Movie Review: Maleficent

The retelling of fairy tales has always had a particular interest for me, whether as viewer, player, reader, or even attempting to try my hand at writer.  I've long been a fan of Bill Willingham's Fables, and before that the Snow White, Blood Red series, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

So, a little burned from Disney's last attempt "Oz the Great and Powerful", my family decided to give the 2014 film Maleficent a try.

To begin, the movie looks amazing, the effects are great , the imagery is wonderful, and it visually ties in quite nicely with the 1959 Disney film.  The story works from the point of view of the "evil" fairy Maleficent, who in the original story is the one who curses Beauty to die on the day of her sixteenth birthday.

Stories told from the villains point of view are always tricky; how, in their back story, can you show the audience the reasons behind their dark deeds, and hopefully win their sympathy?  In Maleficent, they (mild spoiler) do this by introducing Sleeping Beauty's father as a character years before the events of the fairy tale.  This works really well, but does ad a certain darkness to the film that moves the intended audience up by quite a few years from that of the Disney Classic.

In the end, both of my kids loved the film, and my wife and I were cautiously optimistic about it.  It's not my favourite villain retelling of a fairy tale, for that you'd need to read Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples but it was a pretty great show nonetheless.

Retro Viewing on Family Day

Here in Alberta Canada we celebrate Family Day on the third Monday in February (since 2007), which gives us a nice long weekend between New Year's and Easter.  This year my wife and I decided to show our kids some movies that they haven't seen, but should have; Purple Rain (1984) and Hackers (1995).

Purple Rain (which I have to admit I've never seen before, unless you include seeing the music videos from the film) was an interesting experience - part concert film, part romance, part family drama, the film moved back and forth between the amazing musical numbers and stuff that really just came across to me as strange: the creation of a girl band that was to be quote "…sexy but not dirty" which ended up being three women singing a song called "Sex Shooter" in lingerie, the fact that a woman is thrown in a dumpster by her boyfriend's henchman, or the incredibly rude way "The Kid" (Prince) treats two of his band members throughout 90% of the film.

Our biggest fear in showing the kids Hackers was simply that it wouldn't date well - that all the references to hacker culture or the mid-90s fear of what "Hackers" might do to your information may have seemed too cheesy for our kids.

Instead, they really just ate it up.  The fact that it starred current Elementary star Jonny Lee Miller definitely helped,   Also the fact that the film has a nice pace, over the top villains and is an interesting look at a specific (albeit dated) sub-culture was a lot of fun as well.

In the end, we didn't show the kids either film because they were the best movies of their time, but for my wife and I there were a part of our culture growing up, and now our kids have a taste of what we thought was cool growing up, just as their kids will have when shown films like High School Musical 2, Another Cinderella Story, and LOL.

Movie Reviews: Salt and Dinner for Schmucks

Last weekend I checked out not one but two films in the theatre (something that happens maybe once a year for me), so as a result today you get not one, but two reviews!

I went to see Angelina Jolie in Salt on Sunday with my mother, and it was a pretty cool little action flick. I never got around to seeing the Tomb Raider films, so I can't think of an action movie I've seen her in before, but I thought she did really great here. The film has all sorts of plot twists, and as following them is half the fun I'm going to avoid them. To be fair though, if you've read a lot of Robert Ludlum, the movie may not have as many twists for you. The action sequences were great, and I love the fact that the role was originally written for a guy (Tom Cruse was attached for a while) just like the Ripley character from Alien, and in both cases I could not imagine these roles played by anyone else. I know that usually I focus on Fantasy, Horror and SF, but the spy genre is swiftly becoming a personal favourite of mine.

Dinner for Schmucks on the other hand, can't be classified as a genre pick, but it was a lot of fun none the less. I saw it with my wife and our friend Trish and all three of us left the movie figuring it was time well spent. In the same sense as Salt cannot be described completely for fear of spoilers, Dinner for Schmucks has the same problem as everything builds towards the dinner and the schmucks who attend need to be seen to be believed. I was very happy to see Jemaine Clement (who I loved in Flight of the Conchords) representing everything I find exasperating about artists. The two leads are great and I left the film definitely planning to purchase it on DVD.

So there you go, two reviews for the price of one! See you Friday.