This week I watched Maleficent. It was a bit cartoony and a little confused as to whether it wanted to be a fairy tale or something darker and I’m not sure exactly what demographic it was aimed at. Knowing who your audience is counts for a lot with stories like this.
Maleficent was obviously inspired by Wicked, in that it was the Sleeping Beauty story told from the villain’s point of view. The Wicked Witch wasn’t bad; she was discriminated against because she was green and envied because she could fly; she was an animal rights activist who needed to be marginalized by the power structure she threatened!
Whatever. The soundtrack is great.
Angelina Jolie plays a pretty convincing Action Figure. In this one, she’s the Queen of the Fairies.
I must say, the betrayal she suffers at the hands of the human whom she thought was her friend was unconscionable. He wants to be King so he takes her wings. She’s a Fairy whose wings are her limbs, her power, her transportation and her weapon.
Imagine if the boyfriend who pledged his love to you before he went away to school came back and after what you thought was a lovely reunion, rufied you and amputated your legs. Or blinded you.
That’s what the guy did.
The scene where she wakes up and realizes what has been done to her nearly made me cry.
So Maleficent has a really good reason to want to punish this jerk. The fact that she merely cursed his daughter to fall asleep forever on her 16th birthday rather than ripping every soul in his kingdom limb from limb shows remarkable forbearance if you ask me.
But the three Fairies who take the Princess to raise her in safe anonymity are irritatingly stupid. The attempt at comedy is flat and feels out of place in such a dark story. The Fanning sister who plays Aurora is pretty but her character comes across as a simpleton. I mean that in the medical sense. She seemed less like a cheerful, friendly sort as just someone too stupid to recognize danger.
The famous fight at the end, where Maleficent sics a dragon on the king and all renders up a pretty lamb fire breather. No one seemed particularly afraid of it.
The movie is spectacular to look at and has a couple of very powerful scenes. Like Frozen, the story emphasizes the idea that true love takes time to develop and has more definitions than sexual love.
Last night I watched The Extended Version of the Desolation of Smaug.
I didn’t get it for Christmas because it was very hard to come by a DVD, rather than a Blu Ray version of it. I won’t go Blu ray till I have to; I’m not a fan.
Anyway, I kept searching Amazon and finally found a DVD set.
It has about a half hour more than the theatrical version, including two scenes involving Thorin’s father, Thrain. Those of us who read the Appendices in the books know that Thrain was a recipient of the ring of power Sauron…
Never mind. It was good stuff and went a long way toward explaining just why Thorin goes so completely bat shit in the third movie, The Battle of the Five Armies.
There’s a scene in the BFA where Thorin repeats verbatim what Smaug says about not letting go of one single coin in his enormous hoard. Very ominous.
Smaug is a scary dragon. That should be redundant but I’d just seen the lame dragon in Maleficent so it needed to be said. Smaug is highly intelligent, merciless and ruthless. He’s also huge. In the book, the Hobbit, if I remember correctly, there’s not much real interaction between the Dwarves and the Dragon; mostly it’s a lot of hide and seek. The movie lets them run around battling the Dragon in exciting and dangerous scenarios for quite some time yet the Dragon, despite being extremely dangerous doesn’t manage to kill a single one of his targets. I don’t mind. The movie’s a lot more fun than the book.
I finally took down all my Christmas decorations. Like every year, I feel like I just put them up and it’s time to put them away. I wouldn’t mind but it’s a ton of work making the switch. Josie was a huge help.
My four year old niece, Punkin, was here yesterday. When I told her I was sad that Christmas was over she said “But that just means spring is closer.”
She’s right.
She’s always right.