This kind of lifestyle is pretty demanding mentally, so once busy season started to end, the Captain decided to take a day off for no reason other than preserve his sanity. Also, I needed to catch up with a recently-returned Antarctica castaway ("Minnie" from Minnesota), the boss was away, and I needed a Hallowe'en costume. Minnie had not been to a movie since January, so that and popcorn was the prime focus of the day.
The other part of the story is that, as of last Tuesday, our CA hadn't been to a movie in three months because Hollywood is TERRIBLE. Seriously, there hadn't been anything decent since Harry Potter Part VII (which was, to be fair, extremely satisfying). So this very much became a situation where desperation drove you to insanity, like when you're playing poker and you've had a string of low cards, and you finally get a ten-jack offsuit and you play it because it's the best thing you've seen in a while. Bad move, genius.
For some unknown reason, this image came up from pokerbankrollblog.com when I Googled "Jack-ten offsuit." Weird.
Photo courtesy of Universal
I will say this - the day started out fantastically well, and ended pretty well, but the middle bit (THE MOVIE) was fantastically terrible. More on that later.
I woke up late - 9:30am and went to the museum for a coffee. The weather was TERRIBLE - it poured like this all day.
Photo courtesy of NZ's last independent newspaper, the ODT.
After coffee, it was off to downtown to see what movies are playing, and go to the Art Gallery, which is really quite excellent and changes quite regularly.
On the way to the cinema, we wandered past the casino, and I mused for the 500th time about how good the Ports O'Call restaurant in there is. To which Minnie responded that we should go into the casino. Now, I wasn't aware that casinos anywhere could close. However, in true Kiwi fashion, it's apparently considered a crime if an employee has to work before 9am or after 7pm.
The Dunedin casino is open 11am until whenever - whew, just made it at 11:10am. Sadly, we were not the first people to enter the Dunedin Casino at 11:10am on a Tuesday. To their credit, there are signs on EVERY MACHINE about problem gambling.
So ten minutes later, we were down $10 at the slot machines, and went to the movie to pick a film. And that's when Chris O'Donnell tricked me for what I swear will be the last time in my entire life.
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If you've been following the "career" of Chris O'Donnell of late, you'll be aware that he was in a few movies in the mid-90's, then showed his doodle to his last remaining fan in Kinsey, then came back slimmer and cuter as Finn on Grey's Anatomy (and ended up putting down Meridith's cancer-stricken McDog), then disappeared for a few more years.
Photo from ABC / Grey's Anatomy - please don't sue, Shonda
Then he joined one of the more interesting franchise in the history of television. I am, of course, speaking of the JAG-NCIS-NCIS:LA trifecta of courtroom drama . . . and I've never seen a single episode of any of them. Seriously - JAG was on for 10 seasons, NCIS has been on for 9, and LA is in its 2nd season. The only series to rival this is CSI (12 seasons), CSI Miami (10 seasons) and CSI NY (8 seasons). We'll ignore CSI Las Vegas.
You don't know what JAG looks like either. But NBC does.
So back to my original point. Way back before most of this stuff, there was a beloved little movie based on an 19th century French novel called Les Trois Mousquetaires par Alexandre Dumas. The cast was adorable - it featured Chris O'Donnell and three actors who had drug habit in their past, present and future.
I just did a fact check and Oliver Platt has not, as far as I'm aware, been involved in any sort of drug-related shenanigans. But the other two have about six incidents each, so it averages out.
So anyway, this little movie was released in 1993, was pretty cute and lighthearted, everyone spoke American English except the bad guy, Tim Curry, who played it Anglo-French. And, like many people, I have only the fondest memories of movies which I've only ever seen on TBS: The Superstation, at either 8:05 or 10:05, because they like to be themselves. Hey, it works nicely when they air Braves games.
So we're at the movie theatre, and we're looking at the available movies, and I'm thinking "Smurfs, Oprah's Book Club, Subtitled, Paranormal 3, Robot Fighting Movie, Other Robot Fighting Movie - oooh! Three Musketeers!" And I really thought it was going to be a little bit of swordplay, a little bit of fun, and most definitely a popcorn flick. I honestly thought it would be pretty bad, and I'll tell you why.
I hadn't read a review - I don't really believe in them. But, for good movies, the television usually tells you about 4 weeks before a movie premieres that something good is about to come. They spend a lot of cash to tell you way in advance, so you get excited about it, there's a build up, all that jazz. These are called "commercials." Before the days of PVR / Tivo, people used to watch commercials during scheduled breaks in their programming. Big companies would pay networks millions of dollars to air their commercials during these breaks. And it worked, because the companies got advertising, and TV networks got the money to produce quality programming.
When Tivo was invented, advertising revenues dropped and we started getting this:
Thank you, MTV.
In conclusion, commercials generally tell you whether producers believe in a movie enough to spend money to get you to spend money seeing the movie. Make sense? When a movie has a blockbuster cast, but you DON'T see advertisements for it, you should probably stay away from it. We learned the hard way, but at least I got a beer and a popcorn out of it.
Warning: Spoiler alerts below, but you're not going to want to see this film anyway
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Act 1: A New Hope
The film is set in 1625, like the book. This is important. It starts out Italian Job style, in Venice. There's a guard on a dock, standing around with a pike or something. Then a guy (Matthew MacFayden) rises up out of the water in diving gear and shoots him. I s@^! you not.
And then he kills the guard using hidden knives or something, and two more guards.
