With all the prestigious Oscar-season films out, I wanted to take a break and see something different. To my surprise, a film I felt like seeing was M. Night Shyamalan’s latest. Like most people, I loved The Sixth Sense, but I haven’t watched a Shyamalan film at the cinema since Signs in 2002, a movie so offensively stupid it would have put me off his stuff even without the critical bashing his next few films received. The reviews for this one however were quite decent, hailing it a comeback even, and James McAvoy starring did a lot to sway me, since I’m a big fan.
Advertisements
Based on a true story of an Indian boy who gets separated from his family, adopted by an Australian couple, then finds his birthplace 25 years later using Google Earth, Lion is an unashamedly emotional tear-jerker which mostly works. It’s heartfelt, beautifully shot and features uniformly strong performances (and on a totally shallow note, my my Dev Patel is all grown up and crushworthy).
It’s been a long five year break since her last visit, but PJ finally made her way here with her latest tour and I made it to my ninth PJ concert. Short review, it was awesome (again). Passionate, intense, musically and vocally perfect, great crowd.
It’s always interesting to read a book after watching the film adaptation first, particularly when the way the same story is told in different mediums is so drastically different. In Emma Donoghue’s remarkable novel, the only viewpoint we get is that of its narrator, a five-year-old boy named Jack, who lives with his mother (referred to solely as Ma throughout the book) in a 11-by-11-foot room, where he was born. As revealed later, Ma is a young woman who was abducted when she was a 19-year-old student, and kept for seven years in a soundproof garden shed by her captor, a much older man whose visits eventually leave her with a son.
As far as wartime romance goes, Allied is no Casablanca, but I must have been in a right mood for a classy, well-crafted, pleasantly old-fashioned drama with glamorous leads and lacking in flaws that drive me bananas about many modern mainstream films. It’s not a classic by any means, but an enjoyable viewing nonetheless. For god knows what reason, the marketing for this film has given away the key twist that drives its second half, though I can’t say that it affected things much since some sort of twist was a given.
Solid if not quite spectacular effort from Disney. If nothing else I’m happy that I watched it at the cinema, because this movie really is exceptionally beautiful – and that’s saying a lot because complimenting an animated film on visuals is like complimenting big blockbusters on special effects: what doesn’t look great, these days? Yet the Polynesian-inspired world of Moana really does feel special and magical, or maybe it’s just that I can’t watch gorgeous tropical scenery and not think, I need a holiday and I so want to be there.