Saturday 14 September 2013

Other films watched on my flight today: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – an overlong and ponderous film I’d been meaning to watch for ages but put off for ages. I was not at all keen. Far overlong and far too assured of its cleverness when really it told one cheese murder mystery story that devolves into hunting a lame serial killer, and one horribly shallow and sensationalist attempt at a gritty story about a disadvantaged girl being horribly abused then getting revenge. Both are lame ducks that think far too highly of themselves, and the result is far too overlong and ponderous. A disappointment.

On the long-haul flight, I started with Stoker, purely because the posters had interested me. Again, it thought itself rather cleverer than it was just for writing about murderers. Because heightened senses were a theme, ostentatious cinematography was stressed, which was mostly annoying, It’s part Psycho and part Nabokov, but without any innovation and too many easy ways out of interesting problems. I’m amazed the content editors allowed the shower masturbation scene to make it.

Something light next, so after Epic I watched The Terminal, which we had been speaking about before boarding the flight but I’d never seen. Cute and funny, it got away with how far-fetched things got with its story – based, of course, on real life – and with its product placement because it was such light, frivolous, Pninian fun.

I didn’t feel up to The Great Gatsby, so then watched some fun documentaries about the available historical evidence for the existences of King Arthur, Marco Polo and Robin Hood, made a start on The Anchorman but didn’t find it my sort of thing, so went to sleep and then watched another documentary about finding shipwrecks until the plane landed.