Images, A Wedding, Exiled, Rocket Science, & Mansfield Park

Images & A Wedding are two more Altman films. And are the last two I plan on watching for quite some time. I need to rewatch The Player just to remind me that he is a great talent. Because these two were just messes, although Images had some interesting ideas, A Wedding was just a typically messy version of a film done by many others, this one a wedding that goes crazy, with some extremely flippant jokes about the death of characters. They didn't bother me much, or at least they wouldn't have if they hadn't just reminded me of all the other messy Altman films I've watched over the past couple weeks. So I just wanted to say that I added a bunch of Altman films at once, and then put a foreign film in between (they were all Japanese except for the next film). And I didn't like any of the Altman films. Such a disappointment.

Exiled is Johnny To, being extremely stylish, with Anthony Wong and Simon Yam being their normal awesome selves, about a group of friends who grew up in a triad together, two of which were sent to kill one of them, and the other two were sent to protect him. And then they go off on some adventures, being awesome and stylish all over Macao. I'm not sure about a bit in the final scene, but the rest of it was very enjoyable. To is basically the best action director working today. Can't do a lot of other things, like make a sensible plot, but the action scenes are wow.

Rocket Science is all about high school debate. It features a boy with a stutter who is picked to be a member of the debate team by a girl (who MBG was all about as "hot debate girl" (and is 22, although still a little disturbing for me)), and then does terribly, trying many different ways to overcome the stutter. And it features a hilarious Steve Park as the Korean judge who sleeps with the mother of the main character. Just quite awesome. I didn't like it nearly as much as MBG, but it was an enjoyable way to spend the time.

Mansfield Park is the next Austen adaptation from Masterpiece, being the last 90 minute one, again trashing a perfectly good novel, although it isn't as bad as Persuasion or as good as Northanger Abbey, at least some of this is a result of there being no good Northanger Abbey before, and a very good Persuasion. The BBC miniseries from the 80s is apparently good, but the earlier movie (about which I wrote when I saw it in 2004: "Mansfield Park was an interesting Jane Austen adaptation. Very clever, lots of great lines, and there were some nice touches I didn't expect from the movie. Like sex, and some very anti-slavery drawings. A surprise that I liked it? Hell no. I'm the Jane Austen fan in my generation. And Frances O'Connor wasn't too unattractive to look at.") wasn't entirely an adaptation of the book. Although this was an adaptation, I didn't care for Billie Piper as Fanny Price or basically anyone, except for Blake Ritson as Edmund Bertram. Well, I actually didn't even like him, as he was a little emo for the time period. My Austen-ite friend describes this version as a "just slap and a tickle in fancy Regency dress". Basically sums up the movie far better than I have. Anyway, there's only one more new Austen adaptation, Sense and Sensibility, but I have the Austen biography and rewatching Pride and Prejudice (because damnit, I love that so much) and Emma (with Beckinsale being far better than Gwynneth ever could) before that.