j-cf Reviews

Asterix and the Vikings (2006)

arf arf arf

[4/10 · 12 April 2006]

It's not awful but what a waste... Lousy gags, bad music, poor drawings and animation...

Regarding the impressive number of animators and intervallists on this picture (from, hum... a hundred different studios throughout the world? Come on, how can you expect something coherent when doing an animated movie this way!) I wonder if one guy on the credits = one drawing! The lines are rough, the 3d work inadequate (I'm not against it, but not in this film) But the backgrounds are corrects. The storyline is rather dumb, far from the precise cleverness of the BD, and obviously aimed at an international audience. To distribute a movie all over the world doesn't mean to take everyone in the world for a simple-minded guy... A cultural object is far more interesting when challenging, even when it is a foreign movie (being french in this case it's even worse!).

Some new stuff is doing well (the Olaf character, sometimes, like with the stone explanation, but it's not great) but the modern references are exasperating (music, SMS -not even a verbal joke, just a stupid bird named short message service: does anyone know imagination?). But, hey, it's a M6 / TPS production with some Celine Dion in it... pathetic.

Asterix is underemployed and Obelix talks too much. Goudurix could be great (like in the book) but he is too clearly a "cool guy" having a love affair (with an uninteresting made up female character). In fact, only the vikings (wizard excepted) are funny. Too much action, not enough laughs. The best part of the movie are the end credits. Not the music, but the few stills it contains. BD style. Well, definitely, Asterix is not made to move!

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Very interesting, thought not faithful to Verne

[7/10 · 24 December 2005]

OK, this movie isn't at all faithful to Verne's novels (both 20000 leagues & Mysterious island), but who cares. It was too difficult for that time to stay close to the characters and to the relationship between Arronax and Nemo, which is based on the talking, showing different philosophical points of vue. So there we stick to a melodrama full of suspense and action. The pacing is quite fast, for a 1916 movie. A lot of characters and settings are involved, the cinematography is most of the time quite good and the actors are... so so. But it's the editing that attracts attention here, in a griffithian narration full of "parrallel editing" as we say in french. Some sequences are composed of four or five parallel actions, and sometimes flashbacks are used to add another dimension to the melodrama. The same fact is related three times by three different characters, each flashback being longer than its predecessor until the final revelation (that we can guess early in the film, but, as for most of gender movies, the pleasure for the viewer comes from the combination between waited events and surprising elements) narrated by Nemo himself. I don't know anything as for the origin of the version I own on DVD, so this editing question is to stay questioned. But as it is there (I saw the 1h45 version, a Jokanan copy), it's a really imaginative movie, a sort of serial with a complexer narration. It is sometimes a little boring anyway, especially when it deals with Arronax and co (Ned Land is useless, and the real hero of the movie arrives later on) and with submarine sequences (no so many, in fact, but a little childish sometimes). The documentary aspect is anyway interesting (the shark scene, an early Cousteau sequence) and from an historical point of view those sequences are very important.

A good movie, not as brilliant as the Fleischer version, but entertaining and representative of the evolution of American cinema at that time.

Just for the record: it's quite possible that the Nadia anime series by Anno Hideaki have been highly inspired by this movie (I won't say anything else, avoiding spoilers. Watch for yourself).

When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950)

quite funny, and typically fordian

[6/10 · 4 October 2005]

Nobody can say that this is a masterpiece, because this picture was made by John Ford. And, as everyone knows, John Ford can't make a good comedy... This is all rubbish!! This is a good entertaining fordian reflexion about war, patriotism and life (in the army or in a provincial town). Ford is not an aggressive filmmaker like could have been Sturges (by the way, I love Sturges too, but for different reasons), and his look at his characters is tender, full of compassion and amusement, even if the main subject (war) is not funny, a fact which is here quite explicit. Ford knows the weakness points of his compatriots, but denounces them without anger. He is part of America, and is clever enough to know it and not to take everything too seriously. Any Ford's movie is, in some way or another, a comedy. That's his stuff, and even his most somber dramas are kind of comedies. See the cavalry trilogy, or even "how green...": in every Ford movie a character (most often, several) plays a funny-tender part. That's Ford's universe, with his highlights and his lousy pictures. This one is quite in the middle, so definitely worth watching!!!

Invisible Agent (1942)

Invible Man in war, with Fulton on board... but not Whale

[6/10 · 5 August 2005]

This is not the James Whale's Invisible man, far from that, but it's still quite interesting on an historical point of view: America can involve ANY of "her" heroes in wars, even the psychotic one created by Wells. And besides that… it's funny! The hero is dumb (what a pitiful spy!), but this can be related to the original movie (the first Invisible man became insane because of the drug, this one becomes stupid and suspicious - kind of a "war symptom" for America… or France!). Some scenes reminded me of the Whale's movie (which had also a lot of humorous parts), like the barn scene. The directing is correct, not great (Marin is not Whale), and the editing is poor. Characters are sympathetic (the villains, anyway: Lorre and co can manage that). What gives the movie his "power" (on a low level: it's not Lubitsch's To be or not to be) is the distance taken with the story told, which is plain silly (how come a dumb like Griffin Jr Jr can make the drug by himself? And if he can't, this drug has an impressive power of conservation, having been made half a century ago!). But before all that, what keeps this kind of movie alive are the wonderful special effects created by John Fulton. The parachute scene is quite impressive, and so is the cream scene. An enjoyable movie, representative of the Universal's evolution at that time, when the studio capitalized on the "addition principle" (pardon me for my poor English): since we are in war and since Frankenstein can meet the werewolf, why couldn't the Invisible man fight the Gestapo? After all, Nazis were way much scary than any Universal monster… because they were real (nevertheless, America ignored the horrors of concentration-camps at that time, that's why Nazis could still be funny in the movies). A regret anyway: where the hell are Claude Rains and his incredible voice?