Of Swords and Parasols

Period an fantasy films, with a Thai action flick thrown in.

Alice in Wonderland (2010):

I had put off watching this “sequel” to Lewis Carroll’s books not because I didn’t think I’d like it, but because I was afraid the behind-the-scenes politics (Burton and Depp both being Polanski supporters, and Depp winning the “Rape culture! Yay!” prize there) would affect my enjoyment, despite most people I trust liking it. I found Depp’s Mad Hatter creepy and icky and annoying [Disclaimer: I’ve only actually liked the Mad Hatter character in Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars and SyFy’s Alice mini, and neither was really very connected to the original.], but I thought he was creepy in the trailers, too, so it may have just amplified that. But Alice? Alice is awesome. I admit that I spent the first half of the movie not really invested but liking Alice and the Underland creatures and the visuals, but I loved it once the White Queen showed up and the Champion part kicked off. I could have done without the Alice/Hatter indications (creepy, but thankfully went nowhere) but that’s my only real complaint about the actual movie.

( trailer here )

Amelia:

I’d heard mixed reviews on this and so I went from being really excited about it before it came out to just hoping it wouldn’t be bad by the time I watched it. I thought the first and last legs were really good, but the middle part was mostly a dramatization of Amelia Earhart’s lovelife at the expense of everything else about her years in the spotlight, and so I was rather “meh” during a lot of that, though I give the movie a lot of credit for not glamming her up, and actually making Hillary Swank look a lot like Earhart. The main problem, though, was that the movie played out with a bit too much awareness of Earhart’s fate, and so it ended up feeling a bit more like a tragedy than a celebration of her life. Technically good, but not as good as it could have been.

( trailer here )

Angel:

An interesting, beautiful, but sometimes depressing movie about a (fictional) popular author at the beginning of the 20th century. The main character, Angel, lives completely within the world of her fiction, even to the point where she starts to rewrite the reality around her in her head. Most characters I’ve come across who live in a world of fiction are portrayed as vibrant and eccentric and endearing. Angel is all of the above, as well as very charismatic, but the movie focuses a lot on how it also negatively affects her life and relationships, and makes them fall apart around her. The movie was excellent (if a bit slow) and Romola Garai and Michael Fassbender were it was very pretty, but I’m not sure it’s something I could rewatch.

( trailer here )

Chocolate:

This is, I think, only the second piece of Thai cinema I’ve seen, the other being the first Ong-Bok movie. You are welcome to rec more.

Once upon a time, a Japanese gangster (played by Abe Hiroshi, who alternated between being shirtless and wearing a tidy suit. With a gun. And swords. BLESS YOU MOVIE.) in Thailand fell in love with a Thai mob boss’s girlfriend, and then she made him go back to Japan because she was pregnant and didn’t want the mob boss to kill him. Their love was brief and weirdly silent. Their daughter, Zen, is autistic, but has the ability to mimic anything she sees, and she loves her martial arts movies. When mom gets cancer, Zen and her foster brother, Moom, try to collect on debts owed to her by various shady people, who rough up the kids, and then Zen beats the money out of them. The plot is thin and basically an excuse to have JeeJa Yanin beat people up, but surprisingly manages to be touching and interesting anyway. The depiction of autism is very good, though I don’t know how it’d combine with Zen’s mimicking abilities and coordination in real life. The action scenes are awesome, and not flashy. They were also done without stunt doubles, and the credits show a lot of the injuries that happened during filming. Also, Zen is blessedly not remotely sexualized (I mean, you’d hope they wouldn’t try to sexualize a teenaged autistic girl, but Hollywood has jaded me.) Good stuff said: Has there ever been an action movie with a trans character where the trans character wasn’t the villain’s evil flunky?

Have darkeyedwolf's spoilery picspam of the movie.  (Does Abe Hiroshi's butt need a warning?)

( trailer here )

George and the Dragon:

A bit older than the others here (2004) this is a fun quasi-retelling of the legend that reminded me of 80s fantasy. (It even had some battle scenes that seemed to directly referene Willow, and had some thematic similarities to the more recent Dragonheart.) I thought it was a bit on the slow and dull side early on when it was essentially following the traditional tale (With bonus Muslin BFF for George. I…why do guys always return from the Crusades with a Muslim these days in Hollywood, anyway. I think they had way more important things to do than be the enemy’s sidekick!) but it got way better maybe 30 minutes in when we found out what the princess had been up to and she started [rest is spoilery] beating people up for threatening dragons. I would kinda love an adventure series of Luna and George riding around medieval Europe, rescuing endangered magical species. The age difference between George and Luna was kinda big for modern times, but didn’t bug me. I also liked that George clarified that he didn’t change his intentions for her, but because of her. Unless it’s slaying an army out to kill the other, “I did it for you” has a tendency to be more of an indulgence or cry for praise, rather than indicating that someone had an influence on another person, and I think a lot of fiction misses that difference.

I couldn’t find a decent quality version of the trailer on youtube, so have a MV instead:

( MV here )

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus:

Or “the movie Heath Ledger was making when he died, so they got 3 other guys to play his part during the fantasy world bits.” Actually, the way they did the “true faces” stuff to make that work was pretty nifty. Many parts of this are about an immortal trapped in an eternal descent narrative, and his daughter, who is trapped in his narrative and needs to escape it, but other parts (and it feels like parts of the movie were rewritten to focus more on this) are about a conartist falling apart when faced with himself. This is, honestly, a pretty decent movie with good performances with some great visuals, but I actually spent a lot of the time I was watching it thinking I could be rewatching Mirrormask instead.

( trailer here )