welcome to camp telophase

This past weekend we went to the annual gathering of friends a couple we knows hosts every year. It started as a LAN party and grew from there, and now it's big and complicated enough that the hostess runs it as a con (although still held at their admittedly large house), arranging for payments from attendees to cover food and electricity, and scheduling some light programming, usually a beer or other alcohol tasting (run by Toby the first year) plus my contribution: the Annual Bad Movie Showing.

This started when I wanted to subject people to the Bollywood Harry Potter ripoff Aabra Ka Daabra (in 3D! recaps: part 1 part 2) and seized upon this party, and their quite nice media room, as a good opportunity. It was received well, and the next year I subjected them to Death Trance (go to my Cheese Factor Nine tag and read starting from the beginning).

The next year I bought Velayudham and showed it without vetting it first (more than the 10 minutes Toby and I watched to ensure the DVD worked properly), on the basis that Cracked called it a ripoff of Assassin's Creed. It turned out to be surprisingly good! Cheesy as all get-out, yes. Never to be ranked as a good movie, yes. But entertaining as hell. It was also a better Assassin's Creed movie than the Assassin's Creed movie. You could tell that the director and fight choreographer had actually played the game. And the final double air assassination score was Velayudham 2, Assassin's Creed 0. Q.E.D.

(FYI: Velayudham is a Tamil mostly-comedy set in modern times in which a hick from the sticks comes to the big city to pull money from the bank for his sister's wedding, stumbles into a drug-running and human-trafficking plot and inadvertently ends up becoming a superhero, with a costume and fighting style pulled from Assassin's Creed.)

Last year Toby and I had bought tickets to a show downtown before the dates of the party were set so someone else showed the bad movie. I'm not sure what they watched. This year, I looked for more Bollywood ripoffs of movies and ended up with Bichhoo, a remake of the beloved classic story of a misanthropic hitman who takes in his neighbor's daughter after her family is killed by corrupt police. With added musical numbers.

In many places, especially the ending, it is indeed a shot-for-shot remake of Léon: The Professional. The actor playing Gary Oldman chews the scenery appropriately, and the actor playing Jean Reno does a decent job of being misanthropic, although the movie takes pains to ensure he's a hitman with a heart of gold at the beginning. Natalie Portman's character is aged up so there's significantly less pedophilia (the amount of pedophilia in the original depends on which cut you watch), and the movie adds a budding relationship and a decent amount of slapstick between her and Jean Reno. I don't know enough about Bollywood to know if that's less of a whiplash for Indian audiences than it is for U.S. audiences.

Alas, all the stuff the movie added to the original, including the over-the-top origin story that supplies the reason for Jean Reno's personality and job, drags it down and makes it tedious. Natalie Portman, while living with terrible people, is also terrible herself in a non-compelling manner and doesn't really grow until near the end of the movie so there's little reason to understand the relationship between her and Jean Reno. Also, there is not enough musical numbers. I didn't think I'd say this about a musical remake of Léon, but really: the movie needed a dance-off between Jean Reno and Gary Oldman.

What I did like was the movie's sets. They did a lot of location shooting instead of building sets so I felt that I got an insight into what being in Mumbai was like ca. 2000, the year the movie was made.

In short: not particularly recommended, alas. Get your hands on Velayudham instead.

Q. So, did The Wolverine take the inspiration story that was originally published 20ish years ago and update the stereotyped Western vision of Japan it portrayed?
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Watched Aeon Flux last night, and since I was watching it for the sets and costumes and art direction and not for what it laughably called a plot, I was well satisfied. And was happy to find the mini-documentaries on the sets and costumes etc. on the DVD extras, so all was well. and I could almost ignore that for the plot to work you had to assume that clones are second-generation copies with genetic memories of their original's life and not, say, twins. All you identical twins reading this? NOT REAL PEOPLE!

I did find it laughable that at the first, when Aeon was on a nighttime hush-hush Seekrit Mission to break into somewhere and do something-or-other (never quite figured it out), she found it necessary to wear a pure white outfit. Like you do, when you're trying to remain unseen at night.

And the twenty- and thirty-somethings on the council running the city? Were all too young and good-looking. I kept getting the unnerving feeling that the future was being run by male models.

But, as I said, if you're a costume and set geek, well worth watching.

Studio Ghibli has another trailer for their version of A Wizard of Earthsea.

TCM is showing Ghibli films on Thursday nights in January.

( Details under here )