"THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE" ☆☆
All the "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" needs, Walt Disney's new kid-action fantasy, is the beloved "Fantasia"/Mickey Mouse cartoon (and famous classical piece), and a similar sequence in the updated movie itself, to merit an $150 million budget, with extensive CGI, high-powered car-chase stunts through downtown Manhattan, and Nic Cage stylishly getting us through it all as centuries old, cool master sorcerer Balthazar, who needs to find the Prime Merlinian, a foretold young wizard who will one day destroy evil before they vanquish the world by rising the undead (called the, uh, Rising) and killing everybody. And Disney, as well as director Jon Turtletaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (the dream-team that did "National Treasure") seem to think that's all they should offer. It isn't good enough, for adults or kids, to the classy entertainment that this show, and Nic Cage's Balthazar, thinks it is.
College-guy Dave Stutler, played by type-cast dweeb Jay Baruchel, is "the chosen one" who will, and must, stop the evil, and who, just like us, can't seem to get why he should. What does he owe to save mankind from zombies and the supposedly very dangerous, formidable sorcerers and sorceresses, including Salem's own Abigail Williams, who have been inside an ancient doll, called the Grimhold, for so many years? Because he is The Chosen One? Because he is a nerdy dork who needs to prove his worth, and get the girl, of whom he's wanted to woe since he was ten, when Balthazar himself halted the process by introducing himself into Dave's ordinary life with a silver dragon ring and a destiny that means confronting and once and for all stopping evil for the sake of good, where all else will fail? Why should he care? In the moment where Dave would walk away from Balthazar, and sorcery, and his supposed magical destiny, he decides to stay, because he thought that the magic was cool. Is that why we should care, too? Why we should stay in the movie theater? Because we thought the magic was cool?
Actually, I didn't think the visual effects were that impressive.
The Disney short, with Paul Dukas' famously whimsical orchestral piece, is a much better entertainment, and far better aesthetic piece, then the movie it's "based on," with Mickey as the Apprentice, in his notable blue-starry pointy hat and red cloak, controlling a mop magically to pail water, when the whole thing turns disastrously wrong as the mop multiplies to hundreds and swamps The Sorcerer's dungeon with raging water, and Mickey desperately trying to stop it, and the majestic Sorcerer coming to halt the mad procession in one swift, masterful hand, just in the nick of time. "Fantasia's The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is one of the world's best known pieces of perfectly synced images, animation, and classical music (from a guy who doesn't know much about classical music or animation), and could beguile me on dozens of viewings then 2010's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" could only halfway through.
Like most blockbuster entertainment this year, it's a poor movie, with uninspired acting/directing that's too hammy, with an uninspired script (with that great inspired piece?) that's just as fuddled in plot gimmicks and devices like most of kid entertainment out right now, and that some kids may find too silly to even like. A flying, steal eagle? Chinese dragon puppets coming to life? The Grimhold? The Rising? Abigail Williams? The only motive to bad-guys is to take over the world? And the only one to stop them is "the chosen one?" Who is always a young hero? Magic shouldn't exist and be known to anyone, but the climatic battle blasts out in the middle of Washington Square?
And "The Prime Merlinian!?" Give me a break.
"THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE" ☆☆☆
Not as good as it's predecessor, the smart, chilling Swedish whodunit crime thriller "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," about morally wronged Lisbeth Salander, the virulent young goth-girl with a scared childhood, and her fare colleague and on-and-off lover, Mikael Blomkvist, the assiduous "Millennium" magazine editor and amateur sleuth, solving murder while we get closer to Lisbeth's past, on her reason's for despising men (though loving Blomkvist), and confronting new villains for sake of others and her horrible past. That first film, directed by Niels Arden Oplev with screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, and the acclaimed novel by Stieg Larsson, is a a well-crafted thriller, with terrific suspense and compelling characters, Mikael Blomkvist, the various suspects, involving Nazis and old family feuds, and of course Lisbeth herself, who overtakes her chaperone, vicious rapist Nils Bjurman, and as we learn more about her she steadily and mercilessly begins to unwind. In "The Girl Who Played With Fire," Lisbeth is framed for murder of "Millennium's" new reporter and his girlfriend, as they were uncovering sex trafficking, and while that is something Lisbeth would be against someone has placed her prints at the scene of the crime. But why? And why does it involve Bjurman? And is it to do more with her troubled family history? She and Mikael try to solve it, while Lisbeth is hunted by a large albino with an abstinence for pain, the cops try to track her down, and Mikael begins to uncover the mystery of who is "Zala."
"Girl Who Played With Fire" isn't as catching a story as "Girl With Dragon Tattoo," and this one, now directed by Daniel Alfredson and written by Jonas Frykberg (though with the same book/writer in the novel series) isn't as chilling or involving, and it could be the director wasn't as steadfast or the book was just weaker than the first. Anyway, I didn't like this one as much. But it's still an engaging mystery/suspense movie, with a throughly engrossing climax (although it ends too soon). I think we can see the payoff in "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" do better, and aren't seconds in trilogies weaker anyway?
"WINTER'S BONE" ☆☆☆ 1/2
An indie film, with a true indie cast and crew, that relies on it's sheer force to persuade. Persuade us of 17-year-old Ree Dolly's (a great Jennifer Lawrence) plight to keep her younger brother and sister, Sonny and Ashlee, from depravity in rural Missouri, where the winters are stark chill and devoid of any life, warmth, solitude, and sense of security. Where drugs causes her dad to go missing, and his involved family business to become an unflinching barricade to the truth, of horrible red-neck monsters, higher on the chain of command like an organized mob of true killers. Ree can't stop finding her father, even if it means her own safety. The two younger Dolly's will go hungry, and missing dad, Jessup Dolly, put up their home as collateral for his bond, and a ditched court date will submit Ree, her siblings, and disabled mom, to the streets if he doesn't show, which is why Ree has to find him, and why she has no choice. The army won't take her, the possible economy down-spiral can't get her a job, and the seemingly endless miles of vacant, skeletal woods, rundown lower-class houses, and the bitter dead of winter that seeps hope out of us just as it might Ree, is why she no choice, and why she can't give up. Braving the haunting rural landscape and the vicious cretins that will go to any lengths to keep their drug trafficking out of the law, Ree needs to find her father, of whom she hates, her drug-induced, cooking, good-for-nothing lowlife of a dad, to keep Sonny and Ashlee feed, and warm for winter. With only the help of friendly, giving neighbor Sonya, girlfriend Gail, and well-meaning uncle Teardrop, where Ree's and his relationship is something odd and special to behold, can only keep Ree up for so long before she makes her own choices.
However, "Winter's Bone" ends the way you would expect, everything resolved, and things back to the way they were, which doesn't defeat the movie, but keeps it from a truly perfect moral conclusion. Ree never makes a choice. Well, if only to stay with her sibs and not go into the army, something she has always wanted (with 40,000 big ones to help her family along), but we'd expect that. (SPOILER ALERT!: Maybe losing the home, giving Ashlee and Soony away, and going out on her own, in those endless, dark, dank, unforgiving woods, to an uncertain future, would have suited it's story better) Anyway, the film relies on it's impact, on Ree, and those woods, to frighten us, and chill us, to the bone. It works like hell.
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