Renting movies
After failing to find a movie I wanted to see at Q-Square after work Friday (damn 3D flicks everywhere are ruining my chances to see a film that doesn’t give me a headache), I rented three DVDs to watch over the weekend: Quantum of Solace, The Handsome Suit, and Bodyguards and Assassins. It’s Saturday night now, and I’ve already finished all of them.
The latest James Bond flick was, to be frank, boring. Yes, yes, 007’s doing things his way and M gets to clean up the mess. Again. I’d had higher hopes for this as I liked Daniel Craig’s performance in the last one, Casino Royale. He’s really the first actor to grasp the nature of Bond since Connery, and reading Fleming’s books lately just shores up my opinion in this respect. But there was no soul to this one; it felt like the bits and pieces left over from the last film. The writers must be struggling for new material after going through each and every book and short story Fleming penned, and it shows. It may be just as well that the studio is having a hard time coming with a means to make another one. It’s a pity that Craig, probably the last Bond actor actually older than I am, might not get another chance to excel as Bond, but there are plenty of other things he can excel at, I’m sure.
Bodyguards and Assassins, I’d thought from the preview was just another historical kung-fu action piece, but it turned out to be a rather over-the-top tragic/patriotic piece where almost everyone dies in the end after trying to protect Sun Yat-sen on a trip to Hong Kong. It was well done, of course, but I wouldn’t have rented it if I’d known its true nature. Donnie Yen is always interesting to watch, and were most of the other actors, with the exception of the annoying kid who played Lin Yu-tang’s son.
The Handsome Suit, a Japanese film where an “ugly” guy gets to play at being “handsome” with the aid of a mechanical suit, was actually pretty fun; I liked the underlying message that most people are actually quite ugly, no matter what they look like on the outside. The film managed to take this sobering truth and gussy it up with lots of up-beat music and colors, but it came through anyway. I personally would prefer the main character’s original appearance to his “Handsome Suit” form, but I’m just strange like that. Again, I really should learn some Japanese instead of having to rely on subtitles for these films.
