I've decided to remove the sidebar "What I'm Watching at Home" list, because it's a pain to update, manually, in my cheapo freebie blog courtesy of the wonderfull folks at Blogger. Henceforward I'll just comment on films in a brief entry if watchable, link to a lengthier entry if warranted, or refrain from posting at all if the thing is a bust. If it's very lucky, the offending awful film might get mention over at my Romance Novel Roundup.Anyhoo: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. As a film: watchable diversion. As a CGI extravaganza: WOW!!! Very light on plot and with pretty much no character development, it's not exactly a masterpiece of storytelling...but it does have Jude Law, Angelina Jolie (all too briefly), and Gwyneth Paltrow, who opted for the frugal "three facial expressions only" (ernest observer, disarming cheerfulness, angry girl) acting style in this one. By the time the credit crawl showed up, I was pretty much convinced that the film really exists as promotional material for Computer Generated Effects shops. The whole thing was shot on a blue screen set, and even the Evil Genius bad guy was stock footage. Very well integrated stock footage, but still, just more of the "see what we can do these days!" kind of thing. The net result was that I felt I had just watched one of those films you see at a World Expo that is really advertising or educating in a very entertaining way.
I think Sky Captain turned out the way the Director wanted it to. A visual radio serial.
ReplyDeleteI would have likened it to the specific flavor presented in 1940's propaganda posters. The story was weak - but from that era was there ever a strong story?
It wasn't great - but I think it was well put together and hit the mark on what it tried to accomplish.
I do remember think about the "serial" thing about halfway through, which kept me from being too harshly critical. I liked the "propaganda poster" look of many of the scenes, but did feel like it was sometimes too much of a good thing...not every scene needed to be epically iconic, if you know what I mean.
ReplyDeleteI really did enjoy it, though I would have loved more of Frankie's (Angelina Jolie) character, but, again, the "spunky glamourous reporter" thing is very right for the period they were invoking.