Wow. Indeed very well done, every shot was like a painting, the lights were fantastic, every scene was perfectly constructed, I liked it all. Hugh Jackman was great, but he was not the only one. Anne Hathaway was extraordinary, Samantha Barks was amazing, and also Aaron Tveit was really good, and little Isabelle Allen was great too. I didn’t like Crowe’s singing, and the Thénardiers were turned into a comic duo, although still being disgusting people.
The film is a musical, it’s like an opera where not a word is spoken, everything is sang. Although being a musical it is indeed so sad as to be painful. So much, I could barely get through it once, not sure I could endure it again, but that’s just me, nothing to do with the film.
It’s very tragic. It’s the story of Valjean who went to prison because he stole some bread because his sister’s son was starving; he tried to escape so his five years became nineteen. When he was finally granted parole, he couldn’t find work anywhere, being an ex-convict. A priest offered him food and a place to rest, and he stole some silver from the church and ran away. Caught again, he was freed when the priest confirmed his lie that he had himself given him the silver, and actually gives him some more, telling him to use it to make something of his life. He does. He changes his name and becomes a rather wealthy man, and he’s mayor when he meets Javert again.
Fantine works for him. She has been seduced and abandoned with a child, and she left the little girl with the Thénardier couple, working to pay them for her care. When it’s found out that she has a child without having been married, she’s fired, and Valjean is so worried about Javert that he doesn’t even notice her. She has nothing, and she desperately needs money for her daughter - not knowing that the Thénardiers are lowlives who take advantage of her, asking for money but treating the girl like a slave - so she falls into a miserable life, selling her hair, her teeth, and her body. When she reacts to a rough ‘client’, Javert wants to arrest her, but Valjean recognizes her face and wants to take her to a hospital. Fantine is dying, and he promises her that he’ll look after her daughter Cosette, that she’ll be well, before she dies.
Javert strongly believes in the law, in following “the path of the righteous”, and reports himself to him, the Mayor, because he says he wronged him, reporting him as an old convict before finding out that a man believed to be Valjean has been arrested, thus tempting him for a moment, but Valjean can’t let a man go to prison to save his own life, so he confesses before running away.
He goes to take Cosette away with him, paying the Thénardier to let her go with him, and is able to escape from Javert thanks to the help of a grateful man whose life was once saved by Valjean.
He raises Cosette as his own, and we meet them again some years later (maybe nine or ten?), when she’s now a young woman who falls in love with someone met on the street: Marius.
Marius and his student friends are fighting for their rights, their lives and for the People, but they’ll all be slaughtered by the police.
Seeing Javert around (what a small world Valjean lives in) he worries that he might find him again and wants to flee with Cosette, but she’s in love now and doesn’t want to, and writes a letter to Marius.
Éponine is the Thénardier’s daughter and yet she’s a better person than them, she loves Marius so much and would do anything for him, and she finds Cosette’s house for him and then prevents her parents from robbing it, and eventually takes the letter that she wrote. It is so very painful for her, she doesn’t give the letter right away, but she saves Marius life at the barricade they made out of furniture, and right before dying in his arms she gives him the letter.
He sends a reply via a small boy, Gavroche, who leaves it with Valjean. He reads it and is heartbroken to realize that he’s about to lose her, he loves her very much, and he worries what kind of person he is and also that he might die in the fight, so he goes there himself, to find that Javert has been taken prisoner, who had infiltrated as a spy and being recognized by Gavroche. Valjean asks to be given the prisoner so to deal with him himself, and then he lets him go free without conditions, knowing very well that he’ll chase him again but not blaming him for doing his work.
When Marius is injured, he takes him away from the fight and escapes through the sewers carrying him on his shoulder. He meets Thénardier who steals Marius’ ring, then he sees Javert waiting for him, and asks him for the time to take Marius to a hospital or he’ll die. Javert says ‘another step and you die’ but then is unable to shoot him. He is conflicted between his duty and his obedience to the law and the fact that Valjean granted him his life instead of killing him saving his own. He thinks that he can’t do his job properly anymore and throws himself in the river to die.
Marius marries Cosette, but then Valjean confesses to him that he’s wanted by Javert for stealing, and says that he must go away because if he’s caught she’ll be disgraced, and Marius agrees with him.
When the Thénardier try to blackmail him, asking money or they’ll reveal that Valjean killed a man and threaten to say where he is, even producing the ring as proof of what he’s saying, Marius recognizes the ring and realizes that Valjean saved his life and that he misjudged him, and gets out of Thénardier the location of where he can now find him.
Valjean is in a convent, about to die, and they arrive in time to say goodbye. He has a letter of confession prepared for them, and Marius tells a crying Cosette that her ‘father’ is a saint, that he saved his life. Valjean dies glad that he could see his precious Cosette one last time, and his soul goes away with Fantine.
So tragic, what Valjean and Fantine went through all their lives, it’s so heartbreaking, and the ending is too. Maybe it’s supposed to be a positive ending, because Marius and Cosette are together and will live a better life, but I only felt the pain. All the students who died, Gavroche, Éponine.. it’s all so sad, and I admit I was unable to accept that through all this, all that those good people went through, the Thénardier still managed to keep on, free, no matter that the way they were played and written in this movie they were almost comical. It’s indeed very realistic but so hard to accept that Valjean was chased all his life while they kept on stealing every day and were never caught.
The movie was done brilliantly though, every shot was like a painting, the lights made an amazing atmosphere, every picture was worth hanging on a wall, and Éponine’s song was great, so sad and so touching, and Gavroche’s death was powerful as well, this child facing alone the soldiers, and the song ‘do you hear the people sing’ without music was powerful as well, and every scene I thought was done very very well. Gavroche’s actor was very good, but he sang with such a strong accent :-p
Jean Valjean-Hugh Jackman
Javert-Russell Crowe
Fantine-Anne Hathaway
Cosette-Amanda Seyfried
Marius-Eddie Redmayne
Enjolras-Aaron Tveit
Éponine-Samantha Barks
Gavroche-Daniel Huttlestone
Young Cosette-Isabelle Allen
Thénardier-Sacha Baron Cohen
M.me Thénardier-Helena Bonham Carter
Well, obviously it looks so old, and the story has been represented so many times that it can’t surprise anybody anymore, so the scary-effect is now lost, but in 1921 or 22 it must have been something! The shots were very good, pity I didn’t like the actor playing Hutter the husband (Gustav v. Wangenheim), but the women playing his wife Ellen (Greta Schroeder) and Ruth, rich Harding’s sister (Ruth Landshoff) were better, and Nosferatu was very effective - Count Orlok=Max Schreck. It must have been something, this tall figure so pale, appearing and disappearing, coming out of the coffin all stiff with his white hands with long long fingers, his shadow approaching slowly... that was the best part of course. Very effective, all the scenes with Count Orlok were truly impressive.
The story is obviously based on Dracula, although he had to change all the names because, as I read on the internet, he couldn’t get the rights to Dracula, and was later sued by Stoker’s heirs and lost.
A real horror movie in 1921, one hour and a half with a complex story, well developed plot, all very interesting and well done, I can clearly see why director Murnau made history.
The story:
Set in Wisborg in 1838. Real estate agent Knock reads a letter from Count Orlok, from Transylvania: he wants to buy a house here, so he sends young Hutter to arrange the deal, and to offer him the house in front of his own. Hutter calls Transylvania the land of thieves and spirits, or ghosts, I don’t remember exactly, and his wife Ellen is so worried for this long journey that she goes to stay with their friend Harding and his sister. She cries and hugs him as if he was going to war.
Hutter reaches the place, and in the village everybody falls silent when he names Orlok, and they refuse to take him to the house itself.
Count Orlok appears to be rather eccentric, he sleeps during the day and they can only talk before sunset; when Hutter cuts himself while slicing a loaf of bread, Orlok sucks his finger totally shocking him. He then falls asleep and wakes up to find two small wounds on his neck, and writes to Ellen to say that the place is full of insects. When he meets Orlok again to talk business, the count sees a picture of Ellen and says she has a beautiful neck, and yes he’ll take that isolated house right in front of his own...
Ellen has terrible nightmares and sleepwalks. Hutter has nightmares too, and searches the place for Orlok, and finds him sleeping in a coffin, whose lid is broken and he can see the face. Hutter is locked inside and sees outside Orlok loading coffins full of earth on his carriage, and then he lays in the last one and goes away. Hutter tries to escape but hurts himself and is cured at a hospital (I guess, or some place anyway). While loading the coffins, a sailor opens one of them finding it full of earth and rats and is bit by one.
Knock is locked up in an asylum, talking about his Master and eating spiders..
Aboard the ship that is transporting Orlok, the men die one after the other. It is believed to be the Pest, but it’s Orlok killing them all. The scene when a sailor went down to the coffin, and saw him appearing and disappearing, and then saw him rise up all stiff with those hands.. it’s a great scene, I guess it must be real horror back then.
As soon as Hutter is well enough he leaves to go back home. They get to Wisborg roughly at the same time. We see Nosferatu carrying again his own coffin full of the earth in which he was buried and that he needs to maintain his power. A powerful image, no man could carry it as if it was as light as a feather. Ellen reads about Nosferatu in the book Hutter brought with him: it says that the only way to stop him is if a pure girl offers him her blood so to make him forget the sunrise.
Eventually she does just that, at the cost of her own life, and he’s still in her room when the sun rises, and disappears leaving only smoke behind. From that moment the ‘pest’ stopped making victims....
