I've watched a couple new movies this week. Well, "new" in the sense that I had not seen them before, not that they were recently produced and released. The first one was the third installment of the Mummy series starring Brendan Fraser. The second was Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Talk about your dissimilar movies. Possible spoilers after the jump.
While I do like some of the work Brendan Fraser has done, and I did enjoy the first couple installments of The Mummy, this was definitely not a movie that should have been made. Rachel Weisz made the right call in bailing on this flick. Not only did they get a completely different actress for the part instead of writing her out, the director decided to hang a lampshade on the fact and crack a joke about the inconsistency. The plot was recycled from the previous films with virtually no changes, the dialogue was weak and the subplot about how Fraser has trouble relating to his son was so hackneyed that it was physically painful. Spoiler alert: the good guys win.
The other film was at the other end of the spectrum; The Seventh Seal was a marvelous and iconic film. The famous image of Death playing chess with the knight has been copied and parodied a great deal, but the true import of the movie has more to do with whether there is a God and whether one can have faith in the midst of suffering. I don't want to give away too much, but the movie ends on a more cheerful note than I had expected. Max von Sydow is brilliant as the knight and his squire is also superbly acted. Despite the somber topic and the imagery associated with the movie, it's not as bleak as one might think; there's a great deal of humour.
Unless your idea of a good, thoughtful movie is one of the Transformers films, I would heartily suggest staying away from the first movie and making it a point to see the second.
No comments:
Post a Comment