Managed to fit in a couple of movies recently - 3D Disney animated extravaganza Tangled, and Coen Brothers western True Grit... Pretty much opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum...
Tangled is a refreshing take on the Rapunzel story, casting the heroine - voiced by Mandy Moore - as a perpetually grounded teen whose mother uses her magical hair to hold onto her youth. Into this happy home comes roguish Flynn Rider - voiced by Chuck's Zachary Levi - reluctantly taking his new friend out into the world with predictable consequences. It's a fun little tale, with fewer songs than you might expect from this kind of Disney, but all the sickly-sweetness you can handle. It's something of a turnaround for Disney, having broken so many of their own conventions with Enchanted, to go back to the traditional, not to say utterly clichéd approach that Tangled takes... but it was fun, and very nearly got me teary-eyed on a couple of occasions.
Meanwhile, back in the Old West, Jeff Bridges' turn as Rooster Cogburn was brilliant... but somehow not quite enough to stop me nodding off part way through, for about ten minutes. There's nothing wrong with the pacing of the film - the Coens often produce quite plodding narratives, but this is not one of them - and it's actually one of their funniest films. Funny in a way that doesn't have you biting your fist, too. Relative newcomer Hailee Steinfeld is utterly amazing... her smart-mouthed delivery is spot on every time, and she seems to have been born for Westerns... which is a shame, considering how few are made these days. Just about every time she opens her mouth, you know you're in for either a blistering tirade, or the kind of clever negotiation that wins the character few friends. When she finally gets her revenge, the moment is over so swiftly it's almost anticlimactic... but that is just one part of the story... and I'll have to try to see it again, aiming to stay awake for the whole thing.
Not much else going on at the moment... I've been lazing around at home, occasionally reading, more often watching TV, DVDs, or playing games (getting on quite well with Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess)... and all too frequently whiling away far too many hours on the interwebs.
On the upside, one of my other blogging projects is gaining momentum in terms of number of visits, if not amount of content... but it's certainly filling up faster than I'd expected.
No comments:
Post a Comment