I saw a version made in 2005/6, restored by “L’immagine ritrovata”-Bologna, combining various versions available: a French 1922 copy, a Czechoslovakian 1920s copy, a 1930s copy, and a copy from 1939 kept in the Berlin archives. That is if I understood everything correctly..
ITA Nosferatu op. Nosferatu il vampiro
I like it. It reminds me of when I was a little girl and I loved it. With my bad memory I remembered very little, only that Warwick Davis played Willow, and he was like my childhood hero, because Willow was little but he was brave and good and smart and never gave up. He protected the child and saved her at the end. He confronted every danger, even when he knew he couldn’t make it he always tried and kept going. That’s what movies do: from the first time I saw this movie I’ve never forgotten Warwick’s face (although I’m not entirely sure if I pronounce the name correctly..), and every time I saw him I thought: Willow!!
Since some people like to discard every fantasy story saying that it’s just a copy of The Lord Of The Rings, I’ll say it right away: yes, there’s a little one who lives quietly in his village until he faces a great adventure to end the reign of terror of the evil magician. He is helped by a human warrior who at the end becomes a king (maybe) and by a female warrior, and at the end there’s a big battle between the two old magicians, until the courage of our hero saves the day, good prevails and evil is defeated, and now he can return home... so yes, it can be seen like that, and so what? If you look at it so generally, then every action movie has the same plot, every romantic movie has the same plot, every war movie has the same plot....
so shut up and enjoy the movie. It is a good one, and it’s also one of the few decent fantasy movies that were made before the year 2000 (I say one of the few to stay safe, but I can’t think of one more right now).
The story: Queen Bavmorda is evil. Some prophecy say that a child will be born who will bring down her kingdom, so she looks for the baby. When she finds the baby with the mark, she wants to kill it, but a compassionate midwife saves her life at the cost of her own. The mother is killed too, but knowing that her child has escaped. She orders her daughter Sorsha and her army to find the baby and bring it to her - for some reason she doesn’t want to simply kill the baby, she wants to perform a ritual to send the child to some neverland where she could no longer harm her.
Chance be that the child is found by Willow’s children. He knows at once that it’s the child of the Daikini (how they call the big humans), and at first wants to have nothing to do with her, but his wife takes care of her. When his village is attacked by some kind of beast looking for the baby, he tells the whole village about the child. It is decided that it must be brought to her own kind, and given to the first Daikini they find; Willow has come to care for the child, since she smiled at him and stopped crying as soon as he hold her... so he leaves the village taking the child with him. A few others go with him, but not for long. The first daikini they meet is Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), trapped in a cage. He tells them to let him free and he’ll help them, but Willow is not sure if he can trust him, and is reluctant to leave the baby with him. Still, when the next day he meets an army of people marching against Bavmorda and they refuse to take the child, he thinks he has no other choice but to trust Madmartigan.
He heads back home, when he sees that the Brownies have stolen the baby. He follows them and is trapped, but the Brownies leader tells them to free Willow. She’s a fairy queen, and tells Willow about the child’s importance. Elora is her name, and she’s chosen him as her guandian. She tells Willow that if Bavmorda finds the baby then there will be no more hope; she says “Elora must fulfill her destiny and bring about the downfall of queen Bavmorda” and “unless she is stopped, Bavmorda will control the lives of your village, your children, everyone. All creatures of good heart need your help Willow.” and her last words are :”the choice is yours” ....yeah right, after what she said? Bringing his children into this was a masterclass act, as if he could say no after that...
He accepts and takes the baby. He stops at a tavern because the baby must be fed (they talk about her needing changing or needing to be fed but we never, not once, see any of that :-p).
He meets Madmartigan again, trying to escape a jealous husband by dressing up as a woman (still the guy has no problem in going after “her” in front of his wife.. :-// ). When Sorsha and her men enter the place looking for the baby, she reveals Madmartigan’s true identity. The husband becomes furious and starts a big fight; Madmartigan takes advantage of the confusion to escape with the child, with Willow following. Together they reach a lake, and then part ways. Willow reaches the little island on that lake, to find the great sorceress Raziel, only to find out that she’s been transformed into an animal (what animal was that?). Willow always dreamed of becoming a sorcerer, but has never been good at it yet, although having potential he’s never believed enough in himself.
Sorsha has captured Madmartingan and now captures them too. Willow tries to change Raziel back to human, but turns her into a crow instead. They manage to free themselves with the help of two Brownies that follow them, and Madmartigan is accidentally sprayed with fairy love dust, so when they go get the baby in Sorsha’s tent, he stops to speak to her about love. She’s almost won over when her army comes in and she discovers that the baby is gone and thinks he deceived her to give Willow time to get to Elora. There’s a fight and our three escape. At the next village, they are again attacked by Sorsha’s army, but Madmartigan takes her hostage so they have to let them go. The effect of the fairy dust is gone, and he doesn’t even remember what he said. She reminds him, but he says that it’s all gone now. She frees herself and runs back to her army. They reach Tyr Asleen, where the fairy queen had told them to go, but it turns out that it’s empty, all the people there have been transformed into stones by Bavmorda, or something. Willow transforms Raziel into a goat this time. When Sorsha’s army comes, there’s a big fight, and she’s impressed by his courage and skill and probably realizes that she does like him, and she switch sides, starting to fight on his side.
There’s too many warriors, and Willow finds himself unable to protect Elora from Sorsha’s general, who takes the baby and goes straight to Bavmorda, also telling her that Sorsha turned against her.
Madmartigan and some warrior friends go to Bavmorda’s castle to get the baby back, but she transforms them all into pigs. All but Willow, who protected himself with magic. He manages to turn Raziel back into her human form this time, and Raziel turns the men back into humans. With a trick they enter the castle and start a big fight. Willow, Sorsha and Raziel go to save the child. Sorsha is knocked out by her mother, and the two sorceress start a big fight of magic. Raziel is knocked out too, but Willow has taken the child away from the altar where she was to perform her ritual.
Bavmorda confronts Willow, now alone, trying to intimidate him, but he doesn’t back down, doesn’t give the child to her. Ultimately he tricks her, telling her that with his sorcerer’s power he’ll send the child to a place where evil won’t be able to touch her, and when the child disappears a furious Bavmorda cries Impossible! and then accidentally tricks the last part of her ritual, being sent to the neverworld herself. Willow reveals that it was only his “old disappearing pig trick” and the baby is perfectly safe.
At the end, we see that all the people of Tyr Asleen have been saved, probably by Raziel since she could undo Bavmorda’s curse once already before, when they were all pigs, and Sorsha will take care of Elora with Madmartigan. Raziel gives Willow a magic book and he returns home a hero and reunites with his family :-)
So the prophecy was right indeed: despite doing nothing herself, the existence of this child brought down Bavmorda’s reign, and at the end the child will be safe at “the kingdom of Tyr Asleen where a good king and queen will look after her”, the fairy queen said, so I guess that Sorsha and Madmartigan will become queen and king. Not sure if because she was the queen’s daughter or simply because they saved the day, the kingdom, the world actually :-p
I also like a lot the scene when Sorsha frees herself and runs back to her army: there’s a moment, when she has to run away and he has to keep going, when they both stop looking at each other. They are confused because they like each other although they both thought they hated each other, but those were their roles not them, and would like to stay together, keep talking, not end that moment, find out more about whatever it is that they’re feeling, but they are on opposite sides and must go..
romantic scene :-)
Mixed feeling, but I would watch it again, yes. For the first half I kind of despised Bruce, and at the end I was crying like a baby. I’ll settle for an average : ‘many things were nice, so if you want to watch it again, just focus on the scenes with Jennifer and on the second half’ :-).
The story is absurd but that doesn’t count because the premise of this movie is that God gives his power to a man for a week. If you can’t deal with this sentence do not watch the movie.
It is absurd because - even if he doesn’t give Bruce power over the world but only over his town of Buffalo - by giving a man his powers he obviously endangers other people’s lives. The fact that nobody died or was badly injured after all that happens is even more difficult to believe than a man with almighty powers. And he did not affect only his town, because when he moved the moon he caused a tsunami in Japan, which may have seemed funny is 2003, but it’s not so much after 2011.
Still, the absurdity might be overlooked, after all you know that right away so you kind of signed up for it. What I didn’t much like was, actually, Bruce. I love love love Jim Carrey and he didn’t make that many faces in this movie, which is good, he doesn’t need crazy faces to be funny, but his character was.. egocentric, selfish, annoying in all his complaints. Realistic indeed, since many people are like that in the real world, but not someone I felt inclined to like. He had a job, a house, a dog, a car, a beautiful girl who loved him very much, and he kept complaining, constantly, about everything that didn’t go the way he wanted, never once blaming himself for the mess he made.
He’s not satisfied with his reporter job, covering silly stories like ‘the biggest cookie’, and complaints that God hates him. His hockey team loses, he gets stuck in traffic, and it’s all God’s fault, ignoring him while he could help him so easily. He doesn’t read the signs when he drives, he doesn’t watch where he walks, and still it’s all God’s fault. He learns that a colleague has been promoted anchorman, the position he wanted, and ruins his first live job by shouting at a poor old woman and ranting on about the fact that he’s there doing a stupid thing while Evan gets the good job. No surprise, he’s fired. I mean, it’s not bad luck or God’s fault if he acted stupidly and like a complete A#@#@ole.
He tries to help an old man - we see him throughout the movie with strange signs like “r ewe blind” and “life is just” and many more - when a gang of guys troubles him, and is beaten up. This was the piece of the movie intended to show us for the first time that he’s also a good man deep down.
