A New Take on a Classic

Everyone has heard of the Charles Dickens classic known as A Christmas Carol. There have been so many interpretations over the years, whether it be animated, live-action, even Muppets (!) that one would think that there would be no other way to make the story fresh anymore. Well director Robert Zemeckis found a way and through the magic of IMAX and 3D, his version of A Christmas Carol can stand proudly with the best of them.

In Victorian England, Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is miserable once again. It’s been a few years since his partner, Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman), has passed away and the miserly old moneylender hates giving employee Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman) any days off, even if it is Christmas.  When Marley’s ghost visits Scrooge on Christmas Eve, Marley warns him that his miserable existence must change unless Scrooge also wants to be miserable in the afterlife. Three spirits haunt Scrooge, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Together, they show the old man how he has wasted his life until that point and that a terrible fate awaits him if he does not repent.

As timeless and great as Dickens’ work is, this treatment of A Christmas Carol is different because of the exceptional animation that was undertaken to create it. Improving on the performance capture effects seen previously in The Polar Express and Beowulf, Zemeckis’ team at ImageMovers Digital have added so much detail to their characters that it’s a bit scary. Wrinkles on faces, liver spots on hands, and pores on skin are so clear, the only thing separating the animated characters from actual people is their colorful world and the situations they’re put into.

Seeing the movie in 3D and on the mammoth IMAX screen only served to enhance my enjoyment of it. Then again, every film I’ve seen on IMAX has been a fun experience. The 3D touches of falling snow, horses galloping, and other similar effects were nice to see, particularly on such a big canvas as the IMAX screen. Though there are a few times when the 3D can be a bit distracting, they are few and far between. I can say though that if I had seen A Christmas Carol in a regular cinema, I believe I would have still enjoyed it. I’ve heard that this treatment remains quite faithful to the original source material, something that I always appreciate in movie adaptations.

A friend told me that they hesitated to watch this film because he wasn’t a Jim Carrey fan. I reassured him, however, that if you didn’t know Carrey played Scrooge, you wouldn’t notice him. More than just adopting a British accent, Carrey just removes everything we’ve gotten used to about him to play the old miser as well as the three Christmas spirits. Oldman looks exactly like Cratchit so we can’t separate one from the other, but I believe Carrey really needed to separate himself from Scrooge in order to make the character work, and in my opinion, it does.

Killing Nazis for Sport

I desperately wanted to love Inglourious Basterds. After all, this was the latest film from Quentin Tarantino and his films tend to be the kinds of films I love. With Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2, Tarantino pretty much desensitized me to different kinds of violence. So when I heard that Tarantino was going to do a World War II film that had Brad Pitt and other actors killing Nazis, I was already looking for the line to the ticket gate. Unfortunately for me, Inglourious Basterds didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

In Nazi-occupied France, the famed “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) has the Jewish Dreyfus family killed except for the escaped Shosanna. Over in Italy, American 1^st Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) assembles a team of Jewish-Americans and Germans to cause havoc within Germany by scalping Nazi soldiers and carving swastikas on the the foreheads of survivors. Popularly known as “The Basterds”, even Hitler himself takes notice. Four years after her family’s murder, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) now goes by the name Emmanuelle Mimieux and operates a small Paris cinema. When the German sniper Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) shows interest in movies and her, Shosanna is forced to screen the premiere of a film made by Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) about Zoller’s exploits for the Nazi elite. Shosanna plans to burn down her cinema to kill all the Nazis altogether. At the same time, Raine and his Basterds are also plotting the assassination of the German brass with the help of British Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German film star/spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) resulting in a bloody standoff in the basement of a French pub.

Basterds is typical Tarentino in the sense that a. there are a lot of scenes where characters just seem to be talking, b. there’s a lot of graphic violence, and c. the film is an homage to a film genre of the past. I’m not saying the long dialogue is a bad thing at all, in fact, it’s one of the Tarantino trademarks that I love. The dialogue helps the audience understand where the characters are coming from, their motivation, as well as why they’re doing the things they do, and Tarantino has made a habit of writing rich dialogue for his characters. The first scene in particular shows just how evil and twisted Standartenführer Landa truly is. Waltz’s performance here stands out so strongly and he really feels like a suave yet demonic Nazi of the highest order. He combines charm, class, and hatred of Jews to go beyond the stereotypical Nazi of old and his brutality later in the film shows even more of his acting range.

As a Tarantino film, it’s best to keep in mind that Inglourious Basterds wasn’t meant to be historically accurate. I mean, there’s no record of anybody scalping Nazis during World War II and the ending of the film obviously didn’t happen. Despite the great cast, good plot, and the gory details, there was still something a bit off about the film for me. I think the pacing was a bit too slow when compared to other Tarantino favorites like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. I realize the need for explanation and establishing how things are what they are, but I believe Tarantino could have done away with a few minutes here and there to speed up the pace. After all, in a film like this, we as audience members just want to get to the next killing scene already.

I did like the fact though that both Shosanna’s plan and the Basterds’ plot never overlapped and only intersected during the film’s climax. In that way, there was no need for any awkward introductions between characters and the focus stayed on both plans trying to come to fruition. In my humble opinion, Inglourious Basterds was still a good film to catch, just not as good as previous Tarantino efforts on the big screen.

This Should Have Stayed Grounded

As a kid, I was fascinated by stories of aviation pioneers like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. I remember a book that my parents gave me then that told of how both crossed the Atlantic Ocean individually on their planes, making them heroes worldwide. The tragedy of Earhart’s disappearance as she attempted to circumnavigate the world has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories and innuendo for over 70 years, I guess I was just waiting for a movie about her life until that point. Thus I was one of the few who actually wanted to watch director Mira Nair’s Amelia.

Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) had long dreamed of flight and she was determined to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Through the efforts of George Putnam (Richard Gere), she does so, along with setting several other flying records. Putnam and Earhart fall in love and marry, but she also begins an affair with Federal aviation administrator Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). When she does break off the relationship with Vidal and returns to Putnam, Earhart is determined to set the greatest aviation feat of all: circumnavigating the world. Hiring renowned navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston), Earhart tells her husband that she wants to retire from flying after this is done. However, a series of events happen that results in tragedy for Earhart and Noonan.

I’m usually a sucker for these period pieces and biographical films about famous people, so Amelia was something I looked forward to. Based on the books East of the Dawn by Susan Butler and The Sound of Wings by Mary S. Lovell, the film paints a picture of an Amelia Earhart who was initially allowed to fly as nothing more than a publicity stunt. When she first earns fame, she used it to push for more power for female pilots and more representation for women. However, director Nair doesn’t make Earhart a saint, showing her brazen affair with Vidal.

The problem I found with this film is that it was just too damn slow. Even though Swank looks just like Earhart, the plot just seemed to be stuck in quicksand at times. Although Gere and McGregor try to make the most of what’s been given them, it just lacks enough of a punch to make Earhart’s life more compelling. There are times that it seems the actors just can’t generate the energy to make the film livelier. For a film about a woman that set so many records and accomplished so many new and exciting things in her time, Nair somehow finds a way to take the fun out of Earhart’s story.

The life and mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart has been and will continue to be the subject of much speculation and hypothesis for many years to come. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can call Amelia as a good film to refer to when citing a source for those theories in the future.