Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 50

Osmosis Jones

A white blood cell cop and a cold pill agent team up to fight a foreign threat that found its way inside an irresponsible zookeeper.

Inside Out meets Innerspace. The animation style reminded me of Don Bluth, but he had nothing to do with it; a script shot through with toilet humor doesn’t seem like his style, anyways. Yet, the gross-out imagery in this case is appropriate, as the story has to do with all the complicated inner workings of the human body. We have a universe inside of us.

Osmosis plays the loose cannon, and Drix is the by-the-book guy. Like any good buddy cop movie, the straight character paradoxically chafes against the rebel, but Drix in this case also chafes a little bit against Osmosis’ superiors.

There were only a few of the low-hanging fruit jokes that make a pun of alternate-world, microscopic versions of normal-sized human things. I’m attuned to these because they outlived their novelty from my childhood years. One of the most infamous ones (to me) was “Frank Sinorktra” from The Snorks. Get it? It’s like Frank Sinatra but for Snorks. Right? I can’t ruin the humor by explaining it, because there wasn’t any to begin with.

Xanadu Hellfire

A warrior from the future travels back to the present day, and her enemies follow.

This was funny, but not in the way it was intended. It was more of a “safe embarrassment” type of funny, where you feel bad for the people involved—especially the cast—but you’re behind the protection of a screen, with maybe no one else physically around or paying attention with you. Note: don’t watch this with anyone, and cover up anything that looks like a camera lens on the device you’re watching this on. Don’t give the NSA the benefit of seeing you in pain.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

In Napoleon’s Europe, a French sailor takes revenge on the people who wrongly imprisoned him.

Recommended by a friend. I may have read part of the book sometime in the past, but I didn’t remember a single thing about the story going into the movie, which I suppose gives me a unique perspective. This is probably the first quintessential revenge narrative in book form. True, Hamlet came first, and is just as complex in the same areas, but Shakespeare needs to be understood through playact medium to get the full effect. Have you ever tried to read as a written story anything that guy did? It’s 100% a dismal experience, and I’m not talking just about the archaic language. The pace and full meaning needs to be brought to life through live dialogue and movement, the way it was intended.

Anyways, it the movie itself was better than average, though we might be used to the overall type of story through mass media narrative saturation.

The credits show a place called Hot Buns Catering as providing the food for the filming. What an appropriate name.

True Grit (2010)

In frontier America, teenage girl enlists the help of a cranky lawman and a strait-laced Texas ranger to find her father’s murderer.

Another recommended movie, from the same friend, and another great revenge story, also based on a book, and another remake of an older production. Whew. I wish the voiceover exposition in the opening scene was cut, because we’re informed the protagonist survives, removing what would have been a nice thread of tension. The idea of a young girl maybe being killed throughout the course of the movie disappears.

I had heard of the actress in the protagonist role, Hailee Steinfeld, through the ubiquitous celebrity culture chatter. I assumed she was one of the myriad, interchangeable skanky actresses or pop singers—which she is, now—but she really pulled off the acutely-confident Mattie Ross character seamlessly. She came off as eloquently clever and persistent, instead of rude and forceful.

Matt Damon as the straight foil in the triangle of protagonists was fine, though his role wasn’t given much more to work with compared to the other two. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn (what a name) stole the show as the male lead, especially during the courtroom scene. The Coen Brothers directors could have shown the scene to which Rooster was testifying to, but we’d end up seeing him as a wayward, loose canon lawman rather than a humorous scoundrel. We’d get an action scene, but there would be no tension and release in our minds about whether he was telling the truth or not while he was being cross examined. Telling is sometimes better than showing.

A favorite exchange from that scene:

Defense Attorney: I believe you testified you backed away from Aaron Wharton.
Rooster Cogburn: That’s right.
Defense Attorney: Which direction were you going?
Rooster Cogburn: I always go backwards when I’m backin’ up.

The movie was fairly enjoyable throughout, until the very last scene, where a grown-up Mattie told the rude gunman “trash” to “keep his seat.” Presumably, the gunman broke a very strict social rule of the time by not standing or offering his seat when a woman interacted with him. That’s fine, but Mattie broke plenty of social conventions throughout the movie without anyone but Rooster pushing back on her, and even then it was kind of mild. She would have gotten tossed out the courtroom at the door. No woman would be allowed in there, especially a minor. Why, in this universe, did she get a free pass but the gunman didn’t?

Last Three Days

An undercover police officer, searching for his missing wife, has no memory of his last three days.

I think there was a problem with the editing approach for this, because some of the crucial scenes in the narrative ended up being cut. Or maybe I assumed everything would have been more complicated, and the story really did make some kind of simplistic sense. Or maybe I was so bored that my attention strayed. Or maybe I had no memory of the last three hours when the movie ended. The first act dragged on about 20 minutes longer than it should have, that I started to think it was a romance and not a missing time or police action story. I actually have no idea what kind of story it was supposed to be. Really, the only thing I remember were the lead actress’ legs. That’s not me inappropriately honest; it’s a testimony to how badly-constructed this movie was. I even forgot that C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves was prominent in the beginning scenes until I skimmed the movie the day after the first viewing.

You can watch Last Three Days for free on Tubi. Not recommended, but it’s there.

The BFG (2016)

An orphan girl is captured by a dream-granting giant who lives among child-eating giants.

Howl’s Moving Castle meets Waterworld—trust me on that comparison.

Even though in the back of my mind I knew it wasn’t true, every time I saw this movie’s title over the years, I wanted to think this was about the Big Fxcking Gun from Doom. The Doom IP hasn’t had a great track record of producing decent film depictions of its universe, so in my head I thought this was a non-mainline movie that was offering an unconventional take on the perpetually-doomed (sorry) franchise. I like to make up things up in my head about trivial matters, you see.

So this was based on a Roald Dahl book, directed by Spielberg. Dahl’s book were a little dark for children’s literature, and Spielberg keeps his stuff lighthearted, so I went into this knowing that it will be altered in lots of places, for good or ill. I really like British children’s literature—those crazy nonce words get me every time. Thankfully, Spielberg retained them, but I wasn’t sure in what ways a top-tier American director would butcher interpret the story. Since I never read the book, I didn’t know what was altered as I watched.

The second act arrived nice and quick, easily around the 10-minute mark, right when Sophie is whisked from the orphanage. Making the jump so soon leaves a hole in its wake: we know about Sophie, that she’s a curious and brave, if not foolhardy, orphan, but we don’t really know her as a person in the way the audiences need to for that elusive emotional connection. We learn more about her through her relationship with the BFG, and I felt it was parts of her we’d normally find out during the expository first act. Some audiences might sense the dreaded dragging middle area of the movie, particularly when she and the BFG hunt down the dreams in that upside-down world. It’s a visual feast, though, and it really shows their relationship blossoming while illustrating how the BFG actually goes about his duties.

A few adjustments could have made this movie excellent, but it remained just a decent watch, maybe a few inches into “rewatchable but mostly in the background” territory for me. The ending had that particular Spielberg sweetness that he pulls off well, and in reading other reviews, that ending was one of the big departures from the book.