I kind of figured that by the fact that Grace loves him and she is a sweet person who works with children, but this is the first scene that proves it.
Back home he complaints on and on and on about his mediocre life, not realizing that he’s hurting Grace deeply, as if her, her love, their life together meant nothing. He doesn’t mean to hurt her, he doesn’t even think about what she feels, he only thinks about himself. All the time.
Then God tells him that he’s tired of hearing his complaints, and that he can give it a go himself if he thinks he could do a better job. Bruce starts noticing that everything he wishes becomes true, and tests it, and yes he has the power - he could make the car start, walk on water, move things at will, that kind of stuff. Well, the bit when he acted and talked like Clint Eastwood was fun :lol: he even looked like Clint :-p
Immediately he starts using his power to make his own life better. He moves the moon closer to have a romantic night of passion with Grace, makes his dog use the toilet instead of peeing all around the house, takes revenge on the guys that beat him up by having a monkey come out of a guy’s butt ( :-/ ), transforming his damaged car into a new powerful car, has another reporter arrested filling his van with marijuana, and everywhere he goes big news happen - a dog discovers a body, meteors land...
He is hired again, becomes famous as Mr Exclusive, makes Evan fail live on air with the result that Evan is fired, and arranges a big night out with Grace only to tell her that he finally got the anchorman job. She’s taken aback because she had thought that he wanted to propose, after five years together, but again it was all about him.
She doesn’t attend the big party to celebrate his promotion and he keeps calling her, even using the dog to convince her. In a way this was the best part, because in every single movie, when a man gets a little power, or a little fame which is sort of the same thing, immediately he sleeps with other women. Bruce doesn’t, he calls Grace. Unfortunately, she arrives at the precise moment when his fellow anchor-woman Susan kisses him, and she storms out and leaves him. He tries to explain, but thing is, that was only the tip of the iceberg, not the only problem. He tries to convince her to forgive him sending her sign after sign, from the tv, the clouds, the birds spelling ‘call him’ in the sky, then he goes to her to tell her that he misses her, but she doesn’t know what to say and moves to go inside with the kids, so he stops her and then he tries to use his power to make her love him but it doesn’t work - well, I don’t think that he couldn’t affect free will if he wanted to, if God made it a rule not to do it it’s because it must be possible; I think that he thought it didn’t work because she did love him already, she never stopped, love wasn’t the problem at all.
Annoyed by all the voices in his head of people praying to him, he deals with it with what he thinks will make everyone happy: he simply grants everybody’s wishes, with disastrous results. Thousands of people in his town win the lottery, but being so many their prize amounts to like 17$. There’s a big riot in the streets his first night as anchorman, and he leaves his post to walk out and see what he’s caused. God tells him that no matter how bad things appear to be, there’s always a way to clear things up - sure, since unbelievably nobody was hurt; it’s not so easy in real life when things have consequences - also if we were to take this movie seriously, blindly granting everybody’s wishes might have had even worse consequences than that, after all there’s all sorts of people in the world: what about if a fanatic had wished for God to get rid of somebody, or if someone extremely unhappy had wished to die... but this is not a movie to be taken that seriously.
God tells him that people keep asking him to do things for them instead of being themselves the miracles. Bruce finally starts acting like a real man, actually doing things instead of complaining. He helps a man whose car broke down, gives Evan his job back, even congratulating him for real, day after day teaches his dog to pee outside, and puts together the ‘family album’ with the pictures he likes best, thinking of Grace. When her sister comes for her stuff, he gives her the album - well, more than the album, it impressed me that she lived there five years and yet her stuff only fill one bag, although a big one. They could at least make her say ‘I’ll come later for the rest’ or something like that...
Grace has always prayed a lot for God to help Bruce, and now she prays again, this time for God to help her forget him, get over him so she wouldn’t hurt so much.
Hurting deeply, he goes out, walking on the highway, kneeling to pray God to take back his powers, when he is hit by a truck. He finds himself in Heaven with God who asks him to pray for what he really cares about, and he says: “Grace” - “Grace, you want her back?” - “no, I want her to be happy, no matter what that means” and goes on saying he wants her to find someone that will love her like she deserves and will make her happy. Of course he thinks he’s dead, so that ‘you want her back’ might have sounded rather threatening...
‘miraculously’ he is saved and brought back to life “you’re lucky to be alive, someone up there must like you” , the phrase I hate the most in the entire movie, as if others die because God doesn’t like them :-/
Grace of course comes to the hospital, cries and hugs him and they make peace.
Next scene shows Bruce back at his old reporting job, which now he does with a better spirit and a smile. He announces that he’s going to marry Grace who is embarrassed to appear on tv: “she just gave blood and she still has enough left to fill up her face” :-p and “yes behind every great man there’s a woman rolling her eyes” :-p
I also love Jennifer Aniston, that’s why I expected more from this movie, but still it was nice, and I liked them as a couple.
I don’t much care for Steve Carell, but here he played Evan, and it sort of seems like an audition for his very own “Evan almighty” - different Evan though.
The scene where Bruce and Grace are about to have sex is rather funny, like a wrestling match :-p
That’s all, folks. :-p
ITA una settimana da Dio
The first time I saw this, it was great, with a story and a great twist that made it really interesting. Now that I’ve seen it a second time and the surprise is gone, it’s less great. Still a good action movie even without the mystery, but now that I knew what the big mystery was, I noticed all those things that don’t make much sense, all the things that are boring stereotypes, and it kind of became the usual American action movie, like so many I’ve seen already.
The story: Martin (Liam Neeson) and Liz Harris (January Jones) arrive in Berlin and go to their hotel. He forgot an important suitcase at the airport so he takes another taxi and goes back. There’s an accident, the taxi ends up in the river. The driver Gina (Diane Kruger) manages to save his life and then flees the scene because she’s an illegal immigrant. He wakes up four days later at a hospital. He had no documents on him so they couldn’t contact anybody. He seems to remember pretty much everything and is eager to leave and rejoin his wife, but when he gets to their hotel Liz doesn’t recognize him, and there is another man with her, another husband, another Martin Harris (Aidan Quinn). Sure of his own identity, remembering all his schedule, the next day he goes to his appointment with Professor Bressler (Sebastian Koch), only to find that the other Martin Harris is already there. Bizzarre thing, both men seem to know everything about Harris, they even use the same words, but the other guy has documents to prove his identity, our Harry doesn’t. The shock makes him faint and he finds himself again at the hospital, where a kind nurse gives him the name and address of her friend Jurgen (Bruno Ganz) who “finds people”. He’s sedated for an exam, and then a bad guy comes in to take him away. Martin manages to escape and goes to meet that man Jurgen hoping for help. He tells him everything. Jurgen believes him and starts working the case, finding out a good reason why someone should want to take his place: a certain Prince Shaba will be attending a party where Harris is invited, along with Bressler and a few other people. There have been already assassination attempts on the prince’s life, and being Harris someone could have a very good chance to kill him. Martin finds Gina with the help of her friend Biko (Clint Dyer) and convinces her to help him and to offer him hospitality. At her home, they are attacked by two men. During the fight, she finds Biko dead and then manages to kill one of those guys. They escape while the other man chases them. They are in this together now, and he wants to talk to Liz alone, to understand why she’s pretending not to know him. He knows where he can find her alone, and she tells him to look for the missing suitcase.
Jurgen was a member of the Stasi police, and when he receives a phone call from Martin’s “friend” Rodney Cole, and understands that the man is part of a secret mercenary group called Section 15. He is very ill, he has cancer, and he knows that there’s no way he could escape Section 15, so he waits for him at home and kills himself with cyanide without revealing anything of what he knows.
Martin retrieves his suitcase with his documents, and is now relieved to see the name Martin Harris on his passport. He gives Gina some money and says goodbye, then he meets Cole who says that he took the first flight after he received his alarming phone call. Martin thinks he’s here to help him, but instead he abducts him with the help of the surviving man that tried to kill him at Gina’s place.
Gina sees them take Martin away and she steals a taxi to follow them. She’s far behind but still manages to find them. They plan to kill him making it look like an overdose, but she arrives in time to kill them both with her car. Not before they’ve had time to talk to him though, and he learns that he’s NOT Martin Harris after all, nor is the other man for that matter. It’s a fictional identity that he himself created as part of his assassination plan. He’s shocked, but he remembers that he was here in Berlin three months earlier and that he planted a bomb, so they rush together to the hotel to save the prince and everybody in that room. He manages to convince the hotel security guys by telling them the exact date he arrived, and luckily they still have the footage of three months ago (how long do they keep it?) and upon seeing his face they ring the alarm and evacuate the place. Liz stays behind to deactivate the bomb but fails and dies in the explosion. Martin kills the other Martin before he can complete his mission and kill professor Bressler, the real target. Politics had nothing to do with it, it was all a financial matter: his research of a type of corn that could survive everywhere is worth lots of money, and at the end he will announce that thanks to the prince’s help he will make it a gift to the world.
Last scene shows us ‘Martin’ and Gina with fake documents and new identities boarding a train together.
Now, first thing first the taxi was not speeding, there was traffic, so it’s not really believable that she would drive her car off the bridge; I mean, she swerved to avoid a fridge falling down a truck and then again to avoid a bike coming her way, but she accelerated and never hit the brakes? Possible, though.
