Tag: Stephen Fry

Let’s take a time machine back six years ago. The world was different, because not everything was in 3D. Only a few films tried out 3D, thanks to Avatar being the cash cow and visually stunning film that it was. This is when people still thought 3D was actually kind of cool if done right.

Then Alice in Wonderland came out, and it made a shit ton of money. Why did everyone rush to see it? Well, I guess Johnny Depp was a bigger deal six years ago, sure. But because it was released in 3D, so everyone went to see it thinking it would be as pretty as Avatar. It wasn’t.

And say what you will about the plot of Avatar, its story was miles better than the pile of refuse that they gave us with Alice in Wonderland. You would think making it into a bad story would be impossible, given the book. But no, instead they made a sequel to the original Alice in Wonderland, setting this one many years later, with Alice returning to Wonderland with a whole mess of new and awkwardly similar problems. It gave me problems, most of all calling the movie Alice in Wonderland, when it was a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. That is confusing.

But hey, Disney is on a live action kick. So they figured, let’s do a sequel. Alice Through The Looking Glass. This one will probably no be based on the book either, since it is a sequel to the surprise sequel. So who knows what they will fill it with hoping to be edgy. Let’s just say I am going in assuming the worst here, and that is based on a lot of precedent.

Clay? Rust? Red lava? Earthy minerals? Who cares, I am barely a geologist anyways.

The sequel takes place years after the original, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a free girl, roaming the seas the captain of her own sailing vessel like her dad. She is exploring the new world and making trade agreements! It is actually quite fun. Unfortunately, when she gets back she is in a pickle. Hamish (Leo Bill), the man she turned down now runs the company. Her mom (Lindsay Duncan) has traded away the bill of her house for money, and the only way to get it back is for Alice to give up her boat and take a respectable job for a woman.

So, in the chaos, she runs through a mirror, following Absolem the butterfly (Alan Rickman) and returns to Wonderland! But things have changed. The entire gang is still friends, but the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is now the Sad Hatter. He believes his family, killed by the Jabberwocky a long time ago. It is obvious what Alice must do. If you thought look for his family, you were wrong. No, she clearly should go back in time, save them from the Jabberwocky, and bring them to the present to make him feel better. Yeah. That.

But time is a person (Sacha Baron Cohen). And grabbing the Chronosphere can cause a lot of issues. But she does it anyways, because friendship and sets off on a journey to the past to fuck shit up.

The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and White Queen (Anne Hathaway) return, Leilah de Meza with and Amelia Crouch playing their past selves. Rhys Ifans plays the Mad Hatter’s dad and Ed Speleers are regular unimportant dude.

Also returning, the voices of Tweedledee / Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), Bayard (Timothy Spall), Thackery (Paul Whitehouse), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), Mallymkun (Barbara Windsor), McTwisp (Michael Sheen), and introducing Wilkins (Matt Vogel), a robot.

Time is a lot of things, and you will hear every last time pun I do decree!

First of all, Eye in the Sky is Alan Rickman’s real last film. This one is just voice work, and I swear, he maybe had three lines and no close ups. This does not get to count as his final film, I won’t allow it.

As for the actual movie, if you missed it this one deals with TIME TRAVEL. Time Travel is a scary subject matter. It is powerful and can make or break a movie depending on how it is adapted. I am not going to argue one theory of time travel is better than any other, because that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that a film is consistent with their version of time travel. Alice Through The Looking Glass cares not at all, changing the rules on a whim, and makes an incredible hard to follow film without a satisfying reason for making it overly complicated.

This line might be a slight spoiler, because I just want to explain their time travel. Alice finds out that no matter what she does, she can not change the past, the events still occur. That is the time travel they have set up. Until later on in the film, a character is totally able to change the past. Fuck.

Alice goes back in time to three different locations. Why? Because the oceans of time are chaotic and once she learns information, she tries to go to a different time line to change different things. The plot is moved forward by consistently bad decisions from Alice, whom is supposed to be a strong smart female lead. Not only that, because Alice seems to make the same bad decisions, her actions feel repetitive and the films seems to drag when there are easy solutions everywhere.

