ON THE JAZZ AGAIN
Jul. 5th, 2010 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogTeam Def has been to the movies, you know. Etc.
The A-Team
A Hollywood version of The A Team was always going to be tricky, partly because it’s hard to recast a part as iconic as Mr T’s BA Baracus, and partly because the original series was fun but, let’s admit it, patently ludicrous even without considering the absurd lack of body count.
The final result deals a lot better with the casting issue than with the general idea. Everyone – Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson and Sharlto Copley – manages to capture the spirit of the characters without resorting to parody.
The problem is just about everything else. An otherwise decent story about stolen money plates is buried under jumbled editing, overbaked CG bombast and that shaky-cam action directing for which Michael Bay will surely burn in Hell for making so popular that pretty much everyone does it now. And the opening sequence showing how they meet just doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. There are some fun bits, to be sure, but frankly I’ll take any given episode of the first season of the original show over this.
Shrek Forever After
Not much to say about this. For my dollar, the Shrek franchise has been the usual case of diminishing returns, and while this is an improvement over the third one (which was so forgettable I had to Google it to remind myself of the plot), it’s basically It’s A Wonderful Life with a Rumpelstiltskin remix. Not a bad idea, and some fun moments, but really only necessary in the sense that it’s a better note to go out on than Shrek The Third.
End of story,
This is dF
The A-Team
A Hollywood version of The A Team was always going to be tricky, partly because it’s hard to recast a part as iconic as Mr T’s BA Baracus, and partly because the original series was fun but, let’s admit it, patently ludicrous even without considering the absurd lack of body count.
The final result deals a lot better with the casting issue than with the general idea. Everyone – Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson and Sharlto Copley – manages to capture the spirit of the characters without resorting to parody.
The problem is just about everything else. An otherwise decent story about stolen money plates is buried under jumbled editing, overbaked CG bombast and that shaky-cam action directing for which Michael Bay will surely burn in Hell for making so popular that pretty much everyone does it now. And the opening sequence showing how they meet just doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. There are some fun bits, to be sure, but frankly I’ll take any given episode of the first season of the original show over this.
Shrek Forever After
Not much to say about this. For my dollar, the Shrek franchise has been the usual case of diminishing returns, and while this is an improvement over the third one (which was so forgettable I had to Google it to remind myself of the plot), it’s basically It’s A Wonderful Life with a Rumpelstiltskin remix. Not a bad idea, and some fun moments, but really only necessary in the sense that it’s a better note to go out on than Shrek The Third.
End of story,
This is dF
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no subject
on 2010-07-07 03:40 pm (UTC)