The first assassin had already killed one nurse, and proceeded to kill the kind nurse too, and yet he planned to take him away alive, although they later intend to kill him? Why? To make it look like a sedated, confused patient killed then and then went out only to die of overdose? Doesn’t seem like such a brilliant plan, one would expect more from the legendary section 15. Still, again it’s possible.
The first few scenes after he woke up were even rather annoying, shouting at people and ordering them around, I guess in his identity of an American Doctor he thought everybody should bow to his presence and obey without a word, but he was being totally unreasonable. I know this can be explained by what happened to him, still I think that his behaviour before he met the other Martin was too borderline, there was yet no reason to act so weirdly.
A frail girl who accepts to let a stranger man sleep in her home has no trouble in telling him exactly how much money she has and in appearing before him with only a tank top and no bra - does she think she lives in Gentlemen’s World who never really existed??
That same frail girl not only has the guts to kill the first assassin (who tried to kill her too, so fair enough), but she does much more. She doesn’t waste a second to decide that she wants to help him and in finding a cab to steal; while driving, she’s able to recognize Cole’s black car far away up a parking lot, has no trouble killing two more men to help a man she’s only known a day; she’s able to fight security trained men; she follows him voluntarily to the hotel after knowing who he really was and that he planted a bomb there.
Obviously they end up together, in movies there’s only one reason to put a man and a woman together in the plot: they must end up together at the end.
Liz wants to deactivate the bomb because she doesn’t want her face to be connected with a bomb that is of no more use to them now. Of course she doesn’t know that they already have her face and already know all about the bomb, but she was supposed to be so precise, so efficient, and she has no idea how much time left she has? Even though she activated the bomb herself?
Apart from the fact that since she couldn’t reach down enough with her arm she could have broken the wall a bit more. That was a stupid death in my opinion, and there’s no excuse for the fact that she didn’t know how much time she had. They probably did it this way so that Martin wouldn’t have to kill her, he only killed the man :-/
It’s not even worth talking about a man who could barely stand managed to escape from a trained assassin: that’s basic action-movie stuff.
ITA unknown-senza identità
It’s the only time when I enjoyed a movie far more the second time than the first. Now I could better see the entertainment, the story, while the other time I couldn’t get past all the nonsensical deaths, I used to call it “the many ways to die” instead of prometheus. I mean, let’s take a look: two men see a giant dead outside a door, the go past it into a big ‘room’ full of strange things and a pool of weird black stuff, with a snake-like-moving thing coming towards them, at which point the biologist goes Oh so cute come here, and wants to touch it... really? The thing attacks him, squeezing his arm so the geologist tries to take it off him, reasonably not too enthusiastically, but the thing’s ‘blood’ is like acid that melts his helmet and his face. Later on on their ship they receive a signal from the geologist’s suit and they go: he’s outside, open the door! I mean, what? Then a man goes outside, looks at him and says I think there’s something wrong... really? the fact that the man that was dead is now out here crouching like a big black spider seems wrong to you?? The old man thinks that he’ll meet one of the creators and will simply have to ask Make me immortal, and his wish will be granted? The soldier guys think that firearms will kill everything, but this is what men would always think, so their deaths are not as stupid as the others.
Let’s end with another brilliant death: remember all those films when someone tries to escape from a car chasing them by simply running on foot ahead of the car as if they could outrun it? The huge u-shaped ship is falling down, rolling like a wheel, and she runs straight ahead... I understand the panic, but she was supposed to be smarter than that :-/
Anyway, this time I followed the story more closely, and the story is interesting, although with many questions unanswered.
The movie starts with a disc-like ship, like the usual ufos; it leaves behind a blue alien wearing a robe: he eats something and his body dissolves spreading his molecules into the planet’s water. Then we see two archeologists finding new evidence of something that they’ve already found in many different Earth cultures: it seems like giant creatures point at the sky, at a specific point in the universe. Then we get to the point: Scientific exploratory vessel Prometheus, with 17 crew members, is traveling towards that specific star configuration, far away from Earth. The crew slept for two years, and now David the android wakes them up because they have reached their destination. It’s December 2093. The hologram of rich old Weyland explains to them all their mission (really? they all accepted without knowing what they were signing up for?). The archeologists Shaw and Charlie explain that they want to find “the engineers”, that’s what they call the blue aliens because they designed us, and they want to find them because they interpreted all those findings as an invitation to go to that planet (or whatever it is). Shaw is like This is a scientific expedition, we don’t need any weapon! ....
They land and some of them prepare to go out to explore. David wears a suit like the others to keep the illusion of him being like them, because mankind feels comfortable only dealing with their kind.
They go out and see a big structure: they go in to investigate. David activates a holographic image of giant aliens running, and then one of them getting killed when a huge door falls on him severing his head. The geologist is fed up already since he only likes rocks, not giant dead alien creatures, and wants to go back to the ship, joined by the biologist. They get lost in that maze and are unable to reach the ship. David opens the door (oops sorry.. and they buy it :-/ ) and they see a strange place, full of containers. David secretly takes one of them, while Shaw takes the alien’s head.
Analyzing it she finds that their dna is human dna; the head explodes. I wonder why only humans got his dna, and not any of the other species on Earth, that’s puzzling: he spread his dna and yet we got all of it and the other species nothing, they came out all by themselves or did they have their own engineers? One might wonder. If one really wants to.
David secretly opens the container he brought back to the ship and he finds some kind of green phials containing a mysterious liquid and puts a drop on his right index finger (if I remember correctly).
Charlie is upset because he thinks the “engineers” are all dead - they found more bodies, although not so many as to image that a species might be extinct... - and David offers him a drink, all the while careful that his finger won’t touch anything, but Charlie doesn’t notice. Not that and not even the fact that David puts said finger inside his glass before handing it to him :-/ Maybe he was already drunk, I don’t know, don’t remember.
Meanwhile the captain asks Vickers, the expedition ‘leader’, if she’s actually a robot, and that’s enough to make her decide to have sex with him, to prove him wrong... so the captain is not at his post - and nobody else is either - when the geologist calls in to say that he found something moving, and nobody hears them scream and die. Nobody sees that strange creature entering his helmet and his mouth.
Charlie has sex with Shaw and in the morning finds out that his eyes look weird, like there’s something moving in them. A team goes back to that place to look for the two men and they find their corpses, while David finds a place that looks like the bridge of a ship, with a big star map and one ‘engineer’ asleep in a capsule much like the cryogenic capsules they used.
Charlie is getting worse and worse and they all rush back but Vickers won’t let him get in, and Charlie lets her, invites her to kill him with the flamethrower.
During a medical check David tells Shaw that she’s pregnant but she knows that’s not possible, we heard her before saying that she can’t have children, and David tells her that 1.she looks three-months pregnant 2.that it doesn’t exactly look normal and 3. that she can’t look and he refuses to take it out of her and that she’ll be put back in stasis, and sedates her. When people come to take her she fights back (does she simply hurts them or does she kills them?) and runs out of that room, with a specific destination in mind. There’s a medical capsule (or whatever it is called) that can perform surgery automatically, and she gets inside it and programs it manually since apparently it’s designed to work only on men - but she probably has too much on her mind right now to wonder why, since it’s in Vicker’s cabin and she’s a woman. The machine opens her up and takes out an alien thing before stitching her up again. She gets out and closes the alien thing inside, activating the ‘decontamination’ procedure in order to kill it.
The geologist’s signal induces the captain to order the men to open the door to let him in, but when they go outside he attacks them, killing three or more men, before he’s definitely stopped.
Shaw wanders still all bloody, maybe looking for help, until she reaches a room where Weyland himself has woken up and David and two people are waiting on him. He explains that he only had a few days to live, so he came on this journey to find something that will make him live. He doesn’t want to die and figures that since they created us they may have a way to cure us, even of old age...
David tells her that they are not all dead, he found one still alive. The captain wants to go away, he says that this is not the engineer’s world, they came here to create something that eventually killed them, on this remote planet because they were at least smart enough not to produce mass-destruction weapons on their own world.
Vickers calls Weyland ‘father’. It’s not important, just saying: she’s his daughter.
That make-like place is a u-shaped spaceship, and its cargo bay is full of those containers.
Weyland, David, Shaw and two security guys go to wake up the engineer. Shaw wants to know why they hate us so much they wanted to destroy us, but Weyland doesn’t care about philosophical questions, only about himself, and he has David talk to him in his language. We can only assume that David learned his language well enough to accurately explain that Weyland wants a cure to live forever. The alien’s reply is silent but very clear: he detaches David’s head from his body and kills the two guys who started shooting him. Weyland dies too, I don’t know if he was hurt or if he simply ran out of time. Shaw runs away. Vickers, learning that his father is dead, orders the captain to go back home. The alien starts his ship, and Shaw yells at the captain that the alien is headed Earth with a ship full of death and that he must stop him whatever it takes. There are no weapons on the Prometheus, so he really has only one option, and the two co-pilots stay with him to die heroically, while Vickers runs to the escape-pod - I don’t understand why she rushed into a suit and entered a small escape-pod, when before she could reach it simply walking, it was part of the ship, it was her cabin.. maybe this way was quicker? Quicker than grabbing the suit and running as fast as she can? I’m missing something here, I know I must be.
