now the dancing minions have no place to put their big maypole... fish thing

[freckles_and_doubt]

It's hellweek. Students are blinding and stiffing and clutching their brows in angst, courses and majors are falling like autumn leaves. I have managed, possibly by dint of not actually having enough sleep lately, to drift serenely through it all with sublime detachment while about me they reel and writhe and faint in coils. The universe will not end, I tell myself, because this entitled little twit thinks I have it in for her personally and am denigrating her abilities by refusing to allow her to take an extra course. (She failed more than half of them last semester. There's no way in hell.)

By way of amelioration of all this admin horror, we tootled off to see Prince of Persia last night. This was, in the event, absolutely a perfect thing in a perfect place. It's an unashamed assemblage of swashbuckling fluff, with enough wire-work, humour and semi-intelligent scripting to exactly hit the spot in amusing distraction. I loved all the running and jumping and acrobatics over roofs: while my devotion to wuxia wire-work is eternal, this was in some ways even better because it had slightly more of a gritty and likely edge to its unabashed fantasy - not so much with the floating, rather more with the actual effort, and more than a faint nod to parkour. Also, I become quickly gooey-eyed for a hero who doesn't simply hit things, but who is innovative and sneaky and very, very quick to seize an opportunity and the advantages of the terrain. This is fortunate, because the fight scenes, alas, adhered slightly too much of the current trend for very quick cuts, which narks me. Whatever happened to choreography? what about stage actors who lovingly choreograph a whole swordfight and repeat it, night after night, with not a stab out of place? Quick-cut fight scenes not only lose the balletic logic of the conflict, they reflect a sad lack of skill on the part of the participants. Anyone can stab anyone convincingly, once, for the camera. It's doing it over and over in different configurations that actually means something.

smoczek bounced out of the movie waxing lyrical about how much it was faithful to the Sands of Time computer game, and how she now wanted to play it, lots, and I have to admit that the time-reversal elements were well handled, intelligently used and rather more than cool in terms of special effects. Mostly, though, I fell for this movie hard, will-buy-copy-and-put-on-brainless-movie-rotation-with-PiratesoftheCaribbean hard, because both it and its star are endearingly unpretentious. Unlike Avatar this didn't punt itself as The Next Big Meaningful Thing, it was a cheesy adventure delivered well, with due respect to the cheesy adventure genre and its surprising number of strengths. And Jakey is just cute. Apart from his abs, which are extremely watchable, he has this goofy, slightly sleepy, unassuming charm thing going on that actually delivers quite a few otherwise rather dire lines from their direness.

In other news, this week's Guild release is a Bollywood musical number. I am appreciatively awed by the cast's ability to benignly take the mickey out of themselves to extremely entertaining end.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

I like Jake he is very cute...I think Donnie Darko did his career a lot of favours.

But at the moment I am excited about the posibility that my destiny is soon to be fufilled. Some of my friends who work in the film industry have confirmed that William Dafoe will be in my town shooting a film. I have forgiven him for Spiderman so I think the path is open for our love ;-)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I am inexplicably chilled by this confession. Willem Dafoe? Really?

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

Sorry about me and my creepy love fetish chilling your world ;-)

I think it is exactly his creepiness I find intriguing...him and Christopher Walken via for my favourite old guy spot. I do wish though that Willem had better taste...he has really done some appalling films!

(that being said I wouldn't throw George Clooney out of my bed...and some would find that even more distasteful)

[rumint.livejournal.com]

We also enjoyed Prince of Persia, even though it was watched in a very warm Berlin mainly to enjoy the aircon. I was amused how surprised they all seemed that the evil vizier type played by Ben Kingsley in lots of eye makeup was...actually evil! Shock! Still fairly harmless fun, well delivered.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

The main problem with the evil vizier type wasn't even Ben Kingsley or the eye make-up, it was the vizier-who-is-king's-brother stereotype. Even before the eyeliner. Ben Kingsley is just the clincher. He is clearly Three-Fold-Complete-Bad, as Nesbit would have it, and no good can come of it.

[dicedcaret.livejournal.com]

Bump. I very much enjoyed PoP too. It just had such a satisfying mix of action, story, characters, tension and humour, that one was left with a warm, sated feeling of having been properly entertained.

The ruffian boss and his beloved ostriches totally cracked me up. Genius. Also, the knife throwing was pretty awesome.

Btw, speaking of fight scene choreography: Sherlock. The scenes RD Jnr does are a far better demonstration of ninjitsu techniques than you'll see in those self-styled 'Ninja' movie. Distract, injure, takedown. Luverly.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

OMG I totally meant to rave about the ostriches! they were pleasingly silly and amused my mother no end.

Sherlock is another on my will-buy-copy-and-put-on-brainless-movie-rotation-with-PiratesoftheCaribbean movies. Love it. And, as you say, intelligent fight choreography.