The ending is an incredible mess. Wonderland is falling apart because of two separate events that somehow produce the same results. But it doesn’t make sense for them to do the same thing. I will try and explain it out without spoilers.

I hope you passed algebra.

For most of the film, Problem A is happening thanks to Alice and the world is slowly falling apart. Much later in the film, Problem B, a completely different problem occurs and actually sets about the end of the world. Problem A is seemingly forgotten about. However, once Problem A is “solved”, thanks to our protagonist remembering it, it somehow undoes all of the damage of Problem B. The issue with that is there is no justification whatsoever that it should work like that. There are no mentions earlier on that if Problem B happens, it can be fixed by X. On top of that, there was no reason for Problem A to even continue late in the film, except for the fact that Alice becomes incompetent.

Finally, Alice is seen as a strong, independent woman, which is mostly true in the real world scenes where she is chased by pirates, but they reduce her to a bumbling fool in Wonderland. All of her positive traits seemingly vanish just to move the plot forward. On its own, I guess it is okay for a character to be stupid, sure.

The real issue here is that her character does stupid things, but she is still being lauded as a smart and capable heroine the entire film. To me, that seems almost more dangerous than just having a weak lead. What we need in films are actual strong female characters, not weak ones that they tell us are strong with us supposed to them at their word.

This is a bad movie and one I cannot believe was green-light by Disney. The 3D is pointless, the visuals are only great in a few places, the acting is so-so. The plot is a mess, breaks its rules (which breaks story telling rules and shouldn’t be seen as a compliment to the Madness of Wonderland), and most of the events happen thanks to stupidity and not for good plot reasons. The only thing I enjoyed was the excessive time puns and Cohen as Time.

I met Infinity once. He was at a night club, surrounded by friends and seemed to be in a never ending conversation. The friends were all large and powerful people. Saying “met” is a bit of a stretch, because every time I tried to walk over to him, the distance never seemed to lessen. Eventually I decided reaching Infinity was a long battle I was not going to win, so instead I went home and cried myself to sleep.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was The Man Who Knew Infinity though, an Indian math genius who (eventually) blew the math community away with his theories and identities. And I guess he is a famous enough dude who no one knows about (I don’t, you probably didn’t either), so they want to make a movie about his victories.

You know, like A Beautiful Mind, but with less conspiracies and spy stuff. Or like The Theory of Everything, but with less crippling and romance, and more actual math. The last example isn’t that good, because everyone knows who that wheel chair guy is.

That feeling you get when you’re trying to work and you start hallucinating a large British man is judging you.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) never received formal training in high levels of math. But he was an Autodidact, which the movie never says on its own, but it is someone who can learn a subject at high levels without help. A really rare form of smartness. He can’t explain why he knows everything he knows, without any of the formal training or background, but he knows that they must be true. He can see numbers damn it, and so he understands them pretty damn well.

After some amount of training in India once they find out about his gift, Ramanujan realizes he needs to get published with his equations in order for the rest of the world to get his information. He also doesn’t want to be “second place” by publishing the results because someone else publishes it first. He didn’t want to be the Leibniz to someone else’s Newton.

He searches out for a place to go to publish his work, and at Cambridge, a math professor named G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) takes interest in his work. The only problem with the equations, no matter how “right” they look, is that Ramanujan doesn’t have real proof of any of them. Ramanujan doesn’t understand the concept of mathematical proofs either, he just wants to get his formulas published, proofs be damned. His years also take place at Cambridge right before and during World War I, where British people apparently start to hate Indians making his life more difficult. Heck, he is forced to take classes with these white racist blokes just to get some more background, despite it feeling like a waste of time.

Anyways, this films is about a group of people trying to get their math on and eventually, you know, do basically get their math on.