Obviously the only way to stop the alien is to crash the Prometheus into his ship, and they do it. The Prometheus is destroyed while the alien ship falls down and starts rolling until it kills Vickers, but not Shaw who rolls sideways. Shaw enters Vickers cabin, and finds out that the thing that was inside her didn’t die and has instead grown much much larger, so much so it fills the room now. David’s head is still active and he tells Shaw to be careful because the alien is looking for her, and when she sees him she opens the door to let them deal with each other. The tentacled alien attacks the engineer and kills him, entering his mouth. She runs away again, then stops, crying that she can’t take it anymore, when David talks to her again. He asks her to help him, telling her that there are other ships and he can pilot them. She tells him that she doesn’t intend to go back home, she wants to find the engineers’ home planet and ask them why they created us and then changed their mind and decided to kill us all. Shaw takes his body and puts his head in a bag (apologizing in doing so) and they head toward one of those ships. She leaves behind a message to stay away from the place, and they fly away. It’s January the first, 2094.
Last scene, we see that from the engineer’s body comes out a fully grown Alien, with a capital A. For a second it seemed like a shark was emerging, but it was Alien’s back of the head.
The end.
To speculate that they want to kill us because they don’t like what we’ve become (and Weyland would only confirm that opinion, and so would the weapons for that matter), that would imply that they kept watching us, and this doesn’t convince me.
The first alien we saw had a disc-shaped ship and wore a robe. The last alien had a u-shaped ship and wore an armour. It might mean that the monk-like aliens create life and the soldier-like aliens destroy it, or it could simply mean that after thousands of years they simply changed a few things in their society. We’ve changed a lot, so might them.
Maybe they simply like to invent things and create stuff, maybe that’s just their nature.
The puzzling thing is that he seemed really determined to destroy us all. I don’t know why, but they would not end up with an empty planet to start over, they would end up with a planet full of Aliens, right? What good would that do to them? So it makes no sense to think that what they really want is Earth void of humans; it seems like their purpose is simply to kill us. How nice of them.
Cast:
Shaw-Noomi Rapace - good. Her scenes running around all bloody is what I’ll remember more of the movie
David-Michael Fassbender - good. His character had no emotions, no fear, but it sure had arrogance and contempt
Vickers-Charlize Theron - good. Her cold figure in the background had something suspicious about her, just like David.
Captain- Idris Elba - good. Liked him a lot too.
Weyland- Guy Pearce. Why on Earth did they cast a young man to play such an old character? The aging make-up is the most difficult one, and even if it’s done very well it never looks really ‘real’. I didn’t like this.
Charlie-Logan Marshall-Green
Geologist-Sean Harris
I didn’t like it at all, not one bit. It’s mainly the story I don’t like. And I hate the ending. It wasn’t brilliantly acted either, mind you. The first half was boringly obvious and slow, and honestly without emotions, the second half was partly too cruel and partly not enough. First thing first, the characters were not really involving. I didn’t really feel for any of them for a long time. Tibey (Anthony Quinn) is so obviously a bad guy that you keep wondering what the hell is wrong with Cochran (Kevin Costner), why didn’t he go away back to his US instead of staying there. Also, they showed his hard side, but there was no scene that explained why he was thought of as charming. Of course the old, powerful, rich man has a young trophy wife, Miryea (Madeleine Stowe), and of course she’s unhappy and falls in love with the handsome young friend of her husband. Cochran falls for her too, after seeing each other a couple of times and spending an afternoon together playing with the dog on the beach. Another thing I didn’t like, I didn’t feel any love there, they barely knew each other. She was unhappy and like a prisoner, I could understand that, but what did he like? That she was pretty, I guess. :-/
He senses that they are about to go into dangerous territory, but she seems to constantly show up in front of him wherever he turns. Eventually they have sex in her house during a party, while Tibey is dancing outside. Which is wrong on so many levels.
After that he phones a friend in the States who gives him the best advice: get in the car and go home as fast as you can. He never takes advices of course. She asks him not to leave her. They plan to stay together a whole weekend, but she uses the phone at home to phone a friend to ask her to cover for her. Tibey lets them go, then reaches them at Cochran’s cabin, has him badly beaten in front of her, than leaves him alive so he can watch while he disfigures her face and tells her that she’ll end up in a brothel where men will use her day and night. They set fire to the cabin but don’t let him inside, they take him outside and leave him to die there.. but he’ll be found and cured. As soon as he feels better he sets out for revenge. Well, more or less, that was what I thought because of the title, but the only real revenge was Tibey’s. Cochran wants to find her. He only kills one man, the one that beat him.
He finds some help from someone who also has personal reasons to hate Tibey. They interrogate a man then visit a brothel where she was but is no more. Nobody seems to know where she is, only Tibey. At last Cochran confronts him with a weapon. Cochran apologizes to him for stealing his wife (!!) and is told that she is now in a convent. She’s suffered a lot, she’s been used and drugged and used, and he finds her on her deathbed. They barely have time to say I love you to each other, and then she dies in his arms and the movie ends. With all the bastards alive and well. He should have killed them all, both Tibey and those that used her.
ITA revenge vendetta
An Italian movie shot in English: Viaggio in Italia is undoubtably a good movie, but I honestly didn’t like it. The ending was so hurried and unreasonable, and I was left thinking: one and a half hour of these two walking around, just for this??
It’s about an English couple coming to Napoli because an uncle left them a property there and they wish to view the place and sell it quickly. From the start it’s clear that the atmosphere between them is rather cold, they don’t have anything to say to each other and don’t seem to have any interest in common. He’s arrogant and sarcastic, and immediately starts complaining about how people drive and how noisy they are and how bored he is. It’s their first time alone since they married, and things don’t seem to go well. She says that he doesn’t like to be in her company because he always says how bored he is. He says that if they are distant it’s all her fault; she says he was always criticizing her until he crushed her; he says she lacks sense of humour and is full of silly romanticism.. until he says: I don’t want to talk about it and they stop talking completely, and things never get better when people don’t talk.
She spends her days visiting Pompei, the National Archeological Museum of Napoli, the Fontanelle cemetery, the solfatara, while he spends his days in Capri with a lady friend, until she makes peace with her husband.
When they get together again they have another fight - because she took the car quite early without waking him up to ask him if he wanted to use it himself since he had told her that was tired and wanted to sleep all morning - and he tells her how senseless and intolerable she is lately and decide to get a divorce. The caretaker of their property comes to tell them that they must witness sumething very peculiar, and they go: they’re making a mould of two people that were killed in Pompei, a man and a woman, maybe husband and wife, and she bursts into crying and they leave. They can’t go on though because the streets are full of people and no matter how much he uses the car horn they can’t get past: there’s the religious procession of S.Gennaro and they have no other choice but stop the car. They get out to look around, and she’s caught up and moved forward by the crowd and starts shouting to him as if they were capturing her ( but on the other hand, she had trouble dealing with spaghetti, a big crowd must be really too much to handle for her). He moves towards her and of course reaches her, and she throws herself into his arms as if she had gone through some terrible experience and says “oh I don’t want to lose you” and he says “what’s wrong with us, why do we torture one another?” - “when you say things that hurt me I try to hurt you back don’t you see, but I can’t I can’t any longer because I love you” - “perhaps we get hurt too easily”... she asks him to tell her that he loves her and he does.
What happened all of a sudden? What’s changed? They were shouting in each other’s face a few minutes ago and now they’re hugging and confessing they love each other... it doesn’t make much sense. It must be S. Gennaro, he’s done another miracle...
Terrible, it’s really worth nothing. It’s totally predictable, every scene is totally phoned in advance :-/
The characters of the ‘victims’ are stupid, and the ending totally ignores another character’s fate.
The plot is easy: a couple hires a nanny to look after their newborn and their 4-year-old son; she seems perfect like a dream until she turns out crazy like a nightmare.
More in details: Jen seems a perfect nanny, the boy Adam likes her, she can cook, and they’re happy to have her. The wife Fay starts getting upset one night when she sees that Jen rearranged the furniture of a room for their party without asking her, and at that point I still had a little hope of something a little bit interesting. Not great, that was obvious, but at least a bit entertaining; I thought it’s going to start with the nanny taking liberties in the house like it was hers and slowly progress into more and more complicated situations... but no, it wasn’t like that, from this moment on it becomes terrible. It had been boringly slow up to now, like many thriller are at first, but after this it became annoyingly predictable.
Next morning Fay finds her still asleep when she has to go to work; Jen is totally hangover for drinking too much at the party the night before. Fay goes out but hurries back worried for her children and finds Jen asleep again and wearing her clothes, while Adam is bathing the little baby. Fay is angry that Jen wasn’t looking after them and tells her that she has to go away.
Jen doesn’t want to go, and when Fay sees a strange man coming into Jen’s room she calls her husband Tim and also the police. Jen walks out and they close the door, but it’s not that simple. She has her mail addressed to their house and nowhere else to go, so the police order them to let her in. They hire a lawyer to have her evicted, but this requires a lot of time.
There are the usual tricks: she’s only wearing a bathrobe when Tim tells her to go out: she places herself at the window and ignores him so he touches her to have her attention and she moves to make the teenage kid and his mom outside think that he did something to her, so then she’ll say to the police that he tried to touch her and the wife got jealous. Another scene: Tim shouts at her that they’ll take away every comfort and do everything in their power to get rid of her while she’s recording him on her cell phone, and she’ll later show the recording to the judge to make it look like she’s the victim. They fill the house with hidden cameras but the horny kid tells Jen everything: he likes to hack other people security cameras ( ! ) and with his help it’s now Jen the one doing the spying. That kid is willing to do anything she asks in order to have sex with her, and has no remorse in having his innocent neighbour arrested: he tells Tim that she uses drugs so Tim uses his phone to record while he enters her room finding her in her underwear with a syringe: when the police arrive she says she has diabetes and was using the syringe for that purpose, so it looks like he entered her room and filmed her half-naked and stopped her from taking her medicine, and he’s arrested. When he’s let out he can’t go back home because Jen asked a restraining order against him.
