The French are missing...
At the movies with Dan Slevin
I DON’T KNOW what the French did to be so roundly insulted at the movies this week but I’d advise them to steer clear of Wellington cinemas for a while - perhaps until their film festival gets under way again next year.
Firstly, crass action auteur Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) attempts to reboot The Three Musketeers but then does it without a single French person appearing on screen.
Anderson takes the bones of Dumas’ original classic story - honourable swordsmen fighting to protect a king so naive he barely comprehends the threats against him - and adds some monstrous science-fiction elements like giant airships duelling in the skies over Paris.
If you absolutely must go and see The Three Musketeers then trade up to the 3D version. Anderson gets the medium better than most action directors and there are moments when he uses it well here.
Woody Allen attempts to write Paris a love letter in the latest chapter of his European adventures, Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays a discontented screenwriter on holiday with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. He wants to live and write in the inspirational city and be a serious novelist but she would rather he continue his Hollywood hackwork and build their dream house on the Malibu beach.
One night he goes for a walk, gets lost and through some kind of magical time portal (or a bump on the head) he finds himself in the middle of Paris in the 20s - full of bonhomie, joie de vivre and artists and writers soaking up the scene. None of whom are French. If late-period Woody Allen films seem effortless it’s probably because not much effort actually goes in to them - like Eastwood he has been around movie sets long enough to know how to finish on time every day - but Midnight in Paris has more charm than most while continuing to indulge Allen’s usual obsessions.
The greatest insult that befalls the French this week, though, is the truly awful teen-girl-wish-fulfilment-fantasy Monte Carlo in which a young Texan (Selena Gomez) gets a trip to Paris as a high school graduation present and her grumpy step-sister and blousy BFF tag along for the ride. There we get to see the same Parisian tourist traps Allen photographed for Midnight in Paris, before Gomez gets mistaken for a wealthy British society-gal and is spirited down to Monaco to live the high life for a few days. Like a teen version of Sex and the City, Monte Carlo manages to insult everything it touches - including my eyeballs.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is this week’s opportunity to experience something genuinely life-affirming - genius Werner Herzog at his idiosyncratic best. Buried deep inside the hills of the Ardèche are the earliest human cave paintings yet discovered, a record of the birth of human consciousness, self-awareness and sprituality from more than 30,000 years ago. So precious that they are only opened up to scientists for a couple of weeks a year, Herzog took a tiny crew underground to film these extraordinary artworks with modern, hand-held 3D cameras.
But, like any Herzog film, what it’s about isn’t really what it’s about. He’s interested in the paintings, of course, but he’s also fascinated by the people who study them and whether their particular obsessions mirror those of the artists from millennia ago. And those of the unknowable future. For this confirmed atheist, to watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams was to feel the presence of something bigger than us. Not a God that doesn’t exist of course but ... something. Something that I can’t quite, and not sure I want to, put my finger on.
I DON’T KNOW what the French did to be so roundly insulted at the movies this week but I’d advise them to steer clear of Wellington cinemas for a while - perhaps until their film festival gets under way again next year.
Firstly, crass action auteur Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) attempts to reboot The Three Musketeers but then does it without a single French person appearing on screen.
Anderson takes the bones of Dumas’ original classic story - honourable swordsmen fighting to protect a king so naive he barely comprehends the threats against him - and adds some monstrous science-fiction elements like giant airships duelling in the skies over Paris.
If you absolutely must go and see The Three Musketeers then trade up to the 3D version. Anderson gets the medium better than most action directors and there are moments when he uses it well here.
Woody Allen attempts to write Paris a love letter in the latest chapter of his European adventures, Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays a discontented screenwriter on holiday with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. He wants to live and write in the inspirational city and be a serious novelist but she would rather he continue his Hollywood hackwork and build their dream house on the Malibu beach.
One night he goes for a walk, gets lost and through some kind of magical time portal (or a bump on the head) he finds himself in the middle of Paris in the 20s - full of bonhomie, joie de vivre and artists and writers soaking up the scene. None of whom are French. If late-period Woody Allen films seem effortless it’s probably because not much effort actually goes in to them - like Eastwood he has been around movie sets long enough to know how to finish on time every day - but Midnight in Paris has more charm than most while continuing to indulge Allen’s usual obsessions.
The greatest insult that befalls the French this week, though, is the truly awful teen-girl-wish-fulfilment-fantasy Monte Carlo in which a young Texan (Selena Gomez) gets a trip to Paris as a high school graduation present and her grumpy step-sister and blousy BFF tag along for the ride. There we get to see the same Parisian tourist traps Allen photographed for Midnight in Paris, before Gomez gets mistaken for a wealthy British society-gal and is spirited down to Monaco to live the high life for a few days. Like a teen version of Sex and the City, Monte Carlo manages to insult everything it touches - including my eyeballs.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is this week’s opportunity to experience something genuinely life-affirming - genius Werner Herzog at his idiosyncratic best. Buried deep inside the hills of the Ardèche are the earliest human cave paintings yet discovered, a record of the birth of human consciousness, self-awareness and sprituality from more than 30,000 years ago. So precious that they are only opened up to scientists for a couple of weeks a year, Herzog took a tiny crew underground to film these extraordinary artworks with modern, hand-held 3D cameras.
But, like any Herzog film, what it’s about isn’t really what it’s about. He’s interested in the paintings, of course, but he’s also fascinated by the people who study them and whether their particular obsessions mirror those of the artists from millennia ago. And those of the unknowable future. For this confirmed atheist, to watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams was to feel the presence of something bigger than us. Not a God that doesn’t exist of course but ... something. Something that I can’t quite, and not sure I want to, put my finger on.
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