Also starring Malcolm Sinclair, Raghuvir Joshi, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones, Jeremy Northam and Padraic Delaney.

To be fair, neither of these men are clearly normal. Look at how they walk and use umbrellas.

Math is something that should be celebrated, including the discoveries of important aspects of math. We all know Newton and uhh, the other guys, but why not some lesser known people? Especially if they aren’t white! So hooray for Srinivasa Ramanujan, a smart guy who deserves his own film! I just wish they could have made it more exciting.

After our star gets to England, the movie feels very repetitive. He wants to publish formulas, professor wants him to come up with proofs, some sort of compromise, then repeat. Bad things happen to Ramanujan, some racist, some natural, and some…also racist, and he pulls through and gets his math on.

It is good to see that he never gives up despite the pressures, but at the same time, the film barely goes heavy on math (despite him being a really heavy on math individual). And the acting from everyone is the most hum drum experience ever. I didn’t see any passion, which can be a problem with the script more than anything.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a smart guy, and eventually he died. That’s really what I learned from the film. A book on his life would probably be a bit more interesting than this movie.

Ding dong the mother fucking witch is dead. That is how I am starting to feel about this franchise. In college, I wanted to do a semester abroad in New Zealand because it is a beautiful country, but now I think I have seen enough of it.

Everyone knows the Lord of the Rings are incredible, so I won’t mention them. I was really excited with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, it was a bit longer, more CGI, but hey, let’s return to Middle Earth.

I completely hated The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. It was far too long, and it was a completely filler movie. I mean. FUCK. It didn’t end with the Death of Smaug. The obvious end point at least. It was just a long tease that made me bored and tired.

So, here we are, at The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. Two things of note come up with the last part. First off, I really hate the title. I booed so hard and long once they announced the title change. It was originally The Hobbit: There and Back Again, a title taken from the book of his journey. Great title. This one is as lame as The Desolation Of Smaug (given that Smaug doesn’t get desolated).

Two, this one is going to be a lot more exciting than the second film. That much is certain. It is pretty easy to do when you leave like one cool aspect into the second film and delay the rest for the ending. The third film gives the end of the dragon and the big battle, so it will be super awesome. But at what cost? A shitty second movie. Given the connectedness of these films, it is important to look at them individually and as parts of a whole. So I don’t know if I can really enjoy this movie as much knowing that it was essentially delayed a year because the movies were broken up from two films into three films.

I think I am allowed to be a little biased and peeved going into this film, as I believe the second movie was 160 minutes of my life wasted.

But this one has tiny men on rams! Yay rams!

Okay so. Battle of Five Armies. Before that, we got a Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) to kill. And then they do that. Moving onnn.

Humans are all pissed off because their water town is destroyed. They have lost everything, their wealth, their homes. They need a place to go. Making Bard (Luke Evans) their de facto leader, they decide that they kind of want to head to the near by Dwarven stronghold for safety. And to get some of that gold that was promised to them.

Speaking of people who want to go to the stronghold, the wood elves are dicking around too. Apparently there is some priceless treasure in there that they want back. And that is all. A bunch of the elves are played by these people (Lee Pace, Evangeline Lilly, Orlando Bloom). Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett are elves too, but they are in another part of the story. I don’t really understand what they are doing with Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen, so I won’t talk about it.

Oh yeah. Dwarves. Like Thorin (Richard Armitage). He is now a real King because he has a real Castle, but he is after his special stone and is kind of going mad. Mad enough to go to war with the humans and the wood elves. But also, the orcs that no one know are coming. And Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is kind of just hanging around.

There are also non Dwarven actors, like Ryan Gage and Stephen Fry. But also all those Dwarves? I still don’t feel like tagging most of them. Just Billy Connolly, Aidan Turner, and Dean O’Gorman. I think I am done talking about the plot. And actors.

BUT WHO IS THE FIFTH ARMY?

Orlando – “I heard you got a role in another franchise. Lucky. This one is finally owner.”
Luke – “Dude, no one is going to watch the Monster Avengers movies.”