Finally Fay finds a girl who seems to know Jen, but the only thing she can learn from her is Jen’s real name: Alexa. During a phone call she tells Tim that she’ll ask that girl Wren about Jen’s real identity, and Jen hears it all via the cameras. Jen hurts the kid with a knife and takes his car, with him locked in the trunk. She orders Wren to get into the car (and she does!! I mean, she does!! come on!), and after an accident Wren is found dead - although nothing is said about the boy, I don’t even know if they found him or not...
Fay finds a picture of Alexa on a five-year-old paper on a file at the library, and manages to convince the cop to investigate the matter. Fingerprints match, Alexa is wanted for a fire that killed some people, but the cop is told that ‘Alexa’ died in the car accident, only because they saw Alexa’s tattoo on the dead girl’s wrist and they assume it’s her. The family is happily reunited in their home, but Jen comes back for revenge, with her friend’s help who knocks Tim out catching him off guard. Fay hides her little child but not Adam, and doesn’t even call the police. Jen finds her sitting quietly with her son, in terrified wait... the police eventually come anyway, when they find out that the dead body was not Jen’s - of course not, it was of a poor innocent girl nobody cares about apparently.
When Jim comes to, he fights with the guy until he’s shot by the police. Jen wants to escape the police and takes Adam hostage, but she doesn’t really try to escape, she moves very little, to the other side of the house or something. Jen had told Fay to give her Adam or she’ll kill him and Fay let the child go with her; Jen told her not to follow her or she’ll hurt Adam, and yet this time Fay runs after her, pleading to let him go. Jen is moved by this (!) and cries that nobody loved her like that, that her first foster mother told her that her mom didn’t want her, and tries to kill herself jumping down from a certain height - don’t know any specific, but Fay seemed scared for her life; Fay tells her that her mom loved her and saves her when she jumps, and helps her go back up to safety and hugs her!!!!!!
When the police take her away, Fay tells her that it’ll be alright and she’ll sent her that article on her mother... then the family sells the house to a cousin and move near grandma in a smaller house, so now it’ll probably be grandma looking after the little ones...
Terrible, it was just terrible, stupid and boring. Nothing I liked about it.
ITA evil nanny una famiglia in pericolo
A boring waste of time. Only decent things: one scene with Jet Li as the emperor fighting off an assailant, and a couple of scenes with Michelle Yeoh. All the rest was stupid. I mean, I know this is a ‘mummy-movie’ so I wasn’t expecting anything intellectual. What I was expecting was fun, entertainment, and what I got was total boredom.
We meet again the old characters, but now Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn (Maria Bello) O’Connell are retired from adventures; they have a grown-up son, Alex (Luke Ford) who is an archeologist and thinks he has found the over-2000-year-old mummy of a Chinese Emperor (Jet Li). Jonathan (John Hannah) is in China too, what a coincidence.
The emperor not only wanted to conquer all of China, but he also wanted to be immortal, so he sent his general to fetch the sorceress. Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) and the general fell in love, but the emperor wanted her for himself so he killed him and tried to kill her too, but she had cast a curse on him and his army.
- and if anyone says ‘yet again a woman causes trouble’ I shall get furious, because once more the woman didn’t, actually she would have avoided it quickly making her choice right away, choosing the general, if only the emperor wasn’t once more the arrogant bully who wants to take by force whatever he wants.
The O’Connell are given a precious diamond and asked to take it to China. They reunite right away with Jonathan and Alex (is there only one club in China?) and they are later attacked by a friend and by a general who wants to bring the emperor back to life. They sort of wake him up but he’s yet not human nor immortal.
They all go to a place somewhere in Himalaya where they fight again. Zi Yuan’s daughter Li who has watched over the emperor’s mummy (more like a terracotta statue actually..) for 2000 years now goes with them, and Alex falls in love with her. There, the emperor uses the diamond to see the way to Shangri-la, and Li summons three yetis to help them in the fight. Rick is injured saving his son’s life, and they take him to Shangri-la where Zi Yuan is still alive, and he is saved. The emperor comes too, and bathing in Shangri-la waters he is no more a terracotta-statue, he is now a shapeshifter, for some reason, and escapes turning into a three-headed-dragon.. and for some reason he kidnaps Li.
They all head back to the emperor’s tomb where he calls out his terracotta army with the intent to walk over the Great Wall and become invincible.. not sure why stepping on the other side of the wall should make them all invincible, but that’s out it is apparently.
Zi Yuan gives up her own immortality, as well as her daughter’s, in order to summon the skeletons of all the people killed by the emperor and buried all together - although I understood that they were buried inside the Great Wall, not all around it, and all on the same side of it..
A big army rises, guided by the emperor’s ex-general, Lin’s father.
The skeleton-army fights the terracotta-army. Obviously no side can actually win, but they succeed in keeping back the terracotta-army preventing them from crossing the Great Wall.
Alex of course saves Lin. Zi Yuan fights against the emperor, and seeing the cursed dagger at his side, apparently the only weapon that can kill him, she lets him kill her in order to get close enough to get it, and he doesn’t notice. She gives the dagger to our heroes before dying, but Lin’s crying too much to bother over it, so the O’Connell men take it and go after the emperor.
They find him ‘inside’ the Great Wall, not sure why, what was he doing wasting time there instead of crossing to the other side right away and become unstoppable, other than waiting for them to stop him??
Rick stabs his shoulder.. admittedly he had turned into some kind of beast, but still that was clearly not the heart. During the fight the dagger is broken. Alex takes one peace of it, and when Rick notices he takes the other piece, and they stab the emperor at the same time, one from the back and one from the front, with such precision that the dagger’s parts hit themselves.. how lucky.
As soon as the emperor dies once and for all, his terracotta-army crumbles, and the skeleton-army vanishes into dust - without even a father-daughter nod of salute.
Lin is now mortal and can have her romantic relationship with Alex, while Jonathan hurriedly leaves China, tired of mummies, and relocates to Perù. We read on screed that shortly after, mummies were discovered in Perù.. and this might be the only nice thought, since mummies were really discovered in Perù, or Chile, but I still didn’t laugh because everything had been so boring and absurd...
The yetis... I mean, really, Lin calls for help, apparently having some sort of magic herself, although she never uses it again, and three yetis arrive, and they move like very tall men with a white pelt on, jumping and kicking and punching.. :-/
The yetis carry Rick’s body to Shangri-la and then they disappear, meaning that we see nothing more of them, I guess they went back to their comfortable icy mountains. Rick is saved... how? They said that he’s only hope was Shangri-la: was that because there was nothing nearer, and he got cured ‘naturally’, he was nursed back to life, or was he magically saved by Shangri-la’s water?? Honestly by the tone Lin used, I thought that a miracle was needed so I’d say : saved by the water, but then shouldn’t he be immortal? Or you become immortal only if you want? I don’t know.
Alex retrieved the statue of a man driving a carriage with a coffin, presumably with the emperor inside the coffin, who knows why he assumes that. It turns out that it was all a decoy, and the emperor was actually the driver... why did he need a decoy? didn’t he want to be revived? and how did he manage it, since he was in his palace when he turned, and his army was outside?
The bad general uses Evelyn’s blood to open a thing that can only be opened with the blood of a pure-hearted... leaving aside the matter of how dangerous it often is in movies to have a pure heart, she’s chosen because she was ready to protect her husband with her own life, so they say she ‘must’ have a pure heart... and how stupid is that. Maybe it could be true had she done so for some adult stranger, but everybody even villains may have one person they care about.
Rick and Evelyn didn’t look old enough to be Alex’s parents: how old was Alex supposed to be? He didn’t look like a kid, he could have been Rick’s brother :-/
Ford was so very plain in this movie, and the O’Connell’s scene at the beginning, when they pretend to refuse the task because they promised to give up adventures, is very lame; the acting is so artificial, maybe intending to be funny I don’t know, but they clearly long for adventures: that’s because they’re so lucky they always get out safe and sound.
There’s the boring son-that-wants-to-be-consider-an-adult vs parents-who-treat-him-like-a-child theme, although it seems totally unjustified. It’s not like he was kept in a safe bubble at home, he was out there doing what he wanted, but I think that this served to make the final father-son-battling-together-scene more meaningful in their eyes.. not in mine. Li or Zi Yuan should have killed him. Had Zi Yuan no more magic in her? She gave up her immortality, but what about her powers?
Lin would have been the better choice, having prepared for it for 2000 years, and yet the man that has lived comfortably for years and his archeologist son manage to kill a shapeshifting warrior that no warrior could ever defeat before..
It was so boring, it was a complete waste of time.
ITA La mummia-la tomba dell’imperatore dragone
It’s silly, obviously, with a title like that you can’t expect something serious. My main problem with it I think it might be that the main character, the protagonist we follow, the one who is present in every scene, played by Luke Wilson, is so plain and so anonymous that one really wonders why, it’s really difficult to accept that we are looking at a Uma Thurman with superpowers and a sweet Anna Faris fighting over him, I mean, seriously? Why?
