Prince of Persia

[redfiona99]

First a general rant:

Dear directors of the world, steadycam, paning, and many other techniques that do not involve shaking and quick cuts exist. Please use them.

For Mike Newell in particular - I consider myself reasonably immune to the attempts of film directors to induce seasickness and epilepsy via shaky-cam. You, however, managed to make me quesy, and ruin the fight sequences. Which I happen to know would have been good if you'd filmed them properly, because you hired awesome stunt co-ordinators and stuntmen and women. Now either you didn't trust them, which makes you an idiot, or you thought you were being clever, which makes you an idiot.

Either way, you're an idiot.

~~~~

The fight scenes were actually good, but they could have been so much better.



It's not great, but it is fun.

There were certain things in its favour before we even started, such as the aforementioned awesome stunt crew, and that they gave Richard Coyle paid employment, but I was expecting it to be the bad kind of mindless action film.

Instead it was the good kind of mindless action film.

Matters were helped by staffing most of the secondary Persian empire characters with various British actors who could do this in their sleep and decided to have a proper go at it. Ronald Pickup will always sound particularly regal to me as he is Aslan (seriously, I love you Liam Neeson, but you're not Aslan), and Alfred Molina stole the entire film. And possible half of the film next door.

His character was interesting because it's what you'd get if you take Proximo from Gladiator and take away all the seriousness and danger. But he was so lovely. And mad about his ostriches, and oh the final repetition of 'did I tell you about the [I'm terribly sorry I have forgotten the proper name of the tribe]', and so accidentally noble. I loved him so very much.

The Hassassins, coolest thing ever, or coolest thing ever? I loved everything about them (excpet the bits where I was going, I know you have stolen that bit from some non-assassin-related culture). This is what you get when you let your stunt team kick arse and don't fidget-film them.

And the shoot-out in the tower, oh that was magnificent.

It wasn't a flawless film, Jake Gyllenhaal is still not my idea of the Prince, and Gemma Arterton is still a lot better at looking pretty than she is at acting. She is, however, very good at looking pretty.

Also, even if I hadn't seen the spoilery trailer, there was no way that Ben Kingsley wasn't the bad guy. His character had 'grand Vizier' written all over him.

While for once we had a non-evil Persian empire (which ought to make a couple of my friends happy), they were awfully pasty white.

One thing I really liked is how they played with the brothers, like you weren't sure that Tas hadn't got it into his head to be king early, or that Garsiv, with an awful lot of help from his uncle, wasn't making some sort of byzantine power-play. But then you realised that the Uncle was playing them off against each other and that while they all had their flaws (Tas being as easily led as a sheep, Garsiv being a Klingon looking for a ship), when they're pushed to it, and their Uncle isn't around to stir things up, they're absolutely lovely.



So yes, I enjoyed myself.

The new Orange 'don't like mobile phones ruin your movie' ad is genius. It's the (new) A-team trying to film a film with an awful lot of product placement.

Comments

[idleleaves.livejournal.com]

Dear directors of the world, steadycam, paning, and many other techniques that do not involve shaking and quick cuts exist. Please use them.

Gah. Shakycam syndrome drives me batty.