Yeahhh, dead dragon and big army fights!

And some of that was really cool. Well, the dragon death felt kind of rushed and awkward. Like, somehow, the cartoon version of The Hobbit had a more intense dragon death scene than this movie. It kind of just happened, exactly as one would expect too. So that was actually disappointing. Just that it ended so quick and easy, they could have made the death way more awesome and also, you know…put it in the fucking second movie?

Now the army fight was pretty bamf. So that is good. Entertaining fight scenes, although it was hard to follow just how many humans were actually in the war and how the battle grounds were laid out. You just kind of had to go with it and accept it, although I doubt it was planned out. Martin Freeman still made a good Bilbo, so that was good. But of course, the focus wasn’t really on him this whole movie, despite the title. He gets super pushed to the side.

The love story is not as bad as the second one I guess, because of all the fighting going on during it.

And as I said above, I have no idea what the point of the necromancer story line was. Like, they resolved it I guess, but it was totally unexplained and felt incredibly pointless. It was really shitty.

Overall, that makes this movie just okay. Not the weakest of the series, maybe the best. Hard to say. None of these match the LOTR quality and I don’t think that was their goal. But I can’t help but feel the entire franchise was a let down. I haven’t bought any of them, because I know I want to wait for the cool extended package with all of them bundled. But also, will I actually watch any of these again? Probably not. I will probably watch the cartoon Hobbit more.

Wooo, sequels!

A Game Of Shadows is the sequel to the very successful first Sherlock Holmes movie that came out two years prior. I remember the day it was released to theaters, they announced they would already o a sequel, unbeknowingst to Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. at the time, making them both cancel projects. Did you know that RDJ was supposed to be in Cowboys & Aliens originally? Me neither.

As far as I am concerned, from the trailers, this is the only thing that happened in the movie.

This time, the movie is narrated by Watson (Jude Law), as he appears to be typing up a story. What kind of story? Well one that begins with Holmes stalking Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) down the street. He sees that she is delivering a package, and has goons following her. Whoops, those are her bodyguards. Holmes is still narrowly able to catch up to her before she delivers the nice package, a bomb. Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) is up to some shenanigans, has been for some time, and Holmes tends to always put a stop to him.

Some things happen, including the fact that Watson is getting married tomorrow, to the same Mary (Kelly Reilly), and Holmes forgot about the Stag party. He invites his older and equally annoying brother Mycroft Holmes (Stephen Fry), and they go out to a bar and gambling den (void of any of Watson’s friends). Mostly to see a gypsy Simza (Noomi Rapace) who Adler also had a letter to deliver to. Oh look, another assassination attempt.

Turns out that her brother is working for Moriarty as well, and they have no idea why. This leads them to Paris to try and stop another assassination attempt, then Germany and Switzerland. The battle of wits is played out between Holmes and the Professor, all the while other big spoilers happen, and a very unexpected honeymoon disaster.

Holmes was Mary the whole time! No wonder he hated the idea of marriage!

Woo, [rushed out] sequels!

They even said it themselves. Or at least when I hear “fast tracking” a sequel I think of them doing it as fast as possible, spending less time on the script and other areas in order to release it fast enough to ride off the popularity of the first. I mean, it makes sense, but usually means a movie isn’t as good as its predecessor (not that it matters, because the sequel will still make bank).

I did find parts of the movie entertaining, but it wasn’t the same as the first in all aspects. I thought the elements of thriller and mystery were lessened greatly, which took away part of the experience. Sure, I didn’t know what was going on, but not because of the mystery, mostly due to the confusing unraveling of the plot throughout.

It made sense during the beginning, but most of it seemed kind of unrelated, a problem I usually have with stories that span “all across Europe.”. Usually not enough time I feel is spent at the new location to accurately get the appropriate emotions I should get form each scene, and then we are whisked away to a new location.

Although not a bad movie by any means, I just felt that it lacked a lot of what I liked from the first.