Change Your Image
xandar27
Reviews
Clash of the Titans (2010)
Fair, but could have been so much better.
Having read a good number of the reviews here, I feel the film is being panned too much by some. However it does need criticism. As a general action fantasy to watch without any preconceptions, it fills the bill as a film that is worth seeing without being a stand-out.
Where it does go wrong is in two spheres. Firstly there has been a failure to produce rounded or likable characters, Perseus is less sympathetic and his motivation is changed from love to revenge. Andromeda's role, like that of mid-level villain, Calibos, has been cut to shreds. Ammon disappears entirely, while the other members of the questing party are just flat, stock characters, seemingly there solely as cannon-fodder, to be taken out one by one by the CGI monsters.
This brings us to the second failure of the film, which is pacing. The time between battles has simply not been used to fill out the main characters or deepen our interest in them and the situation they face. Instead, as many have commented, there seems to have been a fear of taking more than two minutes between each set-piece battle. The fights themselves have a rushed, confused feel, which fails to produce the tension and involvement of the original. Too much reliance seems to have been placed on CGI, and its supposed ability to create a "wow" factor on its own. Indeed, the transition between location filming and staged sets was often too evident. From the deleted scenes disk, I note that the interplay between gods other than Zeus and Hades was cut almost completely. Those scenes didn't seem to be working however, so perhaps that was a good decision.
On the whole, if you threw out your memories of the first film, this was quite enjoyable escapism. Some of the special effects were excellent, and I did not wholly dislike the introduction of Hades to the mix. This could have been so much better though with more attention to the human element, but I still hope to watch the proposed sequel.
The Drum (1938)
Imperial Dash
A rare opportunity to see a rip-roaring, all-colour, flag-waving vision of the British Empire - made by and for the people who supported and believed in it. Produced in 1938, less than a decade before a tired, post-war Britain finally quit India, this is an almost unique chance to witness the Empire's own view of itself. As such, it is a significant historical document.
Produced and Directed by the Korda Brothers from their London Studios, many of its scenes were actually shot in the Northwest Frontier of India, (modern Pakistan.) With the participation of the Gordon Highlanders and Indian Army, this has a spectacle that dwarfs many Hollywood features. The story, with its loyal "good" Indians, and treacherous "bad" Indians runs deep with the paternalist ideology which provided the justification for the later Empire. With a firm-jawed main character called Caruthers, (Roger Livesey), whose wife cannot endure the constant beating of the drums, the film seems to be the source of more than a few imperial clichés. Raymond Massey joins the cast as a convincingly sinister villain, and Sabu is the young princely hero. And although it jars today with its casual patronising of the Indians, and an assumption of an almost divine British right to rule far-off lands, it is a grand epic that reflects the last hurrah of a now-vanished era.
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
An Undervalued Masterpiece
This is a film that for some reason does not seem to have gained the place in the pantheon of major film achievements that it deserves. It is a story of a working class family at the turn of the nineteenth century, facing the many hardships of work and survival in the harsh mining communities of the Welsh Valleys. Perhaps the unabashedly political theme of the antagonism between miners and their ruthless employers is a factor that has led to it being sidelined by many commentators. Perhaps it is the now-unfashionable sentimentality in the portrayal of the idealised working-class family. Even so, the film remained so powerful in its depictions, even in 1984, that it was not shown on television in Britain for the duration of the 1984-1985 Miners strike.
John Ford's direction evokes a real sense of involvement in the life of the small community perched continually on the edge of disaster. And I would class this is one of the most powerful "weepies" of all time. Anyone who can maintain a dry eye throughout the film is made of stern stuff indeed.