and it is crudely shot in comparison to Kubrick’s other works. But it is a Kirk Douglas movie. It showcases the machismo and the aura that Kirk Douglas brings to all his roles and more reflects his style than anything else.

Even what should have been a dream pairing of a real life couple in Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise for the movie Eyes Wide Shut was incapable of bringing warmth and emotion to a Kubrickian work. It is cold and distant and there’s no chemistry to the scenes where real1 spouses interact and work together. Kidman has proven to be a gifted actress over the years, and Cruise, while a limited actor, is good at communicating his charisma and very good at playing himself to the camera. We, as viewers, should watch and be inspired to feel something. Instead, you might enjoy the scenery and the way parts are shot, but the performances and the emotional content isn’t there.

I don’t believe it’s a waste of time to watch Kubrick’s movies, but it’s a shame that his movies fail to inspire me to feel and care. And I’m unlikely to rewatch any of them besides Spartacus. I would watch The Shining if only to see the way things are shot and framed and to see the classic moments people recognize, but it is imbued with Kubrick’s gifts and failings.

  1. At the time. ↩

Little Big Soldier

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Watched Little Big Soldier yesterday.

I was blown away. I’ve thought Jackie Chan deserves more credit for his acting abilities for a while. His performance in the new Karate Kid1 movie with Jaden Smith was easily the best part of the movie and displayed a depth of skill and range rarely seen in most of his movies. But his performance in Little Big Soldier was superbly good.

It’s the kind of movie that I would not have associated with Jackie Chan or his range, being more in line with the wuxia movies from Jet Li2. There’s a hefty dose of the physical comedy and slapstick that is Jackie Chan’s trademark, but what is more striking is the range and subtlety he brings to the role. I expected something entirely different than what I watched, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it heartily.

Watch Little Big Soldier.

  1. Which was not as good as the original Karate Kid movies with Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. ↩

  2. Of which, Hero, in particular, shares some similarities. ↩

Not as good as the original

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It’s weird how movies screw up the original source or the actual history and, in so doing, weaken the impact.

Watchmen added a bit more violence and was more explicit about depicting the violent events, where the graphics novel rarely shows those events directly. The result is a movie where the impact of the brutality and the damage done to characters is less dramatic than the times where the graphics novel chooses to directly depict the events.

Another example is The Good Shepherd, in which it most directly tells about events during the life of James Jesus Angleton, one of the most powerful figures in the CIA and the national intelligence infrastructure for decades. Most of the events in the movie are reflections of what really happened, real revelations regarding the people the characters represent. The real events were often more disturbing and more interesting than the movie version of the events.

Some movies do work better than the source material. Most of Richard Matheson’s books are better in a film version, from What Dreams May Come to Hell House. His books feel somehow incomplete and the film versions improve them by bringing the visual details to life. Or the Princess Bride, where the movie is the way to experience the story1. But those movies are the exception rather than the rule.

  1. Both versions are good, but everyone quotes the movie. ↩