Then . . . some other stuff happens, we meet the other two guys, Titus Pullo and Hot Priest, and the femme fatale Milla Jovovich. They do a break-in scene that is somehow less believable than that scene in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where Sissy, Missy and Chrissy bust into the bank with the diamonds. That's right, I said less believable.
Then they meet up with a dude who has a French accent. But wait! the astute reader will interject - aren't they in Italy? Shouldn't everyone they meet have an Italian accent?
The easier, and less head-explodey, answer is no. Because accents do not matter in *this* imagination of the tale of the Three Musketeers, which is about three French swordsman and a French farmboy trying to stop a pseudo-English plot to dethrone the French king and replace him with a French cardinal. It took the next scene to confirm my suspicions, which is D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) learning to be a swordsman from his father.
Please review the following chart of characters, the nationality of the character, the nationality of the actor who played the character, and the accent they display on screen:
Italian Guy, Italian - ??? actor, French accent
Three Musketeers (Athos, Porthos, Aramis), French - English actors, English accents
Cardinal Richelieu, French - Oscar-winning German actor, French accent
Milady de Winter, French - American actor, American accent
Louis XIII, French - English actor, English accent
Rochefort, French - Danish actor, English accent
Duke of Buckingham, English - English actor, English accent
D'Artagnan, French - American actor, American accent
Queen, French - English actress, English accent
As you can see by the chart above, there's no rhyme or reason for the accents to be all over the friggin place. It actually made the plot really hard to follow, because the English people sounded like the French, and the Americans looked as out of place as an alligator as a crocodile convention.
This is the point of the film where I first considered the possibility that this could be the new Rocky Horror. A film so terrible that people want to dress in costumes and watch again and again, starting at midnight, while screaming things at the screen.
Act 2: Many Bothans Died to Bring Us This Piece of Crap
OK, so the accents were abysmal, but let me get to the real problem with this film: the script. The script was a combination of a Disney Channel original show, Mean Girls, and a Kei$ha music video. Here's a link to the parody video if you haven't seen it.
The script did make me laugh here and there. There was a running gag about English vs. French fashion, and some of the pauses were awkward and hilarious. The script did, however, include the following unnecessary / unrelated scenes:
- Milla Jovovich killing twenty guys on a balcony for no reason other than to include a slow-motion fighting sequence, including the high twisty-jump thing made famous in Crouching Tiger, Hiddon Dragon
- the 3 Musketeers plus D'Artagnan slaughtering about 40 guardsment, with a limited amount of blood and villagers cheering thereafter
- pigeons pooping on a guy's face
- sailing to England to break into the Tower of London and steal back the French Queen's Necklace
- a situation where a lady buys clothes for Titus Pullo; it's funny because, you know, women aren't allowed to own stuff and such
And, of course, much of this was in 3D (which we didn't see, but probably should have in retrospect).
Act 3: I am Cronos, Master of Anachronism!
The one really impressive feature of this film is how Paul WS Anderson, who has previously brought us such amazing work as Death Race, Alien vs. Predator and Resident Evil, managed to manipulate time and space to include all sorts of stupid crap in this movie, which as noted above was set in 1624.
Among my favourite anachronisms:
Diving Gear
- as noted above, absolutely not
Versailles
- the movie is quite obviously set at Versailles palace on the outskirts of France. I couldn't verify this while watching the movie, because I wasn't sure when Versailles was built OR when the movie was set. For the record, construction of the main palace at Versailles didn't begin until 1632. The extensive renovations which we see today were begun on or about 1682, a full 50 years after.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Steampunk
- a key plot point of the film is the fact that the English have designed an airship that will be used to wage air warfare (aka "airfare") against the French. To say this requires some suspension of disbelief is an understatement. Here's a picture:
Now, we all know and love how the Final Fantasy series is wonderfully connected to Steampunk.
We're also aware that the steam engine was invented in 1690, a full 64 years after this film was set, and that Steampunk movement is ordinarily connected with Victorian Britain, not pre-revolutionary France.
So my question for you, Mr. Paul WS Anderson . . . why would you keep the movie in its original year of 1624 if you were going to throw in all sorts of crap that wasn't invented for another 75 years? Had you moved the film up another 100 years (or not made the mistake of mentioning 1624 of Charles XIII in the first place), you could have put together a plausible leap of faith which involved your primary setting actually existing, and the underlying technologies for the airships you've thrown in could actually being invented. Instead, what you've done is created a confusing world which straddles two and a half centuries of history.
Notre Dame
- I've been to Notre Dame. A lot of people I know have been to Notre Dame. The geography around the church that the airship crashed into during the final swordfight on the roof? NOT Notre Dame
This is real Notre Dame from this website. Even allowing for 400 years of construction in the interim, I'm not convinced that the setting was even remotely accurate.
The not so horrendous
- this film featured some pretty great costumes, which seemed period appropriate
- Orlando Bloom was perfectly cast as an annoying, smarmy, privileged Englishman. He should really consider being the villain in Disney movies for years to come
This photo is from the ODT - shocker!
I'm going to sign off with Minnie's status update post-date:
"I'm gonna be honest. It wasn't so much good as it was ... bad. We also gambled, had a coffee and a curry, misunderstood art, and walked around the Warehouse. I walked out with rubber gloves, some hangers and rags to clean up the mess that will follow. Wouldn't YOU like to know more. (But I did not purchase a mirror. Thought about it, though.)"
If only Paul WS Anderson had thought to stop by the Warehouse when he saw the script as submitted by the screenwriter, who was behind Bridget Jones 1 and 2.
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