Watching Movies 10/5

I avoided seeing this at the time because I didn't care for Todd Phililp's Old School, and while this is better it is equally unsophisticated. A lot of missed potential. I love the amnesia/mystery concept, but the dialogue could be considerably funnier and the tension better executed. If only Shane Black had made it, but hey, if it was a smarter movie it wouldn't have made half a billion dollars. 

I rewatched this because I had largely forgotten it, and I wish I could love this as much as the rest of the world seems to. Despite the lavish production values there's something generic and inauthentic about the whole thing. It's the way the shot cuts just before Johnny Depp steps off his sinking boat instead of right after, the choppy nature of the action scenes that betrays the choreography, the blandness of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, the theme park stage settiness of everything. How is it so carefully crafted and yet so sloppy? It's ultimately just a Disney family film that aspires to something greater and doesn't quite make it. 

The Pirates of Penzance and The Pirate Movie are deeply entwined in my childhood and I could never tell the two apart. Wary of revisiting the films of my youth, Gilbert & Sullivan seemed like the safest bet. This finds a happy middle-ground between Broadway play and movie adaptation, retaining as much theatrical artificiality as possible. This helps center everything on the glorious music, and Kevin Kline is perfect as the Pirate King. It's no wonder his career took off like a rocket.

Starting in the 1960s there was a turn toward authenticity in period films with things like The Leopard, 1900, The Emigrants, and Barry Lyndon. Tree of the Wooden Clogs follows in that tradition. It's a deceptively simple film about a year in the life on a 19th century peasant farm, famously made with real peasants. They face hardships and the trials of life, and there are political and technological changes percolating on the fringes as progress will ultimately destroy their feudal way of life - progress the central family ultimately pays the price for. For a three hour film with no plot, it held my attention and was beautifully photographed. 

Anthony Mann directs a spare, bare-bones Korean war movie about a squad of soldiers moving from point A to point B. Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray both give terrific performances as weary soldiers who are done with war, and the movie has a hopeless, cynical Korean war overtone that separates it from WWII movies. The problem is that there's absolutely no tension in either the battle scenes or the drama. I can forgive the battle scenes since I've simply seen all these cliches before (it actually resembled a Call of Duty video game mission), but Mann should be able to handle the drama better than this. It felt like a novice doing a TV show instead of a veteran filmmaker. Perhaps it was just the budget, since it seems to have been intentionally made on the cheap, but in that case the drama matters even more.