Since I’m talking about movies, this weekend, I got a couple movies from the library which were dramatically different from one another. Both ended up being okay, but I don’t think I’d recommend either one really.
First up was The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. This was, without a doubt, one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen in my life. Right up there with Novocaine. What made this movie so weird was that it was, in places, obviously a comedy. In other places, it wasn’t obvious. It’s not that it just wasn’t funny, like all comedies are in places, but that at times it didn’t even seem to be trying to be funny. And it didn’t seem to go anywhere. The movie was like a treadmill. There was a lot of running, but when it was all over we were exactly where we started. Some parts were great; the interns, Jeff Goldblum and Anjelica Huston, and Willem Dafoe were hilarious. Others were not so great, most notably Owen Wilson and Cate Blanchett and about half of Bill Murray’s scenes, which was unfortunate since he was in just about every scene.
The other movie I watched was a Hong Kong police/crime/action/comedy movie, Curry and Pepper. One of the stars was Steven Chow, he of Kung-fu Hustle fame (which I liked). This movie was less a movie than a gigantic mish-mash of cliches put on film. It had everything from the scarred super-villain to the beautiful news reporter to the Odd-Couple-esque detective partners to the Police Chief who threatens our heroes with suspension for their maverick tactics. When an actor (Steven Chow in this case) makes 11 movies in a year, it’s probably a safe bet that most of them won’t be fantastic.
Neh 