Basically that’s the whole plot: Matt Saunders (Wilson) meets Jenny Johnson (Thurman) and they go out a few times but then she gets jealous of his co-worker Hannah (Faris) probably because she’s always all over him, and he realizes that he’s in love with Hannah and wants to dump Jenny, who is actually the super-heroine G-Girl. She goes crazy, and he’s frightened both for himself and for Hannah’s safety, so he agrees to help super-villain Professor Bedlam (Eddie Izzard) to take away her powers. Honestly Bedlam is the only thing that made it worth watching till the end.
When Matt finally confesses his love and has sex with Hannah, Jenny appears out of the window and throws a big shark in the room. She had gone to school with Barry/Bedlam, and they were very close but after touching a meteor fallen off the sky she gained superpowers and totally changed her attitude towards him, becoming a popular girl and ignoring him completely. He never stopped thinking about her and became a super-villain to... well I don’t know exactly how he planned to win her back by trying to defeat her, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
Matt helps him, luring Jenny to his house - by telling her that he made a mistake and loves her very much, which is not nice, playing with a girl’s heart.. anyway, Hannah shows up too and then Vaughn, and so Matt moves on with the plan uncovering another meteorite that takes away all the radiations in her body. There’s a fight, Matt against Barry, Vaughn against Barry’s man (or men, not sure) and Hannah against Jenny, trying to stop her from touching the rock again, but at the end they both touch it, and they both gain the same super-powers (like superman, they can fly, have super strength, super hearing, super vision, ecc ecc). The two super girls keep on fighting (and the special effects were terrible, maybe on purpose, to be funny, I don’t know), until they crash a fashion show and Matt stops them, telling Jenny that she knows that what they had wasn’t love, and that there is someone else who really loves her, Barry. He confesses what she never even suspected, and now Matt is free to be with Hannah, and Barry finally has his super-Jenny. At the end, Jenny accepts Hannah’s offer to help her with her super-hero duties, while the men wait on land.
There are funny moments, unfortunately there are also many annoying things, starting with Matt:
he approaches Jenny only because his friend Vaughn (Rainn Wilson) told him to do it, and keeps seeing her only because Vaughn basically tells him that she’s easy sex. He never cared for her, other than thinking that she was hot. Who can really blame her if she got pissed!
And his relationship with Hannah! She is going out with a model, and yet she keeps flirting with him even if he doesn’t realize it. They work together, ok, but she’s always around him, joking and touching, giving him gifts and sucking his finger (there was a thorn in it, yeah right).
If they had written it better, it might have been a really funny movie. Both Matt and Hannah should have been written better, and possibly there should have been another actor. Someone funny and believable.
I liked both Thurman and Faris, but my favourite was Izzard. He was funny and cool as the villain, and he was so sweet at the end with Jenny. The best part of the movie.
ITA la mia super ex-ragazza
Honestly, disappointing. There’s been a moment when it seemed scary, thrilling, but it didn’t last long. The ending was like: is that it? The beginning was obviously slow, that’s normal in this kind of movies, but the second part was boring.
First of all the poster shows two faces, John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, but the movie is all around Cusack, Jackson has a very small part.
It’s about Mike Enslin, who writes stories about haunted houses, haunted hotels, and generally haunted places. He doesn’t believe in any of it, doesn’t believe in God or in a spiritual world or anything remotely supernatural, but he considers himself to be a honest writer, so he wants to spend a night in every place he writes about. Nothing ever happened during those nights, despite all the owners’ tales. One day he receives a postcard of the Dolphin hotel in New York, with ‘don’t enter room 1408’ written on it, or something of that effect. It’s not clear who sent the postcard, but Mike has every intention to write about that room. He phones the hotel but is repeatedly told that room 1408 is not available. He goes there in person, and the hotel manager is called: Olin (Jackson) calls it an “evil room” and he does his best to prevent Mike from entering that room, telling him that 56 people have died in there within an hour, either suicides or natural deaths. Nothing can change his mind though, and Olin can’t help giving him the key of room 1408 if he insists, because there’s a law that forces hotels to rent every free room which respects safety measures.
- of course, one might say, why didn’t Olin pretend that the room was occupied if he didn’t want to rent it, or why didn’t he pretend that something was physically wrong with it and therefore unsafe.. it makes no sense I know. Olin says that the room is kept clean and that the hotel owners want to pretend that there’s nothing wrong in their hotels, but this doesn’t mean that Olin couldn’t pretend that the room was occupied, or unsafe, or whatever, anything honestly would be better than to have another death in the hotel, right?
Mike goes to his room alone, because nobody would enter it. It looks like a very normal, common room at first. The air-conditioning unit appears to be malfunctioning, and the receptionist promptly sends someone up: the man gives him the instructions to repair it himself, refusing to enter the room, then leaves in a hurry.
Soon the first little tricks start: chocolates appear on the pillow, the radio-alarm-clock starts playing music, and he thinks there might be someone in the room but he’s completely alone. He seems to be getting upset but still he doesn’t believe in anything supernatural. When he looks out of the window and it suddenly falls down on his hand, hurting it, things change. He rushes to the bathroom already in a state of mental distress, getting everything dirty with the blood on his hand. The water becomes so hot that he can’t turn it off, meanwhile the clock is running a 60-minutes countdown. He sees the ghosts of two people who died throwing themselves off the window; he has visions of his dying father and his poor young daughter as she was before she died. He’s had more than enough and wants to leave, but he can’t. The phone doesn’t allow him to reach the hotel reception, the key doesn’t work and then it breaks in the lock, and the doorknob falls off; he tries to escape through the air vent but once in there he is attacked (sort of) by some ghost or something that look like a mummy, and when he reaches another room he sees from up there that the woman and child he had heard from room 1408 are his wife and his daughter when she was just a little baby, and then the vents change before his eyes, so he goes back in and tries another way. He looks at the floor map and plans to go to an adjacent room to ask for help by walking close to the wall outside the window, but when he tries and his hand can’t reach any window he sees that there are no more windows on that floor. He is forced to go back in, and now the floor map has changed too, showing only his room, and in the room there are no windows anymore. He tries his cell phone but it has no signal, so he tries wifi using his laptop, and he can get a signal, and he calls his wife Lily, asking her to call the police and send them to room 1408, when suddenly the fire system goes off and the computer gets all wet and stops working. The temperature turns instantly very cold, there’s ice everywhere and he makes a small fire in the room to survive the cold, when the computer starts working again and he receives a call from Lily, rather worried about him, telling him that the police are there but they found the room to be empty! The video-chat starts working by itself, telling Lily to come at once to his room, although the real Mike is shouting for her not to come.
I don’t remember exactly the exact moment when each thing happened, but at some point he breaks the wall trying to reach the adjacent room, and can’t. Then the words “burn me alive” appear on the wall. Then blood starts pouring out from the broken wall.
At some point the paintings change, becoming more sad or more scary, and from the painting representing a sailing ship at sea the water start pouring out flooding the room, and he finds himself on the beach in Los Angeles. We saw him before he went to New York, surfing and falling in the water and almost drowning until he woke up on the beach. It’s the same moment, when he wakes up and he’s in LA and Lily comes to see him because the hospital called her, and they make peace, he tells her about room 1408 and she tells him that he should write about it, not really concerned but acting more like it had only been just a nightmare. During a visit to the post office, Mike recognizes in all the faces there people that he saw at the Dolphin Hotel; they start breaking down the walls, and he finds himself again in room 1408, in rather bad conditions now. He sees little Katy calling him and coming towards him, and if at first he tries to resist saying “you’re not real, you’re not Katy” soon he yields and talks to her and hugs her tight, until she dies again in his arms, and crumbles into dust.
Finally the countdown reaches zero, but the next moment the countdown starts again. The room has been restored to how it was when he entered. The phone rings and he asks the usual voice why the don’t simply kill him, but the voice says that the guests enjoy their free will, and that it’s his own choice, he can relive the same hour over and over again or he can avail himself of their quick “checkout system”, and a noose appear hanging from the roof, and he sees himself in the mirror hanging himself, but he replies that he doesn’t like that solution, and he wants to choose his own exit. He uses the rest of the bottle Olin had given him to create a molotov bomb. At first he had suspected that he had been drugged thru that drink but he didn’t stop drinking it. Now he puts some cloth into the bottle, lit it and throws it at the wall, setting the room instantly on fire.
Nothing of what had happened before had concerned the rest of the hotel, but now the fire alarm sounds and the hotel is evacuated so when Lily arrives she can’t enter. He breaks a window causing the fire to burst, and he lies on the floor when two firemen arrive to take him out to safety.
We see Olin in his office saying to himself “Well done Mr Enslin”... and it all seems just too simple.
He is saved, taken to a hospital where Lily visits him, and they go back to their house.
I don’t know, there were a few good moments but not many. Before realizing his tragic past, honestly Mike appeared to be a jerk, so unpleasant when talking to Olin, so arrogant, and then when things went wrong he cursed him as if it had been Olin’s plan when he actually had tried his best to prevent him from going in there - well he had tried to convince him, but as I said before he could have prevented him had he really wanted to.
I don’t remember when it happened exactly, if before or after hurting his hand, but there was a moment when he wanted to leave and couldn’t, and he saw the figure of a man in a room across his own, and tried to shout for help. At first the figure didn’t react, then it started doing exactly what he was doing, copying his every move like a mirror, and when he took a lamp in his hand and the figure did too he saw that the face was his own, and he saw a man trying to kill him and turning around the same man was in his own room attacking him, and then disappearing. That was rather effective, when I still thought it might actually be rather interesting and frightening, but it didn’t last long.
At the end, we see Mike and Lily at home, and when she wants to throw away the things the brought back from the hotel he takes his recorder, and playing it back they both hear Katy’s voice, meaning that he didn’t dream it, that it actually happened.
Now, if everything that happened in there was real, then the room really got frozen, flooded, broken, everything was real and yet the room was able to reset itself to its normal condition without the rest of the hotel noticing anything.. why couldn’t the room do the same when he set the fire? Because this time it had been Mike’s doing not the room’s.. and yet he had spread water, broken walls and windows, and the room turned to normal. Why was this fire different?
If everything that had happened had been just hallucinations, then how come Lily heard Katy’s voice?
I’m sorry but I found it made no sense, and therefore I was not frightened and the ending left me bored and unsatisfied.
I wonder if that’s how King wrote it, if that’s his ending too. It could be, I don’t know.
Tony Shalhoub has a little scene in the movie, he was like his editor or something.
I liked it a lot. I love the way James was able to picture complete personalities for her characters. This is not as easy as it sounds, not many writers make you feel like you know their characters’ personalities. Most importantly, it really feels at the end, when you’re told the solution of the case, that everything that happened really suited the characters, nothing that happens make you think ‘no, they’d never do that’, there’s never a switch/trick when someone who had been described as good soddenly turns evil at the last page, or anything like that. This is what I love the most.
This book doesn’t have Dalgliesh in it but Cordelia Gray instead, a private detective. This is the first book about her that I read, but I see from James bibliography that she wrote one before; anyway, we’re told that she was once in a relationship with Dalgliesh but it ended. This little thing has the nice purpose of putting you in the same world as the other novels. This is not his case, he’s not involved in any way, but he exists, and you hear that he could vouch for her integrity as a non-murderess, so we’re spared the annoying ‘she’s a suspect too’ part of the investigation.
Cordelia once had a partner who eventually killed himself, so she now owns and runs her own agency. She deals mostly in lost pets :-p until Sir George Ralston comes to hire her. His wife, actress Clarissa Lisle, is scared for her life after receiving strange notes with death-related quotes from plays.
Cordelia is to accompany her to Courcy Island as a secretary-companion. Nobody really thinks that she’s in any danger, but in Clarissa’s words: “Death. That’s what I’m afraid of. Just death. I always have been. There never was a time when I didn’t see the skull beneath the skin”.
Clarissa is going there to star in an amateur production of the play “the duchess of Malfi”. She’s spoiled and vain (she’s an actress after all), has had various husbands and various lovers, always thinks about herself, considers her plays the most important thing in the world, and deep down doesn’t really care for anyone, or love anyone, other than herself. She’s charming though, and also profoundly sure that she can have anyone she wants and that she’s entitled to anything she wants.
Nobody really likes her of course, only Sir George will say “I loved her”.
The other relevant characters are: Ambrose Gorringe, the owner of the Island and the castle on it, with a restored theatre. He is a fascinating character, described by those who know him like someone incapable of strong passions, “even his horror is second hand” because among the many things he collects there are things related to past murders. He doesn’t know what love is, for his own admission, his only passion is his island and his house. He doesn’t even care for sex or company.
He has known Clarissa for years and is now putting his castle at her service.
His three servants are: Munter the butler, a bitter sarcastic man who seems to share Ambrose’s annoyance at everyone who comes to disrupt the natural order of things at the castle. His wife is the cook, and her presence is so much in the background that people there don’t even know her name. Oldfield is the boatman and general factotum, who only does what he’s told.
The other guests are: Tolly, Miss Tolgarth, is Clarissa’s dresser. She’s been at her service all her life.
She never married, but had once an affair that gave her a daughter. She loved Viccy very much, but the little girl had an accident. The hospital called her mother when she got worse, but Clarissa answered the phone. Her play was about to start, and she felt like she couldn’t do without Tolly, so she didn’t tell her and the child died without her mother. Tolly never spoke about this to anyone, and kept working for Clarissa as if ignoring what she did.
Ivo Whittingham, a drama critic whose health is so bad anyone can see at first sight that he’s dying. He once had an affair with Clarissa, a sex affair that lasted a long time, as long as he felt her charm and she found him useful with his reviews. He’s rather sarcastic now, what with his failing health, and seems to take a liking at Cordelia. He’s the one that told her about Tolly’s child and what happened. Cordelia figured out right away that he had to be the father, how else could he know that she refused any help from the child’s father, and why else would he bother to inquire at the hospital about the phone call.. he tells this story to Cordelia to warn her not to fall victim of her charm, to let her know how she really is: charming when she wants to be, but basically only thinking about herself.
Simon Lessing, her stepson, a seventeen-year-old student that Clarissa took under her care when both his parents died. She had broken his family when she married his father, and he didn’t like to live with his uncle and aunt, who only saw in him something expensive, and couldn’t afford to let him continue his piano lessons. He feels like he failed her, like her interest in him cooled down as soon as she realized that he wasn’t the great talent that she hoped to be able to show off. He lives in fear that she might send him away and that he’d have to leave his current school. He’d very much like for Clarissa to like him.
Roma Lisle is Clarissa’s cousin. Ex school teacher, now owning a failing bookshop. She’s 45 and wanted the shop to work to run it with her lover, a married man who writes to her to leave her while she’s away at the island. Had he waited for her return, she would have had her part of Clarissa’s inheritance. She had tried to ask her for money but Clarissa had turned her down badly.
Cordelia, like Sir George, doesn’t really believe that whoever sent those messages really meant to threaten her life, but the notes keep coming, so she knows that whoever is responsible is there at the island. When Cordelia is found dead, Inspector Groban (or was it Grogan?) comes to investigate. She holds back information, not wanting to disclose the story about Tolly’s child. Sir George had come to the island too after all, so he’s among the suspects too. Cordelia is sure that Simon can’t have sent the notes. Clarissa was found in her room, on her bed, with her face battered in with a marble arm purchased by Ambrose. He had told Cordelia that the arm was missing early in the morning.
Sir George has a secret too. When he was stationed there as a young soldier, he sort of let others kill a man who turns out to be Munter’s father. One night a drunk Munter enters their dining-room shouting the word “murderer” at him, and in the night he’ll die, drowned.
Of course everyone seems to have a motive, be it money or revenge, and yet nobody seems the type to kill for those reasons. Of course James play with the idea that whoever sent those messages eventually took action and actually killed her, but it’s not like that. There was the clue at the beginning of the investigation: why destroy her face? There was no doubt that Clarissa is the victim, they’re on a small island and it’s been throughly searched, and the idea of extreme rage is not convincing here, with this people, but there’s another reason, and it’s among those listed for us: to hide the real cause of death, to complicate the investigation.
As soon as she can leave the island, Cordelia goes into town to look for an old newspaper article; Clarissa had a clipping hidden in a jewel box that was found missing after her death. When Cordelia finally finds it, she realizes its importance. It shows Ambrose, physically present in town in 1977, when he was supposed to be abroad. He had written a book called Autopsia that had been very successful, and he decided to spend a year abroad to avoid paying taxes on it. Had it been known that he stepped foot in England he should have paid like 80% of his earnings (seems a bit too much, doesn’t it?) and the fact that he hid his visit might even be prosecuted, and Clarissa had known that he was in town. Just for a brief visit to his dying uncle, but that was enough. Clarissa had known how to subtly use that information to get whatever he wanted out of him, like a play in his theatre, the use of all his props, and basically whatever she fancied. Cordelia confronts Ambrose with the new clipping that she took with her, and he calmly tells her everything: yes, Clarissa was blackmailing him, but he didn’t kill her. He was responsible for the messages. Tolly had started it with a quote from the bible, the first messages that Clarissa had thrown away, not really bothered, but when those stopped Ambrose who knew about them had taken over, with quotes about death. He meant to distress her so much that she would fail, and once her career was ruined she’d have had no more use of his theatre or him. He had pretended that the arm had gone missing because he wanted to make it magically appear in front of her during her play, along with a new note. When he accidentally discovered that Simon had killed her, hitting her on the head with the jewel box, he had battered her face with the arm to disguise it as the murder weapon, retrieved the clipping and instructed the boy on how to fool the police. The boy had not planned it, it had been a sudden burst of rage upon discovering how little the real Clarissa cared about him, how she wanted to use him for sex and how she mocked him for it.
Lying had been simple, he had not seen her face afterwards, and had never seen either the arm or the messages. Munter had seen him escape through the window throwing away the jewel box, but Ambrose was confident that he’d never tell, that he could trust him. Simon had not been so sure, so when he had seen Munter fall in the water completely drunk, he did nothing and let him die. He felt guilty for that too, and was planning to kill himself while Ambrose detained Cordelia with his talking.
She finally realizes that and starts running in search of Simon, leaving her bag behind, and thus allowing Ambrose to take her clipping too. She finds Simon planning to drown himself, and as soon as she frees him of the handcuffs he had used to prevent himself from fleeing at the last moment , she heard a trapdoor locking her down. She manages to swim away to freedom, but apparently the boy didn’t, nobody sees him again. Cordelia goes to tell everything to the police, but the murderer is now dead, and there are no proof against Ambrose, no proof that he locked the trapdoor, it’s only her word against his. He sincerely tells her how sorry he is that his visit to Courcy Island was not a pleasant one, and we know that he’ll never suffer any consequence because nothing will ever be proved.
Mrs Munter who was never actually married so nobody really knows her name, leaves the place and goes living with Tolly for the time being, but I suppose that Ambrose will find other servants and will keep living on the island, the only